--, I 
 
 mm
 
 t. BT. HCHEMBACH- 
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 FROM THE LIBRARY OF 
 FRANK J. KLINGBERG
 
 ' A/i Love I could you and I with Him conspire 
 To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire, 
 Would we not sJiatter it to bits and (Jien 
 Remould it nearer to the Hearfs Desire!" 
 
 OMAR KHAYYAM
 
 THE 
 
 BY 
 
 JUSTIN H. MCCARTHY, M.P. 
 
 AUTHOR OF "AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY" 
 14 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE " ETC. 
 
 IN TWO VOLUMES 
 
 VOL. L 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 HARPER & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE 
 1890
 
 TO MY FATHER 
 
 I DEDICATE THIS BOOK
 
 CONTENTS OF YOL. I. 
 
 I. WHENCE ? 1 
 
 II. SEEDS OP REVOLUTION 14 
 
 III. Louis THE WELL-BELOVED 26 
 
 IV. THE PHILOSOPHES 39 
 
 V. THE APOSTLE OP AFFLICTION 67 
 
 VI. THE POMPADOUR 92 
 
 VII. "How WILL BERRY PULL THROUGH?" .... 104 
 
 VIII. A QUEER WORLD 116 
 
 IX. MARIE ANTOINETTE 132 
 
 X. TRIANON 141 
 
 XI. TURGOT 166 
 
 XII. THE DIAMOND NECKLACE 186 
 
 "illl. COUNT CAGLIOSTRO 197 
 
 XIV. KNAVES AND FOOLS 214 
 
 XV. SOWING THE WIND 226 
 
 XVI. THE NOTABLES 239 
 
 XVII. THE BRIENNE ILIAD 251 
 
 XVIII. EQUALITY ORLEANS 262 
 
 XIX. BRIENNE is BLOWN OUT 274 
 
 XX. WHAT ARTHUR YOUNG SAW . 293 
 
 XXI. WHAT ARTHUK YOUNG SAID 319 
 
 XXII. PARIS 332 
 
 XXIII. THE PEOPLE OF PARIS 364 
 
 XXIV. THE ELECTIONS . ... .387
 
 viii CONTENTS. 
 
 OUAPTKR PAGE 
 
 XXV. THE SPRING OP '89 . . 398 
 
 XXVI. THE Row AT REVEILLON'S 404 
 
 XXVII. STATES-GENERAL AT LAST 414 
 
 XXVIII. THE PLAY BEGINS 419 
 
 XXIX. THE WILD GABRIEL HONORE 425 
 
 XXX. THE MAN FROM ARRAS 464 
 
 XXXI. SOME MINOR CHARACTERS 482 
 
 XXXII. PEOPLE IN THE STREETS ........ 494 
 
 XXXIII. THE OVERTURE ENDS , . 50? 
 
 XXXIV. THE EIGHT WEEKS , . 510 
 
 XXXV. SLOW AND SURE , . 531 
 
 XXXVI. ON AND ON 539 
 
 XXXVII. DRIFTING . 549 
 
 XXXVIII. THE TENTH OP JUNE 557 
 
 XXXIX. THE SEVENTEENTH OP JUNE 563 
 
 XL. TENNIS 571 
 
 XLI. PARIS AND VERSAILLES 592 
 
 XL1I. CAMILLE DESMOULINS 605 
 
 XLIII. TWELFTH AND THIRTEENTH OF JULY. . . . 612 
 
 XLIV. THE BASTILLE 623 
 
 XLV. AFTERMATH G52 
 
 XLVI. THE STONES OF THE BASTILLE . . 660
 
 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 WHENCE ? 
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD, to whom life was all paradox, 
 was never more delightfully paradoxical than when he 
 declared that there were only two events in history 
 the Siege of Troy and the French Revolution. Like 
 most of Lord Beaconsfield's brilliant firework phrases, 
 the shining fantasy was more than half a truth. In 
 the antique world that antique world which, in spite 
 of Mr. Freeman, does seem to be set apart from us by 
 so definite and so insuperable a barrier no event is 
 more conspicuous than the story of the armament of 
 Hellenic chieftains and Princes Orgulous against a little 
 town in Asia Minor. In comparison with that mythical 
 or semi-mythical event the conquests of Alexander, the 
 career of Caesar, the very fall of Rome herself, appear 
 to dwindle into insignificance. In much the same way 
 the French Revolution seems to dwarf all modern his- 
 tory ; its heroes good or bad, its shining St. Michaels 
 and Lucifers, Stars of the Morning, dwarf other heroes 
 of other times to the proportions of pigmies. The 
 French Revolution shares with the Siege of Troy its 
 legendary attributes ; shares with it, too, the perennial 
 charm which makes men turn like lovers to its story 
 again and again with unabated interest and unflagging 
 I. 1
 
 2 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. I. 
 
 zeal. Even the Homeric Scholiasts are not more enam- 
 oured of their theme than the historians who once em- 
 bark on the perilous seas of French revolutionary history. 
 
 The heroic muse, suddenly called upon, in the Homeric 
 formula, to sing of the French Revolution, might very 
 well be puzzled where to make a beginning. It is really 
 hard to decide exactly how far back we must hark to 
 get to its legitimate starting-point. Are we to seek the 
 initial impetus in the reign of Louis XV., or in the de- 
 baucheries of the Regency, or in the spacious despotism 
 of Louis XIV., or yet farther back in the feuds of the 
 Fronde and Mazarin, when a queen and a dauphin fled 
 from Paris and a Paris mob ? It is difficult to draw 
 the hard-and-fast line, and the conscientious historian 
 reaching backwards into history might find himself 
 well among the early Capets, among the Merovingians, 
 among the enemies of Caesar, and still come on traces 
 of the causes of the French Revolution. To be plain, 
 the history of the French Revolution is scarcely com- 
 prehensible without a knowledge of the history of 
 France; the history of France in its turn is scarcely 
 comprehensible without that of Rome, of Greece, and 
 so backwards to the dawn of deeds. But a history of 
 the world would be a lengthy preface for a chronicle of 
 the French Revolution, and each chronicler must choose 
 his own starting-point, and toe his own line. 
 
 Still, the great difficulty in approaching the study of 
 the French Revolution is to choose this starting-point. 
 In one sense, in what may be called a dramatic sense, it 
 may be conveniently assumed that the revolutionary 
 egg was hatching while Louis the Well -beloved was 
 cynically speculating on deluges; the shell chipped, and 
 the cock began to crow when Louis XVI. began to try 
 to reign. Yet again, the Revolution may be said to
 
 1789. SEEKING THE SOURCE. 3 
 
 have begun with the self-creation of the National As- 
 sembly ; in another regard, the origin of the Revolution 
 must be placed much farther back. Indeed, it is curious 
 to find how far back we shall have to travel when once 
 we leave the arbitrary line which divides the Old Order 
 from the New. The Revolution began, one authority 
 may argue, with the struggle of the Parliaments against 
 Louis XV. It began, according to another, with the 
 great movement of literature and thought which evolved 
 the Encyclopaedia and the Social Contract. Another 
 will anticipate the scepticism of the eighteenth century 
 by the scepticism of Montaigne, of Bayle, and of Fon- 
 tenelle, will see in the Encyclopaedia and the Social Con- 
 tract not causes, but effects, and will leap back lightly to 
 Althusen, and Hobbes, and Locke, and Genevese deism, 
 not without an eye, it may be, to the thoughts and theo- 
 ries of far Hellenic philosophies. Another dates its im- 
 mediate conception from the moment when Benjamin 
 Franklin amazed the ladies of Versailles with the sombre 
 habit of the Pennsylvanian Quaker, and when Lafayette 
 lent his bright sword to the service of Washington and 
 the young Republic. Another may insist upon a sum- 
 mary of the various forces, accidents, deliberate lines of 
 policy, which, from the breaking up of the great fiefs 
 down to the death of Louis XIV., had prepared the dis- 
 tractions of the monarchy under Louis's descendants, or 
 may ask, more moderately, for a chronicle of the strife 
 of ecclesiastical factions and the battles between the 
 judiciary and the crown. It is the old philosophic 
 business of causation over again. Trace any single event 
 back step by step, and you will find the event of yes- 
 terday intimately and indissolubly connected with the 
 creation of the world. Any starting-point for any his- 
 torical event whatever must be more or less arbitrary.
 
 4 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. I. 
 
 It may be convenient to take the year 1789 as the initial 
 Year of Revolution ; that is the year in which the Rev- 
 olution, however distant its remote causes, actually did 
 begin to be. But it is surely necessary to give such a 
 sketch of the preceding history and condition of France 
 as may be essential to the true understanding of the 
 story. 
 
 For it seems impossible to appreciate the events of 
 the French Revolution without a clear understanding 
 of many of the events which immediately preceded it, 
 and most of the social conditions which made revolution 
 not only possible or probable, but imperative and inev- 
 itable. The volcanic character of the French Revolution 
 is made the more impressive by contrast with the tra- 
 ditional conservatism of the Old Order which preceded 
 it; just as the ruin caused by a landslip, an earthquake, 
 or a tidal wave is most impressive to one whose eyes 
 have long been familiar with the smiling fields, the state- 
 ly town, the teeming coast which have been suddenly 
 laid desolate. Moreover, the genius of Revolution did 
 not leap, fully armed, out of the Jupiter brain of the 
 National Assembly. As the meteorologist can detect 
 the warnings of the coming storm, so the student of his- 
 tory can note, for much more than a generation before 
 the summons to the States- General, the slow, steady 
 growth of the Revolutionary Idea. That the Revolution 
 should have taken France by surprise is in itself surpris- 
 ing. Revolution was in the air for long enough, had 
 been thought of, talked of, written about, breathed 
 abroad in a hundred ways. It was very much as if the 
 dwellers on the slopes of Vesuvius, noting the sullen 
 smoke-cap on the peak, noting the trouble of earth and 
 air and sea and sky, and talking daily of the eruption 
 that threatened, should be taken completely by surprise,
 
 1788. A PIECE OF FICTION. 5 
 
 when at last the lava did begin to brim the lips of the 
 crater. 
 
 There is, indeed, no better preface from a purely lit- 
 erary, or, shall we say, from a purely dramatic point of 
 view, to the French Revolution than that wonderful 
 posthumous piece of fiction which La Harpe wrote 
 under the guise of fact, and on which Sainte-Beuve 
 rightly bases La Harpe's claim to remembrance. Taine 
 places it at the end of his study of the Old Order; it 
 might more appropriately begin a record of the French 
 Revolution. Let "the first lieutenant of Voltaire" 
 speak for himself. 
 
 " It seems to me," he says, " as if it were but yester- 
 day, and yet it was at the beginning of the year 1788. 
 We were dining with one of our brethren of the Acad- 
 emy, a grand seignior and a man of intelligence. The 
 company was numerous and of every profession cour- 
 tiers, men of the robe, men of letters, and academicians; 
 all had feasted luxuriously, according to custom. At 
 the dessert the wines of Malvoisie and of Constance con- 
 tributed to the social gayety a sort of freedom not al- 
 ways kept within decorous limits. At that time society 
 had reached the point at which everything is permitted 
 that excites laughter. Champfort had read to us his 
 impious and libertine stories, and great ladies had lis- 
 tened to these without recourse to their fans. Hence a 
 deluge of witticisms against religion, one quoting a 
 tirade from 'La Pucelle,' another bringing forward cer- 
 tain philosophical stanzas by Diderot. There was un- 
 bounded applause. The conversation becomes more 
 serious; admiration is expressed at the revolution ac- 
 complished by Voltaire, and all agree in its being the 
 first title to his fame. ' He gave the tone to his century, 
 finding readers in the antechambers as well as in the
 
 6 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. I. 
 
 drawing-room.' One of the guests narrated, bursting 
 with laughter, what a hairdresser said to him while 
 powdering his hair : ' You see, sir, although I am but a 
 poor devil, I have no more religion than any one else.' 
 They concluded that the Revolution would soon be con- 
 summated, that superstition and fanaticism must wholly 
 give way to philosophy, and they thus calculated the 
 probabilities of the epoch and those of the future society 
 which should see the reign of reason. The most aged 
 lamented not being able to flatter themselves that they 
 could see it ; the young rejoiced in a reasonable prospect 
 of seeing it, and every one especially congratulated the 
 Academy on having paved the way for the great work, 
 and on having been the headquarters, the centre, the 
 inspirer of freedom of thought. 
 
 " One of the guests had taken no part in this gay con- 
 versation. This was Gazette, an amiable and original 
 man, but, unfortunately, infatuated with the reveries of 
 the Illuminati. In the most serious tone he now began: 
 'Gentlemen,' said he, 'be content; you will witness this 
 great revolution that you so much desire. You know 
 that I am something of a prophet, and I repeat it, you 
 will witness it. Do you know what will be the result 
 of this revolution, for all of you, so long as you remain 
 here?' 'Ah!' exclaimed Condorcet, with his shrewd, 
 simple air and smile, 'let us see, a philosopher is not 
 sorry to encounter a prophet.' ' You, Monsieur de Con- 
 dorcet, will expire stretched on the floor of a dungeon ; 
 you will die of the poison you take to escape the execu- 
 tioner, of the poison which the felicity of that era will 
 compel you always to carry about your person !' At 
 first, great astonishment was manifested, and then came 
 an outburst of laughter. ' What has all this in common 
 with philosophy and the reign of reason?' 'Precisely
 
 1788. CAZOTTE'S PROPHECY. 7 
 
 what I have just remarked to you ; in the name of phi- 
 losophy, of humanity, of freedom, under the reign of 
 reason, you will thus reach your end ; and, truly, it will 
 be the reign of reason, for there will be temples of 
 reason, and, in those days, in all France, the temples will 
 be those alone of reason. You, Monsieur de Champfort, 
 you will sever your veins with twenty-two strokes of a 
 razor, and yet you will not die for months afterwards. 
 You, Monsieur Vicq-d'Azir, you will not open your own 
 veins, but you will have them opened six times in one 
 day, in the agonies of gout, so as to be more certain of 
 success, and you will die that night. You, Monsieur 
 de Nicolai, on the scaffold ; you, Monsieur Bailly, on the 
 scaffold ; you, Monsieur de Malesherbes, on the scaffold; 
 you, Monsieur Roucher, also on the scaffold.' 'But 
 then we shall have been overcome by Turks and Tar- 
 tars ?' ' By no means ; you will be governed, as I have 
 already told you, solely by philosophy and reason. 
 Those who are to treat you in this manner will all be 
 philosophers, will all, at every moment, have on their 
 lips the phrases you have uttered within the hour, will 
 repeat your maxims, will quote like yourselves the 
 verses of Diderot and of "La Pucelle."' 'And when 
 will all this happen ?' ' Six years will not pass before 
 what I tell you will be accomplished.' ' Well, these are 
 miracles,' exclaims La Harpe, 'and you leave me out?' 
 ' You will be no less a miracle, for you will then be a 
 Christian.' 'Ah,' interposed Champfort, 'I breathe 
 again ; if we are to die only when La Harpe becomes 
 a Christian, we are immortals.' ' Come, at least we 
 women,' said the Duchesse de Gramont, ' are extremely 
 fortunate in being of no consequence in revolutions. It 
 is understood that we are not to blame, and our sex ' 
 'Your sex, ladies, will not protect you this time. You
 
 8 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. I. 
 
 will be treated precisely as men, with no difference 
 whatever. You, Madame la Duchesse, will be led to 
 the scaffold, you and many ladies besides yourself, in a 
 cart with your hands tied behind your back.' 'Ah, in 
 that event, I hope to have at least a carriage covered 
 with black.' ' No, madame, greater ladies than yourself 
 will go, like yourself, in a cart, and with their hands 
 tied like yours.' 'Greater ladies ! What, princesses of 
 the blood !' ' Still greater ladies than those !' They 
 began to think the jest was carried too far. Madame 
 de Gramont, to dispel the gloom, did not insist on a 
 reply to her last exclamation, and contented herself 
 by saying, in the lightest tone, 'Now, he will not even 
 leave me a confessor!' 'No, madame, neither you nor 
 any other person will be allowed a confessor ; the last 
 of the condemned that will have one, as an act of grace, 
 will be ' He stopped a moment. ' Tell me, now, who 
 is the fortunate mortal enjoying this prerogative ?' ' It 
 is the last that will remain to him, and it will be the 
 King of France.' " 
 
 How much would one not give that that grim fancy 
 were very fact ? Can we not see the brilliant room, 
 shining with waxen lights, the assembly of wits and 
 poets and philosophers and fair pedantic women, hear 
 the ripple of light conversation suddenly shattered and 
 startled by the astonishing suggestions of Cazotte? We 
 can picture to ourselves Cazotte himself surveying his 
 amazed audience with that curious face of his, the face 
 that recalls in something our own Oliver Goldsmith, 
 the face in which a superhuman mysticism reigns in the 
 high forehead and the wide eyes, and a human sensuali- 
 ty of a sweet and simple type asserts itself in the large 
 heavy jaw, and the large uncertain lips. If La Harpe's 
 wild dream were true, if the author of the " Impassioned
 
 1788. THE STARRY SALONS. 9 
 
 Devil " and the disciple of the Illuminati had made his 
 astonishing prediction, we may well believe that it would 
 have been received with incredulity and amusement. 
 Well might the scholars and statesmen who listened 
 smile confident in the coming triumph of advanced 
 ideas, in the Reign of Reason, in the regeneration of the 
 Age of Saturn. How could they possibly credit a 
 prophet who spoke of such unlikely horrors to the 
 children of the Encyclopedia, to the pupils of Rousseau, 
 to the economists who invested the name of Turgot with 
 a kind of sanctity? There is really nothing in literature 
 more directly tragic than this queer tale of La Harpe's, 
 and it may well be accepted by the lovers of the pict- 
 uresque in history and history is far more picturesque 
 than some historians would allow as a fitting prelude 
 to the story of the French Revolution. 
 
 The picturesque fancy may be pardoned or excused 
 when we remember that the French Revolution, accord- 
 ing to the semi-satiric suggestion of that curious dual 
 historic entity, the brothers Goncourt, began in the sa- 
 lons of Paris. The saying, like all such epigrammatic 
 condensations of history, is neither accurate nor com- 
 plete, but it contains a large measure of truth. Those 
 brilliant assemblies, little local heavens starred with 
 bright names grouped in constellations of thought, of 
 theory, that drifted slowly, steadily, from the suppers 
 of the Regency to the " principles of eighty-nine." As 
 the salons grew in influence, they grew in gravity ; as 
 the pebble of speculation or dogma cast into the waters 
 of public opinion caused a wider and ever-widening cir- 
 cle, those who stood upon the brink began to regard 
 their pastime with an austerer earnestness. A Galiani 
 bewailing Paris in his Italian exile more bitterly than 
 Ovid in Pontus bewailed Augustan Rome, would hardly
 
 10 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. OH. I. 
 
 have recognized, could he have revisited it, the Paris of 
 his light triumphs, in the serious salons of the years just 
 before the Revolution declared itself. The reign of 
 mere wit had withered, the audacities of a new philoso- 
 phy, eager to test with a crude science all the things of 
 earth or heaven, no longer afforded a unique delight ; 
 the dreams of Rousseau, the doctrines of the Encyclo- 
 paedists, had borne their fruit, and the dainty world was 
 dipped in a delirium of political reform, of speculations 
 as to the rights of man and the manufacture of consti- 
 tutions in the Sieyes manner. 
 
 But if there is a difficulty in choosing a starting-point, 
 there is scarcely less difficulty in deciding the treatment. 
 There are two distinct and independent schools of his- 
 torians of the French Revolution. One of these schools, 
 of which M. Charles d'Hericault is perhaps the most 
 characteristic exponent, regards the Revolution as the 
 sheer outpouring of the Pit, and always accords it the 
 honor of capital lettering, as a kind of tribute to its Sa- 
 tanic grandeur. The leaders, in its eyes, are as so many 
 fiends in human shape, specially sent into the world for 
 the purpose of harassing a noble king and yet more 
 noble queen, and a nobility whose resplendent merits 
 make them only a little lower than the archangels. 
 "The Revolution," says M. Charles d'Hericault with 
 all gravity, "is the reign of Satan. God has given the 
 evil angels, for a period which we cannot predict, power 
 over the kingdom of France ;" and he goes on in this 
 vein in a kind of breathless way, dealing largely in 
 "demons," "monsters," and "madmen," as the only 
 epithets proper to apply to any and every Revolution- 
 ist. On the other hand, however, the very elect among 
 the angels would hardly, to his loyal mind, seem quite 
 the peers of a half-divine royal family. If, however,
 
 1789. ANGELS OR DEVILS. 11 
 
 anything could excuse his maudlin sentimentalism, if 
 anything could seem worse than his unscientific rhap- 
 sody, it would be the extravagance of certain of the 
 writers who argue, or, we should say, who write on the 
 other side. There is a M. Jean Bernard, for example, 
 who is too clever a writer to be fitly employed in the 
 sheer partisanship to which he has devoted himself, and 
 who is as trying in his way as M. Charles d'Hericault 
 is in his. To him the Revolutionists are all angels of 
 light, to him the Royalists are all devils of more or less 
 degrees of darkness. Every malign rumor, every foul 
 whisper which strikes at the name and fame of any ad- 
 herent of the throne, is so much gospel truth to this 
 impassioned advocate. Both these writers might 
 well make a serious student of the French Revolu- 
 tion despair. Yet both these writers are popular 
 writers, and act as guides and teachers to large num- 
 bers of people easily impressed and with little oppor- 
 tunity of analysis. Small wonder if, under such con- 
 ditions, Marie Antoinette is regarded as a Saint Do- 
 rothea or as a Messalina by those who think of Saint- 
 Just only as the murderous author of an obscene poem, 
 or as the exalted prophet of the noblest of political 
 creeds. 
 
 A kind of impassioned prejudice seems to govern 
 most writers upon the French Revolution. Lacretelle, 
 Louis Blanc, Thiers, Mignet, Michelet, Lamartine, Mar- 
 tin, Taine, and all the cluster of the lesser writers, are 
 brilliant special pleaders, resolute defenders of the side 
 they have espoused. De Tocqueville and Sorel are more 
 impartial and more judicial ; so are writers like Von Sy- 
 bel in Germany, and Mr. H. Morse Stephens in England. 
 Mill would have been impartial, and we might lament 
 that Mill never wrote his dreamed-of history, were it
 
 12 
 
 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. I 
 
 not that in losing Mill we gained Carlyle. Carlyle was 
 not impartial, but he made a great book. It is curious 
 to remember that his magnificent prose epic is actually 
 nearer in years to the events it treats of than it is to us 
 who read it to-day. It is, no doubt, very hard to be 
 either impartial or judicial about the French Revolu- 
 tion. The whole affair is so dramatic, the darling creeds 
 appeal so directly to the emotions, the central figures 
 are so fascinating and so fatal, that it is difficult to keep 
 cool in such a conflict, and to hold one's reason from 
 running to seed in hatred in one direction, or blossoming 
 into the rank luxuriance of an exaggerated hero-worship 
 on the other. The great secret lies in remembering that 
 all the figures of the French Revolution were men and 
 women like ourselves, animated by like passions, pur- 
 poses, virtues, failings, hopes, and fears ; that a mob re- 
 mains a mob, whether it raves, bristling with pikes and 
 capped with crimson, around an iron lantern, or over- 
 throws the railings of a park; that we all can turn to 
 contemporaries of our own who, under slightly differing 
 conditions, might very well have played the parts of a 
 Danton or Lafayette, a Vergniaud or a La Rochejaque- 
 lein. It may be well for the wisest of us, in expatiating 
 upon the faults of a Robespierre or the follies of a Marie 
 Antoinette, to ask ourselves how we, under like condi- 
 tions, could have withstood on the one hand the temp- 
 tations of absolute power, on the other the traditions of 
 a monarchical past. Of course this is no justification ; 
 yet, if the reflection do but serve to give us pause and 
 to temper our invective, it will have served its turn ex- 
 cellently. Let us always, always remember that we are 
 dealing with men and women some of them even com- 
 monplace men and women, that no fresh race of beings, 
 either fiends or angels, were invented for the Revolu-
 
 1789 MEN AND WOMEX. 13 
 
 tionary period, and we shall do fairly well, and come 
 out in the end with a more human as well as a more 
 humane appreciation of perhaps the greatest pages of 
 history.
 
 14 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. II. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 SEEDS OF REVOLUTION. 
 
 WE begin well if we start off with the heroic deter- 
 mination to be as impartial as we can in our attitude 
 towards the actors in the great drama, to bear in mind 
 and earnestly apply the excellent maxim " Put yourself 
 in his place," and to regard each and all of them not as 
 men and women strangely habited and removed from 
 us by the gap of a century, bnt as friends with whom 
 we may have come into contact in the chances of public, 
 of social, of civil life. Once in this even and exemplary 
 temper, we may with free minds turn our attention to 
 the preliminaries of the great piece. 
 
 Perhaps we may catch the first clattering discordant 
 note of the Revolutionary Carillon on the day when 
 the bells of Paris were tolling for the illustrious dead. 
 Alas for the poor Sun-King, the luckless Roi-Soleil ! 
 What a dismal epilogue to all his long and lustrous 
 reign, filled with wars and the rumors of wars and pom- 
 pous enunciations of "L'lStat, c'est Moi," and stately 
 high-heeled passions for innumerable mistresses, from 
 giddy Montespans and their like to grave De Mainte- 
 nons, coifed and clerical. The dingy funeral, scantily, 
 even scurvily, escorted, the scornful populace varying 
 indifference with actual pelting of stones ; such were 
 the sorry obsequies of the Great King. While he lived 
 the world was ringing with his name ; dead, it did not 
 matter where they huddled him, or how. There never
 
 1715. - JESUITS AND JANSENISTS. 15 
 
 was a more impressive sermon on the glory and the 
 nothing of a name. The king, whose word was law, 
 could not bind his successors even by the solemn state- 
 ments of the royal testament. His will was set aside, 
 treated like so much waste paper. The eighteenth cent- 
 ury, practically beginning with the death of Louis XIV. 
 as the eighteenth century begins in England with the 
 death of Anne, marks its iconoclastic career from the 
 onset by its derision of the last of the despots. Abso- 
 lute monarchy was never more completely exemplified 
 than in Louis XIV., but the century which was to end 
 in the culbute generate and upheaval of the kingly 
 principle began by treating the final wishes of a great 
 king as of no more moment than the catch of an old 
 song. The Revolution could not be far off when the 
 Parisians pelted the unsepulchred coffin of the great 
 monarch, and his last august wishes were lightly daffed 
 aside. 
 
 The seeds of religious controversy, which Louis XIV. 
 sowed, proved fertile in revolutionary ideas. France 
 was by no means Ultramontane ; Louis XIV. endeav- 
 ored to make it so. The early part of the eighteenth 
 century is the theatre of a pitched battle between the 
 Jesuits and the Jansenists, in which the weight of the 
 royal influence was given to the Jesuit camp. 
 
 Jansenius, bishop of Ypres, after passing his life 
 largely in the study of the writings of St. Augustine, 
 died on May 6, 1638. Two years after his death, in 
 1640, Frommond published at Louvain a posthumous 
 work of Jansen's, " Augustinus S. : Doctrina S. Aug. de 
 Hum. Naturae Sanitate, Aegritudine, Medicina, adversus 
 Pelagianos et Massilienses." In his will he referred his 
 book to the judgment of the Holy See, while express- 
 ing his belief that it contained no doctrinal error. But
 
 16 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. II. 
 
 this declaration of Jansen's was suppressed by the pub- 
 lisher of the book. The book created the greatest ex- 
 citement in the theological world. It rallied around it 
 the most impassioned advocates, and against it the 
 most impassioned antagonists. Its second edition was 
 condemned at Rome in 1641 and again in 1642 by Ur- 
 ban VIII. for repeating the errors of Baius in his exag- 
 gerations of the Augustinian doctrines of grace. Baius 
 had bowed meekly to the censure of the Holy See, but 
 the "Disciples of St. Augustine," as the Jansenists 
 called themselves, were not so meek. They rallied 
 their forces ; contested the papal decree. In 1653, In- 
 nocent X. launched a fresh bull condemning the five 
 propositions in which the hostile French bishops found 
 the pith of Jansenian doctrine. These five propositions 
 were : Firstly : That there are divine precepts which 
 good men are unable to obey for want of God's grace, 
 although desirous to do so. Secondly : That no person 
 can resist the influence of divine grace when bestowed. 
 Thirdly : That, for human actions to be meritorious, 
 it is not necessary that they should be exempt from 
 necessity, but only from constraint. Fourthly : That 
 the Semi-Pelagians err grievously in maintaining that 
 the human will is endowed with power of either receiv- 
 ing or resisting the aids and influences of preventive 
 grace. Fifthly : That whoever maintains that Jesus 
 Christ made expiation by his sufferings and death for 
 the sins of all mankind is a Semi-Pelagian. 
 
 The Jansenists did not accept defeat. While they 
 wished to remain in external communication with the 
 Church, they cast about for means of checkmating the 
 papal bull. Ingenious Jansenist divines argued that 
 while they accepted the papal censure of the five points, 
 they refused to recognize that those five points were to
 
 1640-1713. JANSENISM. 17 
 
 be found in Jansen's writings. In this way they carried 
 on the fight against their opponents in Rome and the 
 powerful Jesuit party in France until the appearance 
 of their great champion, Pascal. Never did any cause 
 find a more brilliant defender. Jansenism has passed 
 away; that great fight is over, dead and buried, but 
 still men of all creeds and of all opinions read and de- 
 light in the immortal " Provincial Letters." It has been 
 truly said by the most uncompromising opponents of 
 Jansenism that Pascal's letters touch every chord of the 
 human heart, and that their sudden transitions from 
 logic and wit to sublime and pathetic eloquence pro- 
 duce an effect which can be neither resisted nor effaced. 
 But Pascal died young, in 1662, and the glory of the 
 Jansenist cause was gone. Censure after censure thun- 
 dered from Rome; in France, the face of royalty was 
 set very sternly against the sect. 
 
 Louis had come to regard the Jansenists as Republi- 
 cans in the Church and Republicans in the State. His 
 destruction of Port Royal in 1710 was a heavy blow ; a 
 heavier was that dealt in 1713 at the "Reflexions Mo- 
 rales sur le Nouveau Testament" of Father Quesnel in 
 the papal document so famous throughout the eigh- 
 teenth century as the bull " Unigenitus." 
 
 Into the merits or demerits of the "Reflexions Mo- 
 rales " it is not necessary to enter here ; nor is it neces- 
 sary to offer criticism upon the conception or the enun- 
 ciation of the bull " Uniorenitus." But the bull aroused 
 
 O 
 
 the greatest excitement and the strongest opposition. 
 At an assemblage of bishops in Paris, a minority of 
 fourteen prelates, headed by Cardinal de Noailles, op- 
 posed the majority of forty who supported the Jesuit 
 Le Tellier and the Bull. The division spread through- 
 out the whole of the Church. The Ultramontane party 
 I. 2
 
 18 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. II. 
 
 stood to their guns, and took strong measures to en- 
 force the acceptance of the Constitution. The rebel- 
 lious bishops were dismissed to their dioceses ; the prel- 
 ates who had not been present at the Assembly were 
 called upon by the king to renew their adhesion to the 
 propositions of the bull; the Sorbonne, which had re- 
 jected it by a majority of votes, was peremptorily 
 ordered to register it, and the same duty was sternly 
 laid upon a protesting Parliament. 
 
 Louis soon found that he had raised a whirlwind 
 about his ears. His suppression, not merely of Father 
 Quesnel's book, but of all writings issued in its defence; 
 his forbidding, under heavy pains and penalties, the 
 publication in the future of any other defence, had not 
 the desired result. Dying, he left France distracted by 
 the desperate fierceness of a religious feud which had 
 affected all classes in the State, and which was in itself 
 no small cause of the almost indecent satisfaction with 
 which the country at large heard of the setting of the 
 Sun-King. 
 
 In the dawn of the regency of the Duke of Orleans 
 it seemed for a moment as if the existing conditions of 
 things were to undergo a vital change. A cool demo- 
 cratic wind began to blow through the heated mo- 
 narchical atmosphere. Strange democratic words were 
 made use of by the regent himself in his very edicts. 
 He spoke of the " rights of the nation ;" he declared 
 that, in the event of the absence of legitimate successors 
 to the throne, the gift of the crown belonged to France 
 alone. Not in words alone, but in deeds, the regent 
 showed himself opposed to the policy of the late king. 
 He gave back to the Parliament its right of remon- 
 strance, of which it had been deprived ; he set aside the 
 late king's will; he came very near to summoning the
 
 1618-93. A NEW PHASE OF FRENCH HISTORY. 19 
 
 States-General. The lettres de cachet in force were 
 carefully scrutinized, and a large number of persons im- 
 prisoned in the Bastille were set free. In the religious 
 controversy that was raging he took a different attitude 
 from that of the late king. He set at liberty all the 
 many persons who were in prison for their Jansenist 
 opinions. The Cardinal de Noailles, who had been in 
 disgrace, and against whom a lettre de cachet was said 
 to be actually pending, was named President of the 
 Council of Ecclesiastical Affairs. Le Tellier conceived 
 it prudent to withdraw from popular dislike into volun- 
 tary exile. So far had the reaction gone that complete 
 suppression of the Jesuits was mooted ; but the pro- 
 posal in the end resolved itself merely into an order 
 forbidding them the pulpit and the confessional. 
 
 With the Regency we enter upon a new phase of 
 French history ; the gavotte begins which is destined 
 to end in the Carmagnole. To the gravity, the pom- 
 posity, the heroics of the Great King succeed the wan- 
 tonness, the license, the devil- may-careness of the Re- 
 gency. Louis XIV. was profligate enough, but he 
 environed his profligacy with a certain decorum which 
 was wholly wanting in Philippe of Orleans. We move 
 at once in a more buffoon world, a world of light 
 comedy, brilliant with painted mistresses, with opera- 
 girls, with dancers and dainty abbes, with adventurers 
 of the sword and adventurers of the robe a world of 
 intrigue and shady finance, of bright persistent de- 
 bauchery, a mad, bad business, ruinous for France. 
 
 There were evil deeds, enough and to spare, in Louis 
 XIV. 's reign. Long before its evening, a kind of crap- 
 ulosity seems to have set in, which in itself was fertile 
 stuff for the quickening of Revolution. The memoirs 
 of the time, the writings of Bussy Rabutin, reveal to
 
 20 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. II. 
 
 us a grave degree of corruption among the rising nobil- 
 ity which- disagreeably affected Louis, and which was 
 significant in its warnings. When we read of the way 
 in which some of the young nobles, some of the bearers 
 of famous names, such as the bearer of the name of Col- 
 bert, were banded together for debaucheries, atrocities, 
 and excesses of the most degrading type, we can only 
 wonder that the Revolution did not break out long be- 
 fore its time. The satyr-like lust and fiend-like cruelty 
 of some of the acts recorded of these young nobles must 
 be borne in mind when we think upon the horrors which 
 disfigured the time of the Terror. When we read of 
 two cases in particular in which these wearers of great 
 names inflicted horrible torture for the mere sake of 
 torture upon a woman who was their plaything, and 
 upon an unfortunate man who died of his sufferings, 
 we wonder if any descendant of either of those unhappy 
 victims took part in the September massacres, and sated 
 in those wild days a revenge that was none the less wel- 
 come because it had been long delayed. 
 
 The record of the Regency could only be considered 
 an exhilarating study by a new Timon. Presided over 
 nominally by a debauched prince, who was suspected of 
 being a murderer, and who was known to be a profli- 
 gate and a sot, swayed by a ribald, intriguing Church- 
 man, France was undoubtedly come to a pretty pass. 
 The high dignity, the spacious splendor of Louis XIV., 
 were rapidly resolving themselves into ruin. The eigh- 
 teenth century can scarcely boast a darker, an abler, or 
 more degraded spirit than Dubois. It produced no more 
 perversely immoral ruler than the Regent Philip. But 
 both were men of extraordinary ability ; both were, in 
 their strange way, statesmen. They had original ideas 
 of foreign policy with its English leanings, stimulated,
 
 1719. THE RUE QUIXCAMPOIX. 21 
 
 it shall be said, by English gold, with its Triple Alli- 
 ance growing into its Quadruple Alliance, with its swift 
 unmasking of Cellamare's conspiracy, to which memoir- 
 writing Jean Buvat contributed, its humiliation of Spain, 
 its Brittany executions, its upheaval of Alberoni, its fan- 
 tastic shuffling of the court cards in the European pack. 
 They had original ideas, too, of finance, with their cham- 
 bre ardente for inquiry into the claims of farmers-gen- 
 eral and other public creditors, its tortures, its impris- 
 onments, its victims, its collapse ; with their John Law 
 lunacy of an endless paper currency as grotesque as that 
 which captivates the German emperor in the second part 
 of " Faust," its other John Law lunacy of the Missis- 
 sippi scheme, with its mushroom fortunes and final ca- 
 tastrophe. The most amazing thing in all that Regency 
 is the Rue Quincampoix, with its feverish crowds, a 
 Vanity Fair of the maddest kind, in which lords and 
 lackeys, prelates and shopkeepers, prostitutes and prin- 
 esses jostled and elbowed in the common race for wealth, 
 and which ends with the prudent Prince de Conti ex- 
 changing his paper money for three cart-loads of solid 
 silver one seems to see those three argentiferous carts 
 lumbering through the narrow Parisian streets in the 
 universal crash, and in John Law dying in squalid pov- 
 erty in Venice, without much i-eason to be thankful that 
 he escaped alive from the wild hands of the Paris mob. 
 Seldom has it been given to any single individual to ac- 
 complish such widespread desolation, such national ruin 
 and despair, as John Law accomplished. The advent- 
 urous Scottish gentleman who was to make everybody 
 rich with pieces of paper had promised infatuated 
 Philip that he would wipe out the national debt of 
 France, and leave it as if it had never been. He left it 
 increased to a grand total of six hundred and twenty-five
 
 22 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. II. 
 
 millions of francs. Statesman after statesman, finan- 
 cier after financier, will strive to patch that business 
 together again, to caulk the leaky places ; good and 
 bad, wise and foolish, all will make their effort to mend 
 Law's colossal madness, all will try down to Necker ; 
 but by the time it comes to Necker's turn the work 
 which John Law was really sent into the world to do 
 will have ripened to its due fruition. 
 
 A little later, in 1725, a momentous thing happened, 
 which at first scarcely seemed momentous. An English 
 nobleman, Lord Derwentwater, is said to have founded 
 in Paris in this year the " Loge Anglaise," the first Free- 
 masons' lodge in France ; another English nobleman, 
 the Duke of Richmond, set up another in his Aubigny 
 castle a little later. It would be vain, and worse than 
 vain, to attempt to penetrate back into the past for the 
 early history of Freemasonry. We may, if we please, 
 accept, with Masonic writers, the statement that it ex- 
 isted "ever since symmetry began and harmony dis- 
 played her charms." We may agree, with Charles Kings- 
 ley, that the uninitiate have little right to any opinion 
 on the mediaeval lodge of Kilwinning and its Scotch 
 degrees, on the seven Templars who, after Jacques de 
 Molay was burned in Paris, revived the order on the 
 Scottish isle of Mull, on the Masons who built Magde- 
 burg Cathedral, in 876, on Magnus Grecus, on Hiram of 
 Tyre, and many another name and date important in the 
 annals of Freemasonry. It is perhaps audacious for any 
 one not a Mason to speak of its history and its myster- 
 ies ; on the other hand, Masons are not, we understand, 
 permitted to speak of the tenets or the traditions of 
 their order. Such accounts as exist of Freemasonry 
 differ in the most extraordinary degree according as 
 the writers are animated by an enthusiasm for or an
 
 1725. MASONRY. 23 
 
 aversion to the sect. Thus we shall find one set of 
 writers leaping lovingly back to the sacerdotalism of 
 ancient Egypt, progressing to the Dionysia of old 
 Greece, and dwelling affectionately upon the legend of 
 the building of Solomon's temple and the fate of the 
 architect Hiram Abi, murdered for the sake of the se- 
 cret word which he refused to reveal to his three ap- 
 prentices with the queer names of Jubelas, Jubelos, and 
 Jubelum. From the grave of the murdered Hiram 
 comes the acacia plant, whose name is said to play so 
 large a part in Masonic symbolism. According to this 
 legend the Masonic mystery is to find out the lost pass- 
 word of the temple. Other scarcely less fanciful author- 
 ities talk wild words about Manes, founder of Mani- 
 chaeanism, and the purpose of avenging his death at the 
 hands of a Persian king by a regicide league striking 
 at all Icings. Others pretended that the Freemasons 
 were simply the proscribed and ruined Templars under 
 a new name, and that their cherished purpose was ven- 
 geance of the death of Jacques de Molay. More hos- 
 tile critics, however, go no further back than the medi- 
 aeval migratory Mason guilds, with their ceremonials 
 aped from Benedictine ritual ; we hear much of the 
 disputed Cologne charter of 1535, signed at the open- 
 ing of the cathedral by Melanchthon, Coligny, and oth- 
 ers; and Elias Ashmole, the Englishman who founded, 
 in 1646, the order of the Rosicrucians, comes in for his 
 share of denunciation for his strange blend of Masonry 
 and occultism. All these various legends and various 
 opinions offer interesting enough matter for the studies 
 and the speculations of the scholarly occult. But the 
 serious importance of the part which Freemasonry was 
 destined to play in the history of the French Revolu- 
 tion depends in no degree upon the truth or the untruth
 
 24 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. II. 
 
 of the legends about Hiram, about Manes, or anybody 
 else before the days of Lord Derwentwater. For our 
 purpose it is enough to accept the fact that, in 1717, the 
 Grand Lodge of England was established by certain 
 English noblemen and gentlemen in London, who met 
 together in lodges at the Goose and Gridiron, in St. 
 Paul's, at the Crown near Drury Lane, at the Apple 
 Tree near Covent Garden, and at the Rummer and 
 Grapes in Channel Row, Westminster. These English 
 noblemen and gentlemen bad little thought, at the time 
 when they met together under the hospitable rafters of 
 these pleasantly named London taverns, of the part the 
 work they had in hand would yet play in the destinies 
 of nations and the fates of kings. But when Lord Der- 
 wentwater and the Duke of Richmond pitched their 
 Freemasons' tent in France they began a business which 
 resulted most amazingly. For the thing spread and 
 spread all over the continent of Europe. Introduced 
 by Englishmen into Germany, Austria, Russia, Swit- 
 zerland, Italy, Spain, Portugal ; introduced into Swe- 
 den and Poland from France, which itself owed its Ma- 
 sonic inspiration to England, we find the English or the 
 Scottish lodges weaving all Europe together into the 
 complicated web of a great organization. Kings and 
 princes were among its earliest initiate ; Crown Prince 
 Frederick, afterwards to be famous as Frederick the 
 Great, Francis I. of Austria, and many a noble name be- 
 sides, are inscribed upon its earliest rolls. There is a 
 name yet to be inscribed upon its rolls, the name of a 
 prince not yet born to the House of Orleans, which 
 will be most instrumental in aiding the work which 
 Freemasonry was destined to do in France. In the 
 meantime Freemasonry, waiting for the birth of Equal- 
 ity Orleans, grew and throve in Europe, undismayed
 
 1788. CHARLES EDWARD IN ARRAS. 25 
 
 by the papal excommunication levelled against it in 
 1738. 
 
 At this particular time, however, Continental Free- 
 masonry had not dreamed of the phases through which 
 it was yet to pass. Lord Derwentwater did not antici- 
 pate Adam Weishaupt and the mysterious Illuminati, 
 with their strange cipher L.P.D., which, being inter- 
 preted, means "Lilia Pedibus Destrue," and signifies 
 the doom of kings. He did not dream of that strangest 
 of strange Illuminated, Balsamo-Cagliostro, and all that 
 was to come through him. We shall meet with Cagli- 
 ostro in his season, and with the Illuminati and their 
 terrible L.P.D. In the meantime it is curious to re- 
 member that a legend, which seems to be something 
 more than a legend, declares that Prince Charles Ed- 
 ward himself founded, in the town of Arras, a Scottish 
 Freemason lodge, of which the first president was Robes- 
 pierre's father. If the story were true, it would only 
 be one further proof of the dramatic completeness of 
 the revolutionary story which so early associates with 
 a body destined to play so great a part in the Revolu- 
 tion the name which, of all others, stands out most 
 conspicuously in association with it. When we meet 
 with the Freemasons again we shall find that they have 
 greatly changed in power and influence from their little 
 groups of exiled Jacobites and their small beginnings 
 in the days of the Regency.
 
 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. I1JL 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 LOUIS THE WELL-BELOVED. 
 
 IT is not necessary to linger longer over the mud and 
 swine idyl of the Regency. While growing Freemason- 
 ry was striking its tap-roots in all directions, while the 
 financial fantasies of law had given a further impetus 
 to national financial ruin, Regent Philip contented him- 
 self with reeling from desire to satiety, and from satie- 
 ty to desire, like a more vulgar Faust, and left every- 
 thing in the hands of Dubois. In the battle of the bull 
 "Unigenitus" Dubois had espoused the bull and the 
 papal court, and had obtained the archbishopric of Cam- 
 brai. It is one of the eternal ironies of history that 
 among the names supporting Dubois in his claim to the 
 archbishopric is that of the good, the just, the noble 
 Massillon. In spite of all the opposition that the des- 
 perate and despairing Jansenists could make, Dubois 
 forced the Jansenistic Parliament of Paris to register 
 the combated edict, and the constitution embodied in 
 the bull became established law. In the February of 
 1723 Louis XV. attained his legal majority, Orleans re- 
 signed his regency and became President of the Coun- 
 cil of State, which included among its members Dubois. 
 But just in this crowning moment Dubois died in the 
 August of 1723, and in the December of the same year 
 the regent followed him, and there were two scoundrels 
 the less in France. 
 
 Philip of Orleans dead and out of the way, the Duke
 
 1726. LOUIS XV. 27 
 
 of Bourbon obtained from the young king the position 
 of first minister. Ignorant of everything except the 
 chase, a humble servant of the Marquise de Prie, a tool 
 in the hands of financier Paris Duvernay, the duke was 
 eminently calculated to carry on all that was worst in 
 the government of Philip of Orleans. The religious 
 war still raged. The Jesuits grew more and more pow- 
 erful, the Jansenists more and more feeble. The young 
 king's bride, Maria Leszczynska, daughter of the King 
 of Poland, then resting in pensioned exile in Alsace, re- 
 ceived the surname of Unigenita in graceful allusion to 
 the famous and triumphant bull. In the very earliest 
 years of the young king's reign the spirit of sedition 
 asserted itself ; the spirit of constitutional resistance to 
 aggravated authority made itself felt. The scarcity of 
 bread, that unfailing source of popular disaffection, 
 caused several serious riots in 1725. Caen, Rouen, 
 Rennes were the scenes of desperate conflicts. In Paris 
 itself some two thousand rioters straggled through the 
 streets, shouting and pillaging. They were dispersed 
 at the point of the sword ; two of them were hanged 
 on high gallows in the chief street of the Faubourg 
 Saint-Antoine ; but the spirit of hungry discontent still 
 muttered ominously underground and was only silenced, 
 only staved off, by measures which lowered the price of 
 bread. But a more serious sign was shown in the con- 
 duct of the Paris Parliament when it protested in the 
 very presence of the king himself holding his bed of 
 justice against certain taxes, including one of a fiftieth 
 upon all the revenues of the kingdom, which had not 
 been previously submitted to the magistrates. 
 
 " Do not be late for supper, duke," said Louis XV. 
 graciously to Bourbon on June 11, 1726, as he left Ver- 
 sailles for Rambouillet, whither he bade the duke follow
 
 28 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. III. 
 
 him speedily. The duke did not appreciate the fine 
 point of irony in the king's civility till the king had 
 gone. Then an order arrived, signed with the royal 
 hand, dismissing Bourbon to his domain at Chantilly. 
 And so, like the Eastman in the Gunnlaug Saga, he is 
 out of the tale. Madame de Prie was whistled down 
 the wind to Normandy ; Duvernay was clapped into 
 the Bastille ; Fleury was raised to the rank of first 
 minister, and the Cardinal's red hat soon reached him 
 from Rome. For seventeen years Fleury, who was 
 seventy years old at the time of his triumph, held well- 
 nigh royal sway in France. Astute, subtle, of gentle 
 and simple bearing, Fleury united the sagacity of a 
 fifth-rate statesman with the decorum of a fifth-rate 
 Churchman, and between his sagacity and his decorum 
 he held his own. Those wild popular commotions 
 which characterized the administrations of the regent 
 and of Bourbon died away ; the manners of the court 
 and of the great nobles were modified to something 
 dimly approaching to decency ; financial economy re- 
 stored public credit ; foreign policy was guided in the 
 direction of peace ; a pinchbeck Saturnian age seemed 
 to be established. But the retrospective observer can 
 discern that revolution is still afoot. The desperate 
 battle of Jesuits and Jansenists still raged, and the 
 Jesuits found in Fleury, who had been an ardent Jan- 
 senist, a devoted champion. The miracles reported from 
 the grave of the Jansenist Paris at St. Medard Ceme- 
 tery led to the closing of the cemetery in 1732 by order 
 of the government, and to the promulgation of the fa- 
 mous epigram : 
 
 "De par le Roi, defense & Dieu 
 D'operer miracles en ce lieu." 
 
 Condemnation after condemnation fell upon the heads
 
 1730. "LA BELLE GENITUS." 29 
 
 of those who still protested against the bull " Unigeni- 
 tus." Yet its opponents multiplied. The majority of 
 the Parisians were opposed to it ; and the ranks of op- 
 position were swelled by all Adullamites, by all who 
 were discontented and in danger and in debt, by all 
 who disliked the government or who liked disturbance, 
 by all those floating forces of agitation if not of disaf- 
 fection which are rendered for the moment homogene- 
 ous by a great opposition movement. The battle over 
 the bull " Unigenitus " was one of the training-schools 
 of the Revolution. Not that very many of its fiercest 
 opponents knew or cared to know what the bull really 
 was or what it really meant. It may be fairly said that 
 in general nobody understood anything about those 
 questions of doctrine with which the bull was con- 
 cerned. There were people who called it "la belle 
 Genitus." But it served as a rallying-cry, as a common 
 banner ; it set people thinking, talking, acting ; the 
 Parliament of Paris was in the forefront of the fight. 
 The proposal of Benoit XIII. to amplify the Breviary 
 by a lesson in which Gregory VII. was lauded for hav- 
 ing excommunicated an emperor and released his sub- 
 jects from their oath of allegiance was combated by 
 the Parliament, and a printed sheet set in circulation 
 and containing the new lesson and prayer was suppressed 
 by the Parliament. 
 
 The fight raged and was to rage yet for generations. 
 On the one side the puppet king and the dexterous 
 septuagenarian man of schemes, his minister, and all 
 Ultramontanism ; on the other, the Parliaments and all 
 the waning strength of Jansenism, swollen and sup- 
 ported by all possible elements of disorder that could 
 be attracted to a struggle against a government. We 
 may note a fiery Abbe Pucelle, at white heat of impas-
 
 30 
 
 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. III. 
 
 sioned Jansenism, sneering at Fleury quantum mutatus 
 ab illofand informing an astounded king that duty 
 to the sovereign sometimes compelled disobedience to 
 his orders. We may note contumacious parliaments 
 defying royal authority to a certain point, and yielding 
 when the royal screw is put on heavily, always under 
 the guidance of the grave, imperturbable Fleury. No 
 wild writings on the wall invoking destruction on the 
 Constitution and its supporters could alarm that deter- 
 mined old man ; could alarm, indeed, his determined 
 colleagues. The dwarfish, humpbacked Bishop of Laon, 
 half an Aramis and half a De Retz, of whom it was 
 said that he would have been the devil of a fellow if he 
 had only been a musketeer, declared that the only way 
 out of the whole difficulty was to hand the greater part 
 of the public power back into the hands of the bishops 
 in order to save a hereticized France from destruction. 
 The Parliament ordered the suppression of these utter- 
 ances. The bishop retorted by threatening excommu- 
 nication to any one who should venture .to read the 
 parliamentary order, and recited the prayers against the 
 enemies of the Church. 
 
 At Rome the Holy See solemnly burned the famous 
 " Consultation," in which forty advocates pleaded the 
 cause of as many cures who appealed to the Parliament 
 against the censures of their bishops. This document, 
 among other things, advanced such significant theories 
 of statecraft as that the Parliaments were the senate of 
 the nation, and the king was to be regarded only as 
 the chief of a sovereign nation, while phrases like " pub- 
 lic authority " and " public power " were used with 
 ominous iterance. The forty advocates, pushed into a 
 corner, declared in a later document that they recog- 
 nized that France was a monarchical state, and that the
 
 1730. A PERTINACIOUS PARLIAMENT. 31 
 
 * 
 
 sovereign authority rested in the person of the monarch 
 and of the monarch alone. As a reward for this sub- 
 mission an Order of Council cleared them of the crime 
 of rebellion ; but the Archbishop of Paris, dissatisfied, 
 issued an ordinance in which he declared that the whole 
 of the forty advocates were heretics, and asserted that 
 the bishops had, in virtue of their divine origin, a co- 
 active power independent of the secular authority. The 
 Parliament of Paris suppressed this ordinance, where- 
 upon an Order of Council ordered both the high dis- 
 puting parties to keep an absolute silence upon the 
 whole question of the rights of the two powers. A 
 little later, however, the government allowed the Arch- 
 bishop of Paris to promulgate his ordinance, where- 
 upon the forty advocates declared that the minister 
 associated himself with the charge of heresy brought 
 against them, and refused to plead. The legal order as 
 a body followed their example. Ten advocates were 
 promptly punished by exile. Their departure was con- 
 verted by popular enthusiasm into a triumph, and there 
 was considerable danger of riot. Laon's wild bishop 
 attacked the Parliament bitterly ; the Parliament re- 
 torted by summoning him before the Assembly of Peers 
 for trial, and the peers were summoned for that pur- 
 pose to attend the Parliament. Fleury, to avoid the 
 scandal, suppressed the Bishop of Laon's mandate, and 
 the Parliament issued its order of September 7, in which 
 it set forth "that the temporal power was independent 
 of all other power, that to it alone belonged the right 
 to 'control' the king's subjects, and that the ministers 
 of the Church were accountable to Parliament, under 
 the authority of the king, for the exercise of their ju- 
 risdiction." 
 
 Immediately an Order of Council, launched by Fleury,
 
 32 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. III. 
 
 suppressed this parliamentary mandate, and an usher of 
 the Council was despatched to strike with his own hand 
 the mandate from the parliamentary register. At this 
 juncture the Parliament rose for its habitual vacation 
 of two months from September 7 to November 12. 
 When it met again it was faced by a direct order from 
 Fleury forbidding it to deliberate upon the action of 
 the government with regard to the mandate of Sep- 
 tember 7. The Parliament sent a deputation to the 
 king, which the king declined to receive, whereupon it 
 decided to make a protest "at some more opportune 
 occasion." Fleury took these words to mean when he 
 should be no more, and was indignant. The Parlia- 
 ment was summoned to Versailles and roundly repri- 
 manded, and nothing more was heard of the mandate 
 of September 7. 
 
 The battle, lulled for a while, began all over again 
 when the Archbishop of Paris condemned the " Nou- 
 velles Ecelesiastiques." The Parliament proceeded to 
 discuss this condemnation ; the king ordered them to 
 keep silence till they learned his good pleasure ; the 
 Parliament protested ; the king retorted by exiling the 
 Abbe Pucelle and clapping another councillor into Vin- 
 cennes. Then the Parliament defiantly forbade the 
 distribution of the Archbishop's mandate, and for fear 
 that this order should be erased, as was the order of 
 September 7, they had it printed at once and issued 
 broadcast. The government cancelled the order and 
 exiled four more councillors. Thereupon the majority 
 of the magistrates, to the number of one hundred and 
 fifty, signed their resignations and solemnly marched 
 out of the palace two by two amidst the applause of 
 an enormous crowd, who hailed them as Romans and 
 fathers of their country. This was on June 20, 1732.
 
 1732. MUTINOUS MAGISTRATES. 33 
 
 Fleury, amazed and perturbed, by a policy of blended 
 menace and cajolement, induced the Parliament to re- 
 sume its functions. But it was a truce, not a peace. 
 Fleury would have liked to abolish the Parliament alto- 
 gether, but, as this was too comprehensive a step, he 
 began by endeavoring to reduce its powers. On August 
 18, 1732, he addressed a declaration to the magistrates 
 which changed all the order and usage of the Parlia- 
 ment, and limited much of its authority. The Parlia- 
 ment protested. The king held firm, and the decla- 
 ration of Fleury was solemnly registered at a bed of 
 justice held in the Guards' Hall at Versailles. The 
 magistrates who had to attend the bed of justice seized 
 upon the law which prohibited the changing of the seat 
 of Parliament to declare the bed of justice null and 
 void. The government immediately sent one hundred 
 and thirty-nine of the mutinous magistrates into exile, 
 and then, in November, as if fearful of its own bold- 
 ness, revoked the exile, recalled the banished magis- 
 trates, and practically withdrew the Fleury declaration. 
 This comparative triumph for the Parliament stirred 
 up the Jansenists to fresh activity. Montpellier's bish- 
 op, in a pastoral letter, spoke with ominous prophecy 
 of " a coming revolution which will substitute a new 
 Church for the existing Church." On the other hand, 
 the Jesuits waged fiercer war than ever. Fleury was 
 denounced for his yielding to the Parliament. The 
 faithful were called upon to rally in defence of a threat- 
 ened faith. In the midst of all this welter a young 
 king of four-and-twenty hunted and supped most tran- 
 quilly, and an aged minister oscillated in irritated de- 
 spair between the two factions. 
 
 In the very white heat of the Jesuit-Jansenist wrangle 
 France found herself at war again, much against Fleury's 
 L 3
 
 34 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. III. 
 
 will. But France could hardly in those days stand idly 
 by and see Stanislas Leszczynska, the French king's 
 father-in-law, beaten rudely out of Warsaw by Augus- 
 tus III. and the Russians. The war, which, like all wars 
 at that time, raged in ever so many places at the same 
 time, came to an end honorably and advantageously for 
 France with the treaty of Vienna in 1738, and landed 
 Stanislas Leszczynska, not again on the throne of Po- 
 land, but comfortably enough in the duchies of Lorraine 
 and Bar. To the despair of a peaceful minister, how- 
 ever, war blazed out again in 1740; the European pow- 
 ers were all wrangling together like boys at a muss, and 
 France got very much the worst of it. A picturesque 
 young Archduchess of Austria, hardly pressed, set Hun- 
 gary aflame with enthusiasm at Presburg. " Moriamur 
 pro Rege nostr'a !" became an historical phrase, and a 
 crippled French army found itself in hot retreat from 
 Prague to the French frontier in the January of 1743. 
 This retreat was as fatal to Fleury as Austerlitz was 
 yet to be to Pitt. Old, broken, despairing, he died at 
 Issy on January 29, 1743. He was ninety years old ; 
 he had done his best for himself, and after himself for 
 France ; a better, stronger, wiser man than he could 
 scarcely have saved her under the conditions of the 
 game ; he left her in the hands of a young king of whom 
 the country and the world as yet knew little, of whom 
 the country and the world was soon to know a great 
 deal. From this point onwards the state drifts steadily 
 from shame to shame towards its doom ; we stand upon 
 the threshold of the most disastrous, the most degraded 
 period in the history of France. 
 
 The little that was known about the young king was 
 not much to his credit. He had already disgraced him- 
 self as a husband by his brutal indifference to his wife
 
 1743. MADAME DE CHlTEAUROUX. 35 
 
 and by his more than Oriental extravagance of desires. 
 Already he was remarkable for his mistresses. He had 
 honored one stately family, the family of Nesle, by 
 choosing in succession no less than four daughters of 
 its house to be his mistresses. Of these four mistresses, 
 the latest was Madame de Chateauroux, youngest and 
 fairest of the four sisters, who was in the full noon- 
 tide of her effulgence when battered old Fleury gave 
 up his cunning and died. She was the real influence 
 in the state. Chancellor D'Aguesseau, Marine Min- 
 ister Maurepas, War Minister D'Argenson, and Car- 
 dinal Tencin recognized and submitted to her authority 
 over the young, indolent, sensual king. Madame de 
 Chateauroux, to do her justice, does seem to have tried 
 her best to make something more like a man and less 
 like a hog out of her Louis. She urged him to play a 
 bold part in facing the foes who were now combining 
 against France. England was now actively helping 
 Maria Theresa; Prussia was sated in neutrality by the 
 confirmation of stolen Silesia; Naples and Sardinia, 
 under English influence, withdrew from coalition with 
 France, who thus found herself alone. The desperate 
 defeat of Dettingen in 1743 occasioned more enthusiasm 
 than it deserved in the capitals of London and Vienna. 
 The next year an event of much greater moment nearly 
 came to pass. Louis XV., travelling with his army like 
 an opera king of cooks and lackeys, was suddenly struck 
 down by malignant fever at Metz, and nearly given 
 over. But he did recover ; the influence of his evil 
 star was not yet exhausted. Louis, always easily in- 
 fluenced by theories of religious or ethical decorum 
 while he was in bad health, consented to become recon- 
 ciled with his unhappy wife, and to whistle his beau- 
 tiful, ambitious mistress down the wind. Perhaps the
 
 36 THE FRENCH KEVOLUTION. CH. III. 
 
 indolent voluptuary was getting a little tired of a mis- 
 tress so proud, so impetuous, so eager to make something 
 manly out of her languid monarch as Madame de Cha- 
 teauroux. Anyhow, she was banished, and Louis saw 
 her no more. Louis's rescue from the jaws of death 
 seems to have aroused a good deal of misplaced enthu- 
 siasm among his subjects. The title of " Well-beloved " 
 was conferred upon him by popular sentiment, a good 
 deal, it would seem, to the monarch's own surprise. 
 " What have I done that my people should love me so 
 much?" he is reported to have said perhaps in good 
 faith, more likely with the queer cynical irony which 
 was a characteristic of his fatal nature. 
 
 Though the death of the emperor Charles VII. in the 
 January of 1745, and the terms to which the new elector 
 of Bavaria came with Maria Theresa, removed all reason 
 for continuing it, the war still raged until Fontenoy 
 gave, in the May of 1745, the signal for a series of 
 French victories which ended in the treaty of Aix-la- 
 Chapelle. 
 
 It might be very reasonably maintained that the first 
 serious impetus in that downward movement which cul- 
 minated in the culbute generate was given by the treaty 
 of Aix-la-Chapelle. If the reign of Louis XV. had 
 ended before 1748, it would have been, as kings and 
 reigns went in those days, a not inglorious reign. Un- 
 der the ministership of Fleury the prestige of France 
 was kept to something like the standard of the spacious 
 days of the Sun-king, and Louis XV. himself, with his 
 fine new title of the Well-beloved hot upon him, had 
 not yet, by his private debaucheries, eclipsed the degra- 
 dation of the Regency. In 1748 France was a great 
 and powerful kingdom, victorious in arms all over Eu- 
 rope, with a growing empire in India, a growing empire
 
 1748. TREATY OF AIX-LA-CHAPELLE. 37 
 
 in America, with a roll-call of victories as brilliant as 
 any that followed the fortunes of the marshals of Louis 
 XIV. Before the genius of Saxe, the armies of England 
 had been driven in defeat at Fontenoy and at Lauffeld; 
 before the genius of Dupleix the navy of England had 
 retreated in despair from Pondicherry ; the siege of 
 Maestricht was the last word of a long and glorious 
 catalogue of triumphs. But the treaty of Aix-la-Cha- 
 pelle afforded France no reward for her long and suc- 
 cessful struggle. " I wish," said Louis the Well-beloved, 
 " to negotiate like a prince and not like a merchant," 
 and he made practically no terms for France in the 
 treaty. Glory was enough for Saxe and his generals, 
 the reflected glory was enough for the Well-beloved 
 and the lords and ladies of the Bull's Eye ; but to that 
 vast France of which nobody took any heed, and which 
 was composed of quite others than lords and ladies, 
 marshals and generals, and well -beloved kings, glory 
 was but a barren business. The national debt was enor- 
 mously increased ; the fighting strength of the country 
 had been reduced by victories only less fatal than de- 
 feats, commerce shattered, the navy weakened; and for 
 all these there was nothing to show except the gilded 
 record of some bloody and triumphant battles. Hungry 
 France, thirsty France, trouserless France, might have 
 felt a more appreciable affection for a king who had a 
 touch more of the merchant in his composition, might 
 have felt a keener sympathy for the kingly institution 
 if it had known a little better how to combine the dig- 
 nity of its high office with something of that business- 
 like common-sense which, in the opinion of Louis, set 
 merchants apart from and beneath princes. France got 
 nothing by the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, and from the 
 moment of the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, France, or
 
 38 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. III. 
 
 rather the French monarchy, began to go down the hill. 
 The twenty - six years in which, by the ordinance of 
 Providence, Louis XV. was still permitted to reign over 
 France, were years of deepening degradation for the 
 monarchy, of deepening misfortune for the country and 
 its people.
 
 1781. THE L1TERAKY MOVEMENT. 39 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE PHILOSOPHES. 
 
 WHILE France was slipping faster and faster on its 
 glacier descent to destruction, while a young king was 
 growing older without growing wiser or better, or at 
 all more serviceable to the state, a movement was tak- 
 ing place in literature which was destined to have the 
 most momentous results. While Jansenist and Jesuit 
 plucked at each other's throats, while the king occupied 
 his ignoble life by selecting mistresses with the gravity 
 of a grand signior and the sensuality of a satyr, new 
 forces were coming into play, whose influence in fer- 
 menting the revolutionary impulse is not to be over- 
 estimated. 
 
 " The authority of the king has dwindled, and is 
 obeyed in no particular." So D'Argenson could write 
 in 1731 in the face of the Jansenist and Jesuit Iliad 
 which was raging, and which had for the moment eccen- 
 trically erected the Paris Parliament into the champion 
 of popular rights against the oppressions of a despotic 
 ministry. The fantastic and extraordinary case of 
 Father Girard and Miss Cadiere was promptly made 
 use of as a weapon against the Jesuits. New and strange 
 allies were found swelling the Jansenist ranks. A cer- 
 tain number of men were gradually drifting together 
 into a kind of unconscious alliance, guided by a common 
 sympathy and a common scepticism. Certain men of 
 letters, certain philosophers, certain thinkers, were slow-
 
 40 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION*. CH. IV. 
 
 ly forming themselves into a body destined to be bitterly 
 abused, to be accused of all manner of crimes, to be mis- 
 understood alike by their enemies and their blind ad- 
 mirers, and to effect the most comprehensive changes 
 in thought. In the early part of 1 732 a blow was struck 
 at this loosely adherent, scarcely formed party which 
 had considerable effect in causing it to cohere more 
 closely. A book appeared, which the Parliament con- 
 demned to be burned as dangerous alike for religion and 
 for the order of civil society. The book was the " Let- 
 ters on the English." The author was one of the most 
 popular men of letters, Voltaire. 
 
 Fran 9013 Marie Arouet was born at Chatenay on Feb- 
 ruary 20, 1694. So puny was the child, so poorly fitted 
 for the struggle for life, that it was feared at first that 
 he could not live at all, and neither the excellent and 
 well-to-do notary, his father, nor the keen-witted mother, 
 who died when the child was seven years old, could have 
 ventured to dream of the long life that lay before the 
 frail creature. In 1704 he went to the college of Louis- 
 le-Grand to learn under the Jesuits, according to his 
 own statement, nothing worth the learning. From col- 
 lege his godfather, the Abbe Chateauneuf, took the lad 
 into the dazzling society which was soon to revolve 
 around the sinful splendor of Regent Philip. Under 
 the guidance of Chateauneuf, under the influence of 
 another abbe, Chaulieu, the young Voltaire saw a great 
 deal of life of a brilliant evil kind, and met a great 
 many brilliant evil people, and a good many who were 
 simply evil without being brilliant. Chaulieu was a 
 very typical abbe of the Regency. A dainty rhymer 
 of the lightest and loosest verses, a champion of all the 
 obscene reaction against the severity of the Sun-King's 
 setting days, the intimate of an aristocracy whose chief
 
 1694-1715. AROUET. 41 
 
 ambition it was to excel in corruption and to be fanci- 
 fully original in sin, Chaulieu was the most amazing 
 Mentor that young Telemachus Arouet could have found 
 in his voyage through Paris. It is scarcely matter for 
 surprise that Arouet the father, that eminently respect- 
 able notary, did not rejoice in the course of his son's 
 conduct or the choice of his friends. They were an ill- 
 assorted sire and son. They had nothing in common ; 
 to Voltaire the narrow respectability of his father was 
 at once galling and ridiculous ; Arouet the elder was 
 not sufficiently keen-sighted to see that the flippant boy 
 who consorted with a lewd nobility was a man of genius. 
 By way of mending matters and forcing the blood-horse 
 into the mule's mill walk, Arouet the elder induced 
 Chateauneuf's diplomatist brother to take young Arouet 
 with him on a mission to the Hague. At the Hague, 
 Voltaire fell desperately in love with a young country- 
 woman, a Mademoiselle du Noyer. Mademoiselle du 
 Noyer was the amiable daughter of a most unamiable 
 mother who drove a queer traffic in libels. Pity as well 
 as love urged the young Arouet to hope to withdraw 
 the girl from such an influence. The intrigue was dis- 
 covered, and the amorist was sent back in disgrace to 
 Paris. Years after, Mademoiselle du Noyer married a 
 Baron de Winterfeld, and always cherished an affec- 
 tionate admiration for the great man who had been her 
 boyish lover. Destiny did not draw closer the relation- 
 ships of father and son. To please the father, the son 
 studied law under Attorney Alain in Paris, but he hated 
 the legal trade and sought happiness in Caumartin's 
 library at St. Ange. The advent of the regent in 1715 
 was hailed by the appearance of a bitter and clever 
 poem, "Les j'ai vu," satirizing the condition of France 
 and assailing the Jesuits. Voltaire did not write the
 
 42 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. IV. 
 
 poem, but the authorities thought that he did, and sent 
 him to the Bastille to reflect for nearly a year upon the 
 dangers of dissatisfaction with things as they were in 
 France. In the Bastille he worked hard mentally, for 
 it seems he was not allowed ink and paper finishing 
 his " Oedipus," which was played with success shortly 
 after his release, and in planning the " Henriade," in 
 which he hoped to succeed where Ronsard had failed, 
 and give epicless France her epopee. The "Henriade" 
 was to be all that the " Franciade " was not. For the 
 next six years the young Arouet worked hard and played 
 hard, flitting hither and thither in a passion for wander- 
 ings, falling in and out of love, writing much, reading 
 more in printed books and the bigger book of the world, 
 welcome in the bravest society, rejoicing in his own 
 youth, wit, and ambition, hating Paris and loving the 
 country with a passion that seems exotic and old world 
 in eighteenth-century France. Arouet the elder died in 
 1722, as bitter against his shining, stubborn son as ever, 
 and with his death Arouet the younger also fades from 
 knowledge, and in his place the world has to accept a 
 young Voltaire. Where the name Voltaire came from, 
 why he chose it, and what it signified to him or to oth- 
 ers, is and must remain a mystery. It has been puzzled 
 over, guessed at, reasoned upon ; it is really not of the 
 slightest importance. It may be, as has been ingeniously 
 suggested, compounded of an anagram upon his name 
 of Arouet with the "U" converted to a "V" and the 
 initial letters of the words " Le Jeune " pressed into the 
 service to make up the sum. The new name was soon 
 to be better known than the old. Its owner got into 
 the famous quarrel with an insolent bearer of the name 
 of Rohan. Voltaire was wittier than Rohan ; Rohan 
 revenged himself through the cudgels of his lackeys.
 
 1726. VOLTAIRE IX ENGLAND. 43 
 
 Voltaire, as bitter as creatures physically slight and 
 weak may well be under brutality, applied himself with 
 passion to the art of fencing, and challenged Rohan. 
 Rohan refused to fight, but through the influence of his 
 family he got Voltaire sent for the second time to the 
 Bastille. There he suffered for six months ; when he 
 was at length released he was immediately ordered to 
 leave Paris. In the May of 1726 Voltaire arrived in 
 England. 
 
 England was at that time and for long after a kind 
 of Mecca to Continental lovers of liberty of thought and 
 action. Frederick the Great paid, in his "Memoirs," 
 his tribute to the great men, such as Hobbes, Collins, 
 Shaftesbury, and Bolingbroke, who, in his eyes, had 
 done so much to widen thought. "The freedom of 
 opinion," he wrote, "prevalent in England contributed 
 greatly to the progress of philosophy." All manner of 
 Frenchmen, from Raynal to Roland, from Montesquieu 
 to Marat, visited it during the golden prime of the eigh- 
 teenth century ; Voltaire was not the pioneer. He had 
 formed a friendship with Lord and Lady Bolingbroke 
 in France, and, when the world was all before him where 
 to choose, he very naturally turned towards the country 
 of which he had heard so much from the illustrious St. 
 John. " Before Voltaire became acquainted with Eng- 
 land through his travels and his friendships," says Cousin 
 in his " History of Philosophy," " he was not Voltaire, 
 and the eighteenth century was still undeveloped." In 
 England he passed three years, which were years full 
 of admiration for the country, for the freedom which 
 he admired when he did not always understand it, for 
 its men of genius who were beginning to revolutionize 
 thought its Newton, its Locke, its Swift, its Addison, 
 its Pope. He studied English literature with something
 
 44 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. IV. 
 
 like appreciation, though he thought too highly of Ad- 
 dison's "Cato;" he studied English science, then just 
 dawning into something like scientific methods ; he 
 studied English philosophy, and he studied English the- 
 ology. Seldom were three years of exile more indus- 
 triously, more laboriously employed. 
 
 While in England he published his " Henriade," which 
 Lord Chesterfield, who did not admire Homer, admired, 
 and which we may be allowed to consider perhaps the 
 dullest epic in the world. It was well subscribed for ; 
 it laid the foundation of his fortune. After three years 
 he came back to France and his most famous love-affair 
 with Madame du Chatelet. He was happy in a literary 
 life, producing successful plays, writing and planning 
 histories, when the " Lettres sur les Anglais " saw the 
 light. They do not seem very terrible to-day, they did 
 not seem terrible in a little while even to his enemies, 
 but the Parliament had them burned, and the Parliament 
 prepared to level a lettre de cachet at the head of their 
 author. Voltaire dreaded the Bastille ; he would prob- 
 ably have returned to P^ngland if it had not been for 
 'Madame du Chatelet's existence. In consequence of 
 Madame du Chatelet's existence he retired to Cirey, in 
 Champagne, the chateau of the Marquis du Chatelet 
 there, with the learned lady and her lord, livted six se- 
 cluded years while it was given out that he was in Eng- 
 land. 
 
 Seldom has the service of literature been obeyed un- 
 der more curious conditions. The urbane marquis, the 
 scientific marquise, the philosophic poet and poetic phi- 
 losopher lived a life that might not unfairly be called 
 eccentric at Cirey. The gifted man and the gifted 
 woman were devoured by a positive passion for work. 
 Madame du Chatelet passed the major part of the
 
 1734. MADAME DU CHlTELET. 45 
 
 twenty-four hours shut up in her own room, translating 
 Newton, competing with Euler, devoting all the energy 
 of her fine intellect to the cause of science. Voltaire 
 was no less strenuous, but more catholic, -condemning 
 waste of time as the most unpardonable of offences, 
 studying science with desperate eagerness, writing his- 
 tories, writing plays, consumed by a very demon of 
 work, and yet always ready to play too for the amuse- 
 ment of stray guests. It cannot be said that his life 
 lacked fulness. At one moment he was great at magic- 
 lanterns and puppet-plays, convulsing wandering gen- 
 tlewomen by Puncinella singing " fagnana, fagnana ;" 
 at another he was flying to Holland to avoid lettres de 
 cachet. The influence of Madame du Chatelet would 
 have been unfortunate if she had succeeded in leading 
 him entirely into the service of a sternly rationalistic 
 science. But Voltaire had the good sense to feel doubts 
 of his capacity to shine as a man of science, the good 
 sense to submit those doubts to a famous man of sci- 
 ence, and the good sense on finding those doubts con- 
 firmed to accept the situation. 
 
 When Madame du Chatelet died, Voltaire declared 
 himself inconsolable. " I have lost the half of my life," 
 he said, consciously or unconsciously imitating the ex- 
 quisite tribute of Horace to Virgil. He knew well 
 enough that the gifted lady was no more faithful to 
 him than she was to her husband; the episode of Vol- 
 taire and Chatelet opening a locket of hers after her 
 death and finding that it contained the portrait of 
 neither of them, but of her lover, St. Lambert, has been 
 worked upon in many literatures. Voltaire was not in- 
 consolable, however. It is in one of his own exquisite 
 short stories that he speaks of the despairing pair who, 
 in the end, ceased to despair and raised together a tern-
 
 46 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. IV. 
 
 pie to Time the consoler. Time was always Voltaire's 
 great consoler. He lived so long and lived so thorough- 
 ly that his keenest personal griefs did inevitably fade 
 into a far perspective. Then came the storm and stress 
 of the melancholy Prussian period, when a great king 
 and a great writer behaved with the absurd incivility 
 of angry schoolboys and converted a famous friendship 
 into a yet more famous enmity. Neither Frederick the 
 Great nor Voltaire comes well out of the quarrel. The 
 whole thing was pitiable, mean, and ridiculous, not to 
 be willingly lingered over. Then Voltaire settled down 
 at Ferney, and made for a long time the little village 
 on the Swiss lake the Mecca of the philosophic thought 
 of Europe. 
 
 It was from Ferney that Voltaire fulminated all those 
 thunders against the "Infamous" which have earned 
 for him an exaggerated censure and an exaggerated 
 praise. It was while at Ferney that he gave most 
 strenuous expression to that "fierce indignation," that 
 saeva indignatio, which harassed his spirit all his life 
 very much as it harassed the spirit of Jonathan Swift. 
 To Ferney came men from all parts of the world to visit 
 the great writer the great James Boswell, of Auchin- 
 leck, for one; Dr. Burney, for another. It was at Fer- 
 ney that that most amazing" scoundrel and liar, Jacques 
 Casanova, had those interviews with Voltaire which he 
 records in those astonishing volumes in which a kind 
 of grotesque satyriasis alternates with shrewd and en- 
 tertaining judgments upon men and things. If it were 
 ever possible to take Casanova's statements at the foot 
 of the letter, it would be amusing to accept as in some 
 degree truthful his account of his arguments with Vol- 
 taire over the respective merits of "Merlin Coccaie" 
 and the "Pucelle." But especially it was to Ferney
 
 1762. VOLTAIRE'S SATIRICAL TRIUMPHS. 47 
 
 that the minds and thoughts turned of that body of 
 men who were destined to make the epoch of the Pom- 
 padour illustrious and the French Revolution possible 
 the Encyclopaedists Diderot, D'Alembert, D'Holbach, 
 Helvetius, and Grimm. 
 
 In his own mind Voltaire looked for fame to his 
 longer works. To me, however, Voltaire's happiest style 
 is to be seen in his short stories. His capacity for pro- 
 ducing effective and precious trifles was, as has been 
 said in words which I may adopt and adapt, some- 
 thing wonderful not mere curiosities, but condensed 
 triumphs of genuine satire, whose meaning grows and 
 deepens as they are studied. What, for instance, can 
 surpass the concise humor of " Scarmentado's Travels " ? 
 Or "The Blind Judges of Colors," with its whimsical 
 conclusion, in which, after the recital of all the quar- 
 rels and battles which took place among the blind dis- 
 putants, each of whom claimed to be an infallible judge 
 of colors, we are gravely told that a deaf man who had 
 read the tale admitted the folly of the sightless men 
 in presuming to decide questions of color, but stoutly 
 maintained that deaf men were the only qualified musi- 
 cal critics ? Or " Bababec and the P"akirs " ? A Mussul- 
 man, who is the supposed narrator of the tale, and a 
 good Brahmin, Omri, visit the fakir groups by the 
 banks of the Ganges, at Benares. Some of these holy 
 men are dancing on their heads; some inserting nails 
 in their flesh; some staring fixedly at the tips of their 
 noses, in the belief that they thus will see the celestial 
 light. One, named Bababec, is revered for special sanc- 
 tity because he went naked, wore a huge chain round 
 his neck, and sat upon pointed nails, which pierced his 
 flesh. Omri consults this saintly sage as to his own 
 chances of reaching Brahma's abode after death. The
 
 48 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. IV. 
 
 fakir asks him how he regulates his life. " I endeavor," 
 says Omri, " to be a good citizen, a good husband, a 
 good father, and a good friend. I lend money without 
 interest to those who have need; I give to the poor, 
 and I maintain peace among my neighbors." "I am 
 sorry for you," interrupts the pious fakir; "your case 
 is hopeless; you never put nails dans votre cul." Such 
 specimens, however, are only like the brick which the 
 dullard in the old story brought away for the purpose 
 of giving his friend an idea of the beauty of the temple. 
 The seeds of the Revolution were nowhere more surely 
 sown than in these short stories. Voltaire developed 
 the satirical capability of the French language to a de- 
 gree equalled by no other man. So much sarcastic force 
 was, probably, never compressed into so few and such 
 simple words as in many of these little fictions. The 
 reader is positively amazed at the easy dexterity with 
 which subjects are placed in the most ludicrous light 
 possible. Sometimes Voltaire's ideas become extrava- 
 gant, but his style never does. Sydney Smith frequent- 
 ly lacks simplicity, but Voltaire is always simple and 
 never strains. What an admirable pamphleteer Vol- 
 taire would have made had he but been an Englishman ! 
 What inextinguishable ridicule he would have scattered 
 over a ministry or over an opposition ! How irresisti- 
 bly people would have been forced to think anything 
 he laughed at deserving of laughter! How he would 
 have written up some measure of emancipation and 
 made a reluctant government afraid to refuse it ! That 
 Voltaire appreciated English freedom of speech we have 
 already seen. Had he but understood the genius and 
 the worth of our best literature as well, it would have 
 been better for his critical, and perhaps for his dramatic 
 fame. Voltaire, of course, made fun of English ways
 
 1694-1778. VOLTAIRE'S USE OF SATIRE. 49 
 
 now and then. My Lord Qu'importe, or What -then, 
 who said nothing but " How d'ye do " at quarter-hour 
 intervals, is the prototype of many a caricature drawn 
 by succeeding hands. But in the very chapter which 
 contained this good-humored hit at our proverbial in- 
 sular taciturnity, he calls the English the most perfect 
 government in the world, and adds, with a truth which 
 prevails at this day as much as ever, " There are, indeed, 
 always two parties in England who fight with the pen 
 and with intrigue, but they invariably unite when there 
 is need to take up arms to defend their country and 
 their liberty." Well might Goldsmith, in his " Citizen 
 of the World," well might Disraeli, in " Contarini Flem- 
 ing," pay their tributes in turn as Englishmen to the 
 genius of Voltaire. 
 
 A noble weapon was that Voltaire owned, for one 
 who used it rightly who understood, as Sydney Smith 
 said, how to value and how to despise it. It would be 
 idle to deny that Voltaire sometimes used it unfairly. 
 Fantastic, hot - tempered, sensitive, spiteful by nature, 
 how could such a man have such a stiletto always un- 
 sheathed, and not sometimes give a jealous stab, and 
 sometimes thrust too deeply, and sometimes wound those 
 who were not worth piercing at all ? He often imported 
 petty personal spleens into his satires, and used his 
 giant's strength upon some poor ephemeral pigmy, some 
 Freron or some Boyer. But so did Horace, and Pope, 
 and Swift, and so did Thackeray even in later and milder 
 days. Voltaire has got a worse name for meanness of 
 this kind than almost any other man of kindred genius, 
 and yet seems, after all, to deserve it less than most of 
 the great satirists of the world. Indeed, posterity has, 
 upon the whole, dealt very harshly with Voltaire's errors, 
 and made scant allowance of the praise which his pur- 
 I. 4
 
 50 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. IV. 
 
 poses and efforts so often deserved. Few of the lead- 
 ing satirists of literature ever so consistently and, all 
 things considered, so boldly turned their points against 
 that which deserved to be wounded. Religious intol- 
 erance and religious hypocrisy, the crying sins of France 
 in Voltaire's day, were the steady objects of his satire. 
 Where, in these stories, at least, does he attempt to sat- 
 irize religion? Where does he make a gibe of genuine 
 human affection? Where does he sneer at an honest 
 effort to serve humanity ? Where does he wilfully turn 
 his face from the truth ? Calmly surveying these mar- 
 vellous satirical novels, the unprejudiced reader will 
 search in vain for the blasphemy and impiety with 
 which so many well - meaning people have charged 
 the fictions of Voltaire. Where is the blasphemy in 
 "Zadig"? It is brimful of satire against fickle wives 
 and false friends, intriguing courtiers, weak beings, in- 
 tolerant ecclesiastics, and many other personages toler- 
 ably well known in France at that day. They might 
 naturally complain of blasphemy who believed them- 
 selves included in the description of the learned Magi 
 who doomed Zadig to be impaled for his heretical doc- 
 trines concerning the existence of griffins. "No one 
 was impaled after all, whereupon many wise doctors 
 murmured and presaged the speedy downfall of Baby- 
 lon," was a sentence which probably many in Paris 
 thought exceedingly offensive and impious. Possibly 
 yet greater offence was conveyed to many minds by 
 Zadig's famous candle argument. Zadig, having been 
 sold into slavery, fell into the hands of a very humane 
 and rational merchant, named Setoc. " He discovered 
 in his master a natural tendency to good, and much 
 clear sense. He was sorry to observe, however, that 
 Setoc adored the sun, moon, and stars, according to the
 
 J 6 94-1778. OBJECTS OF VOLTAIRE'S SATIRE. 51 
 
 ancient usage of Araby. . . . One evening Zadig lit a 
 great number of flambeaux in the tent, and, when his' 
 patron appeared, flung himself on his knees before the 
 illuminated wax, exclaiming, 'Eternal and brilliant 
 lights, be always propitious to me !' ' What are' you 
 doing?' asked Setoc, in amazement. 'I am doing as 
 you do,' replied Zadig. ' I adore the lamps and I neg- 
 lect their maker and mine.' Setoc comprehended the 
 profound sense of this illustration. The wisdom of his 
 slave entered his soul; he lavished his incense no more 
 upon created things, but adored the Eternal Being who 
 made them all." Is it impious to satirize the glory of 
 war, the levity of French society, the practice of bury- 
 ing the dead in close churchyards in the midst of cities, 
 the venal disposal of legal and military offices? All 
 these are subjects on which the author pours out his 
 gall in the " Vision of Babouc." The travels of Scar- 
 mentado simply expose religious intolerance in France, 
 Spain, England, Italy, Holland, China. The letters of 
 Amabed denounce fanaticism coupled with profligacy. 
 Anything said against the manner in which the vices 
 of Fa Tutto are exposed must apply equally to Aristoph- 
 anes and Juvenal, to Rabelais and Swift, to Marlowe 
 and Massinger. The " Histoiy of Jenni " is a very 
 humdrum argumentation against atheism; inefficacious, 
 we fear, to convert very hardened infidels, and serving 
 only to demonstrate the author's good intentions and 
 his incapacity for theological controversy. " The White 
 Bull," if it have any meaning whatever beyond that of 
 any of Anthony Hamilton's fairy tales, means to satirize 
 the literal interpretations of certain portions of the Old 
 Testament in which very stupid theologians delighted. 
 To accuse of blasphemy every man who refused to ac- 
 cept the interpretations which Voltaire in this extrava-
 
 52 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. IV. 
 
 gant parable appears to reject, would be to affix the 
 charge upon some of the profoundest of our own theo- 
 logians, some of the best and wisest of our thinkers. It 
 is unquestionable that Voltaire was deficient in that 
 quality which we call veneration. He had no respect 
 even for what Carlyle terms the "majesty of custom." 
 With all his hatred of intolerance, he was himself sin- 
 gularly intolerant of error. He did not care to concil- 
 iate the feelings of those whose logical inaccuracy he 
 ridiculed. Frequently and grievously he sinned against 
 good taste, against that kindly, manly feeling which 
 prompts a gentle mode of pointing out a fellow-man's 
 errors and follies. But there is nothing in these stories, 
 at least, which affords any real foundation for a charge 
 of blasphemy or wilful impiety ; and these volumes, 
 more truly and faithfully than anything else which re- 
 mains of him, reflect to posterity the real character and 
 spirit, the head and heart of Voltaire. In these we 
 learn what Voltaire thought deserving of ridicule; and 
 with that knowledge, on the great German's principle, 
 we come to know the man himself. 
 
 What is the moral of all these satires ? Voltaire gave 
 them to the world with a moral purpose, and, indeed, 
 marred the artistic effect of many of them by the reso- 
 lute adherence with which he clung to it. Do they 
 teach anything but that truth, unselfishness, genuine 
 religious feeling, freedom, and love, are the good an- 
 gels of humanity ; and falsehood, selfishness, hypocrisy, 
 intolerance, and lawless passion, its enemies and its 
 curses? Why accept Juvenal as a moral teacher and 
 reject Voltaire? Why affix to the name of Voltaire a 
 stigma no one now applies to that of Rabelais ? Voltaire 
 mocked at certain religious teaching, unquestionably ; 
 and it is not, under ordinary circumstances, amiable or
 
 1694-1778. VOLTAIRE'S SATIRE JUSTIFIED. . 53 
 
 creditable to find food for satire in the religious cere- 
 monials or professions of any man. To do so now would 
 be inexcusable, because it would be wholly unnecessary. 
 Where each man has full and equal freedom to preach, 
 pray, and profess what he pleases, nothing but malig- 
 nity or vulgarity can prompt any one to make a public 
 gibe of his neighbor's ceremonials of worship, even al- 
 though his neighbor's moral practices may appear some- 
 what inconsistent with true worship of any kind. To 
 satirize the practices or doctrines of the established 
 church of any civilized country now argues not cour- 
 age, but sheer impertinence and vulgarity. But things 
 were very different when Voltaire wrote. Where it 
 might entail banishment, worldly ruin, or even death, 
 to speak a free word of criticism upon the doings of 
 the hierophants of a dominant authority, it was a very 
 excusable and praiseworthy act to expose the folly of 
 some of the deeds, the inconsistency and immorality of 
 some of the teachers. It is more easy to pardon this 
 than to pardon the "Pucelle," that brilliant, indecent 
 burlesque of Chapelain's solemn muse which Richelieu 
 suggested, which Malesherbes adored, which its author 
 affectionately called " Ma Jeanne," which the yet to be 
 famous'author of "Organt" desperately imitated. The 
 "Pucelle" is as unjustifiable to-day as when Voltaire 
 wrote it ; the stories no longer need to be justified. 
 
 Gessler may wear his hat any fashion he chooses, and 
 only ill-breeding would laugh at him as long as he does 
 not insist upon any one performing any act of homage 
 to his humor. But when he sets his beaver upon a pole 
 in the centre of the market-place, and orders imprison- 
 ment or exile for every subject who will not fall down 
 and worship it, that man does a brave and wise act who 
 Bets the world laughing at the tyrant and his prepos-
 
 54 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. IV. 
 
 terous aiTOgance. The personages who used to sing 
 comic songs and dance the clog-dance during certain 
 performances of divine service several years ago were 
 vulgar and culpable boors. Whatever they might have 
 thought of the service, they were not compelled to at- 
 tend it, and in our days theological differences are not 
 decided by mobs and hob-nailed shoes. But if the in- 
 cumbent of the church had the power to bring down 
 penal disqualification, or exile, or worldly ruin upon the 
 heads of all those who declined to acknowledge his cere- 
 monials as their worship, the first man who raised a bold 
 laugh at the whole performance might be very justly 
 regarded as a hero. Something, at least, of this quali- 
 fied character is to be said in palliation of the irrever- 
 ence of Voltaire. Much that was stigmatized as blas- 
 phemy a century ago, most people regard as plain truth 
 now. Much even of the most objectionable of Voltaire's 
 writings may be excused by the circumstances of the 
 time, by the feelings with which he wrote, by the dis- 
 torted and hideous form in which Christianity was pre- 
 sented in the dogmas of so many of its professional 
 exponents. Much, it is true, may be admitted to be 
 wholly inexcusable, for did he not produce the "Pu- 
 celle"? But no one claims for Voltaire an immunity 
 from some severe censure. All that is sought for him 
 is a more general and generous recognition of the praise 
 he merited and the motives which impelled him, a miti- 
 gation of the sentence which so many have pronounced 
 upon him. No other man from Voltaire's birth down- 
 wards, not even excepting Rousseau, has borne such 
 extravagance of praise followed by such a load of ob- 
 loquy. He was not a profound thinker ; he was not a 
 hero ; he was not a martyr for truth ; he was not a 
 blameless man. But he had, at least, half-glimpses of
 
 1694-1778. VOLTAIRE'S GREAT INFLUENCE. 55 
 
 many truths, not of his own time, which the world has 
 recognized and acknowledged since. He had probably 
 as much of the heroic in him as a man constitutionally 
 nervous and timid could well be expected to have. No 
 one would ever have relished less the endurance of the 
 martyr's sufferings in his own person, but he made 
 odious and despicable those who had caused or con- 
 nived at their infliction upon others, and he did some- 
 thing to render future martyrdoms impossible. For 
 his time and his temptations, his personal offences were 
 not very many or very great. If people would but 
 cease to think of him as a philosopher either of free- 
 thought or of infidelity, and would merely regard him 
 as a political and social satirist, they would recognize 
 in bis satirical works, not only the memorials of a ge- 
 nius unrivalled in its own path, but the evidences of a 
 generous nature, an enlightened perception, and an earn- 
 est desire for the happiness and the progress of human 
 beings. 
 
 With these words we must take our farewell of Vol- 
 taire. Never was there a greater force in literature ; 
 never has a man been more wildly worshipped or more 
 wildly execrated. His bitterest enemies can afford to 
 think well of the champion of Rochette, of Galas and 
 Sirven, of La Barre and Lally. His greatest admirers 
 may regret the squabble with Frederick. But the whole 
 life of Voltaire was one gallant fight for freedom. The 
 influence he obtained in his own time was simply enor- 
 mous, only rivalled by the enormous influences which 
 his name and work have exercised since his time. It 
 is impossible to read, without being deeply touched, of 
 that return to Paris in 1778, after an absence of well- 
 nigh a generation, of the enthusiastic triumph accorded 
 to him by the whole city, and of his death, whether
 
 56 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. IV. 
 
 from over-excitement, or an overdose of laudanum, on 
 May 30 in that same year. He had waged a life-long 
 war against tyranny, oppression, and injustice of all 
 kinds ; if he was the great general of the war, he had 
 the good-fortune to rally round him the brilliantest of 
 lieutenants most brilliant of all, the greatest of his dis- 
 ciples, Diderot. 
 
 Denis Diderot was born at Langres in 1713, the son 
 of a studious, intelligent sword cutler and a worthy 
 woman ; he had a " divine Diogenes in petticoats " for 
 a sister and a devout Jesuit for a brother. In his early 
 youth he went to school with the Jesuits, and became 
 so enamoured of them that he sought to escape from 
 Rome in order to join the order in Paris. His father 
 intercepted the escape, but, with wise indulgence, took 
 him himself to Paris to the College d'Harcourt. There 
 the young Diderot had two years of excellent training ; 
 then the father announced that it was time he should 
 begin the world, and offered him his choice of law 
 or medicine. Denis Diderot disliked both. Medicine 
 seemed to him as murderous as it seemed to Faust ; law, 
 the intolerable doing of other folks' business. Diderot 
 senior thereupon promptly and decisively cut off the 
 supplies and Denis found himself thrown on his own 
 resources. To be thrown upon one's own resources in 
 a great capital with much ambition for success chiefly 
 of the literary kind, and no money wherewith to insure 
 bed and board, is not a very agreeable experience in the 
 present day, but it was very much more disagreeable in 
 the last century. The life of a man of letters who wished 
 to live by his pen was desperate, uphill work. He was 
 often hungry, he was often homeless, his raiment often 
 scanty, bis linen often ragged. He was worse off than 
 the gypsy, because he would not steal ; he was worse
 
 1713-1784. DENIS DIDEROT. 57 
 
 off than the tramp, because he would not beg ; he was 
 worse off than the laborer, because he was troubled by 
 the thoughts, the hopes, the dreams which lifted him 
 from the possibility of content in almost animal occu- 
 pation and almost animal gratification of the imperious 
 desires. Diderot was destined to see the man of letters 
 a man of power in France ; but when he first launched 
 his bark upon the perilous sea, the man of letters was 
 hardly recognized as better than an adventurer or a 
 drudge. 
 
 Diderot for the first hard decade of his working life 
 was both adventurer and drudge. He did some teach- 
 ing, got a tutorship in the house of a wealthy man, and 
 deliberately gave it up because it interfered with his 
 scheme of existence. He did as much borrowing as he 
 could. The needy Bohemians of Murger's immortal 
 story did not live a more desperate life than he. Paris 
 is the true Prague of Bohemia, and Diderot was free of 
 the city. He knew what it was to starve. A kind land- 
 lady once forced a supper upon him when he was almost 
 dying of hunger. He swore that if ever brighter hours 
 dawned for him he would never refuse aid to any living 
 creature or help to condemn him to such misery. It is 
 pleasant to record that Diderot kept his oath. But the 
 time for keeping the oath was far off. In the meantime 
 he tramped Paris, wrote and read and hungered and 
 thirsted ; studied rather the book of life than books 
 about life ; married in the reckless Bohemian way a 
 seamstress named Antoinette Champion, and made a 
 dismal match of it. Men of genius are not always the 
 pleasantest companions for the hearth and home, even 
 where the sordid claims of daily life do not intrude and 
 disturb. But Diderot was wretchedly poor, and the 
 seamstress naturally brought no portion with her. She
 
 58 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. IV. 
 
 was full of the domestic virtues, pious, -prudent, careful. 
 But she was rather older than Diderot, she could not 
 possibly understand him; in the end his wild humors, 
 his infidelities, wore out her patience and the bond 
 galled. Poor little Lenette in Jean Paul Richter's 
 masterpiece was much to be pitied for marrying Sieben- 
 kaes, though Siebenkaes was as moral as an apostle. 
 But, on the other hand, Siebenkaes was to be pitied in 
 that he was a man of genius and a poet who had mar- 
 ried a mere Haus-Frau. We must pity Antoinette 
 Champion ; we may also pity Diderot. He should not 
 have married, he was not meant for marriage ; he could 
 not keep the compact he had entered into ; he could 
 not do without intellectual companionship. Unlucky 
 Antoinette Champion could give him her devoted affec- 
 tion, her untiring work, her poor hoarded pence for his 
 cups of coffee, but she could not talk about the things 
 nearest and dearest to his heart, and he inevitably drift- 
 ed off to those who could. Who can help pitying her 
 or blaming him ? To have lived the life due to his mar- 
 riage would have been suicide to Diderot, but not to 
 live it was little short of murder murder of the domes- 
 tic hopes, the domestic yearnings, all that made life 
 sweet to the poor seamstress. Philosophers are often 
 bad house-fellows. After all, we have never heard Xan- 
 tippe's side of the story. 
 
 For many bitter years Diderot toiled and drudged in 
 Paris, doing all manner of hack work, befriending all 
 who sought his friendship, readily cheated and deceived 
 by all who strove to cheat or to deceive him, translating 
 Shaftesbury, penning pamphlets, enduring domiciliary 
 visits from the police, even going to prison. A lampoon 
 upon a courtly minion caused him to be arrested and 
 sent to Vincennes, where he might have rotted to death
 
 1713-84. A REVOLUTIONARY PRELUDE. 69 
 
 but for the efforts of Voltaire. In the woods of Vincen- 
 nes Diderot was allowed to wander, while he was still 
 nominally a prisoner, in the company of Rousseau ; it 
 was while he was in Vincennes that he learned his 
 first sharp lesson in the infidelity of woman. He imag- 
 ined that his new Egeria, Madame de Puisieux, would 
 at least be true to him. He strangely fancied that ge- 
 nius, wit, scholarship, could bind a lewd woman to his 
 side. She betrayed him, while her professions of love 
 and devotion were still warm upon her lips ; he was 
 convinced of her treason and he gave her up. It is one 
 of the most whimsical curses which Nature inflicts upon 
 such men, that while they are themselves untrue they 
 expect to find truth in others. Full of his friendship 
 for Rousseau, whose flagging purposes he had animated 
 with his own philosophical fire, full of bitter reflections 
 upon the treachery of woman's love, Diderot left Vin- 
 cennes a free man after three months of captivity, and 
 set himself with all swiftness to giving the final touches 
 to the first volume of the " Encyclopaedia." 
 
 Much is expected of those who have the fortune or 
 the misfortune to be called upon to play their part in 
 an epoch of transition. Diderot's part was played in 
 such a time ; he was almost unconsciously, but not quite 
 unconsciously, preparing the way for the Revolution. 
 The whole social order around him was wheeling swiftly 
 into a new orbit, and Diderot put his shoulder to the 
 wheel with a will. It is not easy even for the greatest 
 of men to be absolutely certain that they live and move 
 in a time of radical change, a kind of grand climacteric 
 of life and order and law. But Diderot worked in a 
 time when the grand climacteric of the political and 
 social life of France was fast approaching, and he was 
 distinctly conscious of the approaching change. What
 
 60 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. IV. 
 
 shape the change was to take, how great, how convulsive 
 the change was to be, he can have hardly guessed, but 
 he worked like a hero in the cause of change; any change 
 from the condition of life, mental, social, political, in 
 which the France of his youth was set. How far Dide- 
 rot was prepared to go, at least in theory, we may learn 
 from the passages which he interpolated into the Abbe 
 Raynal's history of the two Indies. Take, for example, 
 this sentence : " Until a king is dragged to Tyburn 
 with no more pomp than the meanest criminal, the people 
 will have no conception of liberty. The law is nothing 
 unless it be a sword suspended over all heads without 
 distinction, and levelling all which elevate themselves 
 above the horizontal plane in which it circles." No 
 wonder that Mallet du Pan declared that such sentences 
 "serve as a prelude to the revolutionary code." 
 
 To an age like ours, so rich in the means it affords 
 to all of knowledge, so fertile in the systematization 
 and the spread of information, it is difficult at first to 
 realize the literary revolution which was effected by the 
 appearance of -the "Encyclopaedia." It was really the 
 first of its kind, the " Hero Eponymus " of encyclope- 
 dias. There had been encyclopaedias before, but hardly 
 in the sense which is now, since the days of Diderot, 
 attached to the word. If Albertus Magnus made a kind 
 of compilation, if Vincent de Beauvais wrote a "Specu- 
 lum," if Roger Bacon in an Opus Majus set up the 
 vestibule to an unfinished temple of knowledge, the 
 " Compendium Philosophic," if a Ringelberg of Basle in 
 the sixteenth century, and an Alsted in the seventeenth 
 century, and a Chambers in the eighteenth century pub- 
 lished cyclopedias, none of these ventures could at all 
 compare with the "vast operation" which Diderot and 
 his friend so gallantly undertook and so gallantly car-
 
 1746. THE "ENCYCLOPAEDIA." 61 
 
 ried through. Englishmen may well feel, however, a 
 sense of gratification in thinking that the inspiration of 
 the " Encyclopaedia," nay, more, its pattern and model, 
 came from England. " Our principal debt," Diderot 
 himself wrote, " will be to the Chancellor Bacon, who 
 sketched the plan of a universal dictionary of sciences 
 and arts at a time when there were not, so to say, either 
 arts or sciences." The impassioned admirers of Bacon 
 who seek to adorn his great memory with the author- 
 ship of the plays of Shakespeare and the essays of Mon- 
 taigne might do better in remembering the tribute that 
 Diderot in the prospectus and D'Alembert in the pre- 
 liminary discourse paid to the memory of Francis Bacon. 
 
 The very plan of the " Encyclopaedia " was modelled 
 upon an English example, upon the cyclopaedia of Eph- 
 raim Chambers, which was published in London in 1727, 
 and which was translated into French half a century 
 later with a view to its publication in Paris. Le Breton, 
 the Paris publisher, wanted a man of letters to help him 
 in bringing out the book. He turned to Diderot, who 
 had some reputation among booksellers as a needy, hard- 
 working author. Diderot examined the work, saw with 
 the swift inspiration of genius what a great deed was 
 to be done, and suggested to Le Breton that it should 
 be done. Diderot's eloquence inspired Le Breton, in- 
 spired even D'Aguesseau ; in the January of 1746, a 
 privilege was procured, and a kind of syndicate of pub- 
 lishers formed to run the concern. Even Diderot, with 
 his wide knowledge and desperate capacity for work, 
 felt that he could not accomplish an encyclopaedia, a 
 " book that should be all books," single-handed. He 
 wanted a friend, a colleague, an ally; he found that ally, 
 that colleague, that friend, in D'Alembert. 
 
 One wintry November night in the year 1717, a newly
 
 02 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. IV. 
 
 born child was discovered, well-nigh dead from expo- 
 sure, on the steps of the church of St. Jean le Rond. A 
 kindly hearted woman of the people, a glazier's wife, 
 whose name, curiously enough, seems to have been Rous- 
 seau, adopted the deserted child. The child was the son 
 of the natural son of Madame de Tencin, an authoress of 
 some small reputation and a courtesan of no reputation, 
 who had been the mistress of a large variety of illustri- 
 ous persons, including English Bolingbroke and French 
 D'Argenson. No very illustrious person, however, par- 
 ented the young D'Alembert ; his sire was artillery- 
 officer Destouches-Canon, the brother of Destouches the 
 dramatist. Mr. John Morley, who is rather fond of 
 sweeping criticisms, and who is little in sympathy with 
 the lighter literature of the eighteenth century, is pleased 
 to describe D'Alembert's uncle as " the author of some 
 poor comedies." The criticism is neither just nor happy. 
 The comedies of Destouches are scarcely so delightful as 
 the comedies of Regnard, but Destouches is nearer to 
 Regnard than Regnard is to Moliere, and some of Des- 
 touches' comedies are both excellent and entertaining. 
 When Destouches, the artillery-officer, discovered that 
 his son had been adopted by the poor glass-worker, he 
 allowed himself to feel some natural promptings of duty, 
 if not of affection, and paid from time to time certain 
 small sums for the child's education. It is one of the 
 many curious and ironic facts attendant upon the gene- 
 sis of the French Revolution that one of the master 
 minds of the age, one of the dominant forces of the 
 " Encyclopedia," should owe to the fostering care of 
 the people the right to breathe, which was well-nigh 
 denied to him by the soldier his sire and the harlot his 
 mother. The eighteenth century in France, so largely 
 swayed by harlots and by soldiers, was fated to fall be-
 
 1717. D'ALEMBERT. 63 
 
 fore the strange alliance of the philosophe and the prole- 
 taire, and never did philosophe owe more to the proletaire 
 than D'Alembert, or more keenly remember the debt. 
 Years after, when he had become famous, and Madame 
 de Tencin was eager to claim her kinship with him, he 
 repelled her proudly with the words, " I am the son of 
 the glazier's wife." 
 
 Yet if he was the son of the glazier's wife if he 
 abided with her for no less than forty years, he was not 
 entirely a source of satisfaction to his foster-mother. 
 His passion for learning, which distinguished him from 
 the moment when, in 1730, he entered the Mazarin Col- 
 lege, was the life-long despair of Mistress Rousseau. 
 " You will never be anything but a philosopher, and a 
 philosopher is only a madman, who makes his life mis- 
 erable in order that people may talk about him after he 
 is dead." Such was the poor opinion held by the gla- 
 zier's wife of philosophers. Nevertheless, D'Alembert 
 remained obstinate, remained a philosopher. His career 
 resembles that of Balzac's Daniel d'Arthez in its single- 
 minded devotion to study. He was happily constituted 
 with a perfect genius for work. How many men of let- 
 ters there are, harassed by constitutional infirmity, who 
 begin each morning of their waking life with the mel- 
 ancholy reflection, " What can I avoid doing to-day ?" 
 D'Alembert belonged to that happier class who salute 
 the day with the cheerily courageous question, " "What 
 can I do to-day ?" Yet this exquisite temperament was 
 not due to physical health. His physique was as feeble 
 as Voltaire's, as feeble as Rousseau's ; all his life his 
 health was bad, and his health reacted naturally enough 
 upon his temper and made him fretful and impatient. 
 D'Alembert was the only one of the great sceptics who 
 was fostered by the sheltering wings of Jansenism.
 
 64 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. IV. 
 
 Most of the other Encyclopaedists had been brought up 
 under Jesuit influences ; D'Alembert alone was nur- 
 tured on Jansenism. When the " Encyclopaedia " was 
 started, Diderot's thoughts turned at once to D'Alem- 
 bert. D'Alembert was a great mathematician, one of 
 the greatest in France ; geometry was to him the pas- 
 sion that poetry or that pleasure is to men of different 
 mould. In many ways, indeed, in most ways, D'Alem- 
 bert was strangely dissimilar to Diderot. All that was 
 wild, reckless, wanton in Diderot's nature was entirely 
 wanting to D'Alembert's character. Diderot, as we 
 have said, was a Bohemian of Bohemia. D'Alembert 
 was precise, even austere, scholastic. Some of his utter- 
 ances on the scholastic life remind us of the later lone- 
 liness and reserve of Arthur Schopenhauer. Even the 
 alliance which D'Alembert formed in later years with 
 Mdlle. de 1'Espinasse had nothing in common with Dide- 
 rot's wild amours. His affection for that greatly gifted 
 and amazingly sensitive lady was not a cause of great 
 happiness to D'Alembert, but it was an affection of a 
 high type, and if Mdlle. de 1'Espinasse could only have 
 included among her gifts the art of being faithful, she 
 might have sweetened instead of embittering the career 
 of the great philosopher. 
 
 Around these two men the little army of writers for 
 the great work grew up and held together. High stood 
 Holbach the wealthy, the aggressively atheistic, who 
 came from a childhood in the Palatinate to live out his 
 life in Paris, and whose "System of Nature," written 
 under the pseudonym of Mirabaud, was attacked by both 
 Voltaire and Frederick the Great ; born in 1723, he was 
 to live till the dawn of Revolution and die in the great 
 year 1787. High, too, stood Grimm Frederich Mel- 
 chior Grimm who, born in the same year, was to out-
 
 1715-1 807. GRIMM AND HELVETIFS. 65 
 
 live the century and die in 1807 at Gotha with a mind 
 stocked with marvellous memories memories of the 
 war against Rameau on behalf of the Italian music and 
 his headship of the " coin de la Reine," memories of the 
 great "Encyclopaedia," memories of the great Revolu- 
 tion. He was given by the fates nearly a century of 
 life, and he was lucky in his century and the lines his 
 life was cast in. High stood Claude Adrien Helvetius, 
 who was born in Paris in 1715, the year of the Sun- 
 King's death, of a race of quacks and physicians ; who 
 was in turns farmer-general, versifier, man of letters. 
 He wrote a book " On the Mind," which came near to 
 teaching Utilitarianism, but only succeeded in laying 
 down the doctrine that the love of pleasure and the dis- 
 like of pain were the sole motives for our actions. The 
 book shocked tne youth of Madame Roland, roused the 
 critical wrath of Turgot, and was publicly burned. Hel- 
 vetius was otherwise remarkable for marrying a very 
 pretty wife, whom we shall meet again, and for being 
 the friend of the Great Frederick. If he made a hard 
 and unpopular landlord, he did at least shelter the Young 
 Pretender generously in his hour of need, and pension 
 Marivaux. He died in 1771. These were the generals 
 of the Encyclopaedic army. It was a strange and mis- 
 cellaneous army. The greatest thinkers of the time 
 wrote on the topics to which they had devoted their 
 profoundest thoughts ; ladies of fashion sent dainty 
 fragments of information about clothes and coquettish 
 minutiae about the dressing of the hair. The " Book 
 that was to be all Books" was to be as catholic as the 
 world itself and to contain all things. Nothing in the 
 history of literature is more remarkable than the way in 
 which all these people, philosophers and fair ladies, 
 economists, scholars, soldiers, and wits, worked together 
 I. 5
 
 66 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. IV. 
 
 at the great work in loyal and even loving unison. 
 There was no writer for the "Encyclopaedia" who did 
 not take a personal pride in the " Encyclopaedia." The 
 influence of the " Encyclopaedia " upon the thought that 
 tended to Revolution is incalculable. It was only not 
 as great an influence at that of Voltaire, and the influ- 
 ence of Voltaire himself was not so distinctly instru- 
 mental in bringing the Revolution about as was the in- 
 fluence of the self -torturing sophist, wild Rousseau.
 
 1712. JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU. 67 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE APOSTLE OF AFFLICTION. 
 
 THE first spot which the stranger seeks in visiting 
 Geneva is the little island which bears the name of 
 Geneva's greatest citizen. It is but a little handful of 
 earth, carefully banked against the wear of the waters, 
 carefully railed and kept scrupulously trim. It presents 
 the usual medley of the sublime and the ridiculous essen- 
 tial, or at least inevitable, to all show-places. One of 
 the most conspicuous objects on the little island is a 
 refreshment kiosk, where a placard infoi'ms the thirsty 
 that American drinks are compounded. The other is 
 a statue of the greatest thinker and teacher of the 
 eighteenth century, Jean Jacques Rousseau. Here he 
 loved to come in the days of his youth, when the con- 
 fines of the island in their natural shape met the waves 
 and ripples of the lake, and when what is now called 
 the Old Town was the only Geneva extant, rising tier 
 upon tier of dull brown roofs along its hill, clustering 
 about the antique towers of its church, with the eternal 
 lines of the twin Saleve hills for a background. The 
 new Geneva, the Geneva of the traveller and the tourist, 
 had not come into existence then ; but the Geneva of to- 
 day, which offers its shelter to the Nihilist and to the 
 cosmopolitan revolutionary, is practically in spirit the 
 same Geneva which sheltered the Protestant family of 
 Rousseau from the wrath of a persecuting king. 
 
 Rousseau was born in Geneva on June 28, 1712. Early
 
 68 THE FKENCH REVOLUTION. CH. V. 
 
 in the sixteenth century, Didier Rousseau, a bookseller 
 of Paris, carried his Protestantism from Paris to Geneva, 
 and there set up his staff. A son Jean begat a son 
 David, and a son David begat a son Isaac, and the son 
 Isaac begat Jean Jacques, and with him, all unwitting- 
 ly, the "Contrat Social" and the French Revolution. 
 Rousseau's birth cost his mother her life. To use Mr. 
 Morley's fine phrase, Rousseau " was born dying." " My 
 birth," he writes himself, in the " Confessions," with that 
 note of almost intolerable pessimism which he always 
 loved to strike, "was the first of my misfortunes." The 
 motherless child had the strangest imaginable education. 
 Isaac Rousseau was an imaginative dreamer, and he com- 
 municated the grave malady to his son. There is noth- 
 ing in the last century at once more pleasing and more 
 poignant than the picture Rousseau draws of the long 
 evenings he and his father spent together, the man 
 and the child of seven, reading to one another in turn 
 the novels and romances that the mother had collected 
 together. Through the long hours of the night, the 
 strangely assorted pair would sit and follow with fever- 
 ish delight the long-winded evolutions of last century 
 fiction until the music of the morning birds would arouse 
 them from their paradise to the consciousness of a 
 workaday world outside which was waking up and 
 busy. When the undiluted fiction was exhausted, then 
 came the service of the scarcely less fanciful muse of 
 history. Before the eyes of Isaac and Jean Jacques 
 the glittering brocaded panorama of Venetian history 
 unfolded itself, and the mind of the child gave itself up 
 in wondering homage to the worship of Plutnrch and 
 the Plutarchian heroes. "Every healthy child is a 
 Greek or a Roman." Such is the axiom of a very dif- 
 ferent philosopher from Jean Jacques, of transatlantic,
 
 1712-24. ROUSSEAU, A PUPIL OF PLUTARCH. 69 
 
 transcendental, Bostonian Emerson, himself the hearti- 
 est lover of Plutarch of modern times. Rousseau was 
 not a healthy child, but he shared the common lot of all 
 intelligent children in becoming an antique hero. The 
 heart of any child in which the least seed of the heroic 
 is by good-fortune sown always swells over the splen- 
 did pages of Greek courage and Roman fortitude ; it 
 is possible that the heart of a sickly, sensitive, and high- 
 ly imaginative child beats all the quicker for the very 
 difference which chymic destiny has made between him 
 and the breed of heroes. However that may be, the 
 heroes ot'Plutarch came out of the dead past, and walked 
 abroad with the child Rousseau, welcomed him to their 
 fellowship, hailed him -as a peer. It is a proof of the 
 amazing, delicious, self -deceptive affectation of child- 
 hood that we find the young Rousseau on one occasion 
 startling his hearers, in recounting the myth of Mutius 
 Scaevola, by stretching his little arm over a hot chafing- 
 dish, and so quickening the spirit of the ancient legend. 
 A like tale is to be told in later days of another disciple 
 of Plutarch, a disciple of Jean Jacques, the young St. 
 Just. 
 
 Rousseau was left at an early age practically an only 
 child. There was an elder, most unruly brother, who 
 took to himself the key of the fields and vanished from 
 the knowledge of his kinsfolk and from the knowledge 
 of history forever. Imagination, which always stands 
 on tiptoe by the side of her stern sister, History, would 
 dearly like to speculate on the fate of that lost child of 
 the Rousseau race. He was seven years older than Jean 
 Jacques, who does not even tell us his name ; he was 
 brought up to the father's trade of watch-making; he 
 was a libertine and a rascal ; he was tenderly loved by 
 Jean Jacques. Once Jean Jacques flung himself be-
 
 70 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. V. 
 
 tween the brother and a beating which the father was 
 bestowing on him, and received the blows until the father 
 
 O ' 
 
 stayed his hand. Let us hope the brother was not un- 
 grateful. " He loved me," says Rousseau, " as much as 
 a scapegrace can love anything." At last the scapegrace 
 took himself off altogether ; a vague rumor reached his 
 relatives that he had gone to Germany ; he never wrote 
 them a line ; that was the end of him. For all that 
 they knew, for all that we know, he may have been dead 
 and buried within a year of his flight ; or he may have 
 changed his name and his mode of life, and ended not 
 dishonorably. Who knows? There may have been 
 in some German town a Rousseau who followed with 
 wonder and delight the rising fame of Jean Jacques, 
 and said to himself, " Behold my brother." But if he 
 did he kept his admiration to himself, and Jean Jacques 
 never heard of him again. 
 
 His early education was with an aunt, a singer of 
 sweet old songs, the memory of which clung to Jean 
 Jacques and brought tears into his eyes in days long 
 later. Then his father quarrelled with the operations 
 of the law in Geneva, broke up his home, and sent Jean 
 Jacques, then ten years old, to M. Lambercier's school 
 at Bossey village. Here he first learned his passion for 
 the country ; here too he gained that other extraordinary 
 passion which he has set forth so crudely in the " Con- 
 fessions," and which may well be left there. True to 
 that strange principle with which he set out in writing 
 his life, the principle of leaving " nothing to tell to God," 
 he regards the sensual dawnings in the feeble body of an 
 imaginative child with a direct simplicity which would 
 make one loathe virility if it were not that the absence 
 of virility was the quickening cause of Rousseau's dis- 
 eased, unhappy imaginings. Let us pity and pass on.
 
 1722-48. THE "CONFESSIONS." 71 
 
 While at Bossey a rigorous punishment for an offence 
 which he had not committed roused in the childish mind 
 that first sense of the Swift-like "fierce indignation" 
 against injustice which became the key.-note of his life. 
 To the hysterical temperament of Jean Jacques the 
 sense of wrong was like the travail of a new birth, sharp- 
 ly dividing the old childish life from the new. From 
 Bossey, Rousseau came back to Geneva to live with his 
 uncle and to prepare for the vocation of a minister. But 
 he was sent first to a notary's office, and when he was 
 promptly dismissed thence for incapacity he was ap- 
 prenticed to an engraver. The engraver was a rough, 
 brutal man ; his brutality converted Rousseau into a 
 liar, a coward, and a thief. At last, in sheer terror of 
 his savage taskmaster and of a promised chastisement, 
 Rousseau followed the example of the ne'er-do-weel elder 
 brother and in his turn ran away. He was then sixteen 
 years old. Without a penny in his pockets, without a 
 trade, without an object, without any friends save those 
 he was leaving behind him, he faced the world and step- 
 ped boldly forth into the unknown. It is a curious ex- 
 ample of the strangely contrasted nature of Rousseau 
 that the spirit which shrank in despair from a physical 
 punishment confronted with an almost heroic indiffer- 
 ence the perilous possibilities of the vagabond life. But 
 the old note of romance was once more set a-stirring. 
 Rousseau saw himself on his fool's errand as the hero of 
 all manner of wonderful and delightful adventures ; he 
 noted no darkness on his dubious course, but only a 
 nursery world of festivals, of treasures, of adventures, 
 of loving friends and complaisant mistresses, and he 
 stepped ont with a high heart like a child in a fairy tale. 
 He drifted for a day or two among the villages adjacent 
 to Geneva, tasting the ready hospitality of the peasant.
 
 72 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. V. 
 
 Then he made his way to Confignon village, in Savoy, 
 where a zealous priest dwelt, M. de Pontverre. Rous- 
 seau visited the priest, listened to his arguments, ac- 
 cepted his dinner and his Frangi wine, found his argu- 
 ments excellent, and intimated his readiness to enter the 
 Catholic Church. To hasten that end M. de Pontverre 
 sent his young disciple post-haste to Annecy, to Madame 
 de Warens and his fate. 
 
 After three lazy lounging days, singing under every 
 chateau window in the hope of evoking the adventures 
 which never came, Rousseau found himself at Annecy, 
 and entered upon the epoch of his life which, as he says 
 himself, decided his character. He expected to meet a 
 wrinkled devotee ; he found the fairest face, the bluest 
 eyes, the most dazzling complexion, the most enchanting 
 throat, all the charms that a young and pretty woman 
 possesses in the eyes of an imaginative, sentimental lad. 
 Here, on the threshold of the long-looked-for adventure, 
 Rousseau pauses to give a portrait of himself, and \ve 
 may well pause with him to look on the picture. A 
 slight, well-proportioned figure, a neat foot, a fine leg, 
 a dainty mouth, black hair and brows, eyes deeply sunk 
 and small, but full of passionate fire, a manner unusually 
 awkward and timid, such were the characteristics of the 
 young convert who presented himself to Madame de 
 Warens. A pretty fellow enough, indeed ; but he says 
 that he was quite unconscious of his physical advan- 
 tages, which perhaps we may slightly doubt. His eyes 
 were evidently the feature of his face. In the memoirs 
 of Madame d'Epinay two independent tributes are to 
 be found, written in later years, to the attractions of 
 his eyes : " eyes that overflow with fire," says one wit- 
 ness ; "eyes that tell that love plays a great part in his 
 romance," says the other. But those eyes did not just
 
 1728-32. MADAME DE WAKENS. 73 
 
 then overlook Madame de Warens. She received the 
 youth courteously, kindly ; despatched him to a monas- 
 tery in Turin to complete his conversion. Once again 
 Rousseau tramped along, cheered by a bright enjoy- 
 ment of the changing scenes of each day's journey. At 
 Turin the curious process of Rousseau's conversion was 
 completed ; at Turin he faced for the first time in a 
 foul adventure some of the most horrible facts of life. 
 Soon he found himself alone in Turin without money, 
 with dreams of adventures still buzzing in his head, but 
 never taking tangible shape. He became a lackey in 
 a lady's house ; he stole a piece of ribbon, and charged 
 the crime upon an honest, comely girl, a fellow-servant, 
 and was haunted by regret for his baseness all his life ; 
 he starved in garrets and became again a lackey, and 
 was dismissed this time, and, having no better thing to 
 do, thought of Madame de Warens, and turned again 
 his adventurous footsteps towards Annecy. In the au- 
 tumn of 1729 he appeared for the second time before 
 Madame de Warens. With her for nearly ten years his 
 life became identified. Much of these years were still 
 what the Germans would call Wander- Years, years 
 spent in drifting here and there, now to Lyons, now to 
 Paris, now to Freiburg, seeking an occupation, seeking 
 employment, seeking an aim in life, with no great assi- 
 duity, with no consistency a vagrant, drifting creature. 
 He was declared too ignorant to be a priest ; he had 
 not sufficient application to become a fine musician, and 
 the story of his audacity in attempting to conduct a 
 concert at Lausanne without knowing anything about 
 music is rich in solemn caricature. In 1732 he settled 
 down at Chambery with Madame de Warens and with 
 her friend Claude Anet in the most extraordinary fam- 
 ily union ever recorded.
 
 74 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. V. 
 
 But this household, like all other households, had its 
 terra. Anet died, and Rousseau wept for him and wore 
 his black coat. Then he and Madame de Warens re- 
 tired to that most famous farmhouse, Les Charmettes, 
 and Rousseau dallied with nature and vexed himself 
 over theology, and tried unsuccessfully to learn Latin 
 and fencing, dancing and chess. Then in process of 
 time the Charmettes idyl broke up. Rousseau, unfaith- 
 ful to Madame de Warens, was much surprised and 
 pained to find that she was unfaithful to him. They 
 parted, and the happiest hours of Rousseau's unhappy 
 life came to an end. Dismally poor, he drifted to Paris 
 and tried to convince the Academy of Sciences of the 
 merits of a system of musical notation which he con- 
 sidered that he had discovered. Poverty held him for 
 her own till, in 1743, he was made secretary to the French 
 ambassador to Venice, M. de Montaigu, whom Rousseau 
 soon cordially hated. Eighteen not unhappy months 
 in Venice came to an end in 1V45, which found him in 
 Paris again, in a squalid Sorbonne hostelry, which it 
 had been better for him never to have seen. For here 
 he met Therese Le Vasseur, pitied her, loved her, and 
 most madly made her the companion of his life. She 
 was as ignorant as a Digger Indian, yet Rousseau was 
 fond of her, remained fond of her when she had ceased 
 to be fond of him. We need not dwell upon the mel- 
 ancholy story of the children of this strange union, de- 
 posited, each in its turn, in the foundling hospital, and 
 untraceable forever even to the kind-hearted Marechale 
 de Luxembourg. The speculative mind, the mind of 
 the romancist, might employ itself not unprofitably in 
 wondering what became of those five children, the name- 
 less bearers of the blood of Rousseau. But if Therese 
 did take to drinking brandy and to running after stable
 
 1760. "NOUVELLE HELOISE" AND "EMILE." -76 
 
 boys, we must admit that she had some excuse in the 
 conduct of a husband who forced her against her will 
 to be so unnatural a mother. 
 
 Rousseau's life is not a pleasant life to dwell upon. 
 Stern poverty did not ennoble him, though it made him 
 utter noble words. His friendships with Diderot and 
 with Grimm ended only in miserable squabbles ; his 
 love affairs were too often ludicrous; fame, which never 
 brought him wealth, never brought him dignity in his 
 attitude to life. He seems to have thought that every 
 woman should fall in love with him ; he seems to have 
 thought that every other man of genius was one in a 
 plot to conspire against and to injure him. His visit 
 to England was but an acrid Odyssey, and added his 
 friend and host, Hume, to the list of his fancied enemies. 
 His grim end by his own hand, at that Ermenonville 
 where he loved to botanize, is the stern conclusion of 
 one of the saddest lives ever wasted on our wasting 
 planet. 
 
 It is pleasanter to think of the books than of the man. 
 His first great success was the " Nouvelle Helo'ise," one 
 of the most exquisite romances ever written. The hap- 
 piest judgment is expressed by Lord Beaconsfield in 
 his last novel, and in some of the most graceful words 
 he ever penned, when he speaks of " those feelings which 
 still echo in the heights of Meilleraie, and compared to 
 which all the glittering accidents of fortune sink into 
 insignificance." Then came the " Social Contract," with 
 the Revolution in its womb, and " Emile," for which 
 the imbecile Paris Parliament ordered his arrest. The 
 social success of "Emile" was something surprising; it 
 rivalled the fame of the sorrows of the divine Julie. 
 Taine draws a skilful picture of the woman of the 
 court, to whom love is mere gallantry of which the
 
 ^6 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. V. 
 
 exquisite polish poorly conceals the shallowness, cold- 
 ness, and, occasionally, wickedness ; to whom life means 
 only the adventures and personages of Crebillon the 
 younger. One evening, however, this idle creature finds 
 the " Nouvelle Helo'ise " on her toilet-table ; she reads, 
 and keeps her horses and footmen waiting from hour to 
 hour ; at last, at four o'clock in the morning, she orders 
 the horses to be unharnessed, and then she passes the 
 rest of the night in reading and in tears ; for the first 
 time in her life she finds a man who knows what love 
 really means. In like manner, those who would com- 
 prehend the success of " Emile " must call to mind the 
 children of the age ; the embroidered, gilded, dressed- 
 up, powdered little gentlemen, decked with sword and 
 sash, carrying the hat under the arm, bowing, presenting 
 the hand, rehearsing fine attitudes before a mirror, re- 
 peating prepared compliments, pretty little puppets, in 
 whom everything is the work of the tailor, the hair- 
 dresser, the preceptor, and the dancing-master ; the pre- 
 cocious little ladies of six years, still more artificial, 
 bound up in whalebone, harnessed in a heavy skirt com- 
 posed of hair and a girdle of iron, supporting a head- 
 dress two feet in height, so many veritable dolls to 
 which rouge is applied, and with whom a mother amuses 
 herself each morning for an hour and then consigns them 
 to her maids for the rest of the day. But when this 
 mother reads "Emile" she immediately makes senti- 
 mentally sensible resolutions to dress her offspring bet- 
 ter and to nurse her next child herself. 
 
 Seldom have men been more misappreciated during 
 and since their lifetime than was Rousseau. We think 
 with despair of that letter of the Comtesse de Boufflers 
 to Gustavus III., published by Geffroy. "I intrust," 
 says this rash critic, "to Baron de Lederheim, though
 
 1760. THE "NOUVELLE H^LOISE." V7 
 
 with reluctance, a book for you which has just' been 
 published, the infamous memoirs of Rousseau entitled 
 ' Confessions.' They seem to me those of a common 
 scullion and even lower than that, being dull through- 
 out, whimsical and vicious in the most offensive manner. 
 I do not recur to my worship of him, for such it was ; 
 I shall never console myself for its having caused the 
 death of that eminent man David Hume, who, to grat- 
 ify me, undertook to entertain that filthy animal in 
 England." 
 
 We think with despair, too, of M. Taine writing that 
 " an effort of the will is required to read the ' Nouvelle 
 Helo'ise,' " and of Mr. John Morley's slighting remarks 
 upon that marvellous book remarks which make it 
 clear that he has never read it with the care it deserved, 
 and has unconsciously misunderstood and misrepresent- 
 ed some of its most essential features. Yet Mr. Morley 
 can in general appreciate Rousseau, although there is a 
 coldness in his great biography which Mr. Morley seems 
 to feel towards every man but Burke. Yet M. Taine 
 can appreciate Rousseau, as he shows when he describes 
 Rousseau as the artisan, the man of the people, ill-adapt- 
 ed to elegant and refined society, out of his element in 
 a drawing-room ; the man of low birth, badly brought 
 up, sullied by a vile and precocious experience, highly 
 and offensively sensual ; the man of morbid mind and 
 body, fretted by superior and discordant faculties, pos- 
 sessing no tact, and carrying the contamination of his 
 imagination, temperament, and past life into his austere 
 morality and into his purest idyls ; the man who has no 
 fervor ; the man who is the opposite of Diderot, avow- 
 ing himself that his ideas arrange themselves in his 
 head with the utmost difficulty, that certain sentences 
 are turned over and over again in his brain for five or
 
 78 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. V. 
 
 six nights before he puts them on paper, and that a 
 letter on the most trifling subject costs him hours of 
 fatigue ; the man who cannot fall into an easy and 
 asrreeable tone, nor succeed otherwise than in works 
 
 O * 
 
 which demand application. "As an offset to this, style, 
 in this ardent brain, under the influence of intense, pro- 
 longed meditation, incessantly hammered and re-ham- 
 mered, becomes more concise and of higher temper than 
 is elsewhere found. Since La Bruyere we have seen no 
 more ample, virile phrases, in which anger, admiration, 
 indignation, studied and concentrated passion, appear 
 with more rigorous precision and more powerful relief. 
 He is almost the equal of La Bruyere in the arrange- 
 ment of skilful effects, in the aptness and ingenuity of 
 developments, in the terseness of impressive summaries, 
 in the overpowering directness of unexpected arguments, 
 in the multiplicity of literary achievements, in the exe- 
 cution of those passages of bravura, portraits, descrip- 
 tions, comparisons, creations, wherein, as in a musical 
 crescendo, the same idea, varied by a series of yet more 
 animated expressions, attains to or surpasses, at the last 
 note, all that is possible of energy and of brilliancy." 
 
 This is skilful criticism, keen as a knife, clean-cutting, 
 dexterous ; but there is even keener to be found in a 
 great English writer. Hazlitt has never been happier 
 than in his study of Rousseau. Rousseau, he says in 
 an essay informed with fine sympathy, " had the most 
 intense consciousness of his own existence. No object 
 that had once made an impression on him was ever after 
 effaced. Every feeling in his mind became a passion. 
 His craving after excitement was an appetite and a dis- 
 ease. His interest in his own thoughts and feelings was 
 always wound up to the highest pitch, and hence the 
 enthusiasm which he excited in others. He owed the
 
 1712-78. HAZLITT AXD ROUSSEAU. 79 
 
 power which he exercised over the opinions of all Eu- 
 rope, by which he created numberless disciples and 
 overturned established systems, to the tyranny which 
 his feelings in the first instance exercised over himself. 
 The dazzling blaze of his reputation was kindled by the 
 same fii'e that fed upon his vitals. His ideas differed 
 from those of other men only in their force and inten- 
 sity. His genius was the effect of his temperament. 
 He created nothing, he demonstrated nothing, by a pure 
 effort of the understanding. His fictitious characters 
 are modifications of his own being, reflections and shad- 
 ows of himself. His speculations are the obvious exag- 
 gerations of a mind giving loose to its habitual im- 
 pulses, and moulding all nature to its own purposes. 
 Hence his enthusiasm and his eloquence, bearing down 
 all opposition. Hence the warmth and the luxuriance 
 as well as the sameness of his descriptions. Hence the 
 frequent verboseness of his style, for passion lends force 
 and reality to language and makes words supply the 
 place of imagination. Hence the tenaciousness of his 
 logic, the acuteness of his observations, the refinement 
 and the inconsistency of his reasoning. Hence his keen 
 penetration and his strange want of comprehension of 
 mind; for the same intense feeling which enabled him 
 to discern the first principles of things, and seize some 
 one view of a subject in all its ramifications, prevented 
 him from admitting the operation of other causes which 
 interfered with his favorite purpose and involved him 
 in endless wilful contradictions. Hence his excessive 
 egotism, which filled all objects with himself and would 
 have occupied the universe with his smallest interest. 
 Hence his jealousy and suspicion of others; for no at- 
 tention, no respect or sympathy, could come up to the 
 extravagant claims of his self-love. Hence his dissatis-
 
 80 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. V. 
 
 faction with himself and with all around him; for noth- 
 ing could satisfy his ardent longings after good, his 
 restless appetite of being. Hence his feelings, over- 
 strained and exhausted, recoiled upon themselves, and 
 produced his love of silence and repose, his feverish aspi- 
 rations after the quiet and solitude of nature. Hence, 
 in part also, his quarrel with the artificial institutions 
 and distinctions of society, which opposed so many bar- 
 riers to the restrained indulgence of his will, and allured 
 his imagination to scenes of pastoral simplicity or of 
 savage life, where the passions were either not excited 
 or left to follow their own impulse where the petty 
 vexations and irritating disappointments of common 
 life had no place and where the tormenting pursuits 
 of arts and sciences were lost in pure animal enjoyment 
 or indolent repose. Thus he describes the first savage 
 wandering forever under the shade of magnificent for- 
 ests, or by the side of mighty rivers, smit with the un- 
 quenchable love of nature." Never has the master mind 
 of the last century been more admirably appreciated. 
 It is gratifying, too, to find that Hazlitt shares with Lord 
 Beaconsfield that fine enthusiasm for the "Nouvelle 
 Helo'ise " which helps to console us for Mr. John Mor- 
 ley's somewhat ungenerous treatment of that enchant- 
 ing book. 
 
 The writings of Rousseau which had the most direct 
 influence in bringing about the Deluge, so composedly 
 anticipated by the fifteenth Louis, were the " Discourse 
 on the Influence of Learning and Art," whose appear- 
 ance in 1750 effected, according to Grimm, a kind of 
 revolution in Paris; the "Discourse on Inequality," 
 published in 1754; and, above and beyond all, the "So- 
 cial Contract," which came upon the world like a thun- 
 derclap in 1762. The essay on the " Causes of Inequal-
 
 1754. "CAUSES OF INEQUALITY AMONG MEN." 81 
 
 ity among Men " contained, as has been happily said, 
 "the germs of the whole radical democratic system 
 which he developed in his numerous subsequent writ- 
 ings." In the second essay Rousseau declares civiliza- 
 tion to be a disease, and civilized men a degenerate 
 race. All the customs and institutions of a developed 
 society are, in his opinion, unnatural and artificial. To 
 abolish society, therefore, and return to what he chooses 
 to call the " state of nature," is the one thing necessary 
 to happiness. Inequality among men is the result of 
 their degeneration; and this degeneration is caused by 
 society; which, he admits, may develop the capacities 
 and perfect the understandings of men, but makes them 
 morally bad. This assertion he attempts to justify by 
 saj'ing that the existing social order had been produced 
 by an unnatural measure of power on the one hand, and 
 an unnatural weakness on the other. 
 
 Rousseau soon leaves the solid ground of reality, and 
 deduces from the ideals of his own brain, as premises, 
 all manner of conclusions. The first man, he cries, who, 
 after enclosing a piece of land, dared to say, This is 
 mine, and found other men simple enough to believe 
 him, was the true founder of civilization. What crimes, 
 what wars, what murders, what misery and horror would 
 have been spared the human race, if some one, then, had 
 torn down the enclosure, and had cried to his fellows: 
 "Beware of listening to this impostor; you are lost, if 
 you ever forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all 
 in common, and the earth itself to no one." 
 
 Not unnaturally the plebeian Rousseau, "living from 
 hand to mouth, by turns valet, clerk, tramp, tutor, copy- 
 ist, author, fugitive," was filled with fitful hatred of the 
 rich and powerful. This fitful hatred, together with an 
 abiding love of humanity, made him burn with the de- 
 L 6
 
 82 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. V. 
 
 sire to overthrow society and carry men back to that 
 state of "nature" which he conjured up in his imagina- 
 tion. Are not all the advantages of society, he indig- 
 nantly asks, for the benefit of the powerful and the 
 rich? Are not all lucrative employments filled by them 
 alone? And is not public authority entirely in their 
 favor? When one of them robs his creditors or com- 
 mits other rascalities, is he not sure of impunity ? Are 
 not the clubbings that he administers, the acts of vio- 
 lence that he commits, the murders and assassinations 
 of which he is guilty, mere matters that are hushed up, 
 and after six months no longer mentioned ? But let 
 this same man be robbed, and the entire police force is 
 immediately on the alert; and woe to the innocent man 
 whom he chances to suspect. A rich man has to pass a 
 dangerous place? See how many escorts he has. The 
 axle of his carriage breaks? Every one flies to his as- 
 sistance. There is a noise at his door? He speaks a 
 word, and silence reigns. The crowd incommodes him ? 
 He makes a sign, and the road is clear. A wagoner gets 
 in the way of his carriage ? His flunkeys are ready to 
 beat the wagoner to death, and fifty honest pedestrians 
 would be crushed under the wheels rather than that the 
 gorgeous equipage of one puppy should be retarded. 
 How different is the picture of him who is poor! The 
 more humanity owes him, the more society refuses him. 
 All doors are closed to him, even when he has the right 
 to have them opened; and if he sometimes obtains jus- 
 tice, he does so with more difficulty than another would 
 have in obtaining pardon for a crime. If there is a 
 forced labor to be undertaken, or militia to be levied, 
 he is selected to do it. In addition to his own burden, 
 he bears that which is shifted upon him by his richer 
 neighbor. At the least accident that befalls him, every
 
 1750-62. THE TYRANNY OF POWER. 83 
 
 one deserts him. Let his poor cart upset, and I hold 
 him lucky if he escapes the outrages of the brisk lackeys 
 of some young duke. In a word, all free assistance flies 
 him in time of need, for the very reason that he has 
 nothing with which to pay for it. But I regard him as 
 a ruined man if he is so unfortunate as to have an 
 honorable spirit, an attractive daughter, and a powerful 
 neighbor. Let us sum up briefly the relations between 
 the rich man and the poor man: You have need of me, 
 for I am rich and you are poor. Let us then make a bar- 
 gain. I will vouchsafe you the honor of being my servant, 
 on condition that you give me what little you have left, 
 to repay me for the trouble I take in lording it over you. 
 This utterance is but one example of the bitterness 
 with which Rousseau attacked the existing order of 
 things. Nor can it be denied that much of what he 
 said of civilization in general was but too true of the 
 rotten fabric of Old France. It may be said, it has 
 been said, that at the first glance it might seem that 
 Rousseau's imprecations upon intellectual education, 
 science, and art were diametrically opposed to that spir- 
 it which produced the feverish thirst for knowledge 
 characteristic of the time. But both movements were 
 revolutionary, both were products of the profound dis- 
 content and longing for some radical change which per- 
 vaded men's minds before the Revolution. It is ob- 
 vious that the deep hatred of the existing social sys- 
 tem was common to all the various Utopias that were 
 dreamed of by different men. It is quite true that all 
 kinds of enemies were using their various weapons in 
 the attack on the tottering fortress of the Old Order; 
 that infantry, cavalry, artillery, regulars, guerillas, free 
 lances, high-souled heroes, and stealthy assassins made 
 each his own species of attack, but all attacked.
 
 84 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. V. 
 
 The living words with which Rousseau, with all the 
 fierce conviction of a genius that neared to madness, 
 painted the ideal and idyllic bliss and innocence of men 
 in a "state of nature," freed from the curses and cor- 
 ruptions of civilization, had an absorbing attraction for 
 men who were vexed at every hour by the privileges, 
 the pomp, and the insolence of a nobility and priest- 
 hood that had ceased to perform their proper functions, 
 and lived by draining the heart's blood of the people. 
 If Rousseau did not spare them, he did not spare the 
 monarchy in its turn. Society was due, he said, to an 
 iniquitous compact between oppressors and oppressed, 
 which permitted a child to govern old men, an idiot to 
 rule wise men, a handful of men to gorge themselves 
 with dainties, while the famished multitude lacked the 
 necessaries of life. For him the whole occupation of 
 kings and their ministers had but two aims, to extend 
 their domination without, and to make it more absolute 
 within. When they pretended to have other aims they 
 deceived. The expressions, public good, welfare of our 
 subjects, glory of the nation, so stupidly employed in 
 public edicts, were ever the harbingers of disastrous 
 measures; and the people groan in advance when their 
 masters allude to their paternal solicitude. But Rous- 
 seau has a remedy against tyranny, for the compact be- 
 tween the governors and the governed may be dissolved; 
 the despot is master only so long as he is stronger than 
 the people, and as soon as they are able to expel him, he 
 can make no complaint of their violence. It will always 
 be absurd for a man to say to a man, or for a man to 
 say to a people, " I make a contract with you according 
 to which you bear all the expenses and I reap all the 
 profits a contract which I will observe only so long 
 as I choose, but which you shall observe so long as I
 
 1750-62. THE SUN OF FREEMEN. 85 
 
 see fit." If madmen sign such a treaty, their signatures 
 are not valid. If men who are prostrate upon the 
 ground with a sword at their throats accept these con- 
 ditions, their acceptance is null and void. The idea 
 that men under compulsion, or madmen, could have con- 
 tracted a thousand years ago for all subsequent gen- 
 erations is absurd. A contract for a minor is not bind- 
 ing when he becomes an adult ; and when the infant has 
 arrived at years of discretion he is his own master. At 
 last we are adults, and we have only to act like rational 
 men in order to reduce to their true value the preten- 
 sions of that authority which calls itself legitimate. It 
 possesses power, nothing more. But a pistol in the 
 hands of a highwayman is also a power ; will you, he 
 asks, therefore say that I am in duty bound to give him 
 my purse? I yield only to force, and will recapture my 
 purse as soon as I can seize his pistol. 
 
 When Rousseau declared war upon the government, 
 France and Europe rang with applause. The day will 
 come, says Condorcet, when the sun will shine upon none 
 but freemen who acknowledge no master save their rea- 
 son ; when tyrants and slaves, priests and their stupid 
 or hypocritical tools, will no longer, exist, except in 
 history and upon the stage ; when men will no longer 
 speak of them except to pity their victims and their 
 dupes, to maintain a useful vigilance by recalling the 
 horror of their excesses, and to be able to recognize and 
 to crush beneath the weight of reason the first germs of 
 superstition and of tyranny, if they should ever reappear. 
 This was the Utopia of a philanthropist who was des- 
 tined to take poison in prison to escape from men more 
 extreme than himself, eager to bring that gracious reader 
 of Horace to the guillotine ! This is, indeed, one of the 
 most tragic aspects of the Revolution the aspect which
 
 86 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. V. 
 
 gives it at once its fascination and its terror. If men 
 need shed few tears over the fate of insolent nobles, 
 who thought no more of driving over a peasant than of 
 killing a mouse, nor of lihertine bishops, whose episcopal 
 palaces were little like Christian places, they mast needs 
 mourn the fate of those great-hearted men who, imbued 
 with a world-wide philanthropy, burned with a desire 
 to usher in a millennium of bliss for oppressed hu- 
 manity, but awoke from their dreams to the bitter re- 
 ality that the populace were not always the idyllic and 
 amiable beings that Rousseau had painted them, but 
 occasionally too ferocious and too ignorant to distinguish 
 friend from foe. 
 
 It is urged that the men of whom Rousseau speaks in 
 his famous book on the " Social Contract " are not con- 
 crete, tangible individuals, but pure abstractions, math- 
 ematical units of equal magnitude. Every man, accord- 
 ing to him, is by nature innocent, affectionate, grateful, 
 good. He is still more. He is also an entirely rational 
 being capable of assenting to a clear abstract prin- 
 ciple, and of moving in the straight line of logical 
 syllogism from the premises to the ultimate conclusions. 
 In the dramas, dialogues, and other writings of the time, 
 says Mr. Dabney and this is true of other countries as 
 well as of France appear gardeners, jugglers, peas- 
 ants, country parsons, philosophers, tattooed barbarians, 
 and naked savages, all discoursing, reasoning, marching 
 in the rectilinear path of syllogistic deduction from ab- 
 stract ideas. Rational, good, perfectly equal and per- 
 fectly free such are the abstract entities which Rous- 
 seau calls men, and who, he says, came together at some 
 unknown epoch to make a social contract. Their aim. 
 in making this contract was to discover a form of as- 
 sociation which should defend with the whole power of
 
 1750-62. ROUSSEAU'S "SOCIAL CONTRACT." 87 
 
 the community the person and the property of each as- 
 sociate, and by which each man, though uniting himself 
 with all, obeyed in reality only himself, and remained 
 as free as before. This united assembly of abstract 
 individuals is called simply the State, when it obeys its 
 own will or remains passive ; the Sovereign, when it 
 acts upon itself ; a Power, when compared with other 
 similar assemblages. In the same way the individuals 
 united in a state are called, when regarded collectively, 
 the People ; regarded as participants in the sovereign 
 power, they are called Citizens ; regarded as under the 
 necessity of obeying their own laws, that is, the laws of 
 the state, they are called Subjects. All this abstract 
 juggling with words is employed by Rousseau in the 
 specious but vain attempt to reconcile the absolute free- 
 dom of the individual with his absolute obedience to the 
 will of the majority. Sovereignty, he says, is inalienable 
 and indivisible. The general will can never err. All 
 error arises from party spirit ; wherefore societies and 
 corporations within the state should be either prohibited 
 or so multiplied that no single one can have an appre- 
 ciable influence. "The sovereign, consisting merely of 
 the sum of the individuals who compose it, has and can 
 have no interest opposed to theirs ; and conseqxiently 
 the sovereign power has no need of guaranteeing the 
 subjects against tyranny, because it is impossible that 
 a body should desire to injure all its members." 
 
 In all this it is said everything is abstract. In the 
 real world we live in we see concrete individual men, 
 women, and children, with different desires, different 
 passions, different intellectual capacities, and different 
 moral characteristics. Not so in the ideal world which 
 issued from the brain of Rousseau. All his men of the 
 social contract are equal, all free, all good, all eager to
 
 88 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH, V. 
 
 obey cheerfully the general will. The people, not the 
 king, are the sovereign. The king is but the people's 
 clerk nay, less than their clerk their lackey. The 
 contract between them is not of indefinite duration, and 
 not one " which can be annulled only by mutual consent, 
 or by bad faith on the part of one of the contracting 
 parties." By no means. For " it is contrary," says 
 Rousseau, " to the nature of the body politic for the 
 sovereign to impose a law upon itself which it can never 
 infringe." No sacred and inviolable constitution to 
 bind the people forever ! " The right to change the 
 constitution is the prime guarantee of all other rights." 
 " There is, there can be, no fundamental law obligatory 
 for all time upon the whole people, not even the social 
 contract." For a prince, or an assembly, or magistrates 
 to call themselves the representatives of the people is 
 usurpation and falsehood. Sovereignty cannot be rep- 
 resented, for the same reason that it is inalienable. 
 The moment a people elects representatives, it is no 
 longer free, it no longer exists. The English, he argued, 
 imagined themselves free, but they were vastly mis- 
 taken ; they were free only during the election of mem- 
 bers of Parliament ; so soon as the election had taken 
 place, they were slaves, they were nothing. The deputies 
 of a people, thus, neither are nor can be its representa- 
 tives ; they are only its commissioners, and can make no 
 final conclusions. Every law that has not been ratified 
 by the people directly is null and void ; it is not a law. 
 " It is not sufficient that the assembled people should 
 have fixed the constitution of the state once by giving 
 its sanction to a body of laws ; they must hold, in ad- 
 dition, fixed and periodical assemblies which nothing can 
 abolish or prorogue, so that on fixed days the people 
 may legally assemble without the necessity of any for-
 
 1750-62. THE NEW SOCIETY. 89 
 
 raal convocation. At the moment when the people has 
 thus assembled, all jurisdiction of the government ceases, 
 the executive power is suspended." Society starts again, 
 and the citizens, restored to their original independence, 
 renew, for so long as they please, the provisional con- 
 tract which they had made only for a term of years. 
 " The opening of these assemblies, the object of which 
 is the maintenance of the social contract, should always 
 begin with the decision of two questions which should be 
 separately put to the vote. The first question is this : Is 
 it the pleasure of the sovereign people to maintain the 
 present form of government ? And the second : Do the 
 sovereign people wish to leave the administration in 
 the hands of the present incumbents? In submitting, 
 therefore, to leaders, the sovereign people merely dele- 
 gate to them a power which they exercise in the name 
 of the sovereign people whom they serve, but which can 
 be modified, limited, or reassuraed by the sovereign at 
 will." Thus the people possess not merely the legislative 
 power, which belongs to them, and can only belong to 
 them, but they delegate and take back again at will the 
 executive function as well. So runs much of the gos- 
 pel according to Rousseau. 
 
 The influence of Rousseau in bringing about the Rev- 
 olution can hardly be overrated. In the midst of a 
 thoroughly artificial life, social and political, he suddenly 
 uplifted a voice of passion and pathos which made itself 
 heard everywhere and called the men of his time to 
 come back to nature. It was the cry of a prophet half 
 crazed by the fury of his emotion. Rousseau was in- 
 tensely earnest. He seemed like a man who had never 
 laughed. He was like one who looks over life from 
 some Stylites' pillar, but whose whole soul is with the 
 writhing, struggling, suffering mortals he sees below
 
 90 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. OH. V. 
 
 him. " Man is man's brother," he cried out ; " in this 
 world there are no masters and no slaves ; or at least 
 there should be none. Where now there is nothing but 
 guilty luxury on one side, and hopeless misery on the 
 other, there ought to be equality, love, brotherhood, and 
 happiness." He appealed to all that was noblest in human 
 nature. He appealed to the high as well as the lowly. 
 Most of his arguments were absurdities if they were to 
 be treated as philosophic or economic reasonings ; but 
 he had got tirm hold of his half of the whole truth the 
 fact that society was rotting because of its artificiality; 
 that artificial and not natural distinctions stood as bar- 
 riers between one set of men and another, between all 
 men and true happiness. " Pull down the artificial 
 barriers" was one part of his appeal, the part which 
 told with most tremendous effect. That was what people 
 cared about ; they did not much mind the appeal to 
 return to nature, to the condition of the natural man. 
 Rousseau, in fact, like a great many other philosophers 
 of the more poetic order, created a natural man ; in- 
 vented a being who never had existence, a creature of 
 absolute truthfulness, courage, honesty, purity, health, 
 and happiness. All the eloquence in the world would 
 have failed to induce any considerable number of people 
 to return to the condition of the natural man. They 
 could not do it if they would; and they would not find 
 themselves any better off even if they could. All that 
 part of Rousseau's appeal might as well have been called 
 out to solitude. But the other part of the appeal sank 
 deep into every ear which it reached. It thrilled con- 
 viction into hearts and minds. The rich and privileged 
 themselves admitted its justice and its sincerity. The 
 broad principles of Rousseau became positively fash- 
 ionable among the aristocracy of France. Great ladies
 
 1712-76. "THE APOSTLE OF AFFLICTION." 91 
 
 in the splendid salons of Paris raved about the new proph- 
 et "the apostle of affliction," as Byron so happily styled 
 him. Among the oppressed all over France his eloquence 
 brought into flame a resentment that before had been 
 only smouldering in vagueness and the dark. To them 
 it told of the wrongs heaped for so many generations 
 on them and on theirs; it put before them a picture of 
 what they actually were, and side by side with that a 
 picture of what they might be and what they ought to 
 be. It dinned into their ears the too terrible truth that 
 not natural laws of any kind, but purely artificial reg- 
 ulations were answerable for all that misery with which 
 a whole nation was accursed. " Down with the artificial 
 barriers !" was the refrain of every appeal. Rousseau 
 did not mean revolution by force. He was not thinking 
 of that. He wanted the whole people princes, peers, 
 peasants, and paupers alike to reform themselves by a 
 common effort. Nor is it by any means impossible that 
 his genius, his energy, his passion might have done much 
 to bring about such a great moral and social revolution 
 if only events could wait. But events could not wait. 
 The growth of the moral revolution would have been 
 too slow. Things had gone too far. So when the other 
 revolution began to show itself the people remembered 
 what Rousseau had taught about the artificial barriers, 
 and they levelled them with a crash which is echoing 
 even still through Europe. Rousseau had many faults 
 both as a writer and as a man. But as a writer he was 
 endowed with a power of eloquence and of pity such as 
 has rarely in the history of the world poured forth from 
 platform or from pulpit. As a man he was filled by what 
 a great English statesman of our own day, speaking of 
 another reformer, not Rousseau, called " a passion of phi- 
 lanthropy." That one merit almost empties him of faults.
 
 92 
 
 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. VI. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE POMPADOUR. 
 
 A NEW influence had already ta'ken its place in social 
 and political life. The middle classes, the high bour- 
 geoisie, financiers, farmer -generals, commercial giants, 
 had taken their prominent place in the state, rivalling 
 and overgrowing the nobility in the influence of their 
 wealth and enterprise. The great names of France are 
 no longer the names of old and illustrious families alone ; 
 they are the names of a Bergeret, of a Brissart, of a 
 Bouret, of a Bragousse, of a Camuzet, of a Gaze, of a 
 Chevalier, of a Gaillard, of a Delahaye, of a Delaporte, 
 of a Dupin, of a D'Arnoncourt, of a De Villemur, of a 
 Grimod, of an Helvetius, of a L'Allement de Nantouille, 
 of a Le Riche de la Popeliniere, of a Lenormant de 
 Tournehem, of a Rolland, of a Savalette, of a Thiboux. 
 These are the men of the enormous fortunes who are 
 forcing their way to the front, who are building them- 
 selves palaces, whose luxury eclipses the pride of princes, 
 who are getting the offices of the state within their in- 
 fluence, who are marrying their daughters to the bluest 
 blood and the noblest names of France. They are the 
 patrons of the arts ; the painter, the poet, the man of 
 letters, the wit, the philosopher, the sculptor, the archi- 
 tect, throng tlVeir antechambers, compete for their fa- 
 vors, and laud their names. The part of Maecenas is 
 played by some wealthy man of business who began 
 life in a counting-house or a wine-shop, and whom poets
 
 1721. MONSIEUR AND MADAME POISSON. 93 
 
 will gladly hail as "dulce decus meum," heedless of 
 the absence of kingly ancestors. 
 
 The Pompadour offers to the world a further proof 
 of the triumphs of the bourgeoisie. She was the daugh- 
 ter of a gentleman of the unpoetic name of Poisson, 
 who had been sentenced, not undeservedly, to be hanged 
 for malversation, but had saved his neck by a self- 
 imposed exile. Honest or dishonest, rogue Poisson did 
 get back to France after a time, did succeed by desper- 
 ate pushes of court favor in preserving his neck un- 
 twisted. It would have been a worse thing for Sieur 
 Poisson, but an infinitely better thing for France, if the 
 hanging had been duly and decorously effected, and 
 effected before Madame Poisson had borne him a fair 
 daughter ; though, indeed, upon due reflection we must 
 admit that the hangman's fingers would have saved 
 France no whit. Madame Poisson was a lady of the 
 lightest possible character ; she was involved at the 
 time of the Pompadour's birth in an intrigue with Le- 
 normant de Tournebem, who, no mean authority on the 
 matter, considered himself to be the girl's sire. He 
 manifested for her all the affection of a father, provided 
 for her education in the most liberal way ; if he had 
 set himself the task of preparing a morsel for a king he 
 could hardly have better set about it. All that the art, 
 the culture, the polite muses of the age could do for 
 Mademoiselle Poisson they were called upon by Le- 
 normant de Tournehem to do. No expense was spared 
 in procuring her the best masters in all departments of 
 social art. Guibaudet had taught her how to dance 
 Guibaudet the illustrious ; Jeliotte had taught her to 
 sing ; she danced, we are told, as well any dancing-girl 
 of the Opera ; she sang as well as any professional sing- 
 er, and Georges Leroy quoted against her the saying of
 
 94 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. VI. 
 
 Sallust concerning Fulvia, that "she danced and sang 
 better than was becoming to a decent woman." The 
 instruction that money could not buy, friendship gave. 
 Crebillon deigned to teach her elocution, to instruct 
 her in the acquirement of a perfect diction. She learned 
 to draw, to paint, to back a horse with more than com- 
 mon skill, to touch the harpsichord with distinction, to 
 engrave. She ran the gamut of all the accomplishments 
 betitting a great lady in an age that liked its great ladies 
 to be, or to seem to be, cultured. She refined and tem- 
 pered her quick intelligence in the society of men of let- 
 ters, men of wit ; she spared no pains, and no pains were 
 spared for her, to make herself as attractive as possible, 
 to heighten the effect of her physical beauty by the 
 ornament of a many-sided culture. Whatever she did, 
 she did well ; her singing and playing were the rage in 
 the little social court of which she was the acknowl- 
 edged queen. Thanks to Lenormant de Tournehem, 
 she was fairly launched upon the glittering sea of 
 wealthy Parisian society ; thanks again to his fostering 
 care, she solidified her position by a wealthy marriage 
 with his nephew, Lenormant d'tioles. Her husband 
 was not a comely man, and she does not seem to have 
 professed to care much about him. Her marriage with 
 him was to her but one step in the career which was to 
 bring her so near the throne. 
 
 For the curious thing about the woman is that she 
 seems to have been early inspired with the laudable 
 ambition to become the king's mistress. It would al- 
 most seem as if she took all the labor and pains to make 
 herself so brilliantly accomplished solely that she might 
 become in fulness of time the mistress of the Well- 
 beloved King. While she was yet a little girl Madame 
 Lebon prophesied that she would become the mistress of
 
 1741. MADAME LEXORMANT D'ETIOLES. 95 
 
 Louis XV., and the prophecy seems to have exercised 
 its guiding influence upon all her life. There is some- 
 thing melancholy to the moral, something entertaining 
 to the cynical, in this picture of a girl slowly growing 
 up into beauty and culture, and informed during all the 
 years of her young maidenhood and all the years of her 
 young married life with the one desire, the one hope, 
 the one purpose of becoming the mistress of a satyr 
 king. Soon after her marriage she said with a smile 
 to some talk of love and lovers that the king alone in 
 all the world could shake her fidelity to her husband. 
 The hearer thought, no doubt, that the fair D'^iioles 
 was jesting ; but the fair D'fitioles was perfectly se- 
 rious. She would not be unfaithful to her husband 
 with any save the king, not because she thought the 
 king so hopelessly out of her star that the saying in 
 itself implied eternal fidelity, but because she meant to 
 be unfaithful to him with the king. It was a daring 
 ambition even for the spoiled child of the wealthy bour- 
 geoisie. 
 
 From the moment of her marriage in 1741 Madame 
 Lenormant d'lStioles set herself to captivate the king. 
 She crossed his path whenever she could, she sought to 
 fire his voluptuous imagination with the vision of a rare 
 and radiant .creature, always beautifully attired, always 
 smiling, always dazzling the world with her beauty and 
 her wit. In the royal hunts at Senart Wood she flitted 
 before the kingly eyes a Boucheresque Diana very much 
 to the indignation of Juno (Jhateauroux, who, discern- 
 ing a rival, and a dangerous rival, sternly banished the 
 beautiful Diana from the royal hunt. The banished 
 Diana bided her time. She could not afford to fight 
 against Madame de Chateauroux, but she could very 
 well afford to wait. There came a moment when it
 
 96 
 
 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. VI. 
 
 seemed as if she had waited in vain, as if the prophecy 
 of her youth had cheated her. When Louis lay nigh 
 unto death with that malignant fever at Metz, no heart 
 in all the kingdom, not even Chateauroux's, can have 
 mourned for the ailing king more than Madame Lenor- 
 mant d'JStioles. But the very fever helped her. Under 
 its influence Louis was persuaded to banish Madame de 
 Chateauroux from his presence, and Madame de Cba- 
 teauroux did not long survive the banishment. Louis 
 recovered, earned his title of Well-beloved, and the way 
 was clear for the ambition of the younger Poisson. She 
 had underground influence at court, and she plied it 
 hard ; a faithful Binet, a faithful Bridge, an industrious 
 Madame de Tencin pushed her cause. She appeared 
 at a masked ball before the king, teasing and tempting 
 him with her wit and her beauty. She dropped her 
 handkerchief, Louis picked it up, and every one said 
 that the Sultan had thrown the handkerchief. Yet still 
 Louis hung fire, even after a supper-party where the 
 royal delight in Madame's physical beauty was counter- 
 balanced by a vague alarm at certain ambitious notes 
 in her intellect. A bishop, too, made his appearance in 
 the game, Boyer, Bishop of Mirepoix, doing his best to 
 prevent the threatened conjunction. But the stars were 
 on the woman's side; there was another intimate sup- 
 per; Madame d'lStioles was divinely charming, discreet- 
 ly unambitious. But even while she welcomed the 
 king's affection she painted such a terrible picture of 
 the murderous fury of her deceived husband that she 
 persuaded Louis to allow her to hide herself in a corner 
 of Versailles palace in the rooms that had belonged to' 
 Madame de Mailly. .Once fairly installed in Versailles, 
 Madame d'^tioles was not the woman lightly to leave 
 it. The unlucky husband was in despair, talked of
 
 1745-64. MADAME DE POMPADOUR. 97 
 
 killing himself, talked of tearing his false wife from 
 the king's arms. Then passing from the tragic mood 
 to the pathetic, he wrote a letter to the mistress implor- 
 ing her to return to him. Luckless, diminutive, un- 
 comely D'Etioles, what words of his, though he spoke 
 with the speech of angels, would have brought her 
 back to him now ! She read the letter composedly, and 
 handed it to Louis to laugh at. Louis, who had some 
 of the instincts of a gentleman, said, after reading it, 
 " Your husband, madame, is a very worthy man." But, 
 worthy or no, he was sent away from Paris into a kind 
 of exile, and Madame d'lCtioles had won the first trick 
 in her great game. 
 
 The other tricks she took rapidly. She was soon 
 made Madame de Pompadour. She was presented at 
 court and received with a strange melancholy civility by 
 the queen, and with cold indifference by the dauphin. 
 In a moment, as it were, she became the central figure 
 in the state. A party was formed against her, fierce, 
 virulent, and persistent. A party was formed for her, 
 a party of all those who live by the favor of favorites, 
 of all who thought to influence the king through the 
 mistress, a party as virulent and unscrupulous as its 
 opponent. Roughly speaking, outraged virtue counted 
 for little or nothing in the attacks upon and the in- 
 trigues against the new favorite. Indignation was 
 chiefly aroused by the facts of her birth and station. 
 Hitherto the recognized mistresses of the king had been 
 ladies of the noble order, ladies of name and race. In 
 one case the king did a stately family the honor of 
 raising all its daughters in turn to the purple. But to 
 take a recognized mistress from the middle classes, from 
 the third estate, from the bourgeoisie, to elevate a lady 
 whose maiden name was Poisson, and whose married 
 I. 1
 
 its 
 
 THE FKENCII REVOLUTION. Cu. VI. 
 
 name was Lenormant, this was indeed an outrage upon 
 decency and upon civilization. As a matter of policy 
 it certainly was imprudent. It broke down one of the 
 barriers of prestige with which the Old Order fenced 
 itself from attack. 
 
 Whatever else the reign of Pompadour may have 
 been, it was undoubtedly an Augustan epoch for the 
 arts. It is usually in a period of decadence that the 
 fine arts are most passionately cultivated, that the most 
 eager attention is given to all the fair details of life 
 to exquisite architecture, to highly wrought literature, 
 to decorative painting and sculpture, to delicate handi- 
 craft of all kinds, to engraving, to verse-making, to the 
 binding of books. The courtly poets clustered round 
 Madame de Pompadour like bees around a comb; they 
 sang her praises with the sickly classicism of the time. 
 A court poet is usually an odious creature, but he seems 
 nowhere more pitiful than when he is cutting his apish 
 capers to win the smile of some royal mistress. The 
 brazen Abbe de Bernis, leering over his triple chin, 
 clung to the Pompadour's skirts and saved himself from 
 shipwreck. Naturally he was grateful to his patroness, 
 and he reeled off a world of insipid verses in her honor. 
 Bernis is the stage abbe of the eighteenth century, witty, 
 mean, voluptuous, neat at epigram, quick in turning a 
 madrigal, great at a lady's toilet-table, great at a rich 
 man's banquet, suave, supple, smiling, servile, Epicurean 
 in a sense which would have made Epicurus despair, 
 pagan only in the baser way, a miserable creature. 
 There was nothing better for such a fellow to do than 
 to sing of Madame de Pompadour's dimples, and he sang 
 of them with nauseating, wearisome iterance which 
 might have disgusted even the woman to whom they 
 were offered.
 
 1745-64. "POMPADOUR FECIT." 99 
 
 The luxurious, the decorative ai'ts flourished under 
 her sway. All the costly elegancies of life were dear 
 to her, the potteries of China and Japan, the porcelain 
 of Dresden, the glass work of Venice. Under her pat- 
 ronage the porcelain of Sevres rose into triumphant 
 rivalry with the skill of Saxony and the genius of the 
 East. The condescension of Madame de Pompadour, 
 gave to the master workers of Sevres a palace wherein 
 to live and labor, a domain in which to rest and recreate. 
 The artists of Sevres, like the glass- workers, were graced 
 with the right to hunt, and they could avail themselves 
 of the privilege in the Sevres woods after their long 
 hours in the work-rooms long hours sometimes shared 
 by Madame de Pompadour, who loved to come to Sevres 
 to assist in the choice of tints, and to supply her colo- 
 ny with designs of her own composition. Madame de 
 Pompadour loved to play at art, loved to be thought an 
 artist. The lovers of the art of the last century delight 
 in the slender folio which bears the title " L'CEuvre de 
 la Marquise de Pompadour," in which her own designs, 
 signed " Pompadour fecit," mingle with her reproduc- 
 tions of the designs of others, inscribed " Pompadour 
 sculpsit," and with examples of her love for gems graven 
 after the fashion of the antique. The nymphs and 
 satyrs, the vines and children-cupids of the last-century 
 antique, have a peculiar charm of association when they 
 are designed by Madame de Pompadour. 
 
 She had a great affection, too, for binding, for that ex- 
 quisite art which reached perhaps in the last century its 
 highest point. Under her patronage flourished Pade- 
 loup, the great Antoine Michel Padeloup, binder for 
 kings and king among binders. Louis Douceur, Pade- 
 loup's contemporary, Padeloup's rival in the affections 
 of the great, designed for Madame de Pompadour a
 
 100 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. On. VI. 
 
 blotting-book which is held by the learned to be the mas- 
 terpiece of his art. M. Leon Gruel, the bookbinder and 
 historian of bookbinders, sighs quaintly for the secrets 
 that have lain beneath the covers of that book of citron 
 morocco, wrought with Douceur's favorite lace design, 
 "A petits fers," and emblazoned with the arms of Ma- 
 dame de Pompadour, the three castles on the escutcheon. 
 Who, he asks, will tell us the secrets that this blotting- 
 book has held ? Think that she for whom it was fash- 
 ioned lived for twenty years the uncontested mistress of 
 the destinies of France ! Why cannot things of this 
 nature speak and tell us of all that they have seen ? 
 So the master binder bemoans, and yet that blotting- 
 book has its voice too, and bears its testimony to the 
 innate love for beauty, for luxury, for exquisite refine- 
 ment of all artistic workmanship, which is the especial 
 characteristic of the Pompadour epoch. 
 
 Literature as well as art received her patronage. Her 
 library was large, not from affectation. She sought cult- 
 ure in all directions; she was as eager to enrich her mind 
 as to adorn her body, and the range of her reading was 
 wide and varied. In history, in theology, in philosophy, 
 her shelves were richly stored, for she felt an interest 
 in all the creeds and all the scepticisms. Her love for 
 the stage displayed itself in her splendid collection of 
 theatrical works from the earliest dawn of the drama in 
 France to the lightest court ballet that was footed before 
 the eyes of Louis XV. Nor was romance forgotten. It 
 is a curious proof of the many-sided nature of the woman 
 that in an age so gracefully artificial, so daintily gallant, 
 she delighted in the rough old Carlovingian epics and 
 the frank vigor of the legends of the Round Table. It 
 must be remembered to Madame de Pompadour's honor 
 that the patroness of Marmontel was the means of giv-
 
 1762. THE FALL OF THE JESUITS. 101 
 
 ing the concluding part of Galland's " Mille et une Nuits " 
 to the world, and that the goddess of Crebillon the 
 elder could take pleasure in the deeds of Roland and 
 the loves of Lancelot of the Lake. 
 
 Yet the long period of Madame de Pompadour's sway 
 over France is an unexhilarating study of public inde- 
 cency, incapacity, and injustice. To her and to her 
 creature, Controller-General Machault, France owed the 
 ruinous invention of those " acquits au comptant," those 
 bills at sight upon the king's signature which had always 
 to be met and never to be explained or justified. Dur- 
 ing her reign the religious war raged with a new ferocity. 
 Madame de Pompadour declared war upon the Jesuits, 
 who, triumphing in the blows they had dealt to a reeling 
 Jansenism, thought they could successfully defy the 
 new influence at the foot of the throne. They were 
 mistaken. The brilliant minister Choiseul was their 
 enemy; Madame de Pompadour was their enemy; the 
 philosophers, the Encyclopaedists were their enemies. 
 An alliance stronger than Jansenism ever could rally to 
 its standards was formed against the Jesuits; blow after 
 blow fell upon them with significant success : in 1762 
 the order was formally abolished by the Paris Parlia- 
 ment, its vast property confiscated to the crown, and 
 its members secularized. Madame de Pompadour's tri- 
 umph was great; she had done to the Jesuits as they 
 had done to the Jansenists. But if their defeat was a 
 triumph for Madame de Pompadour, the years of her 
 sway record few triumphs for France. The loss of the 
 French colonies in Canada to the English, the fatal alli- 
 ance with Austria, with its sequel of calamities, the crush- 
 ing naval defeats at Lagos and Belleisle, the disastrous 
 Carrickfergus expedition, the pitiful Peace of Paris 
 these are the jewels in the crown of the Pompadour
 
 102 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. VI. 
 
 glory. She died in the April of 1764, being only forty- 
 four years of age. During all the years in which she 
 had lived with the king she had kept her influence over 
 him unimpaired, and had used that influence most evilly 
 for France. Madame de Pompadour was not a great 
 woman; she was the mistress of a very worthless king. 
 But bad and base as the reign of Louis XV. was, when 
 the king was reigned over by Madame de Pompadour 
 it was a reign fruitful in new and great influences in 
 art and letters and thought. If Pompadour patronized 
 Padeloup, she also patronized Voltaire, and under the 
 shadow, as it were, of the genius of Voltaire the set of 
 men grew into public attention who were the very imme- 
 diate precursors of the Revolution; while a thinker of a 
 very different school was calling upon civilization at 
 large to shake off its superstitions and return to the 
 sylvan savagery of the early man. Voltaire and the 
 Encyclopaedists on the one side, Rousseau and the fol- 
 lowers of Rousseau on the other, represent two irrecon- 
 cilable influences, which had, however, the same effect 
 of making directly for Revolution. No two publica- 
 tions have ever influenced their own times more directly 
 than the famous "Encyclopaedia" and the no less fam- 
 ous "Social Contract." No two publications had more 
 direct effect in undermining the whole existing condi- 
 tions of social order, and in advancing that new con- 
 dition of things which -was to begin with the National 
 Assembly, and to end where ? The Encyclopedists 
 sprang into existence under the fostering influence of 
 Voltaire. Voltaire, who was a sceptic but not an atheist, 
 though he has often and absurdly 'been called so, was 
 the leader of a school of thinkers many of whom were, 
 so far as the term is ever applicable to philosophic think- 
 ers, atheists. Rousseau was horrified by any suggestion
 
 1764-68. MISTRESS AND QUEEN. 103 
 
 of atheism; he was an impassioned Deist, and Deism 
 was the creed of his consistent followers, was the creed 
 of that consistent, most curious follower, Maximilien 
 Robespierre. 
 
 Bad too as was the epoch of Madame de Pompadour, 
 it had at least the merit of being better than the epoch 
 that followed it. Four years later, two years after the 
 death of Stanislas had united Lorraine to France, un- 
 happy Maria Leszczynska died, and afforded Louis XV. 
 the opportunity for a famous display of false sentimen- 
 tality. He bewailed ludicrously enough the woman he 
 had outraged and insulted all her life, and for a brief 
 period he played a sickening comedy of repentance and 
 reform. It did not last long. Maria Leszczynska was 
 not a year in her grave when Louis, reeling along the 
 familiar road of royal debaucheries, found in his path 
 his fate aud the fate of France in the person of the Du 
 Barry.
 
 10 4 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION- CH. VII. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 "HOW WILL BEERY PULL THROUGH?" 
 
 His Well-beloved Majesty Louis XV. had a certain 
 sardonic humor of his own. His phrase about the Del- 
 uge was the epigrammatic summary of his own policy 
 of pleasure and despair. Scarcely less epigrammatic, 
 scarcely less significant, is another of the royal sayings. 
 " When I am gone," he asks, and the words are under- 
 lined with a sneer, " I should like very much to know 
 how Berry will pull through with it." The Berry of this 
 bitter saying was the Dauphin of France, for whom 
 destiny was reserving the crown and title of Louis XVI. 
 The second son of Louis the Dauphin, son of Louis XV., 
 death had steadily removed all obstacles to his succession. 
 In 1765, when he was only e.leven years old, his father 
 died with the strange Roman words upon his lips, " How 
 astoundingly easy it is to die !" The little newly made 
 dauphin was immediately brought to Louis XV. and 
 announced as " M. le Dauphin," and Louis is reported 
 to have uttered some sentimental expressions of pity for 
 poor France with a king of fifty-five and a dauphin of 
 eleven. The time was yet to come when the poor little 
 dauphin of eleven might envy that elder brother of his 
 who died in 1761, leaving it to his brother Berry to 
 become the heir of France. Louis XV. did not love 
 the new dauphin, and always persisted in calling him 
 "Berry," as if, with that kingly impression that words 
 are as good as things, if not better, the calling the child
 
 176?. PLOT AND POISON. 105 
 
 by another than his rightful title would in some way 
 relieve Louis from the dislike of regarding in him the 
 future sovereign. 
 
 When little Louis was thirteen years old his mother 
 died, poisoned, as she declared and as many believed. 
 The dread of poison was common in the court of France 
 for many reigns, and any death at all suspicious or not 
 easily explicable was sure to be set down to plot and 
 to poison. Popular clamor inside the court, popular 
 rumor outside the court, not merely asserted that the 
 dauphiness died poisoned, but named the instigator of 
 the crime, the arch-poisoner, and even named his tool. 
 Choiseul, so rumor said and all the tongues with 
 which its garment is traditionally painted talked this 
 thing loudly Choiseul was the arch-poisoner; Lieutaud, 
 the court physician, was the no less criminal tool. Lieu- 
 taud, the court physician, took a curious method of reply- 
 ing to the rumors. He published his "Medecine Pra- 
 tique," with a picture representing his version of a classic 
 story, according to which the physician of Alexander, 
 accused of planning to poison his royal master, drank 
 off himself the draught he had prepared. As for Choi- 
 seul, he held his head high and defied rumor. But 
 rumor, and such rumor, was very advantageous for 
 political purposes. It strengthened tremendously the 
 hands of Choiseul's malignant, strenuous rival, the Duke 
 d'Aguillon, and his faction ; very possibly it was through 
 this rumor that such influence as the young dauphin 
 possessed passed into the hands of the D'Aguillon party. 
 It seems certain that Louis XVI. 's repugnance to Choi- 
 seul was largely inspired by the impression made upon 
 his childish mind that in Choiseul he beheld the mur- 
 derer of his father and mother. 
 
 Louis XV. had the least possible affection for his
 
 10 g THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. VII 
 
 grandson. He saw in him the most inappropriate suc- 
 cessor, the most unkingly person, according to his ideas 
 of kingliness, that could wait for a dead king's crown. 
 A young gentleman who was ambitious to be remembered 
 in history as " Louis le Severe " had obviously little in 
 common with the man of many mistresses. Perhaps the 
 king, who was so fond of cooking and wood-turning, 
 might have felt some sympathy with the grandson whose 
 most pronounced tastes were in favor of amateur lock- 
 making and hunting. But the cold respectability of 
 grandson Louis's mind, the unattractive awkwardness of 
 grandson Louis's body, the blundering shyness of grand- 
 son Louis's bearing, were all so many insurmountable 
 barriers to sympathy between Louis XV. and the Dau- 
 phin of France. 
 
 Everything about the young prince betokened a bour- 
 geois mind, a nature inspired by all the bourgeois virtues 
 and marred by not a few of the bourgeois vices. He 
 was well-educated in a commonplace way; he could read 
 English well and hate England well; he had a pretty 
 taste in geography; he loved making locks, and practised 
 it later, to his cost, with a scoundrelly locksmith named 
 Gamain ; he liked looking through telescopes with his 
 shortsighted eyes ; he liked orderliness, formality, regu- 
 larity; he was great at commonplace-books, classified 
 extracts, compilations; he was grotesquely economical 
 where economy was of no importance; he had a certain 
 affection for the character of Richard III. of England, 
 whom he considered to be a most ill - used man. To 
 this commonplace, dull, respectable bourgeois prince the 
 destiny that watches over princes gave as a wife the 
 most unsuitable woman in the world, the beautiful Marie 
 Antoinette of Austria. 
 
 Maria Theresa, ambitious daughter of the Pragmatic
 
 1754-70. MARIE ANTOINETTE. 107 
 
 Sanction, ambitious mistress of the partition of Poland, 
 dreamed of an alliance with France. The dream was 
 fostered by Kaunitz, it pleased the mind of Louis XV.; 
 it was decided that the grandson of the French king 
 should marry the youngest daughter of the Austrian 
 empress. Marie Antoinette, who was born on No- 
 vember 2, 1755, was the last of the sixteen children that 
 Maria Theresa bore to her husband, Francis I. It is re- 
 corded that on the day of the birth of Marie Antoi- 
 nette a great earthquake convulsed a large part of the 
 world ; this earthquake, which ruined Lisbon, and im- 
 pressed so differently Voltaire and Goethe, seemed to 
 certain superstitious courtiers an omen of significance 
 concerning the young princess. The education of the 
 royal children was careful and domestic. Francis I. 
 and Maria Theresa were much attached, were devoted 
 to their family. Hunter Francis died in the August 
 of 1765, when the little Marie Antoinette was barely 
 ten years old, and the increasing cares of the state in- 
 terrupted the close intercourse between the mother and 
 daughter. Her son Joseph, who was born in 1741, was 
 formally crowned Emperor of Germany, but the power 
 remained in the hands of Maria Theresa, and to better 
 wield that power Maria Theresa was obliged to leave 
 the education of Marie Antoinette to other hands than 
 her own. Royal princes and princesses are always said 
 by the chroniclers of their childish days to have been 
 prodigies of learning and of virtue ; but it is not difficult 
 in piercing through the courtly eulogies of the young 
 archduchess to learn that she, capricious, self-willed, 
 charming, was quick to learn whatever pleased her, but 
 not too eager or too willing to apply herself to unattrac- 
 tive studies. An amiable Madame de Brandis, a strong- 
 minded Countess de Lercheufeld, in turn guided the
 
 108 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. Vil. 
 
 mind of Marie Antoinette until the time came when her 
 hand was formally sought for a son of France. Her 
 education then was imperfect. She spoke French fairly 
 fluently, but wrote it very badly. Italian she had 
 learned, and learned well, from that amazing Abbe de 
 Metastasio, whose strange fortune it was all through his 
 life to be loved and admired above his merits. She 
 danced exquisitely, and she adored music. Music won 
 her the adoration of the young Mozart, who, when he 
 was younger, yet dreamed with nursery audacity of mak- 
 ing a bride of his royal playmate ; music won her the 
 adoration of Gluck, the great master of eighteenth-cen- 
 tury music. When the time was at last ripening for the 
 royal marriage which was to ally the two reigning houses 
 of France and Austria, it was decided by Choiseul that 
 some one should be sent to instruct the future dauphiness 
 in all the knowledge that was necessary to make her 
 shine in the court circles of Versailles. He found this 
 some one in the Abbe de Vermond, suggested to him by 
 Lomenie de Brienne, archbishop of Toulouse. Over the 
 choice many bitter words have been spoken. There are 
 writers who see in the Abbe de Vermond a very cor- 
 rupter of youth, the evil genius of Marie Antoinette. 
 We may assume that Vermond was a well-meaning 
 man of a narrow knowledge, able to attract the mind 
 of the young archduchess, but wholly unfitted for the 
 grave task of guiding her safely through the difficulties 
 that were likely to lie in her way. He did not capti- 
 vate Mercy, the wise and faithful Mercy, whose lengthy 
 residence at Versailles and whose clear intelligence ena- 
 bled him to appreciate very keenly the difficulties, the 
 perils even, to which the young dauphiness was likely 
 to be exposed. Mercy came to Vienna himself to give 
 the finishing touches to the veneer of French modes
 
 1770. AUGUR GOETHE. 109 
 
 and French thoughts which Vermond was applying to 
 his charge; he dwelt long, earnestly, and unsuccessfully 
 upon the absolute importance of appreciating the for- 
 malities of etiquette which swayed the court of France. 
 Mercy knew well enough the difference between the 
 ways, the well-nigh domestic ways, of the Austrian 
 court and the elaborate, glittering ceremonialism which 
 prevailed in France. One thing at least the young arch- 
 duchess could and did learn to dance. She danced di- 
 vinely, winning the heart of her dancing-master, who 
 declared that she would be his glory. Such as she 
 was, a somewhat spoiled, ill-educated, graceful child of 
 fifteen, trying desperately to play at being a French 
 princess at a time when she had better have been play- 
 ing in the nursery, she was sent out into the new, strange 
 world of Versailles. When Maria Theresa trembled, 
 thinking of that vicious court, Kaunitz reassured her 
 diplomatically. " We must give a lily to gain a lily," 
 he urged sententiously, and so the lily was given. On 
 April 19, 1770, the Archduke Leopold solemnly wedded 
 his sister, Marie Antoinette, in the Augustine convent 
 in the name of the Dauphin of France, and the young 
 dauphiness set out upon her memorable journey from 
 her old to her new home. 
 
 Let the young Goethe speak. He was at Strasburg 
 playing at law, and learning card-playing and dancing, 
 and winning the hearts of his dancing-master's daughters. 
 If these and other things disturbed his studies, "yet 
 this dissipation and dismemberment of my studies was 
 not enough, for a remarkable political event set every- 
 thing in motion, and procured us a tolerable succession 
 of holidays. Marie Antoinette, Archduchess of Austria 
 and Queen of France, was to pass through Strasburg on 
 her road to Paris. The solemnities by which the people
 
 110 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. Cii. VIJ. 
 
 are made to take notice that there is greatness in the 
 world were busily and abundantly prepared, and es- 
 pecially remarkable to me was the building which stood 
 on an island in the Rhine between the two bridges, 
 erected for her reception, and for surrendering her into 
 the hands of her husband's ambassadors." The em- 
 broidered tapestry with which this pleasure-house was 
 lined greatly attracted the young poet, and he paid 
 many a silver coin to its porter for the privilege of going 
 in and looking at it. Two of the rooms had tapestry 
 worked after Raphael's Cartoons, which filled Goethe 
 with indefinable delight; the hangings of the third and 
 chief saloon greatly shocked and startled him. The pict- 
 ure presented the legend of Jason and his two brides, 
 the dark witch woman of Colchis, and the fair girl Creusa 
 of lolchos. At the left of the throne, poor Creusa strug- 
 gled with the merciless flames in the midst of despairing 
 sympathizers; at the right the distraught Jason beheld 
 his murdered children; above, the sorceress drove in her 
 dragon-car along the clouds. Small wonder if the impet- 
 uous young Goethe called upon his companions to wit- 
 ness such a crime against good taste and feeling. " Is 
 it permitted," he asked, " so thoughtlessly to place before 
 the eyes of a young queen, at her first setting foot in 
 her dominions, the representation of the most horrible 
 marriage that ever was consummated ? Is there, then, 
 among the French architects, decorators, upholsterers, 
 not a single man who understands that pictures represent 
 something, that pictures work upon the mind and feel- 
 ings, that they make impressions, that they excite fore- 
 bodings? It is just the same as if they had sent the 
 most ghastly spectre to meet this beauteous and pleas- 
 ure-loving lady at the very frontiers." The something 
 sibyllic in these utterances of the youthful, indignaut
 
 1770. HOW TO MAKE A ROYAL PROGRESS. m 
 
 Goethe strikes us with all the inspiration of prophecy, 
 but they did not delight the companions to whom they 
 were addressed. They hurried him away as best they 
 could, assuring him soothingly that the people of Stras- 
 btirg would be too busy to seek omens in the hangings 
 of a wall. Yet the young Goethe was right, and an 
 omen more portentous and more menacing is not record- 
 ed in the annals of the curious. 
 
 A little later Goethe saw the young queen, and his 
 description forms a parallel picture to Burke's immortal 
 eloquence : " I yet remember well the beauteous and 
 lofty mien, as cheerful as it was imposing, of this youth- 
 ful lady. Perfectly visible to us all in her glass car- 
 riage, she seemed to be jesting with her female attend- 
 ants, in familiar conversation, about the throng that 
 poured forth to meet her train." So, for the first time, 
 the fair Marie Antoinette swims within the ken of great 
 eyes, so, for the first time, she appears before us, limned 
 in immortal language, with her foot upon the threshold 
 of France. If she could only have known what the 
 greatest man of that time, one of the greatest men of 
 all time, was thinking of as he gazed upon that fair, 
 gracious advent, perhaps the imperial Austrian heart 
 might have been touched to some purpose, and the his- 
 tory of France written quite otherwise. For there was 
 one circumstance in connection with this day which 
 struck the vivid fancy of 'Goethe, and which is, as it 
 were, the key to all that followed. A formal regulation 
 had been issued that no deformed persons, no cripples, 
 nor disgusting invalids should presume to show them- 
 selves upon the road of the royal progress. It is one of 
 the most horrible characteristics of the dying century 
 and the dying monarchy, this insane attempt to hide, 
 to suppress, to avoid, and so to forget the stern facts of
 
 H2 TIIE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. VII. 
 
 humanity. Goethe, though he calls it a " very rational 
 regulation," appreciated the grim popular humor which 
 joked about it, and he interpreted the humor in a little 
 French poem which compared the advent of Christ, who 
 came into the world especially to seek the sick and the 
 lame, with the coming of the queen who scared the 
 unfortunates away. Goethe's friends seem to have been 
 pleased with this little satire; a French friend, however, 
 fell foul mercilessly of the language and the metre, and 
 Goethe wrote no more French poems. But the fact 
 that it was written, that it could be written, is the most 
 significant preface to the story that ended in the Con- 
 ciergerie and on the scaffold. The ghastly pretence 
 that a royal road must be all smiles and roses and fair 
 favor, which no touch of human sorrow and human shame 
 or pain was to approach, could only end in an hour in 
 which squalor and suffering and despair should force 
 their way into the sham enchanted palace, and trample 
 on the purple. The lesson is still significant. 
 
 The grim presages which Goethe drew from the Jason 
 pictures were soon responded to. In that part of the 
 pavilion reserved for the Austrian court, Marie Antoi- 
 nette had her first experience of the etiquette of her new 
 country. A Dauphin of France, animated by the same 
 principles which dictated the wedding conditions of 
 John Antony Riqueti of Mirabeau, insisted that noth- 
 ing should remain with his royal consort of a land which 
 was no longer hers. So the young Austrian princess 
 was solemnly undressed, even to her very chemise and 
 stockings, and reclad from head to foot in the garments 
 provided for her by France. Courtly etiquette always 
 assumes, and perhaps wisely, that to change in ap- 
 pearance is to change in fact. But, unhappily, no chang- 
 ing of chemise and stockings could make poor Marie
 
 1770. MARIE ANTOINETTE'S ROYAL ROAD. H3 
 
 Antoinette other than the "Austrian," in the eyes of her 
 court enemies and, at last, in the eyes of France at large. 
 
 By slow and ceremonial stages the young dauphiness 
 proceeded from Strasburg to Saverne, from Saverne to 
 Nancy, from Nancy to Bar, from Bar to Chalons, from 
 Chalons to Soissons, from Soissons to Compiegne. The 
 route was one long triumph flowers, balls, Te Deiims, 
 public banquets. It was roses, roses, all the way, as 
 Browning's luckless hero says in the poem. A little 
 way beyond Compiegne, the Duke de Choiseul met the 
 dauphiness and her escort and guided her to a space in 
 the forest by the Berne Bridge, where she found a royal 
 party who had travelled from Versailles to meet her. 
 The young Austrian fell at the king's feet. He lifted 
 her up, embraced her and presented her to the dauphin, 
 who, in his turn, in what, we may imagine, was a some- 
 what perfunctory and awkward fashion, kissed his bride. 
 At the chateau, the king presented to the stranger a 
 number of princes and peers, the Duke de Chartres 
 among the number an ominous presentation. Here, 
 too, for the first time she met the Princess de Lamballe. 
 From so far these two fair young women had met, and 
 for what a parting ! 
 
 More festivities, more journeyings by slow stages, 
 more gifts, more banquets, more meetings with persons 
 of importance, including Madame du Barry, who ob- 
 tained the privilege of supping at the dauphiness's ta- 
 ble at La Muette. The dauphiness was simple enough 
 or skilful enough to find the Du Barry charming. The 
 Du Barry did not take long to find the young dauphin- 
 ess dangerous and to hate her with all her heart. At 
 last, on a stormy Wednesday, May 16, 1770, in the chap- 
 el at Versailles, the dauphin, in the eyes of all that was 
 noblest and fairest in France, placed the ring of gold 
 L 8
 
 ] 14 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. VII. 
 
 upon the girl's finger, gave her the thirteen traditional 
 pieces of gold. More presentations, chiefly of foreign 
 ambassadors, suppers, music, blessing of the nuptial bed 
 by the Archbishop of Rheims; Marie Antoinette of 
 Austria slept that night as Dauphiness of France. The 
 great ambition of Maria Theresa was fulfilled. No 
 dream slipped through the gates of horn to stand by 
 mother or child and warn them of fate. But the su- 
 perstitious shuddered over the savage storm which beat 
 upon Versailles on the wedding-day, and drew ominous 
 prognostications from the thunder-strokes that beat upon 
 the palace on the day when the dauphiness first set foot 
 therein. A more evil omen was yet to come: the fort- 
 night of successive festivals in honor of the wedding 
 ended on May 30; there was a great display of fire- 
 works in the Place Louis XV.; the crowd was great 
 the precautions few the police arrangements insuffi- 
 cient; two great waves of the crowd met in a narrow 
 space the crush became murderous. When, at last, it 
 was ended and the crowd dissolved, the scene was like 
 a field of battle; hundreds of the dead strewed the 
 ground poor luckless merrymakers who came to a fete 
 and found a massacre. It was never decisively known 
 how many were killed on that terrible night. On the 
 good old courtly principle of sparing at all hazards the 
 feelings of the royal people, as little as possible was 
 said about it, and ruined families mourned their losses 
 in such stoical silence as they could muster lest the 
 sound of their sorrow should vex the ears of the young 
 princess. One hundred and thirty -two corpses were 
 hurriedly interred in the cemetery of the Madeleine, 
 there to wait awhile for more august companionship. 
 Away in far Frankfort-on-the-Main the news of the 
 catastrophe caused aching hearts for a season in the
 
 1770. GOETHE'S FOREBODINGS. 115 
 
 house with the lyre above its portal ; in the house of 
 Dr. Goethe the inmates trembled for the young Johann 
 Wolfgang, then believed to be in Paris, whose silence 
 led them to fear the worst. They were undeceived 
 the young Johann Wolfgang had been fooling them. 
 Wanting a holiday from Strasburg for some whim of 
 his own, he had pretended to go to Paris, and had even 
 written a letter dated Paris, which he had got a friend 
 to post. Fate had not ordained that the young Goethe's 
 life was to be so untimely ended. But young Goethe, 
 reflecting on the awful news, remembered again the 
 Strasburg tapestries with their hideous tale of Jason's 
 marriage and felt his odd melancholy forebodings deepen.
 
 116 THE i'KEKCH HE VOLUTION. CH. VIII. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 A QTJEEB WORLD. 
 
 IT was a queer world upon which the little Austrian 
 archduchess now shone for the first time. The beauti- 
 ful, imperious, wilful girl, who was scarcely more than 
 a child, found herself suddenly in very different sur- 
 roundings from those that had been familiar to her 
 girlhood in Vienna and in Schonbrunn. The old king 
 himself, the central sun of the celestial court system, 
 was not an over-attractive figure. He was then sixty 
 years old, worn with vices, cynical, weary, sensual, with 
 a taste for turning, a taste for cooking, and a stronger 
 taste for mistresses, a great devotion to the reigning 
 favorite and a great indifference to the government of 
 the country. He was as immoral as an ape ; he was 
 about as useful to the country he was supposed to gov- 
 ern as an elderly ape would have been, if that creature 
 of the greenwoods had been taught to wear the royal 
 purple and the trappings of the Saint-Esprit. But he 
 was King of France, and Maria Theresa appreciated the 
 fact thoroughly, and her daughter, through her, appre- 
 ciated it as thoroughly. Marie Antoinette knew well 
 that it was part of her business to captivate the old 
 king, and she set to work very steadily to win what- 
 ever feelings of kindlier affection might be left in his 
 wicked, withered old heart. It is scarcely surprising to 
 find that she succeeded. With all his baseness, Louis 
 was still in the curious courtly sense of the word a
 
 1770. THE DU BARRY. 117 
 
 gentleman, and could hardly fail to be touched by the 
 youth, the beauty, and the pretty ways of his gracious 
 Austrian grandchild. But there was a figure at the 
 court even more important than the king's. We have 
 seen how at La Muette the dauphiness noted the bold, 
 beautiful face of Madame du Barry at her table, and 
 asked, perhaps in childish ignorance and all simplicity, 
 what part Madame du Barry played in the great pag- 
 eant of the courtly life. We are told that the per* 
 plexed and vague answer given by the person she asked 
 was to the effect that Madame du Barry's business at 
 the court was to amuse the king. "Then let her be- 
 ware," is said to have been Marie Antoinette's jesting 
 answer, " for I warn her that she will find a serious ri- 
 val in me." 
 
 Madame du Barry was hardly likely to welcome the 
 rising of the Austrian star. She was the real sovereign 
 of the court, the real sovereign of France, the living 
 cynical proof of the degradation of the monarchy and 
 the monarch. The reign of the Du Barry made decent 
 men regret the reign of the Pompadour. At least the 
 Pompadour was a woman of education, of ability, who, 
 if not of gentle blood, bore herself like a lady of gentle 
 blood, and was always exquisitely careful never to allow 
 her influence to be ostentatiously or offensively obtruded. 
 But Madame du Barry was a very different sort of 
 woman from Madame de Pompadour, and her triumph 
 over the king was the most eloquent possible proof of 
 the royal declension in ignominy. The De Goncourts, 
 in their life of Madame du Barry, quote from the " Jour- 
 nal" of Hardy preserved in the National Library of 
 Paris a curious episode which forms a most appropriate 
 preface to a record of a strange and shameful career. 
 A certain ecclesiastic strange to Paris and its ways was
 
 U8 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. VIII. 
 
 dining at a house where after dinner a Parisian priest 
 bade his brethren present drink to " The Presentation." 
 The ingenuous stranger asked if it was the ceremony of 
 the Presentation of our Lord to the Temple which was 
 to take place the next day, whereupon the priest who 
 had proposed the toast answered that he was thinking 
 of the presentation of the new Esther who was to de- 
 throne Haman. The new Esther was Madame du Barry; 
 the new Haman was the minister Choiseul. 
 
 In the year 1743, in the month of August, the natural 
 child of Anne Bequs was born at Vaucouleurs, was bap- 
 tized and named Jeanne. A protector and patron of 
 the mother, a wealthy financier named Dumonceau, 
 caused the little girl to be taught to read and write and 
 began her amazing education by placing her with her 
 mother in the house of his mistress, a Mdlle. Frederique, 
 famous in the courtesanship of the day for her red hair 
 and her extreme looseness of morals. This excellent be- 
 ginning was presently modified by Mdlle. Frederique 
 herself, who began to grow jealous of the growing 
 charms of little Jeanne. Little Jeanne was packed off 
 to the Convent of Saint -Aure, a gloomy institution 
 where poor girls were kept respectable under a regimen 
 of appalling austerity. Little Jeanne revolted against 
 the regimen, was sent back to Mdlle. Frederique, who 
 would have none of her, and who succeeded in inducing 
 Dunaonceau to turn Jeanne and her mother into the 
 streets. Jeanne was then fifteen. She drifted about 
 the streets for a while hawking cheap jewellery and 
 plying a sordid prostitution. Then a mysterious uncle, 
 a Father Picpus, turned up and got her a place as com- 
 panion at Cour-Neuve, in the environs of Paris, where 
 old Madame Lagarde cheered her declining years with 
 theatrical entertainments. But Madame Lagarde had
 
 1743. THE HARLOT'S PROGRESS. 119 
 
 sons who could appreciate the beauty of Jeanne, and 
 Jeanne was soon sent about her business. 
 
 Then she got a place in a modiste's shop and began 
 the life of little gallantry which led her from lover to 
 lover into the arms of the rascally Count du Barry, and 
 opened the way to the higher gallantry which was to 
 niche her for a season on the steps of a throne. Count 
 du Barry was a swaggering, profligate rogue, who 
 claimed descent from the English Barrymores, and who 
 sustained in Paris a kind of commerce of beautiful 
 women whom it was his business and profit to discover, 
 and train for the benefit of wealthy patrons. Every 
 man has an ideal, even a man in so despicable a business 
 as this of Count du Barry's. Du Barry's ambition was 
 to be the purveyor of a mistress to the king himself. 
 He had already tried and failed when he found in 
 Jeanne, the adventuress whom he had formed into an 
 accomplished and brilliant courtesan, the woman he 
 wanted. Louis XV. saw Jeanne, how and when histo- 
 rians differ, and was completely conquered, to the great 
 grief of Lebel, his valet, who seems to have died of 
 something like grief at discovering that what he had 
 regarded as a passing fancy was likely to prove a per- 
 manence in the royal affections. But as Madame du 
 Barry was neither noble nor wedded, it was decided by 
 the king that she must be the one and the other. Count 
 du Barry could not marry her himself, as he had already 
 a wife living. But there was his brother, Guillaume, 
 needy officer of marines at Toulouse the very man ! 
 A sort of sham husband being thus found, a sort of 
 sham father was found in a certain almoner of the king, 
 Gomard de Vaubernier, who consented to regard him- 
 self as the parent of the fair Jeanne, and so spare 
 Guillaume du Barry the pain of wedding and King
 
 120 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. VIII. 
 
 Louis the pain of loving a young lady who was only a 
 natural child ! The ludicrous farce was played out and 
 the new Madame du Barry found herself comfortably 
 quartered at Versailles as the mistress-in-chief of the 
 king. 
 
 From that moment the name of Madame du Barry 
 was carried by the winds of rumor to all the corners of 
 the earth. Quite unconsciously she played a mighty 
 part in the great game of politics. Every one who hated 
 Choiseul, all the discontented courtiers, all the allies of 
 the Jesuits against whom he had waged so merciless a 
 war, found in the new favoiite a weapon to their hand. 
 Choiseul had laughed at favorites before; had he not 
 overthrown Madame d'Esparbes simply by taking her 
 by the chin in public and asking her, " Well, little one, 
 how are your affairs getting on ?" But the Du Barry 
 was a more serious foe. She had an able prompter al- 
 ways in the background in rascally, clever Count John ; 
 she had a watchful adviser and confidante always by 
 her in rascally, clever Count John's rascally, clever, 
 slightly humpbacked sister, the famous Chon. The 
 world that began to talk of Madame du Barry began to 
 recognize in her a rival and a serious rival to Choiseul, 
 and around her flowing petticoats gathered all the op- 
 ponents of the powerful minister. Madame du Barry, 
 in her dainty nest at Versailles, with her black page 
 and her parrot, and her ape and her poodle, and her 
 dainty, flowing simplicity of attire, her unpowdered hair 
 and unpainted face, her lisping voice that always blun- 
 dered s into z, was preparing the way for the fall of the 
 great Choiseul. 
 
 Madame du Barry had a certain rough-and-ready way 
 of revenging herself upon those who were unlucky 
 enough to offend her. There is one story told in this
 
 1768-70. WHIPPING A COUNTESS. 121 
 
 connection which is curiously characteristic of the wom- 
 an and her ways, and her innate vulgarity. Her friend 
 the Countess de Rosen in a rash moment quarrelled 
 with the favorite, and sought in more ways than one to 
 cause her annoyance. The favorite complained to the 
 king. Louis shrugged his shoulders. " Madame de 
 Rosen is only a schoolgirl, and shoiild be treated like a 
 schoolgirl." Madame du Barry took the royal sugges- 
 tion perfectly seriously. She invited Madame de Rosen 
 to come and see her. Madame de Rosen came. Once 
 inside the Du Barry's rooms, she was seized upon by a 
 sufficiency of stout serving-girls, and in the Du Barry's 
 laughing presence was soundly birched in the most 
 schoolgirl fashion. Poor Madame de Rosen, hurt and 
 hysterical, complained to the king. Louis, who had for- 
 gotten his suggestion, mildly reproved the favorite, who 
 immediately reminded the monarch that she was only 
 obe)nng his own advice. The king laughed, and suc- 
 ceeded in pacifying Madame de Rosen, who afterwards 
 became very good friends again with her chastiser. 
 
 In spite of the Du Barry, however, and all her wiles, 
 the most important figure in the court still was the fig- 
 ure in the eyes of young Louis, the sinister figure of 
 the Duke de Choiseul. At this time he was just fifty- 
 one years of age, and, though he knew it not, his great 
 career lay already behind him. Behind him lay all 
 those great achievements, all those greater plans, his 
 military youth, the envoyship to Rome, secret treaties 
 with Maria Theresa, long alliance with the Pompadour, 
 mad schemes for invasion of England, blunderings in 
 America, blunderings in the West Indies, blunderings 
 in India, blunderings in Poland, "Family Compact" 
 triumph and failure, anti- Jesuit failure and triumph. 
 So many showy successes, so many scarcely less showy
 
 12 2 TiJE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. VIII. 
 
 failures, were crowded into that restless, busy, brilliant 
 half-century of life. 
 
 One very fateful meeting led the young dauphiness to 
 a very fateful friendship. Perhaps no figure in all the 
 courtly world is more attractive, more perplexing, than 
 that of Marie Therese Louise de Savoie-Carignan, Prin- 
 cesse de Lamballe, whose beautiful face looks out upon 
 us and upon all time with such an air of exquisite can- 
 dor in Hickel's portrait as engraved by Fleischraann. 
 That fair, unfortunate creature, whose marriage was so 
 desperately miserable and pitiable, who came so near to 
 marrying Louis XV. in his old age, has had many assail- 
 ants, chief among them the acridly unvirtuous Madame 
 de Genlis, and many impassioned champions, of whom 
 M. de Lescure and M. Georges Berlin are the latest and 
 the most impassioned. Perhaps Carlyle rather over- 
 shoots his mark when he says of Madame de Lamballe 
 that " she was beautiful, she was good, she had known 
 no happiness." The beautiful friend of Marie Antoi- 
 nette must have known some happy hours in that bright 
 court which danced so daintily over the volcanic earth, 
 in spite of her ghastly marriage, in spite of all that was 
 to be. Even Madame de Genlis, who declares that her 
 hands were "terribly ugly," has little to say against her 
 nature ; even the profligate and pitiful Lauzun has to 
 admit that she was " as good as she was pretty." 
 
 Madame de Lamballe's beauty still seems to live far 
 acroes the generations. Hickel's portrait, with its air 
 of childish grace, can thrill us across the wilderness 
 of years with its delicate, haunting loveliness. That 
 hair of fair Italian gold which has been likened to 
 the tresses which crown, nimbus -like, the heads of 
 Raphael's Madonnas, those sweetly smiling lips, those 
 frank, kindly, loyal eyes can still captivate, can still in-
 
 1749-92. LADIES OF THE COURT. 123 
 
 spire. "She is a model of all the virtues," said the 
 Baroness d'Oberkirch ; and the praise does not seem to 
 have been exaggerated. If it was her misfortune to 
 be married to the unlucky Lamballe, it was her good- 
 fortune to have in her father-in-law, the Duke de Pen- 
 thievre, the brightest and best example of the old no- 
 bility of France. The recently published memoirs of 
 Dom Courdemanche, edited by Etienne Allaire, add one 
 more to the many delightful pictures we possess of the 
 good old peer. If France could have boasted more 
 nobles like the Duke de Penthievre and less like the 
 Duke de Lauzun towards the close of the last century, 
 the story of the French Revolution might have been 
 very different. 
 
 There were certain other ladies at that court, ladies 
 very unlike the Du Barry on the one hand, or Madame 
 de Lamballe on the other, three soured and faded ladies 
 who had the misfortune to be the daughters of the 
 king. They were known to the court, they are known 
 to the world, by the endearing nicknames bestowed upon 
 them by their royal father, Loque, Coche, Graille 
 nicknames that Carlyle allots inaccurately. These were 
 Madame Adelaide, Madame Victoire, and Madame So- 
 phie. Another sister, Madame Louise, known to the 
 paternal slang as Chiffe, had left the court for the se- 
 clusion of a convent before the arrival of Marie Antoi- 
 nette. The three were all old maids, and very old- 
 maidish old maids, much given to piety, to scandal, and 
 the like. Two of them were exceedingly plain Ma- 
 dame Adelaide and Madame Sophie which did not serve 
 to increase the little affection that lingered in the heart 
 of Louis. Poor desolate ladies, they seemed very insig- 
 nificant all through their lives, and yet two of them had 
 their mischievous importance, and did more harm than
 
 ]24 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. VIII. 
 
 a legion of old maids could set right again. M. Edouard 
 de Barthelemy has devoted a biggish book entirely to 
 Mesdames de France, in which the curious will find a 
 vast amount of interesting particulars concerning these 
 old ladies and tneir varying fortunes. M. de Barthe- 
 lemy has worked hard with all the available material. 
 The neglected, melancholy old ladies live again in his 
 pages, curious shadows flitting across that sinful court, 
 curious shadows flitting before the terrors of the new 
 order of things which knocked a less sinful court into 
 fragments. 
 
 With their early lives we have nothing to do ; their 
 interest only begins for us with the advent of Marie 
 Antoinette. Madame Victoire, the sad sister who had 
 once been something of a beauty, played but a small part 
 in the grim game that ended for her in exile and Trieste. 
 Madame Adelaide and Madame Sophie were more im- 
 portant. It was permitted to them to have a share, 
 and no inconsiderable share, in accelerating the progress 
 of the inevitable Revolution. They seem to have hated 
 Marie Antoinette almost from the first. Ill-favored 
 themselves, they resented the beauty of the new dau- 
 phiness. Slighted by their father, they resented the 
 attentions which Louis XV. offered to Marie Antoi- 
 nette and the admiration with which he spoke of her. 
 Formal, precise, old-fashioned, and austere, they were 
 shocked and scandalized by the lightness of Marie An- 
 toinette's nature. Their rigid respect for etiquette and 
 strict decorum was daily, hourly outraged by the free- 
 and-easy fashions which Marie Antoinette brought with 
 her from the virtuous but free-and-easy court of Vi- 
 enna. Marie Antoinette was not to be long in France 
 without calling into existence an anti-Dauphiness party, 
 in which party the two Mesdames Adelaide and Sophie
 
 1732-53. A WATCHMAKER'S SON. 125 
 
 were leaders. The anti-Dauphiness party was yet to 
 grow into an anti-Queen party, fostering all the acrid, 
 malignant, envenomed support that Madame Adelaide 
 and Madame Sophie could lend to it. Let us take note 
 as we pass on that Mesdames de France have been the 
 precious patronesses of an obscure watchmaker who 
 desires many things, especially riches and fame. We 
 shall meet with him again. His name is Beaumar- 
 chais. 
 
 If Cervantes smiled Spain's chivalry away, so certainly 
 Beaumarchais helped to smile away the old nobility of 
 France. In late January of 1732 a reputable Parisian 
 watchmaker named Caron begot a son, whom he named 
 Pierre Augustin, and brought up in the good old Egyp- 
 tian way to his own trade. The young Caron had a 
 soul above clock-cobbling. He was smart, good-look- 
 ing, ambitious, esurient of success and the things suc- 
 cess brings with it popular applause, pretty women, 
 the favor of the great, money in poke, fine clothes, and 
 all the fun of the world's fair. But he owed his first 
 rise in life to his watches. He invented a new escape- 
 ment ; some rogue pirated ; Caron, who was always 
 pugnacious and litigious, rushed into print to claim his 
 own, and the Academy of Sciences, to which the watch 
 feud was referred, decided in his favor. This brought 
 him into court notice : he was graciously permitted to 
 try his skill upon Madame de Pompadour's watch, gra- 
 ciously permitted to call himself Watchmaker to the 
 King. Once in touch of the court, Caron resolved to 
 keep so. Luck favored him. A well-to-do woman fell 
 in love with the handsome, pushing young watchmaker; 
 the woman was married ; she cajoled her husband, Con- 
 troller Francquet, into making over his post to Caron. 
 When Francquet died his widow straightway married
 
 126 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. VIII. 
 
 Caron, who henceforth assumed the title of De Beau- 
 marcbais, which he was yet to make famous. Later 
 on, the judicious purchase of a secretaryship to the 
 king flattered his vanity by bringing with it a title of 
 nobility. 
 
 The daughters of the king, Loque, Coche, Graille, 
 and Chiffe, took him up, patronized him, allowed him to 
 teach them the harp, and gave him a recognized place 
 in the society of the court. Not that the court al- 
 ways liked him ; but the cool impudence of Beaumar- 
 chais enabled him always to meet, and meet success- 
 fully, the insolence of any contemptuous courtier. The 
 story is well known of the young nobleman who on one 
 occasion asked Beaumarchais to look at his, the young 
 nobleman's, watch, as he feared there was something 
 wrong with it. Beaumarchais calmly observed that he 
 was so long out of practice that he feared he would be 
 scarcely equal to the task ; then, taking the watch from 
 the courtier's hand, he let it fall from his own carefully 
 careless fingers to the floor, where it dashed to pieces. 
 With a grave smile Beaumarchais said, " You see, I am 
 out of practice," and so walked leisurely away, leaving 
 the courtier gazing sufficiently ruefully at his shattered 
 treasure. 
 
 If Beaumarchais was never afraid of making ene- 
 mies, he had the art also of making serviceable friends. 
 Paris-Duverney, the great banker, was one of these ; 
 Puris-Duveruey, who helped Beaumarchais to make his 
 fortune. After Paris-Duverney's death a document was 
 found in which the banker acknowledged himself Beau- 
 marchais's debtor for 16,000 francs. The Count la 
 Blache, who hated Beaumarchais, contested the validity 
 of the document, and thereupon arose one of the most 
 fiercely fought lawsuits, or rather succession of law-
 
 1732-76. BEADMARCIIAIS. 127 
 
 suits, whereof the world holds witness. Beaumarchais 
 gained, lost on appeal, got into trouble through an at- 
 tempt to gain by a money payment to Goezman's wife 
 the favorable vote of Goezman the Parliamentarian 
 on whose report the vote of the Parliament depended. 
 Goezman brought bis action against Beaumarchais for 
 attempted corruption of a judge. Beaumarchais de- 
 fended himself in the most brilliant, the bitterest m&- 
 moires, and, though he lost his case for the time, his 
 attacks upon the detested Parliament made him as pop- 
 ular with the people as he had been unpopular. In the 
 common phrase, Beaumarchais was bad to beat. His 
 defeat by Goezman cost him his civil rights, as his de- 
 feat by La Blache had cost him his little fortune ; but 
 in his indefatigable way he declined to be defeated, and 
 in the end not only got his civil rights restored to him, 
 but actually defeated La Blache himself. 
 
 Beaumarchais had a kind of genius for getting into 
 queer affairs. It is not over-agreeable to find a man of 
 genius drifting about Europe in the hunt after pam- 
 phlets lampooning Madame du Barry, even with the 
 purpose of buying them up and destroying them for 
 the king ; still less so if he could believe, as has been 
 hinted, that the pamphlets in question only existed in 
 Beaumarchais's ingenious mind. The enthusiasm with 
 which he flung himself into the cause of American inde- 
 pendence was an enthusiasm of that kind which knows 
 how to make a good thing out of its sympathies. But 
 we can forget and forgive all the shifts and dodges, all 
 the seamy side of Beaumarchais's life, when we come 
 to his two immortal plays. Commerce and the Clavijo 
 affair had taken him to Spain in his younger days, in 
 1764, and from Spain he drew the inspiration and the at- 
 mosphere of exquisite intrigue of his two great comedies.
 
 128 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. VIII. 
 
 Those comedies ; those comedies ! They made Beau- 
 marchais immortal. They set him up by the side of 
 Moliere. They helped to laugh the Old Order out of 
 existence. Caron had always a certain fierce eagerness 
 for dramatic success ; had written and produced in his 
 salad days two plays, which had been uncompromis- 
 ingly condemned. Uncompromisingly condemned the 
 " Barber of Seville " was very near being too. Beau- 
 marchais had his head full of his law affair, though all 
 Paris had its head full of it also, and crowded his text 
 with the most tedious allusions to his litigation. The 
 result was a dead, dismal failure on the first night. But 
 if Beauraarchais loved his law, he loved his play more. 
 With a ruthless hand he carved out all the tedious per- 
 sonal stuff, wrote and rewrote, and on the second night 
 the play was a great success. But there was a greater 
 success to come. It was the " Mariage de Figaro," which 
 was destined to be the " Don Quixote " of the Old Order. 
 Louis XVI., with some glimmerings of intelligence sud- 
 denly aroused in him, saw what the piece meant saw 
 even dimly what it might mean, and refused his sanc- 
 tion to its performance. The " Barber of Seville " saw 
 the footlights in 1775 ; it was not till 1784 that the 
 "Marriage of Figaro" was brought out, and aroused 
 the laughter which helped to upset the Bastille, and 
 with it the monarchy five years later. The success was 
 astonishing, well-nigh unprecedented. Aristophanes 
 deriding democracy to an Athenian audience did not 
 win half the enthusiasm that came to Beaumarchais 
 when, masked as Figaro, he laughed at everything 
 which a Parisian audience was supposed to regard as 
 sacrosanct. It is fatally easy to overrate the influence 
 of a particular book, a particular speech, a particular 
 play upon a popular movement. But if ever a move-
 
 1721-89. LOUIS XV. AND LOUIS XVI. 129 
 
 ment was helped to its triumph by the two hours' traffic 
 of the stage, the French Revolution was helped by the 
 bitter buffoonery of Gil Bias Beaumarchais in the " Ma- 
 riage de Figaro." 
 
 It was not given to Louis XV. to escape the lot com- 
 mon to all those princes and monarchs for whom Fran- 
 9ois Villon inquires in his famous ballades. There came 
 an end to his caperings, to his neat cynical sayings, to 
 his merry-makings with his mistresses Pompadour 
 yesterday and Du Barry to-day to Pare aux Cerfs 
 pleasures, if Pare aux Cerfs ever existed, which is by 
 no means certain ; to all the infamies and fooleries which 
 make his name a byword and his reign a sham. The 
 years during which he reigned were fertile of good to 
 France ; they produced great thinkers, great teachers, 
 Encyclopaedists, economists, wits, statesmen ; but, as far 
 as Louis XV. was concerned, he did nothing to make 
 his reign other than a plague spot. " After me the del- 
 uge," indeed. The waters were rising, rising all through 
 the weak, worthless, wicked reign ; now small-pox has 
 seized upon the sin-weakened body. Louis XV. lies as 
 dead and despicable as a poisoned rat ; his last maitresse 
 en titre has vanished into obscurity, to emerge again, 
 unhappily, later on, under terrible conditions. Louis 
 XVI. is King of France, and the history of the French 
 Revolution may be said to seriously begin. There are 
 a new king and queen on the throne of France ; they 
 are both young ; they are aid to have prayed Heaven 
 to guide them in the difficulties of their new life. Never 
 were such prayers more needed, could they but have 
 known it. Poor king, poor queen : let us look at them 
 a little closely and try to understand them, children 
 about to be visited by the punishment for the sins of 
 their fathers. 
 L 9
 
 13 o THE FRENCH KEVOLUTIOX. CH. VIII. 
 
 For fifteen years Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette 
 reigned over France with no thought of the fate that 
 was in store for them. There had been kings of France 
 for hundreds of years past ; there seemed no reason to 
 doubt that there would be kings of France for hundreds 
 of years to come. These fifteen years were full and 
 eventful years. Certain events especially stand out, 
 events of very different kinds, but all tending in their 
 effect to the same result. The comedies of Beaumar- 
 chais, the American Revolution, the Diamond Neck- 
 lace, and the Assembly of Notables are the cardinal 
 points by which to steer through the stormy course of 
 that fifteen years. A queer, perplexing fifteen years 
 they were, with their light-hearted Trianonism, their 
 desperate financial flounderings, their Turgots and Nec- 
 kers and Calonnes and Lomenie Briennes, each trying 
 after his own wise or wild way to accomplish the impos- 
 sible. Fifteen years for the king of much hunting and 
 lock-making ; fifteen years for the queen of Trianon 
 light life, of growing disfavor, unpopularity, enmities ; 
 fifteen years for the people of growing discontent, in- 
 creasing poverty and pain ; fifteen years of freer speech, 
 of conflicting ambitions, of fervid dreams, of desperate 
 hopes. The momentum of the monarchy on its roll 
 down hill to destruction has increased beyond the power 
 of man's hand to hold, increased probably beyond the 
 power of any man's hand to retard. 
 
 A sufficiently eventful fifteen years they were. Poor, 
 scheming, malignant, strenuous d'Aguillon was puffed 
 out of favor by the same breath that blew the Du Barry 
 down the wind into seclusion. Septuagenarian De Mau- 
 repas found the old Pompadour disfavor which had 
 kept him in the cold for a quarter of a century no longer 
 a barrier ; he was called to the post of principal minis-
 
 1774-89. DE MAUREPAS. 131 
 
 ter, and was thenceforward to play a pretty active part 
 for his time of life in helping to ruin France. He was 
 not a very estimable old man, he was not a very intelli- 
 gent old man ; he had been in his queer way a large- 
 handed patron of learnings he could not well appreciate; 
 he had helped to send Maupertuis to Lapland, that Mau- 
 pertuis whose wild ideas Voltaire made so merry over ; 
 he had helped to send Jussieu to South America, that 
 Jussieu who was not the most eminent of the " Botan- 
 ical Dynasty." He was to play his part now in helping 
 on the French Revolution.
 
 13 2 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. IX. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 MARIE ANTOINETTE. 
 
 MARIE ANTOINETTE is one of the most perplexing, 
 fascinating, tragic figures in history. Her empire and 
 her influence, like the influence and empire of Mary 
 Stuart, have not ceased with her existence, but extend- 
 ed almost unaltered and unimpaired to the present day. 
 The admiration which Montaigne, which Bran tome, 
 which Konsard express for Mary Stuart is rivalled in 
 its warmth by the language of her adherents to-day ; 
 the praise of Burke, of Goethe, of Mirabeau, and of 
 Arthur Young finds echo in the passionate homage 
 which is still paid to the name of Marie Antoinette. 
 Historians fight over her as fiercely as the factions 
 wrangled in the days of the Diamond Necklace, in the 
 days of the Versailles Banquet, in the days of the Con- 
 ciergerie. Though she belongs, as it were, to the day 
 before yesterday, though the very traditions of her time 
 still linger in certain ancient stately Parisian circles, 
 though many live and look upon the earth whose grand- 
 sires and grandams were familiar with the court of 
 which she was the most unhappy head, it is most diffi- 
 cult to form anything like a precise judgment upon her 
 character, her nature, and her acts. 
 
 Two schools of what can hardly be called criticism 
 chiefly assert themselves. To the one school Marie 
 Antoinette is only an uncanonized saint and martyr, 
 noblest, purest, highest of women, more than human in
 
 1774-89. CONTRASTING PICTURES. 133 
 
 her beauty and her goodness a kind of angel whose 
 very virtues left her the more easily the prey to the 
 enmities of an evil world The disciples of the other 
 school hold her up to all execration as a mere she fiend. 
 They paint her proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more 
 offences at her back than they have thoughts to put them 
 in. They endow her with monstrous vices stolen from 
 the stews of imperial Rome; they accuse her of name- 
 less, shameless sins ; they conjure up an image of a de- 
 pravity utter and complete, sickening even to think 
 upon, and they assure us that such is her true likeness. 
 They load her life with innumerable love affairs ; they 
 treat her as the furious creature of illimitable and abom- 
 inable passions ; they see in her nearest and most natural 
 friendships the degradation of Baudelaire's " Femmes 
 Damnees;" they drink in with a greedy ear and a base 
 credulity the loathsome charges of the tribunal which 
 condemned her. Her wanton blood, her unnatural appe- 
 tites, her tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide, they 
 make responsible for all the miseries of France, and they 
 exult over the day of her death as over the day which 
 liberated a groaning world from some monster. Accu- 
 sations which we might hesitate to believe of Messalina, 
 cruelty which would seem exaggerated if attributed to 
 Nero, they accept and repeat and circulate as the cur- 
 rent coin of history. The obscenities of revolutionary 
 caricature, the depravities of De Sade, the corrupt im- 
 aginings of a corrupt age, all these are to them as rev- 
 elation, and they fish in the literature of the cesspool 
 for every possible and impossible horror wherewith to 
 smirch her name. Only the imaginings of a madhouse 
 could compete with some of the pictures of Marie An- 
 toinette presented to us as serious history. 
 It may be simply and safely assumed that neither of
 
 134 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. Cn. IX. 
 
 these pictures is the real woman or at all like the real 
 woman. Probably no woman since the world began 
 was quite so angelic as the devotees of the Old Order, 
 the historians of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, would 
 have us believe Marie Antoinette was. No woman, it 
 is to be hoped for the sake of humanity, was ever quite 
 so bad as the kind of female Satan which the ragings 
 of a blood-red school of writers offer as the true Marie 
 Antoinette. The courtly idolatry of the one is more 
 pleasant, more chivalrous reading than the other; but 
 the gutter ravings and the rhapsodies are equally for- 
 eign to the serious seeker after truth. He would be 
 but a sorry student of human nature who gauged the 
 civilization of mankind only by the preciosity of a Eu- 
 phuist or the foul word scrawled on a wall. The rapt- 
 ures for and the ragings against Marie Antoinette are 
 of as little service in aiding us to obtain any true appre- 
 ciation of her character and of her reign. It must be 
 admitted, moreover, that more impartial historians are 
 sometimes scarcely more satisfactory. Every one who 
 has studied the history of the Revolution knows the 
 sketch which Mr. John Morley gives of Marie Antoi- 
 nette in his essay on Robespierre. Its frigid judicial 
 ferocity is scarcely more serviceable than the eulogies 
 and the lampoons. Mr. Morley criticises the child queen 
 of the corruptest court and the corruptest capital in 
 Europe as he might criticise a Girton girl crammed with 
 Comtism and the newest theory of historical evolution 
 placed in the same exalted position. 
 
 In endeavoring to understand Marie Antoinette it is 
 impossible not to feel a profound regret that the collec- 
 tion of letters attributed to her by the Count Paul Vogt 
 d'Hunolstein should be of no avail. Unfortunately, to 
 put the case mildly, their authenticity seems more than
 
 1774-89. THE HUNOLSTEIX LETTERS. 135 
 
 dubious. It would be as reasonable to base a case in 
 favor of Marie Antoinette upon an elaborate study of 
 Dumas's " Chevalier de Maisonrouge " as upon the let- 
 ters of the D'Hunolstein collection. The one is fiction 
 pure and simple, the other is fiction of a graver kind 
 masquerading in the guise of history. Who that has 
 read these letters would not like to be able to make 
 use of them? For it may be admitted that they are 
 exceedingly attractive, exceedingly ingeniously linked 
 together. They have all that charm of fiction which is 
 sometimes the property of veritable fact, but they seem 
 to have no value save their charm. The curious in lit- 
 erary puzzles may add these letters to the letters of 
 Phalaris, to the pseudo-Petronius, to the book of Dio- 
 nysius the Areopagite, and the like. The student of 
 history will read them, if he reads them at all, with a 
 sigh as he follows the unfolding picture of this imagi- 
 nary Marie Antoinette. In the first letter she daintily 
 addresses the future husband as " Monsieur le Dauphin 
 et Cher Frere." She confides fears to her mother of 
 her inexperience " in that new country which has adopt- 
 ed me in your name." She describes herself as "La 
 Jeune Frar^oise." She makes quaint allusions to Rob- 
 inson Crusoe and to Lilliput. She jests about " la Dau- 
 phine en Biscuit de Pate Tendre." She depicts her new 
 life as a perpetual performance where one has never the 
 time to hear one's self live. She makes affectionate al- 
 lusions to Metastasio. She pictures the Count d'Artois 
 as " flippant as a page and heedless of grammar." She 
 gives accounts of her "petits bals." She requests her 
 sister to assure Maria Theresa that she has become " as 
 French as she told me it was my duty to become." 
 She makes solemn announcement of the little lady's 
 wisdom teeth. She is enthusiastic about Gluck's " Iph-
 
 13 6 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. IX. 
 
 igenia." She hits at D'Aguillon as the " Ame Damnee 
 de la Comtesse du Barry." She is alarmed at her new 
 royalty: "Mon Dien, moy Reine si jeune, j'en suis tout 
 effrayee." She is surprised to find " the determination 
 of certain folk to picture me as a stranger, always pre- 
 occupied with her own country and only French against 
 the grain." She is annoyed at the report that she had 
 rebaptized her Petit Trianon " mon petit Vienne." She 
 is grieved at her childishness: "Je suis dans la main 
 
 O 
 
 de Dieu et je m'etourdis le plus que je peux; j'en ai 
 besoin, car ce n'est pas etre reine de France que de ne 
 pas avoir les honneurs d'un Dauphin." She declares, 
 "I feel myself French to the finger-tips," "jusqu'aux 
 ongles." She feels mingled joy and disappointment- 
 over the birth of " la pauvre petite " instead of the ex- 
 pected dauphin. She naturally thinks " the cruel custom 
 of filling the bedroom of the queen at such a moment 
 should be abolished." She has the pretty conviction 
 that her daughter is " la plus belle enfant du royaume." 
 She gossips about the Freemasons, and the reception of 
 the Princess de Lamballe as grand mistress of a lodge. 
 She is indignant at the audacity of the Cardinal de Ro- 
 han in making love to her : " You know my aversion 
 for him." She is in despair at the progress of the " af- 
 f reuse affaire," the "abominable affaire," as she calls the 
 case of the Diamond Necklace. She blends maternal 
 solicitude for the cold of " mon gros Normandie " with 
 allusions to "ce charlatan de Cagliostro" and to Dame 
 la Motte " Je n'ai jamais vu cette femme de Lamotte." 
 She is angered at the light punishment inflicted upon 
 Rohan, who dared " to lend himself to that mad and 
 infamous scene of the bosquet, and to believe that he 
 had an appointment with the Queen of France. She is 
 scornful of the clumsy forgeries which were absurdly
 
 0. THE PIT? OF IT. 137 
 
 signed "Marie Antoinette de France." She is alarmed 
 at the assembling of the Notables. The gloom of the 
 letters grows as events succeed swiftly. We witness 
 the conversion of the graceful queen and mother into 
 an eager politician, fighting for her throne, and even for 
 her life, and the lives of those dear to her. We have 
 allusions to Lafayette, to Orleans, to Mirabeau; despair- 
 ing appeals for help to the emperor. We have a sig- 
 nificant commentary on the changed state of public 
 feeling: "A la mort de nion pauvre cher Dauphin, la 
 nation n'a pas seulement eu i'air de s'en apercevoir." 
 We have the touching request to the Count de Mercy 
 to keep the letter she writes to him, as she would be 
 "bien aise de la ravoir un jour;" the earnest request to 
 the Princess de Larnballe not to come back to danger; 
 the melancholy plaint towards the end: " Je souffre nuit 
 et jour, je change a vue d'oeil ; mes beaux jours sont 
 passes, et sans mes pauvres enfants, je voudrais etre en 
 paix dans ma tombe. Us me tueront, ma chere Chris- 
 tine. Apres ma mort, defendez-moi de tout votre coeur." 
 How gladly would we accept all these as genuine, not 
 so much for any fresh light they afford, but for the ad- 
 ditional touches they give to a great historical picture ! 
 Yet the Hunolstein letters deserve some recognition. 
 The very fact that such documents do exist is, in itself, 
 portion and parcel of the history; and if they are not 
 genuine, their unknown constructor deserves at least 
 the credit of a skilful and well-ordered composition. 
 There is, at least in the excerpts here strung together, 
 nothing that Marie Antoinette might not have written, 
 much that she must have said and written in such words 
 or words akin to them. Even if it were absolutely cer- 
 tain that the Hunolstein collection were not genuine, 
 the letters would still not be absolutely valueless to the
 
 !38 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. OH. IX. 
 
 student, not merely of the life of Marie Antoinette, but 
 of the strange cult of Marie Antoinette that has been 
 steadily growing since her death. A brilliant historical 
 novel may sometimes afford a side-light to the student 
 of history, and in at least a kindred sense something 
 may be gleaned from an acquaintance with the Hunol- 
 stein collection. 
 
 It is hardly fair to say, as has been said, that Marie 
 Antoinette was only an Austrian spy in a high position. 
 She was far too self-willed, too human, too intensely 
 feminine to have any real capability for the part of 
 conscious or unconscious spy. It is the old mistake of 
 regarding all the actors in the French Revolution as 
 being incarnations of logical purposes. They were all, 
 first and foremost, men and women, like other men and 
 women puppets, even as ourselves. Never since the 
 world began was any woman more characteristically 
 womanly than Marie Antoinette. Her womanhood is 
 as characteristic as her beauty. The beauty of Marie 
 Antoinette shines like a star through all that age. Eng- 
 lish Burke, English Arthur Young shall pay their trib- 
 ute of enthusiasm; chroniclers have left descriptions 
 of her at all ages. Bachaumont makes her live for us 
 as she was when she arrived in France, a dauphiness of 
 scarce fifteen, with the slight, unfinished, girlish figure, 
 her fair hair that promises to become light chestnut, 
 her fine forehead, her oval, almost too oval, face, her 
 eyebrows " as thick as a blonde's can ever be," her blue 
 eyes, her aquiline nose, her small mouth and full lips, 
 the lower the famous Austrian lip, her astonishingly 
 white skin and natural beauty of complexion which 
 might well neglect the use of rouge. Nine years later 
 Madame Vigee le Brun, whose portraits of the queen 
 are among the most precious legacies of the eighteenth
 
 1774-89. THE MOST FAIR PRINCESS. 139 
 
 century, painted her portrait also in words, telling of 
 the well-developed form, the noble arms, the little hands, 
 the charming feet, and the brilliant, matchless complex- 
 ion of the sovereign she adored. A Tilly and a Segur 
 vie in their praises. If in Madame Campan's raptures 
 over "all that enchanting being" we fear to find the 
 rhapsodies of the waiting- women, we can remember 
 Burke and Arthur Young and feel reassured. It is dif- 
 ficult in reading all these impassioned praises to think 
 of a certain sketch, which a certain painter named Da- 
 vid, now a young man, shall yet make a sketch of a 
 haggard, prematurely old, almost witch-like figure of a 
 woman with a cap of liberty on her head, going to her 
 dismal death. But that sketch is yet unmade, those 
 fingers are only training for it in Paris and Rome, with 
 little thought in their owner's mind of what they yet 
 shall trace. Let us not draw that curtain. 
 
 It is harder to judge of the character of the queen 
 than of her appearance. Perhaps some words of De 
 Tilly's may help. " A like or a dislike," he says, " was 
 disclosed in her regard more curiously than I have ever 
 seen elsewhere." Impetuous, frivolous, self-willed, affec- 
 tionate, imperious, obstinate, she was very femininely at 
 the mercy of feminine moods. A little less capacity 
 for uncompromising dislike might have saved the mon- 
 archy for a while through Mirabeau; a little less im- 
 perious self -consciousness of royal state might have 
 saved at least the monarchs at the Varennes flight. 
 But this is of the future; we shall be able to judge bet- 
 ter of the queen's character as we trace her tragic story 
 step by step. 
 
 Those who love the intimacies of great names, the 
 domestic minutiae of great dramas, the little familiar 
 details which bring home past times and the lords and
 
 14 o THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. IX. 
 
 ladies of old time so much more vividly than the most 
 pompous panegyric or the most chiselled slander, will 
 feel grateful to the Count de Reiset for his two rare, 
 curious, sumptuous, and instructive volumes, " Modes et 
 Usages au Temps de Marie Antoinette." Count de 
 Reiset republishes an account-book of a certain court 
 dressmaker, in which the dresses of the queen and many 
 court-ladies for several years are recorded. This odd 
 document Count de Reiset has raised almost to the dig- 
 nity of a state paper by the magnificent series of illus- 
 trations with which he has embellished it and by his 
 valuable and exhaustive annotations and elucidations. 
 The Count de Reiset adores his queen, and the book is 
 so far one-sided and prejudiced; but there is no book 
 in existence which gives a better idea of what the Old 
 Order was like in France, in its habit as it lived, just 
 before the Revolution. Luckily indeed for those who 
 love the revolutionary period, there is no lack of pre- 
 cious documents. The engravings of the time stand, of 
 course, in the first place. Then, more readily accessible, 
 come the many and magnificent publications of more 
 recent years; the precious and minute series of illustra- 
 tions which the Count de Viel-Castel devoted to the 
 Revolution and Empire; the set of contemporary revo- 
 lutionary costume plates from 1790 to 1793 which has 
 been edited by M. Jules Claretie from the collection of 
 M.Victorien Sardou; the sumptuous illustrated editions 
 of the De Goncourts' books, which cover the whole pe- 
 riod from the Pompadour to the Terror; the labors of 
 the Bibliophile Jacob. These are the most important 
 among many important works which help the curious 
 student of the time to see its men and women, its he- 
 roes and its martyrs, its saints and sinners, in their habit 
 as they lived.
 
 1774-89. THE NEW KING'S GARDEN. 141 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 TRIANON. 
 
 THERE are certain words which have the power to 
 move all hearers with a profound degree of emotion, 
 and to call up very vivid pictures in the minds of the 
 imaginative. Perhaps of all such spell-words, no one 
 is better to conjure with than the word " Trianon." 
 For the sight or the hearing of that word at once sets 
 fancy working; the mental stage is at once cleared for 
 the daintiest, most pathetic set scene imaginable. That 
 fairy palace, those gracious gardens, the chosen toy, the 
 dearest trinket of the most beautiful and the most ill- 
 starred of queens, arises more or less vaguely, like the 
 shadow-palace of a dream, before the mental vision of 
 the historically sentimental. A little world of rococo 
 decorations, of clipped avenues, of loveliness all ranged 
 and patched and powdered, of noble gentlemen, a little 
 dissolute but very devoted, of piquant abbes and des- 
 perately wicked cardinals and brave Besenvals, and 
 criminal queen-resembling adventuresses, and the cen- 
 tre of all this the enchanting queen herself such is the 
 phantasmagoric image which the word Trianon calls up 
 to the large proportion of persons to whom history is 
 always half romance. Trianon itself was actually the 
 fruit of a queer whim for domesticity which at one pe- 
 riod seized upon that weariest of weary kings, Louis 
 XV. Madame de Pompadour, ever at her wit's end to 
 keep the monarch amused, hit upon the device of pleas-
 
 142 THE FRENCH RE VOLUTION. CH. X. 
 
 ing her royal lover with bourgeois pleasures and the 
 pursuits of little folk. Louis had always, even as a 
 little child, loved Trianon; he loved it more than ever 
 when the fancy of Madame de Pompadour converted it 
 into a kind of model farm, all pigeons, and cows, and 
 chickens, and kitchen-garden. Here the king and his 
 mistress, with a picked court of gentlemen and pretty 
 women, played a kind of ghostly pastoral; here Louis 
 posed grotesquely enough as a sort of demi-god gentle- 
 man farmer, an eighteenth - century Admetus. It is 
 given to no one now to behold the entire Trianon of 
 Louis XV. Time has buffeted it as mercilessly as it 
 has buffeted Antioch, and much of it has vanished ir- 
 remediably from the face of creation. But "though 
 much is taken, much remains ;" the curious can still 
 please their eyes with the dainty pavilion, with its fan- 
 ciful farmyard decorations of cocks and hens, and its 
 central absurdity of the eagle, supposed to be allegorical 
 of the august Jovism of Louis XV. 
 
 At first the title " Little Trianon" was not used. The 
 new pleasure-place was called by many names, but not 
 that name. " New Menagerie of Trianon," " Garden of 
 the Menagerie," "New King's Garden" even "Her- 
 mitage " were among its titles. It was not, according 
 to M. Gustave Desjardins, until 1759 that the term 
 "Little Trianon" was habitually used. Louis XV. 
 might very well have called it the garden of experiments. 
 He had an inclination for botany, which he gratified at 
 Trianon by attempting the acclimatization of all manner 
 of exotics. In this he was aided by the most wonderful 
 gardener of the age, Claude Richard, son of an Irishman, 
 and as devoted to horticulture as ever Palissy was to 
 pottery. Claude Richard, who took his orders only from 
 the royal mouth, who took his wages only from the royal
 
 1774-89. A ROYAL GIFT. 143 
 
 hand, became the joy of Louis's heart. Under him the 
 gardens throve and extended ; under him the straw- 
 berries, which the king loved best of all fruits, flourished; 
 and through him it came to pass that Bernard, de Jussieu 
 set up his staff at Trianon, and made the botanic garden 
 there the admiration of all Europe. 
 
 With the advent of Madame du Barry came the ex- 
 ecution of the chateau which had been planned for and 
 by Madame de Pompadour ; the chateau, with all its 
 wealth of gracious pagan pictures, with its wonder- 
 ful Lariot flying-tables, which enabled a king and his 
 company to feast in discreet isolation flying-tables at 
 whose mechanism a certain locksmith named Gamain 
 labored. A chapel too for was not Louis the "most 
 Christian King"? lifted its bell- tower and Mansard 
 roof among the trees. It was at Trianon, within sound 
 of this chapel bell, within sight of this pretty paganism, 
 that Louis XV. was struck by the sudden illness that 
 was to prove mortal. Scandal was flagrantly busy as 
 to the cause of the malady. Enough the fact that on 
 the Tuesday, April 26, 1774, the king came to Little 
 Trianon, that on the following day he complained of ill- 
 ness, that he was removed to Versailles, and died there 
 on May 10, 1774. When the history of Louis the Well- 
 beloved had come to its grisly end, the history of Little 
 Trianon was just about to begin. 
 
 Louis XV. was not long dead when Louis XVI. made 
 a formal present of Little Trianon to Marie Antoinette. 
 Courtly chroniclers of the event put into Louis's mouth 
 varying extravagant phrases of the petit-maitre type 
 which we may well believe he did not utter. The gift, 
 with or without phrases, was exceedingly welcome to 
 Marie Antoinette. She accepted it, but accepted it on 
 one odd condition. The condition was that the king, her
 
 14 4 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. X. 
 
 husband, was never to come to Little Trianon except upon 
 her express invitation. Little Trianon was to be her own, 
 her very own, as the children say, and no one, not even 
 her husband, was to set foot therein save with her gra- 
 cious permission. Louis might be King of France ; she 
 was determined to be queen in her little dominion. Louis 
 accepted the terms, and Little Trianon became Marie An- 
 toinette's kingdom in little. The condition was perhaps 
 not a very unnatural one for a frivolous young queen to 
 make. She was anxious above all things to be amused ; 
 she wished to make Little Trianon a very palace of 
 amusement, and Louis, as an inevitable figure, was cer- 
 tainly not likely to be amusing. 
 
 The queen, it would seem, had no notion of allowing 
 Little Trianon to remain a place for learned experiments. 
 In the insipid allegory of the hour, Minerva was to give 
 place to Venus and the Graces. Poor Bernard de Jus- 
 sieu's Botanical Garden, which had been the joy of the 
 wise, was hardly entreated. The queen wanted to have 
 a garden in that manner which has been called the 
 English manner, which has been called the Chinese 
 manner, and which sought to substitute for Dutch 
 formality French frigidity and a tepid and tedious 
 sham classicism ; the picturesque freedom of an English 
 park or a Chinese pleasure-ground. Nature, as cham- 
 pioned by Horace Walpole and Rousseau, was to triumph 
 over trim alleys of quincunxes ended by the walls 
 painted with landscapes which delighted last-century 
 France as much as it had delighted Pliny and Pompeii. 
 So Bernard de Jussieu's Botanical Garden was abolished 
 
 -" culbutee," Mercier says turned upside down, and 
 its treasures were rescued from destruction by pious 
 hands, and carted off to not inglorious exile in the Jardin 
 des Plantes.
 
 1774-89. "LITTLE VIENNA." 145 
 
 Luckless queen ! Trianon was destined to prove fatal 
 to her fortunes. In almost every point where its history 
 and hers coincide, it was destined to be of evil influence 
 upon her. Through her love for the place arose the 
 rumor the unfounded rumor that she had baptized it 
 anew as the "petit Vienne," or the "petit Schonbrunn," 
 in order to recall to her mind the beloved homes of her 
 girlhood. Nothing could be better qualified to make 
 the queen of evil repute to sensitive French patriotism 
 than the impression that her heart and her sympathies 
 were still all Austrian. The term " Little Vienna " was 
 certainly in the air for a while, even if the queen did 
 not herself directly sanction it, for it even figures, accord- 
 ing to M. Desjardins, in financial accounts for the year 
 1776. But if. the imprudence of Marie Antoinette had 
 been confined merely to giving rise to an unfortunate 
 nickname for her pleasure-place, there would not have 
 been much harm done. Unfortunately thus bad begins, 
 but worse remains behind. Marie Antoinette's mania 
 for an Anglo-Chinese garden was the opening note in 
 the long gamut of reckless extravagance through which 
 she ran during the early Trianon days. She was soon 
 at odds with Turgot on the question of expense, and 
 it is hard to say how much of Turgot's fall was due to 
 his judicious hostility to the absurd and costly Anglo- 
 Chinese plaything. 
 
 The indifference, the frivolity, of Marie Antoinette 
 would seem recklessly culpable if we did not duly recol- 
 lect extenuating circumstances. The air of personal 
 authority she cast over Trianon was of itself calculated 
 to irritate the irritable public opinion of Parisian society. 
 At Trianon only the red-and-silver liveries of the queen 
 were to be seen ; the red, white, and blue of the king's 
 servants were nowhere visible. At Trianon too, as after- 
 I, 10
 
 14 6 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. X. 
 
 wards, and yet more unwisely at St. Cloud, Marie Antoi- 
 nette issued orders and notices signed " de par la Reine " 
 " by the Queen's command " instead of the habitual 
 and authoritative " de par le Roi." An act of this kind 
 in a country where the Salic law was so scrupulously 
 observed and so jealously regarded was light-hearted to 
 a culpable degree. No less foolish was her petulant, if 
 very natural, dislike to the restrictions of courtly custom 
 and convention which led her to practically banish from 
 her little court the solemn and formal Madame de 
 Noailles, whom the queen nicknamed " Madame 1'Eti- 
 quette," whom the palace-ladies called "Madame Ho- 
 nesta," and to establish in her stead the Princess de 
 Chimay. Nor did the queen do much to win the good 
 opinion of the world at large, and the circle of friends 
 in whom she most delighted, by the way in which she 
 allowed herself to be seen rushing from pleasure to pleas- 
 ure, unaccompanied by the king, and escorted only by a 
 young, heedless company, among whom the king's broth- 
 ers, D'Artois and Monsieur, made themselves needlessly 
 conspicuous. In those early Trianon years, Marie An- 
 toinette seemed to think that the life of a great queen 
 had no other, no higher duties than gambling, dancing, 
 extravagant dressing, festals of all kinds, and high-flown, 
 too gallant friendships, which at the best were dangerous 
 flirtations, and which scandal, ever eying for the worst, 
 persisted in regarding as culpable intrigues. Maria The- 
 resa, Mercy, Joseph IT., regarded Marie Antoinette's 
 recklessness with the gravest alarm. Joseph visited his 
 sister in the May of 1777, and no doubt reasoned and 
 reasoned in vain with the sister to whom he was so de- 
 voted that it was with the utmost reluctance that he 
 left Trianon to return to his empire. Mercy declared 
 that the only object of the young queen's life was pleas-
 
 1779. THE QUEEN'S ATTENDANTS. 147 
 
 ure. Maria Theresa wrote in 1775 that her daughter 
 was rushing to her ruin, and would be fortunate if she 
 succeeded in preserving the virtues of her rank. 
 
 The maddest of all the mad deeds of her Trianon reign 
 was done when, in 1779, she fell ill of the measles. Here, 
 for the first time, she took up her abode at Trianon. It 
 was judged best that she should separate herself from 
 the king during the course of the malady, lest Louis, 
 who had never had the measles, should, by taking it, be 
 prevented from attending to affairs of state. The queen, 
 accordingly, left Versailles and settled down at Trianon. 
 What happened then would seem well-nigh impossible 
 to believe if we did not have it on the grave and reluc- 
 tant testimony of Mercy. It is certain that, when the 
 queen went to Trianon, she chose for the attendants on her 
 sick-chamber not, as might be expected, four court ladies, 
 but four gentlemen, and these four gentlemen perhaps 
 the very last that, given such astonishing conditions at 
 all, the queen should have chosen. These four strange 
 attendants were the Duke de Coigny, the Duke de Guines, 
 Count Esterhazy, and Baron de Besenval. 
 
 The Duke de Coigny was a soldier, forty years of age, 
 neither strikingly good-looking nor conspicuously witty, 
 popular with most persons on account of his good man- 
 ners and his good-nature ; disliked by Mercy on account 
 of the undue influence he seemed to exercise over the 
 queen ; detested by Madame de Polignac for the same 
 reason, and for the efforts he made to overthrow her in- 
 fluence. 
 
 The Duke de Guines owed his duchy to the queen, 
 who manifested for him the most violent partisanship. 
 He chiefly deserves recollection of an ignoble kind as 
 having been the principal cause of Turgot's overthrow. 
 He had been ambassador in London, where he had earned
 
 148 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. X. 
 
 the epithet of "magnificent." He had a dubious dis- 
 tinction for coarse conversation, accompanied by a per- 
 fect gravity of countenance. He was fat with a rapidly 
 increasing corpulence, and struggled against this by wear- 
 ing garments so tight that he had to get on a chair and 
 drop into them while they were held out to him by his 
 servant. This, however, was only on days when he had 
 decided to martyrize himself by standing all day ; on 
 days when he condescended to sit down he wore attire 
 of sufficiently loose construction to permit of the process. 
 He was fond of playing on the flute, and had fluted his 
 way into the favor of Frederick the Great and now of 
 Marie Antoinette. 
 
 Valentin Esterhazy was a young Hungarian gentleman 
 and soldier high in the favor of the queen, to Maria 
 Theresa's annoyance and regret. He seems to have 
 been a comparatively harmless, commonplace, well-mean- 
 ing, feather-headed young man, but the queen delighted 
 to honor him, to correspond with him, to pay his debts. 
 His was perhaps the least amazing, where all were amaz- 
 ing, of the four presences. Undoubtedly the most amaz- 
 ing, where all were amazing, was the Baron de Besenval. 
 Swiss and soldier of nearly sixty years of age, white- 
 haired, courtly, with a bitter wit, cynical, cheaply senti- 
 mental, gallant with a kind of full-flavored barrack-room 
 gallantry, a writer of light tales, a singer of ranz des 
 vaches, he had gained a great influence over the queen, 
 and was said to employ it in the perversion of her mind. 
 Mercy found him pushing, foolish, flippant. In 1775, 
 presuming on his friendship for Marie Antoinette, he 
 went so far as to make her a violent declaration of love, 
 which cost him for some time her favor and intimacy. 
 That she, however, still regarded him as her very close 
 friend, she showed now by choosing him for one of the 
 four astounding guardians of her sick-chamber.
 
 1722-79. BESENVAL. 149 
 
 Pierre Victor, Baron of Besenval, is one of the most 
 carious figures of the age. His race sprang from Swiss 
 Savoy; his name was sometimes spelled Beuzenwald 
 and sometimes Besenwald; and we know on the author- 
 rity of an inscription written in a copy of his memoirs 
 belonging to M. Octave Uzanne that his name was right- 
 ly pronounced Bessval. " A la cour et dans 1'ancien 
 monde, nous prononcions Bessval." His mother was a 
 Polish Countess Belinska, of kin with the Leszczynski 
 house; his father was the diplomatist to whom, and not 
 to Goertz or Alberoni, the honor of the idea which pleased 
 Charles XII. of dethroning the King of England was 
 due. Our De Besenval began early in the career of arms; 
 distinguished himself for his gallantry as a soldier, dis- 
 tinguished himself for his gallantry as a lover. Born 
 in 1722, he was campaigning with the Swiss Guards 
 when he was thirteen years old, and he flashes later on 
 through the Seven Years' War, brilliant, foolhardy, a 
 figure as captivating as one of Duraas's musketeers. In 
 the piping times of peace he ruffled it with the wild 
 spirits who surrounded the Duke of Orleans. He ruffled 
 it most especially with 'that young German Count de 
 Frise, the fine flower of the gallantry of the age, whose 
 famous letter to his friend, half prose and half verse 
 like the old chantefable of Aucassin and Nicolete, is one 
 of the daintiest productions of that age of literary dainti- 
 ness. The nephew of the Marshal de Saxe died young, 
 De Besenval lived on, growing more popular, more witty, 
 more audacious as time whitened his locks. Fair, insolent, 
 and lovable, the Prince de Ligne calls him in his de- 
 lightful memoirs, which contain no more delightful pages 
 than those which paint the portrait of Besenval. De 
 Ligne pictures him the hero of a kind of eternal summer, 
 shining at sixty years of age like a young man on the
 
 150 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. X. 
 
 threshold of his career, conspicuous alike in the brilliant 
 circle of the queen's adorers and among the intrepid 
 hunters whose society pleased the king. He liked to be 
 mixed up in many things; he gained certain courtly 
 privileges by winning certain patents of nobility "of 
 which he had no need, having so much nobility in his 
 soul," and, as for the hunting, surely " a grizzled Swiss 
 lieutenant-general who was present at the death of the 
 Duke of Berwick might very well dispense with being 
 present at the death of the stag forty years later." But 
 that was the character of the man well-preserved, eu- 
 peptic, enjoying himself much and in many ways, car- 
 rying into courtly places something of the coarse salt 
 humors of the barrack-room and the camp. A graceful 
 amateur in the arts of painting and the arts of letters, a 
 lover of'graceful gardens, of graceful women, above all 
 of one most graceful woman, he stands out in vigorous 
 relief from the rest of the courtly rout. He could be 
 faithful to his friends, he had early devoted himself to 
 De Choiseul, and he followed De Choiseul in his disgrace 
 to Chanteloup; he had in him the makings of an excel- 
 lent administrative soldier, as the reforms he effected 
 in his Swiss forces show ; that he could write with a 
 dexterous grace his memoirs and the little pieces that 
 he wrote at Drevenich. during the campaign of 1757 
 prove. He was a man of too many tastes to do anything 
 really great, but he succeeded at least in being remark- 
 able. 
 
 There is nothing in the whole history of the Old Order 
 more, strange than this story of the royal illness. The 
 young queen acted like the girl in the Poitau folk-song, 
 who audaciously rejoices in the fact that she has her 
 three lovers to wait upon her: one to brush her clothes, 
 and one to dress her hair, and one to make her bed. She
 
 1749-79. LA POLIGNAC. 151 
 
 chose to be attended in her bedchamber by four gentle- 
 men, all alike renowned chiefly for their profligacy, all 
 alike regarded by public scandal as the lovers of Marie 
 Antoinette, all alike able to boast of very special proofs 
 of her favor. Guines could say that for him she had 
 overthrown Turgot ; Esterhazy that she had paid his 
 debts and written him innumerable letters ; Coigny that 
 he owed her many honors ; Besenval that he had ad- 
 dressed her in the words of love and still retained her 
 friendship. What can we think of the queen who was 
 nursed by these four libertines and dandies ; still more, 
 what can we think of the king who knew of this and yet 
 permitted it? Fantastic gallantry never aped more 
 madly since the world began. The four courtiers actu- 
 ally proposed to pass all the night and every night in 
 Marie Antoinette's bedroom. This outrage* at least 
 Mercy managed to prevent. With infinite difficulty he 
 succeeded in arranging that the gentlemen should leave 
 the queen's bedside at eleven at night and return again 
 at seven in the morning. 
 
 If the queen's name suffered through her men friends, 
 it suffered also through the women she was devoted to. 
 Her friendship for Madame de Lamballe might have 
 passed ; but there was another and even more famous 
 friend of Marie Antoinette, the mention of whose name 
 even now has the power of goading the opponents of 
 the queen to fury. Gabrielle-Yolande-Claude-Martine 
 de Polastron, born in 1749 the same year as the Prin- 
 cess de Lamballe married in 1767 the Count Jules 
 de Polignac. She was not wealthy, neither was her 
 husband; she lived generally away from the court, until 
 she chanced to win the affections of Marie Antoinette 
 and to become one *f the brightest of the fixed stars 
 in the Versailles firmament. The name of Madame
 
 152 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. Cn. X. 
 
 de Polignac is a name to conjure up hatred with. The 
 animosity which assails the queen deepens in acridity 
 when it is addressed to her dearest friend. So intem- 
 perate is some of the language that has been used about 
 her that it would almost seem as if in the eyes of certain 
 writers Madame de Polignac, and Madame de Polignac 
 alone, was responsible for all the evils of the Old Order 
 and all the sorrows of the Revolution. On the other 
 hand, certain other writers have made the inevitable 
 attempt to rehabilitate her character, and, stealing the 
 pigments of the courtly limners of the queen, have paint- 
 ed us a Duchess de Polignac of the most angelic type, 
 modest, retiring, unambitious a sort of eighteenth-cen- 
 tury Una. We may very readily decline to accept either 
 picture. The Duchess de Polignac, as she afterwards 
 became, was a rarely beautiful woman, a rarely charming 
 woman. We can judge in some degree of her beauty 
 still, from her portraits; her charm we must take on 
 trust from the unanimous enthusiasms of aLevis, a Segur, 
 a Tilly, a Besenval, a De la Marck, a Madame Campan, 
 who all agree in their tributes to the singular grace of 
 her character and bearing. 
 
 Her beauty and her charm completely conquered 
 Marie Antoinette. Her royal friendship for the Princess 
 de Lamballe waned and paled before the hot enthusiasm 
 of her regard for the beautiful wife of Jules de Polignac. 
 Madame de Polignac became one of the most important 
 figures at the court. Whether she was ambitious her- 
 self or not, she naturally became the knot of a little 
 group of ambitious people who hoped to play upon the 
 stops of Madame de Polignac's popularity, to govern 
 the queen through the favorite and the king through 
 the queen. Undoubtedly the influence of Madame de 
 Polignac was not a fortunate influence upon the queen.
 
 1775-79. THE POLIG.VAC PARTY. 153 
 
 However innocent Madame de Polignac may have been 
 of any deliberate schemes, she became the centre of a 
 set of schemers ; she belonged by tradition, by interest, 
 by affection, to that worst kind of court party which sees 
 the salvation of a nation only in the comfort of the court, 
 and considers those institutions only possible which mean 
 the maintenance of that court in all possible luxury and 
 all possible authority. The gang who thronged the Poli- 
 gnac salon, who clung around the Polignac skirts, and 
 who hoped to guide the course of the queen's action 
 through the Polignac fingers, were not a gang who were 
 likely to be good advisers for a young and feather-headed 
 queen. A Duke de Guines, who was to help to overthrow 
 Turgot; a Duke de Coigny, who was to come nigh to strik- 
 ing his king ; a Prince de Ligne, writer of incomparable 
 memoirs, but saturated with the ideas of the Old Order ; 
 a Baron de Besenval ; a Count Valentin Esterhazy ; a 
 Count d'Adhemar ; a light Madame de Chalons ; a 
 plain, pleasing, ambitious Diane de Polignac, sister of 
 Jules such were the members of the Polignac cenacle ; 
 such were the advisers, the influencers of the queen. 
 
 But in condemning the fatal frivolities of Marie An- 
 toinette's early days let us not be blind to the many 
 excuses that can be made for her. She was young, she 
 was beautiful ; she belonged to an age which believed 
 in the divine right of kings and kindred superstitions ; 
 she was flung at an age that had scarcely passed out 
 of childhood into the corruptest court in Europe ; she 
 was surrounded by dangerous enemies and more dan- 
 gerous friends ; she was in daily contact with men 
 whose one idea was to become the favored lover of the 
 queen in the most practical sense, and who were sure 
 to be converted into foes by any rebuff ; worst of all, 
 she was married to Louis XVI. Even under ordinary
 
 j54 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. X. 
 
 conditions Louis XVI. would have been a trying, un- 
 attractive husband for a woman like Marie Antoinette. 
 The monarch who would come to greet his beautiful 
 and dainty consort with hands all grimy from his stithy 
 welt deserved to be called "My god Vulcan" by the 
 Venus of Versailles. But there were graver reasons 
 why Louis XVI. was an unfortunate husband for Marie 
 Antoinette. It seems perfectly certain that Louis XVI., 
 for certain physical reasons, was not the man to make 
 a good husband of ; it seems perfectly certain that for 
 a very long time after the formal marriage Louis XVI. 
 and Marie Antoinette were husband and wife only in 
 name. The subject is a delicate one ; it is treated of 
 again and again most indelicately in the gossip, the 
 lampoons, the verses of the day ; it suggests itself often 
 in the early letters of Marie Antoinette to her mother. 
 An operation upon the king's person was essential ; it 
 was long postponed ; it was at last performed and 
 proved successful. The Queen of France became a 
 mother. We need pay no heed to the slanders of Or- 
 leans, who, lusting for the crown himself, declared that 
 "the son of Coigny shall never be my king." We 
 need pay no heed to the sneers of the Count of Prov- 
 ence. There is not the slightest reason to assume for 
 a moment that the children of Marie Antoinette were not 
 the children of Louis XVI. as well. But in nudging 
 the character of Marie Antoinette, in deploring the 
 frivolity, the flightiness which characterized so much 
 of her early court life, we must bear in mind the cu- 
 rious physical conditions which accompanied her mar- 
 ried life, and, remembering how much the happiness of 
 all men and all women depends upon such physical con- 
 ditions, we must be prepared to make much allowance 
 for the beautiful, wayward, unhappy Queen of France.
 
 1770-79. RUMOR'S TONGUES. 155 
 
 A great number of names have been from time to 
 time brought forward in good faith and in bad faith as 
 the names of Marie Antoinette's lovers. That she had 
 many lovers in the sense that many men were in love 
 with her, it would be impossible, as it would be absurd, 
 to deny. A young and beautiful woman, a young and 
 beautiful queen, was sure to have any number of adorers. 
 But it is alleged again and again that many of these 
 adorers were lovers in the completest sense of the term. 
 It is impossible to say for certain that Marie Antoinette 
 was as pure as admirers of the type of Burke would 
 fain have her to be. But really the evidence against 
 her is of the weakest kind. Perhaps the gravest is to 
 be found in the memoirs of Lauzun, and we shall see 
 that there is, after all, but little gravity in them. 
 
 Lauzun was a brilliant blackguard, an incarnation of 
 all the graceful and disgraceful vices of his age. He 
 is the ornament and rose of a foul state, the typical 
 courtier and soldier of a decadent epoch. Educated, 
 as he says, well-nigh upon the lap of Madame de Pom- 
 padour, he soon approved himself a worthy pupil of her 
 philosophy. He lived the life of his time and of his 
 class to the extreme, reeled like a vulgar Faustus from 
 desire to satiety, and from satiety to desire. Life to 
 him was one long round of women, cards, horse-racing, 
 tempered only by occasional facile diplomacy and by 
 a perfect Avillingness to play a soldier's part whenever 
 called upon. His intrigues have made him famous or 
 infamous in an age of intrigue ; his name has become 
 a proverb among the profligate ; he rivals, but he does 
 not surpass, Richelieu. There could hardly be a more 
 perfect proof of the inevitable Revolution than the life 
 of such a man, and yet the life is interesting and emi- 
 nently picturesque. In the evil panorama of his me-
 
 156 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. X. 
 
 raoirs there is one pretty picture to be gleaned when 
 the lad Lauzun, as yet a child, and standing eagerly upon 
 the threshold of experience, falls in love with the girl act- 
 ress of the theatre. We are reminded of the Daphnis 
 and Chloe of Longus, in their stolen meeting, with its in- 
 nocent, ignorant caresses, a meeting suddenly interrupted 
 by the apparition of a large spider, which neither of them 
 was courageous enough to kill, and which frightened 
 the babyish lovers away, as the spider in our nursery 
 legend frightened away the memorable Miss Muffet. 
 
 In estimating the character of Marie Antoinette, some 
 importance has been attached by her enemies to the 
 statements of Lauzun. In Lauzun's memoirs he dis- 
 tinctly states that the queen was in love with him, that 
 she practically flung herself at his head, that it was her 
 delight to display her passion for him in the most pro- 
 nounced manner before the whole court, and that if her 
 attachment for him was not actually guilty, it was only 
 because of his superior prudence and reserve. I do not 
 think it is in the least necessary to question the gen- 
 uineness of the memoirs of Lauzun. Talleyrand did 
 indeed vehemently deny, in 1818, their genuineness. 
 But the word of Talleyrand in such a matter need not 
 count for much. A man of Talleyrand's diplomatic 
 mind and unscrupulous spirit would very well be will- 
 ing to clear the memory of his friend by denying the 
 authenticity of his memoirs. To my mind, they are 
 perfectly genuine ; to my mind, they prove nothing 
 whatever against the queen. On Lauzun's own show- 
 ing the queen was never his mistress. He affirms, in- 
 deed, that she was tortured by a guilty passion for him; 
 but Lauzun was one of those men who are vexed by a 
 semi-feminine belief in their own unfailing powers of 
 attraction. The fine flower of a corrupt court and a
 
 1749-94. LAUZUX AND HIS MEMOIRS. 157 
 
 corrupt age, he had made so many conquests, enjoyed 
 so many intrigues, played at love with so many pretty 
 women of all kinds, actresses and aristocrats, that he 
 had come to believe himself irresistible. The victim 
 of a semi-sentimentalized erotomania, he saw every- 
 where the victims of his charms, and it is not sur- 
 prising that he imagined the queen herself to be his 
 slave. That he was a despicable rascal, a disgrace to 
 the name of gentleman, an unchivalrous rogue, his me- 
 moirs make sufficiently clear. With his morality, with 
 the morality of the women who loved him or lusted 
 after him, we have nothing to do. It is the baseness 
 of heart which led him to set his love-secrets down on 
 paper, to betray with incredible meanness the long suc- 
 cession of his mistresses, which makes him loathsome 
 in all eyes. It is, indeed, a striking tribute to the vir- 
 tue of Marie Antoinette that this slanderous cur did 
 not dare to describe her as his mistress. It is hard to 
 know what held his unscrupulous hand, and we can 
 only conceive that some glimmering tradition of truth- 
 fulness, while allowing him to warp a few signs of 
 royal favor into the declarations of a guilty passion, 
 did not permit him directly to state in defiance of the 
 facts that he had been, actually and physically, the 
 queen's lover. The very interview which he describes 
 with the queen, in which he pictures Marie Antoinette 
 as falling into his arms and well-nigh soliciting his em- 
 braces, is to be very differently understood when in- 
 terpreted by the light of Madame Campan's statements. 
 She mentions the interview, declares that the door of the 
 queen's room was opened, that Marie Antoinette indig- 
 nantly ordered Lauzun to leave her, that Lauzun depart- 
 ed in silence, and that the queen, turning to Madame Cam- 
 pan, said, " That man shall never come near me again,"
 
 158 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. X. 
 
 Lauzun's later actions are much more characteristic 
 of the impertinent lover, repulsed and revengeful, than 
 of the triumphant favorite of the queen. He became 
 one of her bitterest enemies, and went his unworthy 
 wav to his doom. It is fortunate for history that this 
 ungentle gentleman was not as unprincipled a liar as 
 he was a profligate. While we shudder over the treach- 
 ery with which be revenged his mortified vanity by 
 writing down his calumny of. the queen, we cannot but 
 rejoice that he did no more. It would have been so 
 easy for him just then to lie harder, to pull a longer 
 bow. As it is, his memoirs are not much of a weapon 
 against the character of Marie Antoinette. There is, 
 of course, nothing inherently impossible in the sugges- 
 tion that Marie Antoinette may have been attracted by 
 such a handsome court butterfly as Lauzun. We must 
 remember the conditions of the courtly life ; we must 
 remember the profound corruption of manners, of mo- 
 rality, of literature, of the time ; we must remember 
 the extraordinary blending of scepticism and sentimen- 
 tality which characterized the refined depravity of the 
 century, in estimating the character of the queen and 
 of any other woman of that age. The court of France 
 was not an atmosphere in which virtue flourished. The 
 conditions of Marie Antoinette's life were exception- 
 ally unfavorable to virtue. Married in her early youth 
 to a passionless man of sluggish blood, denied the wifely 
 rights for long enough, troubled in body and soul by 
 such physical indifference, surrounded by homage, com- 
 pliment, adoration ; what an ordeal for such a woman 
 in such an age ! 
 
 Unhappily Louis XVI. was not the kind of monarch 
 to mellow with time ; he was not, in the words of Du- 
 roas's Planchet, a "bonne pate d'homme/' and time
 
 1774-89. A COMIC KING. 159 
 
 only intensified his defects. If he was weak and fool- 
 ish when he came to the throne, he was weak and fool- 
 ish still after many years of reign. Physically he so- 
 lidified, mentally he stultified into a monarch more 
 and more ridiculous, more and more unsuited to the 
 critical conditions of the time. It is a little ironical 
 that his very virtues were in some respects his greatest 
 failings. We may wonder when we find a Count de 
 Tilly declaring that "a king steeped in vices and im- 
 moralities might possibly have saved us, but we were 
 fated to perish through a king whose weakness neutral- 
 ized all his virtues." Yet it is just possible that a king 
 like Henri Quatre, if such a king could have sprung 
 from the weakened Bourbon blood, a king like Louis 
 Quatorze, might have for the time being saved "us" 
 saved, that is, the nobility that did not in the least de- 
 serve saving. But Louis XVI. was not the man to 
 save anything except his pocket money. His bour- 
 geois virtues looked ridiculous to a court that lusted 
 after the recollections of the late reign and the tradi- 
 tions of the Regency, and outside the circle of the court 
 they either were not believed in or failed to make the 
 least impression. The poor man who might have been 
 happy enough as a small shopkeeper, or better still as a 
 small gamekeeper, was ludicrously out of place in his 
 unwelcome trade of king. To the world at large, Louis 
 XVI. in 1789 was a feeble, vacillating, comic individ- 
 ual, at once shy and brutal, with a weakness for mean 
 economies, and a weakness for too much wine the de- 
 graded and unlovely Gambrinus of a comic opera. A 
 king may be many things and hold his crown fast ; but 
 there is one thing he must never be, and that is, comic. 
 Good-bye to the king who is the laughing-stock of his 
 people. It is all very well to be the King Yvetot of a
 
 160 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. X. 
 
 broad ballad ; but the nightcap of Beranger's monarch 
 contrasts too oddly with the imperial purple of the 
 throne. It is by no means clear that the accusations 
 made against Louis of an overfondness for the flagon 
 were based on very substantial facts. He is defended 
 against the accusation, not too skilfully, by the Count 
 d'Hezecques. But it was enough for him to be re- 
 garded by the people at large as the " drunkard king," 
 and, were he as abstemious as Pythagoras, it would be 
 of no avail. Caricaturing Paris stuck a bottle into the 
 pocket of the monarch it derided ; Louis had the same 
 unhappy sort of reputation which in after-days fell 
 upon that Prussian king who was so unjustly baptized 
 as " King Clicquot." If Louis did drink, we may be 
 sure it was with no such poetic pleasure in red wine as 
 that which animates the Persian of Hafiz, the Greek of 
 the pseudo-Anacreon, or the Vaux de Vire of Olivier 
 Basselin. His drinking must have been a stolid sort of 
 business. The picture we have of him coming back 
 from the chase at Rambouillet, half asleep, heavy, daz- 
 zled by the lights, helped up-stairs by obsequious, sneer- 
 ing valets, who assume their weary king to be dead 
 drunk, is not a kingly picture. Louis always had a 
 kind of gross interest in his food, which we shall find 
 yet coming out, comically and yet pathetically crude, at 
 a time when other thoughts than the thoughts of wine 
 and chicken would better have become him. 
 
 If he was derided by the public, Louis was little 
 loved in the circles of the court. He was shy, and his 
 shyness made him hate new faces ; he was rough and 
 rude, and his rudeness made him incessant enemies, 
 whom he could ill afford to have as enemies. His only 
 serious passion and preoccupation was the chase, and 
 his famous diary is one of the most dismal monuments
 
 1774-89. AN UNKINGLY KING. 161 
 
 of human folly that fantastic chance has preserved to 
 us. His queer habit of putting down the word "rien," 
 "nothing," on every day when he did not hunt some- 
 thing has caused some of the most ironic juxtaposi- 
 tions in this journal. As, for example, where we find 
 such entries as these : " To-day nothing ; remonstrances 
 of the Parliament." "Nothing ; death of M. de Mau- 
 repas." "Nothing; retirement of M. Necker." Other 
 entries yet more significant will be made in that diary 
 before the~ poor king is done with it. He was only 
 happy when he was hunting, killing all manner of game, 
 from the wild boar and the stag to the simple swallow ; 
 he was unhappy when a cold in his head or some ab- 
 surd matter in connection with the government of the 
 country interfered with his pastime. It was a great priv- 
 ilege to be permitted to join in the royal hunting-par- 
 ties, and yet by no means always a pleasant privilege- 
 Tremendous proofs of nobility going back to the fif- 
 teenth century had to be furnished, and when they 
 were furnished the bearer of some illustrious or ancient 
 name often found the glory of- sharing in the royal 
 pleasure sorely discounted by the ignominy of having 
 to endure the running fire of the somewhat brutal royal 
 pleasantries at the expense of the bearer of an unfamil- 
 iar face. 
 
 The ordinary enjoyments of the court were detest- 
 able to Louis. He hated late hours ; he hated come- 
 dies and parties ; he hated all play save loto and whist 
 for small stakes ; he hated, indeed, everything courtly 
 except the solemnities of courtly ceremonial which al- 
 lowed him to mask his native timidity under the frigid 
 mask of etiquette. His native timidity needed some 
 such mask. The king's bearing was not kingly ; the 
 royal face was not royal. From the loyal portraits of 
 I. 11
 
 162 
 
 THE FKENCH REVOLUTION. CH. X. 
 
 the time that flatter the lineaments of a failing race, 
 from the savage caricatures that accentuate malignly 
 all its defects, from servility and from satire alike, we 
 can gather a fairly clear impression of that weak, com- 
 monplace face, with its high, slanting forehead, its full 
 nose, its protruding lips, weak chin, swollen, flabby jowl 
 and thick neck. It was a foolish face, with its whimsi- 
 cal, vacant expression of rustic good-humor spreading 
 over its heavy cheeks and prominent lack-lustre eyes, 
 its heavy, drooping eyelids and thick ej^ebrows. Ma- 
 dame Campan, who would no doubt willingly flatter, 
 tries to infuse a tinge of melancholy into the vapid 
 beatitude of the face, but has to admit, what every one 
 else from De Besenval to D'Allonville admits, that Louis 
 lacked all nobility of carriage. The less courtly criti- 
 cism of Barere depicts the unwholesomely pale face, the 
 expressionless bluish eyes, the loud laugh that had some- 
 thing imbecile in its mirth, the ignoble massiveness of 
 the bulk, the hopeless awkwardness of the bearing. 
 That he was slovenly to a degree, even Campan admits, 
 and her waiting-maid mind despairs over his ill-adjusted 
 clothes and the persistent untidiness of his hair. There 
 never was a king less calculated to dominate a brilliant, 
 audacious, and corrupt court, to impress a sceptical and 
 critical people, and to captivate a beautiful and ambi- 
 tious wife. Destiny did the house of Capet the worst 
 turn in the world when it adorned its line with a prince 
 endowed with many virtues, and no capacity for using 
 those virtues for the benefit of his people, his party, or 
 himself. 
 
 But if the king was bad from the kingly standpoint, 
 perhaps his two royal brothers of Provence and Artois 
 were worse. If Louis XVI. was a stupid king, Prov- 
 ence and Artois would not have done any better in his
 
 1774-89. BROTHER OF PROVENCE. 163 
 
 place ; the time was yet to come when they did for a 
 season sit on the royal throne, each in his turn, and not 
 distinguish themselves. That is far ahead. When Ma- 
 rie Antoinette first saw them they were still very young, 
 with the graces and the possibilities of youth. In 1789 
 they had given their measure, and a very bad measure 
 too. But they were very different from the king, and 
 very different from each other. It was said of them that 
 they only resembled each other in one thing their mar- 
 riages. They had married two sisters, princesses of 
 the house of Piedmont princesses whom nobody much 
 liked, and who were conspicuous for no great merits or 
 defects. In all other things Provence and Artois were 
 wide as the poles asunder. Provence was plethoric, 
 pompous, priggish, a huge eater and drinker, with un- 
 wieldy body swollen by overfeeding and lack of exer- 
 cise. On his ungainly existence an affectation of liter- 
 ature and learning sat most ungracefully. It pleased 
 him to pose as a man of taste, to linger long hours in 
 his library, to write little mean paragraphs for the press, 
 and little mean pamphlets, to ape a philosophic calm. 
 When the expected birth of a dauphin dispelled his im- 
 mediate and fondly cherished hopes for a swift succes- 
 sion hopes that were flattered and fostered by a little 
 army of adulators he wrote about his disappointment 
 with a pedantic assumption of serenity which seems 
 sufficiently ridiculous to us, and seemed, let us hope, 
 sufficiently ridiculous to the King of Sweden, to whom 
 it was addressed. He liked to get about him men of 
 letters, wits, and scholars, to quote verses with an as- 
 sumption of intelligence, and to parade fragments of 
 Latin. In appearance he was like the king, his brother, 
 but with a difference. The forehead was lower, the 
 nose smaller, the chin less feeble, the throat less full,
 
 164 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. X. 
 
 the general expression less benign. There was some- 
 thing irritable, something sourly aggressive, something 
 rat-like about his countenance which was curiously dis- 
 agreeable. 
 
 Artois was strikingly unlike his royal brother or his 
 brother Provence in character. He seems to have start- 
 ed in life with the determination to be, like Young Mar- 
 low, an Agreeable Rattle, and to have succeeded in mak- 
 ing himself a Disagreeable Rattle. In his youth he 
 strove to play that kind of page part which was not 
 then typified and immortalized by Beaumarchais's Cher- 
 ubin, and he continued to play the same part long after 
 it had ceased in the least degree to become him. He was 
 as frivolous and empty-headed as a man well could be, 
 and seemed to take a kind of pitiable pride in his frivol- 
 ity and his empty head. He loved to gamble, to revel in 
 a kind of skittish, skipping, grotesquely boyish kind of 
 way, which had in it nothing so dignified as the dog- 
 gedness of the vices of Orleans, nor so unconscious and 
 innate as the vices of Lauzun. Where his brother 
 Provence played at pedant, he played at profligate ; the 
 queen liked him as much as she disliked Provence ; he 
 did his best gravely to compromise the queen by the 
 intolerable license of his manners and speech to her 
 manners and speech which aroused time and again the 
 indignation and the protests of Mercy. He was better- 
 looking than Provence, brisker in expression, of a fairer 
 favor, alerter in his bearing, a sufficiently dashing, sol- 
 dierly prince. He it is of whom Mercier tells the tale 
 of his skin-tight breeches into which he had to be 
 dropped by four tall lackeys the most interesting tale 
 about him. 
 
 Such were the prominent persons in the great court 
 drama, such the meddlers and muddlers who were finally
 
 1774-89. NEGLECTED OPPORTUNITIES. 165 
 
 to laud France in full revolution and send the fine flower 
 of the French nobility skipping basely over the frontier. 
 The courtly party had their chance time and again ; sal- 
 vation lay in their way more than once, and they daffed 
 it lightly aside. Salvation was never nearer to them 
 than now, when a Minister of Marine was called to the 
 Controllership of the Finances, and what looked like a 
 fair field lay open to Turgot.
 
 166 TilE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XI. 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 TURGOT. 
 
 IP the god Thor, oblivious for the moment of his 
 hammer and his goats and the tests of Utgarda Loke, 
 could have looked down from his cloudy Scandinavian 
 heaven upon France in the middle of the eighteenth 
 century, he might have seen a sight in which he might 
 naturally be expected to take an interest. A youthful 
 abbe in his clerical cassock playing at battledore and 
 shuttlecock with an exceedingly pretty young lady whom 
 he called Minette such was the idyllic sight which 
 might be supposed to deserve the attention of the war- 
 god of the North. For that alert young abbe, with the 
 wise, boyish face, who seemed so devoted to the dainty 
 Minette, was actually the war-god's namesake, and his 
 ancestors, it would seem, claimed to be sprung from the 
 war-god's loins. The young abbe's name was Turgot, 
 and Turgot means Thor God, and it might have sur- 
 prised and perplexed the Thor God of the hammer to 
 know that the Thor God of the battledore was going to 
 accomplish things more amazing than any recorded of 
 his illustrious ancestor, and was to help to shake the 
 foundations of the established world. 
 
 The great Turgot was born in Paris on May 10, 1727. 
 He came of an excellent Normandy breed, rich in suc- 
 cessful names. Somewhere in the sixteenth century the 
 family branched into two, the Turgots of Tourailles and 
 the Turgots of Saint-Glair. Our Turgot came of the
 
 1727-81. TURGOT. 167 
 
 Saint-Glairs. It is curious to find that in the early sev- 
 enteenth century a Turgot of Tourailles knocked on the 
 head in a scuffle by an inn a certain Protestant soldier 
 of fortune named Montchretien. This Montchretien 
 had written some tragedies of no importance and a prose 
 work of very considerable importance, because it brought 
 for the first time a very famous term into literature. 
 Montchretien's book was called " Traite d'Econoinie Po- 
 litique." It is a curious example of the " supreme ironic 
 procession" part of existence that the inventor of the 
 term "political economy" should meet his death at the 
 hands of a namesake of one of the most famous teachers 
 of political economy who ever lived. 
 
 Our Turgot was the youngest son of Michel Etienne 
 Turgot, an excellent prevot des marchands in Paris and 
 builder of a dram as famous as that of Tarquinius Pris- 
 ons. Michel Etienne had one daughter, who married 
 the Duke de Saint- Aignan, and three sons, of whom the 
 eldest became a sufficiently eminent magistrate and the 
 second a sufficiently eminent soldier. The third son was 
 a curious blend of precocity and timidity. All his life 
 he was awkward, bashful, nervous ; all his life, too, he 
 preserved the extraordinary capacity for study, the ex- 
 traordinary power of work, which characterized his early 
 youth. He was educated at that College Louis-le-Grand 
 upon whose roll such strange names were yet to be in- 
 scribed ; while he was only sixteen years old he attended 
 the theological lectures at the Sorbonne, and, after ob- 
 taining special permission, on account of his youth, to 
 be examined, passed his examination with conspicuous 
 success. The young Abbe de Laulne he bore this name 
 from a paternal estate rose from success to success, 
 passed examination after examination brilliantly, was 
 elected a prior of Sorbonne, made some admirable Latin
 
 1(58 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. Cu. XI. 
 
 speeches in fulfilment of the duties of the office, and 
 wrote his first work on political economy in attack upon 
 Law's system. His friends were enthusiastic, pressed 
 him to enter the Church, predicted speedy bishoprics ; 
 but to their surprise and disappointment Turgot an- 
 nounced his intention of giving up the Church, and in 
 the December of 1750 he definitely left the Sorbonne, 
 and turned his thoughts to other things. 
 
 Even in that age of astonishing young men Turgot 
 was astonishing. He was only twenty-three years old 
 when he left the Sorbonne, but he was already an ac- 
 complished economist, a profound thinker, a theoretic 
 statesman. Leon Say says of him that while he was yet 
 at the Sorbonne he had already in his mind everything 
 which came out of it afterwards, and that the work of 
 the last thirty years of his life was merely the produc- 
 tion in broad daylight of the mental stores acquired in 
 the Sorbonne. From the moment of his leaving the 
 Sorbonne to the moment in which the controllei'-gener- 
 alship came into his hands, life was for Turgot a series 
 of repeated triumphs. His final fall was, could he but 
 have known it, but his greatest triumph. Deputy So- 
 licitor-General, Councillor in the Parliament, Maitre des 
 Requetes, Limoges Intendant, these are the stepping- 
 stones of his progress from 1752 to 1761. During all 
 that period he moved and shone in the most cultured 
 Parisian society. He was a friend of Madame Geoff rin, 
 of Mademoiselle de 1'Espinasse, of Madame de Graffigny, 
 of Condorcet, of Helvetius, of D'Alembert and the brill- 
 iant Encyclopaedic stars, of the excellent Morellet, of 
 Quesnay and Quesnay's devoted servant, old Mirabeau 
 the "friend of man," of Gournay. He was the corre- 
 spondent of Adam Smith, whom he met later at Ques- 
 nay's house ; he was the friend and correspondent of
 
 1W1-61. TURGOT AX ENCYCLOPEDIST 169 
 
 Voltaire though correspondence came near once to 
 severing the friendship. He was for a little while the 
 acquaintance of Madame du Deffand and of her great 
 friend the Duke de Choiseul, but the acquaintance soon 
 faded out of existence and merged on the part of Ma- 
 dame du Deffand and De Choiseul into active dislike. 
 He was the friend and something more than the friend 
 of the beautiful Mademoiselle de Ligneville, whom her 
 aunt Madame de Graftigny always called Minette. It 
 is one of the minor mysteries of history why Turgot did 
 not marry Minette. They seem to have been tenderly 
 attached ; excellent Morellet is in despair because the 
 attachment did not end in marriage. Some solve the 
 problem by suggesting, without decisively proving, that 
 Turgot was actually in holy orders at the time. Others 
 consider that he was too busy, too practical a man to 
 hamper his career with the cares of a wife and a possible 
 family. Others, again, suggest that Turgot, threatened 
 with hereditary gout and convinced that it was the des- 
 tiny of his race to be short-lived, was unwilling to link 
 a woman's fate with his. Whatever the reasons, the 
 certain fact remains that Turgot did not marry Minette 
 or any one else, that Minette married the wise Helvetius, 
 and that Turgot and Madame Helvetius remained f riend-s 
 all their lives. 
 
 la 1751 the first volume of the famous "Encyclopae- 
 dia " made its appearance. Turgot was soon drawn into 
 the magic circle of its contributors, and wrote five ar- 
 ticles for it, on Etymology, Existence, Expansibility, 
 Fairs and Markets, and Endowments. The article on 
 "Existence" made its mark upon thinkers then, has 
 made its mark upon thinkers since. But though Tur- 
 got's connection with the "Encyclopaedia" was brilliant, 
 it was not of long duration. An imbecile government
 
 1/70 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XI. 
 
 suppressed the "Encyclopaedia," and Turgot, as an offi- 
 cial servant of that government, did not think it be- 
 coming or compatible with his duties to leave his name 
 upon the Encyclopaedic list. It is to be regretted that 
 the fine genius of Turgot could not continue to be asso- 
 ciated to the end with the monumental work of the 
 "Encyclopaedia," more indeed for the sake of the "En- 
 cyclopaedia" than for the sake of Turgot. His own 
 written works are not voluminous, but they are abun- 
 dant, inasmuch as they set forth sufficiently the eco- 
 nomic doctrines of his life, that life which was in itself 
 the best and the most convincing of all his works. 
 
 On August 8, 1761, Turgot was appointed to the in- 
 tendance of Limoges, and for thirteen years, until 1774, 
 he devoted himself to his task and tempered his theo- 
 retic soul in the practical work of statesmanship. The 
 duties of an iutendant were many and varied, the power 
 of an intendant very considerable. At that time France 
 was divided into forty military divisions called Prov- 
 inces, under the command of a governor, and thirty-five 
 administrative circumscriptions called "generalites," un- 
 der the direction of an intendant. Like most of the 
 other administrative arrangements of the Old Order, 
 these divisions were very muddled and confusing. The 
 provinces and generalities were not uniform in extent 
 or identical in limit. They overlapped each other so 
 much that there were generally several intendants for 
 one governor and several governors for one intendant. 
 The functions of governor and intendant were entirely 
 independent. The intendants looked after the police, 
 the militia, and public charities ; they had the power 
 of deciding on litigious cases connected with taxes ; 
 they were maitres des requetes, and had the right to sit 
 with the other maitres des requetes when in Paris ; they
 
 1761-74. TtRGOTS REFORMS. 171 
 
 were in the first place financial agents. Turgot now 
 entered upon all these various and complex duties and 
 proceeded to amaze his peers. Never before, unhappily 
 for the Old Order, had such an intendant been known. 
 Unhappily, too, for most of the adherents of the Old 
 Order, they never wanted to see such an intendant 
 again. Still more unhappily for them, they did not get 
 the chance. 
 
 Turgot found himself in the midst of a network of 
 corrupt and degrading traditions, which he proceeded 
 to break through with the ease and the determination 
 of the strong man. He found the people suffering griev- 
 ously under the oppressions and exactions of the greater 
 and the lesser nobility, and he set to work with uncom- 
 promising courage to reform it altogether. Naturally 
 enough, he won the affection of the peasantry, not much 
 given as a rule to entertaining affectionate feelings tow- 
 ards their intendants. Naturally, too, he won the de- 
 testation of the astounded and indignant nobility and 
 gentry. That an intendant, one of a class that had 
 always thought with them and acted with them, should 
 take it upon himself to interfere with their privileges 
 and to write and talk preposterously about ameliorat- 
 ing the lot of the peasantry was an innovation of a kind 
 not to be endured. For thirteen years they had to en- 
 dure it, however, while Turgot toiled at improvement 
 of taxation, at making a survey of the province, and 
 strove with Angouleme crisis, with dearth of cereals, 
 with opposition to free circulation of corn, with an im- 
 possible Abbe Terray. The irritated and offended no- 
 bility held Turgot up to execration as a "man of sys- 
 tem." "The name of a man of system," Turgot himself 
 has written, " has become a kind of weapon on the lips 
 of all persons either prejudiced or interested in retain-
 
 172 TQE FRENCH REVoLtmoN. CH. XI. 
 
 ing certain abuses ; and it is levelled against all those 
 who propose changes in any order of ideas whatever." 
 
 Never did Turgot give greater proof of the extraor- 
 dinary vitality and varied powers of his mind than 
 during this period of his Limoges intendance. While 
 he was grappling so heroically with the difficulties in 
 the way of a reforming intendant, while he was trav- 
 elling all over his province in the wildest winter sea- 
 sons heedless of the gout and rheumatism that racked 
 him, while he was pouring out those letters and pam- 
 phlets which are so many precious state papers of po- 
 litical economy, he still found time to keep up a large 
 correspondence with many familiar friends Caillard, 
 Hume, Condorcet, and others and to practise some of 
 those graceful literary exercises which are usually the 
 decorous occupation of a learned leisure. He seemed 
 certainly to justify the saying that the great things are 
 only done by those who have no time to do them in. 
 
 Among Turgot's literary enterprises about this time 
 was an ambitious attempt to revive the laws which gov- 
 ern the prosody of the ancient Greeks and Romans for 
 the benefit of French versification. The dream of hap- 
 pily adapting the hexameter to the tongues of modern 
 Europe has been dreamed by more than one scholar in 
 every scholastic generation. Turgot followed the dream 
 so far as to render into French hexameters the fourth 
 book of Virgil's " ^Eneid." The result is not exhilarat- 
 ing to students of French verse. If the exquisitely melo- 
 dious genius of Ronsard and his brilliant stars suffered 
 slightly from a too enthusiastic classicism, such metri- 
 cal talents as Turgot possessed suffered heavily in the 
 majestic Olympian measure. But, unluckily, Turgot 
 was as proud of his verses as Richelieu had been of his 
 tragedy, as most men of genius are of some enterprise
 
 1761-74. VOLTAIRE'S CRITICISM. 173 
 
 curiously out of the scope of their genius. He ad- 
 mired his hexameters immensely, but he was not con- 
 tent with his own admiration. He wanted the admira- 
 tion of Voltaire himself, the aged autocrat of belles- 
 lettres, and to win that admiration unbiassed he caused 
 Caillard to send them to Voltaire as the production of 
 an unknown Abbe de Laage. Alas for Turgot's ambi- 
 tion ! Voltaire at first gave no opinion ; at last, and 
 upon pressure, he wrote a pathetic little letter, in which 
 he pleaded old age and waning sight as his excuse for 
 delay in expressing his satisfaction at what he consid- 
 ered to be a very excellent translation in prose. That 
 " in prose " was a bitter sting to Turgot's vanity. Vol- 
 taire was doubtless innocent of the slightest sarcasm, 
 but the very innocence of the criticism only made the 
 matter worse, and Turgot said some very bitter things 
 about Voltaire's lack of reasoning faculty. 
 
 Nobody now, we should imagine, pastures his classic 
 instincts upon Turgot's travesty, more gravely intended 
 than Scarron's, of the "^Eneid." But one effort of his has 
 made its mark upon what Turgot's English contempora- 
 ries would have called polite literature, the line he wrote 
 under a portrait of Benjamin Franklin: 
 
 "Eripuit caelo fulmen, sceptrumque tyrannis " 
 
 a line which might well have prophetically referred to 
 other sceptres and other tyrants than those Turgot had 
 in his mind. Happily, however, it is not upon his neat- 
 ly turned Latin epigrams any more than upon his labo- 
 rious Gneco-Gallic hexameters that Turgot's claim to 
 the admiration of the world depends. The world will 
 remember the "Lettres sur la Liberte du Commerce des 
 Grains," and the " Reflexions sur la Formation et la Dis- 
 tribution des Richesses," when it has forgotten that the
 
 !74 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XI. 
 
 great economist was also expert in Latinity and ambi- 
 tious of a translator's fame. 
 
 When Turgot had been thirteen years intendant at 
 Limoges he had made his mark pretty plainly upon such 
 public opinion as then existed ; he was recognized by a 
 large party in France as the champion of reform : the 
 one thing needful for the due carrying out of his plans 
 was that he should become a cabinet minister. The 
 same fair fortune that had served him hitherto at every 
 step of his career stood him in good stead now. He be- 
 came a cabinet minister. 
 
 A new order of things had come about. Louis XV., 
 Louis the Well-beloved, had been hurried to his dishon- 
 ored grave. Louis XVI. was King of France, and the 
 grim question, "How would Berry pull through with 
 it?" was about to be answered in all earnest. Berry 
 had begun, as we have seen, by making De Maurepas 
 his prime-minister, by sending D'Aiguillon to the right- 
 about, and by making it pretty plain to the two other 
 sides of that ingenious political triangle, Maupeou and 
 Terray, that they were not likely to adorn their own 
 offices much longer. Who was to take Terray's place ? 
 Who was to be the new Controller-General ? The Abbe 
 de Very, Turgot's intimate friend and the intimate 
 friend of Maurepas, said, emphatically, Turgot. The 
 enthusiastic and intelligent Duchess D'Enville, of the 
 antique La Rochefoucauld line, with which Maurepas 
 was so proud to be linked, said, emphatically, Turgot. 
 The Countess de Maurepas also said, Turgot. Under 
 these conditions Maurepas was very willing ; and thus 
 it came to pass that Turgot was brought into the cabi- 
 net, appointed first of all to the Navy, and then one 
 month later, in August, 1774, to the coveted Controller- 
 Generalship.
 
 1774. TURGOT CONTROLLER-GENERAL. 175 
 
 It seemed at first that Turgot would have to encoun- 
 ter no very great difficulties in his new office. It seemed 
 so at least to the indifferent lookers-on, who do not al- 
 ways see most of the, game. Turgot himself appreci- 
 ated more keenly the dangers in his way. The young, 
 beautiful, imperious queen, with her love for entertain- 
 ment, for all that makes life amusing, and that costs a 
 great deal of money, was not likely to be much of an 
 aid to a reforming minister bent specially on inculcating 
 economy upon an exceptionally weak king. Marie An- 
 toinette did indeed write to her mother that Turgot en- 
 joyed "the reputation of being a very honest man," 
 using, in so doing, almost exactly the words employed 
 by Mercy in his letter to Maria Theresa upon Turgot. 
 But when Marie Antoinette wrote those words she had 
 not yet found the " very honest man " running counter 
 to any of her wishes. As for the king, be appeared to 
 be as pleased with his new controller-general as if he 
 were a new and ingenious lock. The meeting between 
 them at Compiegne, when Turgot came to thank him 
 for the appointment, seems to have been most royal, 
 most effective. Turgot was all gratitude, but he was 
 also all determination ; Louis was every inch a king of 
 the nobly benevolent type. With an excess of gener- 
 ous enthusiasm which was doubtless genuine enough at 
 the time, he pledged himself to Turgot beforehand by 
 his word of honor "to share all your views, and always 
 support you in the courageous steps you will have to 
 take." Poor Louis ! If Turgot had known him better 
 he would have known how little those high-sounding 
 words represented the real workings of that well-mean- 
 ing, most unstable mind. But Turgot was not unnatu- 
 rally hopeful. He entered upon office in the character 
 of a reforming minister, and he proceeded at once to
 
 i-76 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XI. 
 
 play his part. The programme he presented to the king 
 had the merits of brevity and simplicity. It was ex- 
 pressed in three terse points " no bankruptcy, no in- 
 crease in the loans, no taxation." This was the nega- 
 tive policy ; the positive policy, the policy that was to 
 make all this possible, was simpler and shorter still. It 
 was summed up in one phrase " Reduce the expendi- 
 ture." Only reduce the expenditure and all will be 
 well. It was simple enough ; but under the condi- 
 tions, as Turgot had yet to find, it had the sovereign 
 defect of being impossible. 
 
 It would be, perhaps, too rash to say although the 
 statement might be defended that if Turgot had been 
 able to carry out thoroughly his programme, with all 
 that it involved, the Revolution would never have taken 
 place. But it is certain that if Turgot had been allowed 
 a free hand, the Revolution would have been very dif- 
 ferent from what it was. Suppose that Turgot had been 
 able to realize all his hopes ; suppose that he had re- 
 organized the financial condition of France, had crushed 
 the old evil privileges out of existence, h#d lopped away 
 the bulk of the abuses, had established the freedom of 
 industry and commerce, then the majority of the causes 
 which created the Revolution of 1789 would have 
 ceased to exist. But unhappily for Turgot, and still 
 more unhappily for his enemies, Turgot was not given 
 a free hand. He was not a revolutionist at all in any 
 sane sense of the word, but he was regarded by his ad- 
 versaries as if he had been the wildest of revolutionary 
 fanatics. The farmers-general were terribly fluttered 
 in their dovecots, the Terrays and their kind were hot 
 against him ; privilege was up in arms everywhere. 
 
 Turgot soon began to show that he was in earnest in 
 his notions of reform. He began by dismissing Brochet
 
 1774-76. REFORM. 177 
 
 de Saint- Prest, the director of the Corn Agency, the dme 
 </<'innee of Terray in the famous, or infamous, " Pacte de 
 Famine." Terray's scheme was to establish a monopoly 
 in the corn trade a monopoly to be in his hands and 
 those of his creatures. In 1770 Terray suppressed the 
 liberal clauses of the declaration of 1763 and the edict 
 of 1764, by which the Controller-General Bertrin had 
 allowed the free circulation of corn. Terray's act had 
 led to the writing of Turgot's letters defending the free 
 circulation of corn ; but Terray played off the Abbe 
 Galiani and his an ti- free- trade dialogues against Tur- 
 got's letters, and coolly went on with his scheme. A 
 very pretty little plan was on foot. Laverdy, the then 
 controller-general, sanctioned a treaty got up by a cer- 
 tain number of individuals, of whom a retired Paris 
 banker named Malisset was one, " for the care, the pro- 
 viding, and the preservation of the king's cereals." A 
 lawyer, Leprevost de Beaumont, heard of this agree- 
 ment, saw in it a compact for the starvation of the peo- 
 ple, and was about to denounce it, when he was arrested 
 and flung into the Bastille. But, if De Beaumont was 
 thus silenced, his threatened opposition had helped to 
 kill the plan. The treaty was set aside, and in its place 
 the "Regie interessee" was devised. A commission, 
 according to the memoirs on Terray, had been formed 
 to inquire into the corn business. It had under its au- 
 thority two directors or agents-general for the purchases 
 and transmissions, Sorin de Bonne and Doumerc ; so 
 that all abuses in this branch of the public service 
 ought to have been immediately suppressed. But the 
 councillors of state complained that they were not con- 
 sulted, that nothing was communicated to them, and, 
 indeed, that the Abbe Terray had always brought to 
 them the work half done. This conduct became still 
 I. 12
 
 1 - 78 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. Cn. XI. 
 
 more suspected because Brochet de Saint-Prest, who 
 was Terray's sworn ally, was a thorough beggar when 
 he entered the Council, but displayed since he formed 
 part of it an extraordinary amount of opulence and lux- 
 ury. Hence the supposition arose that Terray and Bro- 
 chet, far from checking the monopoly, favored it and 
 carried it on by their underlings, who, too, were ex- 
 tremely rich. 
 
 Target was not going to stop at the dismissal of Bro- 
 chet de Saint-Prest. A little later Sorin and Doumerc 
 were arrested and their papers seized, but nothing was 
 found to criminate them, and they were set at liberty. 
 It was made clear, however, that Brochet de Saint-Prest 
 had swindled, and it seemed more than likely that Ter- 
 ray had kept his eyes closed in very friendly fashion to 
 a good deal of what was going on. The private specu- 
 lators it was impossible to get at. But they were dis- 
 gusted and dismayed, and there was more disgust in store 
 for them. Turgot at once proceeded to repeal the evil 
 prohibitory enactments of Terray and to restore the corn 
 trade to the freedom, limited, indeed, but still precious, 
 which had been accorded to it by Berlin in 1763 and 
 1764. But he was not allowed to proceed without pro- 
 test, even from his own friends. Bertin himself urged 
 caution and progress by slow degrees ; he would have 
 liked Turgot "to conceal your views and your opinions 
 from the child whom you have to govern and to restore 
 to health." There was another person who took upon 
 himself to exhort Turgot upon the corn question Avith 
 signal ill-success for the exhorter. This was Necker, 
 fresh from his triumph with the Colbert eulogium, and 
 already largely convinced of the vast importance to the 
 world in general, and to France in particular, of his ex- 
 istence. Necker interviewed Turgot, who received him
 
 1774-76. TURGOT AND NECKER. 179 
 
 with the affability of an icicle, and converted him into 
 a civil but decided enemy. Turgot was always a shy 
 man, and, like many shy men, concealed his timidity 
 under an assumption of hauteur ; he was never at any 
 time very tolerant of the opinions of those whom he 
 conceived to be less well-informed than himself ; he 
 was cold and rather rude to Necker, both when he re- 
 ceived him and afterwards in writing to him. Necker 
 immediately published his "Legislation sur le Com- 
 merce des Grams," which at once brought him promi- 
 nently into public view as a serious rival to Turgot. 
 
 Neither the prudence of Bertin nor the protests of 
 Necker could at all hinder Turgot in the course he had 
 resolved upon. He determined to restore corn to its 
 former freedom, and he determined also to effect that 
 restoration under conditions of signal significance. It 
 might be possible for an ingenious speculator to trace 
 back to Target's action in this instance one of the most 
 potent factors in the great revolutionary problem. Up 
 to this time, edicts had come upon the people of France 
 as part of " the good pleasure " of the king. The king, 
 advised by his ministers, decided that such and such a 
 law was to take effect, and there was no more to be said 
 about it. The idea of in any way explaining to the 
 people whom these laws were to govern why these laws 
 were made never entered into the head of the sovereign 
 or of his advisers. Now for the first time Turgot took 
 the audacious step of acting in a precisely contrary man- 
 ner. He set forth, in an elaborate preamble to the edict, 
 the reasons for the change which it introduced. The 
 public found, to its astonishment and delight, that they 
 had to do with a minister who, when laws were made, 
 condescended to take them in some degree into his confi- 
 dence, and to explain to them as to reasonable human
 
 180 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. Cii. X! 
 
 beings why the legislative measures which bound them 
 were enacted. Well might Voltaire exclaim in uncon- 
 scious prophecy after reading the preamble to Turgot's 
 edict, "It seems as if new heavens and a new earth had 
 made their appearance !" So in a measure they had 
 appeared, or were about to appear, far-seeing Voltaire. 
 That same preamble must have had a powerful effect 
 in accelerating the onward sweep of the Revolution. 
 When a subordinated people once find that their gov- 
 ernors think it worth while to explain to them why they 
 are governed, they will very soon begin to think that 
 the time has come for them to take a share in their own 
 government. When Turgot penned that edict he was 
 unconsciously countersigning the death-warrant of the 
 Old Order, and of the old monarchy of France. 
 
 Unluckily for Turgot and for the country, his reforms 
 fell upon evil times. The price of corn rose persistent- 
 ly ; the harvest of 1774 was poor; it threatened to be 
 bad indeed in 1775. Mysterious discontent smouldered. 
 On April 18, 1775, a little flame of queer insurrection 
 burst out in Dijon. A band of peasants poured into 
 the town, sacking mills and private houses, seeking for 
 corn and clamoring for the life of the governor, who 
 had said, or was reported to have said, that if the people 
 lacked corn they might eat grass. A plucky bishop's 
 eloquence finally induced the marauders to leave the 
 town ; they disappeared as suddenly as they came. 
 The earth has bubbles as the water has, and these seemed 
 to be of them. While people were still speculating as 
 to the meaning of the odd affair, while some saw in it 
 a genuine popular rising and others only the mechanical 
 performance of a prepared and well-financed plot got 
 up to injure Turgot, the rising was repeated under much 
 more ominous conditions, and much nearer to the seat
 
 1775. "REGUMQUE TORRES." 181 
 
 of government. What is known in history as the 
 " Guerre des farines " suddenly blazed out with start- 
 ling activity in the very neighborhood of Paris. If the 
 Dijon disturbance had been lightning in a clear sky, it 
 was mere summer lightning compared with the forked 
 flashes that split the sky at Pontoise, at Versailles, and 
 at Paris itself. 
 
 There was something mysteriously menacing about 
 these rioters. They appeared suddenly in bands ; it 
 was hard to find out whence they came ; they were 
 marshalled by fantastic Callotesque figures of bandit- 
 like aspect, who seemed to have gold coins in sufficient 
 abundance and some smack of military skill. Pontoise 
 was plundered, startled, turned upside down by the 
 adventurous rabble. Next, they appeared in Versailles 
 itself, hard by the very throne of royalty. They had 
 the hardihood to push their way into the courtyard of 
 the royal palace and clamor for bread there. Louis 
 came out upon his balcony to address the mob, but the 
 mob would not listen to him. Poor Louis, looking 
 down upon that sea of squalid faces, his ears dizzy with 
 that turbulent bawling for bread, had no prophetic vis- 
 ion of another like invasion of his stately palace, like 
 and yet far more terrible, which the fates had in store 
 for him some fourteen years later. It would almost 
 seem as if the preliminary steps of the Revolution were 
 being carefully rehearsed. The mob had found its way 
 to Versailles. Hungry proletaires are trying their 'pren- 
 tice hands at the battlements of kings "regumque 
 turres." 
 
 It is touching, it is pathetic, to read the letters which 
 Louis wrote to Turgot in this time of excitement. In 
 one, he says, "You may rely on my firmness" poor 
 king, who never was sincerely or wisely firm in his life ;
 
 1 82 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XL 
 
 in another he says, "The greatest precautions must be 
 taken to prevent the rioters from coming to lay down 
 their conditions." He was writing of the public mar- 
 kets ; he little thought that the time was at hand when 
 rioters far more serious were coming to lay down their 
 conditions, and when no precautions would prevent 
 them. 
 
 From Versailles the riot spread to Paris, which took 
 fire like tinder in some places. Such police as there 
 were crumpled up before the rioters, who had every- 
 thing their own way for a time, sacking the bakers' 
 shops and carrying off the bread. But if the rioters 
 were determined, so was Turgot. However much his 
 influence fostered the Revolution, he had as little sym- 
 pathy with revolutionaries as the stanchest supporter 
 of the Old Order. The Parliament and Turgot were 
 at odds just then, and between the Parliament and the 
 riots Turgot had his hands full. But he was, from his 
 point of view, equal to the situation. He posted Paris 
 with placards proclaiming all gatherings under pain of 
 death. He caused Lenoir, the lieutenant of police who 
 had let the riots drift on, to be dismissed. Two armies 
 were raised in readiness to swoop upon Paris at a mo- 
 ment's notice. In the face of these vigorous prepara- 
 tions the riot collapsed, evaporated. There were a few 
 fights in the country districts, there was a scuffle on the 
 Versailles Road in which about a score, it was said, of 
 peasants were killed, but for the time being riot was 
 exorcised. Timid Parisians peeping out of their houses 
 to peer at the riot found that it had vanished. Two of 
 the rioters who had been captured were hanged. They 
 went to the gallows declaring that they were dying for 
 the people, an ominous declaration which was to awaken 
 ominous echoes later on. Those two gaunt, poor devils
 
 e. TtiRGoT's ENEMIES. 163 
 
 can scarcely have been in anybody's pay. Those dying 
 words were serious to them, a veritable confession of 
 faith. It was the confession of a political creed too ; 
 those two poor devils, nameless here for evermore, were 
 the protomartyrs of the French Revolution. To them 
 it was no question of a plot stirred up by Sartine or by 
 Conti, by this enemy of Turgot or that enemy of Tur- 
 got. They were hungry, and their fellows were hun- 
 gry, and so they died, as they said, for the people. 
 
 The immediate result of the riots was to greatly 
 strengthen Turgot's favor with the king. But the end 
 was drawing near. In the Parliament of Paris, Turgot 
 found a formidable adversary. He had strongly op- 
 posed the proposal to obliterate the effects of the Mau- 
 peou coup diktat and restore the suppressed parliaments 
 to their old position. But Maurepas was in favor of 
 the proposal, Maurepas planned and plotted, and. Mau- 
 repas carried his point, to the despair of Condorcet, who 
 saw in the return to the old form of parliaments the 
 revival of one of the worst systems of the Old Order. 
 On November 29, 1774, Louis solemnly reinstated the 
 Paris Parliament, and Turgot found himself confronted 
 by a body solidly and stolidly opposed to most meas- 
 ures of reform. 
 
 Turgot had enemies enough as it was. The clergy 
 were against him because he was a philosophy, the court 
 was against him, the Paris bourgeoisie was against him, 
 the Choiseul faction was against him, and with that 
 faction must be ranged the queen. Marie Antoinette 
 was against Turgot because he had interfered with her 
 use of the bills payable at sight, which, while they were 
 the delight of her friends, were a terrible, uncontrol- 
 lable drain upon the treasury. Marie Antoinette won 
 De Maurepas away from Turgot ; Turgot was almost
 
 184 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XI. 
 
 alone. He had the king with him still, and he was able 
 to induce the king to accept his famous six edicts, and 
 force them upon a furious Parliament in a bed of jus- 
 tice on March 12, 1776. These six edicts suppressed 
 corvees, suppressed the offices concerning the wharves, 
 markets, and ports of Paris, suppressed the maUrises 
 and jurandes, suppressed the Poissy came, and, finally, 
 modified the duty on tallow. They embodied several 
 of the most needed reforms, but they were not destined 
 to do France much service. They were all repealed 
 after Turgot's fall, and when the great waves of revo- 
 lution came washing against the throne they carried on 
 their crests changes compared to which the reforms of 
 Turgot seem well-nigh insignificant. 
 
 It would take too long and serve no purpose to go 
 minutely into all the causes that led to Turgot's down- 
 fall. His enemies were many and powerful ; Marie An- 
 toinette was actually eager to have him sent to the 
 Bastille ; the favor of the king was daily weakening. 
 Louis was wearied of a reforming minister who was 
 always making his king do things which neither the 
 king's queen nor the king's court liked. Turgot felt 
 that his hold was failing. He wrote to the king some 
 blunt, vigorous letters, setting forth his position, the 
 king's position, and the position of the country. In 
 one of these letters he wrote words of startling pres- 
 cience. "Do not forget, sire, that it was weakness 
 which placed the head of Charles I. on the block." It 
 is curious how again and again the fate of Charles I. 
 of England is brought warningly, prophetically, against 
 Louis XVI. of France. Louis, we may well imagine, 
 did not like the warning ; perhaps his weak nature was 
 annoyed at being told of its weakness ; perhaps to his 
 obstinate mood Turgot seemed a kind of ambitious
 
 1776-81. TtJRGOT'S FALL. 185 
 
 mayor of the palace. He did not answer Turgot's let- 
 ters, and on May 12th Tujgot was formally dismissed 
 from his office. There was a shout of joy from all the 
 enemies, there was a wail of despair from all the friends 
 of reform. " I see nothing but death before me," Vol- 
 taire wrote to La Harpe, " since M. Turgot is no longer 
 in office. I cannot understand how the king can have 
 dismissed him. It is a thunderbolt which has struck 
 both my brain and heart." 
 
 Turgot met his fall with dignity. He passed his five 
 last years of life in Paris, devoted to literature, to poet- 
 ry, and to science. He saw much of Franklin in 1776; 
 in 1778, when Voltaire came to Paris for the triumph 
 that killed him, he insisted upon seeing Turgot, and, 
 seeing him, Voltaire caught Turgot's hands and said, 
 almost weeping, " Allow me to kiss the hand which has 
 signed the salvation of the people !" These touching 
 and noble words might well atone for the criticism 
 Voltaire had passed unwittingly upon Turgot's "^Eneid" 
 translation. On March 18, 1781, he died in Paris, and 
 was buried, first in the Church of the Incurables, in the 
 Rue de Sevres, and afterwards in the cemetery of Bons, 
 in Xormandy. His grave was opened, it is said, in 1793, 
 in the search for lead for ammunition, when his body 
 was found to "be in perfect preservation. He was hur- 
 riedly re-interred, but the spot is not now known.
 
 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XII. 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 THE DIAMOND NECKLACE. 
 
 HERE let us for a moment draw breath and bridle to 
 deal with an episode which, though in actual date it 
 belongs to a slightly later time, is in itself a complete 
 episode, and may best be treated of by itself and dis- 
 posed of. A complete episode indeed, a little dramatic 
 episode of the strangest, most foolish, most fantastic 
 kind, a very burlesque, yet fraught with the most mo- 
 mentous issues to all concerned. Of all the events that 
 gave a direct helping hand to the progress of the Rev- 
 olution, none was more potent than the queer crime or 
 collection of crimes which mankind knows by the name 
 of the affair of the Diamond Necklace. At the very 
 moment when Beaumarchais was smiling France's aris- 
 tocracy away, came this grim business and dealt its 
 murderous strokes at the Church, the nobility, and the 
 very throne and crown. 
 
 There are some historical problems which appear des- 
 tined always to remain mysteries. Who was the Man 
 in the Iron Mask? Who was Homer? Who wrote, 
 collected, or compiled the " Arabian Nights " ? Who was 
 the author of " Junius"? These, and a score of simi- 
 lar perplexities that leap at once to the mind will prob- 
 ably never be absolutely, uncompromisingly, definitely 
 answered. We may feel morally certain that Sir Philip 
 Francis wrote " Junius," that the Man in the Iron Mask 
 was the Italian envoy ; that the " Arabian Nights " are
 
 1*774-86.- HISTORIC PROBLEMS. IgV 
 
 but the reproduction of a lost Persian original ; and 
 that the "Iliad" and " Odyssey " are not the disjointed 
 fragments of a Wolfian fanaticism. But we cannot sub- 
 stitute in any of these instances an absolute for a moral 
 certainty. The doubt still may linger, must linger, can 
 never be finally swept off and away. The story of the 
 Diamond Necklace is of the same kindred. It is prac- 
 tically impossible that we shall ever know the actual 
 rights and wrongs of that immortal episode. All the 
 facts, such as they are, lie before us; but the interpre- 
 tation of the evidence is of the most varying kind. On 
 the self-same set of facts one student will build up one 
 theory, establish to his own satisfaction and the satis- 
 faction of his school one case ; only to be demolished 
 by another student, who on no other or newer evidence 
 builds up a wholly different theory and establishes a 
 wholly different case. 
 
 It is, it must be confessed, but dreary work toiling 
 through all the voluminous evidence in this case of the 
 Diamond Necklace. Whole mountains of printed pa- 
 per have been piled upon it, and the truth, whatever it 
 may be, struggles fitfully beneath the mass evident only 
 in Enceladus convulsions, but forever invisible to human 
 eye. To read through the De la Motte papers alone, 
 with their conflicting chaos of improbabilities and im- 
 possibilities, is to come out from the ordeal with a 
 whirling brain, and a sensation as having revolved in a 
 whirlpool. There is other evidence of a kind which 
 suggests rather the cesspool than the whirlpool, stag- 
 nant filth of a sort in which the age abounded. All 
 the obscene birds of literature and art, all the lampoon- 
 ers, ballad-mongers, and caricaturists of the baser sort 
 swooped down upon the Diamond Necklace. Like the 
 eagles in the story of Sindbad, they dived from on high
 
 188 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XII. 
 
 after diamonds ; like Sindbad's birds, too, they were 
 lured not by the diamonds, but by the flesh the diamonds 
 clung to. The luckless student who has to glance at 
 these things holds his nose as he goes by and gasps for 
 the free air. All honor to the true caricaturists, all 
 honor to Pasquin and his people and their flying shafts 
 of satire. The caricature and the lampoon have done 
 humanity simple service time and again. But these 
 horrors have no more to do with satire than the poisoned 
 dagger of the assassin has to do with the art of war. 
 
 That strain of Orientalism which animates so much 
 of the last century, begotten of " Mille et une Nuits," 
 " Mille et un Jours," " Mille et un Quarts d'Heure," and 
 kindred fanciful fictions, troubled the blood and brain 
 of Louis XV. In the frenzy of his adoration of Ma- 
 dame du Barry, he expressed the Aladdin-like wish that 
 he could offer her a palace entirely built of gold and 
 jewels. But even the most reckless of monarchs must 
 sometimes cure his whims. There was no chancellor to 
 raise sums for such a purpose, no farmer -general to 
 open a Fortunatus's purse at his prince's feet for such a 
 freak; there was a limit to possible taxation even with 
 the desire to build an Aladdin's palace spurring the de- 
 sire to tax. So Madame du Barry had to do without 
 her palace of gold and jewels. But if the king was 
 balked in one piece of generosity, he was resolved to 
 make up for it in another. He determined that the 
 white Du Barry neck should be adorned with the most 
 magnificent diamond necklace in the world. Accord- 
 ingly, Boehmer and Bassenge, crown jewellers, then or 
 later were consulted, were commissioned to fashion a 
 necklace worthy of such a king and such a mistress. 
 But if Louis had Aladdin's opulence of imagination, he 
 lacked Aladdin's lamp, he lacked Aladdin's ring. When
 
 1774-80. LOUIS ALADDIN. 189 
 
 the widow's son of Canton desired a thing, it was but 
 wish and have ; Louis XV. might wish, but he had to 
 wait long before he could have, had to wait and not 
 have after all. 
 
 Boehmer and Bassenge had no such store of jewels 
 by them as could compose the commissioned necklace. 
 No jeweller in Europe could boast of such a store of 
 the shining stones. To get the needful number together 
 was a matter of time, patience, perseverance, and, above 
 all, money. So Boehmer and Bassenge, flushed with 
 the princely patronage, sent messengers to all parts of 
 the world, east and west and south and north, with the 
 one w r ord of command, "diamonds." All the money 
 they could beg or borrow they scraped together and 
 spent in the prudent purchase of diamonds. There was 
 excitement in the Judengasse of every capital in Eu- 
 rope. Diamonds came to the light of day in all sorts 
 of queer, unexpected places, in dim back shops where 
 bearded Jews lived in squalor upon the ransoms of em- 
 pires; the New World was not left unransacked; from 
 all the points of the compass diamonds gravitated, 
 shining drops into the glittering ocean of stones which 
 Boehmer and Bassenge were to work up into the match- 
 less necklace. It was worth their while to take pains 
 and to spend borrowed money, to drain their resources 
 and pledge their credit to the hilt, for the reward of- 
 fered was as princely as the spirit which prompted the 
 commission. Two millions of livres eighty thousand 
 pounds sterling was the sum agreed upon between the 
 king and his jewellers. That the king was mortal, that 
 there was any risk whatever in the transaction, never 
 seems to have crossed the minds of the jewellers. They 
 collected their diamonds, plundering the earth, and set 
 to work to piece them together with a will,
 
 190 
 
 THE FKENCH REVOLUTION. Cn. XII. 
 
 The Diamond Necklace has done its ominous work 
 and vanished forever. No monarch, no American mill- 
 ionaire could hope to bring together again those stones 
 which Boehmer and Bassenge for the first and last time 
 brought together. But it is perfectly possible for the 
 curious to get some idea of what the Diamond Neck- 
 lace was to be like. The original drawing made for 
 Boehmer and Bassenge has been reproduced, and may 
 awaken in the imaginative mind some notion of how 
 the necklace would have glowed. Any one may see 
 pictured the neck circle of seventeen stories with its 
 triple pendants, and its triple festoons and their pen- 
 dants, its two broad bands of diamonds to meet upon 
 the bosom in a kind of central sun, and diverge again 
 into two tassels, and its other bands, one on each side, 
 also tasselled. But it does not make a very brave show 
 in black and white; we must " make believe very hard " 
 in order to imagine the gleam and glitter and splendor 
 of that historic cascade. Yet even in its pictured in- 
 significance there is something ominous. That Diamond 
 Necklace "is as terrible as the woven web of the Fates. 
 If Boehmer and Bassenge, living in an age of occultism, 
 had been touched with any tincture of prophecy, they 
 must have trembled at their task. For into every fes- 
 toon and string and band of that magnificent toy the 
 Revolution was woven. There was not a stone of it 
 from the first to the last which was not the symbol of 
 some fair or noble life untimely ended. The stones 
 seem red with blood. If ever a mere human trinket 
 helped to make a bloody revolution, that Diamond 
 Necklace was the toy. 
 
 Suddenly, in the midst of all the travail, while the 
 cunning craftsmen were linking stone with stone into 
 all imaginable splendor, the unexpected came to pass,
 
 1774-86. TOUTING THE DIAMOND NECKLACE. 191 
 
 The king died. Madame du Barry vanished from the 
 court where she had reigned and revelled. There was 
 no purchaser for the necklace; it would never find its 
 way to the Du Barry neck. And, in the meantime, 
 here were Boehmer and Bassenge plunged up to their 
 ears and over them in debt, with every penny they could 
 muster sunk in a gorgeous trinket which few could 
 dream of buying, while angry creditors were clamoring 
 for their due. The Diamond Necklace, conceived in 
 obedience to a kind of fairy-tale whim, was proving as 
 troublesome to its luckless possessors as many a fairy 
 gift. There is something curiously tantalizing in the 
 picture of a brace of jewellers with two millions worth 
 of diamonds on their hands, and with nothing in the till 
 to meet their debts. In this sore extremity it occurred 
 to Boehmer that possibly the new Queen of France 
 might, in the first flood-tide of her royalty, like to buy 
 the necklace. Boehmer waited upon Marie Antoinette, 
 displayed the splendid necklace, pleaded speciously, and 
 failed hopelessly. Marie Antoinette admired the neck- 
 lace, but she refused to buy it. Boehmer and Bassenge 
 were at their wits' ends again. They consulted together 
 and adopted a plan. Bassenge was to travel over Eu- 
 rope tempting royal and aristocratic eyes with pictures 
 of the necklace, wooing royal and aristocratic ears with 
 its pi'aises. Never was so splendid a necklace touted 
 for before. Boehmer was to remain at home and do his 
 best to tempt the queen. 
 
 Then a new figure came into the business, and with 
 him the imbroglio began. If Lauzun is the type of all 
 that was worst in the nobility, the Cardinal Prince de 
 Rohan is the type of all that was worst in the clergy. 
 To find a parallel for him in English history we must 
 look to that mad Bishop of Derry, Lord Harvey's
 
 !92 T1IE FREXCII REVOLUTION. Cn. XII. 
 
 brother, Lord Bristol's son, whose insane career of os- 
 tentatious profligacy is one of the most curious epi- 
 sodes in the English ecclesiastical history of the last 
 century. The Cardinal Prince de Rohan was every- 
 thing that a servant of the Church ought not to be, and 
 nothing that a servant of the Church should be. Pro- 
 foundly depraved, even for an age of profound deprav- 
 ity, cynical to excess iu an age of cynicism, lustful, lux- 
 urious, devoted to display, to splendor, to amours of all 
 kinds, he would have been more at home in the court 
 of Nero, or at the table of Trimalcio, than in the service 
 of the Church of Christ. Such characters are not agree- 
 able to study. They are surrounded by miasmatic va- 
 pors, pestilential, deadly, in which it is hard to breathe. 
 There are vices which are in a measure redeemed by 
 some strain of the valiant ; there are men of immoral 
 life who yet are heroic and do not repel, do not at least 
 sicken. But there is no trace of the hero in the com- 
 position of the Cardinal de Rohan. He is not indeed 
 quite the worst, most abominable figure swimming in 
 the cesspool maelstrom of decaying France. Nature, 
 fertile in resource for evil as for good, can trump her 
 own trick, can eclipse an abominable De Rohan with a 
 more abominable De Sade. But for the moment De Ro- 
 han was the King of Fools. 
 
 Louis Rene Edouard de Rohan was born in 1734. 
 In 1770, when, as coadjutor, he received Marie Antoi- 
 nette at Strasburg during the illness of his uncle, the 
 Prince Bishop of Strasburg, he was in his thirty-sixth 
 year. Marie Antoinette seems never to have liked him. 
 She found in him " more of the soldier than the coad- 
 jutor." Her mother, Maria Theresa, cordially disliked 
 him when, in 1771, he came to Vienna as ambassador 
 from France. In Vienna, he lived a mad, tempestuous,
 
 1734-1803. ROHAN, A CARDINAL OF CRIME. 193 
 
 foolish life, riotous, squandering, aimless, desperately 
 dissipated. He amused the emperor, he won the hearts 
 of any number of women ; he was an unfailing irrita- 
 tion to the shrewd eyes of Maria Theresa. But for her 
 unwillingness to offend the French king and to make 
 her daughter's position at the French court unpleasant, 
 she would have insisted upon his recall. After two 
 years of orgies the Rohan embassy came to an end. 
 He was understood to be in disgrace when Louis XVI. 
 mounted the throne, but his high station and the in- 
 fluence of his relatives got him the oifice of Grand Al- 
 moner in 1777, and in 1779, by the death of his uncle, 
 he became Prince Bishop of Strasburg. Through Stan- 
 islas Poniatowski, King of Poland, he got the Red Hat 
 and the great revenues of the Abbey of Saint Vaast to 
 replenish his drained exchequer. The Academy, which 
 had steadfastly shut its doors against Diderot, welcomed 
 him among the immortals ; the Sorbonne chose him 
 for its master. Seldom was more worthless flesh more 
 loaded with honors. 
 
 The Cardinal de Rohan was now nearly fifty, with 
 high bald forehead, complexion of a red favor, white 
 hair, a tall, stately, ample presence. Wine and women 
 had sapped his strength and inflamed his temper, which, 
 though suave enough when the cardinal was uncrossed, 
 could rise to a pitch of fury at a thwarted whim. Per- 
 haps under happy conditions this scion of the great 
 house of De Rohan might have made a decent, honor- 
 able man, and lived a decent, comely life ; but the fates 
 were against him ; he was indeed a vessel appointed 
 unto dishonor, the deepest dishonor. The waning beauty 
 of his ravaged body only makes him by contrast the 
 more detestable and more pitiable. An evil spirit in 
 an evil shell, a Quilp, an Olivier le Daim, we can un- 
 I. 13
 
 194 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XII. 
 
 derstand and accept as things with a kind of natural 
 fitness. But there is a peculiar horror, not without a 
 twist of hateful humor, in an evil soul lurking behind 
 a fair and seemly outside. This descendant of a chiv- 
 alrous house, this member of an order supposed to rep- 
 resent all the old high chivalrous feelings, this prince 
 of a great *Church which taught the creed of Christ, 
 who yet was merely an abject voluptuary, stained with 
 the meanest sins, capable only of the meanest actions 
 and the meanest desires, is a more revolting study than 
 some abject ignorant murderer. It was ripe time for 
 a revolution when the two great estates, the nobility 
 and the Church, could jointly bear such rotten fruit 
 as this. 
 
 This imbecile profligate committed the most imbe- 
 cile act of his life in desiring to commit the most profli- 
 gate. He seems to have lost the horror he called a 
 heart to Marie Antoinette, and to have mingled up in 
 his muddled mind a desire for the beautiful woman 
 with a crazy ambition to play the dominant part of 
 Mazarin to her Anne of Austria. The desire and the 
 ambition were both rendered difficult by the fact that 
 the queen entertained a very hearty, reasonable, and 
 just dislike of the crapulous cardinal. When the new 
 king and queen mounted the throne, Rohan came post- 
 haste from Vienna to pay his respects, and was terribly 
 snubbed for his pains by king and queen. And in this 
 slighted, snubbed position the cardinal shivered for 
 nigh on to ten years, arid, abject, imbecile. 
 
 In his imbecility the cardinal got mixed up with the 
 queerest of queer people. He had a kind of genius for 
 attracting to his silly state the most astonishing adven- 
 turers, and he now linked to his grotesque fortunes two 
 of the most audacious impostors that ever issued from
 
 1756-91. MADAME DE LA MOTTE. 195 
 
 the world's Court of Miracles. One was a woman who 
 claimed to be a Valois, the other was a man who pre- 
 tended to be a prophet and almost a god. Madame de 
 laMotte professed to be descended in direct line through 
 the Counts of Saint Remy from one of the illegitimate 
 amours of Hcmri II. For this august claim the State 
 allowed her some thirty pounds a year. She had been 
 many things, had made many uses of her attractive per- 
 son. She was married to a Count de la Motte, who had 
 served in the Gendarmerie, and was a pretty rascal of 
 his hands. In her 3 r outh and poverty she had been pat- 
 ronized by the Marchioness de Boulainvilliers. She 
 now professed to be in the confidence of Marie Antoi- 
 nette. On the strength of this pretence she was able 
 to sound what stops she pleased on the vicious vanity 
 of Rohan. Madame de la Motte was such an astonish- 
 ing liar that no statement of hers is now in the least 
 believable, and it is mirch more than probable that, as 
 Marie Antoinette herself said, the queen and the cour- 
 tesan never met all. But De Rohan swallowed anything. 
 Madame de la Motte made him believe that Marie An- 
 toinette was eager for a reconciliation ; she professed 
 to be close in the queen's counsel ; she brought him 
 dainty little letters, full of the friendliest import, pur- 
 porting to come from the queen's own royal hand. The 
 letters really came from the ruffian hand of a scoundrel 
 named Reteaux de Villette ; but in the mood in which 
 he then was, a mood of a crazy passion and crazy am- 
 bition, the cardinal would have swallowed any imposi- 
 tion, however gross. It must be admitted that Madame 
 de la Motte handled her big fish with considerable dex- 
 terity. She pretended to take back the cardinal's let- 
 ters to the queen, those letters which Beugnot after- 
 wards helped Madame de la Motte to destroy, when
 
 19 6 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. Cn. XII. 
 
 arrest was in the air, and of which he said that he could 
 imagine no man, not indeed writing them, but begin- 
 ning to read them and then going on with the task. 
 She invented a little comedy of the difficulty the queen 
 had to encounter in bringing the cardinal back into the 
 full sunlight of court favor ; she pretended that the 
 queen insisted upon patience until all was well. And 
 the poor cardinal was patient, a more patient gull never 
 lent himself to the rookers. If he were not such a des- 
 picable old rogue one could almost have the heart to 
 pity him, he was so ludicrously bubbled. How stupidly 
 eager he was to be deceived ! lie allowed himself to 
 believe that the queen actually wrote to him to borrow 
 money, and he paid the money over of course to the 
 faithful Dame la Motte, who lived in luxury upon it 
 with her two scoundrels, her husband and Reteaux de 
 Villette. He allowed himself to believe that a gesture 
 of the head made by the queen one day, at Versailles, 
 as he stood by and watched with Dame la Motte, was 
 a special gesture of recognition and assurance to him, 
 although it was a familiar daily gesture of the queen's. 
 He allowed himself to be juggled by the buffoon scene 
 of the bosquet, in which Madame de la Motte played 
 off a Demoiselle Oliva upon the amorous cardinal as 
 the Queen of France, and then broke up the interview 
 before it could be prolonged too far, leaving the car- 
 dinal with a rose in his hand and insane hopes in his 
 heart. She juggled him into the belief that he was to 
 be permitted to buy the necklace for the queen. But 
 if he was thus pitiably the dupe of Madame de la Motte, 
 he was also the dupe of a man rogue who played upon 
 the cardinal's superstitions as Madame de la Motte 
 played upon his passions.
 
 1784. DE ROIIAX'S VICIOUSXESS AND SIMPLICITY, 197 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 COUNT CAGLIOSTKO. 
 
 IT is curious to think that a man of the world like 
 the Cardinal de Rohan should have been so lightly, so 
 easily bamboozled by a female rogue like Madame de 
 la Motte, and by the most audacious male rogue then 
 strutting his way through Christendom. It points at 
 the least the excellent lesson that a man may be very 
 vicious indeed, and at the same time very silly ; that 
 the profoundest depravity has no armor in it to protect 
 from the assaults of ingenious knavery ; that the mind 
 of the most cynical old sinner is as easily played upon 
 as that of the freshest pigeon yet fluttering to be plucked. 
 That the cardinal was taken in by Madame de la Motte 
 was perhaps not so surprising. The cardinal was in 
 love, or what he called in love, and a man in love will 
 believe anything. But before ever Madame de la Motte 
 had fluttered a single one of her forgeries before his 
 foolish eyes, the Cardinal de Rohan had fallen into the 
 snares of an adventurer who claimed for himself, with 
 an unconquerable coolness in addressing a prince of the 
 Church, attributes that were no less than divine. 
 
 The passion for the occult is always with us. The 
 pupils of the occult try to peep under the veil, as the 
 Persian poets call it, just as idle, cimous children at the 
 fair try to peep under the canvas of the players' tent to 
 catch some furtive glimpse of the ardently desired per- 
 formance. Occultism can never wholly fade from hii-
 
 19 8 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. On. XIII. 
 
 man fancy ; nay, more, it would even appear to increase 
 rather than to dwindle with civilization or with certain 
 phases of civilization. The more sceptical an age is, 
 the more proud of its far-reaching philosophies and its 
 derring-do of thought, the more men turn from the chill 
 glitter of science to the warm half-tints of occultism. 
 The hanky-panky of the gypsy on the green, the tricks of 
 fortune-telling cards, the crystal ball, the lines on the 
 hand, and the look of the face, and the solemn prophe- 
 cies of the stars, all find higher votaries than clowns 
 and bumpkins when Philosophy is clamoring her loud- 
 est that she, and she alone, has the touchstone of truth. 
 It was part of the inevitable, unalterable law of human 
 action and reaction, that the age and the society which 
 had been attracted by Rousseau and D'Holbach, Grimm 
 and Diderot, and D'Alembert should also have been at- 
 tracted by a semi-quack like Mesmer and a whole- 
 hearted rogue and adventurer like Cagliostro. 
 
 Mesmer, whose name, like that of Guillotin, is like to 
 outlast Caesar's, was born in 1734 in Germany accord- 
 ing to some at Vienna, according to others at Weiler, 
 according to others still at Merseburg. In 1766 he was 
 received as medical doctor by the Faculty of Vienna. 
 The subject of his thesis was "The Influence of the 
 Planets upon the Human Body." From the fact that 
 the planets acted one upon another, and that the sun 
 and moon acted upon our atmosphere and our seas, lie 
 concluded that these great bodies acted also upon ani- 
 mated bodies, and especially upon the nervous system, 
 by means of a subtle, all-penetrating fluid. And even 
 as under this influence there existed in the sea an ebb 
 and flow, so also in animated bodies he believed that he 
 discerned a tension and relaxation veritable tides, as it 
 were. This subtle fluid, the general agent of all these
 
 1734-78. MESMKIJ. 199 
 
 changes, much resembled the loadstone in its proper- 
 ties. He called it in consequence Animal Magnetism. 
 
 From Jesuit astronomical professor Hell, with his 
 cures by magnetized iron, from strange Swiss cleric 
 Gassner, with his mysterious exorcisms of Satan as 
 cure for diabolical maladies, Mesmer gained a greater 
 belief than ever in his animal magnetism, and began to 
 try the working of cures on his own account in Vienna. 
 But it was the old business of the prophet and his own 
 country. Mesmer's cures were doubted, derided, got 
 him into serious trouble with angry fathers menacing 
 the magnetic master with drawn swords. At last the 
 empress bade Mesmer "cease his fooleries." Mesmer 
 took the hint. Anticipating Rabagas, he decided that 
 there was a world elsewhere, and that world France. 
 France, of course, meant Paris, and to Paris Mesmer 
 came in the February of 1778, and set in his staff. 
 
 In Paris Mesmer soon became the hero of the hour. 
 The cynical, sceptical Encyclopaedic world was amaz- 
 ingly attracted by the occult. Was not Illuminatism 
 spreading in all directions ? Were not the subtle forces 
 of Freemasonry, if they combated the authority of the 
 Church, opposed to rationalism and atheism as well ? 
 Were not people wild in their worship of Lavater, who 
 read man's mission in his face? Did not they even ac- 
 cord a kind of sneering credulity to the assertions of 
 the Count de Saint-Germain, whom Choiseul affected to 
 patronize? Did they not believe in the Philosopher's 
 Stone, in the Elixir of Life, in Heaven knows what else 
 besides, from the Squaring of the Circle to Perpetual Mo- 
 tion ? The good old Greek alchemists, Zosimus, Aga- 
 thodemon, Agatharchides, and their kind, would have 
 found plenty of fellowship, plenty of followers in the 
 obscurer streets of Paris in the days immediately sue-
 
 200 THE FHEN T CH REVOLt'TIOtf. Cu. XIII. 
 
 ceeding the rationalistic and scientific triumphs of the 
 " Encyclopaedia." 
 
 It is not surprising that the age which gave such a 
 welcome to Mesmer should have given a kindred wel- 
 come to a far more audacious impostor. The name of 
 Cagliostro is writ large upon the records of rascaldom 
 of all time. Lucian's fantastic Peregrinus was a joke 
 to him. If the hour brings the man, then Cagliostro 
 was the very man for that particular hour. The hour 
 of quickening science and quickening superstitions, of 
 Freemasonry and Illuminati, of Weishaupt and of Ca- 
 zotte, of the Montgolfiers and of Saint-Martin, of Ba- 
 beuf and of Mesmer, of the Puysegurs and of Lava- 
 ter, was the very hour for a Cagliostro to shine in, who 
 blended in his own person pretensions to science, to oc- 
 cultism, to illuminatism. The soil of Paris was fat just 
 then for such a rank weed to flourish in. 
 
 In the autumn of the year 1781 Cagliostro was as- 
 tonishing the good people of Strasburg as much by his 
 singular conduct as by the extraordinary cures he was 
 represented to have performed. According to the 
 Abbe Georgel, Rohan's old friend and jackal, the car- 
 dinal, curious to behold so remarkable a personage, 
 went to Strasburg, but found it necessary to use inter- 
 est to get admitted into the presence of the illustrious 
 charlatan. "If monseigneur the cardinal is sick," said 
 he, " let him come to me and I will cure him." If he is 
 well, he has no business with me nor I with him." This 
 reply, far from offending the cardinal's vanity, seems 
 only to have increased his desire to become acquainted 
 with the great medicine- man. When the cardinal 
 gained admission to the sanctuary, he fancied, or Geor- 
 gel thinks he fancied, that he saw impressed on the 
 countenance of this mysterious individual a dignity
 
 1780-88. ACHARAT. 201 
 
 which impressed him with an almost religious awe, and 
 the very first words he uttered were inspired by rever- 
 ence. The brief interview excited more strongly than 
 ever in the mind of the cardinal the desire for a more 
 intimate acquaintance. This gradually came about, the 
 crafty Cagliostro timing his conduct and his advances 
 so skilfully that, without seeming to desire it, he gained 
 De Rohan's entire confidence, and won the ascendency 
 of the strong mind over the weak. 
 
 During the next two years or so Cagliostro seems to 
 have lived largely at De Rohan's palace at Saverne, jug- 
 gling the cardinal, when he happened to be there, with 
 experiments in his laboratory, and making, as the cred- 
 ulous cardinal maintained, not only gold, but diamonds, 
 under his very eyes. In the cardinal's absence the 
 count would indulge in carousals, prolonged far into the 
 night, with the Baron de Planta, the cardinal's equerry, 
 for companion, and pour into Planta's ears the aston- 
 ishing romance which he called his life. Mr. Vizetelly, 
 in his interesting account of the famous swindle, sets 
 forth at length Cagliostro's romantic record of himself. 
 He professed ignorance of the place of his birth, but 
 told a cock-and-bull stoiy of his childhood in Medina, 
 where he went by the name of Acharat, and lived at- 
 tended by servants in a style of great splendor in apart- 
 ments in the palace of the Mufti Salahayn, the chief 
 of the Mussulmans. From Medina he said that he was 
 taken when quite a youth to Mecca, where he was 
 adopted by the Scheriff. Three years later he was car- 
 ried to Egypt, visited the chief cities of Africa and 
 Asia, and eventually found himself in Malta, where a 
 legend of a grand-master and of a princess of Trebizond 
 was evolved, and where he assumed the name of Cagli- 
 ostro and the title of count. From Malta he journeyed
 
 202 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XIII. 
 
 to Sicily and Naples, thence to Rome, where he made 
 the acquaintance of several cardinals, and was admit- 
 ted to frequent audiences of the pope. He professed 
 to have next visited Spain, Portugal, Holland, Russia, 
 and Poland, and gave a list of the nobles of those 
 countries with whom he had become acquainted. At 
 length, in September, 1780, he appeared in Strasburg, 
 where his fame as a physician had already preceded 
 him. There, as he asserted with perfect truth, he 
 tended the poor generally, and particularly sick sol- 
 diers and prisoners, without fee or reward. Strasburg 
 was quickly crowded with strangers, who came either 
 to see him or to consult him. He soon made the ac- 
 quaintance of the Cardinal De Rohan, whom he ac- 
 companied to Paris to prescribe for the Prince de Sou- 
 bise, suffering at the time from an accident to his leg. 
 After a short stay in the capital he returned to Stras- 
 burg, where he seems to have complained of persecution. 
 It seems certain that letters were written to the authori- 
 ties in his behalf by the Count de Vergennes, minister 
 for foreign affairs, the Marquis de Miromenil, keeper of 
 the seals, and the Marquis de Segur, minister of war, 
 desiring that every protection should be afforded to the 
 friend of Abraham. 
 
 It is almost needless to say that Cagliostro's story 
 about his residence in Medina and Mecca, and Egypt, 
 Rhodes, and Malta was a tissue of impudent lies. We 
 know that his real name was Giuseppe Balsamo, that he 
 was the son of a small tradesman of Palermo in Sicily, 
 where he was born in 1 743. The family were of Jew- 
 ish origin. Goethe will visit them in later years. In 
 his early youth Giuseppe belonged to the religious order 
 of Benfratelli. As he grew older he became remark- 
 able for his esurience, his cunning, his zeal for medi-
 
 1743. GIUSEPPE BALSAMO. 203 
 
 cine, his audacity. When the Benfratelli would have 
 no more to do with him, he took with a light heart and 
 a light hand to swindling. When one of his frauds 
 was discovered he fled to Catalonia. There he married 
 a young and pretty girl, Lorenza Feliciana, with whom 
 he drifted to Rome. After conf erring on himself the 
 
 O 
 
 title of Prince Pellegrini, he had the audacity to return 
 to Palermo under his assumed name. There a genuine 
 prince became infatuated with Donna Lorenza, and took 
 her husband under his powerful protection. The false 
 Pellegrini, however, was soon recognized as the escaped 
 swindler and arrested. But on the day appointed for 
 his examination, his friend, the true prince, forced the 
 doors of the tribunal, assaulted the counsel for the 
 prosecution, and overwhelmed the president with re- 
 proaches. In consequence the terrified court set the 
 prisoner at liberty. Cagliostro, leaving his wife in the 
 care of the prince, again started on his travels, in the 
 course of which he visited many of the chief cities of 
 the Continent. He was picked up, it is commonly as- 
 serted, while still a young man being little over thirty 
 years of age by the sect of Illuminati. They thought, 
 and correctly thought, that they had discovered in him 
 a willing and able instrument for the dissemination of 
 their doctrines. Who that loves romance does not re- 
 member that wonderful scene in a cave some little 
 distance from imperial Worms, where the Cagliostro of 
 Dumas learns the objects of the society of which he 
 was now a meniber. The Illuminati were to overturn 
 the thrones of Europe. The first blow was to be struck 
 in France. After the fall of the French monarchy it 
 was proposed to attack Rome. The society was said to 
 have countless followers. It was said to possess enor- 
 mous funds, the proceeds of the annual subscriptions of
 
 204 TUB FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XIII. 
 
 its members, dispersed among the banks of Amsterdam, 
 Rotterdam, Basle, Lyons, London, Venice, and Genoa. It 
 was said that a considerable sum of money was placed 
 at Cagliostro's disposal, to enable him to propagate the 
 doctrines of the sect in France. This was the origin of 
 his first visit to Strasburg in the autumn of the year 
 1780, when he adopted for his device the letters L. P. D., 
 signifying "Lilia pedibus destrue" Trample the lilies 
 underfoot. . 
 
 Was there ever such a magnificently audacious sham 
 and scoundrel in the world before as this Sicilian rap- 
 scallion, who pretended to have been present at the 
 wedding of Cana and to have learned the secret which 
 slaves wish to Oriental princes, of living forever? But 
 if he laid claim to many gifts, he had some acquire- 
 ments. He had studied medicine, if he preferred alche- 
 my. He knew something of what may be called natu- 
 ral magic. His juggleries were so cleverly contrived 
 that many visitors of the highest rank and the utmost 
 intellectual attainments considered them to be marvel- 
 lous. The general public exalted his every act until it 
 touched the supernatural. He asked no price for his 
 public exhibitions. He pretended to consider himself 
 insulted by any one who offered him gold. His hand 
 was constantly open to the poor. He visited them in 
 their homes. He gave them medicine; he gave them 
 alms. It was only natural that this ingenious system 
 of self-advertisement proved successful. People began 
 to talk of the mysterious stranger, the wise and gener- 
 ous physician who passed his time with the lowly of 
 the earth and seemed indifferent to its great ones. The 
 great ones whom Cagliostro affected to disregard were 
 piqued by indifference into curiosity. Soon many of 
 them became enthusiastic disciples and admirers of the
 
 1780. THE ARCH-QUACK. 205 
 
 physician-philosopher. Among these, none believed in 
 him so implicitly as the Cardinal Prince de Rohan, who, 
 spite of the count's " perfect quack face," seems to have 
 worshipped him as a being something more than human. 
 We are told that in one of the salons of the Palais- 
 Cardinal there was a marble bust of Cagliostro, with a 
 Latin inscription on the pedestal hailing him as God of 
 the Earth. 
 
 According to the Abbe Georgel, Rohan consulted 
 Cagliostro about the necklace business before conclud- 
 ing the negotiations. The abbe describes how the Py- 
 thon mounted his tripod. He tells how the Egyptian 
 invocations were made at night in the cardinal's own 
 salon, illuminated by an immense number of wax tapers. 
 The oracle spoke under the inspiration of its diemon. 
 The negotiation was worthy of the prince. It would 
 be crowned with success. It would raise the goodness 
 of the queen to its height. It would bring to light 
 that happy day which would unfold the rare talents of 
 the cardinal for the benefit of France and of the human 
 race. After this it is scarcely surprising to hear that 
 the Countess de la Motte, who h'ad formei'ly met Cag- 
 liostro at Strasburg, had 1'enewed her acquaintance with 
 him in the salons of the Palais-Cardinal. The De la 
 Mottes and Cagliostro were close neighbors. He lived 
 at the Hotel de Chavigny, in the Rue Saint -Claude, 
 quite near at hand. The house which he occupied, ac- 
 cording to Louis Blanc, the house which was afterwards 
 the residence of Barras, was one of the most sumptuous 
 in Paris. It was decorated with Oriental luxury. Its 
 rooms were always brilliant with the gleam of subtle 
 lights. Within them Cagliostro professed the pursuits 
 of the philosopher and planned the juggleries of the 
 quack. The bust of Hippocrates was a conspicuous orna-
 
 206 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. Cn. XIII. 
 
 merit. So was a black frame which enshrined in letters 
 of gold a literal translation of Pope's "Universal Prayer." 
 
 Many very different persons have placed on record 
 their opinions of Cagliostro or of his performances. 
 The words of three of them are especially interesting. 
 One was a woman, the Baroness d'Oberkirche. One 
 was Jacques Claude de Beugnot, then a young man of 
 a little over twenty, with no thought of the kingdom of 
 Westphalia in his head. One was Abraham Joseph 
 Benard-Fleury, the popular actor. The testimony of 
 each may well be cited anew against our king of quacks. 
 The Baroness d'Oberkirche describes Cagliostro in her 
 "Memoirs" as anything but handsome. Still she ad- 
 mits that she had never seen a more remarkable physi- 
 ognomy, and that he had a penetrating look which 
 seemed almost supernatural. She tries to describe the 
 expression of his eyes, that expression at once fire and 
 ice, which attracted and repelled at the same time, 
 which made people afraid and yet inspired them with 
 an irrepressible curiosity. One might, she says, draw 
 two different portraits of him, both resembling him, and 
 yet totally dissimilar. Woman-like, she was much im- 
 pressed with the diamonds which he wore on his shirt- 
 front, on his watch-chain, and on his fingers. They were 
 diamonds of large size, and apparently of the purest 
 water diamonds which, if they were not paste, were 
 worth a king's ransom, diamonds which he pretended 
 that he had made himself. 
 
 The baroness met Cagliostro at a dinner at De Ro- 
 han's. Though there were several guests at dinner, the 
 cardinal occupied himself almost exclusively with the 
 baroness, using all his eloquence to bring her over to 
 his way of thinking with regard to Cagliostro. much to 
 the good baroness's amazement. The baroness declares
 
 1780-88. THE NEW PYTHON. 207 
 
 that had she not heard him with her own ears, she could 
 never have believed that a prince of the Church, a Ro- 
 han, an intelligent and honorable man in so many re- 
 spects, could have allowed himself to be brought to the 
 point of abjuring both his dignity and his free will at 
 the bidding of a scheming adventurer. 
 
 There is hardly a more curious scene in history than 
 this scene between the infatuated prince and the shrewd, 
 observant woman of the world, whose keen eyes study 
 with astonishment that poor deluded spirit in that poor 
 degraded body. It is one of the most valuable of side- 
 lights, for it shows at once the extraordinary weakness 
 of the cardinal and the extraordinary power of Cagli- 
 ostro. De Rohan seems to have been pathetically anx- 
 ious to convince the baroness of the gifts of his wizard. 
 The baroness seems to have been tranquilly sceptical. 
 The cardinal showed her a large diamond which he had 
 on his little finger, a ring worth a little fortune. With 
 a kind of infantile enthusiasm he declared that Cagli- 
 ostro had made it, had created it out of nothing. He 
 declared that he was present, with his eyes fixed upon 
 the crucible, and had assisted at the deed. De Rohan 
 having lauded the Cagliostro who made diamonds, went 
 on to praise the Cagliostro who made gold. He de- 
 clared that Cagliostro had made in his presence, in his 
 crucibles, five or six thousand francs' worth of the pre- 
 cious metal, and had promised to make De Rohan the 
 richest prince in Europe. These were not dreams to 
 De Rohan, these were certainties. He raved about 
 prophecies fulfilled. He raved about miraculous cures 
 performed. He vowed that Cagliostro was not only 
 an extraordinary but a sublime man. His goodness had 
 never been equalled. The charities he bestowed, and 
 the benefits he conferred, passed all imagination.
 
 208 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. Cn. XIII. 
 
 The astonished baroness asked the cardinal if he had 
 given Cagliostro nothing for all this had not made 
 him the smallest advance, had made him no promise, 
 given him no written document which might compro- 
 mise De Rohan? The absurd, unhappy prince assured 
 her that Cagliostro had asked nothing, had received 
 nothing from him. Then the baroness, losing patience, 
 became prophetic. In a fine sibyllic vein she warned 
 De Rohan that Cagliostro must reckon on obtaining 
 from the cardinal many dangerous sacrifices, since he 
 bought his unbounded confidence so dearly. She urged 
 him to be extremely cautious, lest one of these days 
 Cagliostro should lead him too far. The cardinal only 
 answered by an incredulous smile. But the sibyl felt 
 certain that later, at the time of the Necklace affair, 
 when Cagliostro and the Countess de la Motte had cast 
 De Rohan to the bottom of the abyss, he recalled her 
 words and was scarcely comforted. 
 
 Young Beugnot met Cagliostro at one of Madame de 
 la Motte's little suppers. It was a remarkable supper- 
 party. It included Father Loth, minime of the Place 
 Royale, who reconciled his sacred functions with the 
 place of second secretary to Madame de la Motte. He 
 used to say mass for her on Sundays, and charged him- 
 self during the rest of the week with commissions at 
 the Palais-Cardinal which the first secretary thought 
 beneath his dignity. It included also the Chevalier de 
 Montbreul. He was a veteran of the green-rooms. He 
 was still a good conversationalist. He was prepared to 
 affirm almost any mortal thing. He was found, as if 
 by chance, wherever Cagliostro appeared, ready to bear 
 witness to the marvels he had performed. He offered 
 himself as a positive example miraculously cured of any 
 number of diseases, of which the names alone were 
 amazing and alarming.
 
 1780-88. BEUGNOT SPEAKS. 209 
 
 Curious young Beugnot made the most of his oppor- 
 tunity. He sat facing Cagliostro. He made a point 
 of examining by stealth. He confesses that he did not 
 know what to think of him. The face, the style of 
 dressing the hair, the whole of the man, impressed him 
 in spite of himself. He was of medium height, and 
 rather stout. He had a very short neck, a round face 
 ornamented with two large eyes sunken in his head, 
 and a broad turn-up nose. His complexion was of an 
 olive tinge. His mode of wearing his hair seemed new 
 in France. It was divided into several little tresses, 
 which, uniting at the back of the head, were tied up in 
 the form known as the " club." He wore a French-cut 
 coat of iron gray embroidered with gold lace, with his 
 sword stuck in the skirts, a scarlet vest trimmed with 
 lace, red breeches, and a hat edged with a white feather. 
 This last article of dress was still dear to the mounte- 
 banks and queer medical adventurers who haunted fairs 
 and sold their drugs out-of-doors. Cagliostro's splen- 
 dor was heightened by lace ruffles, several costly rings, 
 and shoe-buckles that were quite brilliant enough to 
 pass for very fine diamonds. 
 
 Cagliostro seems to have spoken a kind of jargon, 
 half Italian, half French, plentifully interlarded with 
 quotations in an unknown tongue, which passed with 
 the unlearned for Arabic. He had all the talking to 
 himself, and found time to go over at least twenty dif- 
 ferent subjects in the course of the evening, simply be- 
 cause he gave to them merely that extent of develop- 
 ment which seemed good to him. Every moment he was 
 inquiring if he was understood, whereupon everybody 
 bowed in turn to assure him that he was. When start- 
 ing a subject he seemed like one transported, raised his 
 voice to the highest pitch and indulged in the most ex- 
 L 14
 
 210 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XIII. 
 
 travagant gesticulations. The subjects of his discourse 
 were the heavens, the stars, the grand arcanum, Mem- 
 phis, transcendental chemistry, giants, and the extinct 
 monsters of the animal kingdom. He spoke, moreover, 
 of a city in the interior of Africa ten times as large as 
 Paris, where he pretended that he had correspondents. 
 What a "supper of the gods " that must have been! 
 
 The actor Fleury, in his memoirs, gives an account of 
 another curious meeting, when the Grand Kophta pro- 
 fessed to call up the spirit of D'Alembert. It is too fan- 
 tastically characteristic not to be worth re-living for the 
 moment. The spectators, or, as Cagliostro preferred to 
 call them, guests, sat in arm-chairs along the wall on 
 the east side of the room. Before these chairs an iron 
 chain was stretched, lest some foolish person should be 
 impelled by curiosity to rush upon destruction. On the 
 other side was placed the chair intended for the recep- 
 tion of the spirit. The Grand Kophta the name as- 
 sumed by Cagliostro on such occasions chose the un- 
 usual hour of 3 A.M. for his evocations. Shortly before 
 that time a voice was heard to order the removal from 
 the scene of cats, dogs, horses, birds, and all reptiles, 
 should any be near. Then came a command that none 
 but free men should remain in the apartment. The ser- 
 vants were accordingly dismissed. A deep silence fol- 
 lowed, and the lights were suddenly extinguished. The 
 same voice, now assuming a louder and more authorita- 
 tive tone, requested the guests to shake the iron chain. 
 They obeyed. An indescribable thrill ran through their 
 frames. The clock at length struck three slowly, and 
 with a prolonged vibration of the bell. At each stroke 
 a flash, as sudden and transitory as lightning, illumined 
 the apartment, and the words " Philosophy," " Nature," 
 and " Truth " successively appeared in legible charac-
 
 1780-88. THE GRAND KOPIITA. 211 
 
 ters above the empty arm-chair. The last word was 
 more brilliant than the others. The lights were sud- 
 denly rekindled ; how, no one could tell. Stifled cries 
 were heard, like those of a man whose mouth was gagged 
 or a man struggling to break loose from persons restrain- 
 ing him. Then Cagliostro appeared. 
 
 The Grand Kophta wore a costume which seems to 
 have been a blend of the Moslem and the mountebank. 
 Flowing drapery set off his figure to advantage, and the 
 glow of enthusiasm in his face made him look really 
 handsome. He delivered a short address, commenting 
 on the words just seen over the chair. Then, turning 
 to the four cardinal points, he uttered some cabalistic 
 words, which returned as if from a distant echo. The 
 lights being again extinguished, he commanded the 
 guests again to shake the chain, and as they did so 
 the strange feeling was renewed. The outline of the 
 arm-chair now became gradually perceptible in the 
 darkness, as though the lines had been traced on a black 
 ground with phosphorus. The next moment, and as if 
 by the same process, a winding -sheet could be seen, 
 with two fleshless hands resting upon the arm of the 
 chair. The winding-sheet, slowly opening, discovered 
 an emaciated form. A short breathing was heard, and 
 two brilliant, piercing eyes were fixed upon the specta- 
 tors. This buffoonery was supposed to show that the 
 illustrious philosopher, the author of the Preface to the 
 "Encyclopaedia," had been called from the dead. He 
 would answer questions put to him, but Cagliostro alone 
 was privileged to hear him speak. The spirit was asked 
 if it had seen the other world. The simulacrum of D'Al- 
 embert, answering through the lips of rogue Cagliostro, 
 said, " There is no other world." A witty commentator 
 upon this answer declared that the questioner should
 
 212 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XIII. 
 
 have said, " Illustrious D'Alembert, if there is no other 
 world, where may you happen to come from now ?" 
 
 If Cagliostro permitted himself fooleries of this kind, 
 his purposes were not all foolery. Freemasonry had 
 grown and thriven since the Derwentwater days, and 
 Cagliostro had not been slow to avail himself of the 
 influence it could lend to his professions. Whether he 
 was initiated in an obscure lodge in London chiefly 
 given over to hairdressers and pastrycooks or not, mat- 
 ters little. He was initiated somehow, somewhere, and 
 drifted about the Continent founding mysterious Egyp- 
 tian lodges, and calling himself the Grand Kophta. 
 Adam Weishaupt, professor of canonic law at the Uni- 
 versity of Ingoldstadt, had conceived the idea of mak- 
 ing the range and aim of Freemasonry much wider; of 
 forming a vast occult association which should strike 
 down all tyranny, all superstition, all injustice. Such 
 was Illuminism, with its areopagites, its preparations, 
 its mysteries, as it issued from the brain of the German 
 schemer of eight-and-twenty, in the year 1776. Illu- 
 minism spread rapidly. To further its aims, Adam 
 Weishaupt, who remained its secret head, was ready 
 to use all means and all instruments. Cagliostro and 
 he came together at Frankfort-on-the-Main, the depu- 
 ties of Illuminism, and it was decided that Cagliostro 
 should be initiated. Weishaupt had always professed 
 contempt for the Alchemists and the Rosicrucians, of 
 whom Cagliostro was so remarkable a representative. 
 But Cagliostro was thought to be a useful man to enrol 
 in the ranks of Illuminism, and enrolled he accordingly 
 was, as we have seen. We have seen that he was given 
 money, and sent to spread the light at Strasburg. We 
 have seen how he came upon the Cardinal de Rohan, 
 and soon immeshed him in the toils of his fantastic oc-
 
 1780-88. QUACK, KNAVE, SCOUNDREL. 213 
 
 cultism. How far in thus enslaving Rohan, in helping 
 to spin the conspiracy-web of the Diamond Necklace, 
 he was obeying the orders of a superior tribunal and 
 playing a planned part in a scheme of revolution, it is 
 impossible even to guess. If we have given so much 
 space to so poor a rogue, it is because he filled in his 
 time a great space in the public mind. It is not the 
 best men who are the most admired, the wisest who are 
 the most honored, and Cagliostro, quack, knave, scoun- 
 drel though he was, occupies a place in the picture of 
 his day, and demands in the picture of the historian an 
 attention quite out of proportion to his merits, but not 
 out of proportion to his fantastic influence. In the long 
 records of rascaldom, from Peregrinus to Bamfylde 
 Moore Carew, from the master-thief who robbed Rhamp- 
 sinitus to Jonathan Wild, no single rascal stands for- 
 ward with such magnificent effrontery, such majestic 
 impudence, such astonishing success, as Cagliostro. His 
 is the very garland of roguery, and his memory thrusts 
 itself upon the attention of the chronicler as unblush- 
 ingly as the living swindler thrust himself upon the age 
 in which he lived. The epoch of Cagliostro preceded 
 the epoch of Dr. Guillotin.
 
 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION, CH. XIV. 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 KNAVES AND FOOLS. 
 
 MADAME DE LA MOTTE was resolved to have the neck- 
 lace. It certainly showed magnificent audacity in the 
 woman to dream of carrying off this glory of jewellery, 
 which had been designed for the mistress of a king, 
 and which had been offered in vain in all the courts of 
 Europe. She made the cardinal believe that Marie An- 
 toinette would accept the cardinal's services in the pur- 
 chase of the necklace; Cagliostro, consulted by the car- 
 dinal, advised him to go on. He said that good would 
 come of it. The cardinal went on. The jewellers were 
 deceived by a forged autograph of the queen, agreeing 
 to their terms, and signed, absurdly, "Marie Antoinette 
 de France," an inaccuracy which, in the excitement of 
 the moment, impressed neither the amorous cardinal 
 nor the impatient Boehmer. The cardinal, concealed at 
 Madame de la Motte's house, saw the casket containing 
 the jewels given over to, as he imagined, an emissary 
 for the queen, who was really only Reteaux de Villette 
 again in disguise. For a while all went well. The car- 
 dinal was supremely happy. Madame de la Motte rolled 
 in money and lived sumptuously, while her husband and 
 Villette, having pulled the necklace to pieces, carried 
 the shining stars abroad to sell them at London and 
 at Amsterdam. Suddenly the crash came. Boehmer 
 learned by chance from Madame Campan, the queen's 
 woman, that the queen never had the necklace. Before
 
 1785. A DRAMATIC SCENE. 215 
 
 the story could get abroad, Louis XVI. precipitated 
 matters by summoning the cardinal to Versailles and 
 having him. arrested. De Rohan had just time to send 
 a servant off to ride post-baste to the Palais-Cardinal, 
 leap off his foundering horse, rush to faithful jackal 
 Georgel, and have all the letters professing to come 
 from the queen destroyed before the emissaries of the 
 law could arrive to seize the cardinal's papers. Madame 
 de la Motte was equally fortunate in being able to de- 
 stroy the cardinal's letters before they could be seized. 
 Madame de la Motte was at Clairvaux, dining with the 
 abbot, Dom Rocourt, one of the handsomest and the 
 stupidest men in France, and a very great admirer of 
 Madame de la Motte. Beugnot was there, and we owe 
 to him a most dramatic scene. Supper was kept wait- 
 ing for the arrival from Paris of the Abbe Maury, after- 
 wards destined to be famous enough. We shall meet 
 with him again. He was late, but at last he arrived, 
 and was at once asked if there was any news in Paris. 
 
 The Abbe Maury first professed surprise at their ig- 
 norance. Then came his astounding piece of news, the 
 news which had astonished and bewildered all Paris. 
 The Cardinal de Rohan, Grand Almoner of France, had 
 been arrested on August 15, the festival of the Assump- 
 tion, in his cardinal's attire, as he was leaving the king's 
 cabinet. People, it seemed, talked of a diamond neck- 
 lace which he was to have bought for the queen, but 
 which he did not buy at all. Was it not inconceivable, 
 Maury asked, plaintively, of his amazed listeners, tbat 
 for such a trifle as this a grand almoner of France should 
 have been arrested in his ecclesiastical vestments and on 
 quitting the royal presence ? 
 
 Here was news with a vengeance. Beugnot glanced 
 at Madame de la Motte, whose self-possession seemed to
 
 210 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XIV. 
 
 have deserted her. Her napkin had fallen from her 
 hand, and her pale and rigid face seemed as if it Avere 
 immovably fixed above her plate. After the first shock 
 was over she made an effort and rushed out of the 
 room. In the course of a few minutes Beugnot left the 
 table and joined her, and they at once drove to Paris. 
 On the road Beugnot frequently urged Madame de la 
 Motte to fly. He was a close friend of hers, as he was 
 of many strange folk in his time, and he could give 
 good counsel. But she refused to fly, declaring that she 
 had nothing to do with any necklace affair, and that it 
 must all be some trick devised by Cagliostro. 
 
 It must have been a queer drive. As they entered 
 Paris Beugnot again entreated her to at least burn any 
 papers which might compromise her or the cardinal. 
 This, at least, was a measure dictated by honor on the 
 one side and by prudence on the other. She con- 
 sented. Beugnot offered to assist her, and, as she did 
 not refuse, the much - devoted but still more curious 
 Beugnot accompanied her to her room. Her husband, 
 who had left home early in the morning to join a hunt- 
 ing-party, had not yet returned. The pair opened a large 
 chest of sandal-wood, filled with papers of all colors and 
 dimensions. Being naturally anxious to make quick 
 work of the matter, Beugnot inquired if there were 
 among them any bills of exchange, bonds, bank-notes, or 
 drafts ; and, on receiving an answer in the negative, he 
 proposed to throw the entire heap into the fire. But Ma- 
 dame de la Motte insisted on at least a cursory examina- 
 tion being made of them. The examination proceeded 
 very slowly on her part, very precipitately on his. Beug- 
 not declares that he saw hundreds of letters from the 
 Cardinal de Rohan. He noted with pity the ravages 
 which the delirium of love, aided by that of ambition,
 
 1785. BURNING LA MOTTE'S LETTERS. 217 
 
 had wrought in the mind of this unhappy man. It is 
 fortunate for the cardinal's memory that these letters 
 were destroyed, but it is a loss for the history of hu- 
 man passions. Probably the whole wide literature of 
 amatory epistles, from those attributed to Menander to 
 those written by Keats, from the letters of Camilla Pi- 
 sana to the letters of Miss J., can boast no stranger col- 
 lection of documents than those which the infatuated 
 Cardinal de Rohan wrote, which Madame de la Motte 
 had garnered, and which Beugnot helped to burn. 
 
 Among these motley papers there were invoices, 
 offers of estates for sale, prospectuses, and advertise- 
 ments of new inventions. Some of the letters were 
 from Boehmer and Bassenge, and made mention of the 
 necklace, spoke of terms expired, acknowledged the 
 receipt of certain sums, and asked for larger ones. 
 Beugnot asked Madame de la Motte what should be 
 done with them. Finding her hesitate, he took the 
 shortest course, and threw them all into the fire. The 
 affair occupied a considerable time. When it was over 
 Beugnot took his leave of Madame de la Motte, urg- 
 ing her more strongly than ever to depart. She only 
 answered by promising to go to bed immediately. He 
 left her in an atmosphere poisoned by the odor arising 
 f roi- burning paper and wax, impregnated with twenty 
 different perfumes fit atmosphere for the incantations 
 of such a witch as she ! This was three o'clock in the 
 morning. At four o'clock she was arrested, and at half- 
 past four was on her way to the Bastille. She would 
 have done better in taking Beugnot's advice. 
 
 The rest of the gang were soon arrested Caglios- 
 tro, his wife, the fair Feliciani, Reteaux de Villette, 
 Courtesan Oliva. All Paris was wild with excitement. 
 The air was dark with the showers of memorials is-
 
 218 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. Cn. XIV. 
 
 sued by the different defendants. All the Rohan in- 
 terest, all the high nobility and high clergy, were rabid 
 at the imprisonment of a noble and a prince of the 
 Church. To make bad worse for himself, Louis gave 
 the case into the hands of the Paris Parliament. 
 
 The whole business of the necklace is queer. No one 
 will ever now get to the bottom* of it. The cardinal 
 certainly negotiated for it. Marie Antoinette, who bad 
 refused it from Louis once and again, seems certainly 
 to have, not unnaturally in her woman's way, coveted 
 the glittering toy. De Rohan seems certainly to have 
 believed that the queen would be willing to have it, and 
 not unwilling to have it from his hands. The hostile 
 story the story which Louis Blanc believed is that 
 the queen longed for the diamonds, used the cardinal 
 and Madame de la Motte for her intermediaries, and 
 bought, or wished to buy, the necklace by instalments. 
 It would be useless to go through the terrible intricacies 
 of the most astonishing scandal in the world. There 
 was that wonderful sham interview between the queen 
 and De Rohan at night in the Versailles garden ; there 
 was that wonderful sham signature, "Marie Antoinette 
 de France." About these points the curious thing is 
 that the queen's party asserted a sham in each case, and 
 that Madame de la Motte admitted the sham, but in- 
 sisted that the queen was a party to the absurd impo- 
 sition. The admirers of Marie Antoinette see, and will 
 still see, in her a deeply injured victim. Her enemies 
 see, and will still see, a designing, avid, and unscrupu- 
 lous woman. Every one must choose between the two 
 alternatives. It is simply impossible to decide. 
 
 The bewildering, maddening nine months' trial, with 
 its multiplicity of witnesses, its wealth of mendacity, 
 its well-nigh incredible exposure of roguery and credu-
 
 1785-86. THE NIXE MONTHS' TRIAL. 219 
 
 lity, ended in the acquittal of the cardinal and the ac- 
 quittal of Cagliostro. But if the Parliament acquitted 
 the cardinal and Cagliostro, Louis did not acquit them. 
 They were both ordered into exile. For the others the 
 trial ended in the condemnation to the galleys for life 
 of the man Villette, who confessed to forging the 
 queen's signature ; the condemnation of Madame de la 
 Motte, who was to be whipped, branded, and impris- 
 oned for life. The Countess de Sabran, in one of those 
 letters to the Chevalier de Boufflers which are among 
 the most charming examples of last-century correspond- 
 ence, gives a long account of the punishment of Ma- 
 dame de la Motte, which took place at six o'clock in 
 the morning, in order to avoid too great a concourse of 
 curious people. The unfortunate woman was sleeping 
 profoundly when they came to tell her that her lawyer 
 was waiting to talk with her about her affairs. They 
 had adopted this course the more easily to effect their 
 object. She got up, not fearing anything, put on a 
 small petticoat and a cloak, and descended quickly to 
 the room, where she beheld eight men and M. Le Bre- 
 ton, the registrar, who held her sentence in his hand. 
 At this sight she was much agitated, and tried to fly ; 
 whereupon they threw themselves upon her, and tied 
 the little, delicate hands, which her admirers had called 
 charming, and which were certainly very dexterous. 
 Madame de la Motte boldly asked why they took such 
 precautions. " I shall not escape you ; if you were 
 executioners you could not treat me worse." She be- 
 lieved that it was only a question of placing her in a 
 convent for a few years. They told her to go down on 
 her knees, and, as she was not inclined to do so, one of 
 the executioners gave her a sharp blow, which brought 
 her to the ground. M. Le Breton then read her sen-
 
 220 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XIV. 
 
 tence. When she heard that she was going to be 
 whipped and branded, she went into convulsions and 
 into a fearful fit of passion, biting everything that was 
 near her, tearing her clothes, and pulling out her hair. 
 In spite of this the executioners seized her and car- 
 ried her to the place of punishment. There they put 
 the rope round her neck, and tried to undress her ; but 
 she defended herself like a lioness, with feet, hands, 
 and teeth, and so obstinately that they were obliged to 
 cut her clothes and even her chemise in order to make 
 an end of the affair ; " which," says Madame de Sabran, 
 demurely, " was very indecent, as, in spite of the unrea- 
 sonable hour which had been chosen with the object of 
 keeping people away, spectators were present in very 
 great numbers." The poor wretch uttered loud cries, 
 always saying, " Spare the blood of the Valois !" She 
 hurled forth curses against the Parliament, the cardinal, 
 and the queen she had wronged. She struggled so vio- 
 lently that the executioner could not perform the op- 
 eration of branding her as perfectly as he wished, and 
 scored her all down the back. After the infliction of 
 this stern punishment, they conveyed her in a hack- 
 ney coach to the Salpetriere. Soon after, however, in 
 the most mysterious, incomprehensible manner, she es- 
 caped from the Salpetriere and joined her husband, who 
 had been condemned to the galleys in his absence in 
 London. 
 
 One is anxious to get away from this affair of the col- 
 lar. It is horrible, haunting ; the truth is not in it. It 
 is like a sick vision, fantastic as some picture dream by 
 Callot, some fiction dream by Hoffmann, in which queens 
 and cardinals, false prophets and prostitutes, join in a 
 mad devil's medley of the most unmeaning kind. It 
 was not to be understood then ; it is not to be under-
 
 1791. THE LAST OF LA MOTTE. 221 
 
 stood now. The stanch partisans of Marie Antoinette 
 may think her all innocent ; her enemies may think her 
 all guilty there is evidence or lack of evidence either 
 way. One thing is certain : the affair of the necklace 
 struck a cruel blow at the tottering monarchy. The 
 queen never recovered from the scandal. Cagliostro, 
 for whom St. Angelo waits Cagliostro, with his buf- 
 foon babble of Medina and Acharat, and Althotas and 
 all his machinery of burlesque prophet ; Madame de la 
 Motte, with her branded bosom and blistering tongue ; 
 forger Villette and fools Boehmer and Bassenge ; amo- 
 rous, infamous cardinal, and light-hearted light-o'-love 
 Oliva, among them managed to leave a terrible stain 
 upon the fair name and fair fame of Marie Antoinette. 
 Whether Marie Antoinette were innocent or guilty is 
 really, in this regard, of no moment to us now. What 
 is of moment is that the scandal of the Diamond Neck- 
 lace attached an association of shame to her name, and 
 that the blunderings of De Rohan, and the plunderings 
 of Madame de la Motte, if they failed in all else, suc- 
 ceeded in this in shaking the monarchy. Let us ac- 
 cept that fact as self-evident, and get out again into the 
 clear air. 
 
 But before we pass from the horror of the story, 
 let us see what fate fell upon the principal actors in 
 the queer business. Cagliostro, after beating about 
 the world and living in all manner of places Sloane 
 Street, Knightsbridge, being one of them at last was 
 run to earth in Rome, imprisoned in the Castle of St. 
 Angelo, and there, for all his cunning, the Grand Kophta 
 died. Madame de la Motte ended her evil life in Lon- 
 don, after publishing a vast amount of infamy, by leap- 
 ing out from a window to escape some creditors whom 
 she seemed to think were in reality determined to kid-
 
 222 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XIV. 
 
 nap her. The countess, according to the La Motte 
 memoirs, had persuaded herself that a plot was on foot 
 to carry her off to France, and there imprison her 
 again. She seems to have been driven almost insane 
 by this terror. When her creditors succeeded in break- 
 ing in her door, the wretched woman dropped out of 
 her window, and fell with violence upon the pavement. 
 It was her misfortune not to be killed on the spot ; she 
 was terribly injured, terribly mutilated. In this state 
 she lived for several weeks, and at last died, at the age 
 of thirty-four. " Her whole life," the memoirs observe 
 sententiously, " was one long career of misery ; but it 
 might have ended happily had not the privilege of her 
 birth, by over-exalting her imagination, developed be- 
 yond measure those sentiments of pride and ambition 
 which conducted her to her fall." 
 
 It really would seem as if a relentless destiny were 
 pursuing every one of the knaves and the fools, the 
 dupers and the duped, who were mixed up in the mys- 
 tery of the Diamond Necklace. They all came to a bad 
 end, the big rogues and the little rogues, the big fools 
 and the little fools. If the Diamond Necklace had con- 
 tained some such stone as those we hear of in Oriental 
 legend which entail a curse upon such as come into con- 
 tact with them, it could not have been more ominous of 
 disaster to all who had anything to do with it. De- 
 moiselle d'Oliva married a scoundrel named Beausire, 
 and is said to have died miserably in 1789. The scoun- 
 drel Beausire played his base part of spy and feeder of 
 the guillotine till his turn came. Fouquier Tinville did 
 not like him, it was said, and the guillotine had him and 
 rid the world of him. Boehmer and Bassenge, luckless 
 court jewellers, became bankrupt. 
 
 As for the wicked, foolish cardinal, his end of life
 
 1803. THE LAST OF CARDINAL DE ROHAN. 223 
 
 was better than the bulk of it had been. Soon after 
 the great national ceremony in the Champ de Mars, De 
 Rohan was ordered by the Assembly to resume his func- 
 tions as deputy within fifteen days. Instead of obey- 
 ing, he wrote saying that, as it was impossible for him 
 to give his allegiance to the new civil constitution of 
 the clergy, he put his seat at the disposal of the Assem- 
 bly. The cardinal was naturally looked upon with sus- 
 picion by the popular party. He retired to Ettenheim, 
 a dependency of his Strasburg bishopric, lying beyond 
 the French frontier, on the opposite bank of the Rhine. 
 Here, in his capacity as prince of the Holy Roman Em- 
 pire, he raised frequent levies of troops for the army of 
 the Prince de Conde, whom he aided with a quite un- 
 expected and amazing energy. Naturally, again, these 
 proceedings infuriated the popular party. De Rohan 
 was constantly being denounced in the National Assem- 
 bly, and on one occasion a solemn proposal was made 
 to indict him before the national high court. The As- 
 sembly, however, seeing that the cardinal was out of its 
 reach, paid no heed to the proposal, although it was 
 renewed time and again, but quietly contented itself, 
 after the cardinal's flight, with ordering the municipal- 
 ity of Strasburg to lay violent hands upon all the prop- 
 erty and the estates of the fugitive. It is a queer pict- 
 ure which history paints for us, of the evil old cardinal 
 who had been so base and who had done so much harm, 
 deprived of his vast revenues and living a modest and 
 frugal life, intent only on securing the happiness of his 
 diocese, now reduced to a small patch of territory on 
 the right bank of the Rhine. He had been as profli- 
 gate and as pitiable as Sardanapalus ; it is curious to 
 find that in the last flicker of his old age he showed 
 something of the strenuous spirit that animated the
 
 224 
 
 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XIV. 
 
 Assyrian prince. He died on February 16, 1803, in the 
 sixty-ninth year of his ignominious life. "His noble 
 conduct," says M. Imbert de Saint-Amand, "his gen- 
 erous help to the Emigrants, the reforms operated in 
 his morals in some measure expiated his past faults, and, 
 finishing devoutly a life that had so long been scandal- 
 ous, he died at Ettenheim in peace." 
 
 The scoundrelly male De la Motte outlived every per- 
 son connected with the affair of the collar. He drifted 
 through all manner of perils and degradations and mis- 
 eries, sinking lower and lower as the years went by. 
 In 1825 it is Feuillet de Conches who tells the tale 
 a man bowed down by age and misery presented him- 
 self at M. de Lavan's bureau, and was received by the 
 chief of his cabinet, a man of great merit and high char- 
 acter, M. Duplessis. It was Count de la Motte, who 
 came to ask for bread. M. Duplessis talked with him 
 about the Diamond Necklace, and suggested that he 
 should write his memoirs, including his reminiscences 
 of the mysterious episode. La Motte thereupon wrote 
 what was suggested, and with every appearance of good 
 faith. His notes only confirmed the details which were 
 already known. The queen's memory had no need of 
 being cleared by a poor broken-down wretch who, after 
 having helped to cast a shadow upon her fame by con- 
 tributing to the calumnies of his wife, now came for- 
 ward, under the stress of misery, to deny them to a 
 Royalist government which might be willing to pay 
 solidly for the denial. Still it was none the less pre- 
 cious to have an authentic denial written by one of the 
 principal actors in this too famous drama. If De la 
 Motte was an old man, worn down by misfortune, he 
 still retained all his intelligence, understanding the char- 
 acter of his atonement, and making it, according to the
 
 1831. THE LAST OF COUNT DE LA MOTTE. 225 
 
 opinion of M. Duplessis, in all good faith. Out of re- 
 spect to hallowed memories ; out of respect, above all, 
 to the daughter of Louis XVI., to whom the resuscita- 
 tion of the name of De la Motte would have been the 
 cause of considerable grief, M. de Lavan thought it best 
 to envelop in obscurity the few days this unfortunate 
 being had still to live. 
 
 It seems that the pretensions of the scoundrelly male 
 De la Motte were exceedingly modest. All he asked 
 was an annuity of from three hundred to four hundred 
 francs for life, and his admission into the Hospice de 
 Chaillot. He had still some years of miserable life be- 
 fore him, and we are told that during the last years of 
 his existence the count, who was commonly known by 
 the nickname of " Valois-Collier," took his daily stroll 
 beneath the famous " Galeries de Bois " of the Palais 
 Royal, those galleries where Balzac's Lucien de Ru- 
 bempre wandered, and which have long since joined 
 the Snows of Tester- Year. To the very last, therefore, 
 the count affected the neighborhood of his old haunts, 
 the gambling-saloons of the Palais Royal. For some 
 half a dozen years this strange figure, like some queer, 
 withered, evil old ghost, haunted the Paris in which he 
 had played so vile a part. His face may often have 
 been looked upon by those brilliant young men who 
 were yet to be known as " Young France." They may 
 well have shuddered in the sunlight as they saw that 
 ugly memento of an ugly past creep by them in the 
 day. Overwhelmed by infirmity and misery, he died 
 at last in the month of November, 1831, having almost 
 reached his eightieth year. 
 I. 15
 
 226 THE FKENCH KEVOLUTION. CH. XV. 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 SOWING THE WIND. 
 
 WHEN Turgot was whistled down the wind a new 
 man made his appearance upon the stage, and tried his 
 hand at the desperate game of somehow pulling French 
 finance together. An ingenious, obsequious M. Clugny 
 de Nuis took the control of finance. This Clugny de 
 Nuis is almost forgotten in history. Famous or infa- 
 mous in his time, and among his townsfolk of Bordeaux, 
 for his debaucheries, he had been branded by an epi- 
 gram which found in the letters of his name the words 
 " Indignus Luce." Knowing that his immoralities would 
 not commend him to the austere Louis XVI., he affected 
 a passion for lock-making, and imported two locksmiths 
 from Germany to perfect him in the art. But neither 
 disfavor with the virtuous nor favor with a locksmith 
 monarch was to be of much moment to him. He had 
 his controller-generalship, but, like Richard in the play, 
 he did not keep it long. He died in October of 1776, 
 in consequence, it was said, of some desperate indulgence 
 in debauchery, .and there stepped at once into his place 
 the official who had taken what may be called the sec- 
 retaryship to the treasury, Necker, the Genevese banker. 
 Necker was still quite a young man. Born in 1732, he 
 was only forty-four years of age. Already he was be- 
 ginning to show some signs of that corpulence which 
 was in later years to set the court smiling at his bulk ; 
 already his chin was markedly doubling. On the whole
 
 1732-1804. NECKER. 227 
 
 he was a striking-looking man, with brown, vivacious, 
 piercing eyes, with arched and bushy eyebrows, with 
 closely drawn mouth, with feminine forehead. He held 
 his head high, and yet, in spite of his stiff demeanor, he 
 was awkward in carriage and embarrassed in manner. 
 He was bulky of body and colorless of complexion, 
 easily depressed, a great feeder, and yet always hungry. 
 The sound of his voice was not agreeable to listen to, 
 and his elocution was not easy. His efforts at wit were 
 of the most ponderous kind, and he always exaggerated 
 any social part he strove to play, being absurdly rever- 
 ential where he might wish to assume a studied polite- 
 ness, heavily complimentary where he wished to flatter. 
 He was an excellent banker, no better in any of the 
 great European houses, and if France could have been 
 saved by a display of the qualities that enable a pushing 
 young man to rise to eminence in a banker's counting- 
 house, Necker would undoubtedly have saved France. 
 But France unhappily wanted more than a fine head for 
 figures ; it wanted statesmanship, and of statesmanship 
 Necker had nothing at all. Nobody, it has been hap- 
 pily said, can be a great statesman without imagination, 
 and with imagination Necker was painfully unprovided. 
 But he had a comprehensive, consuming belief in him- 
 self, which had counted for much in the past, and which 
 his career hitherto had indeed amply justified. When 
 he was fifteen years old, his father, a professor of public 
 law in Geneva, had sent him to Paris to the great bank- 
 ing-house of Vernet. Like the good boys in the stories, 
 his abilities earned him the admiration of, and finally a 
 partnership with, his master. The Thellusson brothers 
 allowed him to share in their great enterprises; every- 
 thing he touched seemed to bring him luck. While still a 
 comparatively young man he found himself a millionaire
 
 228 
 
 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XV. 
 
 among millionaires, wealthy in a world of wealth. On 
 the roll of fame whereon the names of great bankers are 
 traced, the name of Necker stood gratif yingly high. But 
 the millionaire banker was not satisfied. He had other 
 ambitions; he wished to make himself a reputation in the 
 world of politics and in the world of letters. His ardu- 
 ous youth had not allowed him time to acquire any great 
 degree of culture; he now strove to make up the deficien- 
 cy. He set to work to accomplish these two great aims 
 as he would have set to work to float some brilliant finan- 
 cial scheme. He determined to enrich his mind with 
 the education he had missed, to create out of Necker 
 the banker a Necker the man of letters. He read hard, 
 he surrounded himself with men of letters ; his strongest 
 aid in his new purpose was his wife. In his marriage, 
 as in everything else, he was singularly lucky. Made- 
 moiselle Suzanne Curchod came of a family that had 
 been ruined and proscribed by the Edict of Nantes. 
 She had been carefully educated ; she had turned her 
 education to account in keeping a school at Geneva. 
 She was neither beautiful nor graceful, but her face was 
 striking and interesting, and she was, what was of great 
 importance in that age, a very brilliant conversational- 
 ist. She was the very woman to make an ideal wife for 
 an ambitious banker. She set up her salon in Paris, 
 after the fashion of Madame Geoffrin and Madame du 
 Deffand ; Marmontel and Thomas were put to work to 
 create a society for her ; her Fridays soon became fa- 
 mous in a certain set, and scholars, poets, Encyclopae- 
 dists, and great nobles with literary leanings honored her 
 salon with their presence. Madame de Stael, passing a 
 plain-featured, precocious infancy in such surroundings, 
 has left her account of these gatherings, and the heart- 
 burnings they used to cause from the difficulty of keep-
 
 1*776. MADAME NECKER. 220 
 
 ing all the irritable geniuses of literature and philos- 
 ophy, of prose and verse, in that serene condition of 
 flattered content which allowed them to be agreeable 
 to others. 
 
 At the time when, in 1776, Necker assumed the 
 controller -generalship, Madame Necker's comeliness 
 had passed in great measure away. She had grown 
 very thin ; she was suffering from the earliest attacks 
 of a nervous malady which at last reduced her to such 
 a condition that she could not keep in the same posi- 
 tion for more than a few minutes at a time, so that 
 when she went to the theatre she was obliged to keep 
 in the back of the box, and balance herself alternately 
 first on one leg and then on the other. She was very 
 charitable, and her charity aided the popularity of her 
 husband. She founded a hospital in the Rue de Sevres, 
 to which the name of Necker clung ; she was entirely 
 absorbed in admiration for her husband's genius, and 
 the ardent desire to urge and aid it as much as possible 
 to its legitimate and lofty conclusion. 
 
 A certain flavor of romance lingers around the name 
 and fame of Madame Keeker. She was born in the 
 Pays de Vaud, in the Presbytery of Grassier. She was 
 the daughter of a respectable, sufficiently learned, and 
 somewhat Richteresque Swiss pastor. We are told 
 that the simple white house, with its green shutters, 
 may still be seen, separated from the main road by a 
 little garden planted with fruit-trees. How many of 
 the amiable and amatory young ministers of Grassier 
 who recognized the growing charms of Suzanne Curchod 
 and cast glances between the fruit-trees as they walked 
 by the Curchod garden, guessed at the restless ambi- 
 tion that sheltered itself behind the green shutters ? 
 Suzanne Curchod was an educated young woman. If
 
 230 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XV. 
 
 she reminds one a little of Byron's heroine who knew 
 " Latin, that is, the Lord's Prayer, and Greek, the al- 
 phabet, I'm nearly sure," if her plunges into science 
 were scarcely so profound as those of Madame du Cha- 
 telet, her accomplishments were quite enough to make 
 her remarkable, and, when coupled with her youth and 
 comeliness, to make her think more than well of her- 
 self. But she was not content with her neat looks and 
 her learning ; she burned as eagerly as Mirabeau him- 
 self with a desire for noble ancestry. She raked out 
 from the obscurity of history some Curchods or Curcho- 
 dis who battled in old time for Savoy, and tried hard 
 with no encouragement from royal genealogists to per- 
 suade herself that these were her illustrious ancestors. 
 
 While she was still quite a young girl she was taken 
 to Lausanne Lausanne as yet blissfully indifferent to 
 the sojourn of Gibbon, blissfully unconscious of the 
 existence of Casanova. In Lausanne, Mademoiselle 
 Curchod made quite a sensation. She was allowed to 
 found one of those dreary little academies of which 
 Rome had set the fashion with its stucco Arcadia, an 
 Academic de la Poudriere, over which she presided as 
 Themire. In Lausanne, too, she loved and was beloved 
 by the great Gibbon. Gibbon cuts a somewhat un- 
 graceful figure in the business. We all know how he 
 sighed as a lover, obeyed as a son. Perhaps Gibbon 
 was not a marrying man. He was, in obedience to des- 
 tiny, to write the " Decline and Fall," and drink all 
 those pipes of sweet wine which were so bad for him. 
 She had a higher destiny before her than to be the wife 
 of a corpulent historian. She thought she was broken- 
 hearted ; she allowed her faithful and quite hopeless 
 lover, Moulton, to get Rousseau to put pressure on the 
 departed Gibbon in vain. When her parents died, she
 
 1*764-76. THE NECKERS. 231 
 
 came to Paris as the companion of Madame de Ver- 
 menoux, a rich widow, and met at her house the partner 
 in Thellusson's bank, M. Necker, a rejected and, it was 
 presumed, despairing suitor of Madame de Vermenoux. 
 Necker fell, however, promptly in love with Suzanne 
 Curehod, and the judicious diplomacy of the devoted 
 and self-denying Moulton brought about the marriage 
 in 1764, and launched a very ambitious woman upon a 
 very remarkable career. 
 
 When Necker took office he could look back with 
 satisfaction upon an eminently successful past. Thanks 
 to himself, he had made money, won distinction, taken 
 the front rank in the great financial fight. Thanks to 
 his position as minister for the republic of Geneva, he 
 had gained that entry to the court of Versailles which 
 had brought him into contact with the brilliant world 
 of stars and titles and ancestral names. Thanks to his 
 wife, he had a salon as well attended as any in all Paris ; 
 he could bid beneath his. roof at any time the Grimms, 
 the Diderots, the Marmontels, the Galianis, theD'Alem- 
 berts, the Buffons, the Raynals, all the crowd of wits 
 and men of genius, without whom no salon could be 
 said to exist. Famous women, too, which was even 
 more important, thronged his halls. Madame Geoffrin, 
 Madame du Deffand, Madame d'Houdentot, the sweet 
 little Duchess de Lauzun, the charming wife of a pict- 
 uresque, heartless rapscallion, for whom, alas ! the Ter- 
 ror waits, the Marechale de Luxembourg, that crown 
 and glory of the Old Regime all these were among his 
 friends ; some were his devoted friends. The Duchess 
 de Lauzun was among the devoted friends ; she carried 
 her devotion so far as actually to slap the face of some 
 one in the Tuileries Gardens who spoke slightingly of 
 the great Necker. Thanks to his daughter, too, the
 
 ^32 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XV. 
 
 witty, but certainly not beautiful, Germaine, Necker's 
 importance was increased. She had been sought in 
 marriage by William Pitt, the rising star of English 
 statesmanship ; she had been sought in marriage by 
 Prince George Augustus of Mecklenburg, brother of 
 the reigning duke. Had she not, in the very January 
 of this marvellous year, 1776, been given in marriage to 
 the Baron de Stael-Holstein, the ambassador from 
 Sweden and Gustavus III. ? It may be admitted that 
 Necker as he entered upon office had a very satisfac- 
 tory past to look back upon. Wealthy, popular, in- 
 fluential, moving in the best society, adored by his wife, 
 adored by his daughter, adored by a good and gracious 
 duchess, and now controller-general of finance and tri- 
 umphant over Turgot what could a man born of a 
 woman wish for more ? And yet Necker did wish for 
 more ; in bis solid, slightly stolid way he saw a mag- 
 nificent destiny before him in which he was to play an 
 unprecedented part, and be hailed by a reformed France 
 as its true father. Men are given on very little provo- 
 cation to imagine themselves saviors of society. It is 
 clear that Necker had a good deal of provocation to 
 believe that destiny had marked him out as a savior of 
 society. The author of the "E^oge" of Colbert was 
 now to be the author of the " Compte Rendu " that 
 memorable "Account Rendered." That any man should 
 attempt to throw some light upon the darknesses of 
 French finance, that he should actually set down in sim- 
 ple figures, which all who ran might read, a statement 
 of receipts and a statement of expenditure, seemed a sort 
 of miracle. It roused up a whirlwind against him, but 
 it won him friends, admirers, fanatics, all over France. 
 The period of Necker's administration was a fatal 
 period for France. The American War of Independ-
 
 1776. THE AMERICAN 1 WAR OF INDEPENDENCE. 233 
 
 ence broke out, and France was drawn into the strug- 
 gle. The reasons which led France to take a share in 
 the conflict were twofold : a desire for revenge upon 
 England for her successes over the French arms in 
 Canada and India, with the consequent diminution of 
 French empire ; and, secondly, a commercial desire for 
 traffic with the American ports, which were sealed by 
 the English supremacy to all but English ships. The 
 war was a triumph for the federated states, a humilia- 
 tion for England, a catastrophe for France. Brilliant, 
 high-minded young officers like Lafayette, brilliant, 
 base-minded young nobles like Lauzun, might win glory; 
 avid, unscrupulous, adventurous men of letters like 
 Beaumarchais might see their way to the turning of a 
 dishonest penny out of the business. But France her- 
 self had not the means for supporting such a war. 
 Necker could not increase the taxation ; he could not, 
 to any appreciable extent, economize ; he had to bor- 
 row, and he did borrow with both hands. But, how- 
 ever fatal his borrowings were to the welfare of France, 
 it was not they that brought about his own temporary 
 downfall. It was his efforts after reform in the finan- 
 cial systems of the country which massed against him 
 a legion of adversaries whom a stronger man than 
 Necker could not have withstood. He had against him 
 Turgot and the Turgotist economists, who did not for- 
 give his succession to Turgot and his destruction of 
 Turgot's plans. He had against him all the financial 
 world, high and low, all the privileged in the adminis- 
 tration and in the court ; he had against him the par- 
 liaments ; he had against him the ministers ; he had 
 against him De Maurepas ; he had practically against 
 him the king, who certainly was not for him. There 
 was nothing for a disappointed and indignant Necker
 
 234 THE PRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XV. 
 
 to do but to resign, and resign he accordingly did on 
 May 19, 1781, in a very cold letter to Louis, in which 
 he expressed the hope that the king would cherish some 
 memory of the years of hard but happy work, and the 
 boundless zeal which he had given to his service. 
 
 Necker thus knocked off his perch and sulking in 
 dignified retirement at Saint-Ouen, the question arose 
 who was to carry on the fortunes of a bankrupt and 
 floundering monarchy. Even if any one had thought 
 of Turgot, Turgot was out of the question, for Turgot 
 had died shortly before the resignation of his rival 
 Necker. Controller Joly de Fleury tried his hand at 
 the muddle tried his hand for a season, during which, 
 on November 14, 1781, De Maurepas died, to the great 
 grief of the king. De Maurepas had done all that lay 
 in him to ruin France, and died no doubt serene in the 
 conviction that he was a great statesman and had con- 
 ferred incalculable benefits upon his country. Then 
 Joly de Fleury dropped out of the great financial game 
 or puzzle of how to make a bankrupt state seem to be 
 thriving, and Controller d'Ormesson took his place and 
 tried his hand for a while, till be, too, dropped out of 
 the game, and his place was taken by a new, pushing, 
 successful man who was called Calonne. 
 
 The overthrow of Necker was the signal for a series 
 of demonstrations in his honor such as might well con- 
 vince him that he was the idol and the destined savior 
 of France. France was flooded with engravings in his 
 praise, now representing him struggling with the hid- 
 eous figure of Envy wearing the mask of Hypocrisy, 
 now representing his bust securely planted on Envy 
 overthrown, now representing his medallion held on 
 high by the adoring arms of a Minerva-like Virtue, now 
 giving him as armorial bearing a single sleepless eye
 
 1783-87. DOING THE IMPOSSIBLE. 235 
 
 with the assurance that nothing past, present, or future 
 escaped its vigilance ; this last dedicated in all enthu- 
 siasm to his illustrious son-in-law of Stael-Holstein. 
 Now, too, began that creation and distribution of busts 
 of the popular fallen minister, busts which should yet 
 play a significant and grim part in history. Seldom 
 has a defeated minister been so bepictured, bestatued, 
 bedaubed with praise. Saint-Ouen not, be it noted, 
 the Saint-Ouen that is later to be associated with Louis 
 XVIII., but another place near by of like name be- 
 came the Mecca of a world of adoring visitors. There 
 was, says Grimm, a well-nigh perpetual procession of 
 carriages to the sacred seclusion. Was it surprising if 
 Achilles Necker in his tent at Saint-Ouen thought that 
 the fate and the fortunes of France depended upon his 
 single arm ? 
 
 To outward appearance Necker's successor, Galon ne, 
 was not unpleasing. Those who looked upon him in 
 the flesh, as we look upon him in contemporary portrait- 
 ure, saw a sufficiently comely gentleman, brave in star 
 and ribbon, with a fine oval face, expansive forehead, 
 wide, keen eyes, and a firm mouth a man with a look 
 of courtly courage that was not unattractive. Courtly, 
 indeed, he was. Was there ever a more courtly phrase 
 uttered than that in which, in answer to some request 
 of Marie Antoinette's, he replied : " Madame, if it is pos- 
 sible, it is done ; if it is impossible, it shall be done." 
 Yet we may well believe that as he bowed over the 
 royal white hand, that as he uttered this insane epi- 
 gram, the bold eyes smiled at his own audacity, and 
 that behind his brazen mask his tongue was in his 
 cheek. He was certainly courageous. Only a man of 
 courage could have taken such a post, and could in 
 such a post have acted as Calonne acted. There are
 
 236 THE ttffiNCtt REVOLtTiOtf. CH. XV. 
 
 many interpretations of Calonne's character. He has 
 been portrayed as a kind of desperate gentleman ad- 
 venturer, treating finance with the hardy audacity of a 
 Grand Seigneur making love to a pretty woman who 
 has only to be rallied a little brusquely to yield the 
 heart's desire. He has been described by Louis Blanc 
 as a cold and crafty calculator, whose light-hearted au- 
 dacity was but one studied factor in the sum of his keen 
 and daring schemes. He has even had his admirers, who 
 are pleased to see in him a patriot sacrificed to the self- 
 ishness of others. 
 
 Whatever Calonne's schemes may have been, what- 
 ever his hidden purpose, whether mere reckless prodi- 
 gality, the childish delight in making the money spin 
 while he could, or the deep-laid, well-nigh medical pur- 
 pose of humoring privilege to the top of its bent, and 
 then when the money was all gone frightening it into 
 acquiescence in infinitely needed reform whatever Ca- 
 lonne's purpose, the facts are plain enough. Calonne 
 raised borrowing to the level of a fine art, and he spent 
 with splendid magnificence. Did any one want money, 
 let him come to Calonne. Had the queen any desire the 
 realization of which involved the spending of large sums, 
 was not Calonne, her devoted servant, ready to do the 
 impossible ? He squandered money with Aladdin-like 
 alacrity ; had he been Fortunatus, Midas, and Monte 
 Cristo all rolled into one, he could scarcely have made 
 a braver show for the time. What magnificent pal- 
 aces were bought for royal pleasure-taking beautiful 
 Rambouillet, where the swans float on enchanted wa- 
 ters ; beautiful Saint-Cloud, and many another place 
 of beauty ! Some money, indeed, went well and wisely 
 for Cherbourg port ; most of it went ill and foolishly, 
 whether with plan or without. Calonne set himself to
 
 1783-87. CALOXXE THE REFORMER. 237 
 
 rebuilding the Avails of Paris, and increasing the effi- 
 cacy of the gatherers of the hated taxes at the gates in 
 the ugly little pavilions built by Ledoux, for which 
 piece of work an anonymous pamphleteer, presumed to 
 be Mirabeau, suggested thatCalonne ought to be hanged. 
 So the time slipped by, glittering with magnificence, 
 and then Calonne began to find that he too had his 
 enemies. It was said freely that Calonne had looked 
 after himself which was indeed true enough, for he 
 had induced Louis XVI. to pay his debts on his as- 
 sumption of office ; he was accused vaguely of various 
 malpractices. His attempt, sufficiently excellent in its 
 way, to renew the gold coinage was made a most potent 
 weapon of attack against him. Whether Calonne had 
 now come to the ripe moment for his elaborate scheme, 
 or whether, like some more commonplace adventurer, 
 he had only come to the end of his tether, in either 
 case he saw that it was time to make a new move. He 
 made a new move, and an amazing move. Out of ex- 
 isting chaos he evoked the Notables. 
 
 Upon the king, the queen, the court, the appearance 
 of Calonne in his new character ^as the reformer was 
 most astonishing. Here was the light-hearted, brisk, 
 efficacious maker or raiser of money, the buyer of pal- 
 aces, the doer of the impossible, actually demanding re- 
 forms like a mere Turgot or Necker. The man in the 
 story who finds the creature whom he has looked upon 
 as his faithful servant suddenly asserting himself as his 
 deadliest enemy, typifies fairly enough the feelings of 
 the court at the astounding conversion, under their 
 very eyes, of Calonne the courtier into Calonne the 
 reformer. Instantly the privileged classes ranged them- 
 selves against him as they had ranged themselves 
 against Turgot and against Necker, only with the more
 
 238 
 
 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XV. 
 
 ferocity that they saw in Calonne not merely an enemy, 
 but a traitor. Well might the Notables alarm all those 
 courtiers who were flinging money to the four winds, all 
 those bourgeois nobles who hated and were hated by 
 the men to whom nobility had become a birth caste, all 
 those wealthy men of the middle class who were as 
 scornful of and as detested by the roturier as if they 
 boasted the bluest blood in France, all those princes ec- 
 clesiastical who enjoyed swollen incomes wrung from 
 the rank and file of the Church, wrung from the peas- 
 antry, all those Commendatory Abbes who frisked on 
 scarlet heels in my lady's chamber, all those intendants 
 whom Law declared to be the real governors of France, 
 all those worthies of the Periwig Makers' Guild who 
 wrangled for precedence with the worthies of the Ba- 
 kers' Guild. The extraordinary world that lived by and 
 for the Old Order might well have trembled at the tread 
 of the Notables as they wended their way to Versailles, 
 might well have trembled if they could have guessed 
 what echo the utterance of one voice in that Assembly 
 would awake. 
 
 In the midst of all the bustle and excitement of the 
 arriving Notables, Vergennes died, on the night of Jan- 
 uary 12th. Never a sovereign indued with a strong spirit 
 of self-reliance, Louis was accustomed to lean very heav- 
 ily indeed upon the ministers in whom he trusted, and 
 he had trusted profoundly in Vergennes. As the grave 
 closed over the coffin of the dead man, the luckless king, 
 with tears in his eyes, was overheard to mutter the un- 
 kingly words, " Oh, how happy I should be if only I 
 were lying beside y6u in that grave !" The epitaph of 
 the house of Capet was sounded in that piteous wail of 
 the weak king, who felt himself upon the e'dge of events 
 .too potent for his feeble personality.
 
 1787. MEETING OF THE NOTABLES. 239 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 THE NOTABLES. 
 
 CALONNE asked for his Notables, and he got his No- 
 tables. From all parts of France, the nobility and 
 clergy who, with less than a dozen other persons, made 
 up that curious body, came together "in the bleak 
 short days." On February 22, 1787, they assembled, 
 one hundred and forty-four of them in all, very uncer- 
 tain as to what they were expected to do, still more un- 
 certain as to what they, with their peculiar and ill- 
 defined powers, could do. They were divided into 
 eight committees, each presided over by a prince of 
 the royal blood, the good duke of Penthievre, the two 
 false royal brothers of Provence and Artois, the duke 
 of Orleans the most conspicuous. The duke of Orleans 
 seemed just then to be sunk in a kind of sullen tran- 
 quillity or angry stupor seemed to be doing nothing, 
 and even thinking nothing, of very much moment. Yet 
 we may well believe that his thoughts were as moment- 
 ous as his deeds were soon to prove momentous. 
 
 To this executive assembly Calonne unbosomed him- 
 self. It was a frank, somewhat cynical process ; it 
 looked as if the man thought that the luck of his des- 
 perate audacity might again prevail in the face of those 
 committees those royal princes, those Notables steeped 
 to the lips in privilege. He may have been hopeful ; he 
 certainly acted as if he were hopeful. In the stately 
 Salle des Menus, destined later to shelter a more impor-
 
 240 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XVI. 
 
 tant assemblage, he faced his Notables with a cool cour- 
 age which may almost be called admirable. His Nota- 
 bles indeed they were in a sense. The Notables were 
 summoned, each individual man of them, by special or- 
 der of the king ; and Calonne, acting through the king, 
 had so arranged the composition of the body as to 
 weaken as much as possible the various forms of oppo- 
 sition. Wittily, airily, audaciously he set forth before 
 the astounded Notables the actual condition of affairs. 
 Deficit, the one word deficit, that was the burden of his 
 swan song, that was the real fact to be faced. The defi- 
 cit, Calonne contended, was not all his fault, and he 
 proceeded swiftly and sharply to assail Necker, and to 
 controvert the " Compte Rendu " in all its most important 
 particulars. Then he denounced the abuses of the priv- 
 ileged orders with a vehemence which does something 
 to justify the fantastic saying of Madame de Stae'l, that 
 Calonne did more than any man to create the French 
 Revolution. Then he unfolded his own plans of re- 
 form, cutting right and left at the rotting tree of feu- 
 dalism, and sat down before the furious Notables, an 
 incarnation, in their eyes, of rampant, deadliest democ- 
 racy. 
 
 The furious Notables were in no mood to take Ca- 
 lonne quietly. Their fury blew upon him from all the 
 bureaux. He was like a man in some wild cave of the 
 winds, around whom all the hurricanes raged and wran- 
 gled. All his glittering words, all his bright audaci- 
 ties were now of no avail. The bureaux clamored for 
 his accounts a significant and most disagreeable de- 
 mand. If sheer picturesque urbanity, if a tongue 
 glibbed with all manner of soft speeches and smooth 
 speeches and hopeful speeches, could have got Calonne 
 out of the slough of despond into which he had waded
 
 1787. CALOXNE DISMISSED. 241 
 
 so cheerily, Calonne had been a rescued adventurer. 
 But they did not, could not, save him. The Notables 
 were open enemies ; Calonne had secret enemies too. 
 Monseigneur Lomenie de Brienne, Archbishop of Tou- 
 louse, had got it somehow or other into his vain head 
 that he was the man to save France at this crisis the 
 number of persons who were convinced that they and 
 they alone could save France was appalling ; he had 
 somehow or other impressed the same belief in his own 
 fitness into the mind of Abbe Vermond, Marie Antoi- 
 nette's adviser, and also into the head of the keeper of 
 the seals, Miromenil, whom Calonne looked upon as a 
 trusty adherent. When Calonne got wind of the con- 
 spiracy, he promptly dismissed Miromenil and ap- 
 pointed Lamoignon in his stead, but it was now too 
 late. The sun of Calonne's splendor was setting ; he 
 had fought a good fight if he had not kept the faith, 
 but his time was up. On April 1 7th he was dismissed, 
 and Lomenie de Brienne reigned in his place over the 
 perplexing collectorship. " The expelled Calonne," 
 says indignant English Perry, " now came over to Lon- 
 don, in which court he conjectured that these pecca- 
 dillos do no injury to a minister's reputation. The 
 warmth of friendship he has uniformly experienced 
 ever since from the court and the cabinet ministers 
 prove that he was in the right." 
 
 In all the noise of the storm that blew Calonne from 
 his post, the utterances of a certain young voice were 
 drowned and made little impression. Yet those utter- 
 ances were more significant and more important than 
 anything else that was said during the whole of the 
 troubled existence of the Notables. In the bureau that 
 was presided over by the Count d'Artois there was pres- 
 ent a young man who thought a good deal of himself, 
 I. 16
 
 242 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XVI. 
 
 and whom some people were beginning to think a good 
 deal of the Marquis de Lafayette. Young Lafayette 
 of the many names he had seven of them, Marie Jean 
 Paul Roch Yves Gilbert du Mottier was born in Au- 
 vergne, in the September of 1757, of a stately race of 
 soldiers. Though he was only thirty years old when 
 the Notables assembled, he had already lived a soldier's 
 life in his generation. His boyhood, we are told, was 
 even more deeply imbued with heroic longings than 
 that of most generous youths of warlike stock. He 
 dreamed of slaying fabulous monsters like a new The- 
 seus. He was made a musketeer when he was only thir- 
 teen years old; he was married to a granddaughter of 
 the Duke de Noailles when he was sixteen; when he 
 was scarcely twenty, and longing for the active career 
 of arms, his attention was captivated by the outbreak 
 of the American Revolution. In defiance of the wishes 
 of his own government, he crossed the Atlantic and of- 
 fered his bright sword to Washington. 
 
 Some critics have formed a very poor opinion of La- 
 fayette's merits in the American business and after. 
 They say that even if his birth and natural disposition 
 had not made him vain, the reception he met with in 
 America would have been enough to turn a wiser young 
 man's head. Though he was only twenty, though he 
 had never set a squadron in the field nor the division 
 of a battle knew more than a spinster, Washington gave 
 him important commands, in which he exhibited great 
 personal courage, but gave no signs of any military abil- 
 ity. It was the policy of Washington, according to this 
 hostile criticism, to win the active help of France by, on 
 every possible occasion, linking Lafayette's name with 
 his own. In this way Lafayette acquired as much fame 
 in America and in his own country as Washington him-
 
 1787. LAFAYETTE. 243 
 
 self; and when he returned to France, in 1779, to beg 
 for the assistance of a French army, he found himself 
 hailed as a conquering hero. The king gave him the 
 command of the Royal Dragoons, and he returned to 
 America more convinced than ever of his military ge- 
 nius. He served through the last campaigns, and was in 
 command at the capitulation of Lord Cornwallis at York- 
 town. Then he came back to France, after the conclu- 
 sion of the war, to find himself still regarded as a war- 
 rior famous for fight. He was praised in the Bull's 
 Eye, acclaimed in the streets, applauded in the theatres, 
 arid flattered in the salons. It is not, perhaps, surpris- 
 ing if he came to regard this flattery as his due; if he 
 became a thought conceited as to his military merits. 
 It is more to be regretted that he tried to play the part 
 of a leader of the gay young French nobility as well as 
 a great general, with far less qualifications for the part. 
 One day he had managed, with great pains, to get drunk, 
 and his last words, as he was being helped into his car- 
 riage, were, " Do not forget to tell Noailles how splen- 
 didly I have been drinking." A sorry piece of feather- 
 headed affectation for the hero of Yorktown ! 
 
 But if there is much to prompt an unfavorable judg- 
 ment, much must be admitted on the other side. La- 
 fayette's American admirers maintain, with great rea- 
 son, that Lafayette's character, after allowance has been 
 made for all its weaknesses, must be regarded as that 
 of a great man. Washington was a well-nigh unerring 
 judge of character, and he gave to Lafayette, almost 
 from the beginning, a confidence which was the basis 
 of a rare disinterested friendship, a friendship which 
 continued to the end. It was no weak character who 
 turned his back upon all the luxury, ease, pleasure, and 
 honors which high birth and position, wealth and youth
 
 244 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XVI. 
 
 could give ; who braved the displeasure of his sovereign 
 and the angry sneers of his kinsmen to share the hard- 
 ships and dangers of the Continental army, to starve 
 and freeze at Valley Forge with Washington, and to 
 participate with the neglected soldiers of the Continen- 
 tal army in what must have appeared to the sober-think- 
 ing world an insane struggle against hopeless odds. His 
 tact also enabled him to perform as great service in the 
 way of mediation as he performed by his sword. He 
 prevented by this the failure, at an early stage, of the 
 American alliance with France, and to him more than 
 to any other was due the gaining of the needful co- 
 operation with Washington at Yorktown of De Grasse 
 and Rochambeau. 
 
 On the whole, we must admit that Lafayette was a 
 high-minded gentleman; he was also an ambitious gen- 
 tleman, and Carlyle's term of "Cromwell-Grandison" 
 is not unhappy. We must bear in mind that he was 
 still very young, that he had been a great success in 
 America, that he was also a great success in Paris, that 
 he was deeply imbued with principles which, for the 
 time in which he was then living, were extremely ad- 
 vanced, though it needed but the turn of a couple of 
 years to make them seem exceedingly reactionary. In 
 short, he was an honorable, handsome, self -conceited, 
 eminently well-meaning, well-born second-class young 
 man. 
 
 Contemporary evidence is always interesting if it is 
 not always the best: let us see what shrewd, simple 
 English Perry says of Lafayette: "The Marquis de la 
 Fayette, as he was then called, distinguished himself 
 much at this time for his opposition to the arbitrary 
 measures of the court and its ministers. He had made 
 seven or eight campaigns in America, much to his rep-
 
 1787. WHAT PERRY SAYS OF LAFAYETTE. 245 
 
 utation as a soldier; he had also spent his leisure hours 
 with Washington, Paine, Schuyler, and others, not less 
 to his honor as a philosopher, and was highly esteemed 
 by them all. It was in their company that he attem- 
 pered the fierceness of the warrior with the philanthropy 
 of the man; it was from them he learned for he was 
 very young those maxims of civil polity which served 
 as the groundwork in the constitution of the free Amer- 
 ican government, and which were one day to be dissem- 
 inated among his compatriots at home. He returned to 
 France a conqueror, and, at the same time, a polished 
 gentleman ; he spoke our language fluently, and by 
 that means could converse with every Englishman re- 
 siding in his metropolis whose knowledge in the science 
 of government might make him a desirable companion. 
 The French court was flattered in taking to itself all 
 the honor it could derive from claiming this promising 
 young man as one of its choicest subjects, and at the 
 same time entertained many well-founded fears that 
 this champion in the American cause might eventually 
 prove a missionary from it to the genius of French lib- 
 erty. Thus, by mixing with and being admired by all 
 classes of his countrymen, he taught them to carol songs 
 to reviving freedom instead of those dirges they had so 
 lately chanted over its remains. In all public discourses 
 or debates M. de la Fayette not only maintained his phil- 
 osophical sentiments of the question upon the ground of 
 speculative reason, but he almost constantly introduced 
 the example of American practice. The king, under all 
 these circumstances, of which he was far from ignorant, 
 nominated La Fayette, with considerable reluctance, to 
 be one of the Notables. He prophetically apprehended 
 many disappointments to his views by such nomination; 
 but to leave him out of the appointment was to invite
 
 246 
 
 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XVI. 
 
 other ills of equal magnitude at least, and much more 
 near. 
 
 " The refractoriness of the members of the Notables 
 was ascribed wholly to the marquis; and as the Bastille 
 at this time was in being and in fashion, it was expected 
 every moment, by the friends of the marquis, that he 
 would be sent there by a lettre de cachet. He never- 
 theless persevered with spirit, and went so far as to ac- 
 cuse the minister, then in the zenith of his power, with 
 peculation in his department ; that he had sold crown 
 lands to the amount of two millions of livres without 
 rendering an account of the money, or even showing 
 that he had had the king's consent to dispose of them. 
 This was like taking a bull by the horns; and the friends 
 of the marquis trembled for the issue of the denuncia- 
 tion. The prince, in a menacing voice, asked La Fay- 
 ette if he would venture to put the accusation in writ- 
 ing ; to which he immediately answered, ' Most cer- 
 tainly;' and the paper was carried to the king, and oc- 
 casioned, though not immediately, that very minister's 
 dismissal; but as that was all the punishment inflicted 
 on him, it was shrewdly suspected that the queen and 
 her party knew the whole transaction, and had shared 
 in its profits." 
 
 But if he had been ten times vainer or weaker than 
 he was, he would still be a serious player in this great 
 play, if only for the sake of the momentous words which 
 he uttered in the Artois Bureau of Notables, and which 
 were, as it were, whistled down the wind that blew Ca- 
 lonne into outer darkness. It was Lafayette who lifted 
 up his voice first and suggested that the right thing to 
 do in the existing crisis was to convoke the States-Gen- 
 eral. It was a great suggestion, and fraught with con- 
 sequences which had not entered for a moment into the
 
 1727-87. LOMEXIE DE BRIENNK. 247 
 
 handsome head of the young soldier who made it. Did 
 Lafayette ever, we may wonder, in those long years of 
 life which were yet to be his, and in which the French 
 Revolution was to be but an episode, did he ever think 
 upon the terrible importance of the suggestion he then 
 made, and wish, perhaps, that he had never made it? 
 It would have mattered really very little if young Amer- 
 ican General Lafayette had held his peace on that mem- 
 orable occasion. The words had to be said; the proposi- 
 tion had to be made. If Lafayette's lips had not framed 
 the words they would have been framed by the lips of 
 some other. But the first person who actually formu- 
 lates the desire for some great reform deserves recogni- 
 tion and honor, if only for being the happy mouthpiece 
 of the stirring need and thought of the hour. Lafa- 
 yette was the lucky man whom chance or fate appointed 
 to first give tongue to that cry for the States- General 
 which was so soon to resound from one end of France 
 to the other. 
 
 Calonne's successor was destined to prove no more 
 successful than Calonne. Lomenie de Brienne had 
 touched the top of his ambition only to prove himself 
 disastrously unequal to it. He was essentially a queen's 
 man, as opposed to a king's man. The king did not like 
 him; distrusted him. Had not the king's falher, the late 
 dauphin, written down Lomenie de Brienne as a sceptic, 
 even an atheist? accusations which stuck in Louis's 
 memory, and led him to say, when De Brienne's name 
 was proposed for the archbishopric of Paris, " Let us 
 have at least an archbishop who believes in God." We 
 have no means of knowing what Lomenie de Brienne 
 did or did not believe in, but he certainly belonged to 
 the worse rather than the better order of eighteenth- 
 century churchmen. He was a scholar, in his way, and
 
 248 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XVI 
 
 liked to pose as a thinker, a philosopher, an economist. 
 A child of the Church, he affected or displayed sympa- 
 thy with the Encyclopaedists; a man of God, he loved 
 to act as a brilliant man of the world. Born in 1727, 
 he was now fifty years old, but his smooth, femininely 
 graceful features wore still something of the air of youth. 
 The friend of the Abbe Vermond, he was also naturally 
 the friend of Marie Antoinette. He had, or thought he 
 had, the art of pleasing women, as he thought that he had 
 the art of governing men. His own profound impres- 
 sion had helped him to the reputation abroad, for what 
 a man profoundly believes of himself he can often get an 
 idle world very willingly to believe too. Men and women 
 of the Bull's Eye and the court agreed that Lomenie de 
 Brienne was a great man, a wonderful man. The queen 
 thought so too, and so he became minister. 
 
 The Notables, called into existence in a vague, un- 
 meaning kind of way, were destined to vanish out of 
 existence as an organized body after a scarcely less 
 vague and unmeaning fashion. Lomenie de Brienne 
 considered that he could set about his great task of 
 regenerating France very much better without their 
 assistance. It seemed to his thin intelligence that they 
 were beginning to meddle too much with things out of 
 their star. A Lafayette demanding States-General, and 
 generally obtruding himself in a reforming attitude, a 
 Duke de la Rochefoucauld sneering at tithes, a king's 
 brother, Count de Provence, describing the gabelle as 
 an "infernal machine," all this was very unbecoming, 
 not to say unpleasant. So Lomenie de Brienne thought 
 that the best thing he could do was to dismiss them 
 with all decent courtesy. This he accordingly did after 
 delivering to them one of the most astonishing speeches 
 ever made by minister chosen of men, in which he grave-
 
 im. THE NOTABLES DISBANDED. 249 
 
 ly thanked them for having established the existence of 
 a deficit of forty millions in the national exchequer. It 
 was hardly worth calling the Notables together to estab- 
 lish what must have been already painfully familiar to 
 any finance minister. However, Lomenie had to thank 
 his Notables for something, so he thanked them for that, 
 and for their other suggestions to be accepted or not 
 as the case might be and so bowed them out of Ver- 
 sailles and away to the four corners of France, every 
 single member of the thus disbanded Notables carrying 
 with him to his own home, no matter what his own 
 principles, the seeds of agitation, of disaffection, of revo- 
 lution. If Calonne had wanted to precipitate the course 
 of the Revolution he could not have hit upon a better 
 plan than this of the Notables. It gave the country, 
 as a whole, its first jog ; put into the minds of plethoric 
 towns and sleepy parishes far away the idea of delega- 
 tion, of a national voice which might have its word to 
 say. If the Notables, who had not been summoned for 
 a century and a half, might thus be brought together 
 to express, as it were, the opinion upon things in gen- 
 eral of the surface of the body politic, why should not 
 the States-General be summoned to express opinions 
 upon things in general which should go below the sur- 
 face, go as low as the Third Estate ? Such were the 
 questions which the dispersal of the Notables set people 
 asking each other in every part of France in the early 
 summer of the year 1787. 
 
 Lafayette, writing to his friend Jay in America in 
 this May of 1787, said that the Assembly of Notables 
 had given the country " the habit of thinking about 
 public affairs," and the phrase sums up the situation 
 with sufficient dexterity. The patriotism of the Nota- 
 bles, as a whole, does not appear very brilliant in the
 
 250 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XVI. 
 
 eyes of the later generations, but for its time it was pos- 
 itively dazzling. The men who overthrew Calonne, who 
 reproached Brienne for want of faith, who refused to 
 vote imposts, who talked of States-General, and nick- 
 named the gabelle an "infernal machine," were men 
 who at least proved, in words written at the time, that 
 " the nation still existed ;" and to have proved so much 
 was to have given a very good reason for gratitude. 
 Lomenie de Brienne began to find that he had not gained 
 much by his polite dismissal of the Notables. His task 
 of regenerating France, of filling up that fatal deficit, 
 was as difficult, as desperate as ever. He was still face 
 to face with antagonism ; it was only the antagonists 
 who were different. Lomenie de Brienne found himself 
 engaged in that fight with the Paris Parliament which 
 was to make him, after a fashion, famous.
 
 1789. THE PARIS PARLIAMENT. 251 
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 THE BRIENNE ILIAD. 
 
 LOMENIE DE BRIENNE had got a bitter business in 
 hand. It would have needed a political Hercules to 
 grapple with the Hydra Parliament, and Lomenie was 
 no Hercules. Things were not as they once were ; gov- 
 ernment by lettre de cachet was drifting to its doom ; a 
 parliament flushed by its late delight in trying a car- 
 dinal, in almost trying a queen, was in a decidedly dem- 
 ocratic mood, more inclined to run counter to courtly 
 wishes than it had ever been in the days when the Jan- 
 senist-Jesuit feud was raging and the Bull Unigenitus 
 of the one party was the red rag of the other. 
 
 We have already seen that the Parliaments played 
 their part in the expression of opposition to royal will. 
 Let us, however, examine the petition of the Paris Par- 
 liament before we enter into the Brienne Iliad. What 
 was the actual method by which government was ad- 
 ministered in the year 1789 ? An absolute monarchy to 
 begin with. Louis XV. had asserted with the uncom- 
 promising directness of a deluge-discerning king the 
 unquestionable, unimpeachable authority of the king as 
 law-maker. But even the royal will was not brusquely 
 promulgated without any decent appearance of consul- 
 tation. Even the impetuous sultans of Arabian tales 
 have their grand viziers whose opinion they invite, lis- 
 ten to with courtesy, and even occasionally follow. The 
 princes of the House of Valois, the kings of the seed of
 
 252 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XVlL 
 
 Capet, found their counsellors in the Paris Parliament. 
 The Parliament of Paris came into being in the four- 
 teenth century. The despotic sovereigns of the four- 
 teenth century had a Grand Council with whom they 
 settled political questions, and a Chamber of Accounts 
 with whom they discussed grave questions of finance, 
 and they had their Paris Parliament with its three 
 divisions Great Chamber, Chamber of Enquiries, and 
 Chamber of Requests with whom they were pleased 
 to consult before administering justice. Within a very 
 short time the Paris Parliament, as was but natural, 
 increased in power and in authority. It was allowed to 
 administer justice by itself, though always, of course, 
 with the royal sanction, and, occasionally, presumed so 
 far upon its position as to argue, and pretty roundly 
 too, with the king. When the argument got too warm 
 for the kingly patience, the king had always a trump 
 card to play. He had only to come down in person to 
 his faithful but slightly aggressive parliament, and hold 
 what was called a Bed of Justice in its presence, in order 
 to compel them to accede to any edict he had framed. 
 But this was a kind of trump card which the king did 
 not always care to play. There are some victories that 
 are too costly to win, and the Bed of Justice always left 
 such a train of irritation behind it that the kings, as a 
 rule, found it but an uneasy couch. Step by step, and 
 inch by inch, the Parliament of Paris grew in dignity, 
 grew in authority. Louis XI., with that keen eye for 
 the main chance which at times made him politically 
 shortsighted, made the councillors over the Paris Par- 
 liament irremovable, except in case of condemnation for 
 high-treason. By this arrangement Louis made a seat 
 in the Paris Parliament a valuable marketable article, 
 which he always disposed of to the highest bidder. Un-
 
 1515-1774. THE PARIS PARLIAMENT. 253 
 
 der Francis I. and his successors, the Parliament throve, 
 and it was not until the advent of Richelieu that it en- 
 countered any serious check in its career of increase. 
 But Richelieu made as light of it as he made light of 
 all orders and all institutions, all men and all things, 
 which stood in his imperious way, and the policy of the 
 Great Minister was inherited by the Great Monarch. It 
 was in Louis XV., in Louis the Well-beloved, however, 
 that the Parliament found its most aggressive, most act- 
 ive enemy. The Well-beloved was a parliament-hater 
 arid a parliament-hunter. He thought nothing of send- 
 ing a whole parliament to the right-about. He exiled 
 it from Paris in 1753, though he consented to the sup- 
 pression of its enemies, the Jesuits, in 1762 ; and in 1770, 
 on the advice of Maupeou, he abolished the old Parlia- 
 ment altogether, and established the Parliament Mau- 
 peou. Louis XVI., whose good deeds generally did him 
 harm, had on his accession recalled the former council- 
 lors, and Lomenie de Brienne was now to find that their 
 spirit was as stiff-necked as ever, and that they would 
 not be satisfied to register the royal edicts without dis- 
 cussing them, as they had done in the days of the Sun- 
 King. The Parliament of Paris was further strength- 
 ened in the country by the existence of twelve provincial 
 parliaments in the chief provinces. These provincial 
 parliaments at Toulouse, Grenoble, Bordeaux, Dijon, 
 Pau, Metz, Besangon,' Douai, Rouen, Aix, Rennes, and 
 Nancy, though they had no actual connection with the 
 Parliament of Paris, invariably made common cause 
 with it in all its struggles with the crown. 
 
 The Parliaments, which ranked first of the Supreme 
 Courts, above the Courts of Accounts and the Courts of 
 Excise and Exchequer, never missed an opportunity of 
 insisting upon their supremacy. They maintained per-
 
 254 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XVII. 
 
 manent rivalry with the High Council and those other 
 councils and ministries which, ranking immediately 
 after the royal authority, had under their jurisdiction 
 not only the Supreme Courts, but also all the civil and 
 ecclesiastical tribunals. They strove to maintain their 
 ancient privileges, and to assert their political predom- 
 inance, which they had first definitely gained when, after 
 the troubled days of Chai-les VI., they had succeeded in 
 converting their right of registration into the widely 
 differing and far more powerful right of verification. 
 The Paris Parliament was the first, as it was the oldest 
 and most illustrious, of the French Parliaments. It 
 claimed to be the delegate of a portion of the sovereign 
 power, and was convinced that upon its existence de- 
 pended that of the crown, in spite of the fact that the 
 king had for many years ceased to consult it upon ques- 
 tions of government. To this Parliament the princes 
 of the blood, the five classes of the peers of France, the 
 six ecclesiastical peers, the chancellor and the keeper of 
 the seals, were admitted, with the right of speaking. 
 It was composed of a first president, several junior 
 presidents, several honorary councillors, and four royal 
 masters of requests-in-ordinary ; of two hundred and 
 thirty-two councillors, a procureur-general, and three 
 advocates-general. These officers of the highest rank 
 were disseminated among four groups of chambers 
 the Grand Chamber, which judge'd all the chief cases; 
 the three Chambers of Inquests, the Chamber of Re- 
 quests, and a chamber for criminal cases called La 
 Tournelle. The Grand Chamber only took cognizance 
 of those criminal processes which concerned gentlemen 
 and state personages, such as ministers or other high 
 government officials. The duties of the Grand Cham- 
 ber, the other chambers, and the Criminal Chamber
 
 l-iS7. MEN OF THE ROBE. 255 
 
 also necessitated the creation of a certain number of 
 officials of lower rank. 
 
 It has been estimated that more than forty thousand 
 persons were employed in the various courts of judica- 
 ture, from the president-d-mortier down to the humble 
 writ-server. To this large number of persons, who 
 peopled the law-courts and formed what was called the 
 Robe, must be added a host of subordinate agents and 
 satellites, from the verger to the crier and the man who 
 posted up the decrees. This little host of legal satel- 
 lites formed a population apart from the rest of the 
 nation. They looked upon themselves as possessing a 
 certain share of legal power ; a fact which made them 
 accept all the more blindly, not only the orders of their 
 immediate superiors, but the influences of the Parlia- 
 ments, more especially that of Paris. The Parliaments, 
 having control over so many persons and opinions, al- 
 ways possessed a decided authority, even under Louis 
 XIV., who had limited their power to the administra- 
 tion of justice. They were confident of recovering their 
 former preponderance as soon as they could resume their 
 political functions, and this was their constant aim 
 throughout the course of the eighteenth century. There 
 had, for a long time, been a bitter rivalry between the 
 court and the Men of the Robe, between the nobles and 
 the parliamentary class. The latter, it is true, acquired, 
 by reason of their profession, an official nobility which 
 brought them certain honorary prerogatives, but which 
 did not put them on a level with the nobility by birth. 
 Thus this semi-nobility often served to increase the irri- 
 tation of the haughtiest members of the Parliamentary 
 class against the ancient nobility. 
 
 The nobility of the long robe kept aloof from the 
 court through envy, from the higher bourgeoisie through
 
 256 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XVH. 
 
 disdain, even from the members of the financial pro- 
 fession, though that had close affinity with theirs, con- 
 sidering that all magisterial posts went by purchase. 
 Evil and astonishing though this system of purchase 
 seems, it was not an entire evil. If it was a choice 
 between a body nominated entirely by a monarch, a 
 mere shadow of authority, and a body which had at 
 least purchased a right to a certain individual inde- 
 pendence, then undoubtedly, of the two evils, the na- 
 tion preferred the latter. The value of the post of 
 councillor rose or fell like the value of real estate. One 
 of these posts, which fetched only from twenty-five 
 thousand to thirty thousand livres in 1712, when the 
 Parliament merely administered justice, was worth 
 double the latter sum in 1747, when Parliament insisted 
 upon being recognized as a political body. The emolu- 
 ments varied very much, according to the amount of 
 work undertaken by each member of the Parliament, 
 and also according to the value which he set on them. 
 When this was very high, it made the fees fall very 
 heavily upon litigants ; for the law-suits, at that time, 
 were accompanied by a thousand minute formalities 
 which, by making them extend over a long period, mul- 
 tiplied the costs. 
 
 The very excellent Bibliophile Jacob paints a curious 
 picture of the way in which the Parliamentary families 
 formed, in the midst of French society, a society apart, 
 which had few relations with other classes. This so- 
 ciety, which was a complete corporation in itself, con- 
 sisted of different groups extending upwards, in ac- 
 cordance with their origin, fortune, and position, from 
 the humblest employments to the highest posts of the 
 judicature. Every new-comer who had purchased an 
 office, at once became an integral part of the associa-
 
 1787. PARLIAMENTARY FAMILIES. 257 
 
 tion, and henceforward obtained naturalization into the 
 long robe, breaking off, in a manner of speaking, all 
 family ties. Parliamentary society had always been 
 notorious for its gravity and severity, its formality, 
 its pride and hauteur. Eschewing fetes, balls, concerts, 
 and theatricals, it was renowned for its dinners. These 
 were followed by some discussion on matters of juris- 
 prudence, or some quiet game of cards, and the com- 
 pany always separated early, for the magistrates were 
 in the habit of rising before daybreak. The interior 
 of their houses, with large .stone staircases, wide vesti- 
 bules, and richly decorated reception-rooms, was in 
 keeping with their character for gloom and severity, 
 and the very servants seemed redolent of the law-courts. 
 Their masters rarely smiled, and assumed a solemn gait, 
 and a majestic, not to say unamiable exterior. The 
 ladies of the long robe, who mixed only with their 
 peers, were said to have no knowledge of social usages, 
 or to have very inaccurate knowledge. They were said 
 to be wedded to formality, and to have envy and hatred 
 for their only occupation. It must be said in their ex- 
 cuse that they only appeared in public at the ceremo- 
 nies of the Parliaments and the sovereign court, and it 
 was on these occasions that they imbibed the taste for 
 the minute and unbending formalities observed by the 
 "robins," as the nobility contemptuously nicknamed 
 the Men of the Robe. The number of bows and their 
 character, from the reverence en dame to the mere in- 
 clination of the head, were all regulated by a law of 
 etiquette as complicated and as rigorous as that which 
 prevailed at court. 
 
 It is hardly surprising that such a body, so consti- 
 tuted, should have inspired an almost religious respect, 
 in spite of the faults committed by individual members. 
 I. 17
 
 258 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. On. XVII. 
 
 This respect was never more strongly displayed than 
 on solemn occasions such as that described by Barbier 
 in his journal. A formal procession of the sovereign 
 courts, in their state robes, was sufficiently impressive, 
 with its presidents, councillors, advocates-general, pro- 
 cureurs-general, registrars and secretaries of the court 
 wearing the scarlet-robe, some with the mortar-cap of 
 black velvet, and others with the red hood trimmed 
 with ermine ; with its officers of the Court of Accounts 
 in black robes of velvet, satin, damask, or satin ; its 
 officers of the Court of Excise in black velvet robes with 
 black hood ; its officials of the Court of Exchequer in 
 red robes with ermine hood, and, following them, all 
 the judicial bodies appertaining to the Parliament, each 
 with their respective costumes and insignia, and taking 
 precedence according to their rank. 
 
 The Paris Parliament, in fighting mood, refused to 
 register the Stamp Tax and Land Tax which Lomenie 
 in his desperate mood had thrust before them. It did 
 not remain content with an attitude of mere opposition. 
 It fermented with demands and protests. It set all 
 Paris fermenting around it. It became in its turn ag- 
 gressive. It insisted upon being furnished with " states 
 of the finances," a demand which led to the ominous 
 joke of the Abbe Sabathier, " It is not States of the 
 Finances, but States-General, that we want, gentlemen." 
 Lafayette's demand, which startled D'Artois, thus echoed 
 by Abbe Sabathier, and startling D'Ormesson, was be- 
 coming the watchword and the catchword of the hour. 
 A Parliament that refused to register, and that talked 
 about States-General, began to tell upon Lomenie's 
 nerves. He lost his head, and imagining, as such weak 
 things are given to imagining, that he was a strong man, 
 he resolved upon -strong measures. After a month of
 
 1787 THE PARIS PARLIAMENT EXILED. 259 
 
 waiting and of wrangling, the king, prompted by Lorae- 
 nie, brought the old crazy machinery of a Bed of Jus- 
 tice into play, and solemnly ordered his Parliament, 
 transported to Versailles for the purpose, to do the royal 
 bidding. Never had a Bed of Justice failed before ; but 
 this time under weak Lomenie's auspices it did fail. 
 No sooner had the Parliament returned to Paris, than 
 it annulled the events of the previous day, and treated 
 the Bed of Justice as a thing of naught. Hereupon 
 Lomenie, now desperate, tried again his part of strong 
 man. He issued the requisite number of lettres de cachet, 
 and sent the whole Parliament into exile in Troyes, in 
 Champagne. Life was dull at Troyes in Champagne 
 for an exiled, if heroic, Parliament, thus standing in a 
 corner like a naughty child. A compromise was arrived 
 at. The Parliament agreed to register an edict for the 
 collection of a tax to be levied on all property alike, 
 and in the pleasant late September days they came back 
 to Paris and popular applause. Paris had been in a 
 wild condition without its beloved Parliament, seditious, 
 tumultuous, noisy, even assailing, with intent to do bod- 
 ily mischief to, the person of the king's royal and un- 
 popular brother Artois, whom we can still see after all 
 these years in a familiar print protected from an irri- 
 table populace by the bayonets of the Guards. Who 
 could guess that the time was so very nigh when the 
 irritable people would be less easily repelled by those 
 bayonets? when those bayonets would be less ready to 
 repel them? 
 
 In the dull November days Lomenie found himself 
 once more at his wit's end. Like the London Lack- 
 penny in Lydgate's poem, for lack of money he could 
 not speed, so he had to come again to the Parliament 
 to ask for a registration of an edict for raising large
 
 260 
 
 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XVII. 
 
 loans for a term of five years, and holding out dim 
 hopes of States-General as a bribe. It was an eventful 
 day. The king came with Lomenie, the king and all 
 his court; but the royal presence did not render the 
 Parliament the more tractable. It argued away for six 
 hours steadily ; then when the king, pushed beyond his 
 patience, insisted upon the edicts being registered, sud- 
 denly a new champion of the Parliament, a new antago- 
 nist of the court, loomed into historic sight astonish- 
 ingly. From the place where he sat, the Duke d'Orleans 
 rose after the imperative demand of the king, and 
 asked if the occasion were a royal session or a Bed of 
 Justice. 
 
 This was mischievous, but there was more mischief 
 to come. For Louis, promptly converting the session 
 into a Bed of Justice, ordered the immediate registra- 
 tion of the edicts, and, while the Parliament was wait- 
 ing to take its vote, the keeper of the seals gravely 
 announced that the registration must take place. There- 
 upon D'Orleans again pushed himself to the front. " Sire," 
 he said, " I entreat your majesty to permit me to place 
 at your feet, and in the heart of this court, the declara- 
 tion that I regard this registration as illegal, and that 
 it is necessary for the justification of those who have 
 taken part in these deliberations to add that it has taken 
 place by the express command of the king." The angry 
 king replied that the registration was legal, and marched 
 out of the place. The Duke d'Orleans brought him on 
 his way to the door, and then returned full of his new 
 heroic mood to record his protest against the illegal 
 registrations. So, for the first time, D'Orleans appeared 
 in any serious way upon the great stage of events. He 
 will appear again often and ominously enough. This 
 was his first taste of rebellion. The next day a lettre
 
 1787. ORLEANS EXILED. 261 
 
 de cachet sent him off to exile in his estate at Raincy. 
 The Parliamentarians Duval, Sabathier who wanted 
 States-General, Freteau, and Robert shared in his dis- 
 grace. This was, as we have said, Orleans' first serious 
 appearance before the world. Let us see what the new 
 patriot was like.
 
 262 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XVIII. 
 
 CHAPTER XVIIL 
 
 EQUALITY ORLEANS. 
 
 A REPULSIVE creature, with a blotched and pustuled 
 face and body, lethargic from premature, long-sustained 
 debauch, was, for the moment, the hero of agitation 
 against the court. Louis Philippe Joseph, Duke of Or- 
 leans, had ingeniously contrived of late years to sur- 
 round his disagreeable identity with an attractive le- 
 gend. To the public at large he was soon to be Phi- 
 lippe galite, Philip Equality, Equality Orleans, soon 
 to be associated with the new democratic movement, to 
 be avouched an enemy of the Old Order and all its ways. 
 Intelligent scribes and energetic draughtsmen devoted 
 their pens and their gravers to the service of their lord. 
 He was represented as a pattern of august benevolence, 
 the true friend of the people, the zealous antagonist of 
 a profligate and oppressive court. He was even held 
 up to emulation as a model of chivalrous courage and 
 daring. Did he not on one occasion, when travelling 
 in the country, get upset with carriage, horses, and 
 servants into a stream ? And did not he, while saving 
 himself by swimming, actually condescend to call out 
 to his struggling valet to cling to the boughs of a tree, 
 from which in due time his master rescued him ? That 
 a noble should so far unbend as to recognize that the 
 life of a jack-servant was worth saving was a circum- 
 stance so remarkable that it called for and received all 
 the honors of pictorial celebration. To the Parisian
 
 1747-87. LOUIS PHILIPPE'S PARENTS. 263 
 
 mob, slowly quickening into a sense of its democratic 
 importance, Equality Orleans became a sort of popular 
 Bayard, without fear and without reproach. 
 
 Paris had not always regarded Equality Orleans in 
 this way, however. The record of his still brief career 
 was not always written in such gracious characters. 
 At one time he was regarded, not without justice, as 
 the crown, if the term may be used in such connec- 
 tion as the crown of the matchless corruption of the 
 age. He was born on April 13, 1747, at Saint-Cloud ; 
 thus he was only forty years old at the time of his 
 question about the Bed of Justice. His father was 
 Philip Louis d'Orleans, familiarly know r n to history as 
 Fat Philip. It was hardly to be expected that much 
 good could come of such a parentage. Fat Philip was 
 one of the most debauched men of his age, which is 
 saying much a kind of brutal Falstaff conceived by 
 Plautus and drawn by Callot ; cynical, vicious, gro- 
 tesque, coarsely immoral, as enormous a feeder as the 
 gluttonous Trimalcio of Petronius. But if strange 
 stories were told of Fat Philip, stranger still were told 
 and credited about his duchess. She was accused of 
 the most amazing, the most reckless profligacy ; she was 
 seriously believed by no small number of persons to 
 have conserved her beauty and her health by baths of 
 human blood. 
 
 It is scarcely necessary for us to pay much heed to 
 these blood-baths and the like. The blood-bath is an 
 old friend in historical fiction, cropping up again and 
 again whenever popular passion wants some fresh stone 
 to throw at one of its butts. All the scandals of that 
 most scandalous age have to be taken with grave and 
 great allowances. The age was corrupt, indeed, with- 
 out its being necessary for us to admit that all the pict-
 
 234 TOE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XVIII. 
 
 ures of its corruption are faithful, austere, unexagger- 
 ated. A man might be bad, abominably bad, a woman 
 might be wicked, even vile enough, without deserving 
 all the opprobrium of popular report and chroniques 
 scandaleuses. But it must be admitted that the fact 
 that the blood-bath story could spring up at all, could 
 gain any kind of credence and it was in some quar- 
 ters most religiously believed does throw its light 
 upon the character of the Duchess of Orleans who 
 brought forth Philip Equality. The police of the time 
 were accused of pandering to her terrible taste by car- 
 rying off the children of vagabonds and beggars and 
 sacrificing them to this new Moloch. But even if this 
 gravest accusation glances off, too monstrous for belief, 
 other accusations enough and to spare arraign her. She 
 was conspicuous in a lascivious and a lustful age for her 
 lasciviousness and for her lust. Dissolute, cynical, and 
 depraved, she lived like some grotesque survival of the 
 decomposing Roman empire ; dissolute, cynical, and de- 
 praved, she died. Of such a sire and such a dam it 
 would be hard to expect a noble breed. 
 
 We are told that the birth of Philip Equality caused his 
 mother terrible suffering, and we are invited by the su- 
 perstitious to see in these circumstances something of that 
 prophetic pain which should accompany the birth of mon- 
 sters like Nero and monsters like Philip Equality. We 
 learn, however, that the child born of such bitter travail 
 was comely enough to delight the wicked old hearts of 
 his parents ; and when at first it was feared that his 
 health was feeble, the grim duke and duchess were ter- 
 ribly afflicted. However, the young Louis Philippe Jo- 
 seph did live. His education was not of a kind that 
 turns out an estimable nobility. His early years were 
 left to his mother's care, and were passed in the midst of
 
 174Y-8T. LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON. 265 
 
 the curious and corrupt society which she gathered about 
 her. His nature, never a very strong one, was easily 
 influenced in the impi-essionable hours of childhood ; 
 and, unhappily for the young prince, the influences to 
 which his rising manhood were especially exposed, and to 
 which he readily yielded, were of the most unfortunate 
 kind. While we make all possible allowances for the 
 exaggerations of pamphleteers, the scurrility of scan- 
 dalous lampoons, the exigencies of the compilers of 
 gossip and the tellers of strange tales, it is still impos- 
 sible to deny that the reign of Louis XV. was one of 
 the very worst that ever stained the history of a royal 
 race. We must recognize, too, that the nature would 
 have to be very strong, the instincts for good very vi- 
 tal and very deeply implanted, to allow a young man 
 brought up in the influence of such a court to escape 
 from its contamination. Under the cynical guidance 
 of his father he was early initiated into all the evils of 
 the day. The tastes of the father were not unnaturally 
 the tastes of the son. If the father had an itch for vil- 
 lainous society, the son was of a like mind. All that was 
 worst among the youth of the worst court in Europe 
 rallied round the son, as their sires had rallied round 
 the father. He reeled from dissipation to dissipation in 
 a desperate, incoherent determination to be the fore- 
 most of that wild brotherhood. In the dawn of his 
 manhood he had promised a fair presence. He was 
 above the middle height ; he carried himself well ; his 
 teeth were good, his skin unusually white and fine. If 
 his features were feeble, they were regular and cleanly 
 cut ; his lips habitually wore a smile ; his blue eyes 
 seemed to regard the world with a languid interest, 
 though sometimes we are told that they could glitter as 
 dangerously as those of a hyena. The famous "hell-
 
 266 THE FRENCH KEVoLtfTlOtf. OH. XVIII. 
 
 fire " flash, which has yet to be recorded, could occa- 
 sionally gleam there in the days when Philip Equality 
 was only the handsome Duke de Chartres, who knew 
 nothing of Dame de Buffon, nor dreamed of Dr. Guil- 
 lotin. He danced well, fenced well, swam well ; bore 
 himself well, indeed, in most bodily exercises. The ac- 
 counts of his early manhood present a sufficiently pleas- 
 ing picture of a personable young prince. But the ex- 
 cesses to which he delivered himself without rhyme or 
 reason soon marred his comely presence. Crapulous de- 
 bauchery starred his discolored visage with pimples, 
 blotches, and unwholesome growths, till his enemies 
 declared that he resembled Sulla, whom the Athenians 
 likened to a mulberry sprinkled with flour. His hair 
 fell, leaving him ignobly bald, and driving the young 
 courtiers who surrounded him to depilate their own 
 foreheads in the sycophantic effort to keep him in 
 countenance, and to make ignoble baldness fashion- 
 able. With the brutalization of his body his mind 
 grew brutalized as well, and the chronicles of the time 
 are full of records of the almost savage roughness of 
 his manners. The accounts of his orgies, of his infa- 
 mies, were the theme of Paris, and the young duke 
 took a pleasure in spreading the worst reports concern- 
 ing himself. No doubt there was immense exaggera- 
 tion in the popular reports ; no doubt there was im- 
 mense exaggeration in the stories which the young 
 duke delighted to blow abroad about himself, blazoning 
 defiantly his ambition for bestial supremacy. But no 
 matter how much we may minimize, or seek to mini- 
 mize, the record, we are left perforce with but a sorry 
 picture of the young De Chartres. Whether the sto- 
 ries told of him, most of them unrepeatably fantastic, 
 are true or not, it was certainly De Chartres's abomina- 
 ble vanity to wish them to be believed.
 
 1747-87. THE GOOD DUKE. 67 
 
 Such was the man, so tarred by evil reputation, whom 
 the strange customs of the time gave in marriage to the 
 daughter of the Duke de Penthievre. If there was any- 
 thing to be said for the. Old Order, for the old nobility, 
 the Duke de Penthievre embodied most of the argu- 
 ments in his own proper person. He deserves to be 
 remembered in the history of his time as the good Duke 
 de Penthievre. He was the richest peer in France. He 
 had one daughter and one son. The son, the young 
 Prince de Larnballe, was married to that princess of 
 the House of Savoy whom we have met before and shall 
 meet again, the beautiful, unhappy Princess de Lamballe. 
 The scandal of the time will have it that the Duke de 
 Chartres schemed a very villainous scheme. He resolved 
 to marry the daughter of the Duke de Penthievre, and 
 to get rid of the duke's son, so that the vast inheritance 
 of the Penthievre wealth should fall into the Orleans 
 exchequer. To carry out this scheme he lured the young 
 Prince de Lamballe into the wildest excesses of debauch- 
 ery, and, so the story goes, lest the weakened constitu- 
 tion and the tainted blood of the prince should resist 
 the persistent licentiousness to which he was urged, De 
 Chartres assisted the process by the actual use of poison. 
 How far these horrible accusations are true, or what 
 shadow of truth belongs to them, it is impossible to 
 say, almost impossible to guess. What is certain is that 
 the Prince de Lamballe was the intimate companion of 
 the debaucheries of De Chartres, that he did die, very 
 horribly and very mysteriously, and that the Duke de 
 Chartres did marry his sister, Mademoiselle de Pen- 
 thievre, on April 5, 1769. It is a hundred and twenty 
 years since that marriage took place, but we can still 
 feel the profoundest pity for the unhappy lady whom 
 fate flung into the arms of the young De Chartres.
 
 268 THE FRENCH REVOLtTTlOtf. CH. XVIII. 
 
 By this marriage there were five children the first, 
 Louis Philippe, in 1773 ; the second, the Duke de Mont- 
 pensier, in 1775 ; third, the Count de Beaujolais, in 
 1776 ; and fourth and fifth in 1777, Mademoiselle Ade- 
 laide and a twin sister who died young. Concerning 
 the first-born a queer story circulates, a story akin to 
 that of the warming-pan which threw such discredit 
 upon the birth of the Old Pretender, James Stuart. 
 It is alleged, and gravely believed by many, that Louis 
 Philippe, the Duke de Chartres of 1789, the Equality 
 Junior of later days, the Mr. Smith of wanderings over 
 sea, the King of the Barricades, was in reality no son of 
 the Duke de Chartres and of the daughter of the Duke 
 de Penthievre, but the child of an Italian jailer named 
 Chiappini, who lived at Modigliana, in the Apennines. 
 It is alleged that the Duke de Penthievre began to get 
 anxious about the succession when he found that after 
 four years of marriage there was no male issue, and that 
 the only child of the union was a female child who was 
 stillborn. The Duke de Penthievre was still a com- 
 paratively young man ; he was not yet fifty years old ; 
 he did not wish his vast wealth to pass to collateral 
 heirs, as it would have passed by the feudal law ; he 
 talked of marrying again. This suggestion was not at 
 all to the taste of the Duke de Chartres, hungry for the 
 Penthievre succession. Finding that his wife was again 
 
 o O 
 
 with child in the beginning of 1773, he carried her off 
 to Italy, with the determination, if she was delivered of 
 a female child, to substitute a male child. At Modig- 
 liana, in the Apennines, the Duchess de Chartres was 
 delivered of a female child, and on the same day the 
 wife of the jailer Chiappini was delivered of a male 
 child. In return for a large sum of money the Chiap- 
 pinis consented to exchange the children, and the Duke
 
 1747-87. THE MODIGLIANA LEGEND. .269 
 
 and Duchess de Chartres returned to Paris with a son and 
 heir who had nothing whatever to do with the House of 
 Orleans. Such is the extraordinary story which is told, 
 a story which, whether we believe it or not, has undoubt- 
 edly a great many curious circumstances attendant on it. 
 How far this fantastic story has any element of truth 
 in it, it would be profitless enough to inquire. History 
 teems with such tales of audacious substitutions ; the 
 bearer of more than one famous name has sat upon a 
 throne by virtue of that name, without, according to 
 rumor, the slightest right to name or throne. It is 
 certain that the story was told ; that it was and is be- 
 lieved by some ; that the son and heir of the Duke de 
 Chartres was declared to have no resemblance to either 
 of his alleged parents ; it is certain that when Louis 
 Philippe in the fulness of time came to be king for a 
 season, he was harassed by a lady who claimed to be 
 the first-born child of Philip Equality, the girl who was 
 exchanged for the child of the Chiappinis. The Chiap- 
 pini story is the story of the enemy of the Orleans ; the 
 story of the Orleans themselves is simply that Louis 
 Philippe was born in Paris on October 6, 1773. There 
 were great rejoicings in honor of the occasion. The 
 beautiful Sophie Arnould, fairest of stage-queens, the 
 wandering star of so many loves and legends, gave, after 
 permission duly sought and obtained from Fat Philip, a 
 great display of fireworks in the gardens of the Palais 
 Royal in honor of the event, to the delight of an enor- 
 mous crowd. It really matters very little whether Louis 
 Philippe was or was not the son of Philip Equality. 
 But it is worth noting that, when Voltaire came to Paris 
 in 1778 for his final triumph, he took the boy of five upon 
 his knee and declared that he traced in his childish feat- 
 ures a striking resemblance to the Duke de Chartres.
 
 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XVIII. 
 
 Into the dim, debauched, disorganized mind of the 
 Duke de Chartres, at no time very brilliant, and now en- 
 feebled by excesses, there seems to have glimmered a kind 
 of impression that he was in some way destined to make a 
 figure in the world. How this was to be accomplished 
 was less evident, but in his uncertain way he sought after 
 success in many directions. He sought, as we have seen, 
 to be infamous among the infamous, to wear the libid- 
 inous laurels of a new Trimalcio, with the result chiefly 
 of converting a sufficiently comely gentleman into pus- 
 tuled horror. He sought for success in the service of 
 his country with yet more disastrous results. He was 
 not to forget for long enough that disastrous sea-fight 
 off Brest, in which English Admiral Keppel was so very 
 near to capturing the Saint -Esprit, with Vice-Admiral 
 the Duke de Chartres on board, and when all Paris rang 
 with D'Orvilliers' declaration that he would have won 
 the day if it had not been for the stupidity or the cow- 
 ardice of the prince. For days and days Paris rang 
 with jeer, epigram, and lampoon against the luckless 
 prince. The English journals, with their cruel com- 
 ments on his cowardice and ignorance of naval war, 
 were largely circulated, largely read. De Chartres was 
 the ignominious hero of the hour. Yet, in spite of all 
 this, in spite of La Motte-Piquet's declaration, " If I had 
 been such a coward as your royal highness I should have 
 blown my brains out," the Duke de Chartres was still 
 obstinate enough and absurd enough to press Louis XVL 
 for the coveted title of Grand- Admiral of France. This 
 was too much. It was impossible to accord the highest 
 naval dignity in the kingdom to the hero of the Brest 
 catastrophe. The request was refused, and, though the 
 blow was softened by the creation of a post of colonel- 
 general of hussars and of light troops, to which he was
 
 1747-87. LOUIS PHILIPPE'S ANGLOMANIA. 271 
 
 appointed, Philip was not to be placated. It is from 
 this point that his hostility to the king and queen may 
 be considered to date its most acrid virulence. Be- 
 tween Marie Antoinette and the Duke de Chartres there 
 had long been war. It would seehi that among the 
 many vague ideas or semblances of ideas that floated 
 through the bemused intelligence of the Duke de Char- 
 tres, one idea which appeared at one time especially in- 
 viting to him was to become the lover of the dauphin- 
 ess. Whether some dim notion of acquiring power and 
 influence spurred him. in this direction, or merely the 
 habitual promptings of a profligate nature, to which any 
 woman seemed an invitation, it would be hard to de- 
 cide. "Whatever advances De Chartres made did not 
 receive favorable reception from Marie Antoinette, and 
 she found a most unforgiving foe. 
 
 The popularity which Philip had failed to acquire by 
 heroism at sea he succeeded, however, in acquiring by 
 other means. Whether he was, as some historians would 
 have us believe, a desperately ambitious man, or, as 
 others insist, merely a more or less helpless tool in the 
 hand of schemers who wanted a figure-head and found 
 in him the man for the purpose, it is clear that he 
 courted notoriety and popularity, and that he became 
 both notorious and popular. His Anglomania helped 
 him to obtain the one, helped him indeed to obtain the 
 other. From his various visits to England, where he 
 had shone a lustrous foreign star in the most dissolute 
 set of the day, he had brought back a taste for the 
 English mode of dress, for English vehicles, English 
 horses, English jockeys, English races. He set smart 
 Paris wild with Anglomania. It was vastly comic to 
 see the gay young nobility of the court aping the man- 
 ners and the customs of the race with whom they were
 
 272 THE TRENCH REVOLUTION. Cn. XVIII. 
 
 so incessantly at war. But no number of English horses 
 to run, English clothes to wear, English jockeys to back, 
 or English oaths to swear, would have made De Chartres 
 popular with the Parisian masses, however much notoriety 
 they might lend to his marred personality. For his popu- 
 larity he relied largely upon the influence he gained from 
 his association with an institution which, though now firm- 
 ly established on French soil, owed its origin to England. 
 Freemasonry had grown and flourished since it had been 
 implanted in the days of the Regency, and among the 
 Freemasons the Duke de Chartres was an important 
 personage. In 1771 he had been named grand-master 
 of all the lodges in France. Freemasonry had not then 
 penetrated at all into the mass of the people ; it was 
 confined practically to the upper classes ; it seems cer- 
 tain that the influence of the French lodges was solidly 
 given to the Duke de Chartres and the principles which 
 he represented or was supposed to represent. Such as 
 he was, notorious by his manners, powerful by his in- 
 fluence with the Freemasons, popular by reason of his 
 large fortune and his ready hand, the unlovely Philip of 
 Orleans was one of the most dangerous of the many 
 dangerous enemies that were to confront Louis XVI. on 
 the day when the States-General were opened. 
 
 Perry contributes his sketch to the historic portraits 
 of Equality Orleans. " The Duke of Orleans, as he was 
 then called, communicated, by means of his wealth, a 
 powerful impulsion to the growing spirit of the times. 
 He gave dinners, he gave suppers to the new reformers ; 
 he collected at his table all that was learned, all that 
 was experienced in the polity of nations, and this he did, 
 perhaps not wholly from a love of the principle that 
 had put all this in motion, but partly from a hatred he 
 had to the -court ; a hatred rendered the more inveter-
 
 1747-87. PERRY'S PORTRAIT. 273 
 
 ate from a reprimand he had received from the king for 
 certain irregularities, committed too near the eyes of 
 the palace. Besides these parties formed in the private 
 rooms of the prince, he instituted a ' club of S9avans,' into 
 which the learned of any nation might be introduced 
 by two members. This club every day increased in 
 numbers ; such discussions took place in it as occasioned 
 the king to send an express order for its discontinuance, 
 under pain of royal displeasure. The duke found it 
 was too soon to resist, he therefore withdrew, and the 
 members wholly dispersed. This may be considered a 
 great stretch of arbitrary power, at such a period especi- 
 ally, as the club was held in a private room, at a house 
 under the colonnade of the Palais Royal, upon his own 
 estate, and where, by the rules drawn up by the members, 
 no gaming was allowed. The company in the coffee- 
 houses talked politics louder than ever had been known 
 before ; these disputants were not to be checked, al- 
 though mouchards, as they were called, were planted in 
 all the most considerable places of public resort, to lis- 
 ten and report to their employers what they had heard 
 and seen." Perry's portrait adds one more testimony to 
 the extreme importance of the part that Equality Or- 
 leans chose to play or was made to play. Beneath the 
 corruption of an Alcibiades he had, as we are yet to 
 learn, something of the courage of an Alcibiades ; had 
 he also something of the ability of an Alcibiades as 
 well ? It is difficult to believe that a man who filled so 
 large a place in so grave a time could have been merely 
 a puppet in the hands of others, an able Duport, an able 
 Laclos. The Regent Orleans was a scoundrel, but he 
 w r as also a man of ability. His grandson may be ad- 
 mitted to have resembled him in both particulars, only 
 with more of the scoundrelism and less of the ability. 
 I. 18
 
 274 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XIX. 
 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 BKIENNE IS BLOWN OUT. 
 
 ON November 21 the king sent for his Parliament 
 and rated them roundly for daring to make any protest 
 against his good pleasure. But while he menaced he 
 reminded them of his promise concerning States-General. 
 "I have said that I will convoke them before 1792 
 that is, in 1791 at the latest; my word is sacred." Pool- 
 king, it was not he who was convoking the States-Gen- 
 eral, but a stronger power than he, which, after finding 
 voice through the mouths of its Lafayettes and Saba- 
 thiers, was beginning to find voices in every mouth that 
 could articulate in France. To the royal menace and 
 the royal pledge the president of the Parliament very 
 respectfully answered by informing the king of the sur- 
 prise with which the Parliament had heard of the dis- 
 grace of a prince of the royal blood, and the imprison- 
 ment of two magistrates, " for having uttered freely in 
 the royal presence what their duty and their conscience 
 dictated." The king answered curtly that his Parlia- 
 ment ought to assume that he had strong reasons for 
 banishing a prince of his blood ; as for the two magis- 
 trates, he had punished them because he was displeased 
 with them. 
 
 From that moment out the quarrel between the king 
 and his Parliament grew keener and more acrid. Through 
 the long winter, through the long spring, the Parliament 
 kept firing off its protests against the royal proceedings j
 
 1787. THE SWIMMER AND THE SEX. 275 
 
 the contagion began to spread, and the provincial Par- 
 liaments to grow mutinous like the Paris Parliament, 
 Everywhere was confusion rapidly growing worse con- 
 founded, the discontent increasing, the deficit also in- 
 creasing, and Lomenie de Brienne on the top of all as a 
 man is on the top of a wave, and as little liable to con-, 
 trol or guide it as a single swimmer could control or 
 guide the sea. In the face of all the popular clamor, 
 the court made a pitiable little effort to show an eco- 
 nomical spirit. Marie Antoinette diminished the num- 
 ber of her horses, carriages, and servants. Certain offices 
 were suppressed, and their emoluments, in consequence, 
 saved, very much to the indignation of the stately gen- 
 tlemen who held those offices. The Duke de Polignac, 
 who was Master of the Bear Hounds, made luckless 
 Lomenie almost apologize to him in the queen's pres- 
 ence for purposing to suppress his office, and then, turn- 
 ing to the queen, made her a present of his post " out 
 of the generosity of his heart." The Duke de Coigny, 
 whom popular report declared to be one of the many 
 lovers of the queen, quarrelled so angrily with the king 
 about the suppression of his post that, in Louis's own 
 words, they nearly came to blows. 
 
 But it was not the suppression of petty pelting little 
 offices of this kind that was to fill the empty exchequer 
 or to appease popular discontent. Lomenie, gravely 
 sick in body, more sick than ever in mind, was becom- 
 ing more and more desperately convinced that his part 
 of strong man was to be decisively played now. He 
 had an idea in his head, one of the insanest of his many 
 insane schemes, which he was now about to carry into 
 execution. This was no other than the entire suppres- 
 sion of all the parliaments in France, and the establish- 
 ment of a brand-new " Cour Pleniere." It was to con-'
 
 2^6 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. Cn. XIX. 
 
 sist of certain great nobles, officials, and lawyers named 
 for life. It was to have the registering powers of the 
 Parliaments. Small law-courts were to be appointed to 
 administer justice in the bailiwicks of France. The 
 States-General were to be summoned for January, 1791. 
 Several reforms, based, like those of Calonne, on Tur- 
 got's suggestions, were to be brought forward. 
 
 All this was to be prepared with the strictest secrecy, 
 and suddenly sprung upon an astonished people and a 
 defeated Parliament. But, unhappily for Lomenie de 
 Brienne, against whom the very stars in their courses 
 seemed to fight, it could not be kept secret. It was 
 plain that something was in the air ; mysterious move- 
 ments of troops, mysterious orders to all the provincial 
 intendants to be at their posts on a certain day, myste- 
 rious incessant printing at the guarded royal chateau. 
 The apparently triumphant Parliament took alarm. 
 Most especially one of the triumphant Parliamentarians 
 took alarm, the wildly eloquent Duval d'JSpremesnil. 
 D'lSpremesnil was a son of that D'lSpremesnil who had 
 served the brilliant, unfortunate Dupleix out in India 
 Dupleix, whose star set before the genius of Clive 
 and had married Dupleix's daughter. Parliamentarian 
 d'lSpremesnil had been born in Pondicherry, in 1746, 
 and he was now in his forty-first year, a distinguished, 
 very eloquent, very hot-headed advocate. It became 
 his fixed determination to find out what was being print- 
 ed, and, by patience and the bribery of a printer's wife, 
 he did find out what was going on. A proof of the royal 
 edict concerning the new Plenary Court was smug- 
 gled out and into D'Epremesnil's hands. On May 3 
 D'Epremesnil communicated his discovery to the Par- 
 liament, which immediately passed a series of highly 
 dignified resolutions which, reduced to their simplest
 
 1788. D'ARTAGNAN D'AGOUST. 
 
 terms, implied that the Parliament meant to stick to 
 its guns. 
 
 Bat, if the Parliament meant sticking to its guns, so, 
 also, did Lomenie de Brienne, clinging fanatically to his 
 ill-omened part of strong man. He launched two let- 
 tres de cachet, one against D'Epremesnil, one against a 
 brother Parliamentarian, Goislard de Montsabert, who 
 had made himself obnoxious by his opposition to the 
 ministerial devices. But luck was heavily against Lo- 
 menie. Somehow or other, D'Epremesnil and Goislard 
 heard of the threatened arrests, escaped somehow in 
 disguise from the hand of the law, and made their ap- 
 pearance before an indignant Parliament on May 5, 1 788, 
 and told their tale. The indignant Parliament solemnly 
 placed the two threatened men and all other magistrates 
 and citizens under the protection of the king and of the 
 law an imposing, but scarcely very serviceable, formula 
 then it sent off a deputation to Versailles to the king, 
 and remained in permanent session to see what would 
 happen. Captain D'Agoust happened Captain Vin- 
 cent d'Agoust, at the head of the French Guards, with 
 fixed bayonets, and a company of sappers. Captain Vin- 
 cent d'Agoust was a steadfast, soldierly man, who may 
 remind us a little of Dumas the Elder's D'Artagnan. 
 Whatever he had to do he would do thoi'oughly, with- 
 out the slightest regard for anything in the world but 
 his own consigne. He was famous, testifies Weber, 
 for an exceeding firmness ; a gentleman of the most 
 ancient stock, steeped in the spirit of his ancestors 
 much more inclined to push the principles of honor to 
 an extreme than to forget them for a single second. 
 Once his pertinacity and firmness had driven the grand- 
 son of the Grand Conde, whom he considered to have 
 given Lira, cause of offence, although a prince of the
 
 278 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XIX. 
 
 blood, into fighting a duel with him. It was not in the 
 nature of such a man, murmurs poor Weber, plaintively, 
 to make himself, as was said in those days of exaggera- 
 tion, the vile instrument of ministerial despotism; but, 
 as a servant of the king, he believed it to be his duty 
 to obey whatever the king ordered. He certainly now 
 carried out his orders in very thorough fashion. He 
 surrounded the Palace of Justice with his troops, al- 
 lowed no one out, and solemnly entered, after some for- 
 mal delays, into the presence of the infuriated and pos- 
 sibly slightly alarmed Parliament. D'Agoust demanded 
 the persons of D'Epremesnil and Goislard, produced a 
 royal order, addressed to himself and signed by the king, 
 authorizing him to arrest them wherever they might be. 
 Here, however, a difficulty arose. Captain d'Agoust 
 did not know Goislard or D'Epremesnil by sight; 
 he invited the Parliament to surrender them ; to point 
 them out. The Parliament, as a body, emphatically de- 
 clined. " We are all Goislards and D'Epremesnils here," 
 one enthusiast cried out. "If you want to arrest them, 
 arrest us all." From the midnight, when D'Agoust first 
 came, till nigh midday, the Parliament remained sitting, 
 while D'Agoust sent for further orders. There was 
 .something sublime, but there was also something ridic- 
 ulous, in this eccentric all-night sitting, with the men of 
 the sword watching the men of the robe, to the grave 
 physical discomfort of some of them through the small 
 hours, and nobody knowing what was to happen next. 
 At eleven in the morning D'Agoust came back again, 
 bringing with him one Larchier, " exempt de robe-courte," 
 whom he called upon to point out to him the two men he 
 was looking for. The pale, perturbed exempt looked 
 tremblingly over the lines of Parliamentarians, sitting 
 Roman-senator-like in their places, and declared that he
 
 1788. WEBER'S SOLDIER. 279 
 
 could not see them. Perhaps he closed his eyes. Baf- 
 fled D'Agoust again appealed to the Assembly, and on 
 receiving no answer again withdrew. Then D'Epre- 
 mesnil and Goislard resolved to surrender themselves, 
 in order to save Larchier from the grave peril to which 
 his refusal to point them out might expose him. 
 D'Agoust was summoned to return; D'Epremesnil and 
 Goislard surrendered themselves with much eloquence 
 and solemnity, and were escorted out through lines of 
 bayonets to the carriages that were in waiting for them. 
 D'Epremesnil was sent to the Isle of Sainte-Marguerite, 
 Goislard to Pierre-en-Cise. Then the whole Parliament 
 had to march out in its turn through the lines of bayo- 
 nets, while the gallant D'Agoust locked the doors of the 
 Palace of Justice and carried off the keys. So ended 
 the first mad stroke of waning despotism against an 
 awakening nation. Lomenie, the strong man, had done 
 the most foolish thing it was in his power to do, and so, 
 in one sense at least, had attained excellence. Why 
 was there no one to remind Louis of that other king, 
 that English monarch, who had also played at the game 
 of arresting representatives of popular feeling, and who 
 had paid a heavy price for his play ? Louis XVI. was 
 imitating Charles I. of England, and with a like re- 
 sult. 
 
 It is curious to read in Weber's book that he, being 
 attracted to the neighborhood of the Palace of Justice 
 while all these events were going on, overheard a man 
 in the crowd ask one of the Gardes Franaises if he 
 would fire upon the people in the case of any attempt 
 being made to rescue the menaced Parliamentarians. 
 " Ay," responded the soldier, " I would fire upon my 
 friend, I would fire upon my brother, if I received the 
 order to do so." A soldierly response of a kind dear to
 
 280 THE FREKCH REVOLUTION. CH. XIX. 
 
 such as Weber. But Weber had only to wait another 
 poor year or so to find that sort of soldierly mood strange- 
 ly changed. 
 
 The country would have none of the new courts. A 
 spirit of fierce opposition spread like flame all over the 
 country. Paris blazed like a volcano, vomiting sedi- 
 tious placards and proclamations of all kinds, more than 
 desperate authority could suppress; more, almost, than 
 fiery-eyed sedition could read, or certainly digest, the 
 whole meaning of. But the pith of it all was that Paris 
 would not be off with the old love, and would not be on 
 with the new. Impassioned, if discreetly anonymous, pa- 
 triotism called upon indignant citizens, in highly inflam- 
 matory language, to resist to the uttermost. The old, 
 old cry, that had been the burden of so many tumults, 
 was repeated again and again, in the written and the 
 spoken word, "To your tents, O Israel!" Nor did the 
 opposition come alone from inflamed civism, from an 
 irate bourgeoisie, from an insurrectionary populace. 
 Peers and princes were as eloquently hostile as the 
 most belligerent burgess of them all. Did not the 
 three great Dukes of la Rochefoucauld, de Noailles, 
 and Luxembourg positively and peremptorily refuse to 
 sit in the new court ? Did not peers and princes of the 
 Church approach the ear of majesty and urge him with 
 eloquent if dutiful solicitations to reflect ? a thing not 
 much in poor Louis's line. 
 
 Paris was in a highly irritable mood. Bread was 
 very dear; it had risen from two and a half to four sous 
 a pound. In fear of worse to come, prudent families 
 began to dismiss all superfluous servants; and these, 
 seeking situations and finding them not, added them- 
 selves to the floating discontent. Want of bread and 
 want of employment are two potent factors of disaffec-
 
 1788. PROVINCIAL PROTESTS. 281 
 
 tion, and neither of them was wanting in Paris in the 
 winter of 1789. 
 
 Poor Lomenie was now in something of the position 
 of Faust when he has summoned the Earth Spirit and is 
 afraid of it, or of the Arabian fisherman when he set 
 free the Djinn. He had aroused a storm which he was 
 wholly unable to lay. It was all very well for the king, 
 in the solemn formality of a Bed of Justice, to register 
 his edicts. He could not get them obeyed. Public opin- 
 ion was all against him; the Chatelet protested by pass- 
 ing a vigorous resolution against the edicts; all over the 
 provinces the flame of fierce protest spread and spread. 
 The Parliament of Rennes declared that any one who 
 entered the new Plenary Court was infamous. After 
 sitting from four o'clock in the morning until six o'clock 
 in the evening, it passed, among other violent resolu- 
 tions, one in which it declared all persons who should 
 in any degree attempt to carry the sovereign's new or- 
 dinances into execution to be guilty of high-treason, 
 and to be prosecuted and punished as such. The arri- 
 val of a strong detachment of the troops in garrison in- 
 terrupted their proceedings; but the inhabitants came 
 in crowds to the rescue of the Parliament, reinforced by 
 a vast concourse of people from the adjacent country. 
 There was a scuffle which grew into a riot. The troops 
 found themselves compelled to give way to the immense 
 multitude of their antagonists, and relinquish their de- 
 signs upon the Parliament. No person could be found 
 venturesome enough to serve the lettres de cachet which 
 had been sent down for the exile or imprisonment of 
 the members. The excitement became so violent and 
 the rioting so alarming that the Bishop of Rennes judged 
 it wise to set out himself express to Paris, and to use 
 such expedition as to spend but thirty-six hours on a
 
 282 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XIX. 
 
 journey of two hundred miles, in order to lay before 
 the king a clear statement of the desperate condition of 
 things in that province. 
 
 But of all the opposition to the schemes of Brienne 
 the most serious came from Dauphine. Grenoble had 
 battled briskly, even bloodily, against the exile of its 
 Parliament ; had set up its Parliament by force of arms. 
 When the tumult subsided, the Parliament obeyed the 
 lettres de cachet that had been levelled at it, and Greno- 
 ble found itself without a government. But Grenoble 
 boasted a citizen of import, a man of some thirty years 
 of age, whom failing health had driven from the bar ; 
 a man who had studied much his Montesquieu and his 
 Blackstone, who was a perfervid admirer of the English 
 Constitution. His name was Mounier ; we shall meet 
 with him again. Prompted by Mounier, the city held 
 a solemn conclave, and decided upon a convocation of 
 the three orders of the province, with double represen- 
 tation of the Third Estate. The enthusiasm knew no 
 bounds. Brienne in vain endeavored to stop the cur- 
 rent of public feeling. Orders of Council prohibiting 
 the Assemblies were only put up to be promptly torn 
 down again by an enthusiastic populace. Marshal de 
 Vaux, sent down to prohibit by force of arms, found 
 it better to temporize. He found the whole province 
 against him, the Three Orders unanimous. His troops, 
 too, showed themselves 'to be in sympathy with the 
 popular will. The marshal was assured by his subor- 
 dinate officers that the soldiers, and the officers too, 
 were not to be counted upon. What was he to do ? 
 He did the best he could. If the Assembly were held 
 at Grenoble he would put it down, he said ; but if it 
 were held somewhere else, why, he would take no hos- 
 tile notice of it. It accordingly was held at Vizille, in
 
 1788. DARING DAUPHINE. 283 
 
 the tennis-court tennis-courts are important in these 
 times of the chateau of a rich manufacturer whose 
 name deserves to be recorded, M. Claude Perier. The 
 Assembly elected Mounier its secretary, gravely de- 
 manded the summons of the States-General, and then 
 gravely adjourned, having performed the most momen- 
 tous deed yet done by them. Brienne was for meeting 
 this rebellion by armed force ; the king was too pru- 
 dent ; the demand of Vizille was to be obeyed at Ver- 
 sailles. It would be impossible to overrate the import- 
 ance of that early movement in Dauphine or of the debt 
 that a dawning democracy owed to Grenoble and Vizille. 
 
 In Flanders, in Brittany, in Languedoc, in Beam, and 
 in Provence, disturbances of the like sinister kind broke 
 out. Brienne had certainly roused the country ; he 
 still made desperate efforts to tranquillize it by the old 
 devices. He met Parliamentary opposition with decrees 
 of exile, but decrees of exile would not fill his treasury. 
 
 The very elements fought against Lomenie, much as 
 the stars in their courses fought against Sisera. We 
 learn that on July 13, 1788, about nine in the morning, 
 without any eclipse, a dreadful and almost total dark- 
 ness suddenly overspread the face of the earth in sev- 
 eral parts of France, and this awful gloom was the pre- 
 -lude to a tempest or hurricane supposed to be without 
 example in the temperate climates of Europe. The 
 whole face of nature was so totally changed in about 
 an hour that no person who had slept during the tem- 
 pest could have believed himself in the same part of the 
 world when he awoke. The soil was changed into a 
 morass, the standing corn beaten into the quagmire, the 
 vines broken to pieces, and their branches buried in the 
 same manner, the fruit-trees of eveiy kind demolished, 
 and the hail lying unmelted in heaps, like rocks of solid
 
 284 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XIX. 
 
 ice. The disordered state of public affairs prevented 
 both the course and extent of this hurricane from being 
 defined as it would have been in a happier season. The 
 thoughts of those who were qualified to observe and 
 record so extraordinary a phenomenon were otherwise 
 occupied ; and the sufferers could only describe what 
 they immediately felt, with little curiosity as to the fate 
 of others. Several large districts were entirely deso- 
 lated ; one of sixty square leagues was totally ruined. 
 Of the sixty-six parishes included in the district of Pon- 
 toise, forty-three were entirely desolated, while of the 
 remaining twenty-three some lost two thirds, and others 
 not less than half their harvest. The entire loss or 
 damage was said to be moderately estimated at four- 
 score millions of livres, or between three and four mill- 
 ion pounds sterling. 
 
 Brienne, at his wit's end now, called an extraordi- 
 nary Assembly of the Clergy, which immediately passed 
 an address to the king calling for abolition of the Ple- 
 nary Courts and the summoning of the States-General. 
 Lomenie had to go. He went in August, 1788, leaving 
 ruin behind him. It is impossible not to pity the poor 
 creature, called in at so desperate a pinch to do what 
 no one could do, and quitting the scene amidst univer- 
 sal execration, because he could not achieve the impos- 
 sible. He had filled his own pockets, however, which 
 may have served to slightly console him, and he van- 
 ished into outer darkness after urging the king to send 
 for Necker. 
 
 Sardonic Grimm declared that there never was a min- 
 ister who showed such talents for throwing everything 
 into confusion as Lomenie de Brienne. He had shaken 
 to pieces the whole political machine in the space of a 
 few months. Thanks to the happy ascendency of his
 
 1788. GRIMM THE OBSERVER. 285 
 
 genius, it could truly be said that there was not a single 
 public body in France that remained in its place, or re- 
 tained its natural movements. Grimm's amused eyes 
 noted a Parliament suddenly adopting a system directly 
 opposed to its own interests, a system it had anathema- 
 tized a hundred times ; noted a nobility, the existence 
 of which seemed the most intimately connected with 
 the rights of the throne, wearing an air of being dis- 
 posed to separate itself. Even the military spirit seemed 
 to that ironic gaze overpowered by some spirit, lauda- 
 ble in itself, perhaps, but rather difficult to reconcile 
 with that character of subordination without which 
 there could be neither discipline nor army. The clergy 
 no longer preached obedience, and the soldiers seemed 
 no longer disposed to maintain it. What seemed still 
 more remarkable to the astute Grimm was that this 
 universal discontent had been preceded by declarations 
 from the king the most favorable to public liberty. 
 The king had just been making more sacrifices of his 
 authority than any of his predecessors had ever ven- 
 tured to do. The Parliaments had called aloud for the 
 assistance of that which of all other things they had 
 most to fear, a meeting of the States-General, "carried 
 away by a man totally without consideration among 
 them, an Abbe de Sabathier." All, he declares, holding 
 up his hands in amazement, as if actuated by some su- 
 pernatural influence, have demanded the convocation 
 of the States-General, making, as it were, in this man- 
 ner amends to the nation for having so long usurped 
 the most capital of its rights. 
 
 Back came Necker again, as serenely confident as 
 ever that if a crisis existed he was the man for the 
 crisis. That unconquerably conceited heart imagined 
 itself equal to all emergencies, Family affection is a
 
 286 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XIX. 
 
 very beautiful thing, and a very wholesome thing, but 
 it is possible that the family affection which surrounded 
 Necker was not overgood for him. To have a clever 
 wife and a clever daughter daily and hourly assuring 
 an ambitious man that he is a new savior of society, a 
 sort of little god upon earth, often has the disastrous 
 effect of making the ambitious man believe it. And 
 Necker was inclined to believe almost anything in the 
 way of praise that could be offered to him. The fire 
 of his ambition, assiduously fanned within the circle of 
 his family, was for the moment assiduously fed outside. 
 The public had got into their heads a queer kind of 
 belief in the omnipotence of Necker. He was known 
 to be an honest man, and honest men had been so rare 
 in the administration of the finances that it was scarcely 
 surprising if other qualities were attributed to him even 
 more miraculous. It seemed, a satirical observer said, 
 as if they conceived that he possessed a magical wand ; 
 that by waving it he could pay off an immense public 
 debt without money ; and that by another movement 
 he could with the same ease supply twenty-five mill- 
 ions of people with corn and bread. Circumstances 
 seemed for a moment to give a sanction to the delu- 
 sion ; the funds suddenly rose, and the general good- 
 humor seemed to dispel the black clouds which hung 
 so heavily over the political horizon. 
 
 Necker on the spur of the moment could think of 
 nothing better to do than to summon the Notables again, 
 and see how they might help him out of the muddle 
 into which Lomenie had plunged things. Since the 
 States-General were to be summoned, the best thing 
 now was to settle how they were to be composed, what 
 form of convocation should be used, in what order the 
 elections should take place, and the manner ip which
 
 1788. NECKER .REDUX. 287 
 
 the different assemblies which were to give instructions 
 to their deputies to the States should be held. These 
 knotty points were lengthily discussed. The year drove 
 on ; russet autumn deepened into bitter winter ; France 
 fermented and poured forth its cahiers / theatrical no- 
 bles solemnly renounced in the nick of time their pecu- 
 niary privileges and were laughed at, not admired ; 
 Bertrand de Molleville wept tears of blood over the 
 ingratitude of men. To his amiable mind it seemed 
 that the Third Estate ought to have been satisfied with 
 the important sacrifices made by the princes of the blood 
 and the nobility; but they were sometimes represented 
 as acts of hypocrisy, which ought not to be relied on ; 
 sometimes as indications of fear, which should encour- 
 age that order to rise in their demands. De Molleville 
 did not like the look of things at all. The most inflam- 
 matory pamphlets against the clergy and the nobility 
 were circulated through the whole kingdom without the 
 least opposition ; the most shameful caricatures, ex- 
 posed to view in the squares, on the quays, and at the 
 print-shops in Paris, excited the crowds they collected 
 to insult not only the ecclesiastics, but every well-dressed 
 man who happened to be passing. It was a terrible 
 time for the De Mollevilles. 
 
 Bouille, too, was much alarmed at the turn things 
 were taking, though he was intelligent enough to see 
 that so totally was every principle of the Old Order 
 crumbling that the public mind was already democrat- 
 ical, while the monarchy still existed. He could see 
 that neither Notables nor States-General might avail 
 while the magistracy was ambitious, while the clergy 
 were jealous of their privileges, while a spirit of inno- 
 vation prevailed among the nobility, while there was 
 a total want of subordination in the army, while licen-
 
 288 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XIX. 
 
 tiousness and insolence pervaded the middle ranks of 
 society, while the lower class experienced the extreme 
 of misery, and the rich indulged themselves in the most 
 unbounded luxury. But he was also intelligent enough, 
 and enough attached to his order, to see that there were 
 possible consequences of the grimmest kind in what 
 Necker was about to do. He had a talk with Necker 
 in January, 1789. He represented to Necker with force 
 and with truth the danger of assembling the States- 
 General in the manner he intended. He told him that 
 he was arming the people against the first orders of the 
 state, and that, when thus delivered up unarmed, they 
 would soon feel the effect of their vengeance, urged on 
 by the two most active passions of the human heart, 
 interest and self-love. Enthusiastic Bouille even entered 
 into particulars, but Necker coldly answered, raising 
 his eyes to heaven, that it was necessary to rely on the 
 moral virtues of mankind. Bouille replied that this 
 was a fine romance, but he would see a horrible and 
 bloody tragedy, unless he were wise enough to avoid 
 the catastrophe. At this Necker smiled, and said that 
 such apprehensions were extravagant. 
 
 As if to confute Necker, however, the populace of 
 Paris began to make a display of that ungoverned 
 and riotous disposition which afterwards made them so 
 grimly conspicuous. A miiltitude of people assembled, 
 seemingly for sport, about the Pont Neuf, where they 
 amused themselves harmlessly enough for some time 
 with dancing, with throwing squibs and crackers, and 
 obliging the passers-by to take off their hats and bow 
 to the statue of Henry IV. They burned Brienne in 
 effigy; they set fire to a guard-house; they fought the 
 watch. After a while, however, they grew tired of 
 such tame sport. Lamoignon, Keeper of the Seals, had
 
 1788. THE FIRST SCUFFLE. 289 
 
 just fallen from office. The mob burned him too in effigy. 
 But by this time they were ready for graver work. La- 
 moignon's hostility to the Parliament made him espe- 
 cially obnoxious. Lighted torches were seized by eager 
 hands, and the mob proceeded in a body to set fire to 
 the residence of Lamoignon. The timely interference 
 of the military saved the house and probably the life of 
 Lamoignon. The French Guards and the Swiss Guards 
 faced the rioters. The fury of the mob was raised so 
 high that they stood a battle with the soldiers, but were 
 soon routed, many of their number being killed and a 
 much greater number undoubtedly wounded. So the 
 first serious scuffle between people and soldiery began 
 and ended. 
 
 Necker's measure as a statesman was never more 
 clearly shown than in his report to the king, which was 
 printed as a supplement to the " Result of the Council," 
 published on December 27, 1788. In this report there 
 were three points. Firstly, Necker declared against the 
 advice of the Notables, that the old States-General should 
 be exactly copied, and that every bailiwick and sene- 
 schalty should return the same number of deputies. 
 The effect of this would only be, he argued, to give ex- 
 actly the same degree of representation to constituencies 
 with enormous populations and to constituencies where 
 the inhabitants were not a tithe of the number. Necker 
 next considered the question of the double representa- 
 tion of the Tiers Etat. He decided to follow the exam- 
 ple of Languedoc, Provence, Hainault, and the new as- 
 sembly in Dauphine, and to agree with petitions from 
 all parts of the kingdom, in urging that the Third Estate 
 should have as many representatives as the other two 
 orders put together. Here he ran most definitely coun- 
 ter to the wishes of all that party both in the court and 
 I. 19
 
 290 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. Cn. XIX. 
 
 in the country who wished to keep the States- General 
 narrowly within the limits that had confined it in old 
 days and under very different conditions. Finally, he 
 urged that the different orders need not be bound to 
 elect only members of their own order. By this pro- 
 vision he hoped to enable the Third Estate to elect mem- 
 bers of the liberal clergy and nobility for their depu- 
 ties. The result of the council was based on this report. 
 It decided that the States- General should consist of a 
 thousand deputies, elected in proportion to their popu- 
 lation by the various bailiwicks and seneschalties, in two 
 hundred and fifty deputations of four deputies each 
 one for the order of the nobility, one for the clergy, and 
 two for the Third Estate. What was perhaps the most 
 important question that agitated the public mind was 
 left unsettled by the decree. Nothing was said as to 
 whether voting was to be by order or by head. The 
 privileged orders regarded vote by order as the real 
 keystone of the difficulty, arid the Third Estate per- 
 ceived that their double representation was of no use 
 if it left them with a practical majority of two to one 
 against them. It was very characteristic of Necker to 
 leave the real crux of the difficulty to settle itself when 
 the time came. 
 
 The publication of the " Result of the Council " gave 
 rise to a very deluge of pamphlets of the newest and 
 most approved democratic pattern. Many were by men 
 of great importance, whom we shall meet with again, 
 men like Target, men like Brissot de Warville, men, 
 above all, like Sieyes. There were others by men of 
 less note, the Volneys, the Ceruttis and their like, who 
 wrote and printed and scattered their pamphlets broad- 
 cast, as if the welfare of France depended upon the 
 amount of printed paper that was produced. But if
 
 1788. THE END OF EIGHTY-EIGHT. 291 
 
 Paris deluged the provinces with pamphlets, the prov- 
 inces in their turn were not behindhand in the activity 
 of their pamphleteers. Many of these provincial pam- 
 phleteers were fated to be famous, if not to be fortu- 
 nate. Most notable was Jean Paul Rabaut, the Prot- 
 estant pastor whose " Desert name " of Saint-Etienne 
 recalled those evil days when Paul Rabaut, his father, 
 was a hunted Huguenot in the wild Cevennes. Rabaut 
 Saint-Etienne had been many things in his forty-five 
 years of life. He was a scholar and a poet as well as a 
 divine ; he had studied law ; he had written a grim ro- 
 mance ; he had succeeded in getting Louis XVI. to pro- 
 pose, and the Paris Parliament to register, an edict .of tol- 
 eration for non-Catholics ; he had written an approved 
 book on early Greek history; he adored Lafayette, Eng- 
 land, and America. Now he had written his pamphlet 
 and joined the army of politicians. Rabaut Saint-Eti- 
 enne was a well-known man when he wrote his pamphlet 
 even outside the circle of his provincial fame. There 
 were other pamphleteers whose names had hardly passed 
 outside the murmur of their rustic burgh. One of these 
 was a young Arras lawyer whose name will soon be 
 familiar. The pamphleteers were all especially inter- 
 ested in the great question of vote by order or vote by 
 head. The popular mind dwelt upon it, and the innu- 
 merable pamphlets might have shown Necker the need 
 of deciding this question at once. But it is obvious to 
 those who study Necker's character closely that to do 
 the right thing at the right moment was an act entirely 
 outside his capabilities. 
 
 So the year 1788 drifted to its end. All through the 
 long and bitter winter France that was fed and clothed 
 discussed the States-General with voice and pen, pour- 
 ing out pamphlet after pamphlet, a very wilderness of
 
 292 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XIX. 
 
 pamphlets. France that was not clothed and not fed 
 shivered and starved, and felt hungry and mutinous. 
 The States-General were to give it food and clothing, 
 no doubt, but in the meantime discontent was deepen- 
 ing, widening ; the forces of disaffection were fed, as 
 they always are fed, by famine. Over in Versailles an 
 amazed and angry court was breaking up into desperate 
 cabals, full of vague, uneasy premonitions, of vague, 
 uneasy fears. The year that now was dying had been 
 an evil, ominous year for them. What would the year 
 that was about to be hold in its bosom ?
 
 1787-89. ARTHUR YOUNG'S ENTERPRISE. 293 
 
 CHAPTER XX. 
 
 WHAT ABTHUR TOUNG SAW. 
 
 IT fortunately pleased Providence towards the close 
 of the last century to inspire a worthy Suffolk gentle- 
 man with a desire for foreign travel. The desire did 
 not carry him very far, nor into many very out-of-the- 
 way places, if we were to gauge his undertaking by the 
 standard of recent travel. But at the time when, in the 
 May of 1787, Mr. Arthur Young of Bradfield, in Suffolk, 
 crossed the Channel and entered upon the first of his 
 tours in France, foreign travel was judged upon a very 
 different plane. It was not then so very far from the 
 time when a journey into Scotland was regarded as an 
 adventure as perilous as an expedition into Central Af- 
 rica ; and though the Grand Tour had made Paris as 
 familiar as London to most gentlemen of fashion, it was 
 still possible for the Suffolk farmer to look upon his 
 travels in France as something in the nature of an en- 
 terprise. An enterprise indeed it was, and destined to 
 prove momentous to history and to literature. Arthur 
 Young crossed the English Channel to make a personal 
 inspection of the agricultural condition of France. This 
 was what he proposed to do. What he actually accom- 
 plished was to put on record the most valuable account 
 of the political and social condition of France during 
 the most important period 'of her history. What was 
 intended as a series of notes for the instruction of the 
 British farmer ended by becoming one of the most pre-
 
 29 4 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XX. 
 
 cious contributions to historical and political literature 
 ever penned. Arthur Young's travels in France during 
 the years 1787, 1788, and 1789 convey the most perfect 
 and accurate picture of France under the Old Order, 
 and France in the very dawn of the Revolution, that 
 exists. It would hardly be unfair to say that the stu- 
 dent would know more of the France of that most mo- 
 mentous time by knowing Arthur Young well, and not 
 knowing any of all the vast number of other books on 
 the subject, than by knowing all the other books and 
 not knowing Arthur Young. 
 
 "That wise and honest traveller," Mr. John Morley 
 calls him. It is one of those felicities for which Mr. 
 Morley is celebrated. He was very wise, was Arthur 
 Young, wise with the wisdom of the brilliant age which 
 boasted still of the genius of Burke, of Fox; he was 
 very honest, with the austere and flawless honesty which 
 might have made him a great statesman, and which, at 
 all events, made him a great man. Somebody has well 
 said that gentlemen are gentlemen all the world over ; 
 all that is necessary to make a man a gentleman is that 
 he should be honest and brave and kind. Arthur Young 
 was all of these ; the term " Gentleman Farmer " was 
 never more happily applied since man first abandoned 
 the acorn and turned to the service of Ceres. There 
 was a high heroic strain about his bravery which in other 
 conditions would have made him a gallant soldier a 
 Wolfe or a Clive. When he was at the Duke de Lian- 
 court's, in 1787, he inspected the school for training the 
 orphans of soldiers to be soldiers themselves. " There 
 are at present one hundred and twenty boys, all dressed 
 in uniform. My ideas have all taken a turn which I am 
 too old to change : I should have been better pleased 
 to see one hundred and twenty lads educated to the
 
 1787-89. ARTHUR YOUNG'S STRUGGLES. 295 
 
 plough, in habits of culture superior to the present ; but 
 certainly the establishment is humane and the conduct 
 of it excellent." Yet one feels that it was but a turn 
 of the wheel under Fortune's hand, and Arthur Young 
 would have made as sterling a soldier as ever followed 
 the colors in some great campaign. His amazing cour- 
 age and coolness under trying and even dangerous con- 
 ditions in France, when the revolutionary fever was first 
 hot, have in them something of the man of the sword 
 rather than the man of the plough ; they smack of the 
 camp rather than the farm. But what most of all shows 
 the true heroic temper of the man is the way in which 
 he waged, all through his life, a war with iron fortune, 
 losing again and again in his magnificent farming ex- 
 periments and always returning to the charge, heedless 
 of poverty, heedless of ruin, with all the fine audacity 
 of some gallant of the Old Guard. 
 
 It is encouraging to think of Arthur Young, of his 
 struggles, his courage, his simple patriotism. To say 
 that his life was not all happy is to say that he was 
 mortal, and shared the lot of mortals. But, upon the 
 whole, he must be accounted happy ; for he was a good 
 man and did good things. His married life was not 
 happy ; the loss of his beautiful and beloved daughter, 
 the "Bobbin" of so many affectionate allusions in his 
 letters, plunged his later years into grief. There are 
 few more tragical things in their quiet way than the 
 description Arthur Young gives of a visit to Burke 
 in Burke's decline, when grief for the loss of Richard 
 Burke has well-nigh broken Burke's mighty heart, and 
 Arthur Young feels a kind of heroic pity for the great 
 man thus desperately brought low, and rides serenely 
 away. And then his own great gi'ief and loss comes 
 upon him, and he is as despaii'ing, as dejected and
 
 296 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XX. 
 
 wretched, as Burke himself. It is a sermon, a very old, 
 familiar sermon ; but it comes home to us with a pecul- 
 iar keenness when two great men give out the text for 
 it. Blindness came upon Arthur Young's eve of life, as 
 it came upon that of Milton ; and he bore his affliction 
 with a dignified, a religious resignation. The happy 
 things in his life were his hopes, his honest, patriotic 
 ambitions, his travels, and his friends. He had many 
 friends ; the pathway of his life was happily starred 
 with them. Wherever he went he made friends. The 
 Burneys were very fond of him, father and daughter. 
 It is a bright picture that Fanny Burney paints of a 
 visit one day from Arthur Young, "most absurdly 
 dressed for a common visit, being in light blue, embroid- 
 ered with silver, having a bag and sword, and walk- 
 ing in the rain." " He was grown all airs and affecta- 
 tions," she adds, "yet I believe this was put on for 
 what purpose I cannot tell, unless it were to let us see 
 what a power for transformation he possessed." It is 
 pleasant to think of famous Arthur Young in all this 
 foppish fantasy. 
 
 It is, however, Arthur Young, the traveller, and Ar- 
 thur Young, the traveller in France, who most interests 
 us in this anniversary of the Revolution. What lifelike, 
 brilliant pictures he draws of all he sees ! how skil- 
 fully and intelligently he records all that he hears ! 
 There never was another traveller like him in the 
 world, since the days of dear Herodotus, for a keen 
 eye and a clever pen. All the rural France of the 
 Old Order comes up before us, as we read, as clearly as 
 if evoked by the wave of a wizard's wand. We shud- 
 der as we cross with him the threshold of the foul, 
 unlovely inns against whose dirt and discomfort he is 
 never tired of inveighing with a kind of whimsical fe-
 
 1787-89. ME CHARM OF YOtfNG'S fRAVELg. 297 
 
 rocity which is exquisitely entertaining. We smile at 
 his satirical emphasis upon the provincial ignorance of 
 events, upon the dearth of journalism, upon the irritat- 
 ing precautions and formalities with which the new au- 
 thorities of the Third Estate occasionally hobbled his 
 wandering footsteps. We see Paris rise up before us, 
 the Paris of 1789, which M. Babeau has been lately de- 
 scribing, and it seems more familiar to us than the Paris 
 of to-day. But the especial charm of the travels lies in 
 the portraits they paint, as their especial value lies in 
 the studies of social and political life they present. His 
 testimony to the beauty of Marie Antoinette is an in- 
 teresting supplement to Burke's ; his sketch of the ex- 
 cellent Duke de Liancourt, who competed with the Duke 
 de Penthievre for the honor of being considered the 
 best of the nobility, is one of the most admirable his- 
 torical sketches extant. Arthur Young was a man who 
 must have adorned any age. It is a special gratification 
 to us to reflect that he belonged to the age which gave 
 birth to the French Revolution. We are better able to 
 understand that woi-ld-disturbing portent by the illu- 
 mination of his fine intelligence. 
 
 In a very poor book by a very able man, the " Ancien 
 Regime " of Charles Kingsley, the author is pleased to 
 imagine that he discerns the whole of the Old Order in 
 one book ; and that book is it seemed incredible to 
 read, it seems almost too incredible to repeat " Gil 
 Bias." Of "Gil Bias" Charles Kingsley has written 
 some very wild and whirling words, sufficiently regret- 
 table to peruse. A critic who declares with all serious- 
 ness that he could " recommend no human being " to 
 read it, who finds it merely a "collection of diseased 
 specimens," is scarcely worth considering with gravity 
 when he pronounces that it is also "the 'Ancien Re-
 
 298 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XX. 
 
 gime ' itself." Statements of this kind pass beyond the 
 limits of the eccentric into the region of the absurd. 
 There is a good deal of the Old Order in " Gil Bias," 
 because " Gil Bias " was written in the days of the Old 
 Order, and Le Sage was a man who knew how to use 
 his eyes. But it would be as unreasonable to expect to 
 find the whole of the Old Order in " Gil Bias " as it 
 would be to find it in the book which Kingsley some- 
 what absurdly puts into contrast with it " Telemaque." 
 There was more in the Old Order for good and evil, and 
 very certainly for evil, than is to be found within the 
 fascinating pages of the great novel. The man who 
 could say that " the most notable thing about the book 
 is its intense stupidity ; its dreariness, barrenness, shal- 
 lowness, ignorance of the human heart, want of any hu- 
 man interest," is out of court at once as an authority or 
 a critic. Such a man might find the " Ancien Regime " 
 or the Baconian cipher in Le Sage's masterpiece. The 
 student who wants to understand what the Old Order 
 was like in France will waste no time in whimsies about 
 " Gil Bias ;" he will plunge deeply into the pages of 
 Arthur Young. 
 
 It is curiously difficult to get anything like a really 
 comprehensive and exhaustive knowledge of the exact 
 condition of the surviving inheritances of the feudal 
 system which constituted what we have called the Old 
 Order in the reign of Louis XVI. But we can at least 
 see how it looked to the eyes of Arthur Young. The 
 extraordinary absence of any coherent system in the 
 whole social arrangement of the country makes any 
 study of the time the most perplexing of tasks. We 
 seem, like the hero of some fairy-tale, to be wandering 
 in an enchanted wood, from which it is impossible to 
 extricate ourselves, and in which it is impossible to
 
 1787-89. THE FEUDAL SYSTEM. 299 
 
 find a direct or serviceable path. In vain we hew our 
 way, lopping down difficulties right and left ; the 
 broken branches grow again with Hydra activity, and 
 the entanglements of the maze become more embarrass- 
 ing than before. The complete confusion of what may 
 be called the local government of the time is one of the 
 most difficult factors of the problem. The various pro- 
 vincial administrations, offspring of time and chance, 
 were conceived on no uniform plan, bore no relation- 
 ship whatever to a common whole, and were frequently 
 in themselves little centres of chaotic agglomeration of 
 obsolete traditions and conflicting systems. Many of 
 the provinces hardly knew how they were governed, and 
 were driven to address the fountain of authority for in- 
 formation of the most rudimentary kind as to the very 
 principles of their own political existence. 
 
 Nor were the principles of what has been called the 
 feudal system less complicated and less conflicting. It 
 is scarcely to be wondered at that a system should be in- 
 volved in such murky obscurity when we remember that 
 the very essence of the system was to permit to every in- 
 dividual lord an amount of authority over his own do- 
 mains which was a little short of regal. The king himself 
 had no power to intervene between one of these little 
 feudal kings and his vassals. Monarch after monarch 
 had essayed in vain to break down this barrier between 
 themselves and the seignorial authority, and at last had 
 given up the struggle in despair. Even when, in 1779, 
 the royal edict abolished servitude and main mort in 
 the crown-lands, the language of the law expressly set 
 forth that it had no. power to enforce the decree upon 
 the territories of the feudal nobility. Thus, at the 
 year 1789, we find this extraordinary feudal system, or 
 want of system, making the whole social administra-
 
 300 fflfi FllENCH DEVOLUTION. On. XX. 
 
 tion of France as bewildering as a child's puzzle and as 
 logical as an idiot's dream. Bound by no rational laws, 
 obedient to no principles, to no theories save those of 
 individual pleasure and independent, isolated authority, 
 the feudal system, a system of chaos within chaos, con- 
 verted France into such an assemblage of disorders as 
 the world has never seen before or since. No East- 
 ern empire, under whatever network of satrapies and 
 pashaliks, ever displayed a more grotesque incohe- 
 rence, a more helpless and hopeless muddle than poor 
 France displayed under the dying days of the Old Or- 
 der those days when Arthur Young was riding on her 
 highways, and weighing all things with his keen, atten- 
 tive mind. 
 
 If the rights of each great lord over his own lands 
 were practically unimpeachable by the king himself, it 
 did not follow that the rights of one great lord were 
 necessarily the same as those of another great lord. 
 The rules which governed each great domain, and which 
 regulated the relationships of lord and vassal, of sire 
 and serf, had grown up like plants of the soil in their 
 own way, and under their own conditions, unaffected by 
 the ways and conditions of other places. Just as one 
 field grew grass and another clover, so one great terri- 
 tory grew one set of laws, customs, and institutions, 
 and another great territory other quite different regu- 
 lations. 
 
 Seldom, therefore, in the whole history of humanity 
 was a more curious structure offered to the scrutiny of 
 mankind than the so-called social system of France 
 under the Old Order towards the autumn of the eigh- 
 teenth century offered to the scrutiny of Arthur Young. 
 That the supporters of such a system the persons who 
 profited by it, adored it, and fostered it could have se-
 
 1789. THE SOCIAL PYRAMID. 301 
 
 riously believed in its stability and its power of perma- 
 nent endurance is one of the most signal examples of 
 purblind power whereof the world holds record. The 
 " Panurge " of Frai^ois Rabelais and the " Elia " of 
 Charles Lamb genially and jocularly divide all man- 
 kind into the Borrowers and the Lenders, the Debtors 
 and the Creditors. Such a jesting-cap-and-bells divis- 
 ion of the human family is scarcely more grotesque 
 than the actual division which existed in France under 
 the Old Order. It was the case of the Haves and 
 Have-Nots over again. The population of France was, 
 roughly speaking, divided into two lots the privi- 
 leged and the unprivileged classes. The former, as 
 compared with the whole bulk, was but a handful of 
 men. The latter was composed of what may be called 
 the French nation. The apex of the social pyramid was 
 formed by the greatest and the least of all the orders, 
 by the king. The nobility came next, a shadow of an- 
 tique feudalism. The Church, with its far-reaching in- 
 fluence and comprehensive dominion, formed the next 
 grade of the pyramid. Then came the widening base 
 of plebeians, themselves divided, the bourgeoisie rich 
 or poor, the peasantry. There were even still actual 
 serfs, as at Saint-Claude, in the Jura. But the privi- 
 leged orders were the governors ; all the rest were the 
 governed. The man whom low birth and iron fortune 
 set apart from the privileged orders might till the 
 ground or drive a quill or follow the drum, might live 
 and breed and die as he pleased ; but he had scarcely 
 more share in the administration of the laws, scarcely 
 more influence upon the makers of the laws, scarcely 
 more right to be heard in protest against them or judg- 
 ment upon them, than if he lived in Mars or Saturn in- 
 stead of Franche Comte or Picardy.
 
 302 THE FRENCII REVOLUTION. CH. XX. 
 
 Let us take a map of France, of the France in which 
 Arthur Young is now in our fancy wandering, that old 
 feudal France, with its ancient divisions into provinces, 
 and look at it. Of all that fair land from north to south 
 and from east to west, a half belonged to the king, the 
 nobility, and the Church. The nobility and the clergy, 
 apart from the king and the communes, owned each a 
 fifth part of the soil of France, a fifth remained for the 
 middle class, a fifth for the peasantry. According to 
 Taine, the nobility in France, just before the Revolu- 
 tion, numbered one hundred and forty thousand, and 
 the clergy about one hundred and thirty thousand. 
 This sum of two hundred and seventy thousand, when 
 resolved into its component parts, consisted of some 
 twenty-five thousand to thirty thousand noble families, 
 and some twenty-three thousand monks in two thou- 
 sand five hundred monasteries, thirty-seven thousand 
 nuns in one thousand five hundred convents, and some 
 sixty thousand cures and vicars in as many churches 
 and chapels. These two orders, who were in a propor- 
 tion of about one to one hundred of the population, 
 owned, if the public lands are deducted, nearly half 
 France. 
 
 And this monstrous cantle, it must be remembered, 
 was the best part of the kingdom. Upon the portion of 
 the two privileged orders were practically all the rich- 
 est and most stately buildings, all the plate in precious 
 metal, all the works of art, all the things in fact that 
 constitute the wealth and luxury of a great state. The 
 wealth of the two orders was enormous. The property 
 of the clergy has been valued at nearly four billions of 
 francs, and their income, including .tithes, reached the 
 stupendous sum of two hundred millions. Vast as this 
 wealth seems, it was in reality vaster. Money was
 
 1789. PLEASANT PRIVILEGES. 303 
 
 worth practically twice as much then as it is worth 
 now ; to get an approximation to the modern value of 
 such sums we must double the total. Nor were the 
 nobles behindhand in wealth and splendor. The ap- 
 panages of the princes of the blood royal covered one 
 seventh of the surface of France. The Duke of Orleans 
 boasted of an income of nearly twelve million livres a 
 year. The temporal princes and the princes of the 
 Church competed with each other in magnificence of in- 
 come, in extent of their authority, over those unhappy 
 drudges who were the people of France and whom the 
 old order regarded but as the helots of a picked aristoc- 
 racy. 
 
 The nobles and the clergy were practically exempt 
 from all contribution to the State. Nobles did not pay 
 "any direct taxes in the same proportion as their fellow- 
 subjects, and in the case of the taille, their privilege ap- 
 proached very nearly to entire exemption. The nobles 
 had the pleasing privilege of appraising their own taxa- 
 tion, and the financial statement of a noble was never 
 inquired into. To question the veracity of a noble 
 would be to strike at the sublime perfection of the 
 whole social system ; it would be an indirect insult to 
 the king, who was himself only the noblest of the nobles. 
 " I pay pretty well what I please," the Duke of Orleans 
 boasted, in his pleasant, straightforward way ; and what 
 the Duke of Orleans said aloud the rest of the nobility 
 said beneath their breaths, or in their hearts, as they 
 followed his illustrious example. The clergy were, if 
 anything, a trifle more fortunate. Except in a few 
 frontier provinces, they paid personally no direct taxes 
 whatever. They had so ingeniously arranged matters 
 to please themselves that they had converted their share 
 of contributions to the State into a "free gift," the
 
 304 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XX. 
 
 amount of which was left entirely to their own discre- 
 tion and generosity. It is the oddest comment upon 
 their discretion to note that in the year 1789, the year 
 of doom, they absolutely refused to make any gift at 
 all. Nay more, there were actually occasions upon 
 which they induced the king to give them something 
 from the public treasury, bleeding to death as it was 
 from a thousand wounds. 
 
 Nor were such exemptions limited to the clergy and 
 the nobility. The bourgeoisie, although they were de- 
 spised by the two great orders, might obtain certain of 
 their privileges by paying heavily for them. Those 
 who could acquired by purchase the rank and privileges 
 of nobles. In this way a nobility of office and royal crea- 
 tion had come into existence, which, although scorned 
 by the old nobility of the sword, enjoyed the same pe- 
 cuniary immunities. Even those who had not thus 
 bought nobility were themselves privileged to no incon- 
 siderable extent. By living in towns, merchants, shop- 
 keepers, and professional men were able to avoid serv- 
 ing in the militia and collecting the faille, from which, 
 in the country, nobles alone were free. They also pur- 
 chased petty offices created by government in order that 
 they might be sold, offices with sham duties which con- 
 ferred on the holders partial exemption from payment 
 of the taille and of excise duties, and other privileges 
 of a like character. It was an amazingly pleasant time 
 for the handful of men who held France beneath their 
 feet ; it was a time terrible almost beyond description 
 for the millions who toiled and spun that the lilies of 
 Court and Church might flourish. 
 
 If taxation was thus oppressive, thus unjustly dis- 
 tributed between classes, it was made more oppressive 
 still by the nature of some of the taxes, by the manner
 
 1789. GAI3ELLE AND TAILLE. 305 
 
 of their assessment and collection, by the want of all 
 administrative unity. France was starred with custom- 
 houses and tolls which hampered trade, fostered smug- 
 gling, and raised the price of all the necessaries of life. 
 Excise duties were laid on articles of daily need, such 
 as candles, fuel, wine, grain, and flour. Goods which 
 might have travelled in three weeks from Provence to 
 Normandy took three and a half months, through the 
 delays caused by the imposition of duties. Artisans, 
 for example, who had to cross a river on their way to 
 their work were often met by customs duties which 
 they had to pay on tlie food which they carried in their 
 pockets. Some provinces and towns were privileged in 
 relation to certain taxes, and as a rule it was the poorest 
 provinces on which the heaviest burdens lay. One of 
 the most evil of the taxes was the gabelle, or tax on 
 salt, which, as we shall see, aroused the indignation of 
 Arthur Young. Of this tax, which was farmed, two 
 thirds of the whole were levied on a third of the king- 
 dom. There were special courts for the punishment of 
 those who disobeyed fiscal regulations of the most mi- 
 nute and grotesque kind. Throughout the north and 
 centre of France the gabelle was in reality a poll tax. 
 The sale of salt was a monopoly in the hands of the 
 farmers, who had behind them a small army of officials 
 for the suppression of smuggling, or using other salt 
 than that sold by them. Every person aged above seven 
 years was forced to purchase seven pounds yearly, 
 though the price varied so much that the same meas- 
 ure which cost a few shillings in one province cost two 
 or three pounds in another. Yet this salt might be used 
 for cooking purposes, and cooking purposes alone. The 
 fisherman who wished to salt his catch, the farmer who 
 wished to salt his pork, must buy more salt and obtain 
 I. 20
 
 306 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XX. 
 
 a certificate that they had bought more salt. The ex- 
 chequers were swollen, the galleys were manned, the 
 gallows were weighted yearly with the fines of purse or 
 of person paid by the victims of this odious tax. But 
 the gabelle was not the only infliction. There was the 
 faille, the first of the property taxes, the taille that was 
 as cruel as the gabelle, and as fatal to agriculture. It 
 was fantastically reassessed every year, not according 
 to any regular economic rule, but according to that 
 more Oriental plan which varies its taxation with the 
 varying fortunes of the place or person taxed. The 
 over-taxed victims soon discovered that the smallest in- 
 dication of prosperity meant an increase in the amount 
 of the tax. Under its blight farmer after farmer and 
 parish after parish were degraded to a common ruin and 
 a common despair. 
 
 The privileges of the great lords of the noble and 
 clerical orders were imperial in their magnificence, re- 
 calling something of the opulence of Oriental satraps. 
 The Archbishop of Cambray, who was at the same time 
 a duke and a count, possessed the suzerainty of all the 
 fiefs in a region containing some seventy-five thousand 
 inhabitants. He named half the aldermen of Cambray. 
 He named the entire administrative body of Cateau. 
 He named the abbots of two large abbeys. He pre- 
 sided over the provincial assembly and the permanent 
 bureau which succeeded it. Near him in Hainault the 
 Abbe of Saint- Amand owned seven eighths of the terri- 
 tory of the provostship, levied on the remainder the 
 seignorial taxes, corvees, and dime, and named the pro- 
 vost of the aldermen. Something of the lost sovereignty 
 of prince and prelate still lingered in these astonishing 
 privileges. A large number of the bishops were spir- 
 itual as well as temporal lords in part, and in certain
 
 1789. PETTY SOVEREIGNS. 307 
 
 cases in the whole of their episcopal cities. Some no- 
 bles, too, wielded authority almost like viceroys. Cer- 
 tain great houses had the right to collect for themselves 
 the aides, or taxes on wines and liquors, gold and silver, 
 cards, paper, starch, manufacture of iron and steel, and 
 the like. Lesser lords had their rights too. Such a 
 lord had often the power of nominating the cure, the 
 bailiff, the clerk of the court, the notaries and other 
 officials ; had his private prison, and sometimes his pri- 
 vate scaffold. The property of any man under his juris- 
 diction who was condemned to death was confiscated to 
 him ; all lands which had lain uncultivated for ten years 
 were swept by a similar process of confiscation into his 
 net. He claimed and took toll upon the sale of land to 
 the extent of a sixth, a fifth, and sometimes even a 
 fourth of the price, and performed the like feat when 
 land was rented for more than nine years. Then the 
 tolls he levied were comprehensive and cruel. In 1724 
 the king had abolished some twelve hundred of these 
 tolls, but enough remained to make the lives of the 
 peasants most miserable, and to make us wonder how 
 they existed at all under heavier inflictions. On the 
 bridges, the roads, the ferries, the boats ascending and 
 descending the water-ways, the grasping lord laid his 
 toll. The drover with his horses and kine, his sheep 
 and swine, the carrier with his merchandise, the farmer 
 with his provisions in his cart, had to pay, and pay stiffly, 
 for the privilege of treading the lord's high-road and 
 passing within the shadow of the lord's chateau. The 
 privilege of sale at his fairs or markets had to be paid 
 for. No one could eat, drink, or dress without paying 
 for the privilege to the lord of the land. To bleed the 
 luckless peasantry further, the noble set up his great 
 ovens, his wine - presses, his mills, and his slaughter-
 
 308 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XX. 
 
 houses, and condemned the poor wretches under his do- 
 minion to have their bread baked, their wine made, their 
 corn ground, and their cattle killed at his buildings, and 
 to pay heavily for that too. Every deed of the peas- 
 ant's life owed its tax to the lord ; every fruit of the 
 peasant's labor yielded its due to the lord. If the avari- 
 cious noble could have seen his way to taxing the very 
 air the peasant breathed, he would have done so and 
 rejoiced thereat. 
 
 It would be hard to say what rights the peasant did 
 possess beyond the grudgingly accorded right to live. 
 Wretched as his land was for the fattest land went 
 for farms for the privileged orders he could not deal 
 with it as he pleased. He could not sow, he could not 
 reap, according to his own pleasure ; meadowings had 
 to remain meadowings, and tilled land tilled land. For 
 if the peasant changed his field into a meadow he de- 
 prived the cure of his dime ; if he turned his meadow 
 into a field he diminished the commons ; if he sowed 
 clover he could not prevent the flocks of the seigneur 
 from pasturing thereon. His lands were encumbered 
 with fruit-trees, which were annually let for the profit 
 of the lord of the abbey. These trees were terrible 
 enemies to the peasant. The shadow they cast, their 
 spreading roots, the annual injury caused by the fruit- 
 gathering, all these harmed his fields, impeded his labor, 
 impoverished his scanty substance. Yet he dared not 
 cut down one of these trees. Nay, more, if one of them 
 perished by accident he was bound to replace it at his 
 own cost. The luckless fellaheen of the Nile Valley 
 were not more hardly used. The right of hunting was 
 a mark of nobility, and only the noble, therefore, had a 
 right to hunt. So in the hunting season the noble and 
 his friends followed their game over the fields of the
 
 1789. NOBLES' RIGHTS MAKE PEASANTS' WRONGS. 309 
 
 peasant, heedless of the damage they wantonly inflicted 
 as they pursued their privileged pleasure, while the 
 peasant who killed any game, even on his own fields, 
 put himself in peril of the galleys. 
 
 The seigneur too, and the abbey, had the privilege 
 of pasturage for their flocks an hour before the villager 
 might venture to feed his sheep and cattle. Small won- 
 der, therefore, if, while the droves and herds of lord 
 and abbot throve and waxed fat, the sheep and cattle 
 of the hind starved and dwindled and perished. But 
 perhaps of all the wrongs, humiliations, and tortures 
 which were thus inflicted by the privileged upon the 
 non-privileged, that which may be rendered the "right 
 of dovecot^" was felt most bitterly. The nobles alone 
 possessed the right of owning pigeons, and the thou- 
 sands and thousands of pigeons which the nobles kept 
 fed upon the crops of the peasant, who had to sow a 
 double seed in the hope of harvest, and to behold with 
 impotent hate and despair the dreaded flocks feed upon 
 the grain his hand had scattered, while he dared not 
 lift his hand to kill a single one of the birds. It was 
 almost as rash to kill a pigeon as to kill a man, and the 
 serf, with a raging heart, had to suffer in silence. There 
 will be a great fluttering of dovecotes by-and-by when 
 the day of reckoning comes, and vast flights of pigeons 
 of a very different kind, but the time is not yet. 
 
 As the peasant man, so was the peasant woman. The 
 peasant girls of Greuze's pictures, daintily capped and 
 petticoated, simply innocent in the display of white 
 bosom, are the creations of his canvas, the peasant girls 
 of opera ballets, of courtly masquerades at the Little 
 Trianon. We think of the ghastly creature whom Ar- 
 thur Young saw near Mars-la-Tour as he was walking 
 a hill to ease his horse. The haggard, hungered wretch,
 
 310 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XX. 
 
 who looked some sixty or seventy years of age, and was 
 some eight-and- twenty, who had been harassed from 
 comeliness to a hag by years of bitter, grinding pov- 
 erty, hard work, and privation, she is the true type of 
 the peasant woman of the time. A curious episode 
 brings, in 1789, the fiction and the fact of peasant life 
 strangely face to face in Paris. Favart, in 1764, had 
 played at the Comedie Italienne a little piece founded 
 on a story of Marmontel's, and called " Annette et Lu- 
 .bin." The piece was one of those pastoralities in which 
 the virtuous loves of a graceful and beribboned peas- 
 antry are duly crowned by fortunate nuptials. The 
 story and the piece were founded on fact. There was 
 a real Annette, there was a real Lubin, and^ their loves 
 had supplied the slender thread of story to the piece. 
 Paris was amused by the piece ; Annette and Lubin 
 were talked of and thought of a good deal- and then 
 quietly forgotten. Suddenly, in the April of 1789, the 
 Journal de Paris made an appeal to the Parisian pub- 
 lic. Lubin and Annette had grown old, were wretch- 
 edly poor. Would none of those who had been enter- 
 tained by the story of their simple loves assist them 
 now in their wretched old age? Paris thus appealed 
 to, the Paris of the theatres and the salons, allowed 
 itself to be touched. Subscriptions poured in for the 
 aged and destitute couple, a performance in their bene- 
 fit was given of "Annette and Lubin," and it is said 
 that the real Annette and Lubin were themselves pres- 
 ent in the theatre on the occasion. One seems to hear 
 what George Meredith calls "the laughter of gods in 
 the background" as we think of this performance. Fa- 
 vart's beribboned Marmontelade goes through all its 
 creaky sentimentality before an audience half-benevo- 
 lent, half -cynical, and somewhere in balcony, box, or
 
 1789. ABSENTEEISM. 311 
 
 parterre sit that poor old withered couple, doddering 
 and dismal, looking with bleared eyes at the travesty 
 of their early youth, and thinking of their sad and 
 squalid life ! One thinks of that poor woman of Arthur 
 Young's, with her vague idea that " something was to 
 be done by some great folks for some such poor ones, 
 but she did not know when nor how, but God send us 
 better." Now, indeed, it would seem as if something 
 were going to be done ; the rumors of the coining 
 States-General were in the ears of all men, as Lubin and 
 Annette blinked their rheumy eyes at the idyllic stage- 
 sham, all Chloe and Daplmis and Pan's pipes and crooks, 
 and thought of their thirteen children and the grinding 
 tithes and tolls, and wondered in a dazed kind of way 
 why all the fine people were making such a fuss about 
 them, and whether the end of the world was at hand. 
 The end of the world was at hand, the end of that world 
 which loved its Lubins and its Annettes on canvas and 
 on the stage, and left them to rot in misery the poor, 
 real wretches who shivered and sweated for the honor 
 and glory of the Old Order. 
 
 One of the very greatest curses of the Old Order was 
 the prevailing absenteeism. The great landlords, whether 
 nobles or princes of the Church, loved to shine and be 
 shone upon in the effulgence of the court. The obse- 
 quious courtier who declared to the Sun-King that to 
 be away from his sight was not merely to be unhappy, 
 but also to be ridiculous, set the fashion for all succeed- 
 ing generations of courtiers. To the two great orders 
 life was life only within the orb of the court. To live 
 on one's own lands, to play the great lord on one's own 
 domains, was to attempt an intolerable vegetation. All 
 the wealthy peers and prelates, therefore, thronged to 
 Versailles, and squandered their vast revenues in keep-
 
 312 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XX. 
 
 ing up the splendor of a splendid court. These courtly 
 satellites represented the fine flower of the noble and 
 clerical orders. Although they numbered little more 
 than a thousand each, they represented the highest 
 wealth, the proudest luxury of the aristocracy were, 
 in a word, the elect of the elect, and also the most ab- 
 solutely useless members of the bodies to which they 
 belonged. They rendered no service to .the State be- 
 yond that of adding by their presence and their extrava- 
 gance to the magnificence of Versailles. They drained 
 the life's blood of their luckless peasantry in order to 
 ruffle it with more than imperial ostentation at the court 
 of the king. It must indeed be borne in mind that the 
 desire of the greater nobility and the greater clergy to 
 dazzle at Versailles was not entirely unprompted. The 
 monarch liked to have his great nobles about him ; 
 liked them to spend their revenues in aggrandizing his 
 own royal glory, in swelling the glittering ranks of his 
 attendant nobility. If a great lord or two, by way of 
 change, took to dwelling for a while with their own 
 people, on their own lands, and in their own provincial 
 chateaux, they were pretty sure to have it signified to 
 them sooner or later that such behavior was not pleas- 
 ing to their royal master. Absence from court for any 
 lengthy period was noted and promptly construed by 
 devoted cabinet ministers into nothing less than a slight 
 to the king's person, and very decisive hints would be 
 addressed to the offending nobles, with the effect of 
 bringing them post-haste back to Versailles again. Life 
 at Versailles was one endless court pageant, in which 
 the great nobles had to play their part by adding to 
 the sumptuousness of the entertainment. The king 
 moved like the central sun of an illustrious constella- 
 tion. The disappearance of some star from one of the
 
 DEATH PREFERABLE TO EXILE FROM COURT. 313 
 
 noted constellations would hardly have created as much 
 surprise in the Bull's Eye as the disappearance of any 
 great noble from his familiar attendance upon majesty. 
 Nothing but exile or death could sanction the absence 
 of the high nobility from the presence of their king. 
 Every now and then some lord would fall into disgrace, 
 and be sent peremptorily off to mope on his own es- 
 tates, mewed dismally in his own castle, there to in- 
 trigue and scheme and plot to get back into royal favor 
 and the ineffable glories of the Bull's Eye. Every now 
 and then the grim sergeant Death, whom even court 
 ushers skilful as De Breze cannot exclude, would ob- 
 trude his presence upon the boscages and salons and 
 carry off into an abiding exile the wearer of some lofty 
 name, some Richelieu or Rohan or Gramrnont. To the 
 true courtier even death was, however, less terrible than 
 exile. To the satellites of the court a country life was 
 one of intolerable dulness. Ovid in Pontus, Ovid among 
 the ruffian Goths, could not complain more piteously of 
 his hard lot, removed from Rome and the favor of the 
 Augustan face, than any luckless French nobleman 
 bound by his sovereign's displeasure to abide for a while 
 in some fair country place that would have seemed im- 
 measurably enchanting in the eyes of a poet or a phi- 
 losopher. " Exile alone," writes Arthur Young, " forces 
 the French nobility to do what the English do by pref- 
 erence ; to reside upon their estates, to improve them." 
 Elsewhere he says of the estates of some great nobles : 
 " All the signs I have seen of their vast grandeur are 
 heaths, moors, deserts, fern beds. Visit their castles, 
 wherever they may be, and you will find them in the 
 midst of- forests inhabited by deer, wild boars, and 
 wolves." What a picture this affords us of pre-revo- 
 lutionary France ! A glittering handful of great no-
 
 314 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XX. 
 
 bles daffing the time away in Versailles, and the vast 
 spaces of their neglected estates given over to the wild 
 beast of the woods, and to those other less important 
 wild beasts, the men and women who tilled and did not 
 garner, who sowed and did not reap, that the glory of 
 Versailles might be sustained to the full. 
 
 Besides exile and death, a third force prevailed to 
 keep certain of the nobility away from the centre of 
 Versailles. The principle of primogeniture had reduced 
 many of the nobles to a very hard pass. We learn 
 from Chateaubriand that in Brittany the eldest son in- 
 herited two thirds of the property, and the younger 
 sons divided among themselves the remaining third. 
 Thus in course of time the younger sons of younger 
 sons came to the division of a pigeon, a rabbit, and a 
 hunting-dog. They could not work ; they were ashamed 
 to beg ; they drifted deeper and deeper into the most 
 ferocious of all poverties, the poverty which seeks to 
 hold its head high and be brave in a faded and fretted 
 gentility. High and puissant lords of a pigeon-house, 
 a toad-hole, and a rabbit-warren, they strove for a while 
 to keep up appearances, to play their annual part in 
 Parisian society, until in the fulness of time nothing 
 was left to them but their name, their abode, and their 
 feudal rights. With these feudal rights as their only 
 income they naturally enforced them upon their un- 
 happy peasantry with all the persistency of a pasha. 
 The majestic misery of Scott's Ravenswood, of Theo- 
 phile Gautier's Capitaine Fracasse, both ruined lords 
 in ruined castles, was the frequent lot of the French 
 nobility in the generation before the Revolution, but it 
 was seldom borne with the heroic dignity of these 
 heroes of romance. The poor nobility wore rusty 
 swords and hob -nailed shoes and faded doublets of
 
 1789, HOW POVERTY AFFECTED THE NOBLES. 315 
 
 antique cut, but they would still hunt and play the 
 prince, and grind the luckless peasant under their feet. 
 
 We must, however, remember that there was a better 
 side to the picture. Some of the nobles whom poverty 
 compelled to reside upon their own estates did in their 
 way, and after their lights, behave not unkindly towards 
 their people. The French nobles at Versailles knew and 
 cared as little about the peasants who labored and hun- 
 gered for their good pleasure as their descendants know 
 of the redskins of Canada or the Hindoos of Pondi- 
 cherry. But a certain proportion of the nobles were 
 compelled by destiny to dwell in something like inter- 
 course with the peasantry, and of these a certain small 
 proportion allowed that intercourse to be tinctured by 
 something like humanity. The influence of Rousseau 
 and of the great masters of the Encyclopaedia had ex- 
 tended from the metropolis into the provinces, and the 
 comparatively few who were at all seriously imbued 
 with the gospel of humanity, as these proclaimed it, did 
 act with what was for the age great kindness to those 
 who were dependent upon them. But these were the 
 exception, not the rule. A selfishness which had be- 
 come ingrained by long generations of power to op- 
 press ; a malign egotism that ignored all need except its 
 own, that refused to recognize any rights save its own ; 
 a profligate passion for ostentation and display ; a heart- 
 less indifference to all things except its own sublime ex- 
 istence, were the prevailing characteristics of the vast 
 majority of the nobility in the time of the Old Order. 
 
 Of all the nobles' privileges, none was perhaps more 
 galling to the peasantry than the privilege of the chase. 
 Montlosier, in his Memoirs, relates that on one occasion 
 he was travelling in the provinces, and every time his 
 peasant guides met a herd of deer on the route they ex-
 
 3i TflE FRENCH REVOLUTION. Cu. XX. 
 
 claimed, " There go the nobility !" The story assumes 
 a graver significance from the fact that Montlosier was 
 an ardent royalist then and for long after. There was 
 a grim truth in the peasants' description of the stags as 
 the nobility of France. The herds of deer, the flocks 
 of partridges, were infinitely more important in the eyes 
 of the nobility than the lives and the welfare of the 
 peasantry. It was one of the fantastic survivals of the 
 feudal system that only the members of the noble order 
 had the right to hunt. This right they guarded with a 
 ferocious severity. No roturier might venture without 
 special permission to enclose his lands with walls, hedges, 
 or ditches ; even when the permission was accorded, it 
 was with the condition that an open space should al- 
 ways be left wide enough to allow the noble huntsmen 
 to pass through with ease. In certain places the peas- 
 ants were not allowed to pull up the weeds that choked 
 the wheat, lest they should disturb the game. Rash, 
 indeed, was the luckless farmer who went to law to re- 
 cover damages for any injury that the game might have 
 inflicted upon him. Such suits were never won. In- 
 deed, men's lives were considered of very little conse- 
 quence in comparison with the safety and the comfort 
 of the game. Poachers were killed at their work by 
 gamekeepers and no heed taken. If a gamekeeper killed 
 a peasant it was enough to say that it had been done in 
 defence of his master's game to convert a murder into 
 an exemplary act of service. Woe be to the luckless 
 knave who disturbed a sitting partridge, who interfered 
 with the rabbit that gnawed his corn, with the stag that 
 browsed upon his fruit-trees. Had he lived in ancient 
 Egypt;* and lifted his hand against some animal sacred 
 to the gods, some cat of Bubastis, some cow of Isis, 
 Borne jackal of Anubis, he would scarcely have been
 
 1789. FARMERS-GEXERAL. 317 
 
 worse off. The Egyptian of old who slew a -sacred 
 beast would have committed blasphemy against the 
 gods of the strange Egyptian heaven ; the peasant in 
 France under the Old Order would have committed an 
 offence against the deities of the Bull's Eye ; in either 
 case he was like to pay with the last stake of life for his 
 mortal sin. Small wonder if the peasant hardly knew 
 which he hated most, the great lord in Versailles or the 
 wild beasts and birds of the woods, whose well-being 
 was so much nearer to the heart of the great lord than 
 the life of the peasant, or the peasant's wife, or the peas- 
 ant's child. All over France vast tracts of land lay 
 bare and desolate, ravaged by the game for whom they 
 were reserved. But it never occurred to the average 
 French nobleman that such a condition of things was 
 not in itself excellent, that hunting was not the noblest 
 mission of privileged mankind, or that a time would ever 
 come when the unprivileged would like to take their 
 turn, and hunt a well-kept, carefully guarded quarry. 
 
 Perhaps, however, the body of men who were better 
 hated than any body of men before or since in France 
 were the farmers-general. They formed perhaps the 
 worst of the many evil institutions which belonged to 
 the vast centralized system of the Old Order. It had 
 long been the iniquitous custom in France to lease out 
 the aides or indirect taxes to persons who were willing 
 to pay largely for the privilege in the hope of reaping 
 still more largely. As it was their interest to wring 
 every farthing they could from those on whom the taxa- 
 tion was levied, so it was inevitable that they should be 
 cordially and indeed deservedly hated. Sully tried in 
 vain, Colbert tried in vain, to limit their rapacity. In 
 1720 the farmers of the taxes formed a syndicate called 
 the Ferme Generate, which soon became one of the
 
 318 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XX. 
 
 wealthiest arid one of the most dangerous institutions 
 of the state. There were, as we know, virtuous men 
 among the farmers-general. But the direct effect of 
 such an execrable institution was not to promote virtue 
 among those who levied the taxes or those upon whom 
 the taxes were levied. There is a story told often 
 enough, but which bears re-telling, which illustrates the 
 odor of the farmers-general. Voltaire was once in a 
 company where tales of robbers were the theme. Every 
 one present contributed to the amusement of his fellows 
 by some appalling narrative of brigandage, outlawry, 
 and crime. At last it came to Voltaire's turn, and the 
 poet was called upon to tell some robber tale. " Gen- 
 tlemen," said Voltaire, "there was once a farmer-gen- 
 eral." Then he was silent. His audience begged him 
 to go on. Voltaire declined ; that was the whole of his 
 story. To be a farmer-general was to be a champion 
 robber of whom nothing further need be narrated.
 
 1789. WHAT ARTHUR YOUNG SAW. 319 
 
 CHAPTER XXI. 
 
 WHAT AKTHUB YOUNG SAID. 
 
 SUCH, in rapid lines, was the condition of France 
 when Arthur Young travelled in it during the years 
 which directly preceded the Revolution. He saw a 
 country where the remains of the feudal system were 
 still heavy upon the soil, where the monarchy had grad- 
 ually absorbed the old warlike powers of the nobles, 
 where the gabelle of Philip the Fair, the taille of 
 Charles VII., the aides of the States-General of 1356 
 were bleeding the land to death. He saw a country 
 where the provinces were administered by intendants 
 acting on the royal commission, a country governed 
 from Paris and Versailles. He saw a country where 
 the two great orders and the rest of the people were 
 marked off with the rigidity of Hindoo caste, where the 
 existence of the most grotesque privileges mocked the 
 advance of civilization and of thought, where the court 
 was crowded with a profligate nobility, while their do- 
 mains ran to ruin, where power and dignity was the 
 privilege of the few, and oppression and misery the lot 
 of the many a country, in a word, which was one mad 
 masquerade of misgovernment. Fortunately for us, 
 fortunately for the world, Arthur Young has left upon 
 record a brief sketch of the condition of France, so im- 
 portant that we need no justification for reproducing 
 the substance of it here. The immense value of such a 
 contemporary study makes the use of it imperative.
 
 320 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXI. 
 
 It is not surprising to find the liberal-minded Eng- 
 lishman especially shocked by the gross infamy which 
 attended lettres de cachet and the Bastille during the 
 whole reign of Louis XV., an infamy which made them 
 esteemed in England, by people not well informed, as 
 the most prominent features of the despotism of France. 
 They were, certainly, carried to an excess hardly cred- 
 ible; to the length of being sold, with blanks, to be filled 
 up with names at the pleasure of the purchaser, who was 
 thus able, in the gratification of private revenge, to tear 
 a man from the bosom of his family and bury him in a 
 dungeon, where he would exist forgotten and die un- 
 known. But Arthur Young was clear-minded enough 
 to see that such excesses could not be common in any 
 country, and that they were reduced almost to nothing 
 after the accession of Louis XVI. The great mass of 
 the people, those of the lower and middle ranks, could 
 suffer very little from such engines, and as few of them 
 were objects of jealousy, had there been nothing else to 
 complain of, it is not probable they would ever have 
 been driven to take arms. The abuses attending the 
 levy of taxes were heavy and universal. The kingdom 
 was parcelled into generalities, with an intendant at the 
 head of each, into whose hands the whole power of the 
 crown was delegated for everything except the military 
 authority ; but particularly for all affairs of finance. 
 The generalities were subdivided into elections, at the 
 head of which was a sub-delegue, appointed by the in- 
 tendant. The rolls of the tattle, capitation, viugti&mes, 
 and other taxes were distributed among districts, par- 
 ishes, individuals, at the pleasure of the intendant, who 
 could exempt, change, add, or diminish at pleasure. 
 Such an enormous power, constantly acting, and from 
 which no man was free, might, in the nature of things,
 
 1789. INJUSTICE WITH EXAMPLE. 321 
 
 degenerate in many cases into absolute tyranny. It 
 must be obvious that the friends, acquaintances, and 
 dependants of the intendant and of all his sub-delegues, 
 and the friends of these friends to a long chain of de- 
 pendence, might be favored in taxation at the expense 
 of their miserable neighbors ; and that noblemen, in fa- 
 vor at court, to whose protection the intendant himself 
 would naturally look up, could find little difficulty in 
 throwing much of the weight of their taxes on others 
 without a similar support. Instances, and even gross 
 ones, came under Arthur Young's notice in many parts 
 of the kingdom that made him shudder at the oppres- 
 sion to which numbers must have been condemned, by 
 the undue favors granted to such crooked influence. 
 But, without recurring to such cases, what, he asked 
 himself, must have been the state of the poor people 
 paying heavy taxes, from which the nobility and clergy 
 were exempted ? It must have been a cruel aggravation 
 of their misery to see those who could best afford to pay 
 exempted just because they were able to pay ! The en- 
 rolments for the militia, which the cahiers called an in- 
 justice without example, were another dreadful scourge 
 on the peasantry; and, as married men were exempted 
 from it, occasioned in some degree that mischievous 
 population which brought beings into the world for lit- 
 tle else than to be starved. 'The corvees, or police of 
 the roads, were annually the ruin of many hundreds of 
 farmers. More than three hundred were reduced to 
 beggary in filling up one vale in Lorraine. All these 
 oppressions fell on the Tiers Etat only, the nobility 
 and clergy having been equally exempted from tallies, 
 militia, and corvees. The penal code of finance made 
 the generous gentleman-farmer shudder at the horrors 
 of punishment inadequate to the crime. Arthur Young 
 I. 21
 
 322 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXI. 
 
 quotes elaborate contemporary calculations which serve 
 to show that, upon an average, there were annually 
 taken up and sent to prison or the galleys two thousand 
 three hundred and forty men, eight hundred and ninety- 
 six women, two hundred and one children, making a 
 total of three thousand four hundred and thirty-seven 
 persons. Of these, three hundred were sent to the gal- 
 leys. The salt confiscated from these miserable people 
 came to an enormous amount, and represented an enor- 
 mous waste of money. 
 
 A few features, said Arthur Young, will sufficiently 
 characterize the old government of France. Then he 
 proceeded to draw up the most scathing indictment ever 
 levelled at the Old Order. The gross cruelties in con- 
 nection with the yabelle especially impressed him, as 
 well indeed they might. Smugglers of salt, armed and 
 assembled to the number of five, were punished in Pro- 
 vence with a fine of five hundred livres and nine years' 
 galleys ; in all the rest of the kingdom the punishment 
 was death. Smugglers armed and assembled, but in 
 number under five, underwent for the first offence a fine 
 of three hundred livres and three years' galleys. The 
 second offence was punished by death. Smugglers with- 
 out arms, but with horses, carts, or boats, were fined three 
 hundred livres or got three years' galleys. The second 
 offence was rated at four hundred livres and nine years' 
 galleys. In Dauphine, the second offence earned the 
 galleys for life, but in milder Provence only five years' 
 galleys. Smugglers who carried the salt on their backs, 
 and were without arms, were fined two hundred livres. 
 If this was not paid they were flogged and branded. 
 The second offence meant a fine of three hundred livres 
 and six years' galleys. Women, married and single, who 
 smuggled salt paid for the first offence a fine of one
 
 1789. THE GABELLE AND THE CAPITAINERIES. 323 
 
 hundred livres ; for the second, three hundred livres ; 
 for the third, they were flogged and banished the king- 
 dom for life. Their husbands were responsible for them 
 both in fine and body. Children smugglers were pun- 
 ishable the same as women. Fathers and mothers were 
 made responsible ; and for defect of payment flogged. 
 Nobles who smuggled were deprived of their nobility ; 
 and their houses were razed to the ground. Any per- 
 sons in the employment of the revenue who smuggled, 
 and all who assisted in the theft of salt in the transport, 
 were punished by death. Soldiers smuggling, with arms, 
 were hanged ; without arms, they got the galleys for 
 life. Buying smuggled salt to resell it met the same 
 punishments as for smuggling. Persons in the salt em- 
 ployments were empowered, if two, or one with two wit- 
 nesses, to enter and examine the houses even of the priv- 
 ileged orders. All families and persons liable to the 
 gabelle had, as we have already seen, their consumption 
 of salt, exclusive of salt for salting meat and the like, 
 estimated at 7 pounds a head per annum, which quantity 
 they were forced to buy, whether they wanted it or not, 
 under pain of various fines according to the case. 
 
 But if Arthur Young's blood boiled at the iniquity of 
 the gabelle, other iniquities kept it warm. The capi- 
 taineries were a dreadful scourge on all the occupiers 
 of land. By this term is to be understood the para- 
 mountship of certain districts granted by the king to 
 princes of the blood, by which they were put in pos- 
 session of the property of all game, even on lands not 
 belonging to them, and, what seemed still more singu- 
 lar to the traveller, on manors granted long before to 
 individuals ; so that the erecting of a district into a 
 capitainerie was an annihilation of all manorial rights 
 to game within it. This was a trifling business in com-
 
 324 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. Cn. XXI. 
 
 parison with other circumstances ; for, in speaking of 
 the preservation of the game in these capitaineries, it 
 must be observed that by game must be understood 
 whole droves of wild boars, and herds of deer not con- 
 fined by any wall or pale, but wandering at pleasure 
 over the whole country to the destruction of crops ; 
 and to the peopling of the galleys by the wretched 
 peasants who presumed to kill them in order to save 
 that food which was to support their helpless children. 
 The game in the capitainerie of Montceau, in four par- 
 ishes only, did mischief to the amount of one hundred 
 and eighty-four thousand two hundred and sixty-three 
 livres per annum. No wonder, then, if time should find 
 the people asking for the destruction of these terrible 
 game-laws, and demanding as a favor the permission to 
 sow their fields and reap their meadows without regard 
 for pheasants or other game. Truly, the English trav- 
 eller could scarcely understand, without being told, that 
 there were numerous edicts for preserving the game, 
 which prohibited weeding and hoeing lest the young 
 partridges should be disturbed ; which prohibited steep- 
 ing seed lest it should injure the game ; which prohib- 
 ited manuring with night-soil lest the flavor of the par- 
 tridges should be injured by feeding on the corn so pro- 
 duced ; which prohibited mowing hay before a certain 
 time, so late as to spoil many crops, and taking away 
 the stubble, which would deprive the birds of shelter. 
 The tyranny exercised in these capitaineries, which ex- 
 tended over four hundred leagues of country, was so 
 great that many cahiers demanded the utter suppression 
 of them. Such were the exertions of arbitrary power 
 which the lower orders felt directly from the royal au- 
 thority ; but, heavy as they were, it was to Arthur Young's 
 mind a question whether the others, suffered circuit-
 
 1789. HOW FEUDALISM WORKED. 325 
 
 ously through the nobility and the clergy, were not yet 
 more oppressive. Nothing can exceed the complaints 
 made in the cahiers under this head. They speak of the 
 dispensation of justice in the manorial courts as com- 
 prising every species of despotism : the indeterminate 
 districts, the endless appeals, irreconcilable with lib- 
 erty and prosperity, and irrevocably proscribed in the 
 opinion of the public ; the incessant litigation, favor- 
 ing every species of chicane, and ruining the parties 
 concerned, not only by enormous expenses on the most 
 petty objects, but by a dreadful loss of time. The 
 judges were commonly ignorant pretenders, who held 
 their courts. in wine-shops, and were absolutely depend- 
 ent on the seigneurs In consequence of their feudal 
 powers. These were vexations which were the great- 
 est scourge of the people, and which made them de- 
 mand that feudalism should disappear. The country- 
 man was tyrannically enslaved by it. There were fixed 
 and heavy rents ; vexatious processes to secure them ; 
 unjust appreciations, unjust augmentations. There were 
 fines at every change of the property, in the direct as 
 well as collateral line ; feudal redemption ; fines on 
 sale, to the eighth and even the sixth penny ; redemp- 
 tions injurious in their origin, and still more so in their 
 extension. There was the banalite of the mill, of the 
 oven, and of the wine and cider press a horrible 
 law, by which the people were bound to grind their 
 corn at the mill of the seigneur only ; to press their 
 grapes at his press only, and to bake their bread in his 
 oven, by which means the bread was often spoiled, and 
 more especially the wine, since in Champagne those 
 grapes which, when pressed immediately, would make 
 white wine, would, by waiting for the press, which 
 often happened, make red wine only. There were cor-
 
 326 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. Cn. XXI. 
 
 vees by custom ; corvees by usage of the fief ; corvees 
 established by unjust decrees ; corvees arbitrary, and 
 other fantastical servitudes. There were prestations, 
 extravagant and burdensome ; collections by assess- 
 ments incollectible ; litigations ruinous and without 
 end ; the rod of seigneural finance was forever shaken 
 over the people's heads. Under such vexation, ruin, 
 outrage, violence, and destructive servitude the peas- 
 ants, almost on a level with Polish slaves, could never 
 but be miserable, vile, and oppressed. Well might 
 they demand that the use of hand-mills should be 
 free ; and hope that posterity, if possible, might be 
 ignorant that feudal tyranny in Bretagne,. armed with 
 the judicial power, did not blush in those evil times to 
 break hand-mills, and to sell annually to the miserable 
 the faculty of bruising between two stones a measure 
 of buckwheat or barley. The very terms of such com- 
 plaints were, as Arthur Young was glad to think, un- 
 known in England, and consequently untranslatable ; 
 they had probably arisen long since the feudal system 
 ceased in the kingdom. What, asked Arthur Young, in 
 manly British bewilderment, were those tortures of the 
 peasantry in Bretagne which they called chevauchesf 
 quintaines f soule f saut de poison f baiser de mariees f 
 chansons? transporte cTceuf sur une charette? silence des 
 grenouillesf This last was a curious article. When 
 the lady of the seigneur lay in, the people were obliged 
 to beat the waters in marshy districts to keep the frogs 
 silent, that she might not be disturbed. This duty, a 
 very oppressive one, was commuted into a pecuniary 
 fine. What, he asked despairingly, were corvee d mi- 
 sericorde f milods ? leide ? couponage f cartelage f ba- 
 rage f fouage f marechaussee ? banvin f ban d'aortt f 
 trousses f gelinage ? civeragc f taillabilite ? vingtain ?
 
 1789. TITHES IN ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 327 
 
 sterlage ? bordelage f minage f ban de vendanges ? droit 
 d'accepte ? In passing through many of the French prov- 
 inces, Arthur Young was struck with the various and 
 heavy complaints of the farmers and little proprietors of 
 the feudal grievances, with the weight of which their in- 
 dustry was burdened ; but he could not at first con- 
 ceive the multiplicity of the shackles which kept them 
 poor and depressed. He came to understand it better 
 afterwards, from the conversation and complaints of 
 some grand seigneurs, as the revolution advanced; and 
 he then learned that the principal rental of many estates 
 consisted in services and feudal tenures, by the baneful 
 influence of which the industry of the people was al- 
 most exterminated. In regard to the oppressions of the 
 clergy, as to tithes, Arthur Young's honesty compelled 
 him to do that body a justice to which a claim could 
 not be then laid in England. Though the ecclesiastical 
 tenth was levied in France more severely than usual in 
 Italy, yet was it never exacted with such horrid greedi- 
 ness as was then the disgrace of England. When taken 
 in kind, no such thing was known in any part of France, 
 where he made inquiries, as a tenth; it was always a 
 twelfth, or a thirteenth, or even a twentieth of the prod- 
 uce. And in no part of the kingdom did a new article 
 of culture pay anything; thus turnips, cabbages, clover, 
 chicory, potatoes, and the like, paid nothing. In many 
 parts, meadows were exempted. Silkworms paid noth- 
 ing. Olives in some places paid in others they did 
 not. Cows paid nothing. Lambs paid nothing from 
 the twelfth to the twenty-first. Wool paid nothing. 
 Such mildness in the levy of this odious tax was abso- 
 lutely unknown in England. But mild as it was, the 
 burden to people groaning under so many other oppres- 
 sions united to render their situation so bad that no
 
 328 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. Cn. XXI. 
 
 change could be for the worse. But these were not all 
 the evils with which the people struggled. The admin- 
 istration of justice was partial, venal, infamous. Arthur 
 Young, in conversation with many very sensible men, 
 in different parts of the kingdom, met with something 
 of content with their government, in all other respects 
 than this; but upon the question of expecting justice to 
 be really and fairly administered, every one confessed 
 there was no such thing to be looked for. The conduct 
 of the parliaments was profligate and atrocious. Upon 
 almost every cause that came before them interest was 
 openly made with the judges; and woe betided the man 
 who, with a cause to support, had no means of concilia- 
 ting favor, either by the beauty of a handsome wife or 
 by other methods. It had been said, by many writers, 
 that property was as secure under the old government 
 of France as it was in England. This assertion might, 
 Arthur Young admitted, possibly be true, as far as any 
 violence from the king, his ministers, or the great was 
 concerned ; but for all that mass of property, which 
 comes in every country to be dealt with in courts of 
 justice, there was not even the shadow of security, un- 
 less the parties were totally and equally unknown, and 
 totally and equally honest. In every other case, he who 
 had the best interest with the judges was sure to be the 
 winner. To reflecting minds, the cruelty and abomi- 
 nable practices attending such courts were sufficiently 
 apparent. There was also a circumstance in the con- 
 stitution of these parliaments but little known in Eng- 
 land, and which, under such a government as that of 
 France, might well be considered as very singular by 
 Arthur Young. They had the power and were in the 
 constant practice of issuing decrees, without the consent 
 of the crown, and which had the force of laws through
 
 1789. LAWS OF KING AND OF PARLIAMENT. 329 
 
 the whole of their jurisdiction. Of all the laws, these 
 were sure to be the best obeyed; for as, by a horrible 
 system of tyranny, all infringements of them were 
 brought before sovereign courts, composed of the same 
 persons who had enacted these laws, they were certain 
 of being punished with the last severity. It might well 
 appear strange, in a government so despotic in some re- 
 spects as that of France, to see the parliaments in every 
 part of the kingdom making laws without the king's 
 consent, and even in defiance of his authority. The 
 English whom Arthur Young met in France were sur- 
 prised to see some of these bodies issuing orders against 
 the export of corn out of the provinces subject to their 
 jurisdiction, into the neighboring provinces, at the very 
 time when the king, through the organ of so popular a 
 minister as Necker, and even at the requisition of the 
 National Assembly itself, was decreeing an absolutely 
 free transport of corn throughout the kingdom. But 
 this was nothing new ; it was their common practice. 
 The Parliament of Rouen passed an order against kill- 
 ing of calves ; it was a preposterous one, and opposed 
 by the administration ; but it had its full force ; and 
 had a butcher dared to offend against it he would have 
 found, by the rigor of his punishment, who was his 
 master. Inoculation was favored by the court in Louis 
 XV. 's time; but the Parliament of Paris passed an order 
 against it, much more effective in prohibiting than the 
 favor of the court in encouraging the practice. Such 
 instances were innumerable, and they forced Arthur 
 Young to remark that the bigotry, ignorance, false 
 principles, and tyranny of these bodies were generally 
 conspicuous ; and that the court, except on a question 
 of taxation, never had a dispute with a parliament but 
 the parliament was sure to be wrong. Their constitu-
 
 330 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXI. 
 
 tion, in respect to the administration of justice, was so 
 truly rotten that the members sat as judges even in 
 causes of private property in which they were them- 
 selves the parties, and had, in this capacity, been guilty 
 of oppressions and cruelties which the crown had rarely 
 dared to attempt. 
 
 Such is the picture in little of the intolerable con- 
 dition of things which rendered revolution inevitable. 
 Such is the picture in little which presented itself to 
 the keen eyes of that wandering Englishman, whose 
 statements of what he saw and what he heard are so 
 inestimably precious to us. We seem as we read his 
 words as if we had sat by his side in some stately Lon- 
 don drawing-room, or in the wide hall of some Sussex 
 country-house, and listened to his cleai descriptions of 
 the troubled France that he knew so well, and to his 
 shrewd judgments upon the hideously unnatural system 
 under which it had so long groaned. A contemporary 
 of that system, he was able to look at it from the out- 
 side almost as much as if he were an Englishman of to- 
 day; he was able to weigh it and to judge it with a 
 mind as clear and as impartial as that of any of his 
 fellow-countrymen in the brilliant epoch to which he 
 belonged and which he helped to adorn. We shall 
 later on find ourselves face to face with an existing and 
 active National Assembly, ready to deal very summarily 
 with all the peculiar privileges and abuses which belong 
 to what is known as the Old Order. When Arthur Young 
 was riding his horse along those French high-roads and 
 making the reflections which afterwards bore fruit in 
 the remarkable judgment he gave to the world, he little 
 thought that a day was close at hand when all the in-- 
 justices of which he complains would be formally abol- 
 ished by a constitutional body. But the day of the
 
 1789. THE GREAT RENtJtfCtATIOtf. 331 
 
 Great Renunciation was close at hand, the day that was 
 to witness the solemn denial, the solemn destruction of 
 that grotesque, fantastic, intricate, and altogether hor- 
 rible institution, the Old Order.
 
 332 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXII. 
 
 CHAPTER XXII. 
 
 PARIS. 
 
 IN the month of October of the year 1783 the hero 
 of a certain famous or infamous fiction entered Paris 
 for the first time by the Faubourg Saint-Marceau. " I 
 sought," he says, " that stately city of which I had read 
 such wonderful accounts. I found but high and squalid 
 tenements, long and ludicrously narrow streets, poor 
 wretches everywhere clothed with rags, a crowd of 
 wellnigh naked children ; I beheld a dense population, 
 and appalling poverty. I asked my father if that was 
 indeed Paris ; he answered, coldly, that it was certainly 
 not the finest quarter ; on the morrow we should have 
 time to see another." These sentences, almost the open- 
 ing sentences of the once renowned romance of " Fau- 
 blas," make a strangely appropriate text for any study 
 of or any speculation upon the French Revolution. As 
 we think of those two riders entering Paris in the gath- 
 ering gloom of the dying day, the haughty, sombre 
 man to whom Paris and all its ways were long familiar, 
 and the eager excited youth who enters for the first 
 time the enchanted palace, and finds it dust and ashes, 
 we are half inclined to forgive Louvet all the follies of 
 his life for that single picture which seems to bring 
 pre-revolutionary Paris nearer to us than any other 
 picture in pen or pencil known to us. 
 
 Neither Faublas the fictitious, nor Louvet his maker, 
 would seem to have learned any lesson from the rags,
 
 1789. PRE-REVOLUTiONARY PARIS. 333 
 
 the hunger, and the agony which the one saw and the 
 other recorded. And yet when the book in which those 
 words appear was first printed the Old World was 
 drifting with awful swiftness to its destruction. No 
 one can read such a story as " Faublas " without seeing 
 that in such corruption the germs of Revolution must 
 be inevitably hidden; no one can read " Faublas "with- 
 out feeling that the society and the civilization which 
 it not unfaithfully, and most certainly not satirically, 
 described, called for some cataclysm to sweep it out of 
 existence. Listen to Louvet once again, speaking this 
 time in his own proper person in the preface to a con- 
 cluding portion of his romance, published, of all odd 
 times in the century, in the month of July, 1789. He 
 is boasting of his book and of its hero. " I have striven," 
 he says, " that Faublas, frivolous and gallant as the na- 
 tion for which and by which he was made, should have, 
 as it were, a French physiognomy. I have striven that 
 in the midst of his defects the world should recognize 
 in him the tone, the language, and the manners of the 
 young men of my country. Tt is in France, and it is 
 only in France, I believe, that we must seek the other 
 types of whom I have too easily designed the copies 
 husbands at the same time so libertine, so jealous, so 
 facile, and so foolish, beauties so seductive, so deceived, 
 and so deceitful." With the crash of the greatest fall 
 in Christendom ringing in the ears of Europe, Louvet 
 de Couvray makes his bow to -mankind, and begs them 
 to accept that estimate of his countrymen and country- 
 women. Revolution was sorely needed when the no- 
 bility of France could find such a panegyrist. 
 
 Yet there are worse books than " Faublas," and worse 
 writers than Citizen Louvet, ci-devant Louvet de Cou- 
 vray. Mr. Carlyle speaks wild and whirling words
 
 334 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXII. 
 
 about the book ; calls it, happily enough, a " wretched 
 cloaca of a book," but asks, unhappily enough, " what 
 picture of French society is here ?" and answers yet 
 more unhappily his own question, "picture properly of 
 nothing." The picture is, unfortunately, true enough. 
 It is not an exhaustive picture. All the France of 1789 
 is not encompassed in its pages, but what it does pre- 
 sent is sufficiently veracious. Autobiographical, fictitious 
 Faublas is a gentleman and a moralist compared with 
 autobiographical, real Casanova. A society which could 
 tolerate and even idolize a Richelieu and a De Fronsac, 
 damnable father and yet more damnable son, can hard- 
 ly complain of being travestied in the pages of poor, 
 sensual, not all unmanly or all uncourageous Louvet. 
 Madame Roland, the high-minded, the beautiful Giron- 
 dist, can speak, and speak seriously, of Louvet's " pretty 
 stories." Not all the praise of all the Girondists who 
 ever perished on the guillotine could make us of to-day 
 think the adventures of Faublas a " pretty story." But 
 Madame Roland's words could make us and do make 
 us see very distinctly that the book which an ardent 
 revolutionary and patriot can describe in such nursery 
 terms can hardly be a very highly colored picture of the 
 society it delineates. 
 
 It is one of the blessings of the historian that fortune 
 is pleased every now and then to inspire individuals 
 here and there with the ardent desire to describe for 
 the benefit of posterity the familiar scenes of their 
 every-day theatre. A Petronius gives us a presentment 
 of Caesarian Rome, which we could scarcely piece to- 
 gether from the grave historians and the gay poets. A 
 Brown or a Ward can almost re-create for us the little 
 London of Queen Anne. A Mercier does his best to 
 present us with a faithful picture of what Paris was
 
 1789. MERCIER'S "PICTURE OF PARIS." 335 
 
 like before the Revolution, and a no less faithful picture 
 of its changed condition after the Revolution was ac- 
 complished. Citizen Mercier was a wonderful man, and 
 his " Picture of Paris " is a wonderful book. He began 
 it when Paris was to all appearance the tranquil city 
 of a stately and secure dynasty ; he brought it to a 
 close just a year before Saint-Antoine shook itself from 
 sleep, and shook the house of Capet into chaos. The 
 first volume of the " Picture of Paris " was published 
 anonymously. The Parisian police disliked it, and 
 sniffed for the author; Mercier coolly avowed himself 
 he never wanted courage and stalked off into volun- 
 tary exile in pleasant Neufchatel, where he finished his 
 task in peace. What a debt we owe to the solitary, 
 sturdy, indefatigable man ! It is very much to be 
 feared that nobody, or next to nobody, reads the " Tab- 
 leau de Paris" nowadays, and yet nobody can thorough- 
 ly hope to understand the Paris of 1789 who has not 
 studied it. 
 
 Mercier himself said of his book that he wrote it with 
 his legs, and the quaint phrase is in itself the highest 
 indorsement of its merit. Mercier loved his Paris as 
 a cultured American citizen loves his London; he ex- 
 plored every inch of it patiently, pertinaciously. Wher- 
 ever his legs could carry him, he went ; whatever his 
 ears could hear, whatever his eyes could see, whatever 
 his tongue could ask, he noted, garnered, and gave as 
 his gains to the world. As we read the book, we seem 
 for the moment, like the councillor in Hans Andersen's 
 delightful story, who slipped his feet into the goloshes 
 of fortune, to be transported across the chasm of time 
 and to live again in that earlier age. Nothing prac- 
 tically is left of that old Paris. It would be as easy 
 to discover the Alexandria of Jerome and of Hypatia
 
 336 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. Cu. XXII. 
 
 in the half-Oriental, half-Parisian sea-city of the Khe- 
 dive; it would be as easy to conjure up ancient Athens 
 from a lounge down Hermes Street, or to call up Corinth 
 from a survey of the half a dozen Doric pillars which 
 are all that remain of it, as to re-create the Paris of 
 Mercier's picture in the Paris of the Third Republic. 
 Directory and consulate, empire and monarchy, king- 
 ship of France and kingship of the French, republic 
 and prince-presidentship and empire again, and yet again 
 republic, have rolled in wave upon wave of change over 
 that old Paris of Mercier's, and swept it away far out 
 upon the sea of time. Much of it was already changed 
 when Mercier, in the days of the Directory, set to work 
 upon his " New Paris." What would Mercier's shade 
 think of his new Paris now, so Haussmannized and Bou- 
 levardized out of ghostly recognition? 
 
 Mercier was fond of saying in his later days, with a 
 cheery self-complacency, that he was the prophet of the 
 Revolution. It is a noteworthy fact that whenever a 
 great political event takes place, some person whom 
 nobody suspects of prophetic powers gets up and de- 
 clares himself to have predicted the prodigy. If he 
 sticks to his text sturdily enough he will probably be 
 accepted in his prophet part, and no doubt Mercier 
 found his believers. But it is difficult to discover any 
 trace of the prophecy. A certain unconscious prophecy, 
 indeed, is to be found in the " Picture of Paris," for 
 Mercier with his frank realism described the squalor, the 
 poverty, and the pain which cankered the painted city. 
 He declares that his faithful pencil found within the 
 walls of the capital more of hideous misery than of hon- 
 est ease, more of grief and disquiet than of the joy and 
 gayety popularly attributed to the Paris people. But 
 his noting of these causes led Mercier no more to any
 
 1789. MERCIER. 337 
 
 deduction of possible events therefrom than the power- 
 ful picture in " Faublas " impressed Louvet to any pur- 
 pose. On the contrary, we shall find in the " Picture 
 of Paris" a prophecy so laughably, so ridiculously un- 
 lucky, that it is almost enough to cover poor Mercier's 
 name with unquenchable ridicule. Any kind of dis- 
 turbance in Paris, he declares, which might degenerate 
 into serious sedition has become morally impossible. 
 The watchfulness of the police, the regiments of Swiss 
 guards there is a curious unconscious tragedy in this 
 touch and of French guards embarracked and ready 
 to march at a moment's notice, not to speak of the vast 
 number of men devoted to the interests of the court, 
 all seem well adapted to repress at any time any ap- 
 pearance of a serious revolt, and to maintain that calm 
 which becomes the more assured the longer it endures. 
 Thus complacently Mercier, prophet of the Revolution, 
 assured the world of the impossibility of Revolution. 
 But, as if to make assurance doubly sure, Mercier went 
 on to consider what might be done in the absurdly un- 
 likely case of the Parisian ever asserting himself un- 
 pleasantly. If the Parisian, he said, who has his in- 
 stants of effervescence, should really rise in mutiny, he 
 would promptly be shut up in the vast cage he inhab- 
 its, his grain would be cut off from him, and when he 
 had nothing more to eat in the larder, he would very 
 soon have to knuckle down and plead for pity. Alas 
 and alas for the prophet of the Revolution ! The in- 
 stant of effervescence became a geyser spring ; the 
 scarcity of bread was bad for the baker; and insurgent 
 Paris did no knuckling down at all, but enforced that 
 process upon its oppressors. Never was a prophet more 
 wof ully out That touch about the Swiss guards is the 
 one thing not wholly laughable in the whole absurd 
 I. 22
 
 338 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXII. 
 
 prediction. There came a time, indeed, long later, when 
 Paris, girt with steel, and forced by famine, was com- 
 pelled to yield after a heroic defence, but there was no 
 dream of such a possibility in Mercier's mind then; 
 nor in any man's mind for nearly three generations to 
 come. 
 
 Let any one who wants to understand his French 
 Revolution get, if he can, a map of Paris of a date as 
 near as may be to its outbreak. Such a map is before 
 me now as I write : " Plan de la Ville et Faubourgs de 
 Paris, avec tous ses Accroissemens et la Nouvelle En- 
 ceinte des Barrieres de cette Capitale. A Paris: chez 
 Mondhare et Jean, rue Sainct Jean de Beauvais, pres 
 celle de Noyers, 1789." This solemn setting forth is 
 surrounded, as was the good old graceful fashion of an- 
 tique map-makers, with an elaborate allegorical device 
 in which a nude nymph, no doubt intended to represent 
 the deity of the Seine, pours water from a jar at the 
 left, while three baby Hermes at the right count over 
 money on a corded box, and represent, no doubt, indus- 
 try, commerce, and the like. A river with a comically 
 stiff bridge, a triumph of the engineering art, is in the 
 background, and over all at the top are emblazoned the 
 arms of the good city of Paris in the congenial com- 
 pany of overflowing horns of plenty and a pair of 
 globes. It is impossible to look at this faded fantas- 
 tical old map without emotion. Here on that square of 
 dirty yellowed paper lies old Paris, the Paris that Mer- 
 cier saw, that Burke and Johnson and Charles James 
 Fox visited, that Marie Antoinette queened it over, that 
 Beaumarchais set laughing, that Voltaire beheld with 
 dying eyes, that Mirabeau loved. Little men thought 
 of what the Revolution was to do when that old map 
 was printed, with its gardens of the " Thuilleries," and
 
 1789. AN OLD MAP. 339 
 
 its Place Louis XV., and above all, with its duly re- 
 corded Bastille. 
 
 With such a map for basis of operations, the curious 
 student of history can now, if he pleases, reconstruct 
 for himself the city of Paris as it appeared to the eyes 
 of its visitors one hundred years ago. M. Albert Ba- 
 beau, who has done so much and such excellent work 
 in bringing the France of the Old Order home to the 
 readers of French history, whose studies of the town, 
 the village, the rural and the military life during the 
 Ancien Regime are already classics, has added greatly 
 to the debt the world owes him by his elaborate and 
 exhaustive study of Paris in 1789. What M. Auguste 
 Maquet did for the Paris of the Sun-King in his de- 
 lightful and magnificent " Paris sous Louis XIV.," M. 
 Babeau has done for the Paris of wellnigh a century 
 later. With these two works, with the labors of the 
 Bibliophile Jacob, with the magnum opus of M. Hippo- 
 lyte Gautier, "L'An 1789," the student can almost re- 
 mould that lost Paris of the year of Revolution, can 
 with a little pains conjure it up for himself, and see it 
 almost as vividly as it seemed to the eyes of those dep- 
 uties from all the corners of France who came toiling 
 across the country roads to be present at the opening 
 of the States-General. With " Paris a travers les Ages," 
 with Herder's inestimable volumes, " written with his 
 legs," with A. de Champeaux's "Les Monuments de 
 Paris," with Pierre Bujon's " Petite Histoire de Paris," 
 his apparatus is fairly complete. He is indeed addi- 
 tionally fortunate if he possess or can gain access to 
 the magnificent, monumental, and rare "Tableaux de la 
 Revolution Fran9aise," a sumptuous folio in three vol- 
 umes, which the Restoration suppressed in 1816, and 
 of which we are lucky enough to own one of the few
 
 340 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXII. 
 
 remaining copies. He will do well, too, in getting hold 
 of the quaint little work in two volumes, "Nouvelle 
 Description des Curiosites de Paris," published in the 
 year 1791, which gives in alphabetical order a vast 
 amount of information about the city of Mercier's days. 
 But though a knowledge of these chief works on Paris 
 is precious, M. Babeau is such a master of condensation 
 and skilful presentation that with his work alone the 
 student may get a very satisfactory picture of what 
 Paris was like on the eve of the Revolution. 
 
 It is difficult now to find any hints of old Paris in 
 the Paris of to-day. Mercier, indeed, after the Revo- 
 lution found, as he shows in his " Nouveau Tableau," 
 much of the city that he had described before the Rev- 
 olution as completely a thing of the past as Babylon or 
 Troy Town. But still, in the days when Charles Lamb 
 visited Paris, when Thackeray first visited Paris, when 
 Carlyle first visited Paris, some half a century ago, it 
 was far more possible for the traveller to conjure up 
 some image of the city of Desmoulins and Dauton, of 
 Besenval and Lauzun, than it now is after the Hauss- 
 mannizing of the Second Empire and the energy of the 
 Third Republic. When one thinks that the custom of 
 giving names to the streets was only sixty years old, 
 having been begun for the first time in 1728, when one 
 thinks that any system of numeration for houses only 
 began at the same time, and was carried out in the 
 clumsiest way, the existing system not coming into 
 use until seventeen years after the Revolution began, in 
 1806, one begins to understand how far off one is from 
 the city into which Faublas rode with his father on the 
 memorable occasion. 
 
 Happily for us, however, we are in something of the 
 position of Lesage's hero when the limping devil so
 
 1789. OLD PARIS. 341 
 
 agreeably unroofed Madrid for him. We may almost 
 say that we, too, have our Asmodeus, that we can at 
 least conjure up a familiar spirit who will enable us to 
 see the Paris of a hundred years ago almost as clearly 
 as if we had been present and beheld it in the flesh. 
 For we can call up a witness who saw Paris with keen, 
 intelligent English eyes, and who could put down his 
 impressions very vividly in his keen English way; we 
 can call up Arthur Young again, and ask him to reveal 
 old Paris to us. The very fact that Arthur Young saw 
 Paris as a stranger, and saw it as an Englishman, makes 
 his account the more real and the more intelligent to us. 
 We can put ourselves in his place all the more readily, 
 and with a little effort can almost succeed in seeing 
 what he saw. 
 
 It is curious to find that he, like that Faublas of 
 whom we have spoken, was first impressed disagreeably 
 by his arrival in Paris. The cause of the disagreeable 
 impression was not quite the same, but the fact remains 
 a curious alliance of the evidence of Louvet's ficti- 
 tious rascal and of the high-minded living Englishman. 
 Being in a post-chaise, he tells us, he travelled to Paris, 
 as other travellers in post-chaises do, knowing little or 
 nothing. For the last ten miles he was eagerly on the 
 watch for that throng of carriages which near London 
 impede the traveller. But he watched in vain; for the 
 road, quite to the gates, was, in comparison, a perfect des- 
 ert. So many great roads joined here that the stran- 
 ger supposed this must be accidental. The entrance 
 seemed to him to have nothing magnificent, to be only 
 ill - built and dirty. To get to the Rue de Varenne, 
 Faubourg St. Germain, he had the whole city to cross, 
 and he crossed it by narrow, ugly, and crowded streets. 
 
 Some time later, when he entered Paris again, he was
 
 342 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXII. 
 
 confirmed in his idea that the roads immediately leading 
 to that capital seemed deserted when compared with 
 those of London. By what means, he asked, in amaze- 
 ment, can the connection be carried on with the coun- 
 try? He decided that either the French must be the 
 most stationary people upon earth, or the English must 
 be the most restless, and find more pleasure in moving 
 from one place to another than in resting to enjoy life 
 in either. He shrewdly said that the roads could not 
 be more solitary if the French nobility went to their 
 country-seats only when exiled there by the court. 
 
 In the beginning Paris struck him as being more or 
 less like any other city. He went about at first " upon 
 the full silly gape " to find out things that he had not 
 found before, as if a street in Paris could be com- 
 posed of anything but houses, or houses formed of any- 
 thing but brick or stone or that the people in them, 
 not being English, would be walking on their heads. 
 After a while, however, he began to change his note, to 
 find many points of difference, for and against. From 
 the tower of the cathedral he got a complete view of 
 Paris. It seemed a vast city, even to his eyes that had 
 seen London from St. Paul's ; its being circular gave 
 an advantage to Paris ; but its greatest advantage was 
 its atmosphere. It was then so clear that he could have 
 supposed it the height of summer. The clouds of coal- 
 smoke that enveloped London always prevented a dis- 
 tinct view of that capital, but Arthur Young took it to be 
 one-third at least larger than Paris. The buildings of 
 the parliament-house were disfigured for him by a gilt 
 and tawdry gate, and a French roof. The Hotel de la 
 Monnaie he thought a fine building, and the fa9ade of 
 the Louvre one of the most elegant in the world. These 
 pleased him because they had, to the eye, no roofs. In
 
 1?89. PARIS AND LONDON. 343 
 
 proportion, he says, as the roof is seen a building suffers, 
 and he adds that he does not recollect one edifice of 
 distinguished beauty, unless with domes, in which the 
 roof was not so flat as to be hidden, or nearly so. What 
 eyes, he asked, must the French architects have had, to 
 have loaded so many buildings with coverings of a 
 height destructive of all beauty ? " Put such a roof as 
 we see on the parliament-house or on theThuilleries upon 
 the faade of the Louvre, and where would its beauty 
 be?" At night he went to the Opera, which he thought 
 a good theatre, till he was told it was built in six weeks; 
 and then it became good for nothing in his eyes, for he 
 immediately supposed it would be tumbling down in six 
 years. "Durability is one of the essentials of build- 
 ing ; what pleasure would a beautiful front of painted 
 pasteboard give ?" The Alceste of Gluck was per- 
 formed by Mademoiselle St. Huberti, whom he consid- 
 ered an excellent actress. As to scenes, dresses, dec- 
 orations, dancing, and the like, he admitted that this 
 theatre beat the Haymarket to nothing. 
 
 Another time he went to L'Ambigu Comique, which 
 he called a pretty little theatre, with plenty of rubbish 
 on it. He noted the coffee-houses on the Boulevards, 
 the music, the noise, the women of the town without 
 end; everything but scavengers and lamps. The mud 
 was a foot deep ; and there were parts of the Boule- 
 vards without a single light. 
 
 Indeed, Arthur Young was not much captivated by 
 Paris. It is curious to note what best pleased his 
 sturdy British sense of the practical. He liked the 
 Boulevards, and the Place Louis XV., which he held 
 was not properly to be called a square, but a very noble 
 entrance to a great city. The union of the Place Louis 
 XV. with the Champs Elysees, the gardens of the Tui-
 
 344 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. OH. XXII. 
 
 leries and the Seine he found open, airy, elegant, and su- 
 perb, and called the most agreeable and best-built part 
 of Paris. There, he said, one could be clean and breathe 
 freely. But by far the finest thing he saw at Paris 
 was the Corn Market. That vast rotunda, with its roof 
 entirely of wood, upon a new principle of carpentry, to 
 describe which would, he declared, demand plates and 
 long explanations; that gallery, one hundred and fifty 
 yards round, and as light as if suspended by the fairies; 
 that ground area, where wheat, pease, beans, lentils, 
 were stored and sold ; those staircases doubly winding 
 within each other to spacious apartments for rye, barley, 
 and oats, won his agricultural heart. The whole, he 
 said, was so well planned, and so admirably executed, 
 that he knew of no public building that exceeded it in 
 either France or England. 
 
 What an eminently sensible way of looking at things ! 
 very English, very un-French. How it would have 
 astonished Restif de la Bretonne, who wrote a little 
 earlier his rhapsody about the charm of those serried 
 ranks of beautiful women who lined the noble avenue 
 of the Tuileries on summer evenings, and during the 
 fine days of spring and autumn. Restif loved to think 
 lingeringly of the attraction of 'the varied groups of 
 people, all awakening a continuous series of ideas which 
 charmed the, mind, as the beauty of those who gave rise 
 to them delighted the eyes. Much the fantastic novel- 
 ist would have cared for the best possible of all corn- 
 markets compared with that brilliant butterfly scene in 
 the Tuileries Gardens which his pen can re-create for 
 us. What a different Paris the two men saw ! and yet, 
 between them, they help us to see it as it was. 
 
 The streets were mostly very narrow and very dirty, 
 with gutters that rushed torrents in time of rain, and
 
 1789. A BUILDING MANIA. 345 
 
 compelled dandies and neatly shod damsels to cross them 
 on the backs of obliging men for a few sous. The chief 
 open places were the gardens of the Tuileries and the 
 Luxembourg, of the Temple and the Arsenal, and the 
 vacant spaces by the Cathedral of Notre Dame, in front 
 of which a kind of perennial fair was carried on, and 
 behind which people amused themselves by playing 
 games on holidays. But three years earlier, in 1786, 
 the principal bridges of Paris had been covered with 
 houses, like old London Bridge and like the Ponte Vec- 
 chio at Florence. Not very long before, the famous 
 Court of Miracles, which was slowly crumbling into 
 ruins, after a long and fantastic career, had been swept 
 away, and a market was established on its site. There 
 were an astonishing number of churches enough to have 
 amazed Sir Roger de Coverley destined, many of them, 
 to fall before the fury of the Revolution. In their 
 shadows nestled, to the injury of the public health, a 
 dangerous number of cemeteries, disused or in use. 
 Nothing, probably, would have more impressed the 
 stranger in Paris in 1789 than the astonishing amount 
 of building that was going on. A kind of mania of 
 reconstruction seemed to have seized upon authority, 
 and in all directions new streets were stretching out, 
 bridges being projected, and stately buildings rising to 
 heaven amid their scaffoldings. Paris might have been 
 the securest city in the world, the Old Order the most 
 durable of human institutions, to judge by the way in 
 which the administrators of a system that was falling 
 to pieces occupied themselves with the rehabilitation 
 of Paris. 
 
 The sidewalk took a long time to establish itself in 
 Paris. London in the last century was an uncomforta- 
 ble place enough, but it was a kind of earthly paradise
 
 346 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXIL 
 
 compared to Paris as far as street comfort and conven- 
 ience went. In most of the Paris streets the pedestri- 
 ans picked their way as best they might along the high- 
 way in common with all the wheeled traffic. Only in 
 a few favored streets were strips of the pavement at 
 each side of the street marked off with posts to form 
 a species of sidewalk. This amazed and irritated Ar- 
 thur Young. It appeared almost incredible to him, as 
 a person used to London, how dirty the streets of Paris 
 were, and also how horribly inconvenient and dangerous 
 walking was without a foot-pavement. The dirt seems 
 to have surprised every one, even in that astonishing 
 last century, which set so little store by cleanliness. 
 Paris was famous, or infamous, for its mud. On days 
 when it rained and it rained a good deal in Paris the 
 streets were given over to a horrible, glutinous, evil- 
 smelling compound of earth and refuse and filth of 
 all kinds, which poisoned the air with its stench, and 
 destroyed the garments to which it clung. Through 
 these streets poured the interminable procession of 
 Paris life, the great, lumbering, gilded carriages of the 
 aristocracy, painted with a whole heathen mythology, 
 and drawn by four or six horses, the many public con- 
 veyances, the cumbrous hackney - coaches with their 
 bright yellow bodies, the mud -carts and water-carts. 
 The fiacres, as the hackney-coaches came to be called, 
 from their first establishment bearing the sign of Saint 
 Fiacre, were dear, dirty, detestable, some two thousand 
 in number. Once, we are told, the wild Duke of Or- 
 leans and his wild companions actually hunted a stag 
 through some of the streets of Paris. Amid all the 
 wheeled traffic, generally going as fast as it could be 
 driven, in defiance of regulations of police and the well- 
 being of foot-walkers, the Paris population made its
 
 1789. A WORLD TO BUSTLE IN. 34? 
 
 way as well as it could, and certainly as rapidly as it 
 could. 
 
 Long before 1789 Montesquieu had hit off the Pari- 
 sian passion for rapid motion. In his Persian Letters 
 he made his imaginary Oriental describe a residence of 
 a month, during which he had not seen a single person 
 walking at a foot-pace. There was'no one in the world 
 like a Frenchman to get over the ground ; he ran and 
 flew. The mimic Persian, accustomed to walk leisure- 
 ly, sometimes lost all patience ; for, to say nothing of 
 being splashed with dirt from head to foot, he could 
 not put up with being elbowed at every turn. Some 
 man coming up behind him compelled him to turn right 
 out of his path, and then somebody else, coming in an- 
 other direction, drove him back to the place from which 
 the former had pushed him; until before he had walked 
 a hundred yards he was as tired as if he had been ten 
 leagues. This astonishing activity is gravely explained 
 by Mercier. The Parisian learned when quite young 
 to keep his footing on the pavement, to got out of the 
 way of horses and carriages, to diminish his bulk like a 
 true Gascon, to jump over the gutters, to run up seven 
 stories without losing breath, and to come down like a 
 flash of lightning. It must indeed have been a curious 
 sight to look down from an upper window upon the 
 mass of carriages of different kinds which were going 
 to and fro; to watch the foot-passengers, who, like birds 
 when they see some one coming with a gun, flutter off 
 in all directions, one putting his foot in the gutter and 
 splashing himself from head to foot, and another get- 
 ting the dust driven in his eyes. 
 
 A very bewildering, perplexing, variegated crowd it 
 was, too, that jostled and pushed and hurried its wild, 
 danse macabre along the unsavory Paris streets. And
 
 348 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. Cn. XXII. 
 
 what a danse macabre it was! Its beggars alone would 
 have delighted Callot. Blind beggars were numerous ; 
 pickpockets were plentiful ; rogues of all kinds were 
 ready to take advantage of the throng. The din was 
 tremendous; the street-cries alone were enough to make 
 the town a very Babel. The sellers of fish, the sellers 
 of cakes, the sellers of gingerbread, of oysters, of or- 
 anges, of old clothes, all made it a point of honor to ad- 
 vertise their wares at the shrillest top of their shrill 
 voices. The women, according to Mercier, cried like 
 men, and the men like women. There was one perpet- 
 ual yelling, which made it impossible to describe the 
 sound and accent of all these multitudinous voices up- 
 lifted in chorus. Auvergnat porters pushed along ; 
 Savoyards carried sedan-chairs, which were still used; 
 hawkers of all kinds filled the air with their strange 
 cries in commendation of their wares; beggars, bur- 
 gesses, soldiers, nobles, strangers, servants, shop-girls, 
 ladies, work-women, all blended together in the inces- 
 sant panorama of the Paris streets. Dangerous in the 
 daytime, they were no less dangerous at night, for the 
 lighting was of the poorest lantern kind, almost as bad 
 as London in the days of Anne, and in some parts of 
 the town even the wretched lanterns were not lit when 
 there was a moon. We can well understand how a 
 stranger would dislike the Paris streets. Arthur Young 
 lost his honest English temper with those same streets. 
 Pai-is, he declared, was in some respects the most ineligi- 
 ble and inconvenient city for the residence of a person 
 of small fortune of any that he had seen, and was vastly 
 inferior to London. It is curious to compare with this 
 Montesquieu's declaration in the Persian Letters that 
 Paris was perhaps the most sensual city in the whole 
 world, and the one in which pleasure was carried to the
 
 1789. A MOTLEY CROWD. 349 
 
 highest pitch, but that, at the same time, it was the city 
 in which men lead the hardest life. Arthur Young was 
 provoked out of all patience by the narrow streets, the 
 crowd, the dirt, the want of foot-pavements. Walking, 
 which in London was so pleasant and so clean that la- 
 dies might do it every day, was here a toil and a fatigue 
 to a man, and an impossibility to a well-dressed woman. 
 What especially irritated Arthur Young was the infin- 
 ity of one-horse cabriolets which were driven by young 
 men of fashion and their imitators, alike fools, with such 
 rapidity as to be real nuisances, and render the streets 
 exceedingly dangerous without an incessant caution. 
 He saw a poor child run over and probably killed, and 
 was himself many times blackened with the mud of the 
 kennels. This beggarly practice of driving a one-horse 
 booby-hutch about the streets of a great capital flowed 
 either from poverty or despicable economy, and could 
 not be spoken of with too much severity, since it ren- 
 dered Paris an ineligible residence for persons, particu- 
 larly families that could not afford to keep a coach a 
 convenience which was as dear as at London. If young 
 noblemen at London, he proudly reflected, were to drive 
 their chaises in streets without foot-ways, as their breth- 
 ren do at Paris, they would speedily and justly get very 
 well thrashed or rolled in the kennel. The hackney- 
 coaches he found much worse than in London ; and 
 chairs were rare, as they ran the risk of being driven 
 down in the streets. To this circumstance, also, it was 
 owing that all persons of small or moderate fortune 
 were forced to dress in black, with black stockings. It 
 was not so much the dusky hue of this in company that 
 annoyed Arthur Young as the too great distinction 
 which it marked in company between a man that had a 
 good fortune and another that had not.
 
 350 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXII. 
 
 These same black stockings that annoyed Arthur 
 Young so much were something more, however, than a 
 mark of social inequality. They were the outward and 
 visible proof of the change that was coming over the 
 country, of the increased simplicity in dress, which was 
 owing partly to Rousseau, partly to Marie Antoinette, 
 partly to the Anglomania of the Duke d'Orleans and his 
 set, and partly to the spread of democratic or semi- 
 democratic opinion. The color of dress was nowhere 
 very brilliant, not so brilliant as in former days. Dark 
 blues and browns, homely grays and blacks, were the 
 chief wear ; the simplicity which came in with the new 
 ideas had had its effects upon daily dress, and the shin- 
 ing foppery of the Old Order had already begun to 
 fade. The trouser, that useful but singularly ugly gar- 
 ment, had already begun to assert itself, and was worn 
 by many instead of the old knee-breeches. Paris was 
 still in 1789 the mistress of modes, but the mode just 
 then was swayed by the Anglomania which had already 
 exercised its sway on science, on sport, and on politi- 
 cal opinion. With the sober colors and cut of English 
 cloth came other English customs. Gentlemen in 1789 
 did not so generally carry swords as of old; a cane was 
 sufficient unless the wearer was, as it were, in full dress. 
 While men still wore powder, women began to leave it 
 off, and the amazing head-dresses of the earlier days 
 had given place to a more natural arrangement of the 
 hair. Women's hats and bonnets were enormous and 
 much beribboned and beflowered. A keen observer 
 might have almost predicted from the change in Pari- 
 sian dress that other and more momentous changes 
 were in the air. 
 
 There are three things which every one instinctively 
 associates with the last century and the Old Order
 
 1789. THE CAFfiS. 351 
 
 patches, powder, and periwigs but the use of all these 
 was already on the decline in 1789. M. Alfred Frank- 
 lin, in his interesting and admirable studies, " La Vie 
 privee d'Autrefois," claims to have discovered the ori- 
 gin of the use of the patch. In a rare French book, the 
 " Diverses Leyons" of Louis Guyon, published in 1625, 
 it is stated that at the end of the previous century 
 physicians sought to cure the toothache by applying 
 to the temples tiny plasters stretched upon velvet or 
 taffeta. It was easy for a beauty to perceive that these 
 black patches greatly heightened the whiteness of a fair 
 skin, and lent a certain lustre even to a waning com- 
 plexion. The patches were useless against the tooth- 
 ache, but they soon became an essential to the toilet. 
 They were worn all through the seventeenth century, 
 but they retained their greatest influence in the eigh- 
 teenth century. Fantastic poets attributed their origin 
 to Cupid's placing a fly upon the breast of Venus, and 
 the " mouches," as the patches were called, had differ- 
 ent names, according to the different parts of the face 
 to which they were applied. Thus one near the eye 
 was " passionate," one near the mouth the " kisser," one 
 on the lips the " coquette," one on the nose the " im- 
 pertinent," on the forehead the "majestic," on the cheek 
 the " gallant," on the lower lip the " discreet," on a spot 
 the " thief," on the fold of a smiling cheek the " play- 
 ful," and so on. During the reign of Louis XV. every 
 lady carried her box of patches, and as they were some- 
 times cut in quaint devices of ships and stars and ani- 
 mals, a lady's face was often a very gallery of shadows. 
 One of the great features in Paris life were the cafes, 
 which had become so numerous since the success of the 
 Cafe Procope, and which continued to increase. To 
 these establishments, as to their London kindred, the St.
 
 JJ52 TilE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXII. 
 
 James's coffee-houses of the Georgian age, people re- 
 sorted to take a cup of coffee, to talk and hear the news. 
 A writer of the time calmly asserts that the urbanity 
 and mildness discernible upon most faces in Paris was 
 due to the establishment of so many cafes. Before they 
 existed, nearly everybody passed his time at the wine- 
 shops where even business matters were discussed. 
 Since their establishment, however, people assembled 
 under their roofs to hear what was going on, drinking 
 and playing only in moderation, with the consequence 
 that they were more civil and polite, at least in appear- 
 ance. The cafes grew rapidly in number. There were 
 six hundred in the reign of Louis XV. They were the 
 daily meeting -ground of the idlers, the talkers, the 
 domino, chess, and draught-players, and the newspaper 
 readers. Billiard-rooms were not added, says Biblio- 
 phile Jacob, until the Revolution, and no one would ever 
 have ventured to smoke there. The fondness for tobacco 
 led to the creation of estaminets and tap-rooms, which 
 ranked much below the cafes. In the cafes there was 
 little or no drunkenness, coffee and other simple drinks 
 being almost the only things supplied. Though they 
 were, for the most part, plain and little decorated, each 
 had its peculiar physiognomy; some of them quiet even 
 to silence, while others were noisy even as Babel. The 
 Cafe de la Ilegence and the Cafe du Quai de 1'Ecole 
 had inherited the renown of the Cafe Procope. Lovers 
 of gossip, rakers-up of rumors, men of letters, retired 
 officers, and strangers formed their chief customers. 
 
 For wilder spirits, caring for fiercer joys than cof- 
 fee, chess, news, and scandal, there were the taverns, 
 the wine -shops, and above all the guinguettes. The 
 guinguette was much smaller than the tavern, and the 
 frequenters, taking their refreshments at tables, were
 
 1789. THE GUIXGUETTR 353 
 
 regaled with dancing and singing. We are told that 
 these establishments were especially numerous in the 
 faubourgs and at the approaches to the barriers, as at 
 these places the wine and spirituous liquors did not pay 
 octroi duty. The guinguette, as we learn, merely con- 
 sisted, in most cases, of a large tent, around the inside 
 of which were long rows of rough deal tables, a place 
 being left vacant in the centre of the tent for the dan- 
 cers, whose orchestra was made up of a squeaky violin 
 and a discordant flute. The guinguettes outside Paris 
 were more frequented, on account of their rustic aspect. 
 They were veritable arbors, hidden in greenery, stand- 
 ing in a garden or shrubbery, whence they were called 
 Courtilles, which means plots of ground planted with 
 trees. There was the Grande Courtille at the end of 
 the Faubourg du Temple, on the road to Belleville, and 
 the Petite Courtille, near the Porcherons, on the road 
 to Clichy. 
 
 The beautiful Marie Antoinette herself was taken to 
 one of these places by the Count d'Artois, and is said 
 to have declared that she never enjoyed anything so 
 much in her life as the wild humors and the wild dances 
 of the place. We are told that her incognita w r as re- 
 spected by those present, who affected not to recognize 
 her. Still she was recognized, and the harmless freak 
 went its way to swell up the long list of the offences 
 against queenly dignity which were to tell so heavily 
 against her. 
 
 There was an immense deal that was very bright 
 about that Old World Paris, though its crowd was not 
 so brilliant as of old, and though there was such a pre- 
 ponderance of black stockings. It was not always rain- 
 ing, it was not all walking in crowded streets. We 
 must remember Restif de la Bretonne's enthusiasm 
 I. 23
 
 354 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. Cn. XXII. 
 
 about the Tuileries. We must remember Dulaure's 
 rhapsodies in his description of Paris curiosities writ- 
 ten in 1786, when he avowed that the old Boulevard 
 combined all the attractions longed for by loungers; 
 varied sights, splendid houses, and delightful gardens, 
 down even to the cafes and wine -shops, which, with 
 their flowers and shrubs, had quite a fairy appearance. 
 On the afternoons of Sundays and Thursdays the Boule- 
 vard was patronized by the prettiest women in Paris, 
 and the long strings of carriages were an ever-varying 
 source of curiosity. But in spite of Dulaure, in spite 
 of Restif de la Bretonne, it is not in the many-tinted 
 Tuileries with its coveys of plumaged dames, it is not 
 in the old Boulevard with all its emphasized splendors, 
 that we are to look for what was most characteristic of 
 the Paris of 1789. 
 
 There is really only one part of the Paris of to-day 
 where the student may for a moment forget himself 
 and fancy that he is back again in the days when the 
 States-General were coming together and the Bastille 
 still lifted its head over turbulent Saint Antoine. That 
 is of course the Palais Royal, where, if, like the Mar- 
 chioness, we make-believe very hard, we can almost 
 conjure up the scene where the people used to throng 
 to discuss the things that were being done over at Ver- 
 sailles, and to duck in the fountains individuals who 
 were supposed to be hostile to the popular cause. It 
 did not dream indeed of gas or electric - light, but it 
 made a brave show with lamps and candles at night, 
 and was crowded then, as it is crowded now, with the 
 curious of all nations. That part, indeed, which was 
 devoted to ladies of the lightest character has happily 
 vanished. It existed long enough; Balzac's Lucien de 
 Rubempre saw it when he came to Paris to make his
 
 1789. THE PALAIS ROYAL. 355 
 
 fortune, and it impressed him a good deal. But alto- 
 gether the Palais Royal of 1789 would not so greatly 
 differ from the Palais Royal of 1889 if it did not lack 
 its Cafe de Foy. 
 
 Ah, that Palais Royal ! Taine, in his " Ancien Re- 
 gime," sighs for eight days of the stately splendid old 
 Versailles life. We should rather, we think, if we were 
 to choose, get a glimpse of the life of the Palais Royal. 
 If we were but possessed of those goloshes of fortune 
 which we spoke of a little while ago, we would gladly 
 wander in that Palais Royal of the year 1789. We 
 would mix with its marvellous crowd. We would 
 study the shops which made it a kind of world's fair 
 for all the luxuries of both body and mind. We would 
 test the merits of the restaurants, the best and dear- 
 est in Europe, the Barrier, and the English Tavern, 
 the humbler Flemish Grotto, the cafes like that Cafe 
 Militaire with its device "Hie virtus bellica gaudet," 
 and the Cafe de l']Ecole, kept by Charpentier, whose 
 pretty and wealthy daughter was wooed by an obscure 
 young advocate whose name was Danton, and who was 
 not always to be obscure. We would visit the wax- 
 works of Curtius, uncle of Mademoiselle Gresholtz, who 
 served Madame Elizabeth, and who should be famous 
 as Madame Tussaud. We should perhaps meet his 
 friends Marat and Robespierre. We would study the 
 marionette shows and the Chinese shadows, and make 
 our way into the lively theatre of Varieties. The Pa- 
 lais Royal is the capital of Paris, said Mercier. It is 
 the heart, the brain, the soul of Paris, said Karamsine 
 the Russian. 
 
 Arthur Young naturally gravitated, as all strangers 
 did gravitate, to the Palais Royal, and was much an- 
 noyed by the National Circus there, a building in the
 
 356 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXII. 
 
 gardens of the palace, which seemed to him the most 
 whimsical and expensive folly that could easily be im- 
 agined. It was a large ball-room, sunk half its height 
 underground ; and, as if this circumstance were not 
 sufficiently adapted to make it damp enough, a garden 
 was planted on the roof, and a river was made to flow 
 around it, which, with the addition of some spirting 
 fountains, undoubtedly made it a delicious place for a 
 winter's entertainment. Arthur Young angrily reflect- 
 ed that the expense of this gewgaw building, the proj- 
 ect, as he supposed, of some of the Duke of Orleans's 
 friends, would have established an English farm, with 
 all its principles, buildings, live-stock, tools, and crops, 
 on a scale that would have done honor to the first sov- 
 ereign of Europe ; for it would have converted more 
 than five thousand acres of desert into a garden. As 
 to the result of the mode that had been pursued, of in- 
 vesting such a capital, he knew no epithet equal to its 
 merits. It was meant to be a concert, ball, coffee, and 
 billiard-room, with shops, something in the style of the 
 London Pantheon. There were music and singing on the 
 night when Arthur Young visited it, but the room be- 
 ing almost empty, he found it equally cold and sombre. 
 All round Paris in the last century were the seats of 
 princes, of nobles, of opulent financiers. The city was 
 cinctured with stately parks and ancient woods. At 
 the north the groves of Enghien and Montmorency 
 led to the glades of Compiegne. At the south lay the 
 fair forest of Fontainebleau, and at the south-west the 
 rabbit-haunted wilds of Rambouillet and the brakes 
 of Meudon. West lay Saint Germain. Eastward lay 
 Bondy and Vincennes. The Boulogne wood was still 
 sylvan in fact as in name. But of all the woods the 
 wood of Senart was Louis XV.'s favorite hunting-
 
 1789. THE ENGLISH GARDEN. 357 
 
 ground, and of all his country-seats Louis best loved 
 Choisy Choisy-le-Roi, as it had come to be called from 
 his predilection for it. In the gardens of Choisy, fa- 
 mous for jasmine and roses, and thronged with the 
 gods and satyrs of Greek mythology, Louis loved to 
 linger after the hunting at Senart. The gods have 
 vanished long ago ; the roses and jasmine have disap- 
 peared like the roses that the Persian poet weeps ; not 
 a trace remains of the chateau which Mansard built for 
 the great Mademoiselle after the Fronde wars. 
 
 But the two places near to Paris of special interest 
 to the stranger were Versailles and Trianon. Arthur 
 Young went to both, and recorded his opinions in his 
 usual matter-of-fact way. He had a letter to Rich- 
 ard, which procured admittance to Trianon, to view the 
 queen's English Garden. It contained about one hun- 
 dred acres, disposed in the taste he had read of in books 
 of Chinese gardening, whence it was supposed that the 
 English style was taken. He found more of Sir Will- 
 iam Chambers there than of Mr. Brown more effort 
 than nature and more expense than taste. He ob- 
 served that it was not easy to conceive anything that 
 art could introduce in a garden that was not there : 
 woods, rocks, lawns, lakes, rivers, islands, cascades, grot- 
 tos, walks, temples, and even villages. He admitted 
 that parts of the design were pretty, and well executed. 
 The chief fault was too much crowding ; which led to 
 another, that of cutting the lawn by too many gravel 
 walks an error to be seen in almost every garden Ar- 
 thur Young met with in France. But the glories of 
 La Petite Trianon, in his eyes, were the exotic trees 
 and shrubs. The world had been successfully rifled to 
 decorate it with curious and beautiful plants to please 
 the eye of ignorance, and to exercise the memory of
 
 358 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. Cn. XXII. 
 
 science. Of the buildings, the Temple of Love seemed 
 to him truly elegant. 
 
 The palace of Versailles, however, one of the objects 
 of which report had given him the greatest expectation, 
 made no impression on him; he viewed it without emo- 
 tion. Nothing could compensate him for its want of 
 unity. From whatever point he viewed it, it appeared 
 to him an assemblage of buildings; a splendid quarter 
 of a town, but not a fine edifice an objection from 
 which even the beautiful garden-front was not free. 
 The great gallery was the finest room he saw; the other 
 apartments were nothing ; but the pictures and statues 
 he hailed as a capital collection. The whole palace, ex- 
 cept the chapel, seemed, to his surprise, to be open to 
 all the world; for he tells us that he pushed through 
 an amazing crowd of all sorts of people, many of them 
 not very well dressed. But the officers at the door of 
 the apartment in which the king dined made a distinc- 
 tion, and would not permit all to enter promiscuously. 
 
 At another time he again visited Versailles, and was 
 again surprised. While viewing the king's apartment, 
 which he had not left a quarter of an hour, Arthur 
 Young was amused to see the blackguard figures that 
 were walking uncontrolled about the palace, and even 
 in his bedchamber. The rags of these men betrayed 
 them to be in the last stage of poverty, and the English 
 stranger was the only person who stared and wondered 
 how the devil they got there. It was impossible for 
 the English stranger not to like this careless indiffer- 
 ence and freedom from suspicion. He declared that he 
 loved the master of the house, who would not be hurt 
 or offended at seeing his apartment thus occupied if he 
 returned suddenly. 
 
 The curious mixture of magnificence and dirt which
 
 1*789. CONCERNING THE BATH. 359 
 
 characterized Paris was not unchai'acteristic of its peo- 
 ple. It must be confessed that in some respects the re- 
 finement of the last century was disagreeably artificial, 
 the thin veneer that cloaked a great deal of coarseness. 
 Washing of the person was, unhappily, an infrequent 
 process. A modern gentleman, accustomed to cleanli- 
 ness from his youth upward, would be beyond measure 
 disgusted if he could step back for half an hour into 
 the Paris of the polite last century at the very filth 
 with which luxurious living was environed. Sanitary 
 arrangements were of the most primitive, most detest- 
 able kind. It is unpleasant to think that the stately 
 palace of Versailles was chiefly characterized to its fa- 
 miliars by its abominable smells. Bathing of the body 
 as a daily institution, even for the nobility, was practi- 
 cally unknown. A palace did not always think it nec- 
 essary to include a bath-room among its appointments. 
 There were indeed public bath-houses upon the river, 
 but they were few in number, and the semi - private 
 bath-houses had a certain shadiness of character. Peo- 
 ple of the middle classes who wished to take a bath 
 could hire one from an ironmonger for a few pence. 
 These baths were shaped something like the shoe of 
 the old lady who had so many children that she didn't 
 know what to do. Such baths, although no doubt 
 highly uncomfortable, had the advantage, in economic 
 eyes, of requiring less water than those of more oblong 
 shape. In the houses of great nobles baths were of 
 a more luxurious nature, and were fashioned in many 
 forms, all seeking after the comfort of the human body. 
 It is a curious example of the manners of the day that 
 great ladies did not hesitate to receive their friends, 
 male as well as female, while in their baths. Decency 
 was, however, respected. A pint or two of milk, or a
 
 3(}0 THE FREXCII REVOLUTION. CH. XXII. 
 
 quantity of prepared essence, rendered the water white 
 and opaque. Some baths, again, were covered with a 
 perforated lid, which left the bulk of the body quite 
 concealed while still permitting evaporation. In many 
 cases, too, ladies took their baths enveloped in a bath- 
 ing-gown from head to foot. Madame Campan de- 
 clares that Marie Antoinette was so particular in this 
 respect that she always bathed clad in a long flannel 
 robe buttoned up to the neck, and when she left the 
 bath she always insisted on having a cloth held up be- 
 fore her to conceal her from the eyes of her women. 
 This statement is curiously and decisively in contradic- 
 tion with that of Soulavie, in his memoirs of the reign 
 of Louis XVL, in which he records the incredible story 
 of a visit paid to the queen by an aged and eminently 
 virtuous ecclesiastic. On entering the room he found 
 the queen, entirely naked, in her bath. He was about 
 to retire, but the queen called him to her side, and held 
 him for some time in unwilling converse, compelled to 
 admire "the fairest form that nature ever moulded." 
 The story would seem on the face of it to be apocry- 
 phal, but it is certain that some great ladies made no 
 scruple of being seen completely unclothed, at their 
 toilet or in their bath, by the male lackeys, and this 
 from no indecency, but from their contemptuous uncon- 
 sciousness that a lackey could be regarded as anything 
 but an automaton. 
 
 Gouverneur Morris gives some very remarkable pict- 
 ures of the freedom of social life in Paris in this regard. 
 On May 27, 1789, he called on Madame de la Suze. " She 
 is just going to dress, but that is nothing." " M. Morris 
 me permettra de faire ma toilette ?" " Certainly." So 
 we have the whole performance of undressing and dress- 
 ing except the shift. On July 26th in the same year he
 
 1752-1816. MADAME DE FLAIIAUT. 361 
 
 notes : " At five go by appointment to Madame de Fla- 
 haut's. She is at her toilet. Monsieur comes in. She 
 dresses before us with perfect decency, even to her shift." 
 That same year, November 13th, Madame de Flahaut, 
 says Mr. Morris, " being ill, goes into the bath, and when 
 placed there sends for me. It is a strange place to re- 
 ceive a visit, but there is milk mixed with the water, 
 making it opaque. She tells me that it is usual to re- 
 ceive in the bath, and I suppose it is, for otherwise I 
 should have been the last person to whom it would 
 have been permitted." 
 
 Madame de Flahaut, who was so frank in this respect, 
 was a very charming woman, who impressed every one 
 she met from Montesquieu and Talleyrand to the clever, 
 whimsical, conceited Gouverneur Morris, who was des- 
 tined to be a good friend to her in later days. She was 
 very beautiful, very witty; she wrote romances and talk- 
 ed philosophies ; she was unhappily married to a man 
 much older than herself, the dissipated, indifferent Count 
 de Flahaut for whom the guillotine waits. Talleyrand, 
 then Abbe de Perigord, was her friend, her lover, and 
 the father of her child Charles, named after him. Pos- 
 sibly this may have influenced Morris when he wrote of 
 the abbe : " He appears to be a sly, cunning, ambitious, 
 and malicious man. I know not why conclusions so dis- 
 advantageous to him are formed in my mind, but so it 
 is ; I cannot help it." 
 
 Gouverneur Morris is of immense value to us in ena- 
 bling us to appreciate the social life of Paris on the eve 
 of the Revolution. Born in 1752, he had been excep- 
 tionally well educated ; his father had desired that he 
 should have "the best education that is to be had in 
 England or America." In his young manhood he de- 
 voted himself to the law; when the Revolution broke
 
 362 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXII. 
 
 out he played a prominent part in asserting the need for 
 American independence, and was gallantly prepared "to 
 fall on the last bleak mountain in America rather than 
 yield." He was with Washington during the long win- 
 ter at Valley Forge, and earned the lifelong friendship 
 of the American leader. In 1780, in consequence of an 
 accident in Philadelphia, Morris had to have his left leg 
 amputated below the knee, and for the remainder of his 
 life we learn that he wore a wooden leg of primitive sim- 
 plicity, " not much more than a rough oak stick with a 
 wooden knob at the end of it." Such was the man who, 
 in the February of 1789, found himself in Paris on some 
 business of his own and his brother's concerning the ship- 
 ment of tobacco to France. His excellent introductions 
 brought him into the best Parisian society, and his keen, 
 quick appreciations of all he saw render his diary and 
 letters second only in importance to Arthur Young's 
 writings in dealing with the time. With a good deal 
 of conceit, and a good deal of humor, he stumped his 
 way through the bright Parisian society, often amazed 
 at its morality, often amused at its behavior, always in- 
 telligent, appreciative, and reliable. If he seems to have 
 believed that he could easily set things right in France 
 if he had the chance, he only shared a delusion common 
 to many persons less intelligent than himself. A little 
 later in this year of 1789 he and his enchanting Ma- 
 dame de Flahaut began to scheme out the ideal policy 
 for the hour. Her suggestions that Mirabeau should 
 be sent to Constantinople, and Lauzun to London, do 
 not say much for her diplomacy. Morris's great idea 
 was that Madame de Flahaut should command the queen, 
 whom he described as " weak, proud, but not ill-tem- 
 pered, and, though lustful, yet not much attached to 
 her lovers," so that a superior mind Madame de Fla-
 
 1752-1816. GOUVERNEUR MORRIS. 363 
 
 haul's superior mind "would take that ascendency 
 which the feeble always submit to, though not always 
 without reluctance." Madame de Flahaut seemed to be 
 pleased with Morris's plan, and declared that she would 
 take care to keep the queen supplied with an alternat- 
 ing succession of gallants and masses. It was impos- 
 sible, Morris thought, not to approve of such a regime, 
 and felt confident that " with a due proportion of the 
 former medicine " Madame de Flahaut " must supplant 
 the present physician." After all, outsiders do not al- 
 ways see most of the game.
 
 364 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXIII. 
 
 CHAPTER XXIII. 
 
 THE PEOPLE OF PARIS. 
 
 SUCH was Paris in that memorable year 1789, a huge 
 hive of humanity, more animated, more excited than it 
 had ever been before in all the course of its turbulent 
 history. The decision of the king and his ministers to 
 summon the States-General had aroused the keenest ex- 
 citement in every part of the city. Every section of 
 the social scale shared in and swelled the general stir. 
 In the salons, in the clubs, in the wine-shops, in the cof- 
 fee-houses, in the streets, above all, in the Palais Royal, 
 Paris buzzed and fluttered and discussed and doubted 
 and wrangled, and was perturbed or hopeful according 
 to its mood. Let us study some of these centres of ex- 
 citement and see what they are doing. 
 
 Parisian society still thronged its various salons, still 
 glittered in satins and embroideries, silks and laces ; 
 the courtly clink of swords was still heard, and the rus- 
 tle of hoops. The salons still made up a world of pow- 
 der and of patches, but they were not the salons of old 
 time, for which some eighteenth century Villon might 
 weep, the salons of the Regency or the Fifteenth Louis, 
 the salons of light wit, the salons of fashionable science 
 and patronized Encyclopaediaism. Politics have turned 
 all heads, and the salons have mostly become political 
 centres. Madame de Sabran swayed the most aristo- 
 cratic of the salons that professed reaction and clung to 
 the court principles. To her rooms came the fine flower
 
 1738-1815. MADAME DE SABRAN. 365 
 
 of the nobility, the wits and politicians, who thought 
 that the Old Order could still somehow be bolstered up. 
 Madame de Sabran was no longer in the enjoyment of 
 that first youth which made her so famous some twelve 
 years earlier. Madame Vigee-Lebrun, to whom we owe 
 so living a knowledge of so many of the lords and la- 
 dies of that old time, has left a ravishing picture of Ma- 
 dame de Sabran. It shows her dark eyes smiling di- 
 vinely under their beautiful brown lashes, the beautiful 
 face beneath its cloud of fair hair, the exquisitely fine 
 skin, the daintily delicate body, which conquered the 
 heart of the audacious and brilliant Chevalier de Bouf- 
 flers. Madame de Sabran was a woman of wit, a wom- 
 an of taste and scholarship ; her wit, her taste, her 
 scholarship, and her beauty captivated De Boufflers in 
 1777, when she was twenty-seven and he was thirty- 
 nine. Madame de Sabran returned the passion of De 
 Boufflers, and for the rest of her life was devoted to 
 him. He was now in 1789 the chief ornament of her 
 salon, and one of the most remarkable, one of the most 
 typical figures of that antique world. 
 
 The brilliant figure of the Chevalier de Boufflers 
 shines eccentrically radiant through the whole revolu- 
 tionary period. He is indeed a wandering star : the 
 Old Order is to be seen at its best in him. His por- 
 traits confirm what the praises of his contemporaries 
 assert, that he was singularly attractive. The gracious 
 oval of his face is instinct with a witty intelligence ; 
 his bright eyes seem to question mockingly ; his nose 
 is large and sensual; so are the large firm lips, but their 
 sensuality is tempered by a sense of cynic humor. The 
 son of that Madame de Boufflers who was so dear to 
 the old King Stanislas of Poland, Louis XV.'s father- 
 in-law, young De Boufflers was originally destined for
 
 366 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. Cn. XXIII. 
 
 the Church, not indeed from any spirit of belief, but 
 solely from ambition, and a desire that the red hat might 
 some time shade his high and handsome forehead. In 
 an age of strange Churchmen there never was a stran- 
 ger servant of the Church than the young Abbe de 
 Boufflers. The traditional Parisian abbe of a world of 
 tales and comedies finds its finest realization in this 
 dainty disciple of the light-hearted Abbe Porquet, this 
 love-making, verse-making scapegrace, who delighted, 
 like Faust, to reel from desire to desire, and to rhyme 
 his way none too decently through life. It is of De 
 Boufflers that Metra tells a tale Metra the journalist, 
 who tells so many and so strange tales. De Boufliers 
 offended some great lady by an epigram : the great lady 
 wrote to him making an appointment and proposing con- 
 ciliation. De Boufflers came to the appointment with a 
 pair of pistols in his pocket. He had hardly spoken to 
 the lady before four tall lackeys came in, who, in obe- 
 dience to the lady's command, seized De Boufflers and 
 administered a severe castigation. De Boufflers bore it 
 composedly, then producing his pistols, made the affright- 
 ed lackeys, on pain of death, administer the same casti- 
 gation to his treacherous hostess, and afterwards to each 
 other in turn. This amazing child of the Church, whom 
 Rousseau despised and in whom Voltaire delighted, sud- 
 denly set the literary and polite worlds on fire one day 
 by the little tale, "Aline," which enraptured Grimm, 
 captivated Madame de Pompadour, and overtaxed the 
 patience of his ecclesiastical superiors. De Boufliers 
 was made aware that he must really choose between let- 
 ters and the Litany. De Boufliers did not take long to 
 choose. With a light heart he laid down the cassock 
 and caught up the sword, and fought his way gallantly 
 through the Hanover campaign. Yet still there was
 
 1738-1815. DE BOUFFLERS. 367 
 
 something of the Churchman in him. He was no long- 
 er an abbe, but he was a Knight of the Order of Malta, 
 so that we have that strange picture of him given by 
 M. Octave Uzanne in which, being at the same time a 
 prior and a captain of Hussars, he assists at Divine Of- 
 fice in the costume of a soldier-abbe, a long white sur- 
 plice on his shoulders and a long sword beating against 
 his heels. The contradiction which is here implied is 
 really typical of De Boufflers' entire nature. He was a 
 creature of contradictions. His friend and emulator, 
 the Prince de Ligne, in one of those exquisite portraits 
 from his gallery of contemporaries, has left a very living 
 and charming picture of the man who was in turn abbe, 
 soldier, author, administrator, deputy, and philosopher, 
 and who, in all these various states, was out of place only 
 in the first. Laclos has left a grimmer portrait of him 
 under the name of Fulber, as of one born eighty years 
 too late, a fanfaron of another time who being serious 
 seeks to be gay, frivolous seeks to be grave, good would 
 fain be caustic, and idle plays at being industrious. Per- 
 haps De Boufflers did come a little belated into the world. 
 His bright butterfly figure seems out of place in the 
 stormy hours of 1789. Rivarol, in his brisk way, 
 summed him merrily up as a libertine abbe, philosoph- 
 ical soldier, rhyming diplomatist, patriotic emigrant, 
 and courtier republican. From the moment of meet- 
 ing Madame de Sabran he took life and love a little 
 more seriously. It became his ambition to win a posi- 
 tion which would allow him to marry the beautiful 
 widow. When, in 1785, he was sent as governor to 
 Senegambia, he showed very considerable ability as an 
 administrator, and was heartily regretted by both blacks 
 and whites, it is said, when he returned France in the 
 end of 1787, and to his adored Madame de Sabran. He
 
 368 
 
 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXIII. 
 
 was now the shining light of Madame de Sabran's salon, 
 and perhaps we may as well part company with him 
 here. He got elected to the States-General as a noble 
 deputy; he played no considerable part in the Assem- 
 bly; in 1790, he with Malouet, La Rochefoucauld-Lian- 
 court, and others, founded the " Impartials " club ; he 
 married Madame de Sabran, emigrated, came back to 
 France under Bonaparte with all his light wit worn out 
 of him, settled down as a kind of gentleman-farmer, and 
 died in the January of the year of Waterloo. He wrote 
 himself an epitaph, which may be thus rendered: 
 
 "Here lies a lord who without ceasing sped; 
 Born on the highway, there he lived, and dead 
 He lies there still to justify the Sage, 
 Who says that life is but a pilgrimage." 
 
 No less characteristic of their age were the two 
 brothers, Louis Philippe de Segur and Joseph Alexan- 
 dre de Segur, the Castor and Pollux of the Royalist 
 salons. The elder brother, Louis, born in 1753, was 
 noted for a kind of grave sweetness, a gallantry and 
 address which had in them a reserve, almost an air of 
 melancholy, which gave them an additional charm. An 
 impassioned Voltairean in his youth, he was destined in 
 his time to play the part of a kind of glorified Vicar of 
 Bray, and to serve a variety of autocratic masters with 
 a whimsical indifference to the liberalism of his early 
 years. Madame de Sabran did not esteem him too 
 highly when she described him in a biting little epigram 
 as an empty-headed philosopher and a pedantic and 
 timid rake. We may think a little better of him if we 
 please. He was a dexterous and delicate political epi- 
 grammatist; he wooed a frolic muse like most young 
 men of his station, and with an average success. No
 
 1789. A UNIQUE EPITAPH. 369 
 
 one has painted better than he the kind of brilliant life 
 which the young nobility lived in the reign of Louis 
 XVL, when " we saw the brief years of our spring- 
 time wheel by in a circle of such illusion, and such 
 happiness, as I think through all time was reserved 
 for us alone. Liberty, royalty, aristocracy, democra- 
 cy, prejudices, reason, novelty, philosophy, all united 
 to make our days more delightful, and never, surely, 
 was so terrible an awakening preceded by so sweet a 
 sleep or more enchanting dreams." There is a picture 
 in little of the Old Order, as it seemed to the eyes of 
 golden youth in those exciting, intoxicating days, when 
 the new ideas were blending with the old like the junc- 
 tion of two rivers. 
 
 His brother, the Viscount Alexandre, who was three 
 years younger than Louis, was a fribble of a lighter 
 type. In later years he classified himself and his elder 
 brother: " He is Segur the ceremonious ; I am Segur 
 without ceremony." In these days of the Sabran salon 
 he was chiefly distinguished as a man of taste and wit, 
 gliding gracefully through life with the support of a 
 rose-crowned and rose-colored philosophy all his own. 
 He wrote clever little poems ; he wrote clever little 
 plays ; he uttered clever little epigrams. The charac- 
 ter of the man may be best estimated from this, that 
 he found fault with those who caused the Revolution 
 chiefly because they " spoiled his Paris," and " turned 
 the capital of pleasures into a centre of disputes and 
 dulness." He got into grave royal disfavor once in 
 1786 for saying with an affected gravity at a social 
 gathering, when pressed for the latest news, that the 
 king had abdicated. As he persisted in this piece of 
 labored witticism with all possible solemnity, it natural- 
 ly got bruited abroad and came to the king's ears, who 
 J. 24
 
 370 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXIII. 
 
 forbade Segur the court and Paris for a season. Segur 
 had little idea how true a prophet he was, but when his 
 prophecy did come true it scarcely seemed so good a 
 jest. Perhaps he deserves to be best remembered, after 
 all, for having happily and certainly ingeniously defined 
 taste as only the art of putting everything in its place, 
 and for saying that taste is to the mind what grace is to 
 beauty. It must be confessed that these seem strange 
 popinjays to defend a threatened throne ; they were as 
 witty, as brilliant, as lightly profligate as the Cavaliers of 
 Charles II., but they did not make quite so good a stand 
 for the institution which allowed them to live and adorn 
 the Sabran salon. Madame de Sabran's little son was 
 typical of that institution. When he was eight years 
 old he was brought before the king and queen to play 
 a part in Voltaire's " Oreste." A beautiful court lady 
 began to talk to him about the classic authors, where- 
 upon the tiny courtier, with a grave bow, said, " Ma- 
 dame, Anacreon is the onlypoet I can think of here." 
 
 Madame de Chambonas held another and less select 
 salon in defence of reactionary principles. Of this salon 
 Rivarol was the prevailing spirit Rivarol the witty, 
 the audacious, the violently royalist. The name of Riv- 
 Arol has come to the front considerably of late years. 
 Always remembered for the brilliant services he ren- 
 dered to the Royalist cause, he has recently, however, 
 been made more of, more written about, more thought 
 of; instead of being bracketed with Champcenetz or 
 with Cham fort, he stands alone, and is studied individ- 
 ually. There is a kind of sect formed under the shadow 
 of his name, a sect of Rivarolists, whose mission it is to 
 keep his memory green and stimulate themselves with 
 his writings. The name of Rivarol does not appear to 
 have been his name by any other right than the right
 
 1763-1801. RIVAROL. 371 
 
 of choice. He first flickered upon Paris, comely, needy, 
 esurient of success, in 1777, that same year in which De 
 Boufflers first met Madame de Sabran. He introduced 
 himself to D'Alembert under the name of the Abbe de 
 Parcieux, De Parcieux being the name of a distinguish- 
 ed physician and geometrician lately dead, with whom 
 the warm imagination of the chestnut-haired youth con- 
 structed a kinship. D'Alembert introduced him to Vol- 
 taire, who welcomed him well. He soon began to make 
 his way in Paris, and to make enemies. His bitter 
 tongue, his mordant epigrams, made him feared and 
 hated. No longer bearing the name of Longchamps or 
 of De Parcieux, he was now the Rivarol who was to be 
 famous. The son of a worthy man who in his time had 
 tried many trades, from silk-weaving to school-teaching, 
 and from school-teaching to innkeeping, Rivarol boldly 
 declared himself a descendant of a stately Italian fam- 
 ily, and, with a light heart, elected himself first chev- 
 alier and then count. Why, it has been asked, while he 
 was about it, did he not make himself a marquis or a 
 duke? 
 
 The son of the innkeeper of the Three Pigeons was 
 well content with himself and his name and his rank, 
 but they afforded excellent opportunities for his ene- 
 mies to fasten upon. He attacked the " Jardins" poem 
 of the Abbe Delille with a critical acridity which enter- 
 tained Grimm, but which raised a cloud of enemies 
 against the critic. Cerutti, Chamfort, La Harpe, and 
 many another waged epigrammatic war with him. It 
 was not an over-nice age, and the champions of the 
 Abbe Virgile, as Rivarol called Delille, found much 
 sport in the fact of Rivarol's marriage to sour-tempered, 
 pretty, pedantic, devoted, Scotch Miss Flint, from whose 
 ill-temper Rivarol soon shook himself free, to the poor
 
 372 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXIII. 
 
 lady's despair. Rivarol's enemies revelled in his do- 
 mestic troubles ; it was a merciless age ; men fought 
 like Indian braves, neither giving nor taking quarter ; 
 all was fair in those hideous literary feuds. But Riva- 
 rol held his own. He bit his way like an acid into so- 
 ciety ; now, on the eve of the Revolution, he was one 
 of the props of the reactionary party, for whom he was 
 to do battle so long and so courageously. 
 
 Champcenetz was perhaps a wilder spirit than Riva- 
 rol. He was born in 1759, the son of one of the gov- 
 ernors of the Louvre, and he rattled through his earlier 
 youth in the liveliest manner a haunter of taverns, of 
 fencing-schools, of houses of ill-fame, like a better-class 
 Fran9ois Villon. Desperately dissipated, a sparkling 
 talker, a skilful stringer of satirical rhymes, he made 
 sufficient mark upon his time by his super-scandalous 
 reputation to earn for himself the honor of more than 
 one incarceration in the Bastille. Wild as a cavalier of 
 the House of Stuart, he was no less Royalist, and cher- 
 ished no hatred to the Bastille which had imprisoned 
 him, nor the institutions which it represented. He 
 walked his wild way with his light songs and his biting 
 epigrams ; his ideal world was a world of full flagons 
 and pretty women, and the new revolutionary spirit was 
 not in the least to his liking, nor to the liking of such 
 as he. Against the bitter epigrammatist bitter epigram 
 was employed to some purpose. There is a description 
 of Champcenetz extant written by Rulhiere, which is as 
 severe and stinging as Champcenetz could himself have 
 written. " To be hated but not to be feared, to be pun- 
 ished but not to be pitied, is a most imbecile calcula- 
 tion. Champcenetz has failed. In seeking to be hated 
 he is only despised. He takes lettres de cachet for 
 titles of glory i he thinks that to be notorious is to be
 
 1759. CHAMPCENETZ. PELTIER. 373 
 
 renowned. He who does not know how to please is un- 
 wise to slander ; it is of little avail to be spiteful if one 
 does not know how to write, and if one goes to prison 
 one should go at least for good verses." Champcenetz 
 was lieutenant in the Gardes Fran9aises, but was not 
 to hold his lieutenancy much longer. He was brave 
 enough, and his ready sword was time and again at the 
 service of Rivarol, whose stinging satire he was more 
 willing to defend than their author was. 
 
 Another journalist of the race was Jean Gabriel Pel- 
 tier, of Nantes, who was born in 1758. He came early 
 to Paris. According to his own account, he received 
 his education in the College of Louis le Grand, and had 
 the misfortune of having some shirts stolen from him 
 by a fellow-student named Maximilien Robespierre, a 
 statement which it surely required a rabid Royalist to 
 believe. In Paris, Peltier found a place after his own 
 heart and friends after his own heart, among whom 
 he promptly dissipated a very pretty patrimony. His 
 tastes and inclinations jumped with those of Rivarol 
 and Champcenetz ; he liked the nobles, liked to rub 
 shoulders with them, to wear their modes and ape their 
 manners ; he became in time more royalist than the 
 Royalists themselves. He was a brilliant, audacious, 
 unscrupulous adventurer of letters, a good swashbuck- 
 ling henchman ; not perhaps quite the best man to help 
 to save a losing cause ; still a faithful free-companion 
 enough. 
 
 A much better man than Peltier was not at this time 
 shining upon the salon where Rivarol and Champcenetz 
 and their like glittered. The man who was to be their 
 ally in their desperate fight for the Old Order against 
 the New Order was now wandering in America and 
 dreaming of settling down there for the remainder of
 
 374 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. Cn. XXIII. 
 
 his days. It would have been much better for unhappy 
 Suleau if he had done so instead of coming home to 
 fight a lost fight and perish by a woman's hand for an 
 unworthy epigram. Louis Fran9ois Suleau was young, 
 like the others. He was born in 1757 ; he too was edu- 
 cated at the College of Louis le Grand, where he had a 
 great friend in a fellow-student named Camille Desmou- 
 lins ; he had served in the army and got tired of it ; he 
 had served the law and known a lawyer named Danton, 
 and got tired of the law in its turn, and had set off in 
 1787 for America. He will return in the late July of 
 this year 1789 to a changed world and to his fate. 
 
 A somewhat dai'ker and more dangerous spirit is the 
 Count Alexandre de Tilly, the beau Tilly, whose me- 
 moirs, as sparkling and as venomous as a poisoned wine, 
 have left behind so curious a representation of the age 
 in which he lived. Tilly was an Osric doubled with 
 lago ; a dandy and a rake, he was also something of the 
 assassin; his beauty, his wit, and his malignant malice 
 gave him a little of the character of a fallen angel. 
 All his comprehensive love for women, all the passion- 
 ate adoration that women paid to him, all the loves he 
 inspired and the hates he felt, all the witty things he 
 said and some of them are incomparably witty all 
 the unconquerable envy, hatred, malice, and all un char- 
 itableness of his nature, all the impertinence and the 
 treachery and the cruelty were to end very dismally 
 and very shamefully in desperate self-slaughter in the 
 years to come. For the moment he was one of the 
 brightest of the courtly satellites, one of the strongest 
 too ; if there had been more men like Tilly -and another 
 king, the royalty might have had a different fate. For 
 a time he was a friend of Rivarol's, and with him and 
 his allies was to fight a stout fight for the monarchy
 
 1764-1816. MADAME NECKER. 375 
 
 with rapier-like pen. But the "Acts of the Apostles " 
 are not yet. 
 
 High constitutionalism, high finance, high philosophy, 
 high diplomacy, found their home in the salon of Ma- 
 dame Necker. Since the old days when Madame Neck- 
 er's salon first became a centre to be shone upon by 
 Grimm's rouged ambitious face, to be longed for by Ga- 
 liani in his distant desert of fifty thousand Neapolitans, 
 to echo to the sighs of D'Alembert for Mademoiselle de 
 1'Espinasse, and to catch the waning rays of Buffon's 
 glory, Madame Necker had found a new ally in making 
 her salon attractive. That new ally was her brilliant ugly 
 daughter, who had married a Swedish ambassador when 
 she might have married Pitt, and who was watching the 
 world with her keen eyes, and meditating literary im- 
 mortality in her quick brain. To the Necker salon 
 came all the distinguished people who put their faith in 
 Necker, and whose devotion to the court meant devotion 
 to the king and hostility to the queen, or, at least, to 
 the Polignac section, which was supposed to sway the 
 queen. It was a ministerialist salon, a salon that looked 
 with suspicion alike upon the rising democratic spirit 
 and upon the extreme feudalism of the Old Order as it 
 was represented by the queen's party. The most brill- 
 iant and conspicuous of the new men who were now 
 thronging to Paris did not swell the crowd at Madame 
 Necker's receptions. The men whom Burke would have 
 called men of light and leading went elsewhere ; a 
 Sieves, whom we shall meet with presently, a Clermont- 
 Tonnerre, whom we shall also meet with, were the most 
 remarkable lions of the salon where Marmontel had 
 glittered and Galiani played Harlequin Machiavelli,and 
 St. Lambert slightly chilled the company with his icy 
 exquisite politeness.
 
 37Q THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. Cn. XXIII. 
 
 A very different salon from any of these, and yet a 
 very important salon in its way, was that of a very 
 beautiful lady of the lightest of light reputations who 
 came from Liege and set up her staff in Paris. The- 
 roigne de Mericourt was the daughter of a rich farmer; 
 she had been betrayed and abandoned, such was her 
 story, by a noble; she gravitated to London and to Paris, 
 where she was ambitious of playing the part, not of a 
 vulgar courtesan, but of a revolutionary Aspasia, a het- 
 aira of the type that was to find its Pericles among the 
 enthusiasts of the New Order. She was very beautiful, 
 she was very clever; her house came to be the centre 
 for all the men of the most advanced ideas. Here came 
 men who were yet to be famous Petion, Romme, Sieves, 
 Target, Maximilien Robespierre, Populus, as Popule was 
 called, Populus who was regarded by many as the real 
 Pericles of Theroigne's Aspasia. At this moment the 
 star of her vexed and unhappy destiny was shining very 
 brightly. The betrayed farmer's daughter Anne Jo- 
 sephe Terwagne was the idol of advanced Paris, a rev- 
 olutionary goddess before the days of revolutionary 
 goddesses. 
 
 Among the smaller salons were that of Madame Ilel- 
 vetius she with whom Turgot had played at battledore 
 and shuttlecock frequented by the leading philosophers 
 and men of science; the revolutionary salons of Madame 
 Dauberval, the dancer's wife, and of Madame d'Angi- 
 viller, where a ridiculous, bedizened old woman played 
 at youth; the salon of the Countess de Tesse, who is to 
 be enthusiastic about Bailly, and many another of less 
 note and scant importance, where the new ideas were 
 assiduously discussed, fiercely championed, or bitterly 
 arraigned. Gouverneur Morris describes Madame de 
 Tesse as a Republican of the first feather, " a very sen-
 
 1746-1830. MADAME DE GEXLIS. 377 
 
 sible woman," who has " formed her ideas of govern- 
 ment in a manner not suited, I think, either to the sit- 
 uation, the circumstances, or the disposition of France, 
 and there are many such." 
 
 Very unlike the salon of the wild Theroigne was that 
 in which Madame de Genlis received the more respecta- 
 ble of the queer crowd which composed the Duke d'Or- 
 leans' party. As the lady of honor to the Duchesse de 
 Chartres, Equality Orleans' daughter-in-law, she acted 
 in some measure as hostess in the Palais Royal. Her 
 daughter Pamela was there to add the charm of her 
 
 O 
 
 rare beauty, that beauty which a few years later was to 
 captivate a young Irish gentleman, the "gallant and 
 seditious Geraldine" Lord Edward Fitzgerald, who loved 
 her, so the legend goes, less for herself than for the fact 
 that her beauty reminded him of one whom he had 
 adored too wildly, the beautiful wife of Richard Brins- 
 ley Sheridan. But in these days the beautiful Pamela 
 was a slender stripling of a girl, and the young Irish 
 gentleman was far away. To Madame de Genlis's salon 
 came Choderlos de Laclos. Most able among profligate 
 penmen, he had come into the world at Amiens in 1741, 
 chiefly, as it would seem, to be of service to a Duke 
 d'Orleans who needed such service badly, and to write 
 an obscene book. The book is still dimly remembered 
 by the lovers of that class of literature ; Laclos himself 
 is dimly remembered, the shadow of a name. Here, too, 
 came Saint-Huruge, bull-necked and boisterous, loving 
 his cups and the sound of his loud voice, an immense 
 believer in himself, a brazen creature, hollow and noisy 
 as brass is hollow and noisy. In these later years Ma- 
 dame de Genlis had grown sourly prim. She was virtu- 
 ous now, and heartily desired that there should be no 
 more cakes and ale. Probably of all women in the
 
 378 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXIII. 
 
 world she liked Madame Buffon least. So she sits now 
 in that "blue-room with its golden beading and its mag- 
 nificence of mirror," sour, austere, compelling even Saint- 
 Huruge to lower his voice, and even Laclos to moderate 
 his sallies. Hers was decidedly the dismalest of all the 
 salons, but very important. 
 
 There was another blue-room of a brighter kind, 
 where Madame de Beauharnais held her little court. 
 Madame de Beauharnais was no longer young ; she had 
 never been very witty, but she possessed the happy art 
 of wearing years gracefully, and of seeming witty, which 
 is almost as good as being witty. And then she gave 
 such excellent dinners. It might almost have been said 
 of her by the uncharitable that she intended to found a 
 salon and only succeeded in starting a restaurant, for 
 certainly her dinners were the things most immediately 
 associated with her name. There was a queer atmos- 
 phere of dead days forgotten about that little room in 
 blue and silver. The ghosts of a former generation of 
 wits and philosophers and statesmen seemed to flit like 
 bats through its dim air. Rousseau was here in his time, 
 and many another famous man now quietly inurned : the 
 Dorats, the Crebillons, the Colardeaus ghosts, ghosts, 
 ghosts. The memory of Dorat was disagreeably per- 
 petuated by Dorat-Cubieres most unadmirable of mean 
 men, a weary rhymer of foolishness, " the delirious mite 
 who wishes to play the ant," as Rivarol kindly said of 
 him. He played the host in this salon and the fool, and 
 was yet to play the knave when his time came. Here 
 came distinguished strangers; an exiled Prince de Gon- 
 zague Castiglione, whom we shall scarcely meet again, 
 and an atheistic Prussian baron whom we shall certain- 
 ly meet again, and come to know more closely. For the 
 present he was known as Jean Baptiste Clootz. Here,
 
 1734-1806. RESTIF DE LA BRETOXNE. 379 
 
 too, came Vicq-d'Azir and Rabaut Saint-Etienne, the 
 excellent high-minded Protestant enthusiast, seeing no 
 shadow of the axe upon his path. Here came Mercier, 
 noting with his keen eyes the Paris that he loved, and 
 little dreaming what a service he had rendered to man- 
 kind by his book. Here, too, came one of the most re- 
 markable figures of a fading past, Restif de la Bretonne. 
 Restif de la Bretonne was one of the strangest 
 figures that literary France of the eighteenth century 
 produced. That curious sloping forehead and long 
 nose, those thick lips, that retreating chin, that large 
 sleepy eye with its vague air of speculation, suggest 
 more the tenth transmitter of a foolish face than the 
 brilliant and amazingly voluminous novelist whose 
 works are so vivid a picture of the France of the Old 
 Order. Compared to a writer whose works occupy 
 some two hundred volumes, the poor half-century of 
 volumes of Balzac's fiction sinks into insignificance. 
 But while Balzac lives Restif de la Bretonne is forgot- 
 ten ; a few bibliophiles rave about him because his books 
 are hard to obtain ; it is said that no one possesses a 
 complete set. A kind of Restifomania, as it has been 
 called, has seized upon a few individuals who offer up 
 to the memory of their eccentric genius an almost Buddh- 
 istic devotion. He has been hailed as the French De- 
 foe, but his popularity has not endured like Defoe's. 
 He has been styled the Rousseau of the Halles, and the 
 Rousseau des ruisseaus ; but while the influence of 
 Rousseau is as enormous almost as ever, the influence 
 of Restif is exercised over a little handful of queer book- 
 worms. Nicholas Edme Restif was born in Burgundy 
 in the October of 1734, the eldest son of the second 
 marriage of a farmer who had been a clerk. He was 
 brought up to the life of a peasant, and the knowledge
 
 390 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. Cn. XXIII. 
 
 of the Bible. Before he was fifteen he was educated 
 for a while in Paris among the Jansenists of Bicetre. 
 In 1751 he was apprenticed to a printer in Auxerre. 
 In 1755 he came to Paris, which was to be his home 
 for the rest of his life. In 1767 he first essayed litera- 
 ture, and for the rest of his life he literally showered 
 books upon a world that was equally willing to welcome 
 them when they came, and afterwards most heartily to 
 forget them. He had always enjoyed astonishing health, 
 which was no doubt the great secret of his alliance of 
 long life with such indomitable work. He ate little, 
 drank less ; his weakness was a devotion for women, 
 which made his life one long procession of amours, of 
 passions, of intrigues of all kinds. An unhappy mar- 
 riage darkened his life for a season, but he shook himself 
 free from the tie and walked his amorous way after his 
 own heart. His greatest enthusiasm was for the dainty 
 shoes, the dainty stockings, the dainty feet and shapely 
 legs of women; about these he raved assiduously through 
 all the interminable length of his many books. But if 
 he was a gallant he was not a dandy. We can almost 
 see him in his habit as he lived, in the costume which 
 he persisted in wearing for twenty years the old blue 
 coat, the heavy black mantle, the huge felt hat. He 
 was always indifferent to linen and the cares of the 
 person. He had a way when he was working hard at 
 a book of not shaving till it was finished, which did not 
 add to his attractions, but which sufficiently displayed 
 his absolute and serene indifference to the mere minute- 
 nesses of existence. In these days of revolution in the 
 air his spirit is all Republican ; he is one of the stran- 
 gest figures to whom it was given to live through the 
 more thrilling part of the great drama that was now 
 upon the eve of beginning.
 
 1757-1832. THE LAMETHS. 381 
 
 To the salon of Madame de Broglie, wife of the young 
 Prince de Broglie, came certain brilliant, thoughtful 
 young men who had a distinguished part to play. One 
 of them was named Barnave ; we shall meet with him 
 again. Here came the two noble sons of an ancient 
 Picardy house, Charles Malo de Lameth, born in 1757, 
 and his brother Alexandre Malo de Lameth, who was 
 three years younger. They had both shared with La- 
 fayette and Lauzun and Boniface Barrel Mirabeau in 
 the honors of the American campaign; they had both 
 been chosen by an affectionate province to share in the 
 honors of the States- General ; they represented the des- 
 perate, honorable attempt to unite loyalty to the mon- 
 archy with advanced constitutional ideas. Here too 
 came Armand de Vignerot, Duke d'Aguillon, son of the 
 D'Aguillon of the Du Barry days, and himself a gallant 
 soldier. Here came the Vicomte de Noailles and the 
 young Duke Mathieu de Montmorency, who entered the 
 National Assembly as a youth of twenty-two he was 
 born in 1767 who was only a child when he followed 
 Lafayette to America, and who was one of the most 
 advanced of the advanced nobility. In consequence he 
 will soon share with the Lameths and their like the 
 merciless hatred of the Royalists quand mdme, such as 
 Tilly and the Rivarol gang. 
 
 The salon of Julie Talma, the great actor's wife, was no 
 less political than dramatic. Joseph Marie Chenier was 
 as interested in the events of the day as in his plays. 
 Ducis's honest if queer admiration for Shakespeare, 
 whom he never read in the original, was allied with a no 
 less honest interest in the events of the hour. Ducis was a 
 Republican of a high ideal kind like Chenier, like another 
 frequenter of the Talma home whom we shall have much 
 to do with hereafter, and whose name was Vergniaud.
 
 382 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXIII. 
 
 One of the queerest of all the queer centres of Pari- 
 sian life was dominated by an English nobleman. The 
 Duke of Bedford, fifth duke of the name, was an ardent 
 sympathizer with the earlier revolutionists, held open 
 house for them and for the light ladies who sympathized 
 with them, Grace Dalrymple Elliott, the Duke of Or- 
 leans' mistress, who wisely left memoirs, and Madame 
 de Saint Amaranthe, and the rest. He was a man of 
 new ideas; he disliked the Duke of Dorset, who reigned 
 at the Embassy; these two motives were enough to tar 
 him on to toy with revolution. But the strongest mo- 
 tive was the first, which led him a few years later to 
 become the leader of the crops or shavers, as the Radi- 
 cal peers and gentlemen were called who showed their 
 affection for advanced ideas by wearing their hair short, 
 and irritated the Tories by thus avoiding the tax on 
 hair-powder. The Marquis de Villette of infamous rep- 
 utation was always a conspicuous figure at the Bedford 
 entertainments. 
 
 A much more sober salon was that of Madame Panck- 
 oucke, the wife of Panckoucke the publisher, the Panck- 
 oucke who shall yet apply for the privilege of report- 
 ing the debates of the National Assembly. Panckoucke 
 himself was an enterprising, ambitious man, sprung from 
 an old printing stock at Lille. He was born in 1736 ; 
 when he was eighteen years old he came to Paris to 
 make his name, and he succeeded. He had a lucky in- 
 stinct; he married a clever woman more ambitious than 
 himself, whose sister was married to the Academician 
 Suard ; he bought the Mercure, the oldest paper in 
 France, and afterwards bought the Gazette de France. 
 Such a man naturally gathered a number of authors 
 about him, and when the Revolution was dawning, and 
 Madame Panckoucke saw her way to playing a part in
 
 1736-98. MALLET-DU-PAN. 383 
 
 politics, she was not likely to want for visitors of dis- 
 tinction. Here came La Harpe, acrid, pedantic, energetic 
 classicist, writer of poor tragedies, compiler of a por- 
 tentous " Course of Literature," which was not without 
 merit, a man who in his fifty years of life he was born 
 in 1739 had earned perhaps more hatred than usually 
 falls to the lot of critics. Here, too, came the older and 
 less ill-tempered critic Marmontel, sixty-six years of 
 age, with a memory going back over the brilliant days 
 of the Pompadour, and the great Titanomachia of the 
 " Encyclopaedia," "quorum pars parva fuit." Both he 
 and La Harpe, belonging as they did to the old school, 
 were yet to outlast the fever heat of the Revolution 
 after seeing the world in which they lived turned com- 
 pletely topsy-turvy, after a fashion intolerably per- 
 plexing to compilers of "Elements de Litterature," and 
 " Cours de Litterature.' 5 Here came Condorcet, whom 
 we shall make closer acquaintance with at the Paris 
 elections. Here came Barere, dreaming not of terror as 
 order of the day, or guillotine Anacreontics, and heed- 
 less of a certain Zachary Macaulay, of whom Brissot 
 could have told him somewhat, and who was yet in 
 eleven years to bear a son who should lend Barere's 
 name a cruel immortality. But Madame Panckoucke's 
 most important guest was the grave, high-minded, hon- 
 orable Genevese Mallet-du-Pan. An austere man of 
 forty, born in 1749, he had seen many things with those 
 grave, judicious, earnest eyes, but nothing yet to pre- 
 pare him for what he was still to see. His childhood 
 was passed in the beautiful little village of Celigny, on 
 the right bank of the Lake of Geneva, where his father 
 was pastor. He studied and earned high honors at the 
 College of Geneva which Calvin founded ; for a while 
 he studied the law. He was fifteen when he entered the
 
 384 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXIII. 
 
 Geneva Academy; when he left the Academy at twenty 
 years of age he plunged at once with a strangely ma- 
 tured mind in the political and journalistic life of the 
 little Republic. He early earned the warm friendship 
 of Voltaire, and no one saw more of the aged philoso- 
 pher in his shelter at Ferney than the young Mallet-du- 
 Pan. The persecutions inflicted upon Linguet aroused 
 the indignation of Mallet-du-Pan ; when Linguet ap- 
 peared at Ferney, as most people in trouble did, he 
 greatly attracted the young man, though he greatly ir- 
 ritated Voltaire, and in 1777, under Linguet's influence, 
 Mallet-du-Pan went first to London and then to Brus- 
 sels, where Linguet decided to publish his Anmihs 
 politiques, civiles, et litteraires du Dix-huitieme Siecle. 
 During Linguet's imprisonment in the Bastille Mallet- 
 du-Pan kept up a sequel to the Annales. When Lin- 
 guet came out of the Bastille he quarrelled with Mallet- 
 du-Pan, and denounced him as an imitator. Mallet 
 indignantly and justly repudiated the charge, and car- 
 ried on his own paper under the title of Mernoires 
 historiques, politiques, et litteraires, sur TEtat present 
 d V Europe, with the motto, " Nee temere, nee timide." 
 In 1782, when Geneva was torn by revolution, and 
 three armies thundered at her gates, Mallet played his 
 part in a mission to General la Marmora, and in coun- 
 selling prudence to his fellow-citizens. In 1784 Mallet- 
 du-Pan came to Paris. Panckoucke had been longing 
 for him since 1778; now at last he induced him to edit 
 the political part of the Mercure, and in Paris for the 
 five years till 1789 he lived in great quiet and seclu- 
 sion with his family he had married young devot- 
 ing himself heart and soul to his journalistic life. Of 
 a strictly simple nature, brought up in the austerity of 
 Swiss life, he was little attracted by the glitter of Paris
 
 1789. ELYSEE LOUSTALOT. 385 
 
 life. Paris began, he said, by astonishing, it afterwards 
 amused, then it fatigued. No higher-minded man ever 
 gave his services to journalism ; no purer spirit devoted 
 itself to the Royalist cause; if that cause could have 
 counted on more supporters like him, it would have 
 been happier. 
 
 A very different type of journalist had just come to 
 Paris in the early part of this year 1789. This was 
 Elysee Loustalot, who was born in 1761 at Saint-Jean 
 d'Angely. His family occupied an honorable place at 
 the Bar; it was in accordance with the fitness of things 
 that the young Loustalot should go to the Bar too. 
 Accordingly he studied law at the College of Saintes, 
 studied law at Bordeaux, and became a lawyer there. 
 He got into trouble on account of a vehement attack 
 he made upon the administration of his native town ; 
 he was suspended for six months from the practice of 
 his profession ; irritated, he shook off the dust of pro- 
 vincial life, and came to Paris in the beginning of 1789 
 to follow the Paris Bar. While pursuing his profes- 
 sion he was keenly attracted by the new political life 
 and activity that was teeming around him, and he was 
 ready enough when the time came and the time was 
 now near at hand to plunge into journalism, and to 
 fight vigorously for the principles of the Revolution. 
 His extraordinary energy, his unwearying capacity for 
 work, his clear and caustic style, were to make him an 
 invaluable supporter of the new men and the new ideas 
 that were coming into play. 
 
 The time was not far off when the active life of liter- 
 ary and political Paris would be in her clubs, but the 
 time was not yet. The Breton Club, germ of the Jaco- 
 bins, was not yet formed ; the Cordeliers was yet to be 
 famous. Still Paris, under the influence of its Anglo- 
 I. 25
 
 386 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXIIL 
 
 mania, had its clubs the " Societe des Amis des Noiis," 
 which Brissot had founded, Brissot who was always be- 
 ing fired by hissing-hot pseudo-enthusiasms; the Lycee, 
 which was much associated with Condorcet; the Club 
 de Valois,.of which that energetic American gentleman, 
 Gouverneur Morris, was delighted to become a member. 
 There were other smaller clubs, too, but the fierce club- 
 fever had not yet set in. But none of these were as yet 
 serious political centres. The real political centre of 
 Paris was the Palais Royal.
 
 1789. OLD RULES OBSOLETE. 387 
 
 CHAPTER XXIV. 
 
 THE ELECTIONS. 
 
 To this excited and exciting Paris in the spring of 
 1789 men were tending from all parts of France. From 
 north and south, from east and west, the high-roads saw 
 a steady stream of men rolling like the single drops of 
 water to be amalgamated into the shining sea of Ver- 
 sailles; for now the elections, the great elections to the 
 States- General, had taken place. After an infinity of 
 speculation and discussion, of publication of pamphlets, 
 of study of precedents, of consideration of time-honored 
 formulas and propositions of radically new notions, the 
 States-General had somehow or other got elected. It 
 had soon become clear that the old rules were obsolete, 
 exploded, useless. On January 24, 1789, the regulation 
 was issued which decided the way in which the elec- 
 tions should be managed in that part of France known 
 as pays Selection. The old administrative divisions 
 known as royal bailiwicks in the northern part of France, 
 and as royal seneschalries in the south, were used as 
 electoral units, and a little later the part of France 
 known as pays d'etat, and which comprised such semi- 
 independent provinces as Burgundy, Brittany, and Lan- 
 guedoc, were also divided into electoral units. In each 
 of these electoral units all the nobles, all the clergy, and 
 all the electors of the Third Estate'who had been pre- 
 viously elected in primary assemblies in town or village 
 were to meet together to choose their representatives 
 for the States-General.
 
 388 TOE FRENCH REVOLUTION. On. XXIV. 
 
 Now all this lay behind those wandering deputies ; a 
 portion and parcel of the dreadful past. The primary 
 assemblies in the towns and villages had got through 
 their difficult and complex method of choosing the elec- 
 tors, who were in their turn to elect their deputies at 
 the large assemblies. The large assemblies in their turn 
 had met and chosen their deputies, and those deputies 
 were now speeding as swiftly as might be along all the 
 roads of France to Versailles. They had not come to 
 pass, however, without an immense deal of friction, and 
 sometimes more than friction. All manner of jealousies 
 and rivalries agitated the bailiwicks ; all kinds of mis- 
 takes were made, leading to the issue of supplementary 
 regulations ; all kinds of quarrels, disputes, bickerings 
 rent the civic and the country air. The old nobility did 
 not always get on very well with the new nobility, 
 proud of their fire-new brand of honor. The upper 
 and the lower clergy were not in cordial union, natu- 
 rally enough. Again and again the orders fought among 
 themselves and fell asunder. In some cases the nobility 
 took no part in the elections, in others they protested 
 against their results. In Brittany they refused to elect 
 any deputies at all. The Third Estate all over the coun- 
 try were fortunate in having the good example and the 
 good advice of Dauphine. The wise men of Grenoble, 
 with Mounier at their head, guided, advised, directed, 
 encouraged the electorate of the Third Estate with mar- 
 vellous prudence and tact. It is impossible to over- 
 estimate the services Mounier and his friends rendered 
 to their cause at this difficult and perplexing crisis. 
 
 The legend of the imprisoned Titan who only waits 
 the magic watchword to shake aside the chains that 
 bind him, the mountains that are piled upon his breast, 
 found for the first time its parallel in history. The
 
 1789. NEW VITAL FORCES. 389 
 
 French people played the part of the prisoned Titan; 
 the magic words States-General were the new open ses- 
 ame that set the Titan free. It is unhappily the vice of 
 Titans to play sad pranks with their newly found lib- 
 erty, pranks that a respectable Swiss Protestant banker 
 could not dream of, much less dread. Enfranchise the 
 people as much as you please, Necker can always con- 
 trol, Necker can always guide such were the confident 
 convictions of Necker the Man, such were the confident 
 assurances of Necker the Minister. So the work went 
 on, and no one felt afraid. All over France there was 
 a great throbbing of new life, the quickening experi- 
 ence of new vital forces. The new privileges were im- 
 mense. Everybody might vote, everybody who had a 
 plaint to make might freely make it heard. Town and 
 country, city and hamlet, all alike were equal as regards 
 the new assembly. Never was so desperate an experi- 
 ment attempted before. The bulk of a nation that had 
 lain for long generations insulted and ignored, the pa- 
 tient victim of wellnigh intolerable abuses, was sud- 
 denly intrusted with the rights and privileges of free 
 men. The question was what these free men would 
 do with these rights and privileges, and that was just 
 the question which nobody could presume to answer, 
 though everybody made bold to hope after his own 
 fashion. 
 
 It is said that five millions of men took part in the 
 elections. Five millions of men, of whom the great part 
 could not write, were summoned to play their parts as 
 citizens and choose their representatives. The nobles 
 fondly imagined that the flock would follow its old shep- 
 herds of the Church, and of the State, and prove a suf- 
 ficiently submissive instrument in the elections of dele- 
 gates agreeable to the Old Order. The Old Order was
 
 390 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXIV. 
 
 decisively disappointed. The untrained masses showed 
 an astonishing alacrity to avail themselves of the unex- 
 pected opportunity offered to them. They did not know 
 their strength, but they were dimly, vaguely conscious 
 of it, and they bowed to their old lords no longer. In 
 every part of France men flocked to the elections. In 
 every part of France men put pens to paper, for the draw- 
 ing up of " cahiers," in which the national wrongs were 
 for the first time recorded, and recorded with striking 
 uniformity. France was waking up with a vengeance ; 
 even the privileged orders were not free from the new 
 democratic spirit. There were children of the Church, 
 two hundred and more of the smaller clergy, who were 
 in some degree inspired with the new ideas, who were 
 hostile to their spiritual heads very much as the peasant- 
 ry were hostile to their temporal heads, and the elections 
 brought some of this democratic leaven into the lump 
 of the Second Estate. 
 
 But of all the elections that sent deputies to the States- 
 General, by far the most important were the Paris elec- 
 tions. The sixteen quarters of the city were divided 
 into sixty electoral districts. To Paris had been allotted 
 no less than forty deputies ten from the nobility, ten 
 from the clergy, and twenty deputies of the Third Es- 
 tate, in accordance with the principle that had been 
 decided upon that the Third Estate was to be represent- 
 ed by as many representatives as the two other orders 
 put together. The Paris elections began much later 
 than any of the others, and most of the deputies from 
 the other parts of France had actually arrived in Paris 
 or Versailles, and were witnesses of the great election 
 which was in some sense the key-stone of the whole busi- 
 ness. The nobility on the whole were strongly liberal. 
 Their ten deputies included the Count de Clermont-Ton-
 
 1758-98. ADRIEN DUPORT. 391 
 
 nerre, the Duke de La Rochefoucauld, Count de Lally- 
 Tollendal, Adrien Duport, and the Marquis of Montes- 
 quieu. Clerraont-Tonnerre was a gallant cavalry colonel, 
 forty-two years old, and exceedingly popular with the 
 Constitutionalists on account of his liberal ideas. His 
 face was singularly striking, even handsome in an impos- 
 ing, severe kind of way. The sharp, straight slope of the 
 forehead continued along the nose, the long upper lip 
 and slightly protruding lower lip, the advanced and 
 rounded chin, the high arched eyebrows and deeply set 
 eyes with a certain menacing sternness in their regard, 
 seem the appropriate facial symbols of the calm and 
 lofty eloquence he had so readily at command. 
 
 Lally-Tollendal was a gallant captain of Cuirassiers, 
 the devoted son of an unhappy father, whose unjust 
 sentence he had succeeded in reversing in spite of the 
 opposition of another Paris deputy, D'Epremesnil, neph- 
 ew of Dupleix and inheritor of his hate. Adrien Du- 
 port was the Duke d'Orleans' right-hand man, aspiring 
 to success through the success of his chief, a councillor 
 in the Paris Parliament, with a vast ambition and a gen- 
 ius for intrigue. He was now about thirty years of 
 age. Duport's influence was very great in the country. 
 He had correspondents in every part of the kingdom, 
 who kept him in close touch with the progress of opin- 
 ion, and who were the means of extending his influence. 
 His house in Paris was a kind of Cave of Adullam, to 
 which all who were discontented, and all who were in 
 distress and all who were in debt were quite welcome 
 to repair so long as they permitted Adrien Duport to 
 make himself a captain over them. Here came all the 
 young ambitious lawyers of advanced opinions ; here 
 came the liberal nobility ; here came the subtle friend 
 of Madame de Flahaut, Talleyrand, Perigord, bishop of
 
 392 THE FRENCH REVOLTJTION. CH. XXIV. 
 
 Autun ; here sometimes came a greater man than any 
 or all of these whose name was Mirabeau. Duport 
 played his game well. He was ambitious ; he saw in 
 himself an excellent prime - minister to some .puppet 
 king, some roi faineant such as the Duke of Orleans 
 might easily be made under his skilful manipulation. 
 That rounded face, with its queerly compressed lips, its 
 large sleepy-looking eyes with lowered lids, its spacious 
 forehead and prominently marked eyebrows, has on it an 
 air of quizzically smiling at the follies of mankind, and 
 dutifully suppressing the smile. Certainly a man who 
 aspired to greatness by the aid of Equality Orleans had 
 every reason to smile at mankind. 
 
 It was considered somewhat surprising that two mem- 
 bers of the primary assembly of the nobility who helped 
 to draw up its cahier were not chosen either as depu- 
 ties or as the supplemental deputies, who were in all 
 cases chosen to be in readiness in case any accident 
 should prevent any of the elected deputies from fulfill- 
 ing their functions. The two men thus omitted were 
 Choderlos de Laclos and Condorcet. No one except 
 the members of the Orleans faction could regret the ab- 
 sence of Laclos from the assembly. All parties might 
 well have considered the presence of Condorcet an ad- 
 vantage. Still a comparatively young man he was 
 only in his forty-sixth year he was already one of the 
 most distinguished scientific men in France, and his 
 name was the link between the thinkers of the Encyclo- 
 paedic age and the radical thinkers of the New Order. 
 The admirer of Voltaire, the intimate friend of D'Alem- 
 bert, the disciple, the friend, and the biographer of Tur- 
 got, the victor over Bailly at the Academy of 1782, 
 Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis of 
 Condorcet, would certainly have added a lustre to the
 
 1748-94. CONDOtlCET. 393 
 
 brilliant assembly of men into whose hands the task of 
 regenerating France was given. 
 
 Condorcet was a liberal of the truest type, the advo- 
 cate of all the oppressed. There was no more zealous 
 advocate of the cause of the blacks. The young Lally- 
 Tollendal, striving to redeem a father's name, found no 
 firmer friend and helper than he. Injustice everywhere 
 found in Condorcet a stanch opponent. That wide in- 
 quiring eye, that high and curiously domed forehead, 
 the large nose of Roman curve, the prominent lips and 
 firm, forward chin, went to compose a face in which 
 an air of extreme gentleness and good-nature masked 
 an ardent, impulsive nature. His tall, slightly stooped 
 form, his huge head, his massive shoulders, made him 
 always a conspicuous figure, and contrasted somewhat 
 oddly with his usual shyness, even timidity of man- 
 ner a shyness and timidity that only quitted him with- 
 in the narrow circle of a few intimate and dear friends. 
 D'Alembert called him a volcano covered with snow. 
 Mademoiselle de Lespinasse said that most people look- 
 ing at him would think him rather a worthy man than 
 a wise man. He had none of the belligerent fierceness 
 which characterized so many of the philosophers, and no 
 man was ever more ready to admit himself in the wrong 
 when he believed himself to be in the wrong. No sweet- 
 er spirit adorned the last century. One critic described 
 him as a mad sheep. Madame Roland illustrated the 
 relation of Condorcet's mind to his body by saying that 
 it was a subtle essence soaked in cotton. His early ed- 
 ucation was curious enough. His father was a cavalry 
 officer who died when his son was three years old. 
 Most of the child's relatives would have liked to see him 
 become in his turn a stout man-at-arms, as his father had 
 been before him, and were sufficiently disappointed at
 
 394 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXIV. 
 
 his becoming a mere economist and philosopher. But 
 his mother's treatment was hardly of a kind to train him 
 either as a good soldier or philosopher. She dedicated 
 him to the Holy Virgin, and for eight years made him 
 wear the dress of a little girl, as a sort of shield against 
 the evils of the world. Achilles in Scyros seems hardly 
 stranger to us than the little Condorcet going about in 
 girl's clothes. Who shall say how profound an influ- 
 ence this extraordinary experience may have had upon 
 the child to whom a little later the Jesuits were to im- 
 part so profound a mathematical knowledge ! The boy 
 in girl's clothes, the pupil of the Jesuits, grew up an 
 impassioned mathematician, but also an ardent politi- 
 cian, eager in a hot-headed, uncompromising way for the 
 bettering of the world. His resolves were more impet- 
 uous than strong. He was little fitted for that golden 
 mean in life upon which Aristotle insists. The more 
 we read his writings, the more we study his life, the 
 more we understand, even while we refuse to agree with, 
 that " mad sheep " criticism. For what he believed to 
 be right he contended with a passion which was the 
 sign rather of sti'ong emotions than of the strong capac- 
 ity to lead. With all the most honorable ambitions of 
 a statesman he lacked the essential capacity of a success- 
 ful statesmanship, the capacity for seeing how much of 
 a desirable work can be accomplished at a certain time, 
 and of appreciating with a fine infallibility the exact 
 time in which the desired work can best be done. He 
 played his part in forming the Revolution ; he was one 
 of the many gallantly ambitious Frankensteins who 
 found their creation too much for them. 
 
 The Pai'isian clergy displayed none of the liberalism 
 of the nobility. Their ten deputies were all strongly 
 conservative; their leader, Antoine Leclerc de Juigne,
 
 1789. THE PARIS ELECTIONS. 3Q5 
 
 Archbishop of Paris, especially. The archbishop was an 
 excellent good man, charitable, well esteemed ; utterly 
 out of sympathy, however, with the advanced political 
 opinions of the hour. It will take the stones of an in- 
 furiated populace to temper his hot conservatism by- 
 and-by, and to make his pride bend to the demands of 
 public opinion. The real interest of the elections, how- 
 ever, centred in the Third Estate. 
 
 There was trouble in Paris. The weak king, oscillat- 
 ing between Necker and the court, between the rising 
 democracy and an imperious consort, prompted by an 
 ambitious Polignac, was making some desperate efforts 
 to shackle his liberated Titan. By delay of elections, 
 by postponement of the opening of the States-General, 
 by such clumsy devices the poor king strove to shuffle 
 aside the inevitable, and to pack cards with fortune. 
 In Paris especially, Paris, where the popular feeling was 
 most alert and most intelligent, the court resorted to its 
 rashest measures. The Paris elections were not fixed 
 until the very eve of the opening of the States-General. 
 By this juggle the court hoped to keep the Paris dep- 
 uties out of the way until the essential preliminaries 
 might be arranged which were to assure to the privi- 
 leged orders the majority of the Third Estate. More- 
 over, the conditions of election were by a special decree 
 made more severe in Paris than in any other part of the 
 kingdom. Only those who paid six livres of impost, 
 instead of those who paid hardly any impost at all, 
 were allowed to vote. To overawe the electors thus 
 minimized the streets were filled with troops, the place 
 of election surrounded by soldiers ; all that the display 
 of force could do was done to bring the electors of 
 Paris to appreciate their position and to submit. The 
 electors did appreciate their position rightly, and they
 
 396 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. On. XXIV. 
 
 did not submit. They started off by declining to ac- 
 cept the presidents proposed for them in the royal name. 
 Sixty presidents had been thus proposed for the sixty 
 districts of Paris, and out of these sixty only three were 
 accepted, and then only on the express understanding 
 that they must consider themselves as duly elected by 
 the will of the people, and not as the nominees of the 
 court. On April 21st the vai'ious districts chose their 
 representatives for the general assembly of the Third 
 Estate of Paris. On April 26th the general assembly 
 of the Third Estate met separately, after the nobles and 
 the clergy had refused to join with them, elected Tar- 
 get for their president, Camus for second president, 
 Sylvain Bailly for secretary, and Dr. Guillotin as assist- 
 ant secretary. Gui Jean Baptiste Target was born in 
 Paris in 1733. He was a member of the Academy; he 
 was the foremost leader of the Paris Bar. lie had al- 
 ways before his eyes as an ideal the British Constitu- 
 tion, a monarchy tempered by parliamentary govern- 
 ment. An air of humorous surprise throned upon his 
 large and heavy face, to which a slight obliquity of the 
 eyes appeared to give an oddness of expression. He 
 was, according to the testimony of his colleague Bailly, 
 whom we shall meet with and estimate later, a man of 
 flawless probity, of infinite political learning, of rare 
 memory, eloquent and logical, of profound and critical 
 judgment. Armand Gaston Camus, his colleague, was, 
 like him, a Parisian ; he was born in Paris in 1740, and 
 up to this time he was chiefly remarkable for his trans- 
 lation of Aristotle's " History of Animals," which had 
 earned him a place in the Academy of Inscriptions. 
 He was a jovial -looking man, with an air of roguish 
 sensuality. 
 
 Assistant-secretary Guillotin we shall meet with again
 
 1738-1814. DR. GUILLOTIN. 397 
 
 and again. At present he was simply a successful doc- 
 tor, fifty-one years of age, with a somewhat skull-like 
 face, large mouth, and smiling eyes. Questions of hy- 
 giene, questions of humanity occupied his mind even 
 more than questions of politics. But he was a keen 
 politician too, no doubt acquainted with the rising of 
 the English people against their king, Charles I., and 
 pained, probably, by the blundering method of decapi- 
 tation employed. Could there not be some better way ? 
 he thought, with no idea of what that better way was. 
 We have seen that the fate of Charles I. appears to 
 have made a profound impression upon the French 
 mind. We have seen what Turgot wrote to Louis XVI. 
 Arthur Young speaks of the opinion some Frenchman 
 of his acquaintance passed upon that act. This French- 
 man, speaking for himself and his countrymen, said 
 that the French had too "profound a respect for their 
 monarchy to allow such a crime ever to become possible 
 in France. Yet the example was always there, ominous 
 and disquieting. We read that Madame du Barry was 
 at great pains to obtain a portrait of Charles I., and that 
 she was wont to stimulate the flagging zeal of Louis the 
 Well -beloved against his Parliaments by pointing to 
 this portrait, and warning him of what he might expect 
 if he did not keep turbulent forces well in check. So, 
 too, in much the same manner the Count d'Artois about 
 this time of the States-General presented Louis XVI. 
 with a picture of Charles I., as a warning to him of 
 what happened to kings who conceded too much to 
 their subjects. How portentous the warning was stu- 
 pid D'Artois and blundering Louis had no idea. Guil- 
 lotin was the man to drive the warning home.
 
 398 TI1E FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXV. 
 
 CHAPTER XXV. 
 
 THE SPUING OF '89. 
 
 PARIS had seldom known a harder, a crueler winter 
 than that of 1788-89. When the year began, the ther- 
 mometer registered eighteen degrees below the freez- 
 ing-point. It had been freezing for thirty -six days, 
 ever since November 24th, and the suffering was in- 
 tense. The Seine had begun to freeze on November 
 26th, and the cold showed no signs of diminishing. 
 It was not so bad for the wealthy, who, cloaked in 
 furs, skimmed along the frozen boulevards in fantastic 
 sleighs, capriciously delighted with the new toys that 
 Nature allowed them to sport with. But to the needy 
 and the really poor the winter was one long agony. 
 People died of cold in the streets; the hospitals over- 
 flowed with luckless wretches men, women, and chil- 
 dren struck down by the merciless intensity of cold. 
 
 Lalande, who had startled Paris before by a threat- 
 ened comet, predicted that the cold would endure, and 
 his prophecy proved correct this time. Until January 
 13th there was no thaw, and then, though there was a 
 slight frost on the 16th, the bitterness of the cold began 
 to break, and was succeeded by pitiless, endless torrents 
 of rain. The horrors of that wild winter are difficult 
 to appreciate. The suffering was appalling, the mor- 
 tality great. Charitable people like Langrier de Beau- 
 recueil, cure of Sainte-Marguerite, like Monseigneur de 
 Juigne, organized dispensations of food and fire in the
 
 1789. A MOMENTOUS JANUARY. 399 
 
 form of soup and charcoal, but there was not enough 
 soup to feed all the starving mouths, nor charcoal to 
 warm the pinched bodies. In some cases the poor 
 wretches to whom the burning charcoal was given were 
 found in their miserable slums dead, asphyxiated by the 
 subtle fumes over which they had cowered in their 
 aching passion for warmth. The Hospice de la Garde 
 de Paris opened its doors to the poor who passed by, 
 that they might come in and warm themselves at its 
 fires on their way. 
 
 From the dawn of the year Paris was as warm with 
 political excitement as it was cold with climate. Day 
 by day thrilling news came pouring in from the prov- 
 inces. Now it was the Dauphine elections begun be- 
 fore the solemn sanction of the State had been given in 
 its published regulation. Now it was riots in Nantes. 
 Now it was the imbecile action of the Breton nobles. 
 Now it was the controversies in Franche Comte be- 
 tween the liberal and anti-liberal nobility. Now it was 
 the dissensions and disturbances in Rennes. Now it 
 was the protest of the nobility of Toulouse against the 
 States of Languedoc. Now. it was the meeting of the 
 three orders in Lorraine, and De Custine's declaration 
 that the order of the Third Estate constituted the na- 
 tion. Now it was the Roussillon nobility renouncing 
 their pecuniary privileges. Now it was the discord in 
 Provence, and the name of Mirabeau blown about on 
 Provengal winds. Now it was the orders of Chateau- 
 roux and of Languedoc renouncing their pecuniary 
 privileges. Never had a more momentous January 
 passed over Parisian heads. Every day brought fresh 
 news from the provinces, and with the news always the 
 wildest of rumors, which turned out in the end to be no 
 news at all, but idlest inventions of popular fancy or
 
 400 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. Cn. XXV. 
 
 popular fear. Poverty drove unhappy women to ex- 
 pose their new-born children almost naked in the street 
 to touch the pity of the passers-by. " It is baptized," 
 one of these women is reported to have said ; " what 
 does it matter whether it dies of cold or of hunger?" 
 Paris had its own excitements too. Duval d'Epremes- 
 nil was denouncing Necker in the Parliament. The 
 Parliament was issuing profitless orders against gam- 
 bling. The worshippers of the Reformed Churches be- 
 gan to agitate for the opening of their places of wor- 
 ship, shut since the days of Louis XIV. The town and 
 the Chatelet, headed by their two provosts, the Prov- 
 ost of the Merchants and the Provost of Paris, were 
 wrangling fiercely over the right to convoke the Paris 
 electors. Neither of these provosts was over-popular. 
 The Provost of the Merchants, Lepeletier de Mortefon- 
 taine, a babbling man of pseudo-gallantries with a taste 
 for rouge, was reproached with having dabbled in mo- 
 nopoly of woods and charcoals. The Provost of Paris, 
 who led the Chatelet faction, Bernard de Boulainvilliers, 
 was popularly accused of a comprehensive system of 
 smuggling. It was said in those early January days 
 that the Cardinal de Rohan had actually been permit- 
 ted to pass through Paris incognito, the cardinal whose 
 name was to figure in so many of the cahiers of the no- 
 bility protesting against his treatment. Cerutti was 
 filling all literary Paris with his fury against Mirabeau 
 for publishing the correspondence between them ; ener- 
 getic Jesuit Giuseppe Antonio Gioachimo Cerutti from 
 Turin, whose fifty years of life had made him liberal in 
 his opinions, but had not taught him how to write good 
 verses. The frosty air was so full of wild ideas that 
 the wildest ceased to excite surprise. A proposal with 
 which Dr. Guillotin and new-made notorious Marquis
 
 1789. "BLACK BUTTERFLIES." 401 
 
 de Villette were associated was set on foot to erect a 
 statue to Louis XVI. on the Place du Carrousel. Then 
 some one else proposed that the Bastille should be pull- 
 ed down, and a statue of the king erected there, with 
 an appropriate inscription to the king as the destroyer 
 of state prisons. This proposal was to seem curiously 
 ominous and prophetic presently. 
 
 In the midst of all this excitement a couple of dis- 
 tinguished men passed from the scene forever. On Jan- 
 uary 21st Baron d'Holbach died, D'Holbach the learned 
 chemist, the aggressive atheist, the patron of Diderot, 
 the friend of Grimm. On the 27th D'Ormesson died, 
 Louis Fran9ois de Paule le Fevre d'Ormesson, first Pres- 
 ident of the Paris Parliament. He was the son of that 
 most incompetent controller-general who muddled the 
 finances in 1783, and who survived his son some sixteen 
 years. 
 
 Slowly the winter slipped into spring ; slowly the 
 cold abated. But two things did not abate the flood 
 of exciting news that came daily pouring into Paris, and 
 the flood of political pamphlets and publications of all 
 kinds that poured daily from the Parisian presses. The 
 air was thick with these " Black Butterflies," as they 
 were playfully called. Seldom has the world witnessed 
 such a flight of political papers since Gutenberg first 
 plied his dangerous craft. In the midst of all this 
 seething mass of printed tirades, attacks, propositions, 
 and programmes, there appeared, by way of the stran- 
 gest contrast, a book which had nothing to do with pol- 
 itics, and which might have made its appearance in a 
 happier age. This was the "Voyage du Jeune Ana- 
 charsis " of the Abbe Barthelemy. For thirty years 
 the good abbe had been at work upon this, the mag- 
 num opus of his life. For the time its scholarship was 
 I, 20
 
 402 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXV. 
 
 profound, and the scholarship was agreeably gilded with 
 the thin gold of a narrative form. It is not perhaps 
 the most agreeable kind of fiction, the kind which seeks 
 insidiously to distil learning under the guise of romance. 
 The "Gallus" and the " Charicles" of Becker are not ex- 
 actly exhilarating books ; they suggest Mr. Barlow and 
 his methods too much. But the young Anacharsis had 
 success enough to delight the heart of the old Barthe- 
 lemy. That long, kindly, smiling, wrinkled face, over 
 which seventy-three winters had passed, had every rea- 
 son now to beam with pleasure. Some friend had ad- 
 vised him, when the book was printed, to hold back its 
 publication until the approaching States - General had 
 come to an end. Luckily for the Abbe Barthelemy, he 
 did not take this advice. Suppose he had, poor old 
 man ! would anybody have ever heard of the young 
 Anacharsis at all ? As it was, the book had a great 
 success. Every one who had time to read anything 
 save pamphlets read it. The literary world, the polite 
 world, were delighted with it. Greece, to anticipate a 
 phrase that soon became disagreeably familiar, was 
 the order of the day. People thought Greece, talked 
 Greece, played at being Greek at Madame Vigee le 
 Brun's, where that pretty paintress gathered her friends 
 about her. The enthusiastic Hellenists got up Greek 
 tableaux, and Dorat-Cubieres played with a lyre, and 
 Le Brun Pindare shook the powder from his hair and 
 sported a wreath of laurel. Nothing could be more 
 queerly in contrast with all that was happening, with 
 all that was going to happen, than this affected aping 
 of Hellenism, this assumption of mere literary ease and 
 enjoyment in a world that was about to fall to pieces. 
 It was dancing on a volcano, indeed, with a vengeance. 
 Yet this sudden Hellenism was to have its influence,
 
 1789. GUARDING AGAINST CUPIDITY. 403 
 
 too, in days a little later, when the mania for being 
 Greek or Roman shall assume grimmer proportions. 
 
 Steadily the winter went its course, steadily the elec- 
 tions went on all over France, steadily the news of them 
 came pouring into Paris, and steadily soon the deputies 
 themselves began to pour into Paris and to settle them- 
 selves in Versailles. The Versailles municipality had ar- 
 ranged a regular tariff of charges for their lodgement 
 to prevent them from being victimized by the cupidity 
 of the eager flock of people who had rooms to let. At 
 last, as we have seen, when the elections in the country 
 were practically all over, the Parisians got their chance 
 of electing their deputies.
 
 404 T1IE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXVI. 
 
 CHAPTER XXVI. 
 
 THE BOW AT BEVEILLON's. 
 
 AT this moment the first jet of pent revolutionary 
 flame pierced the crust and leaped into the air, at once 
 portentous and perplexing. Among the Paris electors 
 was a certain wealthy manufacturer of wall-paper, a 
 self-made man who had been but a working-man, Re- 
 veillon. De Besenval says of him, in his kindly sol- 
 dierly way, that he was an honest man, charitable, well- 
 approved, who little merited the fate he underwent. 
 Reveillon's paper-works were in the Faubourg Saint- 
 Antoine, within the very shadow of the Bastille. In 
 that troublous, truculent ant-hill of Saint- Antoine, where 
 men felt the pinch of poverty very keenly, and where 
 rumors flew abroad as swiftly as they fly through East- 
 ern bazaars, some one had set going an accusation against 
 Reveillon. The opulent paper-maker was accused of 
 saying scornfully that fifteen sous a day was ample pay 
 for the workpeople. This seemed to angry Saint- An- 
 toine to sound badly from the lips of one who had 
 sprung from the ranks of the people, who had known 
 their sufferings, their privations, who knew better than 
 most the little way a scant wage went. Saint- Antoine 
 was angry for another reason too. It was bruited 
 abroad that Reveillon was to receive the order of 
 Saint Michael. Saint-Antoine grumbled ominously in 
 its wine - shops, its garrets, its cellars. Who was this 
 man who cheapened the pittance of the poor, who ac- 
 cepted the decorations of the rich ? Saint-Antoine did
 
 1789. THE FIFTEEN SOUS. 405 
 
 more than merely grumble. It marched in considerable 
 numbers to the door of Reveillon's factory, and there 
 placed an effigy of the obnoxious paper-maker sus. per 
 coll., with the decoration on the puppet's breast. After 
 a while they took the image down, carried it in triumph 
 to the Place de la Greve, and there burned it to ashes 
 under the very windows of the Town -hall, with many 
 denunciations of Reveillon, and threats that they would 
 return again to wreak sterner justice. 
 
 A marvellous affair, this affair Reveillon. A matter 
 of small moment it would almost seem, and yet a mat- 
 ter of great moment as the first flare-up of revolutionary 
 fires. It is difficult to make head or tail of the whole 
 business, so desperately has it been confused by the 
 different stories told of it. Reveillon was the first to 
 thrive in France upon the making of wall-papers in the 
 English manner. He was wealthy after the labors of 
 some eight-and-forty years. His factory was more like 
 a palace. He had magnificent gardens, from which a 
 few years before the Mongolfier balloon mounted to 
 heaven. He employed about eight hundred workmen. 
 He was one of the electors of the Paris delegates for 
 the Third Estate. Saint-Antoine, suspicious, populous 
 with small artisans, seems to have looked with no loving 
 eye upon him. Who started the damning story about 
 the fifteen sous ? Reveillon said, then and after, that 
 it was started by a certain Abbe Roy, a needy ecclesias- 
 tic, patronized by the Count d'Artois. Roy came near 
 to being hanged for it, later, innocent or guilty; he was 
 not hanged, he was forgotten. But according to Reveil- 
 lon, he was his enemy, and went abroad spreading tales 
 against him, including that worst tale of all about the 
 fifteen sous. There were plenty to believe the story, as 
 Reveillon found to his cost.
 
 406 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. Cn. XXVI. 
 
 That worthy soldier and amiable story-teller, M. de 
 Besenval, was much perturbed by these proceedings. 
 For eight years De Besenval had been intrusted with 
 the command of the provinces of the interior the Sois- 
 sonnais, the Bourbonnais, the Orleannais, Berry, Tou- 
 raine, Maine, and the Isle of France, the city of Paris 
 excepted. The command, sufficiently engrossing at all 
 times, became very arduous in the April of 1789, in 
 consequence of the disette and the scarcity of grain. 
 The markets became the scenes of stormy riots. At- 
 tacks were made upon government convoys. De Be- 
 senval, at his wits' end to protect all parts, was obliged 
 to divide his troops in order to watch over all the mar- 
 kets in his command, and to keep in check the "brig- 
 ands," grown audacious by the excitement of the time. 
 Still, De Besenval proudly records that he accomplished 
 his task, that he kept order with the greatest success, 
 that everything went well until, alas! until the unex- 
 pected came to pass. De Besenval had nothing to do with 
 the maintenance of order in Paris ; but when the good 
 city began to "ferment,"authoi-ity in Paris had to call for 
 the aid of the two regiments of the French Guards and 
 the Swiss to help them in maintaining order. The com- 
 mand of these two regiments devolved upon the Due du 
 Chatelet and the Count d'Affry. As luck would have 
 it, the Count d'Affry had an accident which brought 
 him to death's-door, and De Besenval, who was his sec- 
 ond in command of the Swiss, had to take his place, 
 and add the care of Paris to all his other cares. Poor 
 De Besenval ! some sleepless hours were in store for 
 him. No more writing of his graceful tales, no more 
 dreamings of a fair royal face. The cares of Paris, the 
 correspondence of his command, and the duty of seeing 
 Paris properly supplied with corn these duties, which
 
 1789. RtiVEILLON'S FLIGHT. 407 
 
 keep him busy day and night, were among the last 
 services he will be called upon to render to royalty. 
 
 In the opening days of April De Besenval was duly 
 informed of the arrival in Paris of large bodies of most 
 ill-looking strangers, vile fellows in scarecrow tatters, 
 brandishing huge batoons, and babbling all the thieves' 
 lingoes under heaven. These uncanny crews, it seemed, 
 always set in their staff in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, 
 and mischief might confidently be expected from them. 
 On April 27th news was brought to De Besenval and 
 to Du Chatelet of the disturbances in Saint-Antoine and 
 the menaces levelled at paper-maker Reveillon. Du 
 Chatelet despatched a sergeant and thirty men of the 
 French Guard to the spot, and hoped all would be well. 
 
 All was by no means well. The men who had men- 
 aced Reveillon kept their word. They came back again 
 vast battalions of rascaldom and made ferociously 
 merry at the expense of Du Chatelet's poor thirty men. 
 They sacked the house of Reveillon's neighbor, Hen- 
 riot ; Henriot had to fly for his life. The little hand- 
 ful of soldiers dared do nothing, could do nothing, 
 against the furious mob. They had to stand quietly 
 by, thankful that nobody troubled about them. No- 
 body did trouble about them ; all that the wild crowd 
 wanted was to get hold of Reveillon, and failing that, 
 to do as much damage as might be to Reveillon's prop- 
 erty. Reveillon himself they did not get. He had pru- 
 dently slipped across to the Bastille. Behind its mas- 
 sive walls he deemed himself secure. From its towers 
 he could behold the ruin of his splendid house, fair with 
 the paintings of Le Brun. 
 
 The electors of Paris were seated tranquilly at the 
 Archbishopric, proceeding to fuse together the cahiers 
 of the different districts into a common cahier. Bailly
 
 408 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXVI. 
 
 had noted, indifferently, the absence of Reveillon from 
 the council. Suddenly the proceedings were interrupt- 
 ed by a clattering at the door, and the irruption of an 
 armed and angry crowd raving for the absent Reveil- 
 lon's head. About the same time, or earlier, De Besen- 
 val's morning hours were broken in upon by Du Chate- 
 let, alarmed, and excited with the news of the wildest 
 disturbances in the Faubourg Saint -Antoine. Every 
 moment fresh tidings came in to the two perplexed offi- 
 cers. News came of riot, of pillage, of a large crowd 
 growing momentarily larger, of the helpless handful of 
 soldiers who had not dared to fire a shot. Du Chatelet 
 saw that something must be done more decisive than 
 the despatch of thirty men. He sent off some compa- 
 nies of grenadiers, with orders to fire if need be. 
 
 There is a picturesque episode in the Reveillon riot 
 which is not generally noted. When the mob bandits, 
 blackguards, bravoes, whatever they were had swept 
 Du Chatelet's luckless thirty men to one side, and were 
 beating in the doors of the factory, an old woman sud- 
 denly appeared upon the threshold, and boldly called 
 upon the assailants to pause. She was old, it seems, in 
 the Reveillon service ; she called loudly for pity, for 
 justice ; she declared that the people were deceived. 
 Poor, impassioned, eloquent old lady, the brigands put 
 her aside in no time, but not unkindly, and the work 
 of ravage began. 
 
 In the midst of all the clamors and the crashing tim- 
 bers, gilded coaches came upon the scene stately 
 coaches with delicately painted panels, bearing deli- 
 cately painted ladies and delicate attendant lords to 
 Vincennes. Saint- Antoine, pausing in its work of de- 
 struction, or witnessing destruction by others, raged at 
 the gilt carriages and their occupants in an ominous,
 
 1789. A DESPERATE FIGHT. 400 
 
 uncomely manner, and the pretty pageant dispersed, 
 rolling its wheels rapidly. Only the Duke of Orleans, 
 recognized by the crowd, and raising his plumed hat, 
 passed on his way in curious triumph. It was said that 
 he came on purpose to encourage the rioters. 
 
 When Du Chatelet's men arrived on the scene of ac- 
 tion they found. the street so choked with people that 
 it was difficult to force a way to the paper factory, in 
 which the assailants had now lodged themselves, and in 
 which they were making wild carnival, breaking every- 
 thing they could break, and drinking everything they 
 could drink, to the cost of some of them, who took 
 some patent acid employed in the preparation of Re- 
 veillon's painted papers for some choice cordial, and 
 drained a terrible death. Those who found wine drank 
 deep and desperately, as sailors will do in a sinking 
 ship, and fiery with false courage, they faced the dis- 
 ciplined soldiers that now marched down against them. 
 The rioters had only sticks to oppose to the bayonets 
 of the soldiers ; they could only exchange a rain of 
 tiles from the roof against the rain of lead from the 
 levelled muskets ; but they held their own, fighting des- 
 perately. Defeated, dispersed in the street, they rallied 
 within the walls of Reveillon's gutted building, and 
 held it, fighting with tigerish tenacity all through that 
 livelong day. The police spies kept coming and going 
 between the scene of fight and the quarters where De 
 Besenval and Du Chatelet waited and wondered. Very 
 difficult these spies found it either to penetrate into the 
 crowd around Reveillon's door, or to get out of it again 
 when they had so penetrated. To make up for delay, 
 they brought back the most astonishing stories, spoke 
 of people they had seen inciting the rioters to further 
 tumult, and even distributing money.
 
 410 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. OH. XXVI. 
 
 The fight still raged on, desperate as that last wild 
 fight in the halls of Atli which we read of in the great 
 Icelandic epic. At last De Besenval determined that this 
 should end one way or the other. He sent companies of 
 his Swiss off as fast as they could go to Saint- An toine, 
 taking with them two pieces of cannon, and the concise 
 instructions, if they were resisted, to kill until not one 
 of the rioters was left. The sight of the cannon pro- 
 duced a calming effect upon the bulk of the mob, which 
 speedily evaporated ; but the desperate men inside Re- 
 veillon's still held good, still fought and defied. The 
 Swiss fired upon them again and again, carried the fac- 
 tory by storming, forced room after room of the place, 
 bayoneting and shooting the rioters. A great many 
 were killed, a great many were wounded and died later. 
 It was a bloody piece of work from first to last, but to 
 De Besenval belongs such credit as there was for stamp- 
 ing it out. It was, indeed, only like stamping out a 
 small piece of lighted paper while the forest is taking 
 fire behind you ; but still it was something, and poor 
 De Besenval got small thanks for it. The court looked 
 coldly upon him, as he thought. Paris was not pro- 
 foundly grateful to him. The stamping -out process 
 came too late. It saved Reveillon ; it could not save 
 the monarchy. The carnage left its bitter memories. 
 The number of the slain has been much exaggerated. 
 Bailly has even left it on record that he did not think 
 any one was killed. But a great many were killed, and 
 their deaths were not found deterrent. 
 
 So ended the Reveillon episode, which may be look- 
 ed upon as the lever de rideau, the curtain-raiser of 
 the Revolution. To this hour it is uncertain who the 
 men were who instigated the attack, who led it, and 
 who defended themselves with such desperate courage.
 
 1789. THEORIES AND THEORIES. 411 
 
 Reveillon's workmen were not with them or of them ; 
 for it would appear, in despite of that rumor about the 
 fifteen sous, that he was a kind master, in good favor 
 with those in his employment. Nor was it, either, a 
 rising of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Children of 
 Saint-Antoine may have mingled in the mass, may have 
 taken part in the fray for sheer desperate love of fight- 
 ing, and a kind of devilish Celtic delight in the fun of 
 the thing. But the faubourg at large, the faubourg as 
 a faubourg, if we may be permitted the phrase, looked 
 on with folded arms, and, if it said much, did little or 
 nothing. All sorts of fantastic theories flutter, carrion- 
 like, round the graves and the gibbets of Reveillon's 
 mysterious assailants. De Besenval, disliking to dis- 
 trust even so scapegrace a kinsman of the royal house 
 as the Duke of Orleans, decided in a convenient, indefi- 
 nite way that it must have been the English. Others, 
 less particular, insisted that it was done by Orleans and 
 his faction. Later students have actually thought that 
 it was a put-up job on the part of the court, in the hope 
 that by the wholesale complicity of Saint-Antoine they 
 would be provided with a sufficient excuse for flooding 
 Paris with soldiery, and suppressing the inconveniently 
 disaffected. Whoever set the thing going, there were 
 certainly in Paris enough desperate characters ready to 
 bear a hand in any desperate enterprise which might be 
 rewarded with a pocketful of coin, or even a skinful of 
 liquor. News of any kind of disturbance or possible 
 disturbance in the capital naturally attracted to Paris 
 all the seedy rogues, all the vagrom men, all the queer 
 kinsmen and dependents of the chivalry of the road. 
 On every highway and by - way in France, thievish 
 tramps turned their thoughts and their steps towards 
 Paris. If any one wanted to foment a disturbance,
 
 412 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXVI. 
 
 there was plenty of material ready to hand to be had 
 for the buying. The result, in any case, told for the 
 Revolution. The fierce bloodshed enraged Saint- An- 
 toine, the desperate strife showed Saint-Antoine how 
 such things might be done, and how hard it was to 
 cope with the doers. Reveillon, shivering and sighing 
 behind the Bastille walls, might have felt still less at 
 ease if he could have seen but a poor six weeks ahead 
 into futurity, and learned that the fortress of a king 
 was no more stable than the factory of a maker of paint- 
 ed papers. But he was no seer. He was compensated 
 by the king for his losses, and straightway vanishes 
 from history and leaves not a rack behind. He earned 
 the distinction of being the first plaything of the Paris 
 mob ; he had better fortune than their next playthings, 
 as we shall presently see. What became of him after- 
 wards, where he drifted, and how he ended, we have not 
 been able to find out. 
 
 It will probably never be known how the Reveillon 
 business did actually originate. The fact, if fact it be, 
 as would seem on Reveillon's own showing, that noth- 
 ing was stolen, puts the affair out of the category of a 
 mere vulgar raid for plunder upon a building exposed 
 to assault by its owner's unpopularity. The desperate 
 resistance, again, which the rioters offered to the royal 
 troops implies a degree of courage and determination 
 not usually to be found in merely needy or merely mis- 
 chievous rioters. The stories of men in rich attire, of 
 men in women's garb, who were seen egging the mob 
 on are a trifle cloudy and incoherent ; so too are the 
 tales of sums of gold in the pinched pockets of meagre 
 rascaldom. That the killed and wounded came to be 
 talked of by their kind as " defenders of the country " 
 counts for something in the argument that the move-
 
 1789. A NATURAL RESULT. 413 
 
 merit, such as it was, was largely popular and sponta- 
 neous. After all, there is nothing very surprising, in 
 the then electric condition of Paris, in the fact that a 
 mob, irritated by what they believed to be a rich man's 
 scorn of the poor man's need, should incontinently pro- 
 ceed to break the rich man's windows and express a 
 large desire to break the rich man's head. The rash 
 words of another man cost the speaker far dearer not 
 very many days or weeks later. It would not be sur- 
 prising, either, if unscrupulous persons were to be found, 
 of any party, ready to take advantage of an inflamed 
 popular feeling to manipulate riot for their own ulterior 
 purposes and advantage. Whatever we may think, 
 with Reveillon, of the participation of Abbe Roy, with 
 De Besenval of the machinations of England, with oth- 
 ers about the dodges of Orleans, and with yet others 
 about the militant purposes of the court, one thing re- 
 mains clear and incontrovertible that Reveillon be- 
 came suddenly unpopular on account of words attribut- 
 ed to him, that a mob ravaged his premises, and that 
 the riot was bloodily suppressed. The democratic eye, 
 heedless of minute possibilities, saw in the whole affair 
 a movement of not unjustifiable popular passion sav- 
 agely suppressed by the soldiery of a not too popular 
 king.
 
 414 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXVIL 
 
 CHAPTER XXVIL 
 
 STATES - GENERAL AT LAST. 
 
 Two days after the battle round Revcillon's shop, or 
 rather palace, the not too popular king was reviewing 
 his deputies at Versailles, and not increasing his popu- 
 larity in the process. The deputies of the Third Estate, 
 to begin with, were by no means pleased at the choice 
 of Versailles for the session of the States- General. Paris 
 seemed the most obvious place for the purpose ; Paris 
 would have been a much cheaper place for deputies not 
 too well off. The choice of Versailles made the States- 
 General resemble too much a plenary court to please the 
 Third Estate. Then, too, the manner of presentation to 
 the king irritated the susceptible. The deputies were 
 presented, thanks to Master of Ceremonies de Ereze 
 by order and not by their bailiwicks, which would have 
 seemed the simpler, more natural course. These were 
 small things, but they rankled. It was plain from the 
 first that concord was not the order of the hour. 
 
 On May 4th, amid vast crowds, the States-General 
 paraded through Versailles from the Parish Church of 
 Our Lady, where they heard the " Veni Creator," to the 
 Church of St. Louis, where a mass of the Holy Ghost 
 was celebrated. It is the most famous pageant in 
 history ; it has been described a thousand times ; the 
 thought of it always stirs the blood and thrills the 
 pulses. Versailles was resplendent for the occasion. 
 The streets were hung with tapestries ; the French and
 
 1789. A MARVELLOUS SIGHT. 415 
 
 Swiss Guards kept the line between the two churches; 
 all the balconies along the way were hung with precious 
 stuffs. By one of those chances which sometimes make 
 Nature seem in exquisite harmony with the actions of 
 men, the day was divinely fair an ideal May day. The 
 air was steeped in sunlight, the streets were brave with 
 banners, the air rang with martial music, and the swell 
 of sacred bells, the beat of drum and blare of trumpet, 
 blended with the chanting of the priests. The world 
 glowed with color. When did the skies seem deeper 
 blue, the trees and grasses more richly green ? The 
 clear sunlight lent a rarer value to the delicate dyes of 
 silken garment, to the jewels on women's bosoms and 
 the gold on courtly swords. The court shone in its 
 brightest splendor for that brilliant hour. It thought 
 to participate in a triumph ; it shared unawares in a 
 sacrifice. It gleamed and dazzled then for the last 
 time, and walked all unconsciously in its own funeral. 
 For in front of all that world of plumes and jewels, of 
 fair powdei'ed heads and fair painted faces, of chival- 
 rous long-lineaged nobility, walked, arrayed in solemn 
 black, their judges, their executioners, their fate, the 
 deputies of the Third Estate. 
 
 All France, says an historian, was at Paris, all Paris 
 was at Versailles. Every inch of available standing- 
 room was thronged. At every window, on every bal- 
 cony, bright eyes watched the marvellous sight, and fair 
 lips praised or blamed as the speaker leaned to the court 
 or to the new ideas. First of all, at the head of the 
 procession, came a sombre mass of black relieved by 
 touches of white; this was the Third Estate, lugubrious- 
 ly attired, raven-like, ominous. More than five hundred 
 deputies, in the gloomy garb that ceremony forced upon 
 them, moved slowly along, a compact body, while the
 
 416 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXVII. 
 
 warm air trembled to the enthusiastic cheers of the 
 spectators. The cheers lulled suddenly into a grim si- 
 lence as the black band of the Third Estate was succeed- 
 ed by the rainbow brightness of the many-hued nobility. 
 There were friends of the people in those butterfly 
 ranks, but one alone was noted out for salutation, the 
 dark, adventurous Orleans, who ostentatiously stood 
 ahead of his own order to mingle with the later ranks 
 of the Third Estate. " Long live Orleans!" the people 
 cried, and for a moment the weary vicious face glowed 
 with exultation, as it had glowed but four days earlier 
 when the Reveillon rioters had acclaimed him. "Long 
 live Orleans!" Perhaps he thought, as he smiled, of a 
 lengthy life, of a royal crown. 
 
 The same silence that had greeted the nobility greet- 
 ed also the clergy, the clergy in whose own ranks a 
 division into two orders was distinctly visible. Some 
 thirty princes of the Church came first in purple and 
 fine linen, a resplendent hierarchy. Then came a com- 
 pany of musicians, and at their heels trod the clerical 
 Third Estate, the two hundred parish priests in their 
 black gowns. Thus, in funereal melancholy sable, the 
 procession of the deputies of the States-General began 
 and ended. That, too, was ominous to the perception, 
 to the prophetic eye. Those black-garbed priests were 
 to be the first to join with their black-clad brethren of 
 the Third Estate. Both alike represented the people. 
 
 At the end of the procession came the king and the 
 court. Some cheers were accorded to the monarch, 
 partly the cheers of not ungenerous victors, partly cheers 
 of gratitude for the convocation of the States-General. 
 The queen was greeted only by a grave and menacing 
 silence, which she affected to brave with a proud in- 
 difference, But some women in the crowd cried out,
 
 1789. A PROPHECY. 417 
 
 in mocking hostility to Marie Antoinette, the war-cry, 
 " Long live Orleans !" The queen heard the sounds, 
 she saw a gleam of joy, of triumph, in the eyes of the 
 Duchess of Orleans; for a second her courage failed her; 
 she reeled, almost fainted, had to be sustained by the 
 fond arms of Madame de Lamballe. In another mo- 
 ment she was herself again, and went with head held 
 high to the end. 
 
 Among all the spectators of that splendid scene, one 
 of the most interested, one of the most interesting, was 
 Necker's daughter, Madame de Stae'l. Madame de Stae'l 
 was in the wildest spirits. She saw in all that was hap- 
 pening only a tribute to the genius of the father she 
 adored. It was all the creation of his majestic mind, to 
 Madame de Stae'l, and she exulted accordingly. With 
 her, watching from the same window, was Madame de 
 Montmorin, wife of the Minister of Foreign Affairs. 
 She strove to check Madame de Stael's exuberant gayety. 
 " You are wrong to rejoice," she said, gravely. " Great 
 troubles will come from all this for France and for us." 
 Pathetic, prophetic speech, dimly foreshadowing her 
 own death on the scaffold, her son's death on the scaf- 
 fold, her husband's death in the September massacres, 
 her daughter's death in a prison hospital ! She was not, 
 Madame de Stae'l thought, a very wise woman; but she 
 was wise enough to see more in the pageant of that day 
 than Keeker's daughter saw in it, and to gather vaguely 
 some dim tragic perception of the awful forces that lay 
 latent behind its noise and pomp and glitter. It is char- 
 acteristic of the fateful time, this queer gleam of sec- 
 ond sight vouchsafed to the commonplace wife of a 
 commonplace minister of state. Wiser eyes did not see 
 so far: wiser tongues were less truly prophetic. 
 
 Inside the Church of St. Louis the three orders took 
 I. 27
 
 418 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXVII. 
 
 their places in the nave. The king and the queen sat 
 under a canopy of purple velvet starred with the golden 
 lily flowers of their line. Round them were ranged the 
 princes of the royal blood and the flower of the court. 
 A sweet -voiced choir raised the hymn "O Salutaris 
 hostia" as the host was placed upon the altar. Then M. 
 cle la Farre, Archbishop of Nancy, passed into the pulpit 
 and preached. His sermon was inspired by the feeling of 
 the hour ; it became a kind of political pronouncement. 
 Royalist writers reproached him promptly for declama- 
 tions on the luxury and despotism of courts, the duties 
 of sovereigns, and the rights of the people, but he cer- 
 tainly succeeded in arousing at least the temporary en- 
 thusiasm of his audience. When, after a glowing pict- 
 ure of the evils of the fiscal system and the sufferings 
 of the country, he asked if such barbarous exactions 
 should be done in the name of a good, just, and wise 
 king, the enthusiasm of his hearers took fire, and vented 
 itself in loud and prolonged applause, oblivious alike of 
 the sacred character of the edifice and of the presence of 
 the king, before whom it was not etiquette to applaud, 
 even at the play. With the echo of that applause in 
 their ears, noting markedly how the old traditions were 
 losing hold, the States-General came out of the Church 
 of Saint Louis at four o'clock of the May afternoon, to 
 wait patiently or impatiently, according to their tem- 
 peraments, for the morrow.
 
 1789. THE SALLE DES MENUS. 419 
 
 CHAPTER XXVIII. 
 
 THE PLAY BEGINS. 
 
 VERSAILLES woke up on the morning of May 5, 1789, 
 with the memory of all the brave doings of yesterday 
 still buzzing in its brain, to take part in, or to take an 
 interest in, a no less imposing and a yet more impor- 
 tant ceremony. The proceedings of May 4th were like 
 the overture before the curtain rises. With this May 5th 
 the play was really to begin. The three estates of the 
 realm were to meet their monarch for the first time for 
 two centuries, and nobody could be confident, except 
 perhaps the ever - confident Necker, as to what might 
 come of the meeting. The Assembly was to open in 
 the Salle des Menus in the Avenue de Paris. The 
 Salle des Menus exists no more. If a new Villon, weary 
 of regrets for the lords and ladies of old time, were to 
 tune his verse to a ballad for the lost buildings of the 
 world which men might most regret, he should include 
 the Salle des Menus, with the temple of the Ephesian 
 Diana and the palace of Kubla Khan, in the burden of 
 his despair. For, never since man first reared houses 
 out of reeds, or quarried holes in the sides of the eternal 
 hills, has any edifice been the theatre of a more mo- 
 mentous event, or more deserving to be preserved for 
 the sake of its deathless associations. But the Salle 
 des Menus has passed away in fact; in fancy, however, 
 we can reconstruct it. The painter's and the graver's 
 art have preserved for us its seeming, and it needs no
 
 420 TUB FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXVIII. 
 
 great effort of the imagination to call up that stately 
 hall, large enough to hold more than five thousand per- 
 sons, and rich on this May day with all the splendor 
 of a courtly ceremony. We can see the spacious floors, 
 its carpets glittering with the golden fleurs de lis of 
 the Bourbon House, the majestic curve of the painted 
 ceiling, where a picturesque mythology gambolled, the 
 range of massive pillars on either side of the hall which 
 separated the eager beholders from the centre field 
 for the performers in the pageant of the day. We can 
 note the lofty dais, with its terraced lines of steps, at 
 the summit of which the throne was placed, and over 
 which the velvet canopy extended. We can watch the 
 royal pages in their bright apparel as they moved hither 
 and thither on their courtly duties. We can catch the 
 gleam of steel and the blending of blue and scarlet 
 where here and there a soldier stood on guard. The 
 Salle des Menus is gone, its bricks and mortar, its mar- 
 ble pillars, its painted walls and lily-laden carpets have 
 had their day and ceased to be. The wind has carried 
 them all away. But fancy lingers for an instant fondly 
 over the fair theatre it has refashioned for the great 
 Mystery Play of the Deluge. Here it was at last, this 
 deluge Louis XV. had lightly prophesied, its first waves 
 rising round the throne with the beginning of that May 
 day's proceedings. 
 
 The proceedings opened, if not stormily, certainly irri- 
 tably. Foolish court etiquette barred the entrance of 
 the Salle des Menus to the deputies. None was suffered 
 to pass in save after a regular summons from the her- 
 alds-at-arms ; which done, the master of the ceremonies 
 marshalled each man to his place according to his degree 
 and the degree of his bailiwick, in accordance with the 
 fusty precedent of 1614. This fusty precedent had for
 
 1789. AN UNNATURAL TRINITY. 421 
 
 first result to keep a large number of deputies wedged 
 together in a dark and narrow lobby or corridor, and 
 for second result to arouse considerable spleen against 
 the pedantic, slow formality. Deputies pushed, clam- 
 ored, refused to answer to their call or take their places ; 
 it took hard upon three hours to get them into their 
 places. In the midst of the hubbub Equality Orleans, 
 avid of popularity, won some thunderous applause by 
 insisting on the humble priest who shared with him the 
 representation of Crepy en Valois passing into the great 
 hall before him. 
 
 The deputies, seated at last, and comparatively tran- 
 quil, had nearly an hour before them in which to survey 
 the stately Salle des Menus, to gaze at and be gazed at 
 by the glittering mob that thronged the side galleries, 
 and to study each other with that half-timid specula- 
 tion peculiar to all large bodies of strangers brought 
 suddenly into close association. Nigh on to one o'clock 
 the king made his appearance, a royal sun with a train 
 of shining satellites, and the enthusiastic deputies for 
 Robespierre still was loyal, and Orleans still shammed 
 loyalty sprang to their feet and hailed him, so official 
 record assures us, " with cries of joy." The king and 
 queen took their places, the royal princes and the rest 
 of the courtly following settled down too, the ministers 
 sat at the table allotted to them, the " cries of joy " died 
 down and faded out, Master of Ceremonies De Breze 
 lifted his hand for silence announced that the king 
 would speak. The king got up, and the great play 
 began. 
 
 So, from all the ends of France the States-General 
 had come together, and faced each other in the Salle des 
 Menus a kind of unnatural trinity, a three that were 
 by no means one. "August and touching ceremony,"
 
 422 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXVIII. 
 
 said the Marquis de Ferrieres, when he rewrote for his 
 memoirs the description he had penned for his own 
 pleasure immediately after the event. August it cer- 
 tainly was, touching too, though not perhaps quite in 
 the sense in which De Ferrieres intended it. It was the 
 tragic preface to the most tragic epoch in history. Mi- 
 rabeau, with his fine perception, caught and immortal- 
 ized the true meaning of the situation as he looked upon 
 that splendid scene. He saw the king with all his court 
 about him; the princes of the blood royal, a glittering 
 body-guard behind him ; Necker and his ministers in 
 front at the foot of the dais; to right the ranked hie- 
 rarchy of the Church ; to left the representatives of the 
 nobility of France; in front the sombre masses of the 
 Third Estate. Comprehending all this with one swift 
 glance, Mirabeau turned to certain of his friends, and 
 embracing the scene with a gesture, slightly pointed to 
 the king upon his dais, and said very audibly, it would 
 seem " Behold the victim!" That was, indeed, the sit- 
 uation, though no one but Mirabeau guessed it, and even 
 Mirabeau can scarcely have guessed how prophetic he 
 was. Louis the King, in opening his States-General, 
 was in fact performing Hara-Kiri with all conceivable 
 pomp and all conceivable unconsciousness. 
 
 Let us glance for a moment while Necker is pro- 
 nouncing his somewhat tedious, terribly long - winded 
 discourse upon the sober-coated gentlemen of the Third 
 Estate who sat there facing their king. They were 
 some six hundred men, all attired alike, in accordance 
 with due etiquette, all very unlike, when once we forget 
 the coat, waistcoat, and breeches of black cloth, the black 
 stockings, the short mantle of silk or stuff, such as the 
 legal were wont to wear at court, the muslin cravat, the 
 hat cocked at three sides with neither band nor button,
 
 1789. A WELL-REMEMBERED MINORITY. 423 
 
 which royal rescript had endued them with. We shall 
 find them all in the triple columns of the Moniteur, from 
 Afforty, cultivator at Villepinte, of the provostship and 
 viscounty of Paris, to Wartel, advocate of Lille, in the 
 bailiwick of Lille. These two, the Alpha and the Ome- 
 ga of the Third Estate, we shall not hear of again. Ag- 
 riculturist and advocate, they have come here from the 
 extremes of the alphabet and the extremes of France, to 
 do a certain work, and, having done it, to be speedily 
 and fortunately forgotten with the majority of their six 
 hundred fellows. But there was a minority not likely 
 to be forgotten so long as men care to remember any- 
 thing. Here and there in those sombre masses of the 
 Third Estate, staring with their eager curiosity at the 
 victim king, were men with names then unknown or lit- 
 tle known who were by-and-by to be famous, most fa- 
 mous or infamous, according to their several destinies 
 and degrees. 
 
 Out of all that six hundred present or not pres- 
 ent, Time the winnower gleans only a little handful of 
 names. After the two most famous names we must re- 
 member Barnave, and Bailly, learned among men, little 
 dreaming that a colleague from one of the divisions of 
 Paris was occupying his busy brain with an instrument 
 of justice and of injustice that should shear close. We 
 see Buzot and Petion, sitting together now, who shall 
 lie closer yet in the cold fields by-and-by. We recall 
 Camus and Lanjuinais and Rabaut-Saint-Etierine, and 
 Mounier and Malouet, and Rewbell, and the ingenious, 
 nimble-witted Abbe Sieyes. We may note, too, sturdy 
 Pere Gerard and M. Martin of Auch, whom we shall 
 meet again. One man we have mentioned already, the 
 Parisian delegate whose busy brain was forging a surer 
 sword for justice, Dr. Guillotin. Of all the men on that
 
 424 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXVI1L 
 
 "august and touching" occasion, he not indeed, we 
 believe, bodily present owing to some electoral delay 
 was the one most to be dreaded by his fellows if they 
 could have got one sure glance into the wizard's glass 
 of the future. How many heads, from the king to the 
 Arras lawyer, from pocked Equality Orleans to Bailly, 
 pedantic Mayor of Paris, were doomed to fall beneath 
 the grim machine with which the name of Dr. Guillotin 
 has been so indissolubly associated ! It matters little 
 whether Guillotin did or did not actually invent the 
 particular form of death - dealing machine which has 
 borne his name so long. He advocated expeditious de- 
 capitation ; the instrument which expeditiously decapi- 
 tated bears his name. Dr. Louis may have planned the 
 construction of the engine, but the engine was called, is 
 called, will be called the guillotine. That is enough. 
 Inexorable humor of history ! From the crowned king 
 of the stately Capet line, proud representative of divine 
 right, to brilliant young Barnave, no one heeded Guil- 
 lotin much, present or absent, and yet Guillotin was 
 their fate and the fate of thousands more. Carlyle has 
 written his undying epitaph, " his name like to outlast 
 Caesar's."
 
 1267-1789. i'ACT AND flCTioN. 425 
 
 CHAPTER XXIX. 
 
 THE WILD GABRIEL HONORS}. 
 
 MOST Englishmen, when they think about Mirabeau, 
 think of him and of his stock and kin as they stand on 
 Carlyle's picturesque, impressive canvas. In his pre- 
 sentation of Mirabeau in the famous procession, and in 
 his separate essay devoted to Mirabeau and the Mira- 
 beaus, the world is afforded a strongly marked, highly 
 colored, eminently attractive portrait and series of por- 
 traits. But if the Carlylean Mirabeau is eminently 
 picturesque, if the Carlylean House of Mirabeau takes 
 an historical dignity akin to that of the House of Pe- 
 lops, they do not altogether stand the test of modern 
 criticism. Of the real Mirabeau it was almost impos- 
 sible for Carlyle at the time when he wrote, except by 
 a kind of magnificent guess-work, to know much. Of 
 the " great House of Mirabeau " he seems to have ac- 
 cepted implicitly the astonishing statements of the fam- 
 ily and their yet more astonishing pretensions. Not a 
 man of the line, Riquet or Riquety or Riquetti, for the 
 name is spelled all these ways and even other ways be- 
 sides, very perplexingly, who does not seem to have 
 been bustling, ambitious, esurient of dignity, proud of 
 the grandeur of his race, with a kind of blustering pride 
 that almost invites scepticism by its challenging air of 
 swagger. In the greatest study of the Mirabeaus that 
 has yet been made, that of Louis de Lomenie, the Ri- 
 quettis show to less theatrical advantage. It threatened
 
 426 THE F&EKCtt REVOLUTlOiY. CH. XXIX. 
 
 to be one of the gravest losses in modern literature 
 that De Lomenie's book, like the unfinished window in 
 Aladdin's Tower, "unfinished must remain." Happily 
 within the last few months the materials left by Louis 
 de Lomenie for the conclusion of the book have been 
 admirably put together and brought out by his son 
 Charles de Lomenie. 
 
 The Mirabeaus stemmed from a house of noble Ghib- 
 ellines who during an epoch of Guelf supremacy were 
 banished from Florence in the middle of the thirteenth 
 century. Such at least is the notion Mirabeau himself 
 strove to make current, and succeeded in making cur- 
 rent posthumously in the famous "Vie de Jean-Antoine 
 de Riqueti, Marquis de Mirabeau, et Notice sur sa Mai- 
 son. Redig6es par 1'aine de ses Petits Fils d'apres les 
 Notes de son Fils." M. Lucas de Montigny, who gave 
 this document to the world at the beginning of his 
 "Memoires. de Mirabeau," was under the natural im- 
 pression that it was founded by Mirabeau upon mere 
 notes jotted down by his fiery old father. As a matter 
 of fact, however, Mirabeau was deceiving the world. 
 The life of Jean Antoine de Riquetti was entirely by 
 his father, as the discovery of the original manuscript 
 has since made certain. Mirabeau merely copied it, 
 amplifying it here and there to the greater glory of 
 the House of Mirabeau, and altering and softening the 
 archaic vigor and richness of the paternal prose. That 
 the elder Mirabeau suspected some trickery on his son's 
 part is made plain by M. de Lomenie, who quotes a 
 letter from the marquis to his brother the Bailli, in 
 which he expresses a fear that Mirabeau has copied a 
 manuscript lent him for his instruction, and adds that 
 if any copy comes before the world it must be through 
 the son.
 
 1267-178&. GIIIBELLINE OR GUELF? 42? 
 
 In the original manuscript the Marquis de Mirabeau 
 makes much of the splendor and dignity of his race, 
 but their grandeur grows and swells under the copy- 
 ing hand of Mirabeau. The son intensifies terms of 
 grandeur, interpolates adjectives of greater stateliness, 
 and in every way endeavors to heighten the picture 
 of the ancestral dignity. Illustrious Ghibelline nobles 
 banished from Florence, the great house transferred 
 itself to Provence, and took rank at once among the 
 loftiest Proven9al nobility. Such is the Mirabeau con- 
 tention ; but the contention, unfortunately, does not 
 stand the test of cold historic inquiry. To begin with, 
 the Riquettis of Provence do not appear to have made 
 up their mind as to whether the Arrighettis of Flor- 
 ence were Ghibelline or Guelf, a matter of some small 
 importance in the history of a stately house. There is 
 next no existing proof of any kind of the marriage of 
 Pierre, the first of the French Riquettis, with Sibylle 
 de Fos, " of the house of the Counts of Provence, of 
 whom the Troubadours have sung the talents and beau- 
 ty." A fragment of genealogy in the National Library 
 in Paris gives the wife of the first French Riquetti as 
 Catherine de Fossis, a name which has no connection 
 whatever with the house of the Counts of Provence. 
 It is, indeed, as M. de Lomenie shows, truly remarkable 
 that if the first French Riquetti was of sufficient stand- 
 ing to wed the daughter of a princely house, no men- 
 tion whatever of his descendants should be made for 
 two and a half centuries, until the middle of the six- 
 teenth century, in any historical record, not merely of 
 France, but of Provence. Nor is it less remarkable 
 that the first conspicuous bearer of the Riquetti name 
 seems to have had some difficulty in escaping, by alleg- 
 ing nobility, the payment of a tax levied only on the
 
 428 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXIX. 
 
 lowest classes. A strange drop in the world indeed for 
 illustrious Ghibellines or Guelfs wedded to ladies of 
 the princely lines of Provence. 
 
 This John Riquetti of the tax was the son of an Ho- 
 nore Riquetti of Digne, who settled in Marseilles at the 
 beginning of the sixteenth century. He seems to have 
 engaged in commerce of some kind. His son Jehan 
 appears to have worked with success in the coral trade, 
 and to have founded besides a manufactory of scarlet 
 stuffs. He married in 1564 a lady of the old Provencal 
 family of Glandeves, bought the house and lands of 
 Mirabeau, and took its name. Hitherto the castle and 
 estate of Mirabeau had belonged to the Barras family, 
 "li Barras viei coumo li roucas" old as the rocks they 
 were called in Provence. The castle and lands passed 
 by marriage into the Glandeves family, and from Gas- 
 pard de Glandeves Jehan Riquetti, successful coral 
 merchant and manufacturer of scarlet stuffs, bought it 
 when he wedded a lady of the line. It must be admit- 
 ted that in these acts we see more the ambitious, push- 
 ing, prosperous coral merchant than the descendant of 
 illustrious Florentines and of the highest nobility of 
 Provence. Twenty-one thousand crowns of forty-eight 
 sols each was a pretty good sum to pay for a tumble- 
 down castle, so knocked about and dilapidated that it 
 was wholly uninhabitable. He seems to have been as 
 eager to bear the name of Mirabeau as Glossin was in 
 " Guy Mannering " to be called Ellangowan. His am- 
 bition brought him into trouble. Lawsuits rained on 
 him for dues, the castle and lands were even for a sea- 
 son sequestrated, but Jehan Riquetti was hardy, and 
 fought pertinaciously, and won his case at last. In the 
 documents of these various processes he is alluded to as 
 a merchant of Marseilles, and in the final act is called
 
 1267-1789. MAKING A PEDIGREE. 429 
 
 Lord of Mirabeau, with no title of nobility whatever. 
 The second lawsuit was for payment of that right of 
 Francs Fiefs which was only taxable upon roturiers 
 who had acquired noble property. Jehan stood out for 
 his nobility, and an inquiry into his claims was set on 
 foot. The inquiry was held first at Seyne, the oldest 
 abiding-place of the family, then at Digne. Various 
 persons testified in a vague sort of way to the nobility 
 of the family. The absolute absence of documentary 
 proof was accounted for by the destruction of precious 
 papers in the turbulent year 1574. Dim memories of a 
 destroyed shield with a blazon, of a vanished portrait, 
 of a shattered tomb, were offered in evidence. Worthy 
 persons remembered hearsay statements as to the no- 
 bility of the Riquettis. All this was not much for a 
 family belonging to the highest Proven9al nobility, but 
 it was something in the eyes of the commissioners. 
 They accepted the kind of general impression of nobil- 
 ity, acquitted Jehan of the Francs Fiefs, and Jehan 
 styled himself ecuyer thenceforward. 
 
 Thomas de Riquetti, grandson of Jehan, squire and 
 lord of Mirabeau, gave his family another lift in the 
 world by his marriage with a daughter of the house of 
 Ponteves. The difference between the social status of 
 the Riquettis and the lady of Ponteves is curiously 
 marked in the marriage contract, in which the simple 
 squireship of Thomas of Riquetti contrasts with the 
 pompous and swelling epithets of the people of Pon- 
 teves. When this same Thomas, nineteen years later, 
 in 1639, wished to set a younger son's name upon the 
 roll of the Knights of Malta, he had to obtain what 
 was called the secret proof of nobility in the solemn 
 declaration of four gentlemen of old stock that the Ri- 
 quettis were a family of the first water. It is really
 
 430 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXIX. 
 
 curious and pathetic to note the struggles the Riquettis 
 had to keep up their dignity and assert their nobility. 
 Inclusion in the Order of Malta was a much-desired 
 dignity, we may imagine, for the Riquetti Mirabeaus. 
 There had been Mirabeaus before in the order, but they 
 were Barras-Mirabeaus, a very different matter. The 
 Riquettis were making their way, however, patiently 
 and perseveringly, step by step. Thomas's next move 
 was to secure himself a dignified blazon. He had re- 
 course accordingly, not to the official genealogist, Charles 
 d'Hozier, who saw through his pretensions, but to a 
 kind of swindling herald, Jean Baptiste 1'Hermite de 
 Soliers, who turned him out a genealogy and any num- 
 ber of brilliant armorial bearings, just in the same way 
 that a heraldic stationer of to-day will supply, for a 
 consideration, arms and old descent to any ambitious 
 pork-butcher. This amazing rogue of a herald coolly 
 falsified citations from Italian historians, and converted 
 genuine Arrigucci of Zazzera's book into Ariqueti. On 
 the basis of this audacious swindle the great Mirabeau 
 coolly declared that the only mesalliance in his family 
 was with the Medicis. In all probability Mirabeau ac- 
 cepted L'Hermite's work in all sincerity, but the fact 
 remains that it was no Ariqueti or Arrighetti who wed- 
 ded into the Medici line, but one of the Arrigucci, a 
 most ancient house of Fiesole. There did indeed turn 
 up a certain Count Giulio d'Arrighetti in the service of 
 the Grand Duke of Tuscany, who, travelling in Mar- 
 seilles, was hailed with joy by Thomas de Riquetti as 
 a relation, and who seems to have been good enough 
 to recognize the relationship. But as his arms were 
 wholly different from the Riquettis of Provence, and 
 different again from those of the genuine Arrighettis, 
 who are to be found in Florence at a much later period,
 
 1267-1789. NEW LEGENDS. 431 
 
 however, than that of their alleged banishment, this 
 testimony only adds a fresh complication to the inge- 
 nious little family swindle. It was not, however, owing 
 to the audacity of L'Hermite, or the complaisance of 
 Giulio Arrighetti, that Thomas was able to hold his no- 
 bility in 1688, when Louis XIV. ordered the verification 
 of titles of nobility. Two documents did this for him 
 one dated 1398, which calls Antoine Riquetti "vir 
 nobilis juris peritus de Regio," that is, of Riez ; and 
 another of 1410, which calls Antoine Riquetti "judex 
 ciiriae regiae civitats Dignae," that is, of Digne. In 1685, 
 Thomas, who had been a loyal king's man all through 
 the Fronde, received letters-patent permitting him to 
 take the title of marquis from the estate of Mirabeau, 
 and so for the first time a Riquetti entered the ranks 
 of the high nobility. 
 
 In 1693 a new prop for the great house of Riquetti 
 made its appearance in a "Nobiliare de Provence," by 
 the Abbe Robert of Brianon. This book, dedicated to 
 Jean Antoine, second Marquis of Mirabeau, our Mira- 
 beau's grandfather, repeats most, if not all, of L'Her- 
 mite's lies, invents the mysterious Sibylle de Fos, and 
 fills in the foggy period of the Riquetti record with a 
 crowd of remarkable and purely imaginary figures and 
 events. Against this prodigious performance a zealous 
 antiquarian, the Abbe Barcilon of Mauvans, immediately 
 ran a-tilt, especially assailing the imaginary grandeur 
 of the Riquettis, and, rushing impetuously to the other 
 extreme, he brings forward a throng of Riquettis in 
 humble walks of life laborers, artisans, and the like 
 who may, however, belong to those Riquettis with whom 
 our Riquettis always sought to disassociate themselves. 
 It is certain, however, that Barcilon quotes the act of 
 marriage of Houore Riquetti in 1515, which, if genuine,
 
 432 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXIX. 
 
 proves that instead of the nuptials between a lord of 
 Sieves and the daughter of a lord De la Garde of the 
 "Nobilier de Provence," a simple schoolmaster of Digne 
 married the daughter of a tailor of Marseilles. 
 
 But the final support of the glory of the Riquetti line 
 is in Louis d'Hozier's " Armorial de France," in the vol- 
 ume of 1764. Here we have an Azzuccius Arrighetti, 
 banished from Florence in 1267 or 1268 as a Ghibelline, 
 and assumed to be the father of Pierre Riquetti, who 
 died in Seyne in Provence in the middle of the four- 
 teenth century. Here all the older assertions of the 
 Riquettis are completely upset. The Pietro Ariqueti, 
 who was a Guelf banished from Florence, becomes Az- 
 zuccius Arrighetti banished as a Ghibelline. Moreover, 
 there is not the slightest proof that Azzuccius Arri- 
 ghetti was the father of Pierre Riquetti beyond the 
 assumption, unsupported by any documentary evidence, 
 of an Abbe Octavien de Buon-accorsi and a Father Sol- 
 dani, whom Louis d'Hozier cites. Truly the whole busi- 
 ness is an amazing muddle, a veritable genealogistic 
 Slough of Despond, in which we flounder despairingly. 
 The tissue of lies which the Riquettis and their friends 
 built up, generation after generation, not only do not 
 stand separate tests, but do not hold together at all. 
 The account of one friend differs from the account of 
 another friend. The Biblical genealogies are less per- 
 plexing, are easier to reconcile, than the astonishing as- 
 sumptions, assertions, and fabrications of the ambitious 
 Riquettis. M. de Lomenie took a world of pains to get 
 at the truth. He sought and sought in vain for the 
 decree of banishment. It seems as certain as anything 
 well can be that in 1267 the triumphant Guelfs issued 
 no decree of banishment against the Ghibellines. The 
 name of Arrighetti does not occur in the lists of im-
 
 1267-1789. RIQUETTIS AND MIRABEAUS. 433 
 
 portant families of the two parties drawn up by Machia- 
 velli or Villani, nor in the "Nobiliaire Florentin" of 
 Scipione Amrairato, nor in Zazzera's "Nobiliaire Ital- 
 ien," nor in Paolo Mini, nor in Litta. There is indeed 
 a document, a "Priorista," in the National Library, in 
 which eleven Arrighetti figure as having been succes- 
 sively Priors in the Corporation of Woodcutters. This 
 fact would not interfere with their nobility, but merely 
 would imply that they were at the head of one of the 
 twelve trade bodies. But these Arrighetti belong to 
 1367, a century later than the alleged banishment of 
 the whole family. Their arms, too, are different from 
 those described in the Seyne inquiry as belonging to 
 Pierre Riquetti, and from those of the complaisant 
 Giulio of the seventeenth century. 
 
 Perhaps the most curious part of all this amazing 
 story is that the time came when these very dubiously 
 noble Riquettis were called upon to give their aid in 
 bolstering up a family of the Riquets. In 1666 a Riquet, 
 family of Languedoc who had been in obscurity, and 
 who now became distinguished by the enterprise of the 
 canal of the two seas, made rapid progress in wealth 
 and honors and gained first the countship and later the 
 marquisate of Caraman. By a curious chance it came 
 about that in the eighteenth century the Marquis of 
 Caraman found that it would be advantageous for him 
 to seek relations with the Riquettis of Provence, the 
 Mirabeaus. They had succeeded in inscribing their 
 name in the Order of the Knights of Malta. The Count 
 of Caraman wished to get his younger sons on the roll, 
 and in order to do this he sought to give a more ancient 
 lustre to the firebrand newness of his nobility by at- 
 taching himself to the Riquetti Mirabeaus, and so plead- 
 ing precedence for one of the Riquetti kin in the order, 
 I. 23
 
 434 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. Cu. XXIX. 
 
 The then Marquis of Mirabeau accepted the relation- 
 ship graciously, much as Giulio the Complaisant had 
 accepted his ancestor ; but in spite of the amiable fraud 
 they never forgot or allowed others to forget that the 
 Riquetti Mirabeaus were a very different order of be- 
 ings from the Riquets of Caraman. Was there ever in 
 the history of man a more curious example of one family 
 of sham grandeur backing up its pretensions by the aid 
 of another family whose sham grandeur was furbished 
 forth a little earlier ? There seems to have been some- 
 thing in the very name of Riquet or Riquetti which 
 awoke in its wearers a mean and eager hunger for a 
 splendor and an ancestry not their own, a craving after 
 titles, honors, and the glitter of sham genealogies. In 
 all probability Riquets and Riquettis alike were French 
 of origin and of no great beginnings. The wild tem- 
 pestuousness of the race which is supposed to point to 
 an Italian origin is not more characteristic of Italy than 
 of Provence. 
 
 As for that magnificent example of the earlier and 
 stormier Riquettis, the mad knight who chained the 
 two mountains together in some such fit of fiery humor 
 as led the hysterically feminine Xerxes to scourge the 
 raging waves of the sea, he must, it is to be feared, be 
 dismissed bodily from the great Riquetti mythos. Mr. 
 Oarlyle, as was natural, loved this wild Titantic ances- 
 tral Riquetti and made much of him, and deduced char- 
 acteristics of the race from his fierce spleens. But it 
 seems certain, as far as anything is certain in the Ri- 
 quetti muddle, that the famous chain, with its star of 
 five rays in the centre, has naught to do with Mirabeaus 
 or Riquetti. The chain, if it ever existed at all and 
 its existence seems scarcely more certain than of the 
 chain which bound Andromeda and some links whereof
 
 1267-1789. LOUIS XIV. AND THE MAD MIRABEAU. 435 
 
 were still visible, says Herodotus, in his time belongs 
 not to any Mirabeau, but to a Blacas. Old Marquis 
 Mirabeau, in telling this tale, admitted its highly myth- 
 ical and problematic character, but Mirabeau, the Mira- 
 beau, judiciously editing his father's simpler honesty, 
 omits the qualification and converts a Riquetti as leg- 
 endary as Amadis or Gawain into an undoubted four- 
 teenth-century ancestor of tempestuous passions be- 
 coming to one of a great race. Vanity was the strong- 
 est passion in the Riquetti race, and that seems to be 
 the quality of all others which our Mirabeau derived 
 most largely from his predecessors. 
 
 One of the Mirabeaus, and one alone, succeeded in 
 attaining the slightest notoriety outside the limits of 
 Provence before the eighteenth century. This was 
 Bruno de Riquetti, a captain in the French Guards, 
 who appears to have been a hot-blooded, tempestuous 
 kind of person, with little or nothing of the courtier in 
 his composition, and a great deal of the reckless dare- 
 devil. We hear of his batooning some offensive usher 
 in the very cabinet of the king, coolly ignoring the royal 
 order for his arrest, and swaggering with broad audacity 
 into the monarch's presence. Louis XIV. had always a 
 liking for a soldierly quality, and he forgave the mad 
 Mirabeau. The mad Mirabeau is more celebrated still 
 for another example of canteen insolence. A stately 
 ceremonial had been organized by the Duke de la Feuil- 
 lade in honor of the equestrian statue of the king in the 
 Place of Victories, and in this ceremony mad Mirabeau 
 bore his part, chafingly, no doubt, at the head of his 
 company of Guards. Riding away afterwards with his 
 Guai'ds, he passed the statue of Henri IV. on the Pont 
 Neuf, whereupon, turning to his soldiers, he roared in 
 the big Bruno voice, " Friends, let us salute this fellow;
 
 436 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. On. XXIX. 
 
 he is as good as another," and so rode clattering on, 
 leaving his audacity to be the scandal and delight of 
 courtly chroniclers. He was altogether the sort of man 
 whom we may imagine M. d'Artagnan, of his Majesty's 
 Musketeers, would have found by no means bad com- 
 pany. 
 
 Bluff Bruno apart, John Anthony is the first of the 
 Mirabeaus who occupies any serious place in history. 
 His son, the old marquis and friend of man, wrote a life 
 of him, which, as we have seen, the grandson, the great 
 Gabriel Honore, got hold of, and copied out with altera- 
 tions and amplifications, intending to pass it off, and 
 succeeding, posthumously, in passing off, as his own. 
 Thanks to M. de Lomenie, we know what old Marquis 
 Mirabeau wrote, denuded of the interpolations and ad- 
 ditions of the tribune. John Anthony was a remarkable 
 man, and it is curious that he has left so little impres- 
 sion upon his time. A distinguished soldier, his name 
 figures in few of the " Memoires," few of the military 
 chronicles of the age in which he lived and battled. 
 Saint-Simon, the only one who mentions him at all, men- 
 tions him passingly and inaccurately, in connection, be 
 it noted, with that very Cassano fight in which, accord- 
 ing to his son and biographer, he played the most con- 
 spicuous and brilliant part. The probability is that 
 John Anthony was a good and gallant soldier in an age 
 of good and gallant soldiers ; that his deeds, not suffi- 
 ciently remarkable in such a warlike epoch to earn him 
 any exceptional fame, loomed out enormous in the eyes 
 of Mirabeau, always eager in family glorification, and 
 that this is the explanation of the fact that the living 
 Mars of the marquis's memoir only obtains the honor of 
 a misspelled reference in the record of Saint-Simon. 
 
 This casual and inaccurate mention is made all the
 
 1666-1737. JOHX ANTHONY. 437 
 
 more remarkable when it is contrasted with the glowing 
 account which the old marquis gives of the part his sire 
 played on that memorable day. The Mirabeau muse of 
 history, always ready on the least possible prompting to 
 sing the deeds of her heroes in the bombastically epic 
 vein, here surpasses herself. According to the story of 
 the marquis, John Anthony was the hero of Cassano 
 fight, where he played a part akin to that of some Titan 
 of old time, some Roland at Roncesvalles, some Grettir 
 at Drangey. He alone offered his colossal form to the 
 pikes, the bullets, and the sabres of an overwhelming 
 force. He was struck down with a hundred wounds, 
 the least a death to nature indeed, the old marquis, 
 with a calm indifference to scientific possibilities un- 
 worthy of such a hero, declares that his jugular was 
 severed by a shot and the greater part of an army 
 charged full tilt over his ruined body. A faithful 
 henchman, pausing from the charge, flung an iron pot 
 over his master's head it was all he could do and 
 galloped on, leaving John Anthony to his fate. The 
 iron pot saved him. The hoofs and the heels of Prince 
 Eugene's horse and foot rattled over it in vain. When 
 the fight was done the body was still found to have 
 some signs of life. Vendome wailed for John Anthony 
 as Priam wailed for Hector. "Ah, Mirabeau is dead!" 
 he exclaimed in the narrative of Mirabeau the tribune 
 as if Cassano fight had no other result than that. But 
 Mirabeau was not dead. Prince Eugene, eminently the 
 " edle Ritter," had the body picked up, and finding it 
 animate, like a more courteous Achilles, sent it back to 
 Vendome's camp, to Vendome's delight, unrecorded by 
 other history tlian that of the Mirabeaus. John An- 
 thony recovered, had himself patched together, bound 
 up his marred and mangled neck in a stock of silver,
 
 438 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. Cn. XXIX. 
 
 and coolly faced the world again. There is a certain 
 hero of French fiction, a Captain Castagnette, a myth- 
 ical hero of the Napoleonic wars, who gets knocked to 
 pieces, and has gradually to replace every portion of his 
 shattered body with some foreign substance, who would 
 almost seem to be an exaggerated reminiscence of John 
 Anthony " Col d' Argent." We may well pardon John 
 Anthony the harmless pleasure he took in alluding to 
 Cassano fight as " the little affair in which I was killed." 
 For surely no man in history or fiction came to such 
 close quarters with destiny before and got off, on the 
 whole, so well. If he was a stout soldier, he was a poor 
 courtier, as poor as mad Bruno himself. When Ven- 
 dome presented him to the king all John Anthony could 
 find appropriate to say was, "Sire, if I had left my flag 
 to come to court and bribe some strumpet, I should harve 
 had more advancement and fewer wounds." Louis dis- 
 creetly pretended not to hear, and Vendome hurried his 
 unruly favorite away, saying, "Henceforward I will 
 present you to the enemy only, and never to the king," 
 which, on the whole, was perhaps the most prudent 
 course for all concerned. 
 
 In his youth John Anthony must have been singularly 
 handsome, and the description of the portrait of him 
 which still exists in the Castle of Mirabeau somehow 
 suggests the Aramis of Dumas's immortal quadrilateral. 
 He had, we learn, a charming face, which, though ex- 
 ceedingly animated, did not suggest the stern vigor 
 which showed itself in the brave squares of war, and 
 which his children so well remembered. The great blue 
 eyes are full of sweetness, and the young musketeer's 
 beauty is qualified as almost feminine. Our dear Ara- 
 mis was just such a musketeer, and it is hard to think 
 that Dumas had not John Anthony in his mind when
 
 1695-1769. FRANgOlSE DE CASTELLANE. 439 
 
 he gave some touches to more than one of his heroes. 
 Though this delicate beauty must have been consider- 
 ably impaired by the bustle and scuffle of Cassano fight, 
 it did not make John Anthony less attractive to woman. 
 While taking rest at the waters of Digne with his forty- 
 two years, his broken arm, his silver neck, and his body 
 honeycombed with wounds, he met a certain Mademoi- 
 selle de Castellane - Norante, beautiful, wealthy, high- 
 born, wooed her and won her and wedded her, and she 
 bore him six children. The eccentricity of the bat- 
 tered musketeer comes out strongly in this marriage. 
 Not in choosing a young and beautiful girl for, though 
 he is said to have been jealous, his strong left arm was 
 as terrible as ever his right had been but because of 
 the extraordinary preliminaries and conditions of the 
 marriage. First, he wanted the young lady to marry 
 secretly, and when she refused this he tabled a series of 
 conditions for her family to obey. She was to come to 
 her husband in garments which he had prepared for her, 
 taking nothing, not even hei linen, from her home; and 
 he further stipulated, and " that peremptorie," as Du- 
 gald Dalgetty would say, that her mother should never 
 put her foot inside her daughter's new home. This was 
 certainly anticipating the advances of a mother-in-law 
 with a vengeance. It seems, however, certain that John 
 Anthony did, after all, consent to wed his wife encum- 
 bered with her worldly gear to a very considerable 
 amount of property, and that he showed himself a more 
 business-like and less disinterested person than his son 
 and grandson would have had the world believe. How- 
 ever all that may be, the marriage seems to have been 
 a happy one, as it was a fruitful one. It lasted some 
 twenty - nine years. The shattered old warrior died, 
 thanking Heaven that it spared him from a sudden
 
 440 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXlX. 
 
 death, and allowed him to meet his end in tranquillity 
 and composure. Of his six children, five sons and a 
 girl, only three sons survived him. 
 
 John Anthony left three sons, as we have seen : the 
 eldest, whom we know as the Marquis of Mirabeau; the 
 second, Jean Anthony Joseph Charles Elzear de Ri- 
 quetti, whom we know as the Bailli; and the third, Louis 
 Alexander, of whom history takes little heed. The last 
 may be set aside in a few words. He was not his moth- 
 er's favorite. He was neither the handsomest nor the 
 wisest of his family. Yet he was good-looking enough, 
 and M. de Lomenie hits him off happily as the type 
 of a gentleman of the eighteenth-century comedy. He 
 was in the Order of Malta like his brothers; he was a 
 soldier, and did his devoir gallantly, but his head and 
 heart were not of the strongest. He got entangled at 
 Brussels in the lures of an adventuress, half actress, half 
 harlot, a Mademoiselle Navarre, who was one of the 
 many mistresses of Marshal Saxe. She was the mis- 
 tress of Marmontel also, and that meanly voluptuous 
 moralist was just screwing his resolution to the point 
 of asking the adventuress to marry him when young 
 Mirabeau stepped in and carried off the poor prize. The 
 Mirabeau family were furious, strove to move heaven 
 and earth against the marriage before and after it was 
 accomplished; their efforts were suddenly ended by the 
 death of the new Countess of Mirabeau at Avignon in 
 1749. Louis Alexander, renounced by his family, and 
 at his wit's end and his purse's end, was suddenly taken 
 up by the Margrave of Bayreuth and his wife. He went 
 with them to Italy. He accompanied them to Bayreuth. 
 He rose in honor and dignity at the little German court, 
 played a part in Franco-German diplomacy, and married 
 a Julia Dorothea Sylvia of Kunsberg, a young German
 
 1*715-89. JOHN ANTHONY'S SONS. 441 
 
 girl of rank. He became reconciled to his brothers, and 
 at last to his mother. Then in the high tide of prosper- 
 ity and felicity he was struck down by disease, and died 
 at Bayreuth in the autumn of 1761. His widow, who 
 had won all the Mirabeau hearts, came at their urgent 
 request to take her home with them, and the marquis 
 seems never to tire of singing her praises. 
 
 The Bailli Mirabeau may be summed up as a good 
 sailor, a bad courtier, a gallant gentleman, an illustrious 
 ornament of the waning Order of Malta, and an ideal 
 brother. His affection for his brother the marquis knew 
 no bounds, and their sympathetic intimacy is one of the 
 most pleasing episodes in the history of their house, and 
 indeed in the history of the century. They never quar- 
 relled, they seldom disagreed; even when Gabriel Ho- 
 nore set his wits to work he could not set them at odds. 
 As a sailor he fought the English time and again ; now 
 defeated, wounded, and a prisoner in England; now de- 
 feating, as in the affair at Saint-Vaast. As he battled 
 with the English, so he battled with the bureaucracy at 
 the Admiralty, striving, in a shower of pamphlets, after 
 all manner of reforms. As a governor of Guadeloupe 
 he distinguished himself by his sympathies with the 
 native, as opposed to the planter classes, a policy which 
 had its usual effect of making him highly unpopular 
 with the privileged order. He took the final vows at 
 Malta, and rose to high distinction in the fading order, 
 regretting gravely that there were no Turks to fight. 
 For his brother's sake he left Malta, and came home to 
 live with him. 
 
 Few historical characters have been more harshly en- 
 treated than old Marquis Mirabeau, the " Friend of 
 Man." Sneering critics have alluded to him as the 
 Friend of Man who was the enemy of his son. He has
 
 440 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXIX. 
 
 been held up as an example of crabbed dogmatism. He 
 has been reviled because he did not appreciate the dete- 
 rioration and decay of the stately manners of the French 
 nobility. His attitude towards his tempestuous son can 
 be best understood by comparing it with his relations 
 to his own father. His horror at the disregard of eti- 
 quette, which made him growl at Marie Antoinette run- 
 ning about in the short skirts of a stage peasant, was 
 natural in a man whose sire represented the formality 
 of the age of Louis XIV. For the rest, if he was dog- 
 ged, obstinate, stubborn, it is hard to imagine how he 
 could very well have been anything else, sprung from 
 such a sire and such a dame. Victor de Riquetti was 
 born on October 4, 1715. It was a stormy year and a 
 stormy season. Bolingbroke had just arrived in Paris, 
 an attainted peer, flying for his life. James Stuart was 
 about to set forth on that expedition which came for a 
 moment near to placing the crown of England on the 
 head of a Stuart prince. The life that had just begun 
 was destined to have a good deal of experience of ruined 
 royal houses. 
 
 The young Victor was received in his childhood into 
 the knighthood of Malta. It must be admitted that his 
 education was of the Spartan kind. To the curious in 
 the effects of education upon character it is intei-esting 
 to contrast the method of John Anthony de Riquetti 
 with the method of Pierre Eyquem, and to note the re- 
 sult of each method in Victor of Mirabeau and Michael 
 of Montaigne, in the author of " L'Ami des Hommes " 
 and the author of the " Essais." Two wholly distinct 
 schools of education are represented in the story of 
 these two sires and their sons. Pierre Eyquem may be 
 said in some degree to have anticipated the method of 
 " Levana," and to have adopted beforehand the views
 
 1715-89. THE EDUCATION OF VICTOR. 443 
 
 of Jean Paul Richter on the education of children. 
 The result was the formation of one of the most lovable 
 of natures. That education left in the mind of Michael 
 of Montaigne the tenderest affection for the father who 
 reared him. The educational system of John Anthony 
 was wide as the poles asunder from the method of 
 Eyquem. He held it as his cardinal belief that all dis- 
 play of sentiment or of familiarity between parents and 
 children should be rigidly abolished. The business of 
 John Anthony and his wife was always to keep up 
 what we may well call a masquerade of superiority to 
 all the weakness of humanity in the eyes of their off- 
 spring. It would be hard to expect a son who had seen 
 his parents after the loss of a child go about with an 
 air of " full and entire serenity " to extend any great 
 degree of sentimental emotion towards his own children. 
 The chief emotion which John Anthony aroused in his 
 children was fear. He seems to have interpreted the 
 duty of a parent towards his family much as a lion- 
 tamer interprets his duty towards the wild beasts under 
 his control. So long as they are kept in subjugation 
 by fear, all is well. Even at a great distance from his 
 austere sire, the terror of his influence held the young 
 Victor in check, and he himself records the fact that as 
 his mother was accustomed to write his father's letters, 
 and as he was always afraid of his father's letters, he 
 could never, all through his life, open a note from his 
 mother without a beating heart. Yet he had no such 
 Spartan dread of his mother. For her from the earliest 
 days he seems to have cherished the liveliest affection. 
 When Victor was~five years old a strange and terrible 
 plague swept across Provence. The great seaport of 
 Marseilles was panic-stricken and deserted. Fugitives 
 from Marseilles came swarming into Mirabeau's village.
 
 444 THE FRENCH KEVOLtJTlOtf. CH. XXIX. 
 
 Francoise de Mirabeau insisted upon leaving the plague- 
 threatened place with her husband and children. So 
 one of Victor Mirabeau's earliest recollections was of 
 the family flight across the mountains to the town of 
 Gap, which they found in wild disorder. At first entry 
 was refused to the fugitives from Mirabeau, but John 
 Anthony of the Silver Neck was not a man to be trifled 
 with. He practically took the town by storm, forced his 
 way in, assumed command at once, and in twenty-four 
 hours had completely restored it to order and tranquillity. 
 
 Victor and his brother the Bailli were educated chief- 
 ly in a Jesuit college either at Aix or Marseilles. Their 
 schooling was, of necessity, brief. The younger entered 
 the navy at twelve and a half. The elder, Victor, was 
 attached at thirteen to the regiment of Duras, which 
 his father had so long commanded. The father sent 
 him off to the army with a characteristic affectation of 
 Roman austerity. When the son waited upon the sire 
 to say farewell, John Anthony, finding that the carriage 
 had not yet come, and unwilling to waste any time in 
 sentimcntalisms, made Victor take up a book that was 
 being read to him, and continue the reading until the 
 carriage came. Then it was simply " Good-bye, my 
 son ; be wise if you wish to be happy." And so, with 
 no other or tenderer words ringing in his ears, the son 
 turned upon his heel and went to face the world. 
 
 The educational theory of John Anthony was rich 
 in maxims. Two of his favorite counsels to his son 
 were, never to loot an enemy and never to expose him- 
 self from mere foolhardiness. On matters of etiquette 
 he was a precisian and a martinet. Once the young 
 soldier appeared before him at Aix in his uniform. 
 " Sir," said the indignant John Anthony, " when we 
 come before people whom we respect we take off our
 
 1715-89. A STORMY YOUTH. 445 
 
 corporal's coat. A corporal appears nowhere save at 
 the head of his men. Go and take it off." The Friend 
 of Man, recording this, wonders what his father would 
 have thought of an age in which generals and even 
 marshals of France wore uniforms. 
 
 The youth of Victor Mirabeau was sufficiently stormy. 
 In 1731 he was withdrawn for a time from his regiment 
 to enter a military academy in Paris, and the life of the 
 young academician was sufficiently turbulent. By quiet- 
 ly suppressing a letter from his father he exempted 
 himself from submission to the authority his father 
 wished him to obey, and gave himself up to a riotous 
 enjoyment of the capital. There is something of Tom 
 and Jerry, something of the mad escapades of Lever's 
 heroes, in the record of the young soldier's Paris life. 
 Play, debauch, quarrels, laid their usual tax upon light- 
 hearted youth. But what Victor seems to have liked 
 best of all was to frequent the playhouse with his wild 
 companions, and interrupt the progress of the piece by 
 all manner of mad buffooneries. We have an amusing 
 picture of the reckless lads shouting songs in their soft 
 Proven9al and Languedocian dialects in order to silence 
 the orchestra, and clamoring loudly for some other play 
 than the one which happened to be the piece of the 
 evening. Soldiers were called in to repress the tumult, 
 and were promptly driven out again by the rioters. 
 The actors were shouted and howled into silence. The 
 audience laughed and fumed alternately. At last peace 
 was restored at the direct request of a princess of the 
 blood royal, the Duchess de Bourbon, who sent to de- 
 mand an interview with the leaders of the riot. She 
 saw Victor Mirabeau and a musketeer named Ducrest, 
 and persuaded them to extend a gracious forgiveness to 
 the unlucky mummers.
 
 446 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXIX. 
 
 All this playhouse-haunting had its inevitable result 
 upon Victor. The bright eyes of a pretty actress set 
 fire to his boy's heart. Perhaps at no time has the 
 stage been more successful in its attractions than in the 
 eighteenth century. The fair playing- women were wor- 
 shipped with a kind of desperate gallantry in which 
 mere passion was blended with a semi-chivalrous poetry 
 which makes the stage loves of the Old Order eminent- 
 ly picturesque. Of all the pretty women whose names 
 are preserved for us in the amorous chronicles of the 
 day, few were prettier than the little Dangeville, and 
 her charm, in the Shakespearean phrase, overlooked the 
 young Mirabeau. The young fellow seems to have 
 been very seriously in love, for, though he had not a 
 penny in his pocket, he won La Dangeville's heart with 
 words, and was for a sweet season wildly, madly happy. 
 But the happiness was of brief duration. John An- 
 thony of the Silver Neck seems to have heard of it. 
 There came to the young Mirabeau a captaincy in his 
 regiment of Duras, and orders to join it immediately. 
 Young Mirabeau set off with a breaking heart. The 
 farewell between him and his flame was almost tragic, 
 and the vows of mutual fidelity were deeply sworn. 
 However, the young soldier soon heard that La Dange- 
 ville had allied herself with a wealthy nobleman, whom 
 she soon ruined, and so he says that his heartache was 
 completely cured, and that he forgot all about her, 
 which we may be permitted to doubt. 
 
 Victor's stage love was happier in its beginning and 
 its ending than his more regular alliance with Made- 
 moiselle de Vassan. In 1743, being in Paris on certain 
 military business, the idea seems to have occurred to him 
 that it would be a good thing to marry. He was eight- 
 and-twenty then, but for so young a man he seems- to
 
 1769. A SAD STORY. 447 
 
 have acted with the chill composure of a more than 
 eccentric Stoic. He seems to have pitched upon Made- 
 moiselle de Vassan as his future wife in a most casual 
 manner, chiefly in consequence of the good opinion, 
 founded upon hearsay, of the business-like capacities of 
 her mother. Marie Genevieve de Vassan was a young 
 lady in a very peculiar position. There was a law feud 
 between the two branches of her mother's family con- 
 cerning the land of Saulvebceuf, and it was decided to 
 extinguish this suit by a marriage between M. de Vas- 
 san's eldest daughter and her cousin, the young Saulve- 
 bceuf. Death carried off the eldest daughter, so the 
 transaction was transferred to the next, Marie Gene- 
 vieve, then only twelve years old, who was duly married 
 to her cousin. Owing to her youth the marriage was 
 not consummated, and the young Saulvebceuf died the 
 next year, so that in 1743 the young lady was wife, 
 widow, and maid. Victor de Mirabeau had not, it would 
 appear, seen her at the time when he entered into the 
 negotiations for the marriage. The marriage took 
 place, and proved most unhappy. Mirabeau himself 
 describes the twenty years he passed with his wife as 
 twenty years of nephretic colic. 
 
 It would be difficult to find a more melancholy or a 
 more touching story than that of John Anthony's wife, 
 the grandmother of our tribune. That old saying of 
 Solon's about counting no man happy till his death has 
 been quoted and quoted till we are sick of it ; but it 
 never received a more remarkable application than in 
 the case of Fran9oise de Castellane. As a young woman 
 she appears to have been singularly charming. She 
 bore with very rare modesty the beauty which attracted 
 John Anthony ; she even in her youth thought herself 
 ugly, because she saw no other faces that resembled hers,
 
 448 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. Co. XXIX. 
 
 In her young maidenhood she was characterized by an 
 unusual soberness and wisdom. She said of herself that 
 she always found herself too young or too old for the 
 world. Her married life was a pattern of wifely and 
 motherly devotion. Her long widowhood was firm, 
 austere, and blameless. Her association with that grim 
 ruin of a John Anthony had imparted a certain stern- 
 ness to her nature. She had moulded herself, as it were, 
 into a stony, uncompromising inflexibility, which lent a 
 kind of Roman hardness to her relations with her chil- 
 dren and the world. She did not love her youngest son, 
 and she did not love the youngest son of her own eldest 
 and well-beloved son. Much of the misfortunes of our 
 Mirabeau's life may be traced to the severity of his 
 grandmother. But that very severity of discipline and 
 rule, that austerity of morality, only serve to throw 
 into more terrible relief the last act of that rigid life. 
 After eighty-one years of virtue and of piety, the widow 
 of John Anthony was afflicted with the most cruel visi- 
 tation. Her reason left her, and left her under pecul- 
 iarly poignant conditions. Although the story of her 
 strange affliction has been much exaggerated, it is cer- 
 tain that her madness led her mind in a direction very 
 different from that of its lifelong course. The tortured 
 spirit seems to have railed in unwitting blasphemies 
 against Heaven ; the pure tongue to have uttered lan- 
 guage of a gross impurity. It is inexpressibly tragic to 
 think of this lofty nature reduced in extreme old age to 
 abject insanity, accepting only the attentions of an old 
 serving-man for whom she is said to have conceived a 
 servile affection, and at moments, in brief lucid flashes, 
 sending instructions to the religious to pray for her soul 
 as for one already dead. Perhaps one of the strangest 
 features of this amazing case is that with the delirium
 
 1749. BIRTH OF MIRABEAU. 449 
 
 of the mind the favor of the body altered. Something 
 approaching to the freshness and the forms of youth re- 
 turned to the aged body and gave an unnatural and 
 ghastly air of rejuvenescence to the unhappy woman. 
 For three years the victim lingered in this case, devot- 
 edly guarded and tended by her son the marquis. The 
 letters exchanged between the marquis and his brother 
 the Bailli are touching examples of filial affection and 
 filial grief. At last, in 1769, she died ; her long and no- 
 ble life of one-and-eighty years, her long and ignoble 
 agony of three years, were sealed by the sepulchre of 
 Saint-Sulpice. 
 
 The Vicomte Mirabeau thought a good deal of him- 
 self; his brother the Bailli estimated himself more mod- 
 estly. They were both remarkable men ; they were 
 destined not to be the most remarkable of their race. 
 Never since the world began was a stranger child born 
 into it than Gabriel Ilonore Mirabeau. He was born 
 on March 9, 1/49, at Bignon, near Nemours. He was 
 not born into a happy world ; he was not born into a 
 happy family. The Marquis Mirabeau, the wild old 
 Friend of Man, was a friend of woman too, but not, as 
 we have seen, of the particular woman who happened 
 to be his wife. Indeed, he had come, in time, to hate 
 her with a very decided detestation, which she returned 
 in kind. The young Gabriel Honore, pushing up 
 through his sturdy, stubborn childhood, throve under 
 curious and trying conditions. There was an eternal 
 family Iliad always raging about his ears. The mother 
 and the father fought like wild cats. There was, too, 
 the fitful influence of a certain lady, a De Pailly from 
 Switzerland, whom the old marquis, in his capacity of 
 friend of woman, found very beautiful, altogether de- 
 lightful, but whose presence did not tend towards do- 
 I. 29
 
 450 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXIX. 
 
 mestic peace. It was a mad, unlucky household for 
 such a child to be born into. 
 
 The very birth was remarkable, Rabelaisian, almost 
 Gargantuesque. The huge head of the child put the 
 mother's life in imminent peril. That huge head was 
 already adorned with teeth when its lips parted for its 
 first lusty cry. Never, so the gossips said, was a bigger 
 child brought forth. The marquis seemed to take a 
 kind of pleasure, in its great proportions. "I have 
 nothing to tell you about my enormous son," he writes 
 to his brother the Bailli, " save that he beats his nurse, 
 who beats him back again ; they pitch into each other 
 lustily; they make a pretty pair of heads." Some three 
 years later, the small-pox, that terror and scourge of the 
 last century, attacked the child. The frightened moth- 
 er applied some ill-advised salve to the child's features, 
 with the result of scoring his face with ineffaceable 
 marks. From that time forth the heir of the Mirabeaus 
 was, to use a familiar phrase, as ugly as sin. Alas, for 
 the pride of race of the old marquis ! It was part of the 
 good old family tradition, that tradition fostered and 
 kept alive by so much scheming, so much self-deception, 
 so much deception of others, that the Mirabeaus were 
 always comely to look upon. Comely indeed they al- 
 most always were ; but now, here, by perverse chance, 
 was the latest Mirabeau destined to go through the 
 world the reverse of comely. The marquis was furious, 
 inconsolable. It may be that the child's misfortune, 
 instead of stirring the pity, only awoke the aversion of 
 the marquis ; it may be that the extraordinary harsh- 
 ness with which the Friend of Man pursued his son had 
 its origin in an illogical, savage dislike to see a Mira- 
 beau bearing a scarred and disfigured visage through 
 the world. In a being so unreasonable, so inconsistent,
 
 1749. THE BABY MIRABEAU. 451 
 
 as Marquis Mirabeau, even this aberration is scarcely 
 surprising. 
 
 Never, probably, had any infant in this world a more 
 astonishing education. Montaigne's education was 
 curious enough in fact, that of Martinus Scriblerus was 
 curious enough in fiction, but Mirabeau's overtops the 
 fact and the fiction. His father tried his hand ; his. 
 mother tried her hand; the grandmother tried her hand. 
 The boy did a good deal in a strange, independent way 
 towards his own education. When he was only seven 
 years old he solemnly drew up of his own accord a little 
 Rule of Life in which, addressing himself as " Monsieur 
 Moi," he tells himself his duty. He is to give heed to 
 his handwriting. He is not to blot his copies. He is 
 to obey his father, his master, and his mother. The 
 order in which obedience is due is characteristic of a 
 child brought up in the household of the Friend of 
 Man. He is not to contradict, not to prevaricate. He 
 is to be always and above all things honorable. He is 
 never to attack unless attacked. He is to defend his 
 fatherland. This is a sufficiently remarkable code for a 
 child of seven to scheme out. Another childish note is 
 characteristic of the later man. His mother once was 
 sportively talking to him of his future wife. The child, 
 conscious of his own marred and scarred visage, said 
 that the fair unknown must not look too curiously upon 
 his outward seeming, but that " what was within should 
 prevail over what was without." The baby Mirabeau 
 was prophetic of those future conquests, when, as in the 
 case of Wilkes, his seamed countenance did not prove 
 any serious disadvantage. 
 
 The mind of Mirabeau's father varied after the most 
 weathercock fashion concerning young Gabriel Honore. 
 Now he praised him, now dispraised, struck by the stub-
 
 452 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXIX. 
 
 born forcefulness of the boy's character, and irritated 
 by the unyielding spirit which tangents from his own. 
 In the end the queer, unwholesome dislike prevailed 
 over all other emotions in the heart of the Friend of 
 Man. He resolved to send the unlucky lad out of his 
 sight, to place him under some rule more iron than his 
 own ; nay, more, he would not even let this flesh of his 
 flesh bear the paternal name. The burly, troublesome, 
 terrible lad of fifteen was packed off to the correction 
 school of the Abbe Choquard, a stern, bitter taskmaster, 
 the very man, as old Mirabeau conceived, to break his 
 wild colt for him. But the sacred name of Mirabeau 
 was not to be inscribed upon the Abbe Choquard's reg- 
 isters. There was an estate of the mother's in Limou- 
 sin; from that estate the Friend of Man borrowed the 
 name of Buffiere, prefixed to it the Christian name Pierre, 
 and sent Gabriel Honore Mirabeau, thus metamor- 
 phosed into Pierre Buffiere, off to Paris and his mer- 
 ciless master. But the merciless master was more 
 malleable metal than the father. The young Buffiere's 
 astonishing capacity for doing everything he put his 
 hand to easily, and doing it well, was in itself a quality 
 difficult even for the sternest and severest taskmaster 
 to resist. The catalogue of Mirabeau's accomplish- 
 ments in those Choquard days is sufficiently compre- 
 hensive. He knew no less than four languages, Italian, 
 Spanish, German, English, as well as mathematics, 
 music, fencing, dancing, and riding. He was a very 
 Crichton. 
 
 As the Choquard school did not prove to be a taming- 
 school quite after the heart of Victor de Mirabeau, he 
 began to cast about for some sterner discipline, and de- 
 cided upon the army. To the army, accordingly, Mira- 
 beau was sent, but still not as a Mirabeau, only as Pierre
 
 1769. MIRABEAU IN CORSICA. 453 
 
 Buffiere. In the array, as elsewhere, Buffiere-Mirabeau 
 made himself conspicuous, and won golden opinions 
 from all kinds of persons, and got into all manner of 
 scrapes and quarrels. He fell in love, like the typical 
 young soldier of a thousand tales, with a young lady on 
 whom his superior officer had already looked with eyes 
 of affection. The romance ended in a row, a flight to 
 Paris, discovery, capture, a lettre cle cachet, and a dun- 
 geon in the Isle of Rhe. After a while, and after much 
 entreaty, Buffiere came out of Rhe to take to the army 
 again, and this time to the wars in good earnest. There 
 was much going on in Corsica. Pasquale Paoli, after 
 knocking the Genoese about, had taken to knocking 
 their successors, the French, about, and the French were 
 determined to put him down at any cost. Troops were 
 being poured into the island, and now, with some of 
 these troops, with the Legion of Lorraine, Buffiere was 
 to march and do battle. In the absolute fitness of 
 things it would be natural to expect to find a Pierre 
 Buffiere, a Gabriel Honore de Mirabeau, fighting on the 
 side of Pasquale Paoli instead of against him ; but the 
 sub-lieutenant in the Legion of Lorraine had to do as 
 he was told always a difficult thing for him and so 
 he fought against Paoli. 
 
 It is curious to think that in that very year 1769, in 
 which Buffiere-Mirabeau was fighting against the Corsi- 
 cans, a child was born to an officer of Paoli's insurgent 
 army, a child whose birth was one of the most moment- 
 ous that the world has witnessed. On Paoli's side no 
 better soldier fought than Carlo Buonaparte, and no. 
 soldier in the world had ever a better or braver wife 
 than Letitia Ramolino. The wife accompanied the hus- 
 band in all his dangers, was taken with the pains of 
 labor in Ajaccio in the August of 1769, and a male child
 
 454 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXIX. 
 
 was born to her, as the story goes, on a piece of tapestry 
 which represented some of the battle-scenes of the Iliad. 
 Thus in the midst of battle, and surrounded, as it were, 
 by the symbols of battle, Napoleon Buonaparte was 
 ushered into Corsica and into the world. That little 
 strenuous island was indeed a theatre for Titans in that 
 year, when within its girth it held the almost unknown 
 young man who was destined to be the greatest man in 
 France of his age, and the baby boy who, in his turn, 
 was destined to be the greatest man in France, and to 
 fill the world with the gloom of his glory. Both were 
 of the kin of the demigods ; the lives of both were 
 brief ; the lives of both were destined to be the most 
 momentous ever lived in France, among the most mo- 
 mentous ever lived in the history of the world. So, for 
 the first time and the last, the two greatest names of the 
 French Revolution came together unwittingly ; the 
 young Mirabeau beginning the work which the baby 
 Buonaparte was to make and mar thereafter. 
 
 The struggle in Corsica did not last long. Before 
 the swelling French reinforcements Paoli gave way, 
 broke, fled. Many and many were the Voceri wailed 
 for the gallant dead ; many a Corsican widow or be- 
 reaved mother sighed, 
 
 "E per me una doglia amara 
 D' esser donna e poveretta." 
 
 Paoli himself with difficulty escaped from Corsica, and 
 made his way to England to enjoy the friendship of Mr. 
 James Boswell, of Auchinleck, and to be presented to 
 Dr. Johnson. " They met with a manly ease, mutually 
 conscious of their own abilities and of the abilities of 
 each other." Was there ever a happier account of the 
 meeting of two distinguished men? To Johnson we 
 are glad to think that " General Paoli had the loftiest
 
 MIRABEAtJ IN PARIS. 455 
 
 port of any man he had ever seen." That lofty port 
 will loom upon us again in stranger society. For the 
 moment the national cause of Corsica was extinguished ; 
 the fact that a child had been born to an obscure Cor- 
 sican general, that a young sub-lieutenant in the Legion 
 of Lorraine was free to come back to France with a 
 whole skin, were events that seemed not of the slightest 
 moment to any living soul. Decidedly, decisively, the 
 spirit of prophecy was wanting on the earth, for either 
 of those two slight events was of vaster importance 
 than the subjugation of a thousand Corsicas. Anyhow, 
 Corsica, which had been swayed turn by turn by the 
 Carthaginians, the Romans, the Saracens, and the Geno- 
 ese, had found its fate at Ponte Nuovo. The island 
 was subjugated, Paoli was in exile talking to Dr. John- 
 son, Napoleon Buonaparte was born, and Buffiere-Mira- 
 beau was coming home again. 
 
 It would almost have seemed at first that this stormy 
 young Buffiere was coming back to something like 
 peace, something like tranquillity. He had an interview 
 with his uncle, the Bailli, and won the Bailli's heart; he 
 had an interview with his father, who seems almost to 
 have softened for a little, who lectured him a great deal 
 in the dreary " Friend of Man " manner, and finally con- 
 sented to allow his son to, as it were, un-Buffiere himself, 
 to become again Gabriel Honore de Mirabeau. Gabriel 
 Honore de Mirabeau would have liked exceedingly to 
 follow the career of arms in which Pierre Buffiere 
 showed such promise, but here, as in most things, the 
 marquis barred the way to his son's ambition. That 
 the son should desire anything seems always to have 
 been sufficient reason for making the father obdurately, 
 obstinately opposed to it. The marquis resolved ac- 
 cordingly to temper his Achilles once again in the Sty-
 
 456 THE FRENCH DEVOLUTION. CH. XXIX. 
 
 gian stream of Paris. But whereas Pierre Buffiere was 
 drilled and schooled and domineered over in Paris, tast- 
 ing of the terrors of the Choquard system, Gabriel IIo- 
 nore de Mirabeau might ruffle it in the houses of the 
 great as became a gentleman of his blood. To Paris 
 accordingly Mirabeau went, to the very delightful, per- 
 ilous Paris of 1770; and in Paris, as elsewhere, won the 
 hearts of men and women. He made one friend with 
 whom he was destined to work much in later days, the 
 young Duke de Chartrcs, ambitious then to appear the 
 most immoral man in Paris a difficult, a daring am- 
 bition. He was to become ambitious of graver things 
 by-and-by. 
 
 Unhappily this halcyon hour was brief. The mad 
 old ruffian Friend of Man seemed physically and men- 
 tally incapable of keeping on good terms with his son 
 for long. In 1772, when Gabriel Honore was only 
 twenty-three years old, his father goaded him into mak- 
 ing a marriage as unlucky as his own. The young 
 Mirabeau wooed Marie Emilie de Covet, the only 
 daughter of the Marquis de Marignan, and, as was gen- 
 erally the way with any woman he wooed, he won her 
 and married her. But, though the young lady was an 
 heiress, she was allowed very little money while her 
 father lived. Mirabeau was not a business man; he got 
 deeper and deeper into debt. Some fraudulent servants 
 whom the Friend of Man employed to spy upon his son 
 reported to him that Mirabeau was cheating him; the 
 imbecile old man believed it, and by virtue of a fresh 
 lettre de cachet he revelled in lettres de cachet con- 
 fined him in the little town of Manosque. Here, with 
 wife, child, and an allowance of fifty pounds a year, he 
 devoted himself to study, wrote his "Essay on Despot- 
 ism," quarrelled with his wife, quarrelled with many
 
 1774-75. SOPHIE DE MOtfKlfift. 457 
 
 people, quarrelled with his father, who vented his indig- 
 nation by sending Gabriel Honore, by virtue of a fresh 
 lettre de cachet, to a sterner and surer imprisonment. 
 The stranger who visits Marseilles always asks to be 
 shown, and always eyes with curious emotion, a certain 
 solid tower on a little rocky island in that stormy har- 
 bor. That solid tower was famous for two of its pris- 
 oners, one a real man, one the scarcely less real creation 
 of a great man's genius. The solid tower is the his- 
 toric Chateau d'lf ; the fictitious prisoner was Edmond 
 Dantes, afterwards Count of Monte Cristo ; the real 
 prisoner was Gabriel Honore de Mirabeau. Here in 
 this dreary place he was kept for some time ; here, as 
 elsewhere, he won the heart of his jailer, Dallegre. In 
 the following year, 1775, he was transferred by his 
 father's orders to the fortress of Joux, near Pontarlier, 
 in the mountains of the Jura, and here we may say 
 that he met his fate in the person of Sophie de Monnier. 
 This charming and beautiful young woman had been 
 married at eighteen to a mean, dismal old man more 
 than half a century her senior. Mirabeau became ac- 
 quainted with Madame de Monnier and fell deeply in 
 love with her ; she, naturally enough, fell deeply in love 
 with him. But she had another admirer in the Count 
 de Saint-Mauris, the Governor of Joux, a man whose 
 passions had not been calmed by seventy years of a 
 misspent existence. His fury on discovering the loves 
 of Mirabeau and Madame de Monnier prompted him to 
 write to the Friend of Man calumniating his prisoner. 
 The Friend of Man wrote back that Mirabeau should 
 be yet more strictly confined and never suffered to 
 leave the castle. Mirabeau, hearing of this, escaped, 
 and after some months of weary wanderings in Switzer- 
 land, hunted by his father's emissaries, he induced So-
 
 458 THE FftENCH REVOLUTION. CHAP. XXIX. 
 
 phie de Monnier to fly with him to Holland. Moralists 
 not a few have denounced Mirabeau for his conduct in 
 this regard, and yet here, if anywhere in his vexed, un- 
 happy life, the extenuating circumstances were many 
 and great. The persecutions of a fanatic old madman 
 like the Friend of Man are not the kind of arguments 
 best calculated to lead a fiery young man along the 
 paths of virtue. As for the woman, when we think of 
 her girlhood prostituted in most unnatural marriage, 
 when we reflect that her lover was a man whom no 
 woman was able to resist, we may feel that it is not 
 too hard to pardon her. That the love of these two 
 was deep and genuine it is needless to doubt. Their 
 joint life in Amsterdam was one of severe hardship, yet 
 they seem to have been perfectly happy in the bitter 
 poverty which allowed them to be together. But the 
 happiness did not last long. Their retreat was dis- 
 covered, and they were arrested just as they were on 
 the point of flying together to America. What a dif- 
 ferent history France might have had if only the fool- 
 ish, brutal Friend of Man had allowed his unhappy son 
 and the unhappy woman he loved to go in peace to the 
 New World ! Sophie was imprisoned in Paris in a kind 
 of asylum for women. Mirabeau was shut up in the 
 donjon of Vincennes. In that donjon he remained for 
 forty-one months, from 177*7 to the December of 1780. 
 From that donjon he wrote the famous letters to Sophie 
 which have filled the world with their fame, and which 
 occupy a curious place in the literature of human pas- 
 sion. . In that donjon, being allowed books and paper, 
 he wrote indefatigably, if only to keep himself from 
 the persistent thoughts of suicide. He translated the 
 exquisite "Basia" of Johannes Secundus ; he wrote all 
 sorts of essays and treatises, including the celebrated
 
 1777-80. MIRABEAU IN VINCENNES. 459 
 
 one on " Lettres de Cachet and State Prisons." At last 
 there came a term to his sufferings. His child died, 
 and the Friend of Man, fearing lest the name of Mira- 
 beau should perish, resolved to suffer the hideous reso- 
 lution which he had formed and callously records, "to 
 keep the father in prison and even to destroy all trace 
 of him," to be relaxed. Mirabeau's other child, his 
 daughter by Sophie, also died. This event fostered the 
 marquis's resolution, and after entreaties from all man- 
 ner of persons, from Mirabeau's wife, from Sophie, who 
 wrote, taking upon herself all the blame of their love 
 and flight, from his daughter Madame de Saillant, after 
 many expressions of humility which it must have cost 
 Mirabeau much to utter, he graciously consented that 
 the prison doors should be opened. So, after a cap- 
 tivity of more than three years, Mirabeau was again a 
 free man. He stood his trial at Pontarlier for the rape 
 and seduction of Madame de Monnier, and was acquitted 
 in 1782. He was free but penniless ; his father would 
 give him nothing ; in a desperate effort to please his 
 father he brought an action against his wife to force 
 her to live with him, and lost his case, and a decree of 
 separation was pronounced between them. They never 
 were reconciled, but the time came when she was proud 
 of the name of Mirabeau, and the last years of her life 
 were to be passed in the house where he lived, sur- 
 rounded by all the objects that could remind her of 
 him, and she was to die in the room in which the great- 
 est of the Mirabeau s died. Separated from his wife, 
 Mirabeau was also separated from the woman he loved. 
 Poor Sophie ! Mirabeau grew jealous of her, saw her 
 only once after his liberation from Vincennes, and then 
 only to quarrel with her. His breach with Sophie is 
 the greatest blot on Mirabeau's career, but his love had
 
 460 f HE FRENCH HEVOLUTIOtf. CH. XXIX. 
 
 cooled, and his desperate futile desire to be reconciled 
 to his father governed all his purposes. Poor Sophie ! 
 Her old husband died, and she lived in her convent for 
 some years, loved by all who came in contact with her. 
 Then, unhappily, she fell in love and was about to be 
 married, when her lover died, and she killed herself in 
 the September of 1789, when the Old Order was reel- 
 ing to its fall before the blows of her old lover. Poor 
 Sophie ! 
 
 It seems to have been hardly worth Mirabeau's while 
 to have humiliated himself so much, for he failed in 
 the purpose for which he strove ; his father remained 
 practically as hostile to him as ever. He did indeed 
 allow his son to breathe the liberal air, but he still held 
 over his head the royal order which permitted the Friend 
 of Man, who was the enemy of his son, to compel that 
 son to live wherever his father pleased. The privilege 
 of breathing the air was indeed the only privilege the 
 elder Mirabeau did accord the younger Mirabeau. If 
 he could have lived on the chameleon's dish, our Mira- 
 beau might have had more reason to be grateful. The 
 Friend of Man refused all provision to his son, and the 
 son, striving desperately to make wherewithal to feed 
 and clothe himself, complains bitterly that his father 
 hopes to starve him to death since he cannot hope to 
 make him rob on the highway. Mirabeau struggled 
 hard for life in Paris, where so many men of genius, 
 from Fran 9018 Villon to Balzac, have struggled for life, 
 and found the fight a desperate one. Then, in a de- 
 spairing way he drifted across to London to struggle 
 for life there, and to find the fight harder than in Paris. 
 Thinking that, on the whole, beggary in Paris was pref- 
 erable to beggary in London, he returned to France in 
 1785, found the public mind much occupied with finance,
 
 1780-85. MIRABEAU TRAVELLING AND WRITING. 461 
 
 and flung himself at once into the thick of the financial 
 controversy. People began to talk much of this brill- 
 iant pamphleteer ; Minister Calonne even employed him 
 for a season. Then he drifted off to Germany, to Ber- 
 lin ; drifted back to France again ; wrote more pam- 
 phlets against agiotage, which brought him into antag- 
 onism with the government ; got into a financial con- 
 troversy with Necker, in which he made allusions to 
 the need of summoning the States-General and giving 
 France a constitution. When the Notables were con- 
 voked, Mirabeau hoped to be made the secretary of the 
 Assembly, but his hope was disappointed ; the place 
 was given to Dupont de Nemours. Mii'abeau was now 
 an indefatigable writer, living much in the public eye. 
 In days which had no newspapers as we understand 
 newspapers, in days when there were no public meet- 
 ings, no parliamentary institutions, it was no easy task 
 for a poor ambitious man of genius to force himself and 
 his views upon public attention. But Mirabeau was 
 determined, and Mirabeau succeeded. Pamphlet after 
 pamphlet, political treatise after political treatise teemed 
 from his pen, and their brilliancy, their daring, their 
 fierce energy, aroused and charmed the attention of the 
 reading world. France was waking up to an interest 
 in the political life which had been so long denied ; 
 questions of political liberty were in the air ; the salons, 
 where philosophy and poetry had reigned, were now 
 echoing chiefly to discussion of the rights of man and 
 the ideals of constitutions. Naturally a man so gifted 
 as Mirabeau, capable of expressing the growing feel- 
 ings of love for political liberty in such burning words, 
 was hailed with enthusiasm by the new politicians. 
 When the States-General were summoned he was eager 
 to be elected to it. He hurried to Aix, only to be met
 
 462 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. Cn. XXIX. 
 
 by the nobles with a stern hostility and a formal ex- 
 clusion from their body as not possessing any fief of 
 his own. Very well, Mirabeau practically said, you ex- 
 clude me from the nobility. I will try the people. He 
 did try the people ; he stood for Aix, in Savoy, and for 
 Marseilles as a deputy for the Third Estate. He was 
 elected at both places ; he chose to represent Aix, and 
 he came back to Paris as to the conquest of a new world. 
 We are told that he was received with no show of wel- 
 come on that famous Fourth of May in the church of 
 St. Louis. We are told that when he answered to his 
 name on the yet more famous Fifth of May, the plau- 
 dits that had greeted other names were changed into 
 hisses. Mirabeau was not the man greatly to be moved 
 by such cheap expressions of opinion. He knew well 
 enough that his wild life had been made to seem yet 
 wilder in popular report ; he was content then, as he 
 had always been, to fight his fight for himself, and to 
 trust to his own stubborn genius and his unconquerable 
 heart. But even he, with all his ambitions, with all his 
 prescience, could scarcely have foreseen what a fight 
 was awaiting him as he sat with his colleagues on the 
 opening of the States-General. 
 
 There was another Mirabeau in that place, a younger 
 child of the house, destined to inglorious immortality 
 as Barrel Mirabeau. The friend of Rivarol, the friend 
 of Champcenetz, he was, like them, an impassioned Roy- 
 alist ; like them, a wild spirit enough ; like them, and 
 surpassing them in this, a mighty lover of good eating, 
 and especially of good drinking. Born in 1754, and 
 made a Knight of Malta when he was but one year old, 
 Boniface Riquetti Viscount Mirabeau had eaten and 
 drunk and fought his wild way to these his thirty-five 
 years like the barrack-room ruffler he was. The mad,
 
 1754-92. BARREL MIRABEAU. 463 
 
 bad, old Friend of Man had been as lenient to his 
 younger son as he was barbarous and brutal to his eld- 
 est son. Boniface entered the army in 1772; he had 
 served with distinction at Malta ; he had lent his bright 
 sword to Washington and the American colonists in 
 company with Lafayette ; he distinguished himself, and 
 earned the Order of Cincinnatus. In 1780 he came 
 back to France, said a light farewell to the Order of 
 Malta, and married, but can hardly be said to have set- 
 tled down. Now the nobility of Limoges had sent him 
 to the States-General, and from his place among his peers 
 he could glare with a coppery hatred at his elder broth- 
 er, whose rumored amour with Madame Lepay pained 
 his virtuous heart. The hatred that the Friend of Man 
 entertained for Gabriel Honore was shared to the full 
 by Boniface Barrel Mirabeau. One day among the days 
 soon to be, Gabriel Honore will reproach Boniface Bar- 
 rel for coming drunk to the Assembly, to which Boni- 
 face Barrel will practically reply, " Mind your own busi- 
 ness ; it is the only vice you have left me." Boniface 
 was the hero of the Rivarols and Champcenetz, the Pel- 
 tiers and the Suleaus ; his unwieldy bulk was the de- 
 light of the caricaturists ; the sword he drew for Gen- 
 eral Washington and Lafayette was ever ready to leap 
 from its scabbard in the duello.
 
 464 T1IE FHENCII REVOLUTION. Cn.XXX. 
 
 CHAPTER XXX. 
 
 THE MAN FROM AREAS. 
 
 THERE were few men present on that great day whose 
 presence was more dangerous to Louis XVI. than the 
 Anglomaniac, dissolute, Freemason Duke of Orleans. The 
 Duke of Orleans was one of the best-known men in all 
 that strange gathering. He was the centre of all man- 
 ner of intrigues. He was hated by the queen. Pie was 
 adored by the mob partly on account of that very hatred. 
 He was the figure-head of a party that brought into more 
 or less veiled association men of all manner of minds and 
 all manner of purposes. He was among the most con- 
 spicuous figures in that day's pageant. Perhaps the 
 very least conspicuous figure in the day's pageant was 
 that of a young man from Arras, who had been sent as 
 deputy from his native town, and about whom Paris 
 and Versailles knew nothing and cared nothing. Yet 
 the insignificant young man from Arras, with the mea- 
 gre, unwholesome face and the eager, observant eyes, 
 was, if king and court and Third Estate could but have 
 guessed it, infinitely more important than the Duke of 
 Orleans or than a dozen such Dukes of Orleans; infi- 
 nitely more important than any man in the whole As- 
 sembly, with the single exception of Gabriel Honore 
 Riquetti de Mirabeau. 
 
 It is said that, long years before the meeting of the 
 States-General, it came to pass that Louis XVI. visited 
 the famous college of Louis le Grand in Paris. Flat-
 
 1758-89. A ROYAL VISIT. 465 
 
 tered authority brought forward its model boy for au- 
 gust inspection and gracious august approval. What 
 seeds, elated authority no doubt whispered to itself, 
 might not be sown in the youthful aspiring bosom by 
 a word or two of kingly commendation. In this way 
 the son of Saint Louis and the son of an Arras attorney 
 were brought for a moment face to face. The leanish, 
 greenish young man no doubt bowed in respectful si- 
 lence; the monarch no doubt said the civil words that 
 were expected of him and went his way, and no doubt 
 forgot all about the matter five minutes afterwards; for- 
 got that he had ever met the most promising pupil of 
 Louis le Grand, and that the promising pupil's name was 
 Maximilien Robespierre. What seeds, we may wonder, 
 wore sown in that youthful aspiring bosom by the word 
 or two of kingly commendation. Did the most promis- 
 ing pupil of Louis le Grand have any prophetic glimpse 
 of the strange, almost rniVaculous ways by which he 
 and that complimentary, smiling, foolish king should be 
 brought again into juxtaposition? Assuredly not; and 
 yet history, in all the length and breadth of its fantas- 
 tic picture-gallery, hardly affords to the reflective mind 
 a more astonishing interview than that the patronizer 
 and the patronized, the plump, comely, amiable king, 
 the lean, unwholesome, respectful pupil. So strangely 
 did destiny forge the first links of enduring union be- 
 tween these two lives that might well seem as inevitably 
 sundered as the poles. 
 
 We may fairly assume that, when Louis XVI. looked 
 with angry scrutiny upon the hatted heads of the auda- 
 cious Third Estate, he did not recognize that one lean, 
 greenish face, under its black felt, was familiar to him. 
 The promising pupil of Louis le Grand had scarcely 
 dreamed that the next time he stood in the royal pres- 
 I. 30
 
 466 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXX. 
 
 ence he would dare to assert a noble privilege and cover 
 himself in the presence of a king. The taking off and 
 the putting on of a hat may seem a simple matter, on 
 which little or nothing of any moment could possibly 
 depend. Yet that insignificant process, rendered in this 
 instance so significant, may first have assured the young 
 deputy from Arras of the vast gulf that lay between 
 him and the promising pupil of the old days. There 
 was a greater gulf yet to be fixed between that insignif- 
 icant young deputy, audacious with the audacity of force 
 of numbers and a common encouragement, and the man 
 who bore his name a year or two later. Of that his col- 
 leagues had little notion then. There was no man in 
 the Third Estate, there was no man in the world, wise 
 enough to predict the future of, or, indeed, any future 
 for, that obscure, unhealthy young lawyer. Were there 
 no readers of hands, no star-gazers, no pupils of Lava- 
 ter there to discover their master in the humblest of 
 them all ? 
 
 He had come from pleasant Arras, in the leafy Artois 
 land, where Scarpe and Crinchon flow together. The 
 smiling- land had seen many strange and famous faces. 
 It had seen the wrinkled baldness of Julius Cresar in the 
 days when he overcame the Atrebates. It had seen the 
 lantern-jaws of the Eleventh Louis when he came to beat 
 Burgundy out of the Arras hearts, and sought, as kings 
 before and after sought, to change facts by changing 
 names, and to convert Arras from its errors by re-bap- 
 tizing it Franchise. It had seen the bearded Spaniards 
 hold their own for many generations, and leave their 
 traces permanently behind them in the architecture, 
 which makes the wanderer rub his eyes and wonder if, 
 by chance, he has not somehow strayed into Old Castile. 
 Latin and Gaul and Frank, and Burgundian and Hidal-
 
 1758. BIETH OF ROBESPIERRE. 467 
 
 go from Spain, of each and all the leafy Artois land 
 held memories; but of all the faces that had come and 
 gone there was none it more needed to remember than 
 the pale youthful advocate to whom all these memories 
 were familiar, and who now was representing Artois in 
 the States-General. The fair old square of Arras, with 
 its glorious old Town Hall, its cool Castilian colonnades, 
 and all the warmth of color and gracious outline of its 
 Spanish houses, had been crossed a thousand times by 
 young Maximilien de Robespierre, and no man had 
 taken much heed. But the Robespierre footsteps were 
 going to sound loudly in men's ears, the Robespierre 
 face to become the most momentous of all the Arras 
 gallery. 
 
 He was still very young. He was born in Arras on 
 May 6, 1758, and had now just completed his thirtieth 
 year. Of his ancestors we know little or nothing ; the 
 genealogy of the family is uncertain. They seem to 
 have stemmed from an Irish stock planted in France in 
 the sixteenth century. The name Robespierre is cer- 
 tainly not Irish, but it is suggested that the name of the 
 original immigrant may have been Robert Spiers, a pos- 
 sible, if fanciful, derivation. Some strain of nobility is 
 suggested by the courtly prefix of "de" which Robes- 
 pierre himself wore for a time ; but his immediate kin, 
 his father and grandfather, belonged to the middle class, 
 and followed the profession of advocates to the provin- 
 cial council of Artois. It is said, and it certainly mat- 
 ters very little, that the family name should be Derobes- 
 pierre, all in one word, and it is indeed so written in the 
 act of birth of Robespierre preserved in the baptismal 
 register of the parochial church of the Magdalen for the 
 year 1758. When he dropped the prefix is not quite 
 certain. There came a time when such prefixes were
 
 468 THE FRENCH KEVOLUTIOX. CH. XXX. 
 
 dangerous indeed, smacking of adhesion to the Old 
 Order, treason to republicanism, and the like. In the 
 list in the Moniteur of the deputies of the Third Estate 
 the name is simply given Robespierre. The point is 
 unimportant ; that familiar creature History has settled 
 the matter, and Maximilien Marie Isidore de Robes- 
 pierre is known to us and to all time simply as Maxi- 
 milien Robespierre. 
 
 When he was only seven years old, his mother, 
 Jacqueline Carrault by her maiden name, died, and the 
 death seems to have broken the heart and the life of the 
 elder Maximilien Robespierre. He left Arras abruptly, 
 and, after wandering in a purposeless kind of way about 
 the world, drifting through England and through Ger- 
 many, died in Munich, leaving his four children, two 
 boys and two girls, unprovided for. Mr. Lewes cyni- 
 cally throws doubts upon this sensibility. All things 
 considered, he thinks the painful associations of Arras 
 much more likely to have had reference to some unset- 
 tled bills. Men do fly from creditors ; but they seldom 
 leave their native town, their profession, and their chil- 
 dren from grief at the loss of a wife. However this 
 may be, the Robespierres' father did go away from 
 Arras, did die away from Arras, leaving his children to 
 the mercy of the world. The relations came to the 
 rescue. Maximilien was educated for a time at the 
 College of Arras, and after a while, thanks to the pat- 
 ronage of the bishop of Arras, M. de Conzie, he got a 
 purse at the College of Louis le Grand in Paris. Here 
 he had for colleagues Camille Desmoulins and Freron, 
 Desmoulins the Picard and Freron the Parisian. The 
 simple bond of scholastic studies and scholastic emula- 
 tion was to be exchanged in its due time for a closer 
 and a bloodier bond. The grave, prim, patient lad from
 
 1758-89. AT LOtTtS LE GRAND. 469 
 
 Arras, schooled by poverty in perseverance and the am- 
 bition to do well for his brother and his little sisters, 
 dreamed that the wild, vivacious Picard was to be his 
 victim and the turbulent, energetic Parisian his judge. 
 Here it was, too, at this College of Louis le Grand, that 
 the king came and saw, for the first time, in the face of 
 the model boy of the school, the face of his own fate. 
 There is a kind of tragic completeness in the way in 
 which the lives of all these children of the Revolution, 
 the doomed and the dooming, are kept together, which 
 recalls the interwoven strands of some Greek tale of 
 destiny. To Robespierre, however, just then, the only 
 destiny apparent was the destiny to scrape some money 
 together, and provide as a model brother should for his 
 poor next-of-kin. With this end always in view, he 
 worked hard and he worked well. After finishing his 
 classical studies he studied the law, still under the wing 
 of the College of Louis le Grand ; he worked at the 
 same time in the office of a procureur named Nollion. 
 This procureur had a first clerk named Brissot, then at 
 work upon his " Theory of the Criminal Laws," and 
 exciting himself exceedingly about the sufferings of 
 the blacks in the American colonies. He and the young 
 student from Arras may have often exchanged sympa- 
 thies on the injustices of this world, happily uncon- 
 scious of an 8th Brumaire and a 10th Thermidor. 
 
 When the time came for Robespierre to sunder his 
 connection with the College of Louis le Grand, the col- 
 lege authorities, to mark their sense of admiration for 
 his "conspicuous talents," his good conduct, and his 
 continued successes, accorded him, in a formal and so- 
 norous document, a gratification of six hundred livres. 
 Thereupon Maximilien Robespierre returned to Arras, 
 having succeeded, it would seem, in obtaining the sue-
 
 470 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. Cn. XXX. 
 
 cession in his studies for his younger brother. We 
 learn, in an uncertain legendary way, that while he was 
 still in Paris he made a kind of Mecca pilgrimage to 
 Rousseau, then drifting swiftly on towards his myste- 
 rious death. One would like much to know what passed 
 between the Apostle of Affliction and the prim, pertina- 
 cious young collegian who adored the " Contrat Social " 
 and the " Vicaire Savoyard," and how far the Self -tor- 
 turing Sophist saw in the livid Artois lad, with his 
 narrow purposes and inflammable sentimentalism, the 
 proper pupil of his own philosophies. What a subject 
 for a new Landor such a conversation offers ! 
 
 The new Landor can hardly be said to have presented 
 himself in the person of the anonymous author of what 
 purported to be an autobiography of Robespierre, pub- 
 lished in two volumes in Paris in 1830, and really the 
 work of M. Charles Reybaud. Yet there is a good deal 
 of cleverness in this pretended autobiography. The 
 remarks Robespierre is made to utter concerning his 
 admiration for Rousseau are such as seem singularly 
 appropriate to his mouth, and the final determination 
 to visit the philosopher is quite what Robespierre might 
 have written. " I set out alone for Ermenonville on a 
 fine morning in the month of June. I made the journey 
 on foot, the reflections that preoccupied me not permit- 
 ting me to find it long. Besides, at nineteen, when one 
 is mastered by an idea, a fine road before him, and the 
 head full of the future, he soon arrives at the end. A 
 youth of my age would have made, to see a woman's 
 eyes, the same journey which I made to see a philos- 
 opher." This last touch is well worthy of Robespierre. 
 The interview with Rousseau is charming enough to 
 make us wish it were real. The pair wander together 
 for two delicious hours, discussing botany and philos-
 
 1758-89. TFIE ROSATl. 4V1 
 
 ophy; they part with an appointment to meet again the 
 next month; but when the appointed day arrives Rous- 
 seau is dead. At least the interview is one which might 
 very well have taken place. Those who desire to cling 
 to the belief that Rousseau and Robespierre did meet 
 may dwell with pleasure upon the words of Charlotte 
 Robespierre : " I know not on what occasion it was, but 
 it is certain that my brother had an interview with Jean 
 Jacques Rousseau." 
 
 Once back in Arras, Maximilien seems to have settled 
 steadily down to a most exemplary, industrious, method- 
 ical life. He was devoted to his family, to his studies, 
 to his profession, content for highest relaxation with 
 the simple pleasures and amusements of a small country 
 town. There was an academy in Arras, of which the 
 young advocate was a conspicuous and diligent mem- 
 ber. For this academy he wrote a eulogium of Gresset, 
 in which he ran full tilt against the Voltaireans, and a 
 eulogium of the president, Dupaty. There was also in 
 the little town one of those amiable, harmless associa- 
 tions of a cheaply aesthetic kind, of which the grotesque 
 Arcadians of Rome had set the fashion, called the Ro- 
 sati. The Rosati seem to have delighted in a good deal 
 of innocent tomfoolery in the ceremonial receptions of 
 members, who had, it seems, to draw three deep breaths 
 over a rose, affix the flower to their button-hole, quaff 
 a glass of rose-red wine, and recite some verses before 
 they were qualified to inscribe their names on the illus- 
 trious roll of the Rosati. For the Rosati Robespierre 
 wrote a masterpiece, now forgotten, called the " Preach- 
 er's Handkerchief," and the curious can read with no 
 great difficulty a madrigal of the gallant and poetic ad- 
 vocate, offered to a lady of Arras whom he addressed in 
 a simpering vein as the young and fair Ophelia, and
 
 472 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXX. 
 
 whom he adjures, in spite of her mirror, to be content, 
 to be- beautiful without knowing it, to ever preserve her 
 modesty. " You will only be the better beloved," says 
 the rhyming rose-wearer, " if you fear not to be." 
 
 Was Ophelia, we may wonder, the fair being whom 
 legend asserts that Robespierre loved but who proved 
 inconstant ? Was she the woman to whom the motto 
 on an early picture of Robespierre is said to allude ? 
 Robespierre in the picture has a rose in his hand, and 
 the motto runs, " Tout pour mon amie." How the lady 
 liked the faded graces of the poet we do not know. 
 But we may rest at least convinced that the world, 
 whatever it gained or lost by Robespierre's adherence 
 to politics, did not lose a great poet. It was but a cast 
 of the dice in Fortune's fingers, and Maximilien Robes- 
 pierre might have gone on to the end of his days, cher- 
 ishing his family, studying his books, addressing his 
 academy, and penning frigid gallantries for the amiable 
 noodles of the Rosati. But he had another cup to drink 
 than the rose-red wine of the provincial poets. 
 
 Yet this brother of the rose guild was imbued with a 
 sensitiveness which was more than feminine. We learn 
 from his sister of the agony of his grief for the death 
 of a favorite pigeon. Birds appear to have been at 
 all times a weakness of his. A letter of his has been 
 preserved, to a young lady of Arras, in which he dis- 
 cusses with an elaborate and somewhat awkward play- 
 fulness the conduct of some canary-birds which appear 
 to have been presented by the young lady to the Robes- 
 pierre family. Could there possibly be a stranger pref- 
 ace to the Reign of Terror than this quiet, provincial 
 life, with its quiet, provincial pastimes and studies, and 
 its babble about roses and canary-birds and Ophelias, 
 and its gentle air of domestic peace ? There need be
 
 1758-89. THE FIRST AKD LAST OF WORLD PROBLEMS. 473 
 
 nothing very surprising in the contrast. History de- 
 lights in such dyptichs ; but it is a far cry from the poet 
 of Ophelie to the killer of Olympe de Gouges. 
 
 Life was not, indeed, all canary-birds and roses to the 
 young Maximilien. Let Mr. Morley, who perhaps more 
 than any other modern writer possesses the art of tell- 
 ing a difficult truth delicately, speak : " He was not 
 wholly pure from that indiscretion of the young appe- 
 tite about which the world is mute, but whose better 
 ordering and governance would give a diviner bright- 
 ness to the earth." How that better ordering and gov- 
 ernance is to be brought about, Mr. Morley does not 
 hint. Robespierre and his revolutionary familiars 
 thought on this matter very much as Mr. Morley 
 thinks, and did their best in their strange way, when 
 the world seemed shattered to bits, to remould it nearer 
 to their heart's desire. Among the ntany heroic vir- 
 tues upon which Robespierre in later years sought to 
 base his astonishing system, purity had its prominent 
 place. Burke's criticism on systems based on the he- 
 roic virtues proved as well founded here as elsewhere. 
 Wild schemes which sought to abolish love and sub- 
 stitute friendship had their inevitable reaction in the 
 naked orgies of the Directory. The governance and 
 ordering of the young appetite is the first and last of 
 world problems. That that indiscretion should num- 
 ber the cold, passionless, methodical Robespierre among 
 its victims is not the least remarkable proof of the diffi- 
 culty of the problem. 
 
 Those strange revolutions of what the Persian poet 
 calls the Wheel of Heaven, which brought the young 
 Robespierre again and again in contact with men who 
 were to be his familiars, his victims, and his execu- 
 tioners in the great drama, brought him, on his return
 
 474 TIIE FRENCH REVOLUTION. Cn. XXX. 
 
 to Arras, in juxtaposition with a young officer of en- 
 gineers named Carnot. Young Carnot had a lawsuit. 
 Robespierre pleaded it for him. Young Carnot was 
 a member of the Rosati, and shared in its delicate fol- 
 lies. In one of his verses for the Rosati, Robespierre 
 
 JLSKfi * 
 
 " Qui n'aimerait & boire 
 A. Fami Carnot ?" 
 
 Here, again, is one of those brilliant contrasts in which 
 the story of the Revolution is so fecund. A young 
 lawyer and a young engineer-captain sit side by side 
 in affable amateur gatherings with rosebuds in their 
 button-holes, and recite verses and listen to the recitals 
 of others. A twist in the kaleidoscope, and they are 
 still sitting side by side in organized fellowship ; but 
 this time their names are the most famous in France, 
 and their fellowship is the Committee of Public Safety. 
 The Son of the Organizer of Victory, in his memoirs of 
 his father, would wish it to be understood that there 
 was little or no friendship between the young Robes- 
 pierre and the young Carnot. But they were in the 
 same town, members of the same social guild ; they 
 may not have been close friends, but it is difficult, es- 
 pecially with Robespierre's familiar allusion in our ears, 
 to believe that they were not brought into some degree 
 of familiar relationship. 
 
 Robespierre's legal career at Arras was sufficiently 
 distinguished. He pleaded the cause of science when 
 he defended the cause and won the case of a citizen of 
 advanced views, who had mounted a lightning-rod 
 upon his house, to the alarm of less-educated municipal 
 authority. He fought for an old woman who had got 
 into a quarrel with a powerful abbey. He held his own 
 against the bishop of Arras, his old patron, M. de Con-
 
 1784-85. ROBESPIERRE'S ESSAY. 4-75 
 
 zie, and his courage pleased his old patron and prompted 
 him to a fresh act of patronage. He appointed him 
 as judge of his civil and criminal tribunal. All the 
 world knows and marvels at the reasons which in- 
 duced Robespierre to resign this office, which, while he 
 held it, he employed manfully to uphold popular rights 
 against the edicts of Lamoignon. One day the necessi- 
 ties of his office compelled him to record a death sen- 
 tence against a murderer, convicted by overwhelming 
 proof. His sister Charlotte relates how he came home 
 positively crushed by despair at the act which he had 
 just committed. It was wholly in vain that she strove 
 to console him, pointing out with sisterly solicitude that 
 the man he had condemned was a scoundrel of the 
 worst kind, unfit to live. All the answer she could 
 wring from the despairing Robespierre was, "A scoun- 
 drel no doubt ; but think of taking a man's life !" He 
 thought of it till he could bear it no longer, and then 
 formally resigned the office which forced him to such 
 terrible, such heart - breaking horrors, and returned to 
 his career at the bar. Time was to make him less 
 sqeamish. 
 
 A competition was opened by the Academy of Metz in 
 1784 for an essay " Sur les Peines Infamantes." Robes- 
 pierre entered the lists with an essay which won the sec- 
 ond place. The first was gained by Lacretelle the elder, 
 then a lawyer in Paris, afterwards destined, with his 
 brother, the historian, to struggle against Robespierre 
 in a far more serious competition. Robespierre pub- 
 lished his essay in 1785. It is an earnest, even eloquent 
 protest against the prejudice which inflicts upon the 
 families of criminals some stigma of their punishment. 
 The way which Robespierre sees out of the difficulty is 
 curious, as showing the survival of one of the old no-
 
 476 THE FHENCH REVOLUTION. CH. xxx. 
 
 ble privileges and the gradual working of Robespierre's 
 mind. Death by the scaffold was reserved wholly for 
 criminal offenders of noble blood. Robespierre pro- 
 posed that this distinction should be swept away, and 
 that punishment by the scaffold should be the lot of 
 criminals of all classes. By thus equalizing the pun- 
 ishment he considered that the stigma attaching to the 
 families of condemned criminals was minimized. The 
 Sansons were swinging their headsman's swords in those 
 days, and Robespierre's Parisian colleague in the States- 
 General had not yet conceived the immortal instrument 
 which was to be so strangely efficacious in carrying 
 Robespierre's theory into practice. 
 
 When the year 1789 set France fermenting, Robes- 
 pierre was director of the Arras Academy. He seized 
 upon the opportunity offered by the convocation of the 
 States-General to fling himself into the agitation of 
 political life. He formulated his political creed, or so 
 much of it as had as yet taken shape in that narrow, la- 
 borious mind, in an "Address to the Artois Nation," in 
 which he insisted upon the need of reforming the 
 states of Artois. In Artois, as elsewhere in France, 
 there was a kind of farce of representation. In most 
 cases the representation was a fiction, as the members 
 who composed the States had not been freely elected by 
 their fellow-citizens. In Artois the States were theo- 
 retically made up of representatives of the three or- 
 ders, the Nobility, the Clergy, and the Third Estate ; 
 but practically none of them were seriously represented. 
 Robespierre, with his keen, quick perceptions, saw that 
 the happy moment had come for reforming all that, 
 and in his thorough way he was for reforming it alto- 
 gether. He denounced the existing order of things, 
 painted a vigorous picture of the miseries which injus-
 
 1789. THE AETOIS CANDIDATE. 477 
 
 tice and inequality gave rise to, and called upon his 
 fellow-citizens, with a passion which was none the less 
 real because its stream ran a little thin, to tumble the 
 sham old Estates of Artois overboard altogether. Robes- 
 pierre had the discernment to perceive that now or never 
 was the moment for those of his inclining to assert them- 
 selves. The Estates of Artois were eager to bolster 
 themselves up again with the aid of the National As- 
 sembly. They claimed the right themselves to send 
 the deputies to the States - General. Robespierre as- 
 sailed these pretensions fiercely. He urged the peo- 
 ple to appreciate the importance of the hour, to send 
 those in whom they could trust to represent them, and 
 to be no longer juggled by the trickeries and treacher- 
 ies of the privileged classes. 
 
 In this pamphlet Robespierre practically put himself 
 forward as a candidate ; it stimulated public feeling 
 and made him a marked man. People read his vehe- 
 ment appeal, thrilled at its indignation, and resolved 
 that Robespierre should be the man for Artois. He fol- 
 lowed up this first blow by another in an address to the 
 people of Artois, in which he painted a skilful picture 
 of the sort of deputy the Third Estate of Artois really 
 needed. The picture needed a name no more than the 
 picture in the Salon of 1791 needed other label than 
 "The Incorruptible." Having painted his picture of 
 the ideal deputy in such a way as without mentioning 
 his own name to present his own image, he spoke di- 
 rectly of himself. He did not think himself indeed 
 worthy of the honor of representing his fellow-citizens, 
 but he did modestly think that he might be of some 
 service with advice and counsel in that trying time. 
 " I have a true heart, a firm soul," he declared. " If 
 there is a fault to urge against me, it is that I have
 
 478 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXX. 
 
 never known bow to cloak my thoughts, to have never 
 said yes when my conscience bade me say no, to have 
 never paid court to the powerful, to have preserved my 
 independence." 
 
 Robespierre was duly elected an Artois deputy, and 
 set off in the spring weather from Arras, where he was 
 known, to Paris, where he was utterly unknown. In 
 those days, when communication between the capital 
 and the provinces was slow and difficult, it was perfectly 
 possible for a man to enjoy quite a little reputation 
 In his own locality and be wholly ignored a hundred 
 leagues away. Robespierre left Arras as a very dis- 
 tinguished person, the admired of the people, the dis- 
 liked of the privileged classes, an able lawyer and au- 
 thor, a too susceptible, too humane judge. He arrived 
 in Paris, where no whisper of his provincial fame had 
 preceded him, where nobody knew who he was or cared 
 to know who he was. He was not, like Mirabeau, the 
 man to command attention in places where his name 
 was unknown. His small, ungraceful body, his un- 
 gainly limbs, lent few advantages to his presence. A 
 physiognomist might, perhaps, have discovered much 
 in the face, with its pointed chin, its small, projecting 
 forehead, its large mouth and small nose ; in the thin, 
 drawn -down lips, the deeply sunken blue eyes, over 
 which the lids drooped languidly ; the almost sinister 
 composure of the gaze, whose gravity was occasion- 
 ally tempered by a not unpleasing smile. But there 
 were no physiognomists idle enough in Paris just then 
 to 'give their attention to an obscure stranger's face ; 
 and so Robespierre came and went unheeded and now 
 sits unheeded, looking at the king. 
 
 If Robespierre was little understood, little known at 
 the time of which we treat, he scarcely seems to be
 
 1789. DIFFERING OPINIONS. 479 
 
 much better understood or much better known to-day. 
 France, in the persons of its writers, may be said to 
 divide itself into two hostile and wholly irreconcileable 
 camps. On the one side we have M. d'Hericault, who 
 looks upon him as a fiend in human shape ; Michelet, 
 who holds much the same opinion, but expresses it with 
 greater art ; M. Taine, who has invented the " Croco- 
 dile " epithet, which is as wearisome as that of " Sea- 
 Green Incorruptible." On the other side we have Louis 
 Blanc, who greatly admires Robespierre ; M. Hamel, who 
 adores him ; M. Vermorel, who does the like. Hovering 
 between the two factions flits M. Scherer, desperately 
 anxious to be impartial, succeeding on the whole fairly 
 well. But if France is divided in opinion, so too is Eng- 
 land. There are only four important expressions of 
 opinion that have been uttered upon Robespierre in 
 England, only four serious studies of his life made in 
 England. These are Bronterre O'Brien's "Life of 
 Robespierre," of which only one volume was ever print- 
 ed and which is now an exceedingly rare book ; George 
 Henry Lewes's " Life," also exceedingly rare ; Mr. John 
 Morley's essay in the first volume of his " Miscellanies," 
 and, of. course, Carlyle's " Revolution." Of these four 
 works, the first two may be classed as for Robespierre, 
 the last two as against him. 
 
 What astonishing differences of opinion these four 
 men represent ! Carlyle, writing less than half a cen- 
 tury after the meeting of the States-General, sees only 
 that a " stricter man, according to his Formula, to his 
 Credo and Cant, of probities, benevolences, pleasures-of- 
 virtue, and such like, lived not in that age," sees only 
 " a man fitted, in some luckier settled age, to have be- 
 come one of those incorruptible barren Pattern-Figures, 
 and have had marble tablets and funeral sermons,"
 
 480 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXX. 
 
 Wild Bronterre O'Brien, impassioned Chartist that he 
 is, sees in Robespierre little less than divinity. "The 
 more virtuous, the more magnanimous, the more god- 
 like I prove Robespierre's conduct to have been, the 
 greater will be the horror in which his memory will be 
 held by the upper and the middle classes." Mr. George 
 Henry Lewes does not share this passion, but he counts 
 as an admirer, a warm admirer of Robespierre. From 
 among the turbulent spirits of the Revolution he sees 
 three men issuing into something like sovereignty 
 Mirabeau, Robespierre, Napoleon. To him Robespierre 
 is the man " who in his heart believed the gospel pro- 
 claimed by the Revolution to be the real gospel of 
 Christianity, and who vainly endeavored to arrest anar- 
 chy and to shape society into order by means of his 
 convictions." 
 
 Mr. John Morley's judgment jumps rather with that 
 of Carlyle than with the gi'eater and the less enthusi- 
 asms of Bronterre O'Brien and of Lewes. Mr. Morley 
 seems to be endowed with a fatal unreadiness to admire 
 anything or anybody in the past except the writings of 
 Mr. Burke and Mr. Burke himself. He is particularly 
 bitter against Robespierre, partly, we cannot help feel- 
 ing, because, having been so often himself accused of 
 revolutionary sympathies, he wishes to show how scru- 
 pulously impartial, how finely analytical he can be in 
 dealing with a great revolutionary. To Mr. Morley, 
 Robespierre is only a man of "profound and pitiable 
 incompetence," a man without a social conception, with- 
 out a policy. He finds a curious study in " the pedant, 
 cursed with the ambition to be a ruler of men." Pie 
 sees in Robespierre "a kind of spinster" in whom 
 "spasmodical courage and timidity ruled by rapid 
 turns," Finally, Robespierre is always and ever pres-
 
 1789. DEFECT OF MORLEY. 481 
 
 ent to Mr. Morley's mind as the man of the Law of 
 Prairial. It is the great defect of Mr. Morley's method 
 that it is entirely lacking in dramatic sympathy. Dra- 
 matic sympathy is one of the most essential qualities, if 
 it is not the most essential quality, for the proper ap- 
 preciation of history. Mr. Morley is curiously without 
 it. If a man does not act under all circumstances as 
 Mr. Morley thinks he ought to have acted, as Mr. Mor- 
 ley thinks that he himself would have acted, then Mr. 
 Morley has no patience with him, and vituperates him 
 from a severe vocabulary. Let us hope that we may at 
 least try to get nearer to the real Robespierre, the man 
 who is neither the god of Bronterre O'Brien, the fiend 
 in human shape of D'Hericault, nor the pedantic " spin- 
 ster" of Mr. John Morley. 
 I. 31
 
 482 THE FKENCII REVOLUTION. CH. XXXI. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXI. 
 
 SOME MINOR CHARACTERS. 
 
 THE two most conspicuous figures in that assembly 
 were, as we have seen, Mirabeau and Equality Orleans. 
 The least conspicuous, most important figure was that 
 of the respectable advocate from Arras, who is looking 
 at the scene with short-sighted blue eyes that peer 
 through spectacles, Maximilien Robespierre. Between 
 these two extremes are clustered the rest of the dramatis 
 personce, the minor characters of the play, some of whom 
 are to play very important parts, some of whom do lit- 
 tle more than carry a banner or bring on a letter. Cer- 
 tain of these we are already familiar with, Mounier, for 
 example, and Malouet, whom we have met at Vizilles ; 
 these are among the important ; others that are of much 
 less importance we shall meet with later on as they rise 
 up to take their cues in the great tragedy. But there 
 are some few, half a dozen or so, whom we may as well 
 become acquainted with at once most notably a cer- 
 tain good-looking young man of grave, reserved bearing 
 who is sitting among the Third Estate. We have heard 
 of him before down in Dauphine ; his name is Barnave. 
 
 Among those present there was no one of nobler 
 nature than the young Barnave. Still very young, the 
 gravity and stillness of his life had marked him out as 
 a man from whom much was to be expected. He was 
 in many ways a typical representative of that semi- 
 pagan philosophy which preceded the Revolution, and
 
 1701-93. BARXAVE. 483 
 
 which modelled itself upon the wisdom of Greece and 
 the composed austerity of Rome. We have seen al- 
 ready the part he played down in Dauphine by the side 
 of Mounier in that minor Revolution which by its ex- 
 ample and its inspiration was so momentous. He knew 
 now that he was appearing on a greater stage ; he longed 
 to play a greater part. We can even read his thoughts 
 in those 'early hours. " My personal position," he has 
 written, " in those first moments resembled that of no 
 one else. While I was too young to dream for a mo- 
 ment of guiding such an august assembly, that very 
 fact gave a greater security to those who aspired to be- 
 come leaders. No one discerned in me a rival ; every- 
 one might detect in me a disciple or a useful ally." But 
 the young Barnave was ambitious. He wished to be 
 neither the disciple nor the subservient ally. He chafed 
 against that title of aide-de-camp of Mounier which pub- 
 lic opinion gave him. As he sat there, gravely stoical 
 of exterior, internally restless, wondering, and aspiring, 
 his eyes must have rested now and again upon the 
 queen's face, rested, and no doubt admired, and read 
 nothing there of her fate and of his. 
 
 Barnave, Mounier's colleague in the Dauphine depu- 
 tation, was born at Grenoble on October 22, 1761. His 
 family were of the middle class ; his father a well-to-do 
 and respected lawyer. From his earliest years the 
 young Barnave was trained to a high morality, to a 
 grave and noble survey of life. His father and mother 
 were Protestants, and Barnave was educated in the 
 Protestant faith ; but his own religious convictions ap- 
 pear to have been finally moulded by a kind of medley 
 of the philosophy of the old classic world and the phi- 
 losophy of his own time. An episode of his childhood 
 had a curious effect upon the direction of his life. His
 
 484 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXXI. 
 
 mother one day took him to the theatre. There was 
 but one box vacant, and Madame Barnave entered it. 
 Presently the director of the theatre came to Madame 
 Barnave, informed her that the place she occupied was 
 wanted for a friend of the governor of the province, the 
 Duke de Tonnerre, and asked her to withdraw. Ma- 
 dame de Barnave, a woman of firm principle, a woman 
 not easily alarmed, refused to go. The director retired 
 and gave place to the officer of the guard, who repeated, 
 peremptorily, the governor's order. Madame de Bar- 
 nave quietly, steadily refused to obey. The officer, in 
 obedience to the governor's order, returned with a rein- 
 forcement of four fusiliers to eject Madame Barnave by 
 force. By this time the theatre was in an uproar. The 
 occupants of the pit, furious at the insult that was being 
 offered to one of the most prominent and most popular 
 citizenesses of Grenoble, were menacing the soldiers, 
 and there was every prospect of the theatre becoming 
 the scene of a serious riot when Barnave, the father, 
 who had been communicated with, arrived. He took 
 his wife by the arm and left the theatre, saying in a 
 loud tone of voice, " I go by the order of the governor." 
 The public immediately espoused the quarrel. It was 
 solemnly agreed that the theatre should be taboo until 
 the offence was atoned for. Taboo accordingly the 
 theatre was, until at last, tired of months of empty 
 benches, the manager came to Madame Barnave, and 
 by his entreaties persuaded her to appear once more at 
 the play-house, and so restore to it its lost credit. The 
 episode made a profound impression upon the mind of 
 the childish Barnave. He saw his mother publicly in- 
 sulted by the representative of the dominant order, the 
 inequality of social life was revealed to him, and he 
 swore his oath of Hannibal that he would never rest
 
 1761-89. THE STILLXESS OF BARNAVE'S YOUTH. 485 
 
 until he had "raised the class to which he belonged 
 from the state of humiliation to which it appeared to 
 be condemned." So the influence of a ludicrous and 
 offensive Duke of Thunder had its share in moulding 
 the destinies of the Revolution. The child in the 
 theatre, shamed and angry at the unwarrantable insult 
 offered to his mother, grew into the man who at Dau- 
 phine laid the axe to the root of the tree, who at Ver- 
 sailles watched it tremble to its fall. 
 
 From father and from mother the young Barnave in- 
 herited a proud, courageous nature. As a lad of sixteen 
 he fought a duel for the sake of a younger brother 
 whom he tenderly loved, and was wounded, well-nigh 
 killed. A little later the brother for whom he had 
 fought so chivalrously died, and Barnave expressed for 
 him a profound regret which breathes much of the an- 
 tique spirit, an Attic sadness of final. separation. "You 
 were one of those whom I had set apart from the world 
 and had placed the closest to my heart. Alas ! you are 
 now not more than a memory, than a passing thought ; 
 the flying leaf, the impalpable shadow, are less attenu- 
 ated than you." These might be the words of some 
 plaintive threnody in the Greek Anthology, in their re- 
 signed despair, in their sombre recognition of the noth- 
 ingness of life. 
 
 The gravity which chai'acterized Barnave set the seal 
 of manhood upon his youth when that youth was still 
 little more than boyhood. He had always sought the 
 companionship, the friendship of those who were older, 
 wiser than himself. The ordinary pleasures of youth 
 seem to have had but few attractions for him. He was 
 serious, with a kind of decorous gravity which might 
 have belonged to some Roman youth; he was ambitious; 
 he was completely master of himself. His thoughts
 
 486 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXXI. 
 
 turned to literature, but it was his father's wish that 
 he should study law, and in obedience to that wish he 
 worked hard and well. Constitutional law attracted 
 him profoundly ; he studied all questions of government 
 with zeal ; in the year 1783 he delivered an address upon 
 the necessity for the division of powers in the body pol- 
 itic. When the struggle began in Dauphine the young 
 Barnave was ripe to take his share in the struggle. 
 
 Near to Mirabeau according to pictured history, not 
 near to him in fact, shows a man of forty years, who 
 was beginning to be talked about, the Abbe Sieyes. 
 Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes, born at Frejus, in the Var, 
 on May 3, 1748, had lived these first forty years of his 
 life without making any profound impression upon the 
 world, or even upon France. At forty a man might, 
 most unreasonably, begin to despair of fame, if he has 
 as yet worn no feather from her wings. It certainly 
 would have been -most unreasonable for Sieyes to de- 
 spair; for, though he knew it not, his life was not half 
 lived yet, and fame was waiting for him at the next 
 turning. Some keen eyes had noted him already ; the 
 keen eyes of the young Barnave especially. It was the 
 earliest dream of the young Barnave during those first 
 days of States-General to bring Mounier and Sieyes into 
 alliance a desperate enterprise, as easy as to solder close 
 impossibilities and to make them kiss. The young Bar- 
 nave was strong and patient, but the strength of the 
 Titans and the patience beloved of the gods could not 
 suffice to bring a Mounier and a Sieyes into union of 
 thought and union of action. During his forty years of 
 pilgrimage he had moulded his own mind, and mapped 
 out, as far as man may, the steerage of his course into 
 the future. Sprung from an honest bourgeois stock, 
 his youth promptings made him eager to enter the mili-
 
 1748-1836. PHILOSOPHIC SIEVES. 487 
 
 tary service, either in the artillery or the engineers. 
 But he was sickly of body, and his family, in his own 
 angry words, "doomed him" to enter the Church. 
 Trained in his childhood by the Jesuits, he was sent 
 when scarcely fifteen years old to Paris to complete his 
 theological studies at Saint-Sulpice. At Saint-Sulpice 
 he worked hard, grappling, with strenuous, inquiring 
 spirit, at all sorts of topics that were not set down for 
 him in the scheme of Saint-Sulpice. In fact, the youth- 
 ful Sieyes was not a persona grata in the eyes of Saint- 
 Sulpice authority. He went in for advanced philosoph- 
 ical speculation, studied profoundly without accepting 
 his Encyclopaedists and his Rousseau, read much and 
 wrote much, and in his writings permitted himself much 
 freedom of opinion. At length Saint-Sulpice, shifting 
 from tacit to pronounced disapproval, suggested plainly 
 to the philosophic Sieyes that there must be on the face 
 of the earth other institutions more suited to his peculiar 
 temper than Saint-Sulpice. At all events, Saint-Sulpice 
 cared to shelter him no more, and Sieyes, acting upon 
 the hint, withdrew himself to the Seminary of Saint- 
 Firmin, and there completed the period necessary for 
 the Sorbonne degree. In time he obtained a canonry 
 in Brittany; later, he was made Vicar-General and Chan- 
 cellor of the diocese of Chartres, and became a member 
 of the Council of the Clergy in France. It was in 1788 
 that he first came conspicuously forward as a politician. 
 His famous pamphlet, " Qu'est-ce que le Tiers 3tat ?" 
 had a tremendous success. " What is the Third Estate ?" 
 asked Sieyes, and answered himself, "Everything." 
 " What has it been till now ?" " Nothing !" " What 
 does it desire to be ?" " Something !" Such a politi- 
 cian was naturally too advanced for the clerical order; 
 they did not elect him to the States-General. But the
 
 488 ME FRENCH REVOLUTION. OIL XXXL 
 
 Paris electors had Sieyes in their eye and in their mind, 
 and when they were electing their deputies they in- 
 cluded him in the number. Some slight discussion was 
 raised when his name was proposed. " How," it was 
 asked, "could a member of the clerical order be proper- 
 ly chosen to represent the Third Estate ?" The point 
 was not pressed. The services Sieyes had rendered and 
 his advanced liberalism were his best advocates, and he 
 was elected the twentieth and last deputy for Paris. 
 
 A grave, respectable man of nearly fifty years of age, 
 and wearing them well, with a certain, steady dogma- 
 tism in his bearing, such was Malouet, who had been 
 many things and done many things in his half-century. 
 Malouet was born at Riom, in Auvergne, on February 
 11, 1740, of a family of humble provincial magistrates. 
 Educated by an uncle, an amiable and accomplished 
 Oratorian, at the College of Juilly, there was at one 
 time a chance that Malouet might have entered the 
 priesthood and indeed he actually wore the ecclesias- 
 tical habit for a season, but only for a season. Then he 
 turned to law and to literature, passed his legal exam- 
 inations, wrote a chilly classical play and a couple of 
 chilly comedies. When he was only eighteen years old 
 he was attached to the embassy of the Count de Merle 
 at Lisbon, and in Lisbon he passed eighteen fruitful 
 months, learning much of the ways of statesmen, and 
 confirming in his young mind that judicial way of esti- 
 mating men and things which w r as all his life his char- 
 acteristic. When the Count de Merle came back to 
 Paris, Malouet was for a time attached in a kind of 
 nominal post to the Marshal de Broglie's army, and saw 
 battles lost and won. In 1763, when peace was de- 
 clared, Malouet's friends found for him another post, 
 newly created, that of Inspector of Embarkations for
 
 1V40-1814. MAtOttfif. 489 
 
 the Colonies. For two years he filled this office at 
 Rochefort, always acquiring tact, always forming pro- 
 found judgments always methodizing his mind and 
 adding to his store of knowledge. By this time De 
 Choiseul had started his mad scheme for an European 
 settlement in Guayana, which was to cost France four- 
 teen thousand men and thirty millions of money. 
 
 Malouet was sent to Saint-Domingo as a sub-commis- 
 sioner, and for five years struggled with an impossible 
 colonial system. By his desperate determination to be 
 impartial he pleased neither the blacks nor the planter 
 class. It was always more or less his lot, says Sainte- 
 Beuve dryly, to please nobody. After five years, Ma- 
 louet, who was now married and well-to-do, found the 
 climate too bad for his health, and he returned to France, 
 where he exercised much influence in the Admiralty 
 departments. After three years he set out again in 
 1776 for French Guayana. Those three years were im- 
 portant years for Malouet. He mingled much in the 
 society of men of letters, was on intimate terms with 
 D'Alembert, Diderot, Condorcet, and the eccentric, dif- 
 fuse Abbe Raynal. By his marriage Malouet gained, 
 through the Chabanons, the happiest insight into the 
 most cultured literary society of the hour, and gained 
 also that certain measure of literary skill which char- 
 acterizes his own writings. He left this pleasant literary 
 life in 1776, to return to Guayana; he passed two years 
 there, and was on his way home when he was captured 
 by an English privateer and carried to England, where 
 he was well treated and not detained long. In 1781 he 
 was made intendant at Toulon, and at Toulon he re- 
 mained for eight years an ideal man of affairs. Here it 
 was that the Abbe Raynal, paying him a flying visit, 
 finally stopped for three years, and might have stopped
 
 FRENCH REVOLUTION. On. XXXI. 
 
 longer, so Malouet declares, if he had wished it. When 
 the elections for the States-General began in 1789, the 
 electors of Riora chose him for their delegate, and he 
 was seated now in the great hall watching his colleagues, 
 feeding his suspicions of Mirabeau. 
 
 A man of whom we have heard already is Joseph 
 Mounier, who handled the agitation in Dauphine so 
 skilfully, and whose name was so influential in the days 
 when the States-General were being elected. His inti- 
 mate interest in England, his knowledge of the English 
 language and of English institutions, seem to have lent 
 something of an English character to his face, which 
 would have seemed almost more appropriate at West- 
 minster than at Versailles. Jean Joseph Mounier was 
 born on November 12, 1758, at Grenoble, in a house in 
 the Grande Rue, where a not altogether accurate tablet 
 now commemorates the fact, and describes him as hav- 
 ing been the President of the National Assembly. His 
 father was a cloth merchant, with a modest fortune and 
 seven children. An uncle, a cure of Rives, took charge 
 of young Joseph's education, and the story goes that 
 the very severity of the cure's ideas of education planted 
 in the boy's mind the ideas of liberty. He went after- 
 wards to the College Royal-Dauphine at Grenoble, where 
 the gravity and stillness of his youth earned him the 
 nickname of Cato. But for all his Cato gravity he did 
 not escape expulsion from his college. He had the au- 
 dacity to write " Nugae sublimes " at the head of a page 
 of metaphysics. This trifling with great things was not 
 to be tolerated; the outraged spirit of Royal-Dauphine 
 could only be pacified by the withdrawal of Mounier. 
 A fanciful legend has it that Mounier, after leaving col- 
 lege, dreamed of the career of arms, and finding that 
 that career was practically closed to one who was not
 
 1747-1814. MOUNIER. DUBOIS-CRANC^. 401 
 
 of noble birth, he swore his oath of Hannibal against 
 the privileges of the noble classes. Anyhow, he took 
 np the law, married under somewhat romantic condi- 
 tions a sister of one of his friends, Philippine Borel ; 
 and in 1783 settled down to what promised to be a 
 peaceful country life. But a chance meeting with some 
 English tourists led to a friendship, to a correspondence, 
 to a study of the English language, of the English con- 
 stitution. Mounier began to follow with impassioned 
 interest the debates in the British House of Commons. 
 He studied the theories of government and its prac- 
 tice in many countries. When the difficulty broke out 
 in Dauphine, Mounier was ready, an experienced and 
 thoughtful man, to come to the front and to take his 
 part. As he sat now in the States-General, he thought 
 that destiny reserved for him still greater deeds. He 
 had to eat the bitter fruit of the tree of disappoint- 
 ment. 
 
 Yonder soldierly man of two - and - forty, with the 
 large body and the wide, smiling eyes, the curled hair 
 and commanding profile, is Dubois-Crance, who is yet 
 to be much heard of. He lives again for us in David's 
 likeness. We see the great neck, powerful under the 
 loose shirt that is opened as if to allow him freer play, 
 the great forehead from which the curling hair goes 
 boldly back, the firm mouth, the large, shapely nose, the 
 resolute chin, the commanding eye. He was evidently a 
 man meant for much. There were plenty named Dubois, 
 or Duboys, in France, according to a biographer of Du- 
 bois-Crance, but this Dubois came from Champagne, 
 and inherited the fine and slightly mocking spirit which 
 was said to be a Champagne birthright. He was an 
 eager, even excitable speaker, foaming up like his na- 
 tive juices, that "foaming grape of Eastern France"
 
 492 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. OH. xxxi. 
 
 which an English poet has celebrated, and settling down 
 speedily again as the sparkling champagne settles down 
 after its first petulant exhilaration. Born at Charle- 
 ville on October 17, 1747, the youngest son of the In- 
 tendant Germain Dubois, De Crance received his educa- 
 tion from the fathers of the Charleville College. Child 
 of a warlike breed, Edmond Louis Alexis Dubois-Crance 
 longed to follow the career of arms. 
 
 When he was little more than fourteen years old he 
 was allowed, by a special dispensation as to age, to en- 
 ter the first company of those musketeers of the king's 
 guard whose name is chiefly dear to the world for the 
 sake of D'Artagnan. In the ranks of the musketeers 
 the young Dubois-Crance learned his trade, endured the 
 badinage of his brother-officers over certain attacks upon 
 the family right to titles of nobility, and slowly formed 
 his character, very much as an armorer might forge 
 the sword he wore at his side. He had a modest fort- 
 une from his father, which was lucky, for, in an age 
 when all advancement went by favor, Dubois-Crance 
 was the last man in the world to advance. He could 
 not and did not curry favor. He made a rich and hap- 
 py marriage in the December of 1772. In 1775, when 
 the musketeers were disbanded, he retired on a pension 
 and with the title of officer. In 1776 he retired to 
 Chalons, busy and happy with the cares of his books, 
 and the joys of his well-stored library, and his literary 
 labors. In 1789 he was chosen deputy of the Third 
 Estate for the bailiwick of Vitry-le-Fran9ois, and came 
 up to Paris in the end of April prepared to act in all 
 obedience to the cahier which set forth the remon- 
 strances, plaints, and griefs of the people of Vitry-le- 
 Franyois a cahier which owed its shape and purport 
 largely to his own inspiration. It has been no less
 
 1747-1814. DUBOIS-CRANC& FATHER GERARD. 493 
 
 happily than truly said of him that while he was at 
 this time Voltairean in mind, deist by conviction, Cath- 
 olic by education, Gallican like Richelieu and all the 
 great Frenchmen of the eighteenth century, Royalist 
 by habitude, Dubois-Crance was a Republican unawares, 
 like all the Constitutionalists, who were anxious to set 
 the nation and the law above the monarchy while still 
 preserving the concord between them. Before all things 
 Dubois-Crance was a patriot the patriot as defined by 
 Brissot de Warville, the man who wishes absolute lib- 
 erty for all men. 
 
 One other interesting figure we may pause for a mo- 
 ment to glance at, a unique figure. 
 
 In Augustin Challamel's curious and interesting book, 
 " Histoire-Musee de la Republique Fran9aise," we get 
 a portrait of Michel Gerard, the only man in the whole 
 Third Estate who insisted upon stumping about Ver- 
 sailles in his native peasant garb. He looks a sturdy, 
 honest fellow, with his solid, shaven face and long hair, 
 and his simple farmer's clothes in their quaint Bas- 
 Breton cut. He was an honest, sturdy fellow, with no 
 great admiration for the bulk of his colleagues, with 
 no overweening admiration for himself. His fifty-two 
 years of life had scarcely prepared him for the things 
 to be, but he faced all things coolly. 
 
 There are many others in that brilliant crowd on 
 whom the mind lingers, men distinguished already, or 
 who shall yet be distinguished. But they will come 
 before us in their due time ; for the moment our eyes, 
 as fanciful spectators of that great scene, have looked 
 upon some of the most important of its players.
 
 494 TUB FREISJ1I REVOLUTION. CH. XXXII. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXII. 
 
 PEOPLE IN THE STREETS. 
 
 LET us believe that it is in our power, after having 
 witnessed in imagination that eventful assembly in the 
 Salle des Menus, to pass out from thence and wander 
 off to Paris, and make acquaintance with one or two 
 persons whom we may assume to have been abroad that 
 day. The people in the Salle des Menus at Versailles 
 were vastly important people, and yet there were some 
 walking in the streets that day who were destined to 
 play the leading parts in the great drama upon which 
 the curtain had just been rung up. 
 
 One of the strange chances of history associates a 
 momentous name with the time. At the very time 
 when the States-General wei'e thus coming together, to 
 mix but not to combine, there appeared in Paris a vol- 
 ume of verse. The volume had no connection with the 
 new political movement : it had no literary success ; it 
 did not deserve any. It may be doubted whether a 
 new " Iliad," a new " Hamlet," or a new " Avare " 
 would have attracted much public attention in the 
 week which saw the assembling of the States-General. 
 And yet the volume had its importance, for it brought 
 before the world, for the first time, a name that was to 
 be heard much of in the succeeding years. It is pos- 
 sible that some of the members of the States-General 
 may have carried a volume of the book in their pockets 
 as they lay at Versailles. Mirabeau may have glanced
 
 1789. "ORGANT." 495 
 
 scornfully at it ; it may have stirred for a moment the 
 spoiled blood of the Duke of Orleans, or been smiled 
 at by the Bishop of Autun. It was called "Organt." 
 It was a coarse, dreary imitation of Voltaire's abomina- 
 ble " Pucelle." It professed offensively to be printed 
 " Au Vatican ;" it bore for preface the simple words, 
 " J'ai vingt ans : j'ai mal fait : je pourrai f aire mieux." 
 Its author's name was Saint-Just. 
 
 " Organt " is now one of the curiosities of the bibli- 
 ophile ; it is scarcely sufficiently well known to be called 
 a curiosity of literature. It is scarce few people pos- 
 sess it ; it is dull few people have read it : even its 
 cold licentiousness is not sufficiently animated to make 
 it attractive to the swillers at the pornographic sty. 
 It is not worth wasting half an hour or half a minute 
 over. There are, indeed, some thick-and-thin admirers 
 of Saint-Just, hagiologists of the mountain, fanatical 
 worshippers to whom all the deeds of their hero are 
 alike heroic, who profess to find grace, charm, humor 
 in this frigid, drear indecency. Critics of such a tem- 
 per would consider that Richelieu was eminently qual- 
 ified for the drama, that Cicero was a fine poet, that 
 Frederick the Great was the literary peer of Voltaire. 
 It might, we should imagine, be possible to admire 
 Saint- Just without of necessity admiring "Organt." 
 But the preface was a kind of pithy " apologia pro 
 vita sua" a memoir in little. He was twenty years 
 of age ; he had done badly, very badly indeed, but 
 there was the stuff for better things within him. It 
 behooves us to be careful, in estimating the career of 
 such a man as Saint-Just, not to let ourselves be led 
 away too much by the actions of his youth. His mo- 
 rality was not of an elevated kind. But youth is not 
 too often moral, and neither the traditions nor the lit-
 
 49G THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXXII. 
 
 erature of the time were very favorable' to a high Ro- 
 man morality. 
 
 There was some excuse to be made for Saint-Just. 
 He was a very young man, of the kind whom Shake- 
 speare's Aristotle sets apart from moral philosophy ; he 
 lived in an age which had a marked tenderness for the 
 lightest, even the loosest of verse. At this very time 
 an English nobleman, Lord Pembroke, then abiding in 
 Venice, could think of no better way of employing his 
 means and leisure and delighting his friends than by 
 reprinting the poems in Venetian dialect of the famous 
 or infamous Giorgio Baffo. As a rare book, as a curi- 
 ous book, Lord Pembroke's Baffo is eagerly sought 
 after by collectors, and its four volumes are seldom 
 met with. To us it is curious because it bears a date 
 destined to be most memorable in history. On the title- 
 page, opposite to the leering, pimpled visage of bad old 
 Baffo, is the superscription, " Cosmopoli, 1789." To the 
 nice observer of mankind there is something peculiarly 
 significant in the juxtaposition of literary events. In 
 the same year the representative of an ancient house 
 a sufficiently typical representative, too, of the Old 
 Order devoted a portion of his princely revenues to 
 the reprinting of an exceedingly profligate, indecent 
 old rhymer ; and a young, daring, penniless democrat, a 
 representative of the New Order in its most advanced 
 form, made his appearance before the world as the au- 
 thor of an indecent poem. Saint-Just and Lord Pem- 
 broke appear before the world in the same volcano year 
 as the patrons of the lewd. 
 
 Over Saint-Just, as over Robespierre, the wildest dis- 
 putes have arisen. The lovers of the fiend-in-human- 
 shape theory have held him up to the execration of the 
 human race : his impassioned admirers have exalted
 
 1767-94 SAINT- JUST. 497 
 
 him, endowed him with the attributes of a young arch- 
 angel. M. Ernest Hamel, the enthusiastic biographer 
 of Robespierre, has written also an enthusiastic biogra- 
 phy of Saint-Just, much of which is devoted to contra- 
 dicting the biography of M. Edouard Fleury, in his work 
 " Saint-Just et la Terreur." M. A. Cuvillier-Fleury, the 
 Academician, sees in Saint-Just only a politician over- 
 estimated by the misfortune of the time, a man of let- 
 ters gone astray in great affairs, a rhetorician playing 
 at the tribune, an artist of phrase, of language, of atti- 
 tude, who might say, like Nero dying under the dagger 
 of Epaphroditus, " Qualis artifex pereo." It is not now 
 the time to estimate the character of Saint-Just. He 
 has hardly stepped upon the political stage; he is, as it 
 were, waiting at the wings to take his call ; let it be 
 enough to see what his life has been up to this time. 
 Louis Antoine de Saint-Just was born on August 25, 
 1767, at Decize, a little village of the Nivernais. His 
 family was old, but plebeian and not noble. His father 
 was a veteran soldier who had earned the cross of Saint- 
 Louis, a signal distinction, which did not, however, bring 
 nobility with it. In 1773 the elder Saint-Just came to 
 Blerancourt; in 1777 he died, leaving a wife who was 
 still young, two little daughters, and Saint-Just, then 
 ten years old. Madame de Saint-Just was devoted to 
 her son, who seems to have cordially returned her affec- 
 tion. From her he got that melancholy which was al- 
 ways characteristic of him; from her that sweetness of 
 manner which even his enemies recognized and made 
 use of to attack him. A little later Saint-Just was sent 
 to Soissons, to the college of Saint-Nicholas, kept by the 
 Oratorians, where he seems to have been unhappy, tur- 
 bulent, even mutinous, but an ardent lover of learning. 
 Plato, Montesquieu, and Rousseau were his favorite 
 I. 32
 
 498 THE FEENCII REVOLUTION. CH. XXXII. 
 
 authors. When he left college, he went for a time to 
 study law at Rheims ; but he did not complete his 
 studies, and he returned to his own village to devote 
 himself to literature. Here he wrote the " Organt," 
 which was published towards the end of 1789, after 
 which Saint - Just himself came to Paris. Whatever 
 opinion may be formed about the character of Saint- 
 Just, it would be difficult to differ about the charm of 
 his personal appearance. If the portrait given by M. 
 Hamel, from the pastel belonging to Madame Philippe 
 le Bas, be faithful, he had a face of singular beauty, 
 with an almost feminine charm of outline and an air of 
 melancholy sweetness. The large, fine eyes seem full 
 of tenderness; the mouth is delicately shaped; the thick 
 hair, parted in the middle and coming low over the 
 forehead, frames the almost girlish comeliness of the 
 face in its mass. It is certainly a most attractive face. 
 
 There was a man in Paris at this time who was des- 
 tined to be even more wildly adored in his time, and 
 even more wildly execrated by posterity, than Saint- 
 Just, or even than Robespierre. Probably no name, 
 not even Nero's, suggests to the unreflecting mind more 
 images of horror than the name of Marat. It is a kind 
 of synonyme for insane crime, for the mad passion for 
 blood, for mere murderous delirium. What we said of 
 Saint- Just we must say again for Marat: the time has 
 not come for us to attempt an estimate of his character. 
 He, too, waits his chance to make an appearance in the 
 great drama. What it behooves us to do is to learn 
 what the man's way of life had been until this year, in 
 which for the fii'st time he thrust himself into the great 
 game of politics. 
 
 Jean Paul Marat was born on May 24, 1743, as well 
 as can be ascertained, at Boudry in Neufchatel, His
 
 1743-93. MARAT. 499 
 
 father was Jean Paul Marat, of Cagliari in Sardinia ; 
 his mother was Louise Cabrol, of Geneva. He was for- 
 tunate enough we have it on the evidence of his own 
 record to receive a good and careful education at 
 home. Part of his description of his early youth reads 
 like a similar statement made by a very different man, 
 Marcus Aurelius Antoninus : " J'ai eu 1'avantage de 
 recevoir une education tres soignee dans la maison pater- 
 nelle, d'echapper a toutes les habitudes vicieuses de 
 1'enfance qui enervent et degradent 1'homme, d'eviter 
 tous les ecarts de la jeunesse et d'arriver a la virilite 
 sans m'etre jamais abandonne a la fougue des passions : 
 j'etais vierge a vingt-et-un ans." We learn also from 
 Marat's own words that his health was very feeble in 
 his early years, that he had none of the petulance nor 
 the playfulness of ordinary children. Even those who 
 are entertained, with Mr. George Henry Lewes, by think- 
 ing of Robespierre as a gambolling infant, would find 
 it hard to think of Marat as a playful child. He was 
 docile and industrious ; his schoolmasters could always, 
 he says, manage him by kindness. Once a master beat 
 him, and anger at an unjust humiliation filled the young 
 Marat with a resolute determination never to return to 
 that master's tuition. For two days he refused food 
 rather than obey; then when his parents, in an attempt 
 to regain their compromised authority, locked him in 
 his room, he flung himself from the open window into 
 the street, and carried, in consequence, a scar on his 
 forehead for life. 
 
 He was always consumed by a thirst for glory, to 
 make a great name, to be famous somehow, some way, 
 but at all events to be famous. The various phases 
 which this thirst for fame took are curious enough. 
 When he was five years old his ambition contented it-
 
 500 TUB FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXXII. 
 
 self with the modest desire to be a schoolmaster; at 
 fifteen he had augmented his desires, and longed to be 
 a professor; at eighteen he wished to be an author; at 
 twenty to be a creative genius. "I was reflective at 
 fifteen," he says, " an observer at eighteen, a thinker at 
 twenty. From the age of ten I contracted the habit of 
 the studious life ; the labor of the mind became for me 
 a veritable necessity, even in my illnesses, and I found 
 my dearest pleasures in meditation. Such Nature made 
 me, Nature and the teachings of my childhood; circum- 
 stances and my reflections have done the rest." Marat 
 seems to have been much attached to his mother, and 
 her death while he was still young was a deep grief to 
 him. His father, a medical man of ability, seems to 
 have had little of the softer parts of life. He wished 
 his son to be a learned man, and in a great degree he 
 had his wish. 
 
 At the age of sixteen Marat found himself well pre- 
 pared for the struggle of life. His mother was dead ; 
 he felt that he should be no longer a burden on his fa- 
 ther, on his younger brother and two sisters. He went 
 out upon the world like the heroes of the fairy stories, 
 and drifted all over the greater part of Europe. He 
 lived two years in Bordeaux, ten in London, one year in 
 Dublin, one year at the Hague, Utrecht, and Amster- 
 dam, nineteen in Paris. He acquired in the course of 
 these varying habitations a large number of languages 
 English, Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch, as well as 
 Greek and Latin and his scientific knowledge was ex- 
 tensive and profound. He sighed and sought for liter- 
 ary glory. In 1775 appeared at Amsterdam his book 
 on " Man, and the Principles and Laws of the Influence 
 of the Soul upon the Body, and the Body on the Soul." 
 An English version had come out two years earlier.
 
 1775-89. MARAT'S WRITINGS. 501 
 
 The book is forgotten now; we may doubt if here and 
 there half a dozen stray admirers of Marat read it in 
 the days that pass ; it made no profound mark upon its 
 time. But it was attacked by Voltaire in 1776, which 
 was in itself a kind of immortality. Camille Desmou- 
 lins and Marat shall yet quarrel over the sneers from 
 Ferney. Marat was not, however, the kind of man to 
 be easily abashed, even by a Voltaire. He kept on 
 writing books books on light and electricity, essays 
 on optics and translations of Newton's "Optics," pam- 
 phlets on the balloon catastrophe of June, 1785, which 
 caused the death of the aeronauts Pilatre de Rosier and 
 Romain. It seems certain that he was a sincere and 
 eager man of science, that he earned a fairly distin- 
 guished name, that he interested Franklin, and that he 
 was desperately in earnest about his theories. His last 
 scientific book, published in 1788, on "Light and Op- 
 tics," bore the enthusiastic epigraph, " They will sur- 
 vive in spite of wind and wave." There lies before the 
 curious, too, a romance given to the world by the bib- 
 liophile Jacob, dealing with the "Adventures of the 
 young Count de Potowski," which is said to be by 
 Marat, and which is accepted as Marat's by his devoted 
 biographer, Alfred Bougeart. Veritable or not, it does 
 not rank its author among the great romancists of the 
 earth. 
 
 There was busy work before the Gallicized child of 
 the Cagliari doctor. Good-bye to proposals to estab- 
 lish the existence of a nervous fluid as the true vehicle 
 of union between soul and body; good-bye to attacks 
 upon Helvetius ; good-bye to honorary membership, for 
 " Chains of Slavery" literature, of patriotic societies of 
 Carlisle, Berwick, and Newcastle; good-bye to that 
 illustrious position of brevet-physician to the guards of
 
 502 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. On. XXXII. 
 
 the Count d'Artois, which has oddly earned him, from 
 Carlyle and others, the grotesque title of a horse-leech. 
 Marat now became the impassioned political pamphlet- 
 eer. The M.D. of St. Andrew's University, the man 
 of science whose rejection by the Academy aroused an- 
 gry indignation in Goethe, the disciple in the "Plan 
 de Legislation Criminelle " of Beccaria, was to begin his 
 strange career of fame and infamy as the author of the 
 "Offrande a la Patrie" in 1788, and the flood of little 
 pamphlets which begot the "Ami du Peuple" in 1789. 
 As we watch him here, on the threshold of his new 
 career, we must at least admit that there never was a 
 man in more deadly earnest; that there never was a man, 
 in his wild way, more upright or more sincere. It is 
 pleasant to read, it is pleasant to be able to cordially 
 endorse, the very sane words of an English writer in 
 the " Encyclopaedia Britannica : " " Whatever his polit- 
 ical ideas, two things shine clearly out of the mass of 
 prejudice which has shrouded the name of Marat that 
 he was a man of great attainments and acknowledged 
 position, who sacrificed fortune, health, life itself, to his 
 convictions ; and that he was no ' bete feroce? no fac- 
 tious demagogue, but a man, and a humane man too, 
 who could not keep his head cool in stirring times, who 
 was rendered suspicious by constant persecution, and 
 who has been regarded as a personification of murder 
 because he published every thought in his mind, while 
 others only vented their anger and displayed their sus- 
 picions in spoken words." We shall have much to do 
 with Marat : it is very well to keep these temperate 
 thoughts and words in mind during the course of our 
 relations with him. Here, however, before we grow 
 into too grim and deep a knowledge of the man, we 
 may as well put on record the profound regret of all
 
 1759-94. DAXTON. 503 
 
 bibliophiles that Marat's little "Essay on Gleets," pub- 
 lished in London in 1/75 for the "ridiculously small 
 sum" of eighteenpence, is absolutely unfindable gone 
 like the "snows of yester-year;" gone, perhaps, to the 
 moon where, according to Ariosto, all things lost on 
 earth do go but certainly gone; gone as if it had never 
 been. That pamphlet was fourteen years old now in 
 the year 1789, and Marat had other and more moment- 
 ous matters to think of. 
 
 There was all this time a man at the Paris bar who 
 took no part in the opening of the play, but who was 
 yet to act a leading part in the performance, Georges 
 Jacques Danton. The business yet to be of the Bas- 
 tille, which brought into juxtaposition such men as Ma- 
 rat and Marceau, Santerre and Thuriot de la Rosiere, 
 did not bring forward the name of Danton. The Cor- 
 deliers' club, that centre and hotbed of all that was most 
 extreme in the revolutionary movement, had not yet 
 made Danton its chief and illustrious. But there was 
 Danton in this Paris of 1789, a man of thirty summers, 
 working away at his profession, and watching every- 
 thing that happened with his keen, wide eyes. 
 
 Georges Jacques Danton was born at Arcis-sur-Aube 
 on August 26, 1759. His father, Jacques Danton, pro- 
 cureur in the bailiwick of Arcis-sur-Aube, died in 1762, 
 when Georges Danton was three years old, leaving a 
 widow, who married again, and who lived till the Octo- 
 ber of 1813. He left also two girls and a boy. Danton 
 grew up a strong, sturdy, largely made country boy. 
 Never very comely, a series of mishaps left their suc- 
 cessive marks upon his massive features. He was tossed 
 by a bull in his boyhood, and one of the horns of the 
 bull gave him a hare-lip for life. This disagi'eeable 
 experience, instead of deterring him from frequenting
 
 504 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXXII. 
 
 the society of bulls, seemed only to have tarred him on 
 to becoming a sort of amateur bull- fighter ; and on a 
 second occasion he got into an argument with a bull, 
 which ended in his being badly gored in the face, and 
 his nose being flattened and nearly destroyed. After- 
 wards he got into a quarrel with a savage boar, which 
 tusked him badly. Later still he caught the small-pox, 
 and the disease still further disfigured his countenance. 
 But, in spite of all these misfortunes, there was a com- 
 manding quality and rugged charm about his face which 
 generally commended it to those with whom he came in 
 contact. He was sent to school at Troyes, and w r hile 
 there in 1775, hearing of the approaching consecration 
 of Louis XVI., he formed an unconquerable desire to 
 see how kings were made. He borrowed some money 
 from his schoolfellows, ran away from school by scaling 
 the wall, walked the whole twenty-eight leagues, and saw 
 the consecration. It did not apparently impress him in 
 the least, and when he came back to school he made very 
 merry over the solemn pomp of king-making, which he 
 had been at such pains to witness. There is hardly a 
 more interesting episode in history than this of the wild 
 country lad of sixteen standing in that cathedral at 
 Rheims, and watching with ironical attentiveness the 
 making of a king. Did the scene come back to him, 
 we may wonder, in later years, when he was to play so 
 prominent a part in undoing what that ceremony did ? 
 His relatives had some idea of his adopting the clerical 
 calling; but the proposal did not appeal to the young 
 Danton. He decided for the law, came to Paris, entered 
 a lawyer's office somewhere about 1779. He worked 
 hard at the law, and tasted poverty for some years. In 
 1787 he married Antoinette Gabrielle Charpentier, the 
 pretty and well-endowed daughter of M. Charpentier,
 
 1762-94. AtfDRfi CHtfXIER. 505 
 
 who kept the Cafe de 1'Ecole in the Palais Royal. Such 
 was the record of the man who now, as advocate in 
 Paris, watched what was going on and waited for his 
 opportunity. 
 
 One future actor in the great play, one future victim 
 of la Sainte Guillotine, followed eagerly all that is going 
 on, but followed it sadly, from afar, like Ovid in Pontus. 
 A picturesque young poet was over in England, in Lon- 
 don, a secretary in the French Legation. He was only 
 twenty -seven years old, but already his unpublished 
 poems had made the name of Andre Cheni'er decently 
 illustrious in circles of the politely lettered ; his passion 
 for Madame de Bonneuil was familiar gossip to the so- 
 cially scandalous. He was the most Grecian of young 
 men : talked, thought, wrote nothing but Sappho, Greek 
 Anthology, and Theocritus. He was born, appropriately 
 enough, in Constantinople, for his Greek spirit was more 
 Byzantine than Athenian. He was very miserable at 
 being away from Paris, and longed to return. Patience, 
 young Franco- Anglo-Hellene. You will return too soon : 
 there is a day waiting you, a July 25, 1794, when you 
 will ride with a couple of counts, your fellow - poet 
 Roucher, and that most famous of adventurers, Baron 
 Trenck, on their and your last adventure. But the 
 young man saw nothing of all this through the dusty 
 London summer, as he drove his diplomatic pen and 
 dreamed of Paris and the blue Sicilian sea and the 
 brown -limbed shepherds of Theocritus. His brother 
 was in Paris, the eager, strenuous dramatist and eager, 
 strenuous republican politician, Marie Joseph. We shall 
 meet with both again. 
 
 One other figure we may perhaps note. It is that of 
 a man of some forty-three years of age ; a man with a 
 peaked face, a large, hard mouth, and large, hard eyes.
 
 506 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXXII. 
 
 He was a Picard. He had been educated in Paris, and 
 had known what it was to be poor. He had been a pro- 
 cureur at the chatelet, and had sold his office. He had 
 been a widower, and had recently married again a wife 
 who was devoted to him. He had many children. He had 
 written some enthusiastic verses in praise of Louis XVI. 
 His name was Antoine Quentin Fouquier-Tinville.
 
 1*789. M. NECKER SINGS OUT OF TUNE. 60? 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIII. 
 
 THE OVERTURE ENDS. 
 
 NECKER himself read out the recapitulation of this 
 long discourse, and stimulated a little the flagging spir- 
 its of a wearied assembly. They might well be excused 
 for feeling a certain weariness. The opening speech of 
 the Keeper of the Seals had not been over-lengthy, but 
 it had been practically inaudible, as M. de Barentin's 
 voice was weak. The financial statement of M. Necker 
 was exceedingly long. It occupies thirty closely printed 
 columns of the Hfoniteur, and it depressed its audience. 
 It was, of course, could good M. Necker only have known 
 it, so much waste time ; as well might a philosopher at- 
 tempt to stay the progress of a conflagration by reading 
 a paper on the inflammable nature of tinder. However, 
 useful or useless, the speech did come to an end, like all 
 things, French monarchies and French revolutions in- 
 cluded ; Necker made his bow, papers were rolled up, 
 the king rose up and departed, with his glittering court 
 about him, amid shouts of " Vive le roi !" from the as- 
 sembly ; shouts which we may imagine to have come 
 with greater volume of enthusiasm from the noble and 
 clerical throats than from the throats of the Third Es- 
 tate. It was half-past four of the May day, and the 
 Versailles streets were still light, when the great States- 
 General, for the first time brought together, spread itself 
 abroad in all directions, chiefly needing refreshment. 
 Hunger is imperative, even upon saviours of society,
 
 608 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXXIII. 
 
 whether reactionary or revolutionary, and we need 
 scarcely doubt that the most prominent thought in all 
 men's minds, after that lengthy speech of Necker, which 
 M. Broussonet, Perpetual President of the Society of 
 Agriculture, prosed out, was dinner. But over all those 
 dinners that day, whether in the stately palace or the 
 humblest lodging in which the modest member of the 
 Third Estate found himself, in the inn which sheltered 
 the provincial priest of narrow purse, or in the chateau 
 where one noble offered princely hospitality to another, 
 nothing was talked about but that day's work and that 
 day's congress. But no one of them all, not Mirabeau 
 the Magnificent, nor loyal Cazales, nor scheming Tal- 
 leyrand-Perigord, nor young Roman Barnave, nor ob- 
 scure, unnoticed Robespierre, had any dream of the 
 tragic character of the drama to which they had just 
 played the overture. Nor did they dream of the rapid- 
 ity with which the ball was to be set rolling. Louis 
 XVI., going to sleep that night, would have scarcely 
 slept, or wo.uld have dreamed bad dreams, if he could 
 have guessed that little royal document, to be made 
 public on the morrow, accompanied by a little dexter- 
 ous royal manipulation of the great triune puzzle of the 
 States - General, would be the first little insignificant 
 move which should end for him and so many of his in 
 the Place de la Greve. If we were superstitious, we 
 should like to imagine the ghosts of the great kings of 
 the House of Capet crowding into the royal room that 
 night, gazing in mute despair upon their most luckless 
 descendant and vanishing, ominous, into air. But Louis, 
 who recorded many things in his strange diary, has not, 
 disappointingly, recorded the dreams that visited his 
 tired brain that night. 
 
 Necker's speech was, naturally enough, not regarded
 
 1789. OPENING OF THE STATES-GENERAL. 509 
 
 with universal favor. It seemed curiously unworthy of 
 the great occasion in the eyes of the democratic leaders. 
 Here was an historical assembly called together from all 
 the ends of France, and Necker could find nothing more 
 momentous to offer it than a dreary discussion upon the 
 finances. The finance question was important, but not 
 the most important, to men who were eager to reform 
 the Constitution, to men who carried their new zeal so 
 far that they thought Louis XVI. should have, as it 
 were, consecrated the occasion by resigning his royal 
 authority, and receiving it again as the free gift of a 
 free people. 
 
 The chief immediate effect of the great opening of 
 the States-General was to spread abroad a profound 
 sense of disquiet. Punctilious deputies, irritated by 
 the petty humiliations inflicted on the Third Estate by 
 De Breze and his kind, suspected that these slights were 
 but the marks of graver purposes. Undoubtedly there 
 was much to justify suspicion of sinister intentions on 
 the part of the court. There were mysterious move- 
 ments and massing of troops. A battalion of Swiss and 
 two new regiments, the Royal-Cravate and the Burgun- 
 dian Cavalry, had just entered Paris, and rumors came 
 thickly of fresh troops marching on the capital. Was 
 not all this a covert, but distinct, menace to democratic 
 Paris? was not the court preparing to manipulate a 
 troublesome Third Estate by the strong hand ?
 
 510 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. Cu. XXXI V. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIV. 
 
 THE EIGHT WEEKS. 
 
 ON the very day after the opening of the States- 
 General the strain was felt and the struggle began. 
 By posted placard, by heraldic proclamation, the king 
 had made it known to his three orders that they were 
 to assemble again at nine of the clock on the morning 
 of May 6. At the appointed hour, therefore, the depu- 
 ties of the Third Estate presented themselves duly at 
 the Great Hall, only to find that they had the hall all 
 to themselves. The place looked a little lugubrious, a 
 little vacant and desolate. There was not the brilliant 
 crowd of yesterday ; there was not the courtly color 
 and glitter. The six hundred deputies of the Third 
 Estate did not seem a great body in the vast hall ; 
 their uniform attire, which aroused the wrath of Mira- 
 beau, showed sombrely, almost funereally. The two 
 other orders had not arrived, did not arrive : it was 
 soon obvious that they were not going to arrive. It 
 presently came to the knowledge of the expectant 
 Third Estate, naturally suspicious and wisely watchful, 
 that the two other orders were at that present moment 
 abiding in special halls of their own, and busily engaged 
 in verifying their powers by themselves. The deputies 
 of the Third Estate were ready at once to proclaim 
 their opposition to any such process. To them, or at 
 least to the wisest among them, it seemed vital that the 
 States-General should be regarded as a composite body;
 
 1789. WHAT IS TO BE DONE? 511 
 
 that if separate verification of powers were admitted, 
 the separate vote by orders might come to be admitted 
 too, and the most important privilege for which they 
 had struggled be thus whistled down the wind. It 
 must have been a curious sight, that great hall with its 
 six hundred sober - habited deputies, excited, angry, 
 courageous, determined not to concede any of the 
 points for which the will of the people had called them 
 into existence, yet anxious too, naturally enough, not 
 to proceed too fast, not to be premature, not to be rash 
 nor impolitic. 
 
 After waiting for some time without any sign of the 
 advent of either the nobility or the clergy, it became 
 obvious that the assembled deputies ought to do some- 
 thing. The only question was, What was best to do ? 
 The first thing and the simplest seemed to be to intro- 
 duce some element of order into their excited, murmur- 
 ous ranks. The oldest deputy present, the father, as we 
 may say, of the Third Estate, M. Leroux, whilom mayor 
 of the bailiwick of Amiens, was called upon by some 
 process of popular acclaim to maintain order among his 
 children. They were not yet, with their unverified 
 powers, a properly constituted body ; but, like all hu- 
 man societies, they could, of their own will, establish a 
 sort of social comity among themselves. This social 
 comity M. Leroux was to preserve, aided in his efforts 
 by the six oldest deputies next in age to himself. So 
 much having been resolved upon, the next matter in 
 hand was to decide upon what step the semi-coherent 
 Third Estate should now take. 
 
 The first recorded speech that rises clearly out of 
 the unexpected chaos is that of Malouet. Malouet's 
 proposition was to send a deputation from the Third 
 Estate to the two other orders, inviting them to join
 
 512 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXXIV. 
 
 their colleagues in the common hall. Mounier argued 
 the point. He was more prudent, more deliberate ; 
 he thought nothing was lost by sitting still. It may be, 
 he suggested, that the other orders are at the very mo- 
 ment deliberating upon some such proposition; it would 
 be, therefore, better to wait and let the other orders 
 speak. A great deal of discussion followed, which we 
 should like to hear every word of that first fluctuant 
 democratic assembly would be curiously interesting 
 but which is lost forever to human ears. In the end it 
 was decided that for the time being the best possible 
 action was inaction : the Third Estate resolved to sit 
 still and do nothing. With a quaint formal logic they 
 argued that, as their powers were not then verified, 
 they were still only a mere aggregation of individuals 
 come together to form the States-General, but as yet 
 unformed. They could they admitted this much 
 discuss things amicably among themselves, but in them- 
 selves they recognized no power whatever to act to, 
 as a body, do anything whatever. Characteristically 
 they pushed their logic so fine that they refused even 
 to open any of the many letters addressed to the Third 
 Estate. As they could, however, discuss " amicably," 
 they discussed the other orders, and agreed that these 
 should have time to reflect upon the unwisdom of the 
 course they were pursuing. In the midst of all this, at 
 about half-past two, a deputy from Dauphine he re- 
 mains nameless, a mystery came in with the news that 
 the two other orders had resolved upon the separate 
 verification of their powers. Thereupon the sitting, 
 such as it was for in the eyes of logical democracy an 
 unorganized body could hardly even sit came to an 
 end, and its units parted, perplexed but patient, to meet 
 a<rain on the morrow at nine of the clock.
 
 1789. THE GREAT RENUNCIATION. 513 
 
 Meanwhile the clergy and the nobility had in their 
 own insane way been pretty busy. The clergy, with 
 the Cardinal de la Rochefoucauld for provisional presi- 
 dent, had decided, after a brisk debate, that their pow- 
 ers should be verified within the order. One hundred 
 and thirty-three votes w r ere given for this decision as 
 against one hundred and fourteen opposed ; not much 
 of a majority, after all. The majority was greater among 
 the nobles, where the debate was even keener. Under 
 the provisional presidentship of M. de Montboissier, the 
 oldest noble present, the question whether the verifica- 
 tion should be special or general was fought out. The 
 advocates of special verification argued that the depu- 
 ties elected in the noble order should submit their pow- 
 ers to commissioners chosen from that order. They 
 held that the nobility could not recognize the legiti- 
 macy of the powers of the members of the other orders, 
 and could not, therefore, submit their own powers to 
 them ; that the order of nobility was alone qualified to 
 investigate the titles by which their deputies claimed 
 to be included ; and, finally, that it really was not worth 
 while to waste time about the matter, as the main thing 
 was to get verified somehow, and so proceed to busi- 
 ness. This last argument was sufficiently specious, but 
 it did not delude the democratically minded nobility. 
 Lafayette, the Duke de Liancourt, the Vicompte de 
 Castellane, gallant Count Crillon from Beauvais, the 
 deputies of Dauphine, of Aix in Provence, of Amont, 
 and some others, to the number all told of forty-seven 
 deputies, argued that it was the right of the States- 
 General, as composed of all three orders, to verify the 
 powers through commissioners of the three orders, see- 
 ing that the elections had been sanctioned by the three 
 orders of each district, and that the deputies had taken 
 I. 33
 
 514 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXXI V. 
 
 the oath in presence of the three orders. But their 
 arguments were thrown away ; the democratic forty- 
 seven were out-voted by one hundred and eighty-eight 
 nobles, blindly anxious to invite collision and accelerate 
 catastrophe. In accordance with the decision of the 
 majority, twelve of the oldest nobles were nominated 
 as commissioners to verify the powers of the order. 
 Thereafter, as M. Freteau urged that no deliberation 
 should take place until the election of the deputies of 
 Paris, the nobles raised their sitting and adjourned to 
 the following Monday, under the impression, as far as 
 the triumphant majority were concerned, that they had 
 done an exceedingly good day's work. Of that fact, 
 Lafayette and the rest of the protesting forty-seven 
 were, we may well imagine, less serenely assured. 
 
 On the following day, Thursday, May 7, Malouet re- 
 peated his proposition of the previous sitting. He 
 thought that they ought to allow nothing to delay the 
 main purpose for which they were called together. 
 They might have to reproach themselves bitterly if any 
 disaster followed upon their inaction. In any case, no 
 harm could come of his proposal. The mere invitation 
 to the two other orders to come and join them could 
 not possibly, as some seemed to fear, constitute them 
 into an organized body. It would only show their ea- 
 gerness to begin work, and would throw the blame of 
 delay upon the clergy and the nobility. Then, for the 
 first time that we have any knowledge of, the lion voice 
 of Mirabeau was lifted in the debate. Mirabeau was 
 altogether opposed to Malouet's suggestion. He held 
 that the Third Estate should persist in its policy of mas- 
 terly inactivity. It did not exist as an organized order, 
 and had not, therefore, the right to send any deputa- 
 tion. His words, we may imagine, were fierce, vehe-
 
 1789. IN A CASUAL WAY. 515 
 
 merit, eager ; it is tantalizing to have them only pre- 
 served in the dry and dusty brevity of the Moniteur. 
 Mounier endeavored to steer a medium course between 
 the anxiety of Malouet and the indignation of Mirabeau. 
 He was as opposed as the latter to any formal deputa- 
 tion ; he was as unwilling as the former to risk any 
 danger by unnecessary delay. His advice, therefore, 
 was at least ingenious. The Third Estate, not being 
 organized, could not formally address itself to either of 
 the two other orders. But and here the ingenious 
 Mounier revealed his tact there was nothing whatever 
 to prevent individual deputies of the Third Estate from 
 lounging, in a casual way, into the rooms where the 
 other orders were assembled, and suggesting, still in 
 a casual way, that it would be on the whole rather a 
 good thing if the two orders were to join themselves 
 to the third order, as the king had ordered. These 
 casual deputies might further intimate, still in that 
 ingenious casual way which committed them to noth- 
 ing, that the deputies of the Third Estate would do 
 nothing, and intended to do nothing, until the two other 
 orders joined them. Mourner's plan took the fancy of 
 his hearers and was adopted by an immense majority. 
 Twelve members were chosen how, we are not in- 
 formed and these twelve went, in their casual way, 
 to have a look in upon the clergy and the nobility. 
 Presently the twelve deputies came back again with 
 the results of their casual embassy. They had found 
 the room of the nobility deserted, except for its twelve 
 commissioners of verification, who informed their visit- 
 ors that the nobles would not meet again till the Mon- 
 day. The clergy they had found in full session, and 
 the clergy had replied that they would think over the 
 proposition made by the Third Estate. There was
 
 516 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXXIV. 
 
 nothing for the Third Estate to do now but to wait a 
 bit. Wait they accordingly did, and in about an hour 
 the Bishops of Montpellier and of Orange, with four 
 other ecclesiastics, came into the hall, where we may 
 assume that their entry created no small sensation. 
 
 The clerical deputation had not much to suggest, how- 
 ever. All that they had to offer was the proposal that 
 each of the three orders should nominate commissioners 
 who might deliberate together as to whether the powers 
 of the three orders should be verified in common or not. 
 Having discharged themselves of their mission, the bish- 
 ops and their four followers withdrew. A confused, 
 vehement debate sprang up on the proposal. The de- 
 bate came to nothing. The matter was too important 
 for hasty, ill-judged decision, and the sitting came to 
 an end, as it had begun, in doubt, but also in determina- 
 tion not to give in. 
 
 That same May 7 was an eventful day for other rea- 
 sons. It saw a deadly blow struck and parried at 
 the liberty of the press. On the previous day the 
 king's Council of State had issued an order calling at- 
 tention to the issue of periodicals which had not re- 
 ceived the usual legal permission, and declaring that the 
 existing law would be enforced against the publishers 
 of all such periodicals. The next day made plain the 
 meaning of this rescript. Another order of the Council 
 of State appeared, formally suppressing the periodical 
 entitled " iStats Generaux," of which the first number, 
 dated from Versailles, May 2, had already appeared. 
 The king, according to this precious Order of Council, 
 had felt himself bound to mark particularly his disap- 
 proval of a work as condemnable in its nature as it was 
 reprehensible in its form. His majesty, therefore, dis- 
 covering that this print was "injurious, and bearing,
 
 1789. SUPPRESSION AND RESISTANCE. 517 
 
 under the appearance of liberty, all the characteristics 
 of license," ordered its immediate and comprehensive 
 suppression. It was typical of the unlucky court and 
 the unlucky king that such a time should have been 
 chosen to play so desperate a game, and that the selected 
 victim should have been a Mirabeau should have been 
 the Mirabeau. Mirabeau was the author of the " ]&tats 
 Generaux;" Mirabeau was not the kind of man to be 
 daunted by the royal fulmination. His letter to his 
 constituents concerning this edict is a masterpiece of 
 eloquent indignation. " It is true, then," he says, " that, 
 instead of enfranchising the nation, they seek only to 
 rivet its chains; it is in the face of the assembled na- 
 tions that they dare to produce these Aulic decrees." 
 But Mirabeau was not to be dismayed, not to be in- 
 timidated. He was careful to exonerate the king from 
 complicity in the ill-advised decrees. It was not the 
 monarch who was culpable, but his audacious ministers 
 who had presumed to affix the royal seal to their crimi- 
 nal edicts, and who, while they tolerated and fostered 
 the lying prints of the Court party, sought to destroy 
 with an antique prerogative the right of the deputies of 
 the nation to make known to their constituents the do- 
 ings of the States-General. Mirabeau announced, as it 
 might have been expected that he would announce, that 
 he intended to continue the condemned publication, and 
 continue it he did under the title of "Lettres a mes 
 Commettants." So much the court gained by their 
 move. Nay, they gained more than this, and worse for 
 them. 
 
 The assembly of the electors of Paris was still sitting, 
 working at its cahiers, when the news of the royal edict 
 reached them on this very May 7, while the clergy and 
 the Commons were exchanging ideas. The Elective
 
 518 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXXIV. 
 
 Assembly immediately interrupted its task to formulate 
 a solemn protest against the decree of the Council. For 
 the first time Paris interfered in public affairs, and it 
 made a good beginning. From that moment the free- 
 dom of the press was assured in France. The Court 
 party in their desperate game had made a rash move, 
 and lost heavily at a moment when they could not even 
 afford to lose lightly. The mad attempt to conceal from 
 the nation at large what was going on in the States- 
 General that represented it, or only to let it know as 
 much as it seemed good to the Court party to allow to 
 filter through the courtly prints, was completely check- 
 mated. From that hour the whole population of France 
 was almost as much in touch with the States-General, or 
 rather with the Third Estate, as Paris was itself. For 
 Paris, for the people, lived now in close and daily com- 
 munion with the Third Estate. Into the great Salle des 
 Menus, where the Third Estate daily collected together, 
 the populace poured daily, first come first served, to 
 listen to what the Third Estate said, to witness what 
 the Third Estate did. Paris was in feverish, electric 
 communication with Versailles through the endless pro- 
 cession of comers and goers who, as it were, linked the 
 two centres together. 
 
 Every day more and more the course of events was 
 dividing the State into two parties, the party which was 
 represented by the Third Estate, and the party which 
 was represented by the king, or rather by the court. 
 The differences which divided the court itself were 
 being obliterated in the face of what the court regarded 
 as the common danger represented by the attitude of 
 the Third Estate. The court had for its prop the sup- 
 port of the majority at least of the two privileged or- 
 ders. It had also, or thought that it had, the support
 
 1789. DEATH OF M. IIJfiLIAUD. 
 
 519 
 
 of the troops it was massing around Paris and Ver- 
 sailles. The Third Estate, knowing itself also to be 
 menaced by this massing of troops, had on its side only 
 the popular press and the voice of public opinion. But 
 every day as it went by gave the members of the Third 
 Estate clearer assurance that the people were with them. 
 They were shown so much by the daily crowds who 
 thronged from Paris to witness their debates. They 
 were shown so much by eager, excited Paris, holding its 
 own kind of irregular National Assembly in the gardens 
 of the Palais Royal. There day after day the crowd 
 grew greater, and the news from Versailles was more 
 eagerly sought, more and more excitedly canvassed. 
 They knew so much in the action of the Elective As- 
 sembly of Paris, which swelled their number with demo- 
 cratic deputies, and which so boldly fought for them the 
 battle of the freedom of the press. 
 
 On Friday, May 8, the Nobles did not meet at all. 
 The clergy met to 'do little or nothing. The Third 
 Estate assembled to discuss some system of police, some 
 organization for its anomalous position. The debate 
 was interrupted by the arrival of the Bishop of Mans 
 and four cures of his diocese with the news of the death 
 of M. Heliaud, deputy of the Commons of that province, 
 and with the request that the Third Estate would assist 
 at the interment that night. He had got "out of the 
 scrape of living," perhaps a little too soon. The next 
 day, Saturday, May 9, the Third Estate, continuing its 
 debate of the previous day, resolved for the present to 
 adopt no elaborate regulations, but to leave the order of 
 the assembly provisionally in the hands of their dean. 
 The clergy busied themselves with the nominations of 
 its commissioners and the composition of the mooted 
 conciliatory deputation. The nobles did not meet at
 
 520 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXXI?. 
 
 all. Sunday intervened, a Sunday that must have been 
 tremulous with excitement, and on the Monday the ex- 
 traordinary game began again. To the eyes of all 
 France, of all the world, was presented the astonishing 
 spectacle of a States-General which could not or would 
 not take shape, of a Third Estate which sat with folded 
 arms and did nothing, of two privileged orders doing 
 worse than nothing. Through the long succession of 
 May days from the llth to the 24th, nothing was done, 
 nothing that can be called anything. 
 
 The Commons still adhered to their determination to 
 regard themselves merely as an assembly of citizens 
 called together by legitimate authority to wait for oth- 
 er citizens. Malouet and Mounier made occasional sug- 
 gestions of various kinds with reference to some further 
 possible action or decree of organization, suggestions 
 which were generally rejected. The clergy and the no- 
 bility occupied themselves with deputing representatives 
 to attend the service held for the late King Louis XV., 
 a deed sufficiently characteristic. It seems cynically fit 
 that while the world was fermenting with new ideas the 
 two privileged orders should be busying themselves 
 with the memory of the monarch who, in his own person, 
 may be said to have incarnated the Old Order, with all 
 its vices, and whose cynical indifference to what might 
 come after him had been in so great a degree the cause 
 of what had come to pass and what was yet to come to 
 pass. On Wednesday, May 13, a deputation from the 
 nobility, headed by the Duke de Praslin, entered the 
 hall where the Third Estate assembled, announced that 
 they had duly organized themselves, and expressed their 
 willingness to meet, through a commission of their own 
 order, with any commission appointed by the Third Es- 
 tate to confer with them upon the matter. This sug-
 
 1789. D'ARTOlS THE HEROIC. 521 
 
 gcstion was promptly backed up by a similar proposal 
 from the clergy through a deputation headed by Gobel, 
 Bishop of Lydda. Rabaut-Saint-3tienne, who had not 
 learned intolerance from the old lessons of the Cevennes, 
 advised the Third Estate to hold the proposed confer- 
 ence with the two privileged orders. On the other side, 
 Chapelier, urged thereto by his fiery Breton blood, pro- 
 posed a kind of angry protest against the action of the 
 clergy and the nobility. The debate lasted over the 
 next day and many days; was not ended until Monday, 
 May 18, when the proposition of Rabaut-Saint-Etienne, 
 slightly modified, was accepted, and it was agreed to 
 nominate a commission from the Third Estate to confer 
 with the two other orders. On the next day, Tuesday, 
 May 19, the commission was appointed. It consisted 
 of sixteen members namely, Rabaut - Saint - Etienne, 
 Target, Chapelier of the hot Breton blood, Mounier the 
 fertile of suggestions, D'Ailly, Thouret, Dupont, Le- 
 grand, De Volney, Red on, Viguier, Garat 1'Aine, Ber- 
 gasse, Solomon, Milscent, and, best of all, Barnave. 
 While all this was going on, the nobility had been busy- 
 ing itself chiefly with the election of the Count d'Artois. 
 The Count d'Artois had been elected for Tartas, and 
 had declined the election, in obedience to the orders of 
 the king. The nobility sent a formal expression of its 
 regret to the Count d'Artois, and the count responded 
 in a high-flown epistle in which he acknowledged with 
 gratitude the courtesy of the chamber of nobility, and 
 talked of the blood of his ancestors, and assured the 
 nobility solemnly that, so long as a drop of that blood 
 rested in his veins, he would prove to the world at large 
 that he was worthy of the privilege of being born a 
 French nobleman. No premature prophetic inkling of 
 shameful flight marred the effect of this rhetoric.
 
 522 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXXIV. 
 
 While the Commission of Conciliation, most ironically 
 misnamed, was meeting, one or two things occurred in 
 the hall of the Third Estate which deserve to be re- 
 corded, especially as both of them served to bring 
 Mirabeau conspicuously forward. On Saturday, May 
 23, Target's demand for a record of their proceedings 
 was rejected, and with it the petition of Panckoucke to 
 be allowed to print the proceedings as supplement to 
 the Mercure de France. Then the letter was read to 
 the Assembly from court -usher De Breze. De Breze 
 wished to inform the Third Estate that the king, willing 
 to accord the honor of reception to such deputies as 
 had not come to Versailles on the 2d, would receive 
 them on the following day, Sunday, in the Hall of Her- 
 cules at six in the evening. When the letter was read 
 to its conclusion, which expressed a " sincere attach- 
 ment," Mirabeau called out, " To whom is this ' sincere 
 attachment ' addressed ?" The reader of the letter an- 
 swered that it was addressed to the dean of the Third 
 Estate. Mirabeau answered that there was no one in 
 the kingdom who was entitled to write so to the dean 
 of the Commons, and the Commons, approving of Mira- 
 beau's words, instructed that same dean to let court- 
 usher De Breze know their mind in this matter. The 
 other event belongs to the sitting of Monday, May 25. 
 On that day the dean read out a motion which had been 
 submitted to him. This proposed that the deputies 
 should only attend in black clothes, or, at least, should 
 only speak in black clothes ; that strangers should only 
 be allowed to sit upon the elevated grades at the two 
 sides of the hall, while the deputies occupied the middle; 
 that the benches should be numbered and drawn for by 
 lot, and the deans changed every eight days ; that the 
 benches of the clergy and nobility should be always left
 
 1789. "COUNT" MltlABEAU. 
 
 523 
 
 empty. The quaintest debate arose on these proposi- 
 tions. Some members thought the whole motion ridic- 
 ulous at a time of such gravity. Others, profoundly 
 philosophic, approved of the black clothes rule as a sig- 
 nificant lesson to the ridiculous vanity of the rich. Mira- 
 beau declared that the whole thing proved the imme- 
 diate necessity of some sort of regulations in order to 
 keep their debates in becoming order. To this Mounier 
 retorted that when he proposed the same thing a fort- 
 night earlier Mirabeau had opposed it, and caused its 
 rejection. As Mounier, in speaking, made considerable 
 use of the expression " Count Mirabeau," an indignant 
 deputy, whose democratic name is lost in oblivion, pro- 
 tested against the incessant repetition of ranks and dig- 
 nities in an assembly of equal men. Mirabeau replied 
 that he mocked himself of his title of count ; that any 
 one might take it and wear it who liked; that the only 
 title he cared for was that of the representative of a 
 great province, and of a great number of his fellow-cit- 
 izens. To this the democratic deputy replied that he 
 cordially agreed with " Count Mirabeau," and added 
 that he called him count in order to show how little 
 importance he attached to such a title, which he was 
 ready to give gratis to any one who liked to wear it. 
 After this odd little discussion, in which the first note 
 of the later war against titles of all kinds was thus 
 sounded, Mirabeau's proposition for the better regula- 
 tion of debates was carried by a large majority. 
 
 On May 23, and also on May 25, the Commission of 
 Conciliation met and did not conciliate. The nobility 
 and the clergy stuck to their guns. They would have 
 the special verification by each order of its own powers. 
 They would not hear of a verification in common. The 
 Third Estate, on their side, would not yield. A sug-
 
 524 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXXIV. 
 
 gested compromise, by which the orders should be ver- 
 ified by commissioners of the three orders, was emphat- 
 ically rejected by the nobles, who acted all through the 
 negotiations with a haughty intolerance that did not 
 characterize the clergy. The clergy, much more divided 
 among themselves, far more deeply imbued with the 
 democratic spirit, had not acted with the impetuosity 
 of the nobility. They did not, as the nobility did, com- 
 plete their verification after the Commission of Concil- 
 iation was resolved upon. On the contrary, they sus- 
 pended their verification, and declared themselves not 
 constituted until the result of the commission should 
 be made known. So things stood on Wednesday, May 
 27, when the Commons assembled in their hall and 
 listened to the reading of the final decision of the no- 
 bility, in which they insisted upon adhering to the sep- 
 arate verification, leaving it to the States-General to 
 decide what rule should govern the verification of the 
 powers of future States-General. 
 
 On this provocation Mirabeau asserted himself more 
 strongly than he had yet done. Camusat de Belombre 
 proposed to send a deputation to the clergy, calling 
 upon them to join themselves to the Commons. This 
 proposition Mirabeau supported with all the strength 
 of his eloquence, with all the influence of his domi- 
 nating personality. Even we of to-day, who read the 
 speech over in the chill livery of black and white, seem, 
 as we read, to hear what Carlyle has so happily called 
 " the brool " of that lion voice, seem to see the splendid 
 figure dominate that confused, unorganized assembly, 
 the marred, magnificent face glow with its patriotic 
 passion. It would be rarely curious to know the exact 
 impression which such a speech, so delivered, made upon 
 such hearers as sensible Mounier and sensible Malouet,
 
 1789. MIRABEAU'S APPEAL. 
 
 525 
 
 who always remind us of the strong Gyas and the 
 strong Cloanthes in the Virgilian epic ; upon pallid, 
 portentous Robespierre ; upon a hot-hearted Barnave ; 
 upon many others. The individual effect we can never 
 know ; the general effect was electric. In scornful, 
 scathing words he assailed an insolent nobility. He 
 held up to derision their preposterous claims to recog- 
 nition as a "legislative and sovereign chamber." In 
 words of mingled conciliation and menace he reviewed 
 the vacillating conduct of the clergy. " Let us," he said, 
 " send a most solemn and a most numerous deputation 
 to call upon the clergy in the name of the God of 
 Peace to rally to the side of reason, justice, truth, and 
 join the Commons in a last appeal to the intelligence 
 or the discretion of the nobility." Amid wild applause 
 the suggestion was accepted. Target was bidden to turn 
 once more to the chamber which sheltered the delibera- 
 tions of the clergy ; and at his heels trod a deputation 
 consisting of some of the ablest and the most enthusi- 
 astic of the assembled Commons. 
 
 The appearance of Target, the expression of Mira- 
 beau's words, had a profound effect upon the clergy. 
 A general enthusiasm appeared to be spreading among 
 the more enlightened and the more impressionable, 
 which was highly distasteful to the reactionaries. Lu- 
 bersac, Bishop of Chartres, whose name deserves to be 
 remembered, was one of the first to propose that the 
 clergy as a body should, at that very moment of time, 
 rise and betake themselves to the Commons' Hall, and 
 forthwith unite themselves with their brethren of the 
 Third Estates. This proposition was received with 
 rapturous delight by a large body of the clergy pres- 
 ent, but the reactionary prelates pleaded, counselled, 
 finally prevailed ; at least, that is to say, they succeed-
 
 526 THE FRENCH REYULITIOX. CH. XXXIV. 
 
 ed in delaying the wholesale exodus of the clergy from 
 the Clergy Chamber. It was decided to postpone the 
 reply until to-morrow. To-morrow and to-morrow and 
 to-morrow had crept at this petty pace now for some 
 time, and the anti-national prelates hoped for further 
 procrastination. Could not influence be brought to 
 bear upon the court? could not the Polignac party 
 press and be pressed? On the next day, May 28, the 
 clergy solemnly decided to suspend all discussion upon 
 the proposition of the Commons until the result of fresh 
 conferences. The anti - nationals were well content. 
 They knew that a letter had been written, or rather 
 accepted by the king, which was at that moment being 
 read in the Commons. That letter would effect much : 
 so they hoped, and devoutly believed. 
 
 The royal letter had different fates in different quar- 
 ters. It called in set terms upon the Commissioners of 
 Conciliation to meet again on the following day, in the 
 presence of the keeper of the seals, in order to try once 
 again to cause a fusion. When this letter came to the 
 chamber where the nobility were assembled, the nobil- 
 ity were in a state of white heat of excitement. Caza- 
 les and D'Antraigues had just been making flaming 
 speeches, in which they insisted that the division of 
 orders and the respective vetoes should be declared 
 constitutional. The session, stimulated to giddiness by 
 the clattering and rattling inanities of the fiery Cazales 
 and the fiery D'Antraigues, did accordingly vote and 
 decide, by a majority of two hundred and two to sixteen, 
 that "the deliberation by order, and the prohibitive 
 faculty which the orders have separately, are constitu- 
 tional to the monarchy," and that it, the Noble Estate, 
 " will adhere abidingly to those guardian principles of 
 the throne and of liberty." As those high-sounding
 
 1789. THE ROYAL LETTER. 527 
 
 words were greeted with acclamation, no doubt that 
 Cazales felt, and that D'Antraigues felt, that they had 
 between them deserved very well of their country, and 
 had preserved the monarchy from its most dangerous 
 enemies. The Duke of Orleans indeed, and Count Cril- 
 lon, protested against the declaration, but nobody heed- 
 ed them. All was excitement, enthusiasm, high-flown 
 devotion to the monarchy and their order. It was in 
 the midst of all this passionate effervescence that the 
 Marquis de Breze handed the president the letter from 
 the king, open and unaddressed, as was usual when such 
 a document was sent to a chamber not yet constituted. 
 But effervescent nobility would have none of it. They 
 were not an unconstituted chamber, they were a duly 
 constituted chamber. Cazales and D'Antraigues had 
 not harangued for nothing ; the blood of the nobility 
 was up ; the letter must needs be returned, and sent 
 again more orderly. M. de Breze accordingly with- 
 drew, taking his letter with him, and returned with all 
 despatch, bearing the same document duly arranged 
 according to the wishes of the punctilious nobility. It 
 was characteristic of them, in that hour, to think that 
 a scrupulous adherence to fine formalities might really 
 serve to stay the course of democracy and discontent. 
 
 In the meantime the Commons were no less ani- 
 mated, no less excited. Their proceedings had opened 
 with a message from the clergy, announcing the receipt 
 of the royal letter, and in consequence the postpone- 
 ment of any decision in reply to yesterday's Target 
 demonstration. Then came the reading of the royal 
 letter, a sufficiently foolish letter. 
 
 " I could not see without sorrow," the poor king wrote, 
 " and even without inquietude, the National Assembly, 
 which I had convoked in order that it might occupy it-
 
 528 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. Cn. XXXIV. 
 
 self with me in the regeneration of my kingdom, given 
 over to an inaction which, if it were to be prolonged, 
 would dissipate those hopes which I have formed for 
 the happiness of my people and for the prosperity of 
 the State." The king was wrong. The regeneration of 
 his kingdom was being worked out in that very inac- 
 tion which he so much deplored. His people, for whose 
 happiness he was so concerned, were slipping away from 
 his royal, paternal authority ; and it was not the elo- 
 quence of Cazales and D'Antraigues, the Rosencrantz 
 and Guildenstern of this sorry episode, that would keep 
 them in their place at the foot of the throne. However, 
 Louis thought, it would seem, that the best thing was 
 to try again. The commissioners of the three orders 
 should meet again on the morrow, in the presence of 
 the keeper of the seals, and certain other commission- 
 ers that the king would send, and no doubt with a little 
 deliberation the "harmony so desirable and so urgent" 
 would be realized. 
 
 As soon as the letter was read, Malouet, always pru- 
 dent, always cautious, made a very characteristic prop- 
 osition. He proposed that the discussion should be car- 
 ried on in secret, and that strangers should be ordered 
 to withdraw. Thereupon up rose and thundered at him 
 a strange figure thundered, or tried to thunder, rather, 
 with one of the weakest voices in the world. The new 
 speaker bad several names. His family name was Chas- 
 seboeuf. For this his father had substituted Boissirais. 
 He was now known by the name he had adopted as 
 Count Constantin Fran9ois de Volney. Volney's " Ruins 
 of Empire " is still a name, and little more than a name, 
 in literature. Few people, we fancy, read it now, and 
 are perturbed or pleased by its reflections. At this 
 time it was not even written. Count de Volney was
 
 1789. VOLNEY. 5 2 g 
 
 only a young man, a little over thirty, who knew Ara- 
 bic, and had written a book of travels in Egypt and 
 Syria, recently published. 
 
 " What !" the fiery, impetuous, weak -voiced Volney 
 screamed. " Strangers ! Who talks of strangers ? Are 
 they not our friends and brothers ? Are they not our 
 fellow-citizens ? Is it not they who have done us, done 
 you, the honor of electing us as deputies? We have 
 entered upon difficult undertakings : let, then, in Heaven's 
 name, our fellow-citizens environ us, inspire us, animate 
 us. They will not, indeed, add one jot to the courage of 
 the man who truly loves his land, and longs to serve 
 her ; but they will force a blush to the cheek of the 
 traitor or the coward, whom the court or cowardice has 
 already been able to corrupt." Thus, or in some such 
 wild and whirling words, did Volney harangue the Third 
 Estate, and dissipate prudent Malouet's proposal to the 
 thin air. The strangers remained to listen, with due 
 profit, to the rest of the debate, which was finally ad- 
 journed without any decision being arrived at. 
 
 The next day heard more discussion, still undecided, 
 undefined. Among the nobles, an energetic Lally Tol- 
 lendal, Paris deputy, friend of Necker, son of the fa- 
 mous unhappy governor of India, made various sugges- 
 tions, of no great importance and with no great effect. 
 Lally Tollendal was not an unremarkable man. The 
 speech he made was not a bad speech. It was, perhaps, 
 as good a speech as could be made in favor of so bad a 
 case. It is not to be found in the Moniteur, where, in- 
 deed, so much is missing. It is not to be found in that 
 " Histoire Parlementaire de la Revolution FranQaise " 
 of Buchez and of Roux, to which Carlyle has paid 
 somewhat scornful compliments. It is to be found in 
 that magnificent series of " Archives Populaires " which 
 I. 34
 
 530 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. OH. XXXIV. 
 
 is being brought out in Paris by order of the National 
 Assembly, under the direction of MM. Mavidal, Lau- 
 rent, and Clavel a series of inestimable value to the 
 student of the French Revolution. We have seen al- 
 ready that he had, after long and unwearying assiduity, 
 succeeded in upsetting the judgment passed upon his 
 father. He passed his time in those early days of the 
 States-General in alternately encouraging the nobles to 
 resist and recommending them to yield. He was yet to 
 be the friend of Madame de Stae'l, an exile in England, 
 and at last a peer of France. He was not the man for 
 the rough work of revolutions. We need not see or 
 hear much more of him.
 
 1789. MIRABEAU ASSERTS HIMSELF. 531 
 
 CHAPTER XXXV. 
 
 SLOW AND SURE. 
 
 IN the Hall of the Third Estate the lion voice was 
 again heard thundering. Mirabeau was every day as- 
 serting himself more and more. Every opportunity 
 that arose only brought him into clearer eminence as 
 the strong man of the Third Estate. He read the royal 
 letter, with its clumsily concealed purpose, and he rent 
 it with his angry eloquence. " This is a snare, only a 
 snare !" he cried to the listening Commons. But with 
 ready skill he exonerated the king from conscious share 
 in the duplicity. Yet why did the king interfere at 
 all ? he asked. There was no reason, no justification for 
 his interference. The Third Estate was engaged in le- 
 gitimate negotiation with the other two orders. It had 
 practically succeeded in winning the clergy to its side, 
 and might reasonably count upon soon persuading the 
 nobility to follow the clerical example. Was that the 
 moment for interference? And what was the meaning 
 of this royal letter ? An act, indeed, as far as the king 
 personally was concerned, of goodness and of patience 
 and of courage, but none the less a snare planned by 
 the hands of men who had given their royal master an 
 inexact picture of the state of affairs, a snare woven by 
 the hands of Druids. It was a snare if they acceded to 
 the demands of the king ; it was a snare if they refused ; 
 it was a snare every way. If they accepted, every- 
 thing would finish, as in 1589, by an Order of Council,
 
 532 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXXV. 
 
 If they refused, the throne would be besieged with loud 
 clamors against their insubordination, and new strength 
 would be lent to the absurd calumnies that the Consti- 
 tution was in peril from the democracy. Mirabeau pro- 
 posed, therefore, that an address should be presented to 
 the king, that the commissioners should do everything 
 in their power to effect the meeting of the conference 
 in the common hall, the Salle des Menus, and that they 
 should seek to restore concord between the three orders 
 without touching upon any of the principles which the 
 Third Estate represented. 
 
 After a long debate the meeting adjourned at half- 
 past three, to meet again at five o'clock, when the de- 
 bate was resumed and protracted until half-past ten at 
 night. It was then finally resolved that the Commons 
 accept the proposed conference under three conditions : 
 First, that a deputation should be sent to the king to 
 assure him of the respectful homage of his faithful Com- 
 mons. Secondly, that the conference should be held 
 on the day and hour that his Majesty should indicate. 
 Thirdly, that a formal report should be drawn up of 
 each sitting, signed by every member who was present. 
 
 This decision to accept the proposed conference marks 
 a fresh crisis in the constitutional struggle, marks off a 
 fresh point of departure. The three orders, separated 
 for so long, were brought as it were face to face again, 
 through their commissioners, and watched each other 
 warily, like gladiators in the arena. So far, the Third 
 Estate, upon the whole, had had the best of it. It 
 seemed upon the point of success when the royal letter 
 came. The manner in which it accepted the royal pro- 
 posal was in itself a point in its favor. On the other 
 hand, the nobility were as arrogant, as self-confident, as 
 overbearing as ever, and the clergy, who had vacillated
 
 1789. THE COMMONS AND THE KING. 533 
 
 under the steady, persistent pressure of the Third Estate, 
 were beginning to swing back into their old pronounced 
 sympathy with the other privileged order. The action 
 of the court in forcing the hand of the king had encour- 
 aged the reactionaries in the two camps. They now 
 thought that continuous firmness was alone necessary 
 to dissipate the resistance and display the weakness of 
 the Third Estate. Under such conditions of wary an- 
 tagonism the conference was to begin. 
 
 In the mean time the Commons had some ado to get 
 their address presented to the king. On the day after 
 the address was resolved upon, May 30th, the Keeper of 
 the Seals informed the Third Estate that the king, being 
 about to depart, could not receive the Commons' depu- 
 tation, but would fix a day and hour when he would re- 
 ceive it. This reply meant a good deal more than it 
 said. It was the time-honored custom that such an in- 
 dividual as the representative of the Third Estate would 
 be on this occasion should address the king on his knees. 
 This was the sort of venerable ceremonial to which the 
 Third Estate in their present mood were scarcely like- 
 ly to allow any representative of theirs to submit. It 
 seemed, therefore, to the courtly mind the simplest plan 
 to postpone the troublesome matter on the good old 
 courtly principle. 
 
 On May 30th, when the letter of the Keeper of the 
 Seals was read out to the Third Estate by their dean, a 
 point of some difficulty was immediately raised. Al- 
 though the king had postponed the reception of the dep- 
 utation, yet the first meeting of the joint commissioners 
 was to take place that same evening. Now, some o'f the 
 members present argued that if the commissioners of 
 the Third Estate attended the conference, they would, 
 by so doing, stultify the resolution at which the Com-
 
 634 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXXV. 
 
 mons had arrived on the previous day namely, that the 
 conference should be resumed only after the royal re- 
 ception of the deputation. Hereupon other members 
 arose, and declared no less confidently that the resolu- 
 tion of the previous day decided upon the deputation 
 and the renewal of the conferences, but did not, by the 
 use of the word " after," make the conferences condi- 
 tional upon the reception of the deputation. There was 
 quite a lengthy wrangle over this point, which it was 
 found impossible to settle, and no official record (of any 
 kind) of the proceedings was kept. The memories of 
 different members clashed. The notes which different 
 deputies took for themselves in their private pocket- 
 books, on being consulted, were found to clash also. 
 Luckily, the Marquis de Rostaing found a solution of 
 the difficulty. Let us, he said, go on with the confer- 
 ences, but let us also resolve not to conclude them until 
 our deputation has been received by his Majesty. This 
 suggestion was accepted unanimously by the Commons, 
 who were very keen about their deputation coming to 
 pass. That it was undoubtedly the original intention 
 of the proposers of the deputation that it should pre- 
 cede the renewal of the conferences is, however, made 
 perfectly clear by a study of the text of the address 
 drawn up for the deputation to present to the king, an 
 address which was read to the Third Estate on this very 
 May 30th by their dean. 
 
 There was indeed some excuse for the unwillingness 
 of the monarch to welcome the deputation from his 
 faithful Commons. His eldest son, the young Dauphin 
 of France, was sick, sick unto death. Poor little Louis 
 Joseph Xavier of France ! he had been ailing now for 
 nearly three years, his puny body wasted, and his scant 
 strength sapped by slow and weakening disease. The
 
 1789. THE LITTLE DAUPHIN. 535 
 
 luckless life that had been so eagerly looked for, that 
 had first fluttered its faint flame on October 22, 1781, 
 was now waning rapidly to its close. Scarcely eight 
 years all told of childish life, and now it was about to 
 flicker from a world that was growing too stormy for 
 princes. There had always been anxiety about the Dau- 
 phin. In more than one of her letters to her brother 
 Joseph of Austria, Marie Antoinette speaks with evi- 
 dent anxiety of the child's health. In a letter written 
 in the September of 1783 she speaks of the folly of the 
 physicians in not wishing the little Dauphin to make 
 the journey to Fontainebleau, "although he has twenty 
 teeth, and is exceedingly strong." In the December of 
 the same year she wrote again, "My son is marvellously 
 healthy ; I found him strengthened and speaking well." 
 A little later in the same month she wrote, " Every 
 one is amazed at the splendid condition in which my 
 son came back from La Muette." Now the end of the 
 little life had come. " She should have died hereafter," 
 says Macbeth, in the bitterness of his heart, when he 
 hears of his consort's death in the stormy hours of strug- 
 gle which leave no time for tears. Something of the 
 same kind might have been said over the dying Dau- 
 phin. There was no time for tears then. France, in 
 the first throes of its great constitutional travail, scarce- 
 ly noted the drooping of the little royal head. It drop- 
 ped at last, tired of life, on the night of June 3d. He 
 had been a-dying through all the angry days from May 
 28th, and the sorrow of the father pleaded its defence 
 for the reluctance of the king to receive the deputation. 
 In their address, in language of the utmost respect 
 for the sovereign, the Third Estate set forth its own 
 case with considerable, indeed with suflicient boldness. 
 It shared the royal regrets at the inaction of the States-
 
 536 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXXV. 
 
 General, but threw the blame of that inaction entirely 
 upon the shoulders of the nobility. With a certain 
 cautious irony the address assured the king of the con- 
 fidence which the Third Estate felt in his fairness and 
 reason to prevent any attempt or encroachment upon 
 the liberties of the Assembly. By a bold stroke the 
 address endeavored to ally the king in common cause 
 with the Third Estate against " those different aristoc- 
 racies whose power can only be established upon the 
 ruin of the royal authority and of the public weal." 
 It finally assured the monarch that when the Commons 
 had the duly constituted right to address him, he should 
 speedily be able to judge of their fidelity to the honor 
 and dignity of the Throne and the credit of the nation. 
 Such was the remarkable document which was to be 
 submitted to an astonished king as soon as might be. 
 
 On the evening of May 30th, at six o'clock, the con- 
 ference began at the Chancellery of Versailles. The 
 Keeper of the Seals was accompanied by the commis- 
 sioners named by the king the Duke de Nivernois, 
 De la Michodiere, D'Ormesson, Vidaud de la Tour, De 
 Chaumont de la Galaisiere, the Count de Montmorin, 
 Laurent de Villedeuil, the Count de la Luzerne, the 
 Count de Puysegur, the Count de Saint-Priest, Valdec 
 de Lessart, and Necker. To these august presences, to 
 these shadows of great names, came the commissioners 
 of the Third Estate wifh their minds pretty clearly 
 made up came the commissioners of the nobility with 
 what they were pleased to call their minds quite made 
 up came the commissioners of the clergy with their 
 minds in a more or less vacillating and perplexed con- 
 dition. Probably a more hopeless, more meaningless 
 conference was never yet attended by men. 
 
 The conference opened with a well-meant attempt on
 
 1789. THE RIGHT OF THE NOBILITY. 537 
 
 the part of one of the clergy to propose a plan of con- 
 ciliation. This plan, or rather this proposal of a plan, 
 was promptly set aside in favor of a preliminary dis- 
 cussion of principles and facts. Then D'Antraigues, the 
 storm-petrel of his party's suicide, got up and made 
 one of the most imbecile orations that ever yet fell 
 from a foolish mouth. He began by declaring that the 
 action of the nobility was just the one right, just, rea- 
 sonable, and, as it were, Heaven-inspired course of ac- 
 tion which they were bound to take. This fine theory 
 of noble infallibility he proceeded to back by a long 
 string of arguments founded on the actions of previous 
 States-Generals. What other States-Generals had done 
 they might do -such was the drift of his argument 
 but not a jot more. There is something piteous, some- 
 thing pathetic, in this desperate, wooden-headed way in 
 which the champion of the claims of the nobility meets 
 a wholly new condition of things with a string of musty 
 usages and rusty traditions. Fiery -hot D'Antraigues 
 might almost as reasonably and pertinently argue that 
 because Clovis split the skull of one of his soldiers on 
 a memorable occasion, therefore his Sacred Majesty the 
 sixteenth Louis of the line of Capet would be justified 
 in braining, with a battle-axe swung in his own royal 
 hands, the contumelious and audacious instigators of 
 the Third Estate. There was a brawling, wrangling 
 debate upon meaningless D'Antraigues meaningless 
 speech, which lasted for some four hours. A member of 
 the Third Estate, whose name fame does not appear to 
 have very jealously preserved, replied to D'Antraigues. 
 He argued that at the time of the States -General of 
 1560, of 1576, of 1588, and 1614, the powers were veri- 
 fied, not by order, but by government, and that there- 
 fore the nobility could not even invoke ancient usages
 
 538 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXXV. 
 
 in favor ot its pretensions. To this an indignant noble 
 retorted that it was the right and privilege of nobles 
 to be judged only by their peers. To this a champion 
 of the Commons replied that there was in the matter 
 under discussion no question whatever of judgment 
 of a crime to which the pretended privilege referred. 
 Then one of the nobles carried the war into the camp 
 of the Third Estate, by contesting the right to style 
 themselves "Commons;" an " innovation of words which 
 might lead to an innovation of principles, if indeed it 
 had not done so already." The discussion, if discussion 
 it can be called, was finally adjourned until June 8d, over 
 the days of festival.
 
 1V89. THE ARBITER OF FRANCE. 539 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVI. 
 
 ON AND ON. 
 
 IT was worth while to follow with so much attention 
 the delays and doubts, the vacillations and strivings, 
 the tentative endeavors of the curious agglomeration 
 of human beings from all the ends of France which was 
 known for a season to the world as the Third Estate. 
 For since history began to be recorded no more remark- 
 able process of growth has been inscribed upon its 
 pages than the gradual growth or even crystallization 
 of the inchoate mass of simple members, unverified dep- 
 uties to the States-General, unorganized members of a 
 new and bewildering Third Estate, into a National As- 
 sembly which was to change the fate of France. As 
 we follow the slow process day by day we can wellnigh 
 witness the steady quickening of the almost inert mass 
 into a consciousness of its own strength, of its own pos- 
 sible power. We can note its stubborn determination 
 to be, and to have not merely its right of being, but its 
 actual being recognized, waxing stronger with every 
 coming together in the Salle des Menus. We can watch, 
 too, with interest, how there, as in all assemblages of 
 men, the stronger come to the front ; how a Mirabeau, 
 with no official position, yet naturally takes distinct 
 and persistent headship; how even the thin small voice 
 of an obscure and unheeded Robespierre also assert- 
 ed itself at the right time, and made its due claim 
 upon the attention of fellow-men. It was not merely a
 
 540 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXXVI. 
 
 National Assembly or a new Constitution that slowly 
 fermented during those lingering hours of disappoint- 
 ment and delay. It was a new France, and a new world. 
 
 To us of to-day, with our knowledge of what was in 
 the future for these men, there can scarcely be much 
 grimmer or more pathetic reading than the reports in the 
 Moniteur or elsewhere of those early meetings, of the 
 early speeches, and of their speakers. The shadow of 
 death is over it all. As we are confronted with name 
 after name of each of those men, the brilliant, the am- 
 bitious, the well-intentioned, the hopeful, the heroic, we 
 think of the fate of each, and can scarcely avoid a 
 shudder. It is a very necrology, the list of those eager 
 Parliamentarians. The words " was guillotined," with 
 the date, affix themselves in our fancy to name after 
 name as we read. A few, it is true, escape the guillo- 
 tine. Some die too soon, like Mirabeau. Some die too 
 late, like Sieyes, refusing in his dotage, many a long 
 year later, to receive Monsieur de Robespierre, whose 
 ghost had long since wandered by Cocytus. Some live 
 to be a councillor of state, like Mourner, or to die poor, 
 like Malouet. But for the rest, all the more important 
 figures are like forest-trees marked for the inevitable 
 axe. The ingenious machine to which their latest col- 
 league, Dr. Guillotin, of Paris, will give a name, must 
 be the doom of so many of them who then thought of 
 no such thing, who feared if at all only the attacks of a 
 despotism, and who dreamed of liberty and a Saturnian 
 age. If any one of all those deputies had been gifted 
 with that strange Scottish power of second sight which 
 environs with a misty veil those destined to untimely 
 and violent deaths, the most conspicuous heads in that 
 assembly would have been so veiled that day. 
 
 While the conference was going on the discussion
 
 1789. JEAN SYLVAIN BAILLY. 541 
 
 over the deputation to the king was going on too. The 
 Third Estate had resolved to elect a dean every eight 
 days. The dean who was elected when the deputation 
 was proposed happened to be M. d'Ailly. M. d'Ailly 
 resigned his functions, almost immediately after being 
 invested with them, on the ground of bad health. It 
 became necessary to choose a new dean, and by a large 
 majority Bailly was elected to the post. This was the 
 first important appearance upon the scene of a figure 
 destined to be conspicuous and unhappy. There are 
 few sights more melancholy than that of a man of quiet 
 scholastic life suddenly flung into the strife of fierce po- 
 litical life at some moment of great national struggle. 
 Jean Sylvain Bailly was eminently in his place at the 
 Academy of Sciences, eminently in his place in his 
 astronomical observatory outwatching the stars, emi- 
 nently in his place at his familiar desk writing prize 
 treatises on Leibnitz, and an excellent, even brilliant 
 history of astronomy, ancient and modern. It was un- 
 happily not enough for Bailly to be the only French- 
 man save Fontenelle who had the honor to be a mem- 
 ber of the three great academies of Paris. He must 
 have his share of civic life, must serve his country as a 
 good citizen should, must needs be ambitious, most hon- 
 orably ambitious, to play a part in politics. An appre- 
 ciative Parisian public voted him to the States-General, 
 and handed him over to the headsman. He was an hon- 
 orable, high-minded man, a scholar, and a gentleman, 
 but he was more in his element among the wheeling 
 worlds of space than in the wheeling humanities of a 
 revolution. Better for him if he had kept his eyes 
 among the stars, like the hero of Richter's exquisite 
 story. He could indeed help the Revolution on its 
 way. His simple noble nature was one of the orna-
 
 542 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXXVI. 
 
 ments of the Third Estate. But he could not guide 
 the Revolution, or largely help to guide it, and he cer- 
 tainly could not stop it, as he tried in vain to do. As 
 well might he have hoped by stern concentration of his 
 astronomer's mind to play the part of a new Joshua, 
 and stay the revolutions of the sun, as to stay the revo- 
 lution of the forces around him. Under happier condi- 
 tions, and in more tranquil times, he might have earned 
 a distinguished place among a nation's representatives, 
 but the stormy tides of an insurgent and desperate de- 
 mocracy were too strong for him. His mild, intelligent 
 face was not the face of a man born to sway the multi- 
 tude. His high forehead sloping back from an exceed- 
 ingly aquiline nose, his large benign eye, the full cheeks 
 and slightly heavy lower face, the mobile mouth, sensu- 
 ous rather than sensual all these were characteristics 
 of intelligence, of delicacy of mind, of qualities excel- 
 lent in a scientific man who was also a man of letters ; 
 excellent even for a statesman in serene hours, but not 
 strong enough to dominate the Carmagnola of sans-cu- 
 lottes into which the destinies were driving France. 
 
 There was a good deal of small altercation going on 
 in these days in the chamber of the Third Estate. The 
 refusal of the king to receive the Commons' deputation 
 was in especial a fruitful theme of debate. On June 
 2d M. d'Ailly, as dean of the Third Estate, proposed to 
 make some modifications in the address to the king, as 
 resolved upon at the session of May 30th. The proposed 
 alterations were not accepted by the bureau, which ad- 
 hered to the original address with some slight modifica- 
 tions. A rather sharp debate arose over these modifi- 
 cations, which, according to some members of the 
 bureau, were purely nominal, and according to one of 
 the members of the bureau, were of a nature highly prej-
 
 1789. THE KING AND THE THIRD ESTATE. 543 
 
 udicial to the Assembly. Some of those present called 
 for the rereading of the original address, that the exact 
 nature of the changes introduced might be made known. 
 Others demanded the reading of the second address 
 proposed by M. d'Ailly and now withdrawn. Others 
 were opposed to any rereading as useless and profit- 
 less. Others again urged that if there were to be any 
 rereading, all strangers present should be compelled 
 to retire. Some were for placing implicit confidence 
 in the wisdom and discretion of the gentlemen of the 
 bureau. Some thought that to do so was to endow 
 the bureau with far too much authority. In the end 
 a decision against rereading was carried by 185 votes 
 to 114. 
 
 On the next day, June 3d, the deputation question 
 came up again. By this time, as we have seen, M. 
 d'Ailly had resigned his deanship possibly that re- 
 jected second address may have had something to do 
 with it and Bailly had been chosen dean in his place. 
 There was much complaining against the action, or 
 rather the inaction, of the king. Susceptible constitu- 
 tionalism pointed out that while the deputations from 
 the clergy and the nobility had been received with 
 alacrity and enthusiasm, the most meaningless delay 
 was placed in the way of the deputation from the 
 Third Estate. Even the sickness of the Dauphin was 
 not admitted to be a valid excuse. In such a moment, 
 it was argued, a sorrowing monarch ought to have all 
 the more need and desire for the support and sympathy 
 of his faithful Commons. Under all which considera- 
 tions it seemed quite clear to the susceptible consti- 
 tutionalism of the Third Estate that further pressure 
 must be put, and that promptly, upon the king. Bailly 
 declared that though it was exceedingly difficult to get
 
 544 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. Cn. XXXVI. 
 
 admission to the king, still he was entirely in the hands 
 of the Third Estate. If they bade him, he would do all 
 in his power to get into the presence of his sovereign. 
 Thereupon Mirabeau, looking as usual straight to the 
 heart of the matter not, perhaps, we may imagine, 
 without arousing even already some slight jealousy in 
 the less impetuous and also less masterly mind of Bailly 
 proposed that Bailly should request the king to name 
 a time when he would receive the deputation of the 
 Commons. This motion was easily carried unanimous- 
 ly, but Bailly found it hard to carry out. 
 
 It was hard for the Commons to get at their king. 
 He was more and more in the hands of the nobles, and 
 the policy of the nobles as a body was the policy of the 
 feather-headed D'Antraigues. Count Henri de Launai 
 d'Antraigues was the hero of the hour with the gentle- 
 men of the noble estate. Young, handsome, ambitious, 
 frothily eloquent, he was eminently skilful, for a time 
 at least, in winning the hearts of men and women. Per- 
 haps even while he was making his flaming harangues 
 to a delighted chamber of nobility he had against his 
 heart some latest love-letter of the beautiful Saint- 
 Huberty, the exquisite Anne Antoinette, whose acting 
 delighted Paris, and whose generous heart was now en- 
 tirely at the feet of the rhetorical young noble from 
 Languedoc. The eloquent Languedocian gentleman, 
 the much -beloved, much- loving Magdalen Saint -Hu- 
 berty, bound together for the hour by the bonds of a 
 facile passion, were bound together for a dreary destiny 
 and a dismal end. For the moment, however, D'An- 
 traigues was flushed with pride of his fair mistress. 
 For the moment the Saint-Huberty, forgetting all pred- 
 ecessors from Sieur Croisilles, her rogue of a husband, 
 downward, was rapturously devoted to her shining
 
 1789. COUNT D'ANTRAIGUES. 545 
 
 politician lover. For some time the young D'An- 
 traigues had been quite a conspicuous figure in Paris. 
 He boasted an illustrious descent. He claimed as an 
 ancestor the distinguished gentleman and soldier to 
 whom, when he was wounded, Henri Quatre wrote ut- 
 tering the most royal and chivalrous wishes for his 
 speedy restoration. Parisian society not altogether un^ 
 reservedly accepted him at his own estimation. There 
 were not wanting sneering sceptics who denied him all 
 patent of nobility. His name, said these sceptics, was 
 not D'Anti-aigues at all ; it was Audanel, the anagram 
 of De Launai, and the name which he signed as a pseu- 
 donym to some of his political pamphlets. Envious 
 tongues even went so far as to insinuate that he had 
 been, as it were, drummed out of a regiment of Viva- 
 rois for poltroonery in some affair of honor. It is true 
 that Barau, in his history of the families of Rouergue, 
 cited by M. Edmond de Goncourt, declares that the 
 House of Launai owned among others the seigneury of 
 Antraigues, and that the land was invested with the 
 privilege of carrying the title of count by letters-pat- 
 ent of September, 1668, for the benefit of Trophime de 
 Launai, granduncle of our " young Languedocian gen- 
 tleman." At the same time Barau admits that when 
 our D'Antraigues came to Paris and solicited the hon- 
 ors of the court he could not completely furnish the 
 necessary proofs. It is certain that when Mirabeau as- 
 sailed him in his pamphlet, " Lettre de M. le Comte de 
 Mirabeau a M. le Comte d'Antraigues," for his sudden 
 adhesion to the cause of the noble order and his attacks 
 upon the Third Estate, the Proven9al rallied the Langue- 
 docian upon his sham nobility. Mirabeau declared that 
 the Vivorais deputy had converted himself into a D'An- 
 traigues to the great astonishment of his worthy parent, 
 I. 35
 
 546 THE FRENCII REVOLUTION. CH. XXXVI. 
 
 who had never considered himself to be descended from 
 that noble house, but had simply written himself " D'En- 
 traigues," taking that name from a little house built in 
 a marsh. It is curious, in confirmation of this, that M. 
 de Goncourt cites letters from the son of D'Antraigues 
 and the Saint-Huberty, in which the son always signs 
 himself D'Entraigues. 
 
 Whether illustriously noble or not, D'Antraigues 
 passed for illustriously noble with a not too critical 
 Parisian society. He carried himself like a gentleman 
 of a good house; his mother was a Saint- Priest; he had 
 sufficient means to move with ease in the capital ; he 
 had travelled considerably ; he was regarded in cer- 
 tain circles as a very rising man. In a world of actors 
 and actresses, of men of science and men of letters, of 
 philosophers and wits, of thinkers and triflers, he passed 
 for brilliantly accomplished destined to great things. 
 He was supposed to be an ardent advocate of the rights 
 and claims of the people rights and claims which it 
 was daringly popular to talk about and to recognize. 
 His ready meridional flow of speech, his easily fired 
 imagination, his swiftly roused, slightly meaningless 
 warmth of words, all profoundly impressed an easily im- 
 pressionable audience. Then he was very good-looking. 
 A portrait of him exists by Carmontelle, the dramatist 
 and painter. The young count is represented in the 
 company of Montbarre, listening to the minister with 
 his sword at his side, seated across a chair, with one 
 arm hanging on the back, while his fine profilo, his 
 bright eye, the magnificence of his dress, and the ele- 
 gant nonchalance of his bearing, says De Goncourt, 
 make a perfect portrait of a graceful courtier. He had 
 been Madame de Saint-Huberty's lover for some five 
 years before he came at all conspicuously before the
 
 1789. A FEATHER-IIEAD STATESMAN. 547 
 
 political world by his very revolutionary'" Memoirs on 
 the States-General." 
 
 Luckless, unreliable D'Antraigues was perhaps the 
 most foolishly feather - headed gentleman who ever 
 came from Languedoc. We may meet with him again, 
 it may be once or twice, but we may as well glance 
 over the rest of his unlovely career now, and say good- 
 bye to him. He belonged to that strange, perplexing, 
 impulsive, imaginative, unreliable breed which has en- 
 riched modern literature with a Numa Roumestan and 
 a Tartarin de Tarascon. We should prefer that he 
 might linger in our memory if he lingered there at 
 all as the sentimental lover of the Saint-Huberty, ad- 
 dressing his opera-house deity in the high-flown senti- 
 mentalisins of Rousseau, and as the eloquent champion 
 of popular rights, but that is unhappily not possible. 
 He was a renegade and turn -coat; the moment he 
 found himself among the noble order of the States-Gen- 
 eral he swung round upon the political circle and be- 
 came the impassioned, we might say the vulgarly im- 
 passioned, champion of the Old Order and all its 
 works and ways. We need not accuse him of being 
 grossly insincere in his conversion. Such a feather- 
 head had no real principles, no real opinions. He was 
 swept away by the impulse of the moment, the emo- 
 tion of the hour ; he had never been true to a friend, 
 man or woman ; he could not be true to any cause. As 
 it had stimulated his excitable Southern imagination to 
 pose as the champion of an oppressed people, so in the 
 heated atmosphere of the noble chamber it pleased him 
 to play at serving an assailed monarchy, and lending 
 his bright eloquence to the cause of an ancient nobility. 
 
 He was intoxicated by the flow of his own words, by 
 his own cheap tinselled ideas, by his conviction that he
 
 548 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXXVI. 
 
 was a great statesman. It was certainly in an evil day 
 for the nobility of France and the supporters of the 
 Old Order when they came to have such a champion. 
 It is, however, consolatory to reflect that D'Antraigues 
 rendered better service to the cause of liberty by his 
 opposition to it than he could ever have rendered it 
 by his support. His renegade popularity was of brief 
 duration. It is written concerning him that he will 
 presently emigrate, that he will marry the Saint-Hu- 
 berty, that he will drift from European court to Euro- 
 pean court, offering his worthless services against his 
 own country. He will become member of the Russian 
 Legation at Dresden, and betray the secret papers of 
 his master, the Emperor Alexander, to England. He 
 will be regarded by royalists and emigres as le beau 
 conjure, and considered as a kind of Royalist Marat, 
 ready on the return of royalism to ask for four hun- 
 dred thousand heads. He will be reported, if not be- 
 lieved, to have accused himself with pride of getting 
 rid of sympathizers with the Revolution by poison. 
 He will settle down in England, near London, at Barnes 
 Terrace. He will write doleful and pitiful complaints 
 against his wife, and maundering regrets for his mar- 
 riage. He and she will finally perish by the knife of 
 an assassin, a dismissed servant and suspected spy, Lo- 
 renzo the Piedmontese, who killed himself after the 
 double murder. He and she will lie together in an 
 English grave, somewhere in the gray St. Pancras re- 
 gion. Could there be a more dismal, more tragic end- 
 ing for two lives that had begun so brightly?
 
 1789. NECKER'S PLAN. 549 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVIL 
 
 DRIFTING. 
 
 STILL the slow debates dragged on; still Bailly made 
 his unceasing, unsuccessful efforts to see the king; still 
 met the commissioners in conference. On June 3d the 
 nobles wasted time in profitless and purposeless investi- 
 gations into the custom of deciding by order in the 
 most distant days. They made a brave show of pedan- 
 try in citing capitularies of Charlemagne and a letter 
 of Hincmar, " De Ordine Palatii," in discussing the ex- 
 istence of orders among the Franks of the time of Tac- 
 itus, and in wrangling over the term "Commons" as 
 applied to the Third Estate. In this apparent dead-lock 
 Necker developed a plan, and produced it on June 4th. 
 He proposed that each order should verify separately 
 its own powers, that contested points should be brought 
 before the commissioners of the three orders, and that 
 in any case of final disagreement the matter should be 
 left to the judgment of the king, a judgment without 
 appeal. On June 5th the clergy decided to accept the 
 Necker proposal. If the nobility had been as astute 
 as the clergy, and had acted as they acted, the Third 
 Estate would have been caught in a very ingenious 
 trap. But, luckily for the Third Estate and the cause 
 it represented, the nobles, guided by such spirits as 
 D'Antraigues, Cazales, D'Epremesnil, and their kind, 
 were less politic. They declined to accept a proposal 
 fashioned, had they but been wise enough to know it,
 
 550 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. Cu. XXXVII. 
 
 entirely in their interests; declined to accept it except 
 with amendments of a kind which the Third Estate was 
 not likely to tolerate. Indeed, the Third Estate, long 
 tolerant, was growing desperately impatient. On June 
 5th an indignant deputy proposed boldly what no doubt 
 many were desiring, that the Third Estate should have 
 done with temporizing for good and all, and should 
 form themselves at once into a National Assembly. 
 Mirabeau once more rose to the situation, dominated 
 and directed the fluctuant Assembly. All the efforts of 
 the ministers, he declared, had been directed to sowing 
 the seeds of division, while they pretended to preach 
 union. Forced, against their wills, to convoke the 
 States-General, they hoped, by dividing them and set- 
 ting them against each other, to minimize their power 
 and to reduce them to the necessity of accepting the 
 ministry as the final arbiter of their differences. They 
 should not hide from themselves, he said, that the veri- 
 fication of powers prejudged the question of the manner 
 of voting, since to verify the powers was in itself to 
 deliberate upon the legality or illegality of those same 
 powers. Since it was the same question, by what right 
 could any tribunal whatever other than the States-Gen- 
 eral dare to decide in this particular? He wound up by 
 declaring that to adopt the proposals of the royal com- 
 missioners would strike at the rights of the nation, and 
 wound alike justice and expediency. It would paralyze 
 with the chill of death the National Assembly before it 
 had even manifested its existence, and it would destroy 
 the last hope of the nation. It was finally decided, by 
 four hundred votes to twenty-six, that the Third Estate 
 would not consider the ministerial proposals until after 
 the close of the conferences. 
 
 On June 5th Bailly had announced to the Third Es-
 
 1789. A SPIRITED RETORT. 551 
 
 tate that he had been unsuccessful in his efforts to ob- 
 tain an audience of the king and queen, and he had 
 proposed to the Commons that they should resolve to 
 go as a body to sprinkle holy water upon the body of 
 the dead Dauphin. This proposal was carried unani- 
 mously. Now, on June 6th, Bailly was able to an- 
 nounce to the Third Estate that the king had at last 
 consented to receive the long -deferred deputation 
 would, in fact, receive it that very day. Received the 
 deputation accordingly was, though only to the num- 
 ber of twenty members, a smaller number than the Com- 
 mons had originally proposed to send. The Commons' 
 deputation was composed of the following deputies : 
 Bailly, Redon, Thouret, Bouillote, Chapelier, Volney, 
 Target, D'Ambezieux, Rabaud-Saint-fitienne, De Luze, 
 Milscent, Tronchet, Ducellier, Prevot, Mounier, Mira- 
 beau, Lebrun, Legrand, Aucler, Descottes, Mathieu de 
 Rondeville, Pelisson. The twenty were solemnly re- 
 ceived by the afflicted king. The antique ceremonies 
 of abasement which the Keeper of the Seals had talked 
 over earlier with Bailly were, most wisely, not insisted 
 upon. The Keeper of the Seals had suggested to Bailly 
 that it certainly was the ancient usage for such an indi- 
 vidual as an orator of the Third Estate to speak to his 
 king on his knees. " We do not wish, of course," said 
 the Keeper of the Seals, " to insist upon an old ceremony 
 which might wound the feelings of the Third Estate, 
 but still, if the king wished it " "And how if twen- 
 ty-five millions of men do not wish it ?" Bailly boldly 
 interrupted, after which no more was heard of the an- 
 cient usage. 
 
 Now, at last, without kneeling, the Commons' deputa- 
 tion got into the royal presence. Now the bland, weak 
 face of the king could survey, among those twenty men
 
 552 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. . CH. XXXVII. 
 
 who trod gravely at Bailly's heels, with other notable 
 faces the face most notable of all, and probably most 
 distasteful to him of all, the face of Mirabeau. In that 
 face, no doubt, Louis thought he saw the most danger- 
 ous enemy of the monarchy ; only a little while and 
 that face shall be thought of as belonging to the best 
 friend of the monarchy. While such speculations as 
 might be were passing through the muddled, angry, af- 
 flicted royal mind, Dean Bailly gravely read the long- 
 prepared address, to which he had neatly tacked a little 
 condoling sentence about the poor dead Dauphin. The 
 king then, having to say something, said as little as 
 possible. He accepted with a cold satisfaction the ex- 
 pressions of devotion and attachment of the Third Es- 
 tate. He assured them that all the orders of the States- 
 General had an equal claim upon his goodness. He 
 finally, with an undertone of menace, advised them, 
 above all things, to second promptly, wisely, and peace- 
 fully the accomplishment of the good which the sover- 
 eign so anxiously desired to do for his people, and 
 which the people no less anxiously and confidently ex- 
 pected from him. With these words the king dismissed 
 the deputation, convinced, no doubt, that in uttering the 
 words set down for him he had played a very states- 
 manlike part indeed. The deputation returned imme- 
 diately -to the Salle des Menus to give an account of 
 their interview. 
 
 That June 6th was to be an eventful day in the Com- 
 mons' Chamber. Bailly and his twenty colleagues had 
 scarcely returned from the royal presence when a depu- 
 tation arrived from the clergy with a very remarkable 
 proposition. The clergy had been busy in their cham- 
 ber that same morning. Decoulmiers, Cure of Abbe- 
 court, had moved the hearts of all his hearers by a
 
 1789. AN INGENIOUS TRAP. 553 
 
 pathetic harangue on the poverty of the people and the 
 scarcity of grain. Fired by a somewhat tardy sympa- 
 thy with the sufferings of the poor, the clergy resolved 
 to petition the king to order the strictest investigation 
 in order to discover the monopolizers of the corn that 
 belongs to the country. They further resolved to send 
 a deputation to the Third Estate, calling upon the Com- 
 mons to join with them in a conference having for its 
 aim and object the alleviation of the popular suffering 
 due to the scarcity of food. 
 
 Here was a trap with a vengeance, and one of the 
 most ingenious kind. The prelate who held up in the 
 eyes of the Third Estate and the thronged benches of 
 spectators a horrible hunch of black bread, and asked 
 them with a tearful voice to look upon the food of the 
 peasant, had calculated very skilfully upon the result of 
 his dramatic appeal. If the Assembly yielded to the ap- 
 peal, and took action of the kind demanded, it would by 
 so doing practically sanction that very separation of the 
 orders against which it had striven so long and so pa- 
 tiently. If, on the other hand, it rejected the appeal 
 now made to it, it afforded its enemies the opportunity 
 of saying that it set a technical and legal question far 
 above the well-being of the people it pretended to rep- 
 resent. 
 
 The Third Estate parried this subtle stroke very 
 skilfully. Bailly, as dean, replied to the deputation that 
 the ardent wish of the representatives of the people was 
 to come to the people's help, and that in the action of 
 the clergy they hailed a hope of that speedy union 
 without which the public misfortunes could only in- 
 crease. As soon as the deputation had withdrawn, car- 
 rying with them this craftily qualified reply, a vehe- 
 ment debate arose. Populus, a comparatively obscure
 
 554 THE FRENCfl REVOLUTION. CH. XXXVII. 
 
 member, a lawyer from Bourg-en-Bresse, declared ener- 
 getically that the action of the clergy was merely a 
 most insidious political move. A member still more 
 obscure followed Populus in a maiden speech. The new 
 speaker was almost unknown in the Assembly : his ap- 
 pearance was not of a kind to attract. A face deadly 
 pale, veins of a greenish hue, insignificant features, a 
 sinister expression, an uneasy unwillingness to look any 
 one straight in the face, a continual and painful wink- 
 ing of the eyes, an almost childish nervousness which 
 made him tremble like a leaf on rising to address the 
 Assembly, such were the most conspicuous characteris- 
 tics of the new speaker. But if the appearance of the 
 man was insignificant, the words were full of signifi- 
 cance ; if the expression of the face was repellent, the 
 expression of his thoughts captivated the audience ; if 
 the manner was nervous, the matter was bold, daring, 
 and decisive. 
 
 " Let the clergy," he said, " if they were indeed so im- 
 patient to solace the sufferings of the people, come into 
 that hall and ally themselves to the friends of the peo- 
 ple. Let them retard no longer by meaningless delays 
 the duty of the Third Estate. Let them no longer seek 
 by paltry devices to turn the Commons from the resolu- 
 tions they had adopted. Nay, more, and better still, let 
 them remember that the primitive privileges, the an- 
 cient canons of the Church, justify the sale even of the 
 sacred vases in so excellent a cause. Let them, as min- 
 isters of religion and worthy imitators of their great 
 Master, renounce the luxury which environs them. Let 
 them put aside that pomp which is only an insult to 
 poverty. Let them return to the modesty of their ori- 
 gin. Let them dismiss the stately servants who escort 
 them. Let them sell their splendid equipages and con-
 
 1789. HOBESPIERftE). 555 
 
 vert this vile superfluity into food for the poor." This 
 energetic speech was received with a general murmur 
 of the most flattering approval. Every one was eager 
 to know who the young orator was who had so adroitly 
 seized upon arguments so skilful ; nobody seemed to be 
 aware who the orator was. It was not until some min- 
 utes of eager inquiry that men began to pass from mouth 
 to mouth, through the body of the hall and all along 
 the galleries, the name of Robespierre. The young Ar- 
 ras lawyer had made his first appeal to popular favor, 
 and had not made it in vain. It is curious to note that 
 Robespierre was so completely unknown at this time 
 that his name does not appear in the columns of the 
 Moniteur which records the debate of June 6th. A frag- 
 ment of his speech is indeed given, but it is set down 
 by the perplexed reporter or recorder to a mysterious 
 
 and meaningless " N ." The speech is not mentioned 
 
 at all in Buchez and Roux' "Histoire Parlementaire," 
 and even the excellent "Archives Parlementaires" only 
 follow the Moniteur in according it to a nameless speak- 
 er. Fortunately, however, the fact is recorded, and a 
 fuller summary of the speech given by E^ienne Dumont, 
 of Geneva, the Protestant pastor who was the friend of 
 Bentham, of Romilly, and of Mirabeaiu He was pres- 
 ent at the sitting of the 6th of June, and described the 
 impression it produced upon its hearers. 
 
 Malouet rose in support of the motion of Populus, 
 that the clergy should be invited at once to join the 
 Third Estate in the Salle des Menus. The discussion 
 was interrupted by the arrival of a deputation from 
 the nobles informing the Third Estate of the deter- 
 mination to which they had arrived with regard to the 
 Necker proposal. The Third Estate gravely assured 
 the deputation that its information would be duly con-
 
 556 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXXVII. 
 
 sidered, whereupon the deputation withdrew, and the 
 debate upon the proposal of the clergy continued. It 
 was finally decided to send this message to the clergy : 
 " Swayed by the same duties as you, touched even to 
 tears by the public sorrows, we entreat you, we conjure 
 you to join us at this very moment in the common hall, 
 in order to consider the means of ameliorating those 
 sorrows."
 
 1789. A MEMOHABLE DATE. 557 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVIII. 
 
 THE TENTH OF JUNE. 
 
 IN all constitutional movements, in all tentative agi- 
 tations, there conies a critical moment when the irreso- 
 lute becomes resolute, when inertia becomes action,/ 
 when a number of scattered forces become homoge-( 
 neous, and union arises out of chaos. June 10, 1789, 
 was such a critical moment in the history of the French 
 Revolution. Up to that time, if we anticipate and am- 
 plify a simile of Sieyes, the new ship of state, the Tiers 
 Etat, had been rocking meaninglessly at her moorings, 
 and in the gathering storm there seemed every prospect 
 that she might be wrecked while riding at anchor and 
 actually in port. But with June 10th came Sieyes 
 and his simile. " Let us cut the cable," he said, " it is 
 time." And he proceeded to cut the cable, and set the 
 ship free for her famous voyage and her amazing ship- 
 wrecks, a voyage and shipwrecks which that adventur- 
 ous constitutional mariner Sieyes shall survive and sor- 
 row over. 
 
 The Third Estate had fought hard for the true rights 
 of the States-General. It had battled for the common 
 scrutiny and the common vote. It had found leagued 
 against it the overt hostility of the noble order, the 
 covert animosity of the court, the vacillations and 
 chicanery of the clerical order. The conferences had 
 come to nothing. The Commons were face to face 
 with a tremendous alternative either to yield ignomin-
 
 558 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXXVIII. 
 
 iously or to persevere in what might almost seem a 
 desperate course. As was natural, it was Mirabeau 
 who helped to decide the action of the Third Estate. 
 Scarcely had the Commons assembled on June 10th when 
 he rose and called the attention of the Assembly to the 
 grave danger involved in further delay. There was, he 
 believed, a member of the Third Estate, a deputy of one 
 of the Paris divisions, who had a very important pro- 
 posal to make to the Third Estate, and he solicited the 
 best attention of the Commons to that proposal. Nat- 
 urally the Commons, who, as a body, were beginning 
 to regard Mirabeau as their natural leader, were only 
 too eager to listen to any proposal which came to them 
 thus heralded. Mirabeau sat down, and the Abbe Sie- 
 yes arose. This was Sieyes' first appearance before the 
 Commons ; this was Sieyes' first speech, it was his first 
 decisive step in public life. He naturally addressed a 
 favorable audience. His pamphlet was in every man's 
 mind, in every man's hand that famous pamphlet whose 
 initial question was in every man's mouth : " What is 
 the Third Estate? Everything. What has it been 
 till now in the body politic? Nothing." The priest 
 against his will who had so long abstained from preach- 
 ing or confessing, who had devoted his hours to the 
 study of philosophy and the laws of applied politics, 
 was well commended in the eyes of the expectant Com- 
 mons ; the big proposal he had to make was listened to 
 with the greatest enthusiasm. 
 
 In brief, this proposal was that the first two orders 
 should be immediately summoned to join the Com- 
 mons, that they should be informed that the call of the 
 constituencies would be made in an hour, and that the 
 members of either of the orders who did not obey the 
 summons would be condemned by default. Here was a
 
 1789. EVASIVE REPLIES. 559 
 
 serious, a daring proposal. It fired the Assembly with 
 enthusiasm. After a debate prolonged to an evening 
 sitting the proposal of Sieves was accepted with some 
 slight modifications. The next day, June llth, being a 
 religious holiday, the Third Estate did not meet, but we 
 may note, significantly enough, that a hundred cures of 
 the clerical chamber assembled together, and solemnly 
 agreed that, without waiting for the decision of their 
 body, they would unite with the Third Estate for the 
 common verification of powers. On the following day, 
 Friday, June 12th, the Third Estate assembled, and pro- 
 ceeded to carry into effect its resolution of the day be- 
 fore yesterday. It sent two deputations, one to the no- 
 bility and one to the clergy, calling upon them to join 
 the Third Estate in the common hall, and proceed to 
 the calling of the constituencies and the verification of 
 powers. To this summons the clergy responded, with 
 more or less periphrase, that they would think about it. 
 To this summons the nobles in their turn responded, 
 also with more or less periphrase, that they would think 
 about it. The reply in the case of the clergy implied 
 a certain amount of uncertainty. The nobles were not 
 in the least uncertain. They intended to adhere to 
 their original resolution. 
 
 The Third Estate occupied itself for a while in dis- 
 cussing an address to the king. A proposal of Bar- 
 nave's carried the day over a proposal of Malouet's, 
 which was too much sugared with compliments to please 
 the taste of an Assembly that was rapidly passing out 
 of its political childhood. Barnave put the case of the 
 Commons with great strength and directness. He threw 
 the blame of the defeated project of conciliation entire- 
 ly upon the shoulders of the nobility. There was noth- 
 ing left, he contended, for the Commons to do save to
 
 560 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXXVIII. 
 
 get to work as speedily as possible without losing any 
 further time in vain discussions. He wound up by re- 
 questing the king with a polite firmness to allow the 
 dean of the Third Estate an interview with his sacred 
 person, in order that an account of the determination 
 and the action of the Commons might be submitted to 
 him. This address disposed of, the Third Estate be- 
 gan to set to work in good earnest. Upon the motion 
 of one of the Paris deputies, Desmeuniers, a man of let- 
 ters, who had at one time been private secretary to the 
 Count de Provence, it was resolved to proceed at once 
 to calling over the roll of the constituencies. Each 
 deputy, as his constituency was called, was to submit 
 his powers to the bureau to be registered. The ma- 
 chinery was fairly in motion at last ; but on this first 
 day no single representative of the two higher orders 
 put in an appearance at the Salle des Menus. The 
 hundred clergy were evidently held in check. 
 
 The political machine was now in working order. It 
 was, in fact, actually working. It only needed that im- 
 portant appendage of all machines, political or other 
 a name. On June 15th Sieyes proposed that it should 
 be styled the Assembly of Known and Verified Represen- 
 tatives of the French Nation. Mirabeau proposed, sim- 
 ply, Representatives of the French People. Mounier pro- 
 posed, " Majority deliberating in the absence of the Mi- 
 nority." A deputy from Vendome, to whom nobody paid 
 any attention, suggested that the Assembly should consist 
 of "Representatives of their Constituents." Pison du 
 Galland, a well-esteemed Grenoble lawyer, whom des- 
 tiny will preserve for a peaceful and dignified ending 
 as a judge at Grenoble, had a notion that the title of 
 all titles was "Active and Legitimate Assembly of the 
 Representatives of the French Nation." Legrand struck
 
 1789. AN EXCITED CITIZEN. 561 
 
 well in the centre of the speculative target with the 
 happy and simple suggestion that they should call them- 
 selves "National Assembly." Supplementary to this 
 question of the nomenclature, and really more impor- 
 tant, was the question of the authority of the body. 
 Should the king have a veto or not ? Mirabeau protest- 
 ed passionately in favor of a royal right of veto : " I 
 believe the veto of the king to be so necessary that I 
 would rather live in . Constantinople than in France if 
 he had it not." Camus, the Aristotelian scholar, the 
 learned in ecclesiastical law, pertinently asked if any 
 royal veto could prevent the Assembly from being what 
 it was. 
 
 The protracted debate dragged on till the midnight 
 of June 16th. The later scenes were stormy. The vast 
 majority of the Assembly were in favor of coming to a 
 vote at once, of constituting themselves a National As- 
 sembly before the next morning dawned. But a minoi-- 
 ity was opposed a very decided, persistent minority 
 some hundred deputies in all, headed by prudent Ma- 
 louet, who fought vigorously against an immediate de- 
 cision. With cries, protests, noisy interruptions of all 
 kinds, they prevented the appeal by name, much to the 
 indignation of the spectators. One of these was so ex- 
 cited by the scene that he ran from his place to show 
 his disapproval of the action of Malouet by taking him 
 angrily by the collar. The fiery citizen made his escape 
 successfully after this astonishing breach of parliamen- 
 tary decorum. In the midst of all the hubbub the As- 
 sembly as a body preserved its dignity. Strongly pa- 
 tient, it was content to wait until the warring minority 
 had worn itself out in clamorous interruptions. At mid- 
 night, when the tumult was somewhat abated, when 
 three of the deputies had withdrawn, when the com- 
 L 36
 
 562 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXXVIII. 
 
 posed majority bad found itself in tranquil possession 
 of the hall, Gautier de Biauzat urged that so important 
 a resolution should be carried in the full light of day, 
 under the eyes of the whole nation. Biauzat was a sen- 
 sible man, a moderate liberal, a lawyer at Clermont- 
 Ferrand, for whom fate reserved a peaceful ending as a 
 councillor of state in the year of Waterloo. " I am 
 ready," he declared, " to vote that we should constitute 
 ourselves a National Assembly, but this is not the hour. 
 To-morrow I will be ready to sign that vote with my 
 blood." His suggestion was accepted. The Third Es- 
 tate, after its parliamentary baptism of fire, rose at one 
 in the morning.
 
 1789. A LETTER FROM THE KING. 553 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIX. 
 
 THE SEVENTEENTH OF JUNE. 
 
 ON the morning of June 17th the Third Estate met 
 again for the last time as a separate, disorganized order. 
 A vast throng of spectators lined the hall to witness the 
 solemn celebration, the thought of which was in all 
 men's minds, comment on which was in all men's 
 mouths. For a moment, indeed, it seemed as if the 
 daring deed would be again delayed. A message came 
 to Bailly summoning him to the Chancellery to receive 
 a letter from the king. The royal letter was a warning 
 to the audacious Third Estate, reminding it that it 
 could do nothing without the association of the other 
 orders. Such a letter at such a moment might have se- 
 riously interfered with the determination arrived at. 
 The hundred malcontents might feel themselves stimu- 
 lated to fresh efforts in the direction of delay, the less 
 enthusiastic members of the majority might be either 
 chilled or alarmed into inaction. Under the circum- 
 stances, the Assembly acted wisely in avoiding all possi- 
 ble dissension by adjourning the consideration of the 
 royal letter, and by forbidding its dean to leave the hall 
 until the conclusion of the sitting. By a vote of four 
 hundred and ninety-one to ninety by a clear majority, 
 that is to say, of more than four hundred members the 
 amended motion of Sieyes was carried, and the chaotic 
 Third Estate was metamorphosed into the ordered and 
 organized "National Assembly."
 
 564 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXXIX. 
 
 It is well, it is even essential here, to read and to re- 
 cord the words in which the newly created Assembly, 
 through the mouth of Sieyes, formulated its right to ex- 
 istence : 
 
 " The Assembly, deliberating after the verification of 
 powers, recognizes that it is already composed of repre- 
 sentatives directly delegated by at least ninety-six hun- 
 dredths of the nation. Such a large body of delegated 
 authority cannot rest idle in consequence of the absence 
 of the deputies of certain constituencies or of certain 
 classes of citizens, for the absent who have been duly 
 summoned cannot prevent those who are present from 
 exercising the fulness of their rights, more especially 
 when the exercise of those rights has become a pressing 
 and imperious duty. 
 
 "Moreover, since it belongs to only duly verified rep- 
 resentatives to carry out the popular wish, and since all 
 the verified representatives ought to be in this Assembly, 
 it is further indispensable to conclude that to it, and to 
 it alone, belongs the right to interpret and to represent 
 the general will of the nation. 
 
 " There cannot exist between the Throne and the As- 
 sembly any veto, any negative power. 
 
 "The Assembly declares, then, that the common work 
 of national restoration can and should be begun with- 
 out delay by the deputies present, and thatjthey ought 
 to carry it on without interruption as without obstacle. 
 
 " The denomination of ' National Assembly ' is the 
 only title that belongs to the Assembly in the existing 
 condition of things, whether because the members who 
 compose it are the only representatives legitimately 
 and publicly known and verified, whether because they 
 are delegated by wellnigh the entire sum of the nation, 
 or whether, finally, because, the representation being
 
 1789. A FAR-REACHING ECHO. 565 
 
 one and indivisible, no deputy, in whatever order or 
 class he may be chosen, has the right to exercise his 
 functions separately from this Assembly. 
 
 " The Assembly will never lose its hope of uniting in 
 its bosom all the deputies who are absent to-day; it 
 will not cease to call upon them to fulfil the obligation 
 imposed upon them of aiding in the work of the States- 
 General. The Assembly declares in advance that at 
 whatever moment the absent deputies may present 
 themselves in the session that is about to open, it will 
 rejoice to receive them, and to allow them, after due 
 verification of their powers, to share in the great labors 
 which should bring about the regeneration of France. 
 
 " The National Assembly resolves that the reasons 
 for this present resolution shall be at once set forth in 
 order that they may be presented to the king and to 
 the nation." 
 
 The Assembly, having thus formulated its act of birth, 
 proceeded to swear a solemn oath : " We swear and 
 promise to fulfil with zeal and fidelity the duties which 
 devolve upon us." This oath, sworn by some six hun- 
 dred deputies in the presence of some four thousand spec- 
 tators, might well "excite the greatest emotion, and 
 form an august and imposing ceremony." The echo of 
 that oath would ring very unpleasantly in the ears of the 
 king, still more unpleasantly in the ears of the queen, 
 most unpleasantly of all in the ears of the Polignac fac- 
 tion and the intriguers of the Bull's Eye. Its echo, too, 
 would reach to those two chambers where the clergy 
 and the nobility were so busily engaged in doing noth- 
 ing, and would arouse most unpleasant emotions there 
 envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness, but es- 
 pecially and most unpleasantly a sense of fear. The 
 echo of that oath would resound all over France, and
 
 566 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXXIX. 
 
 tell the long-silent, long-suffering millions that they need 
 suffer and be silent no longer, for they have found a 
 voice at last, and a loud one, that princes and prelates and 
 even kings must perforce listen to. The fame of this 
 great oath has been much obscured by the yet greater 
 fame and moment of another oath, which has yet to be 
 taken, very soon, under conditions even more urgent, 
 more magnificently dramatic than these. But the mem- 
 ory of that solemn conjuration should be kept green, 
 for it inaugurated the Revolution. 
 
 In order to prove their existence as an organized and 
 constitutional body, the newly born National Assembly 
 proceeded at once to certain -enactments. It immedi- 
 ately took over to itself the right of taxation. The ex- 
 isting taxes it declared to be illegally levied, as they had 
 not been agreed to or accepted by the nation. Never- 
 theless, and for the moment, it consented to ratify their 
 levy provisionally, until and here came in a very happy 
 diplomatic stroke " the first separation of this Assem- 
 bly, from whatever cause it may arrive." " After that 
 day the National Assembly orders and decrees that all 
 levy of imposts and taxes of all kinds, which shall not 
 have been duly, formally, and freely accorded by the 
 Assembly, shall cease entirely in all the provinces of the 
 realm." By this daring act the Assembly guarded itself 
 against some despotic stroke, by leaving behind it a 
 freed nation, whose duty and whose interest it would 
 be to carry on the work. To provide against possible 
 bankruptcy, it placed the national creditors under the 
 safeguard and the honor and loyalty of the French na- 
 tion. It further announced its immediate intention of 
 dealing with the dearth and the public misery. The 
 Assembly having thus established its rights, and entered 
 thus upon the exercise of those rights, sent Camus off
 
 1789. ORDER OUT OF CHAOS. 567 
 
 post-haste to printer Baudouin at Paris, to have these 
 important resolutions printed without delay, and scat- 
 tered broadcast throughout the length and breadth of 
 France. The National Assembly meant business. 
 
 So from the most chaotic beginnings the formless, 
 powerless, meaningless Third Estate had grown into a 
 great constitutional assembly, claiming the right to ad- 
 minister the affairs of the State. During all those weary 
 weeks of waiting, of delay, of inertia, the Assembly had 
 been slowly taking shape, slowly, surely growing into 
 being, as in the hands of the Indian juggler the little 
 seed he plants in the soil grows on miraculously into the 
 sapling and the tree. The spectators hardly perceive 
 the process of growth between the sowing of the seed 
 and the existence of the tree; but the process has taken 
 place ; the seed has become the sturdy sapling ; the 
 Third Estate has become the National Assembly. A 
 modern poetess says of a modern diplomatist, " that he 
 held his Piedmont up to the light, and she suddenly 
 smiled and was Italy." In something of the same way 
 it might be said of Sieyes, that he held the Third Estate 
 up to the light, and it suddenly smiled and was France. 
 It was France, indeed, that that National Assembly rep- 
 resented. For all intents and purposes of government, 
 and especially for the great intent and purpose of re- 
 generation of the country, that National Assembly was 
 France. To this amazing, most perplexing conclusion 
 had Necker's easily manipulated Third Estate arrived, 
 much to Necker's disappointment, and even disgust. 
 
 The name of the king in the Sieyes manifesto had 
 evoked loud and enthusiastic cries of "Long live the 
 King!" in the morning sitting of June 17th. At the 
 evening sitting the king's name came again before the 
 Assembly under less congratulatory conditions. That
 
 568 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXXIX. 
 
 missive from the monarch which the Assembly had not 
 in the morning allowed Bailly to go for had now come 
 into Bailly's hands, and was by him now read to the 
 Assembly. It was addressed to "M. Bailly, Dean of 
 the Order of the Third Estate," and the body of the 
 letter was quite as ill-advised and foolish as its address. 
 After protesting plaintively against the use of the term 
 ' privileged classes," as applied by the Third Estate to 
 the two other orders, it went on to say that " the re- 
 serve which the order of nobility had shown in its ac- 
 quiescence in the overtures made on my part should 
 not have prevented the Third Estate from giving an 
 example of deference ;" and wound up by assuring the 
 Third Estate that the more confidence and attachment 
 the Third Estate displayed towards their king, the 
 better they would represent the feeling of the people, 
 whom the king loved, and by whom it was his happi- 
 ness to be beloved. The Assembly took the letter very 
 coolly. Unkingly maunderings of that kind were not 
 likely to delay the onward course of the new constitu- 
 tional body. Indeed, at that moment the constitutional 
 body proceeded to discuss with great gravity an impor- 
 tant question concerning the physical body. Learned 
 Dr. Guillotin, of Paris, was much concerned in his med- 
 ical mind by the condition of his colleagues in the Na- 
 tional Assembly. It seemed to him that the air of a 
 hall breathed, exhaled, and inhaled by some three thou- 
 sand persons could not possibly be otherwise than bad 
 for his brother-deputies. He thought further that the 
 seats were too closely crowded together for either 
 health or comfort; moreover, the seats, such as they 
 were, were portentously hard and unyielding for ses- 
 sions of twelve to fourteen hours. He earnestly sug- 
 gested that they should be forthwith provided with
 
 1789. AN INTERESTING SPECTACLE. 
 
 cushions. We of a later time associate the name of 
 learned Dr. Guillotin more with man's thinking appa- 
 ratus than with man's sitting apparatus. It is gratify- 
 ing to discover that the mind which devoted itself to 
 the best means of removing the human head could also 
 devote itself to the physical well-being of the other ex- 
 tremity. A grateful Assembly hailed with enthusiasm 
 the suggestions of their scientific colleague, and prompt- 
 ly requested him to preside over all the necessary ar- 
 rangements for the ventilation of the hall, the better ar- 
 rangement of the benches, and the due cushioning. All 
 of which good Dr. Guillotin would no doubt have been 
 delighted to do, if only time and fate had permitted. 
 But there were interruptions, interruptions of the most 
 unforeseen kind, waiting in the immediate future to in- 
 terfere with the excellent sanitary intentions of Dr. 
 Guillotin. 
 
 Arthur Young has recorded his experience of the 
 Assembly on what he happily calls the "rich day" of 
 the 15th of June. " We went immediately," he says, 
 " to the hall of the States to secure good seats in the 
 gallery ; we found some deputies already there, and a 
 pretty numerous audience collected. The room is too 
 large ; none but stentorian lungs or the finest, clearest 
 voices can be heard. However, the very size of the 
 apartment, which admits two thousand people, gave a 
 dignity to the scene. It was indeed an interesting one. 
 The spectacle of the representatives of twenty-five mill- 
 ions of people, just merging from the evils of two hun- 
 dred years of arbitrary power, and rising to the bless- 
 ings of a freer Constitution, assembled with open doors 
 under the eye of the public, was framed to call into 
 animated feelings every latent spark, every emotion of 
 a liberal bosom. ... In regard to their general method
 
 5VO THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XXXIX. 
 
 of proceeding, there are two circumstances in which 
 they are very deficient : the spectators in the galleries 
 are allowed to interfere in the debates by clapping their 
 hands, and other noisy expressions of approbation: this 
 is grossly indecent ; it is also dangerous ; for if they are 
 permitted to express approbation, they are, by parity of 
 reason, allowed expressions of dissent ; and they may 
 hiss as well as clap ; which, it is said, they have some- 
 times done : this would be to overrule the debate and 
 influence the deliberations. Another circumstance is 
 the want of order among themselves ; more than once 
 to-day there were a hundred members on their legs at a 
 time, and M. Bailly absolutely without power to keep 
 order." Those words of Arthur Young's, which paint 
 so vivid a picture of that new-born turbulent Assembly, 
 have in them a kind of allegory. All those excited 
 deputies, so vehemently striving to be heard at once, 
 were typical of the conflicting theories of national re- 
 generation that came into being with the dawn of po- 
 litical liberty. Those crowded benches where the pub- 
 lic sat grimly approving or grimly disapproving, had a 
 significance beyond what Arthur Young discerned. And 
 that description of Bailly, " absolutely without power 
 to keep order," seems to be written in words surcharged 
 with prophecy.
 
 1789. THE QUEEN HAS HER WAY. 
 
 CHAPTER XL. 
 
 TENNIS. 
 
 ON Friday, June 19, 1789, the newly created National 
 Assembly sought rest from its labors in the serene be- 
 lief that it was the ruling power in France. That same 
 night the most desperate stroke was resolved upon by 
 its enemies. The king was away at Marly, oscillating 
 feebly between the imperious counsels of the queen and 
 the prudent commonplaces of Necker. At Versailles, 
 where the popular passion stirred even the courtly air, 
 Necker had more power. He could command from the 
 king a respectful if bored attention. The best to be 
 said for Necker's prudent commonplaces, and indeed it 
 is saying much, is that attention to them might have 
 put off the evil day a little longer. But at Marly the 
 queen had it her own way. The Polignac influence, the 
 influence of the pitiful blood-princes, the influence of 
 all the evil and all the imbecile counsellors who guided 
 or who followed the queen, were able to bear upon 
 the weak king with irresistible force. The courtly talk 
 was bloody. The insolent National Assembly must be 
 crushed into the earth from which it sprang. If Ver- 
 sailles, if Paris protested, were there not troops, were 
 there not foreign mercenaries, were there not cannon ? 
 
 O * 
 
 Let a gallant king hold his own though he slaughter half 
 his citizens. But the king, if he was not of the stuff of 
 which kings are well made, was not of the stuff out of 
 which scoundrels are well made either. He had not the
 
 672 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. OH. XL 
 
 wit to be wise and follow Necker or do better than 
 Necker. He had not the will to be cruel with his court, 
 and to choke democracy with its own blood. He adopt- 
 ed a kind of despairing, ridiculous, middle course. He 
 would blow neither hot nor cold ; he did, perhaps, the 
 very most foolish thing that under the conditions he 
 possibly could have done. If he did not suppress the 
 National Assembly out of hand, at least he would pre- 
 vent it from meeting until the royal session of the com- 
 ing Monday. This brave act was to have two great 
 consequences : It was to humiliate and belittle the over- 
 weening Third Estate. It was to prevent the clergy 
 from uniting with the Third Estate, as the majority of 
 them seemed now ominously inclined to do. 
 
 On the night of June 19th the king went through the 
 process which he called making up his mind. On the 
 morning of the next day, in the clear daylight of six 
 o'clock on that summer morning, June 20, 1789,Versailles 
 was placarded with the announcement of the royal ses- 
 sion for Monday, and the closing of the Salle des Menus 
 for necessary preparations until that date. To Bailly 
 came an uncourteous letter from Master of Ceremonies 
 de Breze uncourteous inasmuch as it should have been 
 written by the king, and not by De Breze informing 
 him of the shutting that had taken place, and the sitting 
 that was yet to take place. Bailly, in the face of this 
 astonishing news, displayed an unconquerable coolness, 
 an unconquerable dignity. When the hands of his clock 
 neared the appointed hour of eight, he made his way 
 towards the Salle des Menus, as if nothing had happen- 
 ed, or could happen, to hinder the triumphant course of 
 the National Assembly. It was not a pleasant morning 
 even for a man speeding to an agi'eeable appointment. 
 It drizzled depressingly with a fine persistent rain: the
 
 1789. CHILLING RAIN, MORE CUILLIXG BAYONETS. 573 
 
 sky was gray, and most unsummerlike ; it seemed as 
 if the very elements were of the courtly faction, and 
 frowned disapproval upon the Third Estate. Under 
 that dismal sky, through that depressing rain, Bailly 
 and a swelling concourse of attendant colleagues pick- 
 ed their way along the muddy streets to the Salle des 
 Menus. At the Salle des Menus Bailly made as if he 
 would enter as usual, but he was instantly stopped by 
 the sentinels on guard. Then ensued a colloquy be- 
 tween Bailty and the officer in command, while the at- 
 tendant deputies hung about in groups, and sheltered 
 themselves, those who were most prudent, under drip- 
 ping umbrellas. The officer in command was reasonably 
 polite, but absolutely peremptory in his refusal. Bailly 
 urged with all the eloquence at his command that the 
 sitting of the National Assembly had been convened, 
 and that the king had no right to intervene. The offi- 
 cer only shook his head and pleaded his orders. Some 
 of the younger deputies in their irritation talked from 
 under their umbrellas of forcing their way into the hall. 
 The officer replied to such menaces by an order to fix 
 bayonets, more chilling than the rain. What was to be 
 done ? one deputy asked of another, as they stood there 
 on the sloppy pavement, and peered into each other's 
 faces, pale under the protection of the damp umbrellas. 
 It is hard to be heroic under an umbrella ; it is hard 
 for the wet civilian to feel heroic in the face of a taci- 
 turn soldiery with fixed bayonets and no respect for per- 
 sons. Yet those deputies wished to be heroic, aud were 
 in fact heroic. While Bailly and one or two others 
 were permitted as a special favor to enter the Salle des 
 Menus and collect the papers of the National Assem- 
 bly, the indignant deputies, in the midst of a no less in- 
 dignant populace, discussed, on the Paris Avenue, all
 
 574 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XL. 
 
 manner of proposals. Some were all for hurrying off to 
 Marly, and holding their Assembly under the very win- 
 dows of the offending king. Others were for going to 
 Paris, a suggestion which met with much popular en- 
 thusiasm, and which would have antedated the Revolu- 
 tion by some four weeks. Suddenly, ingenious Dr. 
 Guillotin, ever a man of an alert, inventive mind, said 
 his say. Was there not, he asked, a certain old tennis- 
 court in Versailles large enough to offer accommoda- 
 tion, and, considering the weather, agreeable shelter for 
 a considerable body of people ? Why should they not 
 proceed in a body to this tennis-court, and hold their 
 menaced meeting there? No sooner said than done. Dr. 
 Guillotin has more than one reason for being remem- 
 bered by history. 
 
 Priests of the historic muse might well be pardoned 
 for permitting themselves a certain hyperbolic passion, 
 a certain lighting up and letting off of verbal fireworks 
 over that marvellous session of the tennis-court. To that 
 ancient, tattered, dilapidated tennis-court, where princes 
 had played ball unheeded up to yesterday, where cheap- 
 ly audacious, imbecile princes should feign a desire to 
 play ball to-morrow, to that dusty paradise of nets and 
 rackets the National Assembly trooped, spurred by in- 
 dignation, by need of shelter, by the advice of ingenious 
 Dr. Guillotin. One member who was in bad health had 
 to be carried in arms, and lifted about in a chair inside 
 the court. Bailly came, still cool, still dignified, convoy- 
 ing his rescued papers. His immediate friends ranked 
 about him, encouraging and deriving courage. Escort- 
 ing the deputies and their dean came their masters, the 
 attendant people, furious with the fury of awakened, 
 suddenly slighted democracy, and bearing, as on stormy 
 waters, the National Assembly to its haven and its fate.
 
 1789. A FAMOUS TENNIS COURT. 575 
 
 A few moments more, and the tennis-court, whose dis- 
 mal solitude had echoed unheeded that day-dawn, was 
 choked with a mass of men who were making a revo- 
 lution. 
 
 Many pictures have preserved for the curious eyes of 
 later generations the exterior and interior aspect of that 
 tennis-court. We can see the indignant deputies en- 
 tering amid enthusiasm by the lofty door, surmounted 
 by a kind of scroll or scutcheon, and framed in high flat 
 pillars terminating in an arch that is merely decorat- 
 ive. We can see them again inside the court, with its 
 walls painted black, in order that the balls may be seen 
 more distinctly against them; with one wall lower than 
 the rest, from which sprang pillars to support the roof. 
 Here the open space gave light and air to the court; 
 here, too, nets hung to prevent the balls from escaping. 
 Round three sides of the court, about midway up the 
 wall, projected a kind of penthouse roof structure which 
 has its part in the " pastime of princes." There were a 
 few wretched benches scattered here and there. With 
 some difficulty a table was procured, and a commodious 
 chair for Bailly, which, however, he declined to use. It 
 was not for the Dean of the National Assembly, he ar- 
 gued, to sit while the members of the National Assem- 
 bly stood. 
 
 " Ubi bene, ibi patria." Wherever the delegates of 
 the people were gathered together, there was the Na- 
 tional Assembly, whether it were in the golden splendor 
 of the Salle des Menus or the naked austerity of this 
 tennis-court. Bailly, with his clerks and papers, en- 
 shrined himself at a table, persistently cool and digni- 
 fied. The assembled deputies thronged about him, all 
 their various temperaments displaying themselves freely 
 under the touchstone of that tremendous hour. Mounier
 
 570 T1IE FRENCH REVOLUTION. Cn. XL. 
 
 was the fortunate man who made himself the mouth- 
 piece of the hour. He proposed to the fluctuant Assem- 
 bly that they should adopt by oath the declaration 
 that wherever it might be forced to unite, there was the 
 National Assembly, that nothing could prevent it from 
 continuing its deliberations, and that it should never sep- 
 arate until the completion and establishment of the Con- 
 stitution. Such was the oath that Mounier proposed. 
 Such was the oath that Mounier, looking back years 
 afterwards, in exile, and in antagonism to the triumph- 
 ant Revolution, still found it good to have proposed 
 and sworn to. Bailly took the oath first. He was so 
 calm, so collected, that his voice never faltered over the 
 momentous words. His utterance was so loud and clear 
 that every man in that great audience, and many men 
 outside that great audience, heard him and applauded 
 him. Then followed that memorable scene which a hun- 
 dred pictures and descriptions have rendered as familiar 
 to most of us as remembered episodes in our own lives. 
 Do we not know that eager rush of deputies concentrat- 
 ing around the table where Bailly stands? Can we not 
 see the six hundred hands uplifted in solemn if slightly 
 theatrical unison, the eager faces lifted up to a heaven 
 beyond the bare roof of the tennis - court, the eager 
 faces peering down from galleries and apertures? Can 
 we not hear the hubbub of wild voices repeating the 
 oath, the clamor of spectators shrieking a more than 
 Roman applause? It is a great scene, and the very 
 thought of it makes the blood come quicker, though it 
 is exactly a hundred years between this June in which 
 we write and the June when that mighty oath was 
 sworn. It was the greatest game of tennis ever played 
 on earth, and the balls were the crowns, even the heads 
 of kings. Swearing over, the turn came for signing.
 
 1789. MARTIN D'AUCH. 
 
 577 
 
 Every man who had lifted his right hand in support of 
 Mounier's resolution should with the same right hand 
 append his name to the written oath. This the depu- 
 ties did, working hard, for it took time to inscribe those 
 six hundred names until four of the clock of that sum- 
 mer afternoon. One man, and one alone, of all that 
 vast crowd had the hardiness or the foolhardiness to 
 oppose the popular impulse. M. Martin d'Auch, of 
 Castelnaudary, in Languedoc, emerged for the first and 
 only time from obscurity to win for himself something 
 of the same kind of fame obtained by the fool whcr set 
 fire to the Temple of Ephesus. He wrote his name, and 
 wrote after it the word " opposant," in token that he 
 would have none of Mounier and Bailly and the wild 
 ways of an audacious democracy. The luckless Lan- 
 guedocian deputy had indeed the courage of his queer 
 opinions. He came very near to paying for his courage 
 and his queer opinions with his life. Many of his col- 
 leagues insulted him. Furious spectators denounced 
 him to the crowd outside, who began to yell for his 
 blood, and to brandish weapons. That Languedocian 
 life would not have been worth a copper coin if its 
 owner had passed into the midst of that murderous 
 mob. Bailly, who did not know what was going on, 
 saw the scuffling, heard the clamor. He forced his way 
 into the heart of the throng of furious deputies, leaped 
 upon the table to command attention, and had Martin 
 d'Auch brought before him. Martin d'Auch seems to 
 have been, up to this point, if not cool, at least clear as 
 to his purpose, and dogged in maintaining it. He could 
 not swear to execute acts not sanctioned by the king. 
 Bailly argued with him, reproved him severely even, in 
 the hope " of satisfying the general discontent." Out- 
 side the clamor was increasing. Bailly ordered Deputy 
 
 10^7 
 . <J 4
 
 578 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XL. 
 
 Martin d'Auch to conduct himself or be conducted away 
 as quickly and quietly as possible. He was carried by 
 the more kindly of his colleagues to a side-door. There, 
 overcome by the whirlwind himself had raised, he fell 
 fainting, and exclaiming, "This will be my death !" 
 Even at that side-door it would seem that he was only 
 conveyed safely away on the assurances of his escort 
 that his mind was unhinged. M. Boulle was much ex- 
 ercised by his colleague's conduct. "Why," he wrote, 
 plaintively, "should this sublime moment be selected by 
 one of our number to dishonor himself ?" He goes on 
 to say that "what is strange is, he had not behaved 
 badly up to that time, and he voted for the Constitu- 
 tion." He adds : " His name is now blasted through- 
 out France. And the unfortunate man has children !" 
 Blasted throughout France, indeed. The memory of 
 poor puzzle-headed Martin d'Auch has earned an im- 
 mortality of infamy for that solitary act of folly or less 
 than folly. In that building which commemorates the 
 tennis-court oath, and where the names of the illustri- 
 ous six hundred are duly inscribed, and each encircled 
 by its wreath of honor, the space where the name of 
 Martin d'Auch would come is left blank, as the space 
 for Marino Faliero is left blank in the gallery of the 
 Venetian Doges. 
 
 What seems to have most annoyed the deputies was 
 not so much Martin d' Audi's refusal to swear as they 
 had sworn, but his audacity in marring the fair una- 
 nimity of the document to which they subscribed by 
 putting- his own name thereto and adding the word 
 " opposant." Some of the more vehement spirits were 
 for erasing at once alike the name and the qualifica- 
 tion. Others, much more prudent and more far -see- 
 ing,, urged that it should be left upon the document
 
 1789. THE RESOLUTE IRRESOLUTE. 579 
 
 untouched. They argued, or might have argued, that 
 the very exception made unanimity of the other depu- 
 ties only the more apparent and the more important. 
 These counsels carried the day, and proved at least 
 that the new Assembly was capable of respecting lib- 
 erty of opinion and the voice of the smallest minority. 
 
 This was the last of Martin d'Auch. I have not 
 learned, I do not know if it is possible to learn, what 
 became of him, bearing that " name blasted throughout 
 France." One would like to hear his side of the story, 
 like to learn the motives, clear or confused, which led 
 him one against so many to do and dare on that fa- 
 mous day. The minority are always in the right, says 
 the eccentric reformer in one of Henrik Ibsen's come- 
 dies. We may be permitted to think with Mounier and 
 Boulle and most other people that the minority of Mar- 
 tin d'Auch was in the wrong in this instance. But his 
 memoirs would be rare reading : his notes on the vari- 
 ous phases of the Revolution, if he lived through them 
 and made notes, as full of matter as the meditations of 
 Jacques. The private opinion of a highly respectable 
 " crank " on that amazing panorama of method and 
 madness, the French Revolution, could not fail to be 
 curious and probably diverting. One may wonder, too, 
 with a touch of pity, what became of those children, 
 luckless bearers of a "name blasted throughout France." 
 Did they rejoice in their stubborn old father, or slip 
 away from him, and, later, change the branded name 
 and seek oblivion as respectable Citizen This or Citizen 
 That ? Are there descendants still of that resolute ir- 
 resolute? In all that full, instructive episode of the 
 session of the tennis-court there is nothing in its way 
 more instructive, more significant, than the story of 
 Martin d'Auch. It is bad to play the part of odd man
 
 580 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. - CH. XL. 
 
 out when one happens to be in a minority of one against 
 six hundred gentlemen who are engaged, consciously or 
 unconsciously, in making a revolution. 
 
 Before the tennis - court meeting broke up, the Na- 
 tional Assembly had resolved that when the meeting of 
 the royal session of the 22d concluded, the members 
 should remain in the hall their hall to continue their 
 deliberations. But the session was still to be delayed. 
 The royal intelligence or lack of intelligence at Marly 
 was being primed by noble audacity. The Nobility 
 Chamber sent a deputation of forty-three of its mem- 
 bers to carry an address to the king, assuring him that 
 the question now concerned him even more than them. 
 He replied in a lofty vein, the mouth-piece of some abler 
 inspiration than his own, "Patriotism and love for their 
 king have always distinguished the French nobility," 
 and so forth, and so forth. Louis declared that he ex- 
 pected, with a full confidence in the fidelity of the no- 
 bles, that they would adopt the conciliatory measures 
 with which he, for the good of his people, was busy. 
 
 It was not quite easy to see where the conciliation 
 came in. Would that it were possible to have a full, 
 exhaustive, and impartial account of everything that 
 took place at Marly during the momentous hours of that 
 Sunday ! Would that we might follow, step by step and 
 thread by thread, all the workings of the courtly plot, 
 all the complications of the courtly intrigues ! What- 
 ever the deliberations of the Sunday were, they bore 
 fruit in a further postponement of the royal session. A 
 fresh proclamation put the ceremony off from Monday, 
 the 22d, to Tuesday, the 23d. Once more the National 
 Assembly found the doors of the Salle des Menus closed 
 against them; once more they found themselves with- 
 out a legislative home. They did not again go to the
 
 1789. A CONTRARY RESULT. 581 
 
 tennis-court ; why, is not absolutely certain ; conflict- 
 ing history offers two reasons. The first, and more dra- 
 matic, is that the Count d'Artois, in a fit of more than 
 usually foolish bluster, had retained the court for his 
 own use, intending to divert himself and his friends by 
 playing tennis on the spot where the National Assembly 
 had dared to assert itself. The second story, which is 
 backed by the authority of Bailly, of De Ferrieres, of 
 Rabant Saint-Etienne, and of the " Two Friends of Lib- 
 erty," is that the populace, expecting a second tennis- 
 court sitting, had crowded into the place to witness the 
 deliberations, and that the deputies did not think there 
 was sufficient space left to them to work in comfort. 
 Whatever the cause, we may.be permitted to feel glad 
 that history does not record a second tennis-court meet- 
 ing to dim the unique interest of the first. Whatever 
 the cause, the place where they did meet was still more 
 favorable to the fortunes of the Third Estate. The 
 deputies tried to find asylum at the Recollets, but failed, 
 as its members were afraid to commit themselves. But 
 it now seemed that some hundred and forty-nine mem- 
 bers of the Clerical Chamber, anxious to join the Third 
 Estate, had taken up their quarters in the Church of St. 
 Louis. The unlucky king's ill-advised delay brought 
 about the very thing most essentially to be avoided by 
 the king's party the fusion between the clerical and 
 popular orders. In the nave of the Church of St. Louis 
 the National Assembly "set in their staff." A table 
 was set for the president and his secretaries. A number 
 of chairs to right and left represented respectively the 
 natural places of the clerical and noble orders. The 
 public were admitted, and the church was very soon full. 
 At two o'clock the ecclesiastics, who had assembled in 
 the choir, entered the nave under the guidance of the
 
 582 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XL. 
 
 Archbishops of Vienne and Bordeaux and the Bishops 
 of Rodez, Coutances, and Chartres, and solemnly took 
 their places with the National Assembly. " The temple 
 of religion," it was happily said, " became the temple of 
 the country." The fusion between the two orders was 
 practically accomplished. A popular picture of the 
 time represents a peasant leaving his plough to grasp 
 the hand of a priest who greets him cordially : " Tou- 
 chez-la, Monsieur le cure ; j'savais ben que vous seriais 
 des notres," says the legend. The artist, either care- 
 lessly or ironically probably carelessly has represent- 
 ed these types of the two orders as offering each other 
 their left hands. Left-handed or right-handed, the sal- 
 utation had taken place. It would have been better for 
 the king and his courtly counsellors not to have post- 
 poned that royal session. 
 
 On Tuesday, June 23d, however, the royal session did 
 take place. It began with sombre auspices for the Third 
 Estate. Bailly was troubled in his mind by memories 
 of a nocturnal visit from Baron de Menon, the Duke 
 d'Aiguillon, and Count Mathieu de Montmorency, who 
 came with tidings that Necker had broken with the 
 court and would not attend the session. Revolving 
 many cares in his mind, like pious ^Eneas, Bailly came 
 to the Salle des Menus to find fresh cares awaiting him. 
 The old, tedious, ill-advised insults were repeated. The 
 deputies of the Third Estate were kept outside the 
 door in driving rain it rained a good deal that June. 
 The place and the environs were surrounded by a men- 
 acing display of armed troops. While the clerical and 
 noble orders were afforded entrance by one door, the 
 Third Estate was kept a long time dancing attendance 
 at another door, until at last Bailly's declaration that 
 the National Assembly would, as one man, bodily take
 
 1789. NBCKER'S PALTRY SCHEME. 533 
 
 its departure moved even the stolid officialism of M. de 
 Breze, and the indignant Third Estate came into the 
 hall to find the two other orders seated. Save that the 
 public was not present, the hall wore much the same 
 aspect as it did on that day when the States-General 
 opened. But if the public was not present, neither was 
 Necker. His place lay ominously vacant, giving rise to 
 much wonder. Those who were in the courtly swim 
 knew why. Bailly knew why. The news soon spread 
 to the less learned. Necker had his plan for meeting the 
 difficulties of the situation. He had framed a scheme as 
 ludicrously inefficient as Mrs. Partington's mop and pail, 
 by which a kind of bastard imitation of the English con- 
 stitutional system was to be grafted onto or superim- 
 posed upon most of the old evil system. He was for two 
 chambers. He was for a principle of voting by which 
 the orders voted together on unimportant and separately 
 upon important matters. He was for an establishment 
 of provincial States or Parliaments. He was for non- 
 publicity of meeting for everything, in a word, which 
 awakening France just then did not happen at all to 
 want. But, paltry and peddling as Necker's scheme 
 was, it was too much for the king, or, rather, for the 
 wire-pullers behind the king. The kingly party would 
 have no concessions. The king came down to Versailles 
 on June 23d, to meet the mutinous Third Estate, with 
 an elaborate declaration of autocratic bluster. Necker 
 resigned. He was a weak, vain man, incapable of appre- 
 ciating or dealing with the great occasion, but he could 
 not go with the kingly party. He resigned, and the 
 kingly party blundered on without him. 
 
 The king read, with his usual plainness of manner, 
 the speech composed for him. He spoke the despot- 
 ic language that came so strangely from his lips. He
 
 584 THE FRENCH iiEVOLtJTiotf. CH.XL. 
 
 censured the conduct of the Assembly, regaining it only 
 as the order of the Third Estate. He annulled its decrees, 
 enjoined the continuance of the orders, imposed reforms, 
 arid determined their limits ; then he enumerated the 
 benefits that kingly condescension allowed. 
 
 These were publicity for finance, voting of taxes, and 
 regulation of the expenditure. For this the States will 
 indicate the means, and his Majesty "would adopt them, 
 if they were compatible with the kingly dignity and 
 the despatch of the public service." Having gone so 
 far, the king further condescended to sanction the equal- 
 ity of taxation when the clergy and the nobility should 
 be willing to renounce their pecuniary privileges. The 
 dues of property were to be respected, especially tithes, 
 feudal rights, and duties. The king invited the States 
 to seek for and to propose to him means for reconciling 
 the abolition of the lettres de cachet, with the precau- 
 tions necessary either for protecting the honor of fam- 
 ilies, or for repressing the commencement of sedition and 
 the like. The States were also to seek the means of 
 reconciling the liberty of the press with the respect 
 due to religion, the morals, and the honor of the citi- 
 zens. The king then declared in the most decided man- 
 ner that he would preserve entire, and without the 
 slightest alteration, the institution of the army. To say 
 that was to say that the plebeian should never attain 
 any grade in the army. 
 
 The amiable despot appeared scarcely to appreciate 
 the provoking violence of his speech, for he appeared 
 surprised at the aspect of the Assembly. When the 
 nobles ventured to applaud the article consecrating 
 feudal rights, loud voices cried from the Third Estate 
 for silence. 
 
 The king, after a moment's pause and astonishment,
 
 1789. Atf INSANE MENACE. 585 
 
 continued with a grave, intolerable sentence, which flung 
 down the gauntlet to the Assembly, and began the war: 
 "If you abandon me in so excellent an enterprise, I 
 will, alone, effect the welfare of my people ; alone, I 
 shall consider myself as their true representative !" 
 Then he made a bad and foolish ending to a bad and 
 foolish speech: " I order you, gentlemen, to disperse im- 
 mediately, and to repair to-morrow morning to the 
 chambers appropriated to your order, there to resume 
 your sitting." Having uttered this insane menace, the 
 king left the chamber, followed by the whole of the 
 courtly party. The deputies remained alone, looking 
 at each other in a brief composed silence. But the si- 
 lence was soon broken. 
 
 Mirabeau, who, with the instinct of the true leader, 
 had been more and more asserting himself, rose and 
 said : " Gentlemen, I admit that what you have just 
 heard might be for the welfare of the country, were it 
 not that the presents of despotism are always danger- 
 ous. What is this insulting dictatorship? The pomp 
 of arms, the violation of the national temple, are resort- 
 ed to to command you to be happy ! Who gives this 
 command ? Your mandatary. Who makes these im- 
 perious laws for you ? Your mandatary; he who should 
 rather receive them from you, gentlemen from us, who 
 are invested with a political and inviolable priesthood ; 
 from us, in a word, to whom alone twenty-five millions 
 of men are looking for certain happiness, because it is 
 to be consented to, and given and received by all. But 
 the liberty of your discussions is enchained; a military 
 force surrounds the Assembly ! Where are the enemies 
 of the nation? Is Catiline at our gates? I demand, 
 investing yourselves with your dignity, with your legis- 
 lative power, you enclose yourselves within the religion
 
 586 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XL. 
 
 of your oath. It does not permit you to separate till 
 you have formed a Constitution." 
 
 Mirabeau had scarcely ended when the master of the 
 ceremonies, De Breze, entered and said to the presi- 
 dent, in a low tone, " Sir, you heard the king's order!" 
 Bailly seems hardly to have risen to the importance of 
 the occasion. He replied, " The Assembly adjourned 
 after the royal meeting ; I cannot dismiss it till it has 
 deliberated." Then turning towards his colleagues near 
 him: " It seems to me that the assembled nation cannot 
 receive any orders." 
 
 That sentence was admirably taken up by Mirabeau, 
 who addressed himself to the master of the ceremonies. 
 But if Bailly was weak, Mirabeau was strong. Though 
 he was not in the least entitled to make himself the 
 spokesman of the Assembly, he seized upon the new op- 
 portunity. With his powerful and imposing voice, and 
 with terrible dignity, he hurled back these words: "We 
 have heard the intentions suggested to the king ; and 
 you, sir, who can never be his organ to the National 
 Assembly you, who have here neither place, voice, nor 
 right to speak you are not a man to remind us of his 
 discourse. Go and tell those who send you that we are 
 here by the will of the people, and are to be driven 
 hence only by the power of bayonets." 
 
 Breze was disconcerted, thunderstruck ; he felt the 
 power of that new royalty, and rendering to the one 
 what etiquette commanded for the other, he retired 
 walking backward, as was the custom before the king. 
 The court had imagined another way to disperse the 
 States-General : mei'ely to have the hall dismantled, to 
 demolish the amphitheatre and the king's estrade. Work- 
 men accordingly entered, but at one word from the pres- 
 ident they stopped, laid down their tools, contemplated
 
 1789. . THE BATTLE BEGINS. 587 
 
 with surprise the calm dignity of the Assembly, and be- 
 came attentive auditors of a momentous discussion. 
 
 A deputy proposed to discuss the king's resolutions 
 on the morrow. He was not listened to. Barnave, the 
 young member for Dauphine, laid down forcibly the 
 heroic doctrine, "You have declared what you are; you 
 need no sanction." Gleizen, the Breton, asked if the 
 sovereign spoke as a master, where he ought to consult. 
 Petion, Buzot, Garat, Gregoire, spoke with equal energy. 
 " You are to-day," added Sieyes, calmly, " what you 
 were yesterday. Let us deliberate." The Assembly, 
 full of resolution and dignity, began the debate accord- 
 ingly. On the motion of. Camus it was declared " that 
 the sitting was but a ministerial act, and that the As- 
 sembly persisted in its decrees." The Assembly next 
 declared, on Mirabeau's proposal, that its members were 
 inviolable ; that whoever laid hands on a deputy was a 
 traitor, infamous, and worthy of death. 
 
 The battle between the court and the people had 
 definitely begun. The king was wholly unequal to the 
 occasion. He talked daggers, but he used none. When 
 De Breze, who came and informed him that the depu- 
 ties of the Third Estate remained sitting, asked for or- 
 ders, he walked about for a few minutes, and said at 
 last, in the tone of one tired to death, "Very well; leave 
 them alone." That was all he could think of. He had 
 denounced them; had met their resolutions with a for- 
 mal and autocratic dissolution, and when they still per- 
 sisted in their course he could only say, with a weary 
 shrug of his shoulders, " Very well; leave them alone." 
 But the queen and the court were not willing to let 
 them alone, and the next few days witnessed the growth, 
 on the one hand of the Assembly, and on the other of 
 a plot to put that Assembly out of the way forever.
 
 588 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. Cn. XL. 
 
 On June 24th the clerical order broke into two. 
 The hundred and forty-nine who sympathized with the 
 Third Estate went from their hall to the Commons' 
 hall, while the remainder, by a vote of 132 to 118, de- 
 clared themselves the "active Assembly of the Clerical 
 Order at the States-General." They might have as 
 well declared themselves Emperors of the East for all 
 the good it did them. In the noble order faction was 
 also at work. Clermont-Tonnerre, the gallant cavalry 
 colonel, the advanced young noble who little dreamed 
 that he would one day vote for veto, support the dicta- 
 torship of the king, and die ignominiously by the hands 
 of the crowd, urged the nobles to join the Third Es- 
 tate and the dissentient clergy. Lally-Tollendal urged 
 the same thing; but he and those who thought with 
 him were outvoted. In the Commons little happened. 
 The Assembly decreed the establishment of a printing- 
 house at Versailles for the service of the Assembly, 
 and named Baudoin, the Paris deputy, as their printer. 
 Bailly read a letter from Necker thanking the Third 
 Estate for their marks of interest on the previous day. 
 A nominal verification of the powers of the dissentient 
 clergy took place on the motion of the Archbishop of 
 Vienne, " in order that they might deliberate in the 
 general assembly of the representatives of the nation." 
 On the 25th more ecclesiastics came over to the Third 
 Estate, and, more significant still, so did some forty-five 
 of the nobles, including De Beauharnais, happy in a 
 fair wife from Martinique, who shall yet be an empress; 
 The Duke de la Rochefoucauld, whose coffin shall be 
 broken by a revengeful monarchy more than a genera- 
 tion later; the Duke d'Aiguillon, and, most conspicuous 
 of all, the Duke d'Orleans. 
 
 The prince's man, Sillery, the convenient husband of
 
 1789. TIIE DUKE D'ORLEANS. 
 
 589 
 
 Madame de Genlis, as Mirabeau calls him, pronounced, 
 in the name of all, an inappropriate discourse, such as 
 might have been made by a mediator, an accepted ar- 
 biter between the king and the people : " Let us never 
 lose sight of the respect that we owe to the best of 
 kings. He offers us peace ; can we refuse to accept it ?" 
 But D'Orleans was rapidly drifting from compromise 
 of the Sillery kind. He was now playing the part, or 
 being made to play the part, of a regular leader. He 
 had a party who regarded him as a head or a figure- 
 head, it is hard to. say which, and who had a distinct 
 and defined programme. They wished to bring about 
 the abdication of Louis XVI., and the elevation of the 
 Duke d'Orleans to the throne. The duke himself, ac- 
 cording to some evidence, had no such vaulting am- 
 bition, whatever the pushing Saint -Huruge and the 
 pushing Choderlos de Laclos might design for their 
 pleasure-loving puppet. 
 
 " The duke was a man of pleasure," writes Mrs. Elli- 
 ott, " who never could bear trouble or business of any 
 kind, who never read or did anything but amuse him- 
 self. I am certain that he never at that time had an 
 idea of mounting the throne, whatever the views of his 
 factious friends might have been. If they could have 
 placed him on the throne of France, I suppose they 
 hoped to govern him and the country." Others, too, be- 
 sides Mrs. Elliott saw in him only a dissipated, weak 
 creature, the tool of daring and desperate men and 
 women. But he was something more than that. 
 
 With such strange allies about him and behind him, 
 D'Orleans was drifting to his doom. His tired, blood- 
 shot eyes were fixed, it would seem, upon the crown. 
 They were not far-sighted enough to see what lay be- 
 yond. Just at this moment, however, his advent was of
 
 590 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XL. 
 
 great value to the Third Estate. His popularity, how- 
 ever gained, however factitious, was an arm against that 
 menace of armed force which still threatened the Assem- 
 bly. On this very June 25th, after D'Orleans' arrival, 
 Barnave proposed and formed a deputation to the king, 
 to protest against the troops that surrounded the States- 
 General, to ask for their recall, and the free entry of the 
 people to the sittings. It was a timely move on Bar- 
 nave's part. The people outside were growing fiercely 
 excited at the sight of the soldiers and at the shutting 
 of the doors against them. They might have proceeded 
 to some desperate extremity to try and force an en- 
 trance, when Bailly, Clermont-Tonnerre, and the Arch- 
 bishop of Vienne came to them, and calmed them with 
 the news of Barnave's deputation. 
 
 On the 26th a deputation from the electors of Paris 
 came to cheer the Assembly with a commendation of its 
 virtues. There was better cheer still in the advent of 
 Talleyrand-Perigord, Bishop of Autun, to join the Third 
 Estate. Others followed his example, most notably De 
 Juigne, Archbishop of Paris, whose action, said grace- 
 ful Bailly, added the only crown yet lacking to his 
 virtue. On the 27th the game was up. The king wrote 
 to the clerical and the noble orders, bidding them join 
 their colleagues of the Third Estate. Under protest, the 
 minority of the clergy and the majority of the nobles 
 obeyed the royal order. Even in the Commons' hall 
 the nobles still for a while persisted in sitting apart as 
 a special order, with the Duke de Luxembourg at their 
 head; but after a time the distinct seats became con- 
 founded, and "the futile pre-eminences of rank vanished 
 before national authority." One dogged gentleman in- 
 deed, the Baron de Lupe, noble deputy for Auch, scorn- 
 ful of all compromise, refused to come over. He sat in
 
 1789. THE BATTLE FOUGHT AND WON. 591 
 
 stubborn and solitary grandeur all by himself in the 
 Chamber of the Nobility, until at last the court officials 
 shut its doors, and deprived him of his gloomy joy. 
 Even then, however, he was not to be beaten ; he made 
 a point of coming daily and walking up and down the 
 corridor outside the chamber for a certain time each 
 day, an incarnation of the insane obstinacy of his order. 
 The Duke de Luxembourg made a stately little speech, 
 in which he set forth his sense of duty to his king. 
 Bailly, ever graceful, expressed his joy at the event, and 
 declared that an hour so happy should not be troubled 
 with any work. " Our sitting should end now." The 
 sitting did end accordingly, with cries of " Long live 
 the king," genuine enough still from all those lips, roy- 
 alist still, if we except the lips of the Orleanist faction. 
 The Assembly adjourned. The great battle had been 
 fought and won ; the three orders were united accord- 
 ing to the will of the Third Estate. A careless on-look- 
 er might imagine that the struggle was over ; that the 
 Saturnian age, long looked for, had arrived. The care- 
 less observer would be wrong, as careless observers usu- 
 ally are. The court had apparently given way, but had 
 only given way to mask its deep revenge ; while suspi- 
 cion, irritation, and triumph had done the one thing that 
 of all others was most deadly to the courtly party had 
 alarmed and aroused Paris.
 
 592 TI1E FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XLI. 
 
 CHAPTER XLI. 
 
 PARIS AND VERSAILLES. 
 
 PARIS and Versailles were wild with excitement. Bon- 
 fires blazed in the streets, and an enthusiastic populace 
 indulged in wild dances round them, incapable of con- 
 fining their exultation within more sober limits. In 
 Paris, especially, the enthusiasm was at its hottest and 
 maddest. Paris had been suspicious, alarmed, almost 
 desperate ; it seemed now to have won the day, and 
 gave itself over to a very carnival of exhilaration. It 
 is difficult to form a comprehensive idea of the passion 
 which animated the city. Even those who were present 
 and well able to judge misunderstood the force of events. 
 Gouverneur Morris seemed to think that all was practi- 
 cally at an end. It only remained, he thought, " to form 
 a constitution, and as the king is extremely timid he will 
 of course surrender at discretion. The existence of the 
 monarchy depends on the moderation of the Assembly. 
 For the rest I think they will soon establish their credit, 
 which, among other things, will bring the exchange be- 
 tween France and foreign nations to be more favorable, 
 If the money of this country is brought into free circu- 
 lation, it will, I think, lower interest everywhere. The 
 sum is immense, and its effects must be commensurate 
 to its activity and mass. At present it lies dead and is 
 poorly supplied by the paper Caisse d'Escompte." 
 
 There was an even keener observer than Morris in 
 Paris. Arthur Young gives a living picture of the ac-
 
 1789. PAMPHLETS PRO AND CON. 
 
 593 
 
 tivity and excitement of the hour : " The business going 
 forward at present in the pamphlet shops of Paris is 
 incredible. I went to the Palais Royal to see what new 
 things were published, and to procure a catalogue of 
 all. Every hour produces something new. Thirteen 
 came out to-day, sixteen yesterday, and ninety-two last 
 week. We think sometimes that Debrett's or Stock- 
 dale's shops in London are crowded, but they are mere 
 deserts compared to Desein's and some others here, in 
 which one can scarcely squeeze from the door to the 
 counter. The price of printing two years ago was from 
 twenty-seven livres to thirty livres per sheet, but now 
 it is from sixty livres to eighty livres. This spirit of 
 reading political tracts, they say, spreads into the prov- 
 inces, so that all the presses of France are equally em- 
 ployed. Nineteen twentieths of these productions are 
 in favor of liberty, and commonly violent against the 
 clergy and nobility ; I have to-day bespoken many of 
 this description, that have reputation ; but inquiring 
 for such as had appeared on the other side of the ques- 
 tion, to my astonishment I find there are but two or 
 three that have merit enough to be known. Is it not 
 wonderful, that while the press teems with the most 
 levelling and even seditious principles, that if put into 
 execution would overturn the monarchy, nothing in 
 reply appears, not the least step is taken by the court 
 to restrain this extreme licentiousness of publication? 
 It is easy to conceive the spirit that must thus be raised 
 among the people. But the coffee-houses in the Palais 
 Royal present yet more singular and astonishing spec- 
 tacles; they are not only crowded within, but other ex- 
 pectant crowds are at the doors and windows, listening 
 d gorge deploy ee to certain orators, who from chairs or 
 tables harangue each his little audience ; the eagerness 
 I. 38
 
 594 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XLL 
 
 with which they are heard, and the thunder of applause 
 they receive for every sentiment of more than common 
 hardiness or violence against the present government, can- 
 not easily be imagined. I am all amazement at the min- 
 istry permitting such nests and hotbeds of sedition and 
 revolt, which disseminate among the people, every hour, 
 principles that by-and-by must be opposed with vigor, 
 and therefore it seems little short of madness to allow 
 the propagation at present." 
 
 Again he writes: "The ferment at Paris is beyond 
 conception; ten thousand people have been all this day 
 in the Palais Royal; a full detail of yesterday's pro- 
 ceedings was brought this morning, and read by many 
 apparent readers of little parties, with comments to the 
 people. To my surprise, the king's propositions are 
 received with universal disgust. He said nothing ex- 
 plicit on the periodical meeting of the States; he de- 
 clared all the old feudal rights to be retained as proper- 
 ty. These, and the change in the balance of representa- 
 tion in the Provincial Assemblies, are the articles that 
 give the greatest offence. But, instead of looking to or 
 hoping for further concessions on these points, in order 
 to make them more consonant to the general wishes, the 
 people seem, with a sort of frenzy, to reject all idea of 
 compromise, and to insist on the necessity of the orders 
 uniting. . . . Every hour that passes seems to give the 
 people fresh spirit: the meetings at the Palais Royal are 
 more numerous, more violent, and more assured ; and 
 in the Assembly of Electors, chosen for the purpose of 
 sending a deputation to the National Assembly, the lan- 
 guage that was talked, by all ranks of people, was noth- 
 ing less than a revolution in the government, and the 
 establishment of a free constitution. What they mean 
 by a free constitution is easily understood a republic;
 
 1789. DOGE OR KING? 595 
 
 for the doctrine of the times runs every day more and 
 more to that point; yet they profess that the kingdom 
 ought to be a monarchy too, or, at least, that there 
 ought to be a king. In the streets one is stunned by 
 the hawkers of seditious pamphlets, and descriptions of 
 pretended events, that all tend to keep the people 
 equally ignorant and alarmed. The supineness and 
 even stupidity of the court is without example; the 
 moment demands the greatest decision; and yesterday, 
 while it was actually a question whether* he should be 
 a Doge of Venice or a King of France, the king went 
 a-hunting !" 
 
 This keen-eyed, .keen-witted observer tells us that 
 in these most interesting discussions he found a gen- 
 eral ignorance of the principles of government. There 
 was a strange and unaccountable appeal, on the one 
 side, to ideal and visionary rights of nature; and on the 
 other there was no settled plan that could give security 
 to the people for being in future in a much better situa- 
 tion than hitherto a security absolutely necessary. All 
 the nobility, with the principles of great lords, that he 
 conversed with, he found most disgustingly tenacious of 
 all old rights, however hard they might bear on the 
 people. They would not hear of giving way in the 
 least to the spirit of liberty, beyond the point of paying 
 equal land taxes; which they hold to be all that can 
 with reason be demanded. He weighed the argument 
 on both sides calmly. On the side of the people, it was 
 to be urged that the vices of the old government made 
 a new system necessary, and that the people could only 
 be put in possession of the blessings of a free govern- 
 ment by the firmest measures. But be thought that it 
 could be replied, on the other hand, that the personal 
 character of the king was a just foundation for relying
 
 596 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XLI. 
 
 that no measures of actual violence were to be seriously 
 feared. The state of the finances, under any possible 
 regimen, whether of faith or bankruptcy, must secure 
 their existence, at least for time sufficient to secure by 
 negotiation what might be hazarded by violence. "By 
 driving things to extremities the patriots risk a union 
 between all the other orders of the State, with the par- 
 liaments, army, and a great body even of the people, 
 who must disapprove of all extremities ; and when to 
 this is added the possibility of involving the kingdom 
 in a civil war, now so familiarly talked of that it is upon 
 the lips of all the world, we must confess that the Com- 
 mons, if they steadily refuse what is now held out to 
 them, put immense and certain benefits to the chance 
 of fortune, to that hazard which may make posterity 
 curse instead of bless their memories as real patriots, 
 who had nothing in view but the happiness of their 
 country." 
 
 Already the temper of the mob was beginning to grow 
 dangerous. There is a story, perhaps rather a legend, 
 of an unlucky lady, a countess it is said, who ventured 
 to express too audibly in the fermenting regions of the 
 Palais Royal her disapproval of the Third Estate. An- 
 gry hands, chiefly, it is to be hoped, feminine, seized 
 upon the perturbed and protesting countess, a table was 
 sought for eagerly, and found easily there are always 
 plenty of tables in the Palais Royal and on this table 
 the unlucky lady was extended, and promptly and pub- 
 licly whipped. Thus early the national spirit showed 
 itself paternal, or rather maternal, in its chastisement 
 of offenders. This was the first, but not the last, time 
 that aristocratic bodies had to undergo humiliating pun- 
 ishment from the new masters. In another case an old 
 officer was made to go down on his knees humbly in the
 
 1*789. THE COURT PLAN. 597 
 
 mud of the Palais Royal, and apologize for some offence 
 against the democratic spirit. Young courtiers who 
 ventured in, thinking that they could swagger it off 
 with high looks and hands on sword-hilts, were soon 
 compelled to beat ignominious retreat, lest worse should 
 come of it. A man suspected of being a spy was lit- 
 erally hounded to death by the mob. All these signs 
 were significant enough of the rising temper of Paris, 
 but their full significance was not appreciated by the 
 court. 
 
 The Court party, chafing at their temporary defeat 
 for temporary they only considered it to be were rag- 
 ing for revenge. They insisted in their secret conclaves 
 that the only thing to do was to suppress the Assembly, 
 that the Assembly was only to be suppressed by mili- 
 tary force, and that the sooner military force was em- 
 ployed the better. If Paris protested, then why not 
 treat Paris as a hostile city, turn against it the swords, 
 the bayonets, the cannon, and the muskets that should 
 have already blotted out the Assembly, and blot out 
 factious opposition in its turn in Paris with a few caval- 
 ry charges and a few rounds of cannon-shot? That was 
 clearly the thing to do : wear a more or less civil front 
 for the moment, mass troops upon Versailles and Paris, 
 and when the moment came then to work with a will. 
 
 The court was not without means for the perfection 
 of this precious plan. Albert Duruy, in his admirable 
 study of the royal army in 1789, with infinite pains and 
 patience has reconstructed the military machinery of 
 the kingdom at the moment of the revolutionary out- 
 break. M. Albert Babeau has added to his " Studies of 
 Social Life under the Old Order " a valuable volume on 
 "La Vie Militaire;" and M. Ch. L. Chassin's "L'ArmSe 
 et la Revolution " contains much information. Much,
 
 598 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XL!. 
 
 too, is to be found in the writings of the Bibliophile 
 Jacob. On January 1, 1789, the royal army consisted 
 of three kinds of troops. It is not easy to ascertain 
 precisely the numerical strength of the standing army 
 in 1789. According to the "tat Militaire dc la France 
 pour 1'Annee 1789," military force comprising the picked 
 men of the royal household, the regular troops, and the 
 militia amounted to two hundred and thirty-six thou- 
 sand men on a peace footing, and two hundred and 
 ninety-five thousand on a war footing; a very respecta- 
 ble muster. On the other hand, Grimoard, in his "Ta- 
 bleau Historique de la Guerre de la Revolution," esti- 
 mates the army of the line at one hundred and sixty- 
 three thousand four hundred and eighty - three men, 
 including the household troops; and Baron Poisson, in 
 his "L'Arme'e et la Garde Nationale," puts forward 
 the round number of one hundred and sixty thousand. 
 That is to say, these two authorities estimate the mili- 
 tary strength of France at the eve of the Revolution at 
 a figure very amazingly smaller than the total of the 
 official statistics. At the same time, Guibert, in his 
 memoir upon the operations of the council of war, which 
 was published in 1789, estimates the strength of the 
 army on a peace footing at nearly one hundred and 
 eighty thousand men. There is very considerable dis- 
 crepancy between these figures. The Vicomte de Broc, 
 in his ' Study of France in the Ancien Regime," adds 
 a further variation by estimating the strength of the 
 regular army in 1789 at one hundred and seventy thou- 
 sand men, composed of one hundred and twenty-seven 
 thousand infantry, thirty -five thousand cavalry, and 
 eighty-five thousand artillery. But, however these fig- 
 ures disagree, they at least are sufficient to prove that 
 the French Monarchy, at the very moment before the
 
 1789. MILITARY STRENGTH OF FRANCE. 599 
 
 Revolution, was, nominally at least, backed by a deci- 
 dedly imposing military force. But it was not imposing 
 when contrasted with the military strength of other 
 European states. France had to some degree stood 
 still, while other states were advancing, and now, in 
 1789, Russia, Prussia, and England were more formida- 
 ble as military powers than the country which in the 
 days of the Sun-King had claimed the distinction of 
 being the first military power in Europe. At the same 
 time the situation of France was from a diplomatic point 
 of view exceedingly strong in 1789. The treaty of 1756 
 enabled her to count on the alliance of Austria, and in 
 consequence Tuscany, of which the emperor was grand 
 duke; the family compact assured her the support of 
 Spain, Parma, and Naples; the marriages of the two 
 princes of the blood royal, the Count of Provence and 
 the Count d'Artois, assured her of the sympathy of 
 Sardinia. 
 
 The Court party had a man after their own heart to 
 do for them the little business of blotting out the As- 
 sembly and, if necessary, of blotting out Paris. This 
 was Victor Fran9ois, second Duke de Broglie. He was 
 of Italian descent the family name was Broglio he 
 had been a gallant soldier of the old school in his day; 
 he was now some seventy years old, obstinate, old-fash- 
 ioned, wholly unaware that the world had wagged at 
 all since the days of his youth. A soldier was still to 
 him a humane machine, able to drill, to march, to shoot 
 and be shot ; but with no capacity for thinking, for 
 looking upon the world with critical eyes, for commit- 
 ting the terrible crime of considering whether after all 
 he was bound under all conceivable conditions to obey. 
 Broglie felt sure that the troops were to be relied upon. 
 He had every confidence in himself. D'Artois had
 
 600" THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XLl. 
 
 every confidence in him. The queen, unhappily, had 
 every confidence in both. There were plenty of foreign 
 troops coming, daily drawing nearer. Royal-Cravate 
 was at Charenton, Reinach and Diesbach at Sevres, 
 Nassau at Versailles, Salis-Samade at Issy, the hussars 
 of Bercheny at the Military School; at other stations 
 were Chateauvieux, Esterhazy, Rosmer. There were 
 plenty of cannon; the plot was ripening to perfection; 
 all that was to be done was to dismiss Necker, form a 
 good courtly ministry, clap the Assembly under lock and 
 key, and shoot down every one who objected. In vain 
 did Besenval point out to bull - headed Broglie that 
 Paris was dangerously excited. Broglie would listen 
 to no advice. The Parisians were pitiful citizens ; 
 Royal-Cravate and the like should teach them a lesson. 
 Necker himself seems not to have participated at all 
 in this new and extraordinary change in the counsels of 
 the king. He declared positively that he knew nothing 
 of these military movements till it was impossible that 
 they could be concealed from any one. " The war min- 
 ister," he says, " talked of necessary precaution, in con- 
 sequence of the late seditious appearance at Paris and 
 Versailles, and the explication was natural enough, but 
 could no longer be admitted when Marshal Broglie was 
 called to court. I could never ascertain," he adds, " to 
 what lengths their projects really went. There were 
 secrets upon secrets; and I believe that even the king 
 himself was far from being acquainted with all of them. 
 What was intended was probably to draw the monarch 
 on, as circumstances admitted, to measures of which 
 they durst not at first have spoken to him. Time," he 
 continues, " can alone unveil the mystery ; with me, 
 above all others, a reserve was maintained, and reason- 
 ably, for my indisposition to everything of the kind 
 was decided."
 
 1*89. THE PEOPLE SUSPICIOUS. 601 
 
 Necker must have been somewhat easily impressed 
 by the lack of necessary precautions. " The road," says 
 Perry, "between Paris and Versailles at this time re- 
 sembled a defile through which a vast army was march- 
 ing. Columns of troops, trains of artillery, baggage 
 wagons, and couriers with despatches occupied every 
 foot of the way. If Paris resembled a besieged city, 
 Versailles did not less picture a martial camp, in which 
 the palace might be compared to the tent of Darius. 
 The parole and countersign were changed sometimes 
 twice or thrice a day, by way of keeping the soldiers on 
 the alert, and all this time the National Assembly had 
 upon its hand the most important labors of any legis- 
 lators in any nation." 
 
 It was scarcely surprising if the people, and those who 
 represented or who led the people, began to look with 
 suspicion upon the way in which the Court party were 
 massing troops around Versailles and anigh to Paris. 
 They may well have guessed that the desperate idea 
 had entered into the minds of the Polignacs and Brog- 
 lies and Besenvals and Vermonts, who represented the 
 royal as opposed to the popular party, to sweep with 
 one wild stroke the new democratic opposition out of 
 existence befoi'e the bayonets and the grapeshot of royal 
 troops. Even the democratic leaders had no idea of the 
 way in which the troops were honeycombed by indiffer- 
 ence by disaffection; how little the Court party could 
 really rely upon the one arm to which they trusted for 
 relief from the growing ascendency of the Third Estate. 
 
 Yet there were signs too, and significant signs, that 
 all was not well for the court in the temper of the 
 troops. The soldiers who were in Paris had mixed 
 much with the crowd, had been well treated, talked to, 
 influenced. The Gardes Frangaises were more and
 
 602 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. Cu. XLI. 
 
 more in sympathy with the people daily. Chatelet had 
 sent eleven of the guards to prison in the Abbaye for 
 what he considered mutinous conduct. The Palais 
 Royal heard of it ; the Palais Royal rose, broke open 
 the Abbaye, and took the prisoners out in triumph. 
 Triumphant Palais Royal then sent a deputation to the 
 National Assembly. The Assembly, sorely puzzled by 
 the turbulence of Paris, discussed the matter for a long 
 time, at last appealed to the king's clemency, and the 
 king, prudently, was clement. The guards, after re- 
 turning to prison as a formal sign of submission to the 
 law, were set at liberty by the king's order. This was 
 the first popular triumph ; it ought to have taught the 
 court, but could not. 
 
 The troops meantime arrived in great numbers: Ver- 
 sailles assumed the aspect of a camp. Paris was encom- 
 passed by various bodies of the army, ready to besiege 
 or blockade it as the occasion might require. These 
 vast military prepai'ations, announcing sinister projects, 
 aroused the wrath of Mirabeau. When every deputy 
 feared to speak, in a raised voice, of the concentration 
 of troops, Mirabeau startled them by asking, why were 
 these troops assembled in the vicinity of the National 
 Assembly, and whether the majesty of the people was 
 to be attacked? He demanded that one hundred depu- 
 ties should instantly bear a petition to the king, request- 
 ing the withdrawal of the soldiers. "What," said 
 Mirabeau in the course of his speech, "has been the 
 issue of those declarations and of our respectful behav- 
 ior? Already we are surrounded by a multitude of 
 soldiers. More have arrived, are arriving every day. 
 They are hastening hither from all quarters. Thirty- 
 five thousand men are already cantoned in Paris and 
 Versailles, twenty thousand more are expected; they
 
 1789. LOUIS XVI.'S ARTFUL ANSWER. 603 
 
 are followed by trains of artillery; spots are marked 
 out for batteries; every communication is secured, 
 every pass is blocked up; our streets, our bridges, our 
 public walks are converted into military stations. Se- 
 cret orders, precipitate counter-orders, are events of pub- 
 lic notoriety. In a word, preparations for war strike 
 every eye and fill every heart with indignation." 
 
 Louis XVI. answered the Assembly roundly and roy- 
 ally, as he conceived royalty. He declared that he 
 alone had to judge the necessity of assembling or dis- 
 missing troops. He assured the Assembly that those 
 assembled formed only a precautionary army to prevent 
 disturbances and protect the Assembly. No person 
 could be ignorant, the king declared, of the disorders 
 and the scandalous scenes which had been acted and re- 
 peated at Paris and Versailles, before his eyes and be- 
 fore the eyes of the States-General. It was necessary 
 that he should make use of the means which were in his 
 power to restore and maintain order in the capital and 
 the environs. It was one of his principal duties to 
 watch over the public safety. These were the motives 
 which determined him to assemble the troops round 
 Pai'is. If, however, he artfully suggested, the needful 
 presence of the troops in the neighborhood of Paris still 
 gave umbrage, he was ready, at the desire of the Assem- 
 bly, to transfer the States-General to Noyon or to Sois- 
 sons. In this case he promised to go to Compiegne, in 
 order to maintain the communication which ought to 
 subsist between the Assembly and its king. 
 
 Paris was in the greatest excitement ; but the Assem- 
 bly did not seem to understand fully the danger. Guil- 
 lotin went to Paris to impart a comfortable sense of 
 tranquillity to the assembly of the electors. He assured 
 them that everything was going on excellently, and that
 
 604 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XLI. 
 
 Necker was stronger than ever. It would be difficult 
 to find a more fantastic instance of false confidence. 
 That very day, whilst Guillotin was speaking, the court 
 had struck the stroke which was to herald its victory.
 
 "89. NECKER BANISHED. 
 
 005 
 
 CHAPTER XLII. 
 
 CAMILLE DESMOULINS. 
 
 ON July 11, at three o'clock in the afternoon, Necker 
 was seated at table with some guests, when a messenger 
 arrived with a letter from the king. Necker broke the 
 seals, and read to himself with an unmoved countenance 
 the royal order that he should at once, with all possible 
 secrecy, leave Paris and France. Necker put the letter 
 in his pocket and continued his conversation as if noth- 
 ing had happened, but as soon as the dinner was over 
 he took his wife aside and told her of his banishment. 
 No thought of disobeying the royal order seems for a 
 moment to have flashed across the mind of Necker. He 
 quietly ordered his carriage, and he and his wife, with- 
 out a single leave-taking, without even delaying to 
 change their clothes or make any preparations for their 
 journey, without telling their daughter what had hap- 
 pened, set off at once on their flight towards the fron- 
 tier. Next morning all Paris knew that Necker was 
 disgraced, banished, gone. 
 
 The exile of Necker coincides with the first political 
 appearance of one of the most famous of the revolution- 
 ary heroes. Necker's disgrace was Camille Desmoulins' 
 opportunity. All Paris was raging with excitement, 
 at once furious and fearful, longing to do something 
 and not knowing what to do. The Palais Royal was 
 as usual the chief centre of public and political excite- 
 ment, That day the human hive was thronged and
 
 fi06 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XLII. 
 
 noisy with the hum and buzz of angry voices. All the 
 material for a popular movement raged and fumed there 
 under the tranquil July sky, under the leafy summer of 
 the trees, but there seemed to be no one to turn the mo- 
 ment to account. , A mob is a strange, helpless, desper- 
 ate thing, vacillating between the poles of do and do 
 not, waiting for some voice to sum up its secret mean- 
 ing and direct it in its course. So in the summer heat 
 that great crowd weltered, flowing and eddying, wait- 
 ing for its voice and hearing none, or rather hearing a 
 babel of voices with no unison in them. Suddenly the 
 crowd found a centre of attraction. A young man, 
 nerved to a kind of prophetic fury by the agitations of 
 the hout, had leaped upon one of the tables of the Cafe 
 Foy, and was shouting something at the top of his voice. 
 A man who had something definite to say was worth 
 listening to, and the great crowd listened to the lean, 
 dark-haired young man, who, with his black eyes blaz- 
 ing with excitement, was shrieking forth a flood of pas- 
 sionate, impetuous speech, and conquering in his fury 
 the stammer which was slightly habitual to his tongue. 
 " Citizens," he yelled, sending his voice as far as he 
 could over the sea of staring faces " Citizens, you know 
 that the whole nation desired to keep its Necker. Well, 
 I have come from Versailles Necker is dismissed. That 
 dismissal is the St. Bartholomew's bell of patriots. This 
 evening all the Swiss and German battalions will sally 
 from the Champ de Mars to slaughter us. There is not 
 a moment to lose. We have but one resource to rush 
 to arms and to wear cockades whereby we may know 
 each other." So Camille Desmoulins shouted, bubbling 
 with revolutionary thoughts, almost choking with the 
 torrent of his words, wildly incoherent, but pregnant 
 with purpose. The answering yell with which the
 
 1789. TO ARMS. 
 
 607 
 
 crowd greeted his proposal told him that he had struck 
 the popular thought. "What colors shall we wear to 
 rally by ?" he went on. " Will you wear green, the 
 color of hope, or the blue of Cincinnatus, color of the 
 liberty of America, and of democracy?" "Green, 
 green," the crowd shout uproariously. Camille pinned 
 a green ribbon to his hat, and a thousand hands, tearing 
 at the boughs of the trees, fashioned the symbols of 
 cockades from their green leaves. Then Camille, still 
 standing on his table, still dominating with his wild 
 genius the swaying mass, green now with the livery of 
 spring, produced two pistols and held them high in the 
 air. " My friends," he cried, " the police are here, they 
 are watching me, they are playing the spy on me. Very 
 well, it is I, I, who call my brothers to liberty. But I 
 will not fall living into their power. Let all good citi- 
 zens do as I do. To arms !" A deafening shout of 
 " To arms !" answered this appeal. Camille, the hero of 
 the hour, the leader of the mob, leaped from his table 
 and led his little army into the streets. Like a living 
 sea the mob of the Palais Royal rushed through the 
 Boulevards, growing larger at every street, at every cor- 
 ner, at every house. Paris was in their hands. They 
 forced the theatres to close as a tribute to the banished 
 Necker; they seized all the busts of Necker and of Or- 
 leans that they could find in the shop of sculptor Cur- 
 tius, and carried them, veiled in black, in Roman tri- 
 umph through the streets. Camille Desmoulins had 
 made his first bid for fame. 
 
 The little Picard town of Guise in the kindly Ver- 
 mandois was a pleasant place enough for an eager, im- 
 pressionable boy to be born in, to remember as the cradle 
 of his youth. The undulating plains of the Aisne de- 
 partment are fat and fruitful ; in the richer lands along
 
 608 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XLII. 
 
 the Oise the farmers of Vervins raise good crops of 
 wheat and rye and barley, of oats and hemp, of flax and 
 hops. The little river Aisne, the larger Sorame, water 
 its green meadows, reflect the milky blueness of its 
 skies. It may please us, as it pleases M. Jules Claretie 
 in his charming volume, to imagine the boy Camille 
 wandering by Aisne's waters, a book in his hands, read- 
 ing and dreaming ; or climbing the slope which led to 
 the citadel, pausing for a moment to hearken to some 
 burst of music coming from the church, reciting some 
 verses of Voltaire in front of the chapel, murmuring 
 some mighty lines of Tacitus in the stern face of the 
 citadel. 
 
 Guise itself was a fortified town of the third class, 
 with frowning walls that still seemed formidable in the 
 days of Camille Desmoulins' boyhood, but which would 
 be as useful as so much brown paper against modern 
 artillery. The town itself has an old-world air about it, 
 not indeed the old world of the fifteenth or sixteenth 
 century, but the old world of the days when the Rev- 
 olution was dawning. It was a hard-working, patient, 
 industrious, dignified little town, and it never bore a 
 stranger child than Camille Desmoulins, the "gamin de 
 genie," the " corner-boy of genius " as we may perhaps 
 best translate the term. He was born in the Street of 
 the Greafc Bridge, hard by the Place of Arms, on March 
 2, 1760. His father, Jean Benoist Nicolas Desmoulins, 
 was a country lawyer, by no means wealthy, who had 
 risen to the office of "lieutenant-general civil et criminel 
 au bailliage de Guise;" his mother was Marie Magde- 
 leine Godart, of Wiege village. Camille was the eldest 
 son ; there were two other brothers who entered the 
 army, and two sisters, of whom one entered the Church 
 and the other lived on until 1838. It is curious to think
 
 1789. TWO FRIENDS. 
 
 609 
 
 of a sister of our strange, gifted, wild Camille living on 
 tranquilly into an epoch so different from that in which 
 her brother for a while buffeted so stoutly with destiny. 
 
 It was the elder Desmoulins' ambition to educate his 
 son largely, to make him a famous lawyer, to see in him 
 the realization of the dream that old Desmoulins had 
 long ago put aside for himself, the dream of being an 
 advocate at the Parliament of Paris. It did not at first 
 appear as if this revived dream were any too likely to 
 be realized. The studies essential for such a scheme, 
 for the desired success, were not for all comers ; they 
 cost money, and the elder Desmoulins had very little 
 money. But luckily or unluckily, it is hard to say 
 which one of those useful relatives who seem most ap- 
 propriate in the domain of comedy came to the rescue. 
 M. de Viefville des Essarts, who had formerly been an 
 advocate of the Paris Parliament, and who was yet in 
 the fulness of time to be Yermandois deputy to the 
 States-General, obtained for Camille a purse at the Col- 
 lege of Louis le Grand. Here Camille first fed that ex- 
 traordinary love for knowledge which was the master 
 passion of his youth ; here he first tasted the triumphs 
 of success ; here he first sucked the milk of an ideal re- 
 publicanism ; here he first met, and made a friend of, 
 Maximilien Robespierre. 
 
 The lovers of an amusing and not perhaps wholly 
 profitless speculation might please their thoughts by 
 fancying what our wild Camille's future might have 
 been if only that useful relative, \ r iefville des Essarts, 
 had not turned up in the nick of time with his purse at 
 Louis le Grand. Would the wild humors which at times 
 hung about him, as the fogs hung about the marshy 
 places of the Vermandois where he was born, have got 
 the better of him ; would he have shocked the little 
 I. 39
 
 610 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XLII. 
 
 tranquil town more than he did, or served as a soldier 
 like his kin, or settled down after the solid patient pat- 
 tern of his sire, and made an excellent citizen ? Slug- 
 gish he could scarcely have ever been ; the wild blood 
 that burned in him would have ever and ever said nay 
 to that ; but he might have tempered it more to the 
 grave Guise Music. He might but Viefville des Es- 
 sarts did turn up ; Camille went to Paris, and there is 
 an end to the speculations. 
 
 In Paris Camille worked hard, spurred by his inde- 
 fatigable thirst for knowledge. Every healthy child, 
 says Emerson, is a Greek or a Roman. This young 
 student Camille was devoutly, desperately Roman. The 
 glory of the Roman Republic possessed his spirit with 
 a kind of sibylline enthusiasm. The mighty figures of 
 a high antique republicanism haunted his days and 
 nights. The sonorous periods of Cicero w r hipped his 
 hot blood to fury ; in the gloomy grandeur of Tacitus, 
 in the epic irony of Lucan, he found his hatred of tyr- 
 anny interpreted for him with the eloquence of the 
 gods. As dear to him as the writings of the classic au- 
 thors themselves was a book now well-nigh forgotten, 
 then very famous, the "Revolutions Romaines" of the 
 Abbe Vertot. In its pages he looked upon the pale 
 phantom of stern Roman virtues, and seemed to enter 
 into spiritual brotherhood with a Brutus or a Gracchus, 
 a Marius or a Cato. 
 
 Camille Desmoulins lives for us in the wonderful 
 portrait by Rouillard in the Versailles museum. The 
 dark skin, the dark hair, the dark, burning eyes, give 
 something almost of a gypsy aspect to the face. It is 
 the face of a child of genius, wayward, erring, brilliant, 
 fantastic, the face of an artist, a visionary, a dreamer of 
 dreams. No more attractive face looks out upon us
 
 1789. DESMOULINS' LUCILE. 611 
 
 from the gallery of the past, no more attractive person- 
 ality passes across the stage of the Revolution. His 
 love for the beautiful Lucile is one of the most romantic 
 stories in history that is so often romantic ; among all 
 the women of the revolutionary period her gracious fig- 
 ure is the fondest and the fairest.
 
 012 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XLIII. 
 
 CHAPTER XLIII. 
 
 TWELFTH AND THIRTEENTH OP JULY. 
 
 ON that same day a serious collision occurred be- 
 tween the people and the troops. According to a pict- 
 uresque contemporary account the Prince de Lambesc, 
 with a body of German cavalry, rode into the Place 
 Louis Quinze, a spacious square, and, with a menacing 
 attitude, announced by the mouth of two of his trum- 
 peters that he had orders to disperse all groups of citi- 
 zens who might be assembled on the place, or in the 
 gardens of the Tuileries. An elderly man answered one 
 of the heralds in a manner which occasioned the trum- 
 peter to ride back to the prince, to tell him that he had 
 been insulted by a citizen to whom he had communicated 
 his highness's pleasure. On this the prince, in a pas- 
 sion, galloped up to the offending but unarmed old 
 man, riding over a woman, and striking the object of 
 his revenge with his drawn sword. The circumstance, 
 slight as it may appear in itself, was regarded as an at- 
 tack upon the citizens of Paris by the military; and the 
 cry of, " To arms ! to arms !" reverberated from street 
 to street, like the repeated claps of thunder amid sur- 
 rounding hills and woods. The whole city was in con- 
 fusion in an instant ; a mixture of rage and dismay was 
 on every countenance. A blow had been struck, which 
 was considered as an incentive to a quarrel, that coer- 
 cive measures of the military might be better justified. 
 A battle must be fought. The play-houses, the churches,
 
 1789. LAMBESC. 
 
 613 
 
 and even the shops were all shut up ; workmen ran out 
 of their manufactories with their tools and implements 
 of trade in their hands as weapons of attack or defence, 
 as exigence might require. 
 
 It is not easy to be sure of the events of that strange 
 day. It seems pretty certain, however, that the first 
 serious struggle took place on the Place Vendome, where 
 the bust-bearing mob came against a detachment of 
 Royal -Allemand and a detachment of Dragons -Lor- 
 raine. The soldiers charged the crowd, killing and 
 wounding ; the crowd, instead of flying, held its own, 
 and forced the troops back to the Place Louis Quinze. 
 It is said that in the scuffle a Savoyard who was carry- 
 ing the bust of Orleans was wounded by a bayonet- 
 thrust, and a young man who was carrying the bust of 
 Necker was shot dead. The sight of the retreating 
 soldiers startled the Prince de Lambesc. With some 
 confused idea of securing a better military position 
 he charged into the Tuileries Gardens, upsetting in 
 his wild ride a peaceful citizen. The boom of cannon 
 was heard. Startled citizens declared that this was 
 the signal to the legionaries massed round Paris to 
 fall upon the city. The alarm spread in all directions 
 and awoke the most warlike spirit. The court had 
 expected some such disturbance to arise ; had even 
 counted upon it for the furtherance of the courtly plan. 
 There were troops massed in the Champ de Mars, wait- 
 ing for just such an excuse of revolt as this to do their 
 work. But the courtly plan did not succeed. Those 
 soldiers in the Champ de Mars were as valueless as the 
 painted monsters of a Chinese army. 
 
 The French Guards now made their momentous irrup- 
 tion in history. They had been showing a mutinous 
 spirit for some time. They were as bitterly dissat-
 
 614 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XLIII. 
 
 isfied with their present commander, Chatelet, as they 
 had been devoted to his predecessor, Marshal Biron, 
 who had managed them with great skill, and had much 
 increased their efficiency. Chatelet was a man of 
 a martinet spirit, who made himself very unpopular 
 with the men under his command, altering and med- 
 dling where alteration and meddling had best been left 
 alone. But even their dislike did not on this very day 
 on which they renounced their allegiance prevent them 
 from saving Chatelet's life from the fury of the mob. 
 The fury of the mob, the courage of the mob, the suc- 
 cess of the mob, were largely aided by the action that 
 the French Guards took on this memorable day. They 
 now broke loose, advanced at quick time and with fixed 
 bayonets to the Place Louis Quinze, and took their stand 
 between the Tuileries and the Champs Elysees, and 
 drew up in order of battle against the German regi- 
 ment of the Royal-Allemand. Now was the time to 
 make use of those forces stationed in the Champ de 
 Mars. But somehow those forces showed an unex- 
 pected languor, an unexpected dilatoriness. The hours 
 were driving on ; evening was beginning to fall before 
 the Swiss could be fairly got to the scene of disturb- 
 ance. As they came up they were confronted by the 
 Guards in the Champs Elysees with levelled muskets. 
 The Swiss halted, and refused to fire. The officers had 
 no other alternative but to lead their soldiers back to 
 the Champ de Mars. 
 
 While all this wild work was going on, Paris was not 
 entirely left without guidance. The pale phantoms of 
 municipal power had indeed no influence, but the elec- 
 tors were still an existing organized body, and in this 
 moment of trial they took the helm judiciously. Very 
 difficult it was to take the helm. The position of the
 
 1789. THE TOWN HALL. 
 
 615 
 
 electors was exceedingly perplexing. The Hotel de 
 Ville, where they assembled, was flooded by a tumultu- 
 ous mob, shrieking for arms, vociferating wild counsels, 
 raging with incoherent threats. It was a trying time for 
 the electors, into whose hands a power to which they 
 made no pretence was suddenly thrust. Loyal subjects 
 of their king, they naturally hesitated to commit them- 
 selves to acts the end of which seemed so uncertain, or 
 to assume an authority to which they had no legal 
 right. When they did decide to take up the authority, 
 it was not so easy to get it either recognized or obeyed. 
 They had to deal not only with an insurgent patriotism; 
 they had to deal too with those who, caring nothing for 
 patriotism, saw in the general disturbance their chance 
 to profit. All the rogues, the vagabonds, the destitute, 
 the desperate, the evilly disposed from inclination, and 
 the evilly disposed from despair, were out and abroad, 
 and the electors were at their wits' end to keep them in 
 check and preserve the order of the city. 
 
 Moleville paints a moving picture of the disorder, 
 fermentation, and alarm that prevailed in the capital 
 during this fearful day. A city taken by storm and 
 delivered up to the soldiers' fury could not present a 
 more dreadful sight. Detachments of cavalry and 
 dragoons made their way through different parts of the 
 town at full gallop to the posts assigned them. Trains 
 of artillery rolled over the pavement with a monstrous 
 noise. Bands of ill-armed ruffians and women, drunk 
 with brandy, ran through the streets like furies, break- 
 ing the shops open, and spreading terror everywhere by 
 their bowlings, mingled with frequent reports from 
 guns or pistols fired in the air. Many of the barriers 
 were on fire. Thousands of smugglers took advantage 
 of the tumult to hurry in their goods. The alarm-bell
 
 616 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. On. XLttl 
 
 was ringing in almost all the churches. A great part 
 of the citizens shut themselves up at home, loading 
 their guns and burying their money, papers, and valua- 
 ble effects in cellars and gardens. During the night 
 the town was paraded by numerous patrols of citizens 
 of every class, and even of both sexes; for many women 
 were seen on that mad night with muskets or pikes 
 upon their shoulders. Such was Paris without courts of 
 justice, without police, without a guard at the mercy 
 of one hundred thousand men, who were wandering 
 wildly in the middle of the night, and for the most 
 part wanting bread. It believed itself on the point of 
 being besieged from without and pillaged from within. 
 It believed that twenty-five thousand soldiers were 
 posted around to blockade it and cut off all supplies of 
 provisions, and that it would be a prey to a starving 
 populace. 
 
 If the departure of Necker threw the capital into this 
 state of excitement, it had no less effect at Versailles 
 and in the Assembly. The deputies went early in the 
 morning of July 13 to the Hall of the States. Mounier 
 spoke against the dismissal of the ministers. Lally- 
 Tollendal delivered a lengthy eulogy upon Necker, and 
 joined Mounier in calling upon the king to recall the 
 displaced ministers. A deputy of the nobles, M. cle 
 Virieu, even proposed to confirm the resolutions of June 
 17 by a new oath. M. de Clermont-Tonnerre opposed 
 this as useless ; and, recalling the obligations already 
 taken by the Assembly, exclaimed, " We will have the 
 constitution or we will perish !" The discussion had 
 already lasted long, when Guillotin arrived from Paris 
 with a petition entreating the Assembly to aid in estab- 
 lishing a citizen guard. Guillotin gave a terrible de- 
 scription of the crisis in Paris. The Assembly voted
 
 1789. THE FEARLESS ASSEMBLY 617 
 
 two deputations, one to the king, the other to the city. 
 That to the king represented to him the disturbances 
 of the capital, and begged him to direct the removal of 
 the troops, and authorize the establishment of civic 
 guards. The deputation to Paris was only to be sent 
 if the king consented to the request of the Assembly. 
 
 The king replied that he could make no alterations 
 in the measures he had taken, that he could not sanction 
 a civic guard, that he was the only judge of what should 
 be done, and that the presence of the deputies at Paris 
 could do no good. The indignant Assembly replied to the 
 royal refusal by a series of stout-hearted and significant 
 declarations. It announced that M. Necker bore with him 
 the regret of the nation. It insisted on the removal of the 
 troops. It reiterated its assertion that no intermediary 
 could exist between the king and the National Assem- 
 bly. It declared that the ministers and the civil and 
 military agents of authority were responsible for any 
 act contrary to the rights of the nation and the decrees 
 of the Assembly. It maintained that not only the min- 
 isters, but the king's counsellors, of whatever rank they 
 might be, were personally responsible for the present 
 misfortunes. It declared that, as the public debt had 
 been placed under the safeguard of the honor and the 
 loyalty of the French people, and as the nation did not 
 refuse to pay the interest thereon, that no power had 
 the right to pronounce the infamous word " bankruptcy," 
 and no power had the right to be wanting to the public 
 faith under whatever form and denomination it might be. 
 
 After these strong and prudent measures the Assem- 
 bly, to preserve its members from all personal violence, 
 declared itself permanent, and named M. de Lafayette 
 vice-president, in order to relieve the respected Arch- 
 bishop of Vienne, whose age incapacitated him from
 
 618 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XLII1. 
 
 sitting day and night. The Assembly greatly feared 
 that the court might seize upon its archives. On the 
 preceding Sunday evening Gregoire, one of the secreta- 
 ries, had folded up, sealed, and hidden all the papers 
 in a house at Versailles. On Monday he presided 
 for the time, and sustained by his courage the weak- 
 hearted by reminding them of the Tennis Court, and 
 the words of the Roman, " Fearless amid the crash of 
 worlds." 
 
 When the morning of July 13 dawned Paris was 
 seething in excitement. The electors in permanent 
 committee formally called upon Flesselles, the provost 
 of the merchants, to organize the Paris militia, and the 
 permanent committee rapidly drew up a proclamation, 
 which was posted upon the door of the Hotel de Ville, 
 authorizing the establishment of a militia. Many of the 
 provincial towns possessed a militia, and the democratic 
 leaders had been eagerly desirous of establishing one in 
 Paris, where it might prove of the most inestimable ser- 
 vice to them. The militia was to consist of forty-eight 
 thousand citizens, called up by registry of two hundred 
 men each day for three or four days in each of the sixty 
 districts of Paris. These sixty districts were to form 
 sixteen legions, twelve of which were to form four bat- 
 talions, and the other four three battalions only, named 
 after the quarters of the city from which they were 
 raised. Each battalion was to consist of four companies. 
 Each company was to consist of two hundred men. 
 Every member of the new force was to wear a cockade 
 composed of the colors of the city red and blue. The 
 staff officers were to have a seat in the permanent com- 
 mittee. The arms given to each man were to be re- 
 turned to the officers at the end of the service. In de- 
 fault of this the officers were to be answerable for the
 
 1789. "TO THE LANTERN!" 
 
 619 
 
 weapons. The officers were to be appointed by the per- 
 manent committee. 
 
 The city certainly responded nobly to the demand of 
 the permanent committee. It has been said that the 
 militia was formed almost as soon as the fable described 
 the army of Cadmus to assemble. From all the ends 
 of Paris honest burgesses streamed to the various cen- 
 tres of the sixty districts. It is written that at noon 
 about eighteen thousand had been mustered, and called 
 over on the Place de Greve, before the town-house, with 
 at least three times their number of less-regular armed 
 citizens at their backs, who seemed ready to hazard, or 
 even lose, their lives at the first word of command. 
 There were, moreover, a choice band of volunteers, 
 clothed and paid by a society of patriots, on whom the 
 greatest dependence was placed. Thousands of citizens, 
 totally unaccustomed to arms, were soon seen armed at 
 all points and wearing the red-and-blue cockade of the 
 new army. The mass of the people now showed them- 
 selves the enemies of pillage. They respected property, 
 only took arms, and themselves checked robbery. Some 
 mischief, indeed, took place. The priests of the house 
 of the congregation of St. Lazarus were found by the 
 arms-seeking mob to have corn in their granaries. The 
 mob, with some queer, angry memory of famine in their 
 minds, raged over the discovery, ravaged the place, and 
 stupefied themselves with the wine in the cellars. But, 
 on the whole, order was fairly well maintained. Small 
 groups of thieves committing robberies on their own 
 account were promptly haled to the Place de Greve, the 
 common place of execution, and hanged by the ropes 
 which were used to fasten the lanterns. It was this 
 wild justice which first found voice for that terrible cry 
 of " A la lanterne /" which was yet to ring so often and
 
 620 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XLIII. 
 
 so ominously through the streets of the transformed 
 city. 
 
 It was high time for Paris to arm itself. Every mo- 
 ment during the early hours of that dreadful day Paris 
 expected to see the troops of the king enter the menaced 
 city. Every one was shrieking for arms; every one was 
 eager to shoulder a musket or brandish a pike, or, for 
 that matter, to handle some mace, some battle-axe, or 
 two-handed sword, long out of fashion, the rusted prop- 
 erty of vanished knights whose bones were dust and 
 whose souls are with the saints, we trust. It was easier 
 to shriek for arms than to get arms. The bewildered 
 committee in the Hotel de Ville, badgered for arms, 
 were at a loss what to answer. They could only say 
 that if the town had any they could only be obtained 
 through the provost. The mob replied by bidding them 
 send for the provost immediately. 
 
 The provost, Flesselles, was on that day summoned to 
 Versailles by the king, and to the Hotel de Ville by the 
 people. He was a new man, who had only received the 
 office some few weeks before. He was a weak man, whol- 
 ly unequal to the gravity of the situation. He seems to 
 have thought that a revolution could be allayed with 
 rose-water; that glib phrases, unctuous manners, could 
 soothe down the difficulty. It would have been better 
 for himself if he had gone to Versailles. Possibly he 
 was afraid to refuse the summons of the crowd. Pos- 
 sibly he thought he could better serve the king at Paris. 
 He went to the Hotel de Ville, and made liberal prom- 
 ises : so many thousand muskets that day ; so many more 
 hereafter. He said he had got a promise from a Charle- 
 ville gunsmith. In the evening Flesselles' chests of 
 arms were delivered at the Hotel de Ville. When they 
 were opened, however, they were found to be filled with
 
 1789. ARMS, ARMS! 621 
 
 old rags. Naturally the multitude raged with a great 
 rage with the provost. Flesselles declared that he had 
 been himself deceived. To quiet the mob he sent them 
 to the Carthusian monastery, promising them that they 
 would find arms there. The astounded monks received 
 the raging crowd, took them all over the monastery, and 
 satisfied them that they had not as much as a gun to 
 shoot a crow with. 
 
 The people, more irritated than ever, returned with 
 cries of treachery. To pacify them, the electors author- 
 ized the districts to manufacture fifty thousand pikes. 
 They were forged with amazing rapidity, but the great- 
 est speed seemed too slow for such an hour. The impa- 
 tient masses thought of the Garde Meuble on the Place 
 Louis Quinze. There were weapons there indeed, but 
 of a venerable type old swords, old halberts, old cui- 
 rasses. Such as they were, they served the turn of the 
 impatient mob, who speedily distributed to hundreds of 
 eager hands weapons that belonged to the history of 
 France, weapons that were now to play a part in more 
 momentous history. Powder destined for Versailles was 
 coming down the Seine in boats ; this was taken posses- 
 sion of and distributed by an elector at the grave risk 
 of his life. The cannoneers of the Gardes Fran9aises 
 brought into the city to swell the general armament a 
 train of their artillery, which they had taken from the 
 Gros Caillou Hospital. The people then bethought them 
 of the grand store of guns at the Invalides. The depu- 
 ties of one district went, the same evening, to Besenval, 
 the commandant, and Sombreuil, the governor of the 
 Hotel. Besenval promised to write to Versailles about 
 it. Write he did to De Broglie, but he received no an- 
 swer. Next morning, at seven o'clock, the mob, headed 
 by Ethis de Corny, of the permanent committee, made
 
 622 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XLIII. 
 
 a more decided demand, swept into the place, and seized 
 the store of weapons. Paris was bristling with steel. 
 
 That night of July 13 was one of the strangest Paris 
 had ever seen. All night long its streets echoed to the 
 tramping of feet of patrols ; all night the air rang with 
 the clink of hammer on anvil where men were forging 
 pikes. All night citizen soldiers, eccentrically armed 
 and eccentrically drilled, held themselves in readiness 
 to fight. All night the permanent committee held 
 the sceptre of authority at the Hotel de Ville, where 
 Moreau de Saint-Mery had once to threaten menacing 
 rapscallions with a blowing-up of the whole building 
 with gunpowder before he could reduce them to quiet. 
 All night the Place de Greve was choked with cannon 
 and piles of arms. All night good patriots helped the 
 feeble civic illumination by hanging lamps from their 
 windows. TLe strangest night Paris had ever seen 
 came and wen* and heralded the strangest day.
 
 1789. THE FOURTEENTH OF JULY. 
 
 623 
 
 CHAPTER XLIV. 
 
 THE BASTILLE. 
 
 WHEN the morning of July 14 dawned, probably no- 
 body in all that distracted, desperately heroic Paris 
 dreamed that the light of one of the most famous days 
 in the history of mankind was being shed upon the 
 world. Nobody probably dreamed that the fourteenth 
 of July would be remembered through generation after 
 generation as a sacred day of liberty. Not even fiery 
 young Camille Desmoulins, with his stutter and his 
 patriotism, who occupied himself on July 14 by arming 
 himself with a musket and a bayonet, " quite new," at 
 the captured Invalides. Not Doctor Marat, concerned 
 no longer with light and electricity, but busy with 
 graver things, and revolving, like the pious ^Eneas, many 
 cares in his mind. Not the Sieur Santerre, first of 
 French brewers to employ coke in the roasting of malt, 
 and of whom it shall yet be said, inaccurately, that he 
 ordered drums to beat to drown the dying speech of a 
 king. There were plenty of men in Paris that day who 
 were prepared to make a bold stand for freedom, and 
 to die with arms in their hands, rather than submit to 
 the menaces of a court prompted by Polignacs, and 
 buttressed by Royal - Allemands ; but there was no 
 prophet to see that this particular day was to prove 
 the day of days, and all through the fall of a prison. 
 
 The mind's eye, cleared and strengthened by much 
 study of old prints, can construct for itself a sufficient
 
 6^4 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XLIV. 
 
 picture of the Bastille as it was. When the mob came 
 surging up from Saint- Antoine on that memorable day, 
 they saw for almost the last time the sight which had 
 been familiar to Saint- Antoine for generations and gen- 
 erations. The gray, gaunt, oblong block, with its eight 
 tall towers or buttresses, one at each angle, and two 
 between on each of the longer sides, had cast its daily 
 shadow over Paris for nigh four hundred years. Etienne 
 Marcel, provost of the merchants, started it in 1357, 
 when France was still reeling from the defeat at Poic- 
 tiers, and luckless John lay in the hands of his enemies. 
 In those days it consisted only of a fortified gate. It 
 was made into a fortress by Hugues Aubriot, provost 
 of Paris, in 1370, under Charles V. Hugues Aubriot 
 was one of the first to experience the capabilities of his 
 Bastille as a prison. He was accused of being over- 
 much inclined to the Jews, of being overmuch inclined 
 to Jewesses, of being at once a roisterer and a heretic. 
 He was condemned to be burned alive, but the king's 
 clemency saved him, and substituted imprisonment on 
 bread and water for life. Within the solid walls of his 
 own Bastille the provost of the merchants was first 
 confined. His story is the first chapter in the long 
 chronicle of injustice which had linked itself through 
 the centuries with the name of the Bastille. The last 
 chapter was now reached, and was being read with 
 amazing rapidity by Saint-Antoine. 
 
 The story of Hugues Aubriot's career has all the ma- 
 terials in it for melodrama. Aubriot had a standing 
 quarrel with the University of Paris and with Etienne 
 Guidomare. Guidomare seems to have been a typical 
 student of the time. There was something of Panurge, 
 something of Fran9ois Villon, something of Abelard, 
 and something of the Admirable Crichton in his com-
 
 1370-1789. HUGUES AUBRIOT. 625 
 
 position. Provost Aubriot offended the university on 
 the day of the feast of Lendit, in 1377, in September, 
 by interrupting them on their parchment-buying pro- 
 cession to the plain of St. Denis with a procession of 
 his own, in which a luckless lady of bad character, Ag- 
 nes Piedeleu by name, was being convoyed througli the 
 streets of Paris, stark naked, to the pillory. The woman, 
 shivering and ashamed, denounced the provost at every 
 street turn as the abettor of the crime for which she 
 was suffering she was accused of causing the ruin of 
 a young girl and she called on the students to rescue 
 her. There was very near being a free fight, which 
 was only averted by the discretion of the rector of the 
 university. Hugues Aubriot had student Guidomare 
 arrested on a trumped-up charge of seducing a young 
 girl named Julienne Brulefer, and the student only es- 
 caped through King Charles V.'s intercession and clem- 
 ency. The feud between Aubriot and the university, 
 between the provost and the student, straggled on into 
 the next reign, Charles VI.'s, when Aubriot again ar- 
 rested Guidomare upon the old charge. Guidomare 
 retaliated by accusing Aubriot of keeping a Jewish 
 mistress. The Jewess gave testimony against Aubriot, 
 and killed herself in open court. Provost Aubriot was 
 doomed to die the death, but the royal mercy changed 
 the sentence to perpetual imprisonment in the Bastille, 
 ef which he had laid the first stone, and of which he 
 was the first prisoner. Shortly after he had been clap- 
 ped into jail there was a kind of twopenny-halfpenny 
 insurrection in Paris ; the mob broke open the Bastille 
 this was its first siege and sought to make the ex- 
 provost a captain over them. The released prisoner 
 affected great gratitude, promised to do wonders for 
 them on the morrow, but when the morrow dawned 
 I. 40
 
 626 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. Cn. XLIV. 
 
 dismayed insurrection found that it had lost its leader. 
 Aubriot, sufficiently thankful to breathe the free air 
 again without putting his head in peril for his libera- 
 tors, had slipped out of Paris in the night. He made 
 his way to Dijon in Burgundy, where he was born, and 
 where, a little while later, he died and was more or less 
 forgotten. Such is the story, historical or legendary; 
 it is a good story, and inaugurates with sufficient effect 
 the career of the Bastille. 
 
 Many strange inmates that Bastille had from the 
 days of Hugues Aubriot to the days of De Launay. 
 Illustrious and obscure, base and noble, famous through- 
 out the world or destined to remain forever a mystery, 
 the denizens of the great keep pass like shadows before 
 us. Lariviere and Noviant, ministers of the mad king 
 Charles VI., knew the Bastille, and narrowly escaped 
 death for their supposed share in the burning of the 
 "Savages." The two hermits of the order of St. Au- 
 gustin, who came to Paris to cure the mad king, were 
 lodged in the Bastille for a while as guests until they 
 failed, when they were beheaded. Montagu, convicted 
 of plotting against Charles, went to his death from the 
 Bastille. Pierre des Essarts, his enemy, who died on 
 the scaffold in his turn, held the Bastille when it was 
 besieged by the Burgundians, led by the butcher Ca- 
 boche. Then came the influence of the English in 
 1415. The Armagnacs in the Bastille were massacred 
 in 1418. When Henry V. was made regent of France 
 he made his brother Clarence captain of Paris, and put 
 English garrisons in the Bastille, Louvre, and Vincennes. 
 Stout English soldiers lounged at ease in that Bastille 
 which Englishmen afterwards were to help to take. 
 When the French factions united against England, and 
 traitor Michel Laillier opened the gates to Richemont,
 
 1370-1789. COME LIKE SHADOWS. 62 7 
 
 the English garrison were allowed to march out and 
 embark behind the Louvre. The Duke of Exeter, who 
 succeeded Clarence, killed at Baugy, as governor of 
 Paris, made Sir John Falstaff governor of the Bastille. 
 Falstaff was succeeded by Lord Willoughby d'Eresby, 
 under whom it was evacuated. Under Louis XL, the 
 Bastille did not want for tenants. It knew D'Harau- 
 court, Bishop of Verdun ; probably Cardinal Balue ; 
 certainly Antoine de Chabannes, Count of Dammartin, 
 who actually escaped. It knew Louis de Luxembourg, 
 Count of St. Pol, and Armagnac, Duke of Nemours, 
 who were both executed. Under Francis I. it held 
 Admiral Chabot and his enemy Chancellor- Poyet. Un- 
 der Henry II., Anne du Bourg and Dufaure were im- 
 prisoned for Protestantism, and Du Bourg was exe- 
 cuted. Montgomery and Montmorency were Bastilled 
 by Catherine de' Medici. Under Henry III. the Bas- 
 tille greeted the monk Poncet, the Archdeacon Rossiers, 
 and our old friend Bussy d'Amboise. Laurent Tetti 
 held the Bastille during the " Battle of the Barricades," 
 and surrendered it to De Guise, who handed it over to 
 Bussy Leclerc. Madame de Thou was the first woman 
 imprisoned in the Bastille. It does not seem quite cer- 
 tain whether Brisson the president, whom Bussy Leclerc 
 hanged, and who asked, like Lavoisier, to be allowed to 
 live till he had finished the work he was engaged upon, 
 was in the Bastille. Mayenne compelled Leclerc to 
 surrender the Bastille; he retired to Brussels, and there 
 tranquilly died. Du Bourg 1'Espinasse, the successor 
 to Leclerc, refused at first to surrender the Bastille to 
 Henry IV. " If the king be master of Paris, I am mas- 
 ter of the Bastille," he asserted sturdily. He was al- 
 lowed to march out with the honors of war, and Henry 
 entered accompanied by Biron poor Biron, actually
 
 628 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XLIV. 
 
 the hero of " Love's Labor's Lost," whom grim fate car- 
 ried there again to his death. The Count of Auvergne's 
 long imprisonment is one of the features of Bastille 
 history. 
 
 Jean de Saulx, Viscount of Tavannes, was imprisoned 
 in the Bastille, was exchanged against four ladies, im- 
 prisoned again, and finally escaped. Sully threw him- 
 self into the Bastille at the death of Henry IV. Conde 
 was imprisoned in the Bastille. La Galigai, wife of 
 the murdered Concini, knew the Bastille. Under Rich- 
 elieu the place had ever so many prisoners, including 
 old Bassompierre, and ex-governors Vitry and Luxem- 
 bourg. The- Bastille was besieged in 1649 under the 
 Fronde by D'Elbosuf, and surrendered by Du Tremblay. 
 De Retz smiled at some talk there was of pulling down 
 the fortress. Mademoiselle was at the Bastille in 1652, 
 firing on the enemy. Danish Rantzau lay his term in 
 the Bastille, and died of dropsy soon after his release. 
 Under Louis XIV. the false Christ, Morin, was Bastilled 
 and burned. Then came the wild time of the poisoners 
 and sorcerers. Madame de Montespan was accused of 
 attending a mass when naked. People talked much 
 then of indecent masses, of naked women used for al- 
 tars, black candles burned, and mass said and gospel 
 read backwards, and other nonsense, which, however, 
 helped to keep the Bastille going. M. de Bragelonne 
 was sent to the Bastille in 1663 for gambling in an un- 
 privileged house. Fouquet lay in the Bastille guarded 
 by famous D'Artagnan and his musketeers. Bussy 
 Rabutin, in 1665, was imprisoned for the second time 
 for writing the " Histoire Amoureuse." Lauzun was 
 clapped in the Bastille for jealousy of Mme. de Monaco. 
 The Bastille knew Marsilly, the English agent, Maupeou, 
 De Rohan. It knew the Man in the Iron Mask, whom
 
 1870-1789. SO DEPART. 629 
 
 Colonel Jung considers to have been one Marcheuille, 
 the chief of a plot against Louis XIV., arrested on the 
 banks of Somme in 1673. A quarrel between Count 
 d'Arrnagnac and the Duke de Gramont over a horse- 
 race ended in a blow and one night's imprisonment. In 
 1686 a young Englishwoman was imprisoned for aiding 
 the escape of Protestant children. She escaped herself, 
 we learn, somehow. It would almost seem as if our 
 English dramatist Vanbrugh was in the Bastille for a 
 season. An Englishman named Nelson knew of its 
 hospitality. So like shadows come and go the heroes 
 of the Bastille history : the fanciful may imagine that 
 their gray ghosts flitted on the air on that July 14, and 
 surveyed with ironical satisfaction if, indeed, as Lamb 
 doubts, ghosts can be ironical the destruction of their 
 old-time prison-house. 
 
 Carlyle, writing at a time when the taking of the 
 Bastille was as recent as the "Year of Revolution," 
 1848, is to us, complains despairingly of the difficulty 
 of his task. " Could one but, after infinite reading, get 
 to understand so much as the plan of the building." 
 No such difficulty lies in the student's way to-day. 
 There is a little library of books in existence upon the 
 Bastille; the ambitious scholar can study it in plan and 
 section, and, in the Arab phrase, know it as well as he 
 knows his own horse. In the year of centenary, and 
 for a twelvemonth before, Paris was amused and enter- 
 tained by the erection of a sham Bastille, which re- 
 called, though in a changed locality, the terrors and the 
 triumphs of 1789. Perhaps to the imaginative mind 
 that mimic reconstruction of old Paris may bring a 
 little closer the conception of the old Rue Saint-An- 
 toine and the old Bastille, with the little houses and 
 the little shops nestling at its base. It is a picture in
 
 630 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XLIV. 
 
 little indeed : the lath and plaster and cardboard have 
 not the proportions of the antique stones, so many of 
 which now withstand the wash of the Seine on the 
 Concord Bridge. But we must remember, too, that the 
 Bastille was not really so portentous as it looks in the 
 pictures and engravings of the time. In those pictures, 
 in those engravings, the proportions of the Bastille are 
 amazingly exaggerated no doubt, as has been suggest- 
 ed, for the sake of enhancing the merit of the victors. 
 The Bastille was in reality not quite so high as the 
 Louvre, and was not half so long as the Louvre colon- 
 nade. Its walls were ninety-six French feet high on 
 the exterior, and seventy-three feet internally, and nine 
 feet thick. Its ditches were twenty-three feet lower 
 than the level of the interior courts. 
 
 It is sufficiently easy for the revolutionary student to 
 reconstruct the scene of the greatest and shortest siege 
 in history. The grounds of the Bastille lay in the an- 
 gle formed by the Place Saint-Antoine and the Rue de 
 la Contrescarpe, and extended all along the Rue Saint- 
 Antoine to the point where the Rue des Tournelles 
 abutted on it. This was the point at which the attack 
 took place. The spectator standing at the opening of 
 the Rue des Tournelles saw the two end and three side 
 towers rising high and sullen in front of him. Below 
 to the right, and at right angle to the fortress, was the 
 entrance to the Bastille. Immediately adjoining this 
 gate, and nestling to the outer wall of the Bastille, was 
 a small cluster of shops, and shops continued with inter- 
 vals all along this low outer wall well down the Rue 
 Saint-Antoine to the Saint-Antoine gate. 
 
 Every one of the eight grim towers bore its own 
 name and its own terror. On the side which looked 
 towards the city were ranged the Tower of the Well,
 
 1789. THE BASTILLE AND SAINT- ANTOINE. 631 
 
 the Tower of Liberty surely the most ironical baptism 
 the Tower of La Berthaudiere, and the Tower of La 
 Basiniere. On the side which flanked the Faubourg 
 of Saint-Antoine were the towers of the Corner, of the 
 Chapel, of the Treasure, and of the Compte. Sully in 
 the spacious days of the fourth Henry had joined the 
 grand arsenal to the Bastille, which was thus a perfect 
 storehouse of arms, a fact familiar to the popular mind, 
 and much ruminated upon at a moment when arms be- 
 came essential. 
 
 Who first thought of the Bastille ; across whose ad- 
 venturous mind on that July morning did the idea flash 
 of directing the strength of insurgent Paris against the 
 ancient prison ? We shall probably never know. The 
 people wanted arms. Wild, incoherent schemes of bat- 
 tle with the royal troops in the Champ de Mars, of 
 triumphant march upon Versailles, seethed in unreason- 
 ing brains. Cooler and more logical minds thought of 
 defending Paris against possible, against almost inevit- 
 able assault, and of arming awakened patriotism as 
 speedily as possible. Under these conditions it was 
 natural that the minds of men should turn to the two 
 great storehouses, or to what they believed to be the 
 two great storehouses, of arms in the city, the Hotel des 
 Invalides and the Bastille fortress. No man's mind on 
 the morning of July 14 cherished the thought of captur- 
 ing the Bastille as a great act of patriotic protest. 
 When Saint-Antoine turned to march upon the prison, 
 it had no notion that it was inaugurating a new epoch 
 in history. Saint-Antoine wanted weapons, so did its 
 brother, Saint-Marceau. Saint-Marceau knew that arms 
 were stored in the Invalides. Saint-Antoine believed 
 that arms were stored behind the gray familiar walls of 
 the Bastille. Saint-Marceau naturally and simply went
 
 632 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XLIV. 
 
 to the Invalides. Saint- Antoine no less naturally and 
 simply went to the Bastille. 
 
 But the determination of Saint- Antoine and others to 
 march upon the Bastille was causing the wildest excite- 
 ment in the Hotel de Ville, where the committee of 
 electors were desperately, well-nigh despairingly, delib- 
 erating. What, they asked themselves piteously, could 
 an ill-armed, ill-disciplined rabble do against the im- 
 pregnable Bastille ? What could come of any such 
 business but swift, inevitable retribution from the armies 
 that were gathering like eagles around Paris ? Still, 
 Bastillism was in the air. Every one's thoughts turned 
 to the Bastille, inside the Electoral Committee as out- 
 side of it. The wildest schemes for its capture were 
 solemnly submitted to the storm-tossed assemblage. 
 One worthy locksmith had the brilliant idea that it was 
 to be taken by the good old Roman plan of the cata- 
 pault, which by dashing enormous blocks of stone at the 
 Bastille should batter a breach in its wall through which 
 patriotism might rush. The classically minded lock- 
 smith was elbowed aside by M. de la Caussidiere, major- 
 general of Parisian militia, who insisted that the Bas- 
 tille, like all other fortresses, was only to be taken ac- 
 cording to the regular and formal rules of military war- 
 fare. Ideas as wild, if not wilder, were agitating else- 
 where heads as frenzied. Certain of the men of Saint- 
 Antoine had set a captain over them in the person of 
 that brewer Santerre who had first of Frenchmen em- 
 ployed coke in the roasting of malt, the brewer Santerre 
 whom Johnson had met and talked with when he trav- 
 elled with the Thrales in Paris in 1775. He was now 
 engaged in turning the scientific side of his mind upon 
 the question of the moment. Scientific Santerre thought 
 that an ingenious blend of oil of turpentine and phos-
 
 SANMRRfi. 693 
 
 phorus might be forced through the pumps of fire-en- 
 gines and so set fire to the accursed place. Scientific 
 Santerre had the pumps actually carried to the space 
 before the Bastille. As the oil and phosphorus notion 
 was soon abandoned, the pumps were used later in an 
 endeavour to send a stream of water upon the touch- 
 stones of the Bastille cannon. This ingenious purpose 
 was baulked by the fact that the pumps refused to 
 carry their stream of water anything like high enough. 
 What was an indignant populace, what was a storm- 
 tossed Electoral Committee to do in the face of that 
 grim, gray, unconquerable fortress ? Neither populace 
 nor committee knew that by some curious blundering 
 De Launay, governor of the Bastille, had little means 
 of holding out long. There was powder enough, and to 
 spare indeed, but a grave lack of provisions. He had 
 only two sacks of flour, it seems, and a little rice where- 
 with to feed his garrison. The garrison was small enough 
 too thirty-two Swiss with their commander, Louis la 
 Flue, eighty-two Invalides, Major de Losme-Salbray, and 
 the governor himself. A grim position, though there 
 were fifteen good cannon on the platforms of the towi'rs, 
 and though it needed no great number of men to handle 
 fifteen cannon. But the crowd outside the Bastille, and 
 the crowd outside and inside the Hotel de Ville, knew 
 little or nothing of the bad garrisoning and worse vic- 
 tualling of the Bastille. They only saw before them 
 their old familiar enemy holding its head high, and they 
 wasted their wild energies in desperate devices such as 
 those of the classical locksmith and the scientific San- 
 terre. The Electoral Committee in its perplexity sent 
 at eight o'clock a deputation Bellon, Billefod, and Cha- 
 tOM military men all of them. These actually break- 
 fasted with De Launay, spent some three hours with
 
 634 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XLIV. 
 
 him, and came back to say that De Launay had drawn 
 back bis cannon, and would only use them in self-defence. 
 This was not what the crowd outside the Bastille want- 
 ed. Not for three hours' parley did they come together 
 did they now wait clamoring under the gray walls. All 
 Paris seemed to be marching on the place. For, once 
 set in motion, the popular movement became irresist- 
 ible. As the wild mob tramped its way through the 
 faubourg, it grew and grew in volume. Every street, 
 every alley, every shop, hovel, garret, and cellar yielded 
 some recruit for the wild ranks, some man who could 
 brandish a knife or shoulder a musketoon, or wield some 
 improvised pike of his own making. Out of the slums 
 and the blind-alleys ran rivulets of squalid, ferocious hu- 
 manity to swell the roaring tide that was sweeping, wave 
 upon wave, against the Bastille. Those who had first 
 arrived before the fortress found themselves compelled 
 to abide at their post. Every avenue of approach to 
 the Bastille was choked with men. Every moment the 
 pressure from afar grew greater. What had been the 
 extreme outer rank and fringe of the crowd a second 
 since, was now in its turn cinctured by fresh contin- 
 gents, all swaying, shouting, pushing towards the Bas- 
 tille. Whatever those who were nearest to the Bastille 
 may have felt as they gazed upon its apparently im- 
 pregnable towel's, they had to go on with their task. 
 Retreat was impossible Before them lay the prison, 
 behind them the most fantastic multitude that ever 
 came together for the assault of mortal fortress before. 
 Poor wretches more ragged than the beggars of Callot's 
 fancy, smug citizens in sober browns and hodden grays, 
 National Guards in vivid uniforms, lean men of the law 
 in funereal black, strangers from all the ends of the 
 earth in odd foreign habiliments, gentlemen in coats
 
 1?89. DE LA ROSIERE. 
 
 635 
 
 that would not have shamed a court ceremonial, all were 
 blended together in one inconceivable raving medley. 
 
 At ten of the clock that inconceivable, raving medley 
 found an ambassador in the person of Thuriot de la 
 Rosiere, deputed by the district of Saint-Louis de la 
 Culture, and accompanied by Dourlier and Toulouse 
 and a number of the crowd. Thuriot de la Rosiere de- 
 manded speech of the governor, and so became for the 
 moment famous, unwitting of a 9th of Thermidor yet 
 to come when he shall help to refuse speech to a Robes- 
 pierre, and so become for the moment again famous. 
 Speech was at first denied, afterwards granted, and 
 Thuriot de la Rosiere, unaccompanied, was permitted 
 to enter and to interview the governor. Thuriot de la 
 Rosiere seems to have conducted his interview with De 
 Launay in imperious fashion. He harangued the sol- 
 diers. The Swiss did not understand a syllable, but the 
 Invalides, it is said, understood and trembled at their 
 stern significance. " I come," he said to De Launay, 
 " in the name of the nation to tell you that your levelled 
 cannon disturb the people, and to call upon you to re- 
 move them." De Launay declared that he could only 
 remove them in obedience to a direct order from the 
 king himself. Still he had, he declared, withdrawn them 
 from the apertures so that they were invisible from out- 
 side. De Launay seems to have definitely promised not 
 to make any use of his cannon unless attacked in the 
 ^first instance. While the interview was going on, it is 
 said that the people outside began to grow alarmed at 
 Thuriot's long absence, and to cry out for him, and that 
 to pacify their demands De Launay led Thuriot to the 
 platform of the tower that the people might see him. 
 Perhaps Thuriot only came on the platform of the tower 
 to see that the cannon were indeed withdrawn from the
 
 636 THE FftfiNCH DEVOLUTION. CH. XLIV. 
 
 embrasures according to promise. Anyhow, he appeared 
 on one of the towers, and was greeted with a wild cry 
 of joy from the crowd below. 
 
 If one could only conjure up some picture of the sight 
 of that crowd, of the sea of faces which stared up at 
 those Bastille turrets, and watched for the figure of 
 Thuriot de la Rosiere, black against the sky. To Thu- 
 riot, looking down, a sea of indistinguishable faces, 
 stretching far as the eye could reach down every ave- 
 nue, lost itself at last in mere blackness of packed heads 
 in the distant streets. The faces were mostly French 
 faces, ferocious faces, the faces that the Old Order had 
 so zealously driven down out of sight, the faces of a rab- 
 ble whom famine and despair held shut for so long in 
 the shadow of death, and who had now crept out into 
 the July sunlight to look about them a little with blink- 
 ing, bloodshot eyes. If there was much that was wolf- 
 ish, much that was obscene, much that was so ominous 
 in those haggard faces, it was the fault of the Old Or- 
 der which made them what they were. It made them 
 into beasts of prey, and now the beasts of prey were 
 free, and would fain rend their masters. But the faces 
 were not all such nightmare visions. There were faces 
 there of men made to lead, of men who were to be fa- 
 mous or infamous by-and-by. The French Guards, with 
 the qualities of training impressed upon their grave, sol- 
 dierly faces, lent a solid dignity to the mad scene. Other 
 faces, too, besides French faces, were discernible in the 
 throng. One spectator sees the Tartar face of a Turk 
 among the assailants. What brought the child of Islam 
 there ? There was probably at least one British face 
 there, the eager Scotch face of William Playfair of Ed- 
 inburgh; indeed, if he were not there it is hard to see 
 how he avoided it. While his brother, John Playfair,
 
 1789. WILLIAM PLAYFAIR AND JOHN STONE. 6 37 
 
 was quietly making himself a quiet name as a mathe- 
 matician and geologist in Edinburgh, wandering Will- 
 iam had drifted into France, and drifted into the Rev- 
 olution. He was a member of the Saint- Antoine mili- 
 tia, which had been enrolled on the night before this 
 Bastille morning, and it is scarcely likely that he would 
 be found missing from the ranks of his new fellowship. 
 As we here probably see the first of him, we may as 
 well see the last of him. It was his destiny to rescue 
 
 r J 
 
 D'Epremesnil from popular fury in the Palais Royal, in 
 the February of 1791 a kindly, courageous deed which 
 has been inaccurately ascribed to Petion to be threat- 
 ened by the fulminations of Barere, to escape by way 
 of Holland to London, and ruminate a scheme for de- 
 stroying the Revolution which he had served by means 
 of a system of forged assignats; to return to Paris after 
 Waterloo and edit GalignanVs Messenger, which still 
 goes on w r hile poor Play fair is forgotten; and to die in 
 London at the age of sixty-four. 
 
 There is another face of English mould visible to the 
 mind's eye among the besiegers of the Bastille the face 
 of John Stone of Tiverton. We may meet and part with 
 him, too, at once. It was his destiny to bring together 
 the "gallant and seditious Geraldine," young Lord Ed- 
 ward Fitzgerald, and the beautiful Pamela, daughter of 
 Madame de Genlis and of Equality Orleans. It was his 
 destiny to share the suspicion with which the Revolu- 
 tion regarded all Englishmen after the affair of Toulon, 
 and to taste the fare of French prisons. It was his des- 
 tiny to adore the Girondists, and to glorify Charlotte 
 Corday. It was his destiny to die peacefully in Paris 
 after his stormy life, and to sleep in Pere la Chaise, by 
 the side, no doubt, of Helen Maria Williams, whom he 
 loved, not wisely, but too well,
 
 638 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. Cn. XLIV. 
 
 Such are some of the faces we may note while the 
 crowd grows and gathers in the space about the Bastille. 
 Thuriot de laRosiere, having seen and been seen by the 
 multitude from the summit of the prison, came down 
 again to address a vain appeal to the soldiers under De 
 Launay's command, and to assure the mob without that 
 De Launay would not surrender. At this news the 
 clamor and the confusion grew louder and more bewil- 
 dering. The angry sea still tossed, but as yet the signs 
 were not entirely menacing. A number of persons came 
 forward asking for arms ; asking for peace. As they 
 appeared to be well-intentioned, M. de Launay was not 
 unwilling to receive them, and allowed the first draw- 
 bridge to be lowered. On this drawbridge the new dep- 
 utation rushed, but was followed in its rush by a num- 
 ber of the crowd without. The governor appears to 
 have feared an attack upon his little garrison; the order 
 to fire was given, was obeyed, the crowd was driven 
 back with bloodshed, and the drawbridge hurriedly 
 pulled up again amid the wild cries of those outside, 
 who considered themselves the victims of treachery. 
 Fire and bloodshed had begun; fire and bloodshed was 
 to be from that moment the order of the day. 
 
 If it were only not so astonishingly hard to unravel 
 the story of this famous siege ! The very multiplicity 
 of existing accounts only renders the task more difficult. 
 The different descriptions of the day's deeds vary in the 
 most essential particulars; conflict and clash upon points 
 which are absolutely essential to the proper comprehen- 
 sion of the story. Never perhaps has the difficulty of 
 sifting historical testimony and winnowing satisfactory 
 grain from the monstrosity of chaff been more fantas- 
 tically illustrated. On the most vital points, one ap- 
 parently perfectly credible witness will say one thing,
 
 1789. CONFLICTING STATEMENTS. 639 
 
 and another witness, apparently no less credible, appa- 
 rently testifying in no les^ good faith, will roundly as- 
 sert diametrically the opposite. We have on record 
 the statements of men who were outside the prison; we 
 have also the statement of one man who was inside the 
 prison during the whole siege; and it is beyond expres- 
 sion perplexing to find that the accounts refuse to tally. 
 That two accounts of such a wild, tumultuous affair 
 should differ in some degree is inevitable; that they 
 should differ as widely as they do is almost inexplica- 
 ble. But they do differ, and all that the amazed student 
 can do is to weigh as best he can and decide as best he 
 can, and so make the best or worst of it. The actual 
 truth is apparently unknowable; each of us must read 
 by the gloss of the law of probability as best he can. 
 
 Thus, for example, it would appear from some ac- 
 counts that after Thuriot de la Rosiere's interview 
 with De Launay there was another deputation, another 
 interview between the governor and a deputy of the 
 people, M. de Corny. Between the Corny interview 
 and the Thuriot interview much confusion seems to 
 have arisen, and some writers attribute to Corny what 
 others attribute to Thuriot de la Rosiere. Again, as re- 
 gards the firing upon the deputation for whom De Lau- 
 nay had lowered the first drawbridge, it is stated in the 
 memoir of one of the besieged soldiers that the firing 
 only began in self-defence when the armed mob came 
 rushing towards them shouting demands for the Bastille 
 and imprecations upon the troops, and began cutting 
 the chains of the drawbridge. Some say that De Lau- 
 nay's men only fired powder in order to alarm the some- 
 what disorderly invaders of the drawbridge. However, 
 from whatever cause, firing had taken place, and the 
 regular siege of the Bastille had now begun. Two sol-
 
 640 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XLIV. 
 
 diers, Louis Tournay, of the Dauphin Regiment, and 
 Aubin Bonnemere, of the Royal Comptois regiment, 
 mounted on the bridge which closed the Court of the 
 Government, aided, perhaps, by bayonets stuck between 
 the stones, and, climbing on the roof of the guard- 
 house, they succeeded in getting inside the first enclo- 
 sure. De Launay had left only one Invalide to guard 
 the drawbridge here. He had given orders to the sol- 
 diers at the second gates not to fire upon the assailants 
 before first calling upon them to retire, which could not 
 now be done in consequence of the distance between 
 besiegers and besieged. Comparatively at their ease, 
 Louis Tournay and Aubin Bonnemere hacked away at 
 the chains of the drawbridge, apparently under no 
 " fiery hail." The bridge at last fell, crushing some of 
 the assailants underneath it. The crowd foamed over, 
 and the first court was won. 
 
 But the winning of that first court was not every- 
 thing was not even much; seemed, indeed, almost 
 nothing to the invaders. It is difficult to form a clear 
 idea of the swift succession of events during the early 
 hours of that July noon. From the Cour de Gouverne- 
 ment, from adjoining roofs, from behind the shelter of 
 convenient walls, the besiegers blazed away desperately 
 and wholly unavailingly at the walls, the towers, the 
 turrets. From the platforms the besieged answered 
 back, firing at random into the crowd below, and with 
 more effect. Accounts clash here, as at all points of 
 this momentous siege. If we were to accept the au- 
 thority of certain highly wrought engravings of the 
 time, we should conjure up a picture of a mighty keep, 
 its ramparts bristling with legions of defenders and 
 assailed by a desperate populace, who are boldly attack- 
 ing it in front, and who in some representations are
 
 SIEGE OF THE BASTILLE. 6 4! 
 
 actually endeavoring to take it by assault by means of 
 scaling-ladders and the like. Anti-revolutionary histo- 
 rians, on the other hand, have made light of the whole 
 business ; have sneered at the famous siege as a theat- 
 rical sham from beginning to end ; have declared that 
 the Bastille never would have been taken never, in 
 fact, was taken, but was only surrendered by a humane 
 governor, who was barbarously betrayed. What is cer- 
 tain is that the Bastille was surrounded, through all the 
 early morn and afternoon of that summer day, by an 
 hourly swelling crowd ; that all the streets in the im- 
 mediate neighborhood were black with an excited 
 throng, starred here and there by spots of color, where 
 soldiers in brilliant royal uniforms and men of the 
 Gardes Fran9aises mingled with the assailants. After 
 firing began however firing did begin it kept on for 
 hours, shots spitting from the black earth, from the 
 yawning windows, from the tiled roofs upon the keep, 
 and having about as much effect upon its rugged walls 
 as so many cheap fireworks. From the Bastille itself 
 occasionally, but not too regularly, rolled down an an- 
 swering peal. Once and once only was a Bastille can- 
 non fired. It has been asked, in wonder, why De Lau- 
 nay did not use his cannon save this one time why 
 he did not play with his artillery upon the concourse 
 beneath, and sweep, as he easily could have swept, the 
 streets for the time being clean of enemies. Is is hard 
 to find an answer. De Launay was, perhaps, unnerved, 
 lie seems to have been a man capable of conceiving 
 strenuous deeds, but little capable of carrying them 
 into execution. Perhaps he put confidence in those as- 
 suring orders of Besenval's, and looked for hourly re- 
 lief. Perhaps he began to fear that the Bastille must 
 fall, and deemed it as well not to put himself beyond 
 I. 41
 
 642 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XLIV. 
 
 the pale of pity with that wild mob, who might be soon 
 his masters. Perhaps he felt that he could not count on 
 the obedience . of his soldiery. Whatever the reason 
 may have been, it is certain that the Bastille cannon 
 were, with one exception, not used on that wild day ; 
 their last chance of shooting forth flame and iron upon 
 a rebellious Paris was happily denied to them. 
 
 In all that seething mass of besiegers certain men 
 make themselves especially conspicuous, certain names 
 have passed into history enveloped with a kind of le- 
 gendary fame, much akin to that which belongs to the 
 heroes of heroic epics, to the Four Sons of Aymon, and 
 the Peers of Charlemagne. Especially conspicuous, es- 
 pecially dear to Saint - Antoine, was Santerre then 
 thinking nothing of the advantages of coke in the 
 roasting of malt, thinking only of blended oil and phos- 
 phorus, or of any other blend that would serve to 
 roast the Bastille. Santerre got wounded in that siege, 
 but not to the death ; he was fated to outlive the Revo- 
 lution, and mourn the ruin of an excellent brewing 
 business. 
 
 Another conspicuous figure was young Elie, officer in 
 a regiment of the queen, who came to the siege in citi- 
 zen's attire, and went away to invest himself in his mil- 
 itary garb to command the more respect, and was back 
 again and in the thick of it as soon as might be. Near 
 to him w r as another young man, some thirty years of 
 age, Pierre Auguste Hulin, who had been many things 
 in his span waiter, working clock-maker, chasseur to 
 the Marquis de Conflans, and now Bastille besieger. 
 Another soldier was close at hand, Arne "Brave Arne," 
 Joseph Arne, only twenty-six years old ; a native of Dole 
 in Franche Compte, a grenadier of the company of Resu- 
 velles, and a good-looking, impetuous, soldierly youth,
 
 1789. ELI AMD HULIN. 6 4 3 
 
 as his face survives to us in portraits. A wine -mer- 
 chant named Cholat was near, too, playing a cannon- 
 eer's part. In the thick of the press was an active 
 young man in the sober suit of a Chatelet usher, Stan- 
 islas-Marie Maillard, whose fame was not to be lim- 
 ited, like that of li and of Hulin, to the one brave 
 day. Marceau was here beginning his "brief, brave, 
 and glorious " career. Herault de Sechelles, the young 
 president of the Paris Parliament, good-looking and gal- 
 lant, the son of a gallant soldier-sire, was in the hottest of 
 it all. Many tales have grown up around these names, or 
 some of these names. It is hard to say, in this siege of the 
 Bastille, what is legend and what unadorned truth. It 
 would seem as if we had to abandon the highly pictur- 
 esque legend of Mademoiselle de Monsigny, the young, 
 beautiful girl whom the mob took for De Launay's 
 daughter, and incontinently proposed to burn there and 
 then as an expiatory victim for the sins of the father, 
 and who was only rescued by the bravery of Aubin 
 Bonnemere, while the real father, who was on guard in 
 the Bastille, was brought to the parapet by his daugh- 
 ter's cries, and immediately shot dead. Aubin Bonne- 
 mere got a sabre of honor in 1790, but it is said that this 
 deed of his is very doubtful. 
 
 Through the crowd, as we have seen, deputations 
 made from time to time their way with drums beating 
 and flags of truce. One of these deputations came from 
 the Hotel de Ville, after excited individuals had come 
 rushing in with the still hot grape-shot from the fire of 
 De Launay's solitary cannon. It called upon De Launay 
 solemnly, by order of the permanent committee of the 
 Paris militia, to allow the Bastille to be occupied by the 
 militia in common with his own troops, who were from 
 that moment to be under the civic authority. This or-
 
 644 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XLIV. 
 
 der was signed by De Flesselles, the pale, doomed prov- 
 ost, as president of the committee. Luckless De Fles- 
 selles, he sat in the grand hall of Saint-Jean, surrounded 
 with papers, letters, and people who came, the envoys 
 of the different districts, to accuse him of treachery to 
 his face. Through all the din he still strove hard to 
 soothe the mob with affability, to face calmly the ter- 
 rors that threatened him. Some of the electors, finding 
 themselves compromised with the people, turned round 
 and attacked him. Dussaulx, the translator of Juvenal, 
 and Fauchet endeavored to defend him, innocent or 
 guilty, and to save him from death. Under such terri- 
 ble conditions did he try to give orders such as this 
 which was now carried to the Bastille. It was conveyed 
 by a deputation which included M. de la Vigne, presi- 
 dent of the electors, and the Abbe Fauchet, who has 
 left on record a glowing account of the attempt to get 
 speech with De Launay. According to this account the 
 deputation tried three several times to approach and 
 present their order ; and each time were fired upon and 
 forced to retire. On the other hand, the besieged story 
 is that the deputation were called upon from within to 
 come forward, that they hung back for some ten min- 
 utes in the Cour de 1'Orme without venturing forward, 
 and that De Launay thereupon declared to his soldiers 
 that the deputation was evidently only a snare, as a 
 genuine deputation would not have hesitated to ap- 
 proach. The hesitation of the deputies, if hesitation 
 there were, was due no doubt to the cries of the people 
 behind them who kept shouting to them to beware of 
 the treachery of the governor. It is easy to see how 
 between besiegers and besieged, each desperately sus- 
 picious of the intended treason of the other, any chance 
 of coming to any possible understanding was exceed-
 
 H89. WHAT BANNER? 
 
 645 
 
 ingly unlikely. No understanding was arrived at, and 
 the fight, if fight it can be called, raved along its course, 
 leaving in its wake great waves of excitement that ed- 
 died back to the Hotel de Ville and p kept all there in 
 passion and panic. 
 
 All through the long hours the fight went on, panic 
 and passion at the Hotel de Ville sending its electric 
 thrills of panic and passion to the Bastille, and the Bas- 
 tille sending back its electric thrills of panic and passion 
 to the Hotel de Ville. The pale Provost Flesselles still 
 kept up a determined air of patriotism, although patriot- 
 ism at large was growing hourly more suspicious of 
 him. "I saw him," says Dussaulx, "chewing his last 
 mouthful of bread ; it stuck in his teeth, and he kept it 
 in his mouth two hours before he could swallow it." 
 The pale Governor de Launay grew more and more un- 
 determined as the minutes stretched into hours and no 
 hint came of Besenval's promised aid, of the great deeds 
 that the Court party were going to do. Still Saint- An- 
 toine, far as eye could reach, was black with raging hu- 
 manity, still the fearful gaze beheld only tossing pikes 
 and the light on musket barrels pointed to the walls as 
 to the heavens, and almost as vainly, and vomiting fire. 
 Over that wild welter a banner, even banners, floated 
 mysterious banners which have puzzled and shall puzzle 
 historians of the Bastille doomsday ever since. What 
 was the banner, what were the banners, used on that 
 day ? Maillard and others carried flags ; but these may 
 have been white in sign of pacific intent. They cer- 
 tainly were not red. The red flag was then only the 
 emblem of martial law, and did not become the symbol 
 of revolution till 1792. Little Saint- Antoine seems to 
 have carried a green flag. Republicanism is anxious to 
 prove that some sort of banner was borne on that great
 
 646 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XLIV. 
 
 day which was regarded as in some degree a national 
 banner ; but the thing seems hard to prove. It is more 
 than likely that, very much as men on July 12 wandered 
 about Paris with $e tilting helmets of the Valois princes 
 upon their heads, and the swords, perhaps, of Merovin- 
 gian monarchs in their hands very much as Georget 
 from Brest handled the King of Siam's cannon so the 
 banners that flapped on the wind of that wild fight may 
 have been royal standards of all hues and ages conveni- 
 ently lifted from wherever patriotism with a taste for 
 the picturesque could lay hands upon them. Indeed, in 
 certain of the engravings which represent episodes in 
 this new Titanomachia the curious may discern on cer- 
 tain of the banners therein displayed signs which look 
 exceedingly like the insignia of royal rule, the lilies of 
 the Bourbon line. It is difficult to believe that patriot- 
 ism had on July 14 sufficiently formulated its existence, 
 sufficiently solidified itself to be ready equipped with a 
 patriotic banner all complete. Cockades, indeed, it had 
 got whether Flesselles strove to amuse it with such 
 toys or no. They were no longer the green cockades 
 of Cincinnalus and Camille Desmoulins. These had 
 been dismissed with contumely for suggesting the green 
 of the D'Artois livery. The new cockades were red, 
 white, and blue. Over their origin authorities have 
 long wrangled and shall long wrangle. But the tri- 
 color banner had hardly sprung into existence on that 
 day. The gules and argent and azure of its heraldry 
 did not vex the feverish eyes of De Launay, looking care- 
 fully over at the madness with a method in it beneath 
 him. It was, perhaps, lucky for that madness with a 
 method in it that De Launay was not the man of the 
 whiff of grapeshot. A whiff of grapeshot, a succession 
 of whiffs of grapeshot, would have held the Bastille a
 
 1?89. POWDER. 647 
 
 little longer ; would have beaten back Saint- Antoine for 
 the time being, in spite of those cannon that the Gardes 
 Fran9aises brought up and trained into position against 
 the Bastille ; might have altered the course of history. 
 But De Launay was not the man of the whiff of grape- 
 shot. 
 
 For a moment, however, it seemed as if De Launay 
 might be the man of the whiff of gunpowder. He had 
 talked big before to Thuriot de la Rosiere about what 
 he would do at a push ; he would blow the Bastille and 
 all Saint-Antoine, too, into the July heaven. Now in 
 this hour of gravest pressure, when all Paris seemed to 
 be raving around the Bastille, when cannon were being 
 brought to bear upon its gates, when the guard-house 
 was vanishing in a sheet of flame into the air, and the 
 flame was being briskly fed by cartloads of straw ; when 
 no help whatever came from De Besenval on the other 
 side of the river, or from those courtly legions massed 
 about Versailles why then it seemed to De Launay 
 that he would try the last, that he would be as good as 
 his word, and do his best to blow the Bastille and its 
 enemies out of existence together. But with De Lau- 
 nay apparently conception and execution were two 
 widely different things. He caught up a fuse and made 
 for the powder-store of the Sainte-Barbe. But there a 
 soldier, Jacques Ferrand, who did not share the heroic 
 mood of the governor, met him with the point of the 
 bayonet and kept him back. One may imagine that a 
 more determined man would not have been so kept 
 back. He might have beaten down that bayonet. He 
 might have found a pistol somewhere instead of that 
 fuse. He might have either shot the mutinous soldier, 
 or shot into the barrel of powder nearest to him, and 
 so carried out his purpose, and caused the Bastille to
 
 648 ME FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XLIV. 
 
 disappear on the wings of the afternoon. But no. 
 Balked at the Sainte-Barbe powder - store, De Launay, 
 still clutching his fuse, ran with all speed to the Liberty 
 Tower, where another store of powder was kept. There 
 he again endeavored to fire the powder. There he was 
 prevented again by soldier Bequart, who by doing so 
 saved the Bastille for some few days, and saved his 
 own life and the life of the governor for some few 
 minutes. Then De Launay seems to have given up, 
 and the end approached. The discouraged garrison 
 were determined to capitulate, were eager to escape 
 with their lives if they could make no better terms. 
 They tried at first to make better terms. They beat a 
 drum, the hoisted a white flag on the Tower of the Basi- 
 niere. The assailants saw only new treason in these 
 signs of peace, and continued furiously to advance, fu- 
 riously to fire. The Swiss officer La Flue, speaking 
 through a grating by the drawbridge, shrieked for per- 
 mission to be allowed to march out with the honors of 
 war. It is difficult to understand how any human voice 
 could be heard, no matter how loudly it shouted, over 
 all that infernal din. But the Two Friends of Liberty 
 say that he was heard, and answered with savage cries 
 of refusal. Then La Flue, after a pause for some hur- 
 ried writing by De Launay, held out through the aper- 
 ture a paper and cried out that they were willing to 
 surrender if the assailants promised not to massacre the 
 troops. All eyes were fixed on that fluttering piece of 
 paper, all minds were speculating as to the words it 
 might contain. But between that paper thrust through 
 the grating by the outstretched hand of the Swiss officer, 
 and the wild mob who were eager to read it, there was 
 truly a great gulf fixed. The deep and yawning ditch 
 of the moat lay between assailants and assailed, and
 
 1W9. BRIDGING THE MOAT. 
 
 640 
 
 how was that ditch to be bridged over? An unknown, 
 courageous individual brought a plank, which was laid 
 on the parapet and stretched across the ditch to within 
 touch of the drawbridge, and held in its place at the 
 other end by the weight of many patriot bodies. Then 
 the unknown courageous individual advanced along this 
 perilous bridge, stretched out his hand for the paper, 
 almost had it, when he reeled, either because he lost his 
 balance, or struck by a shot from above or perhaps 
 behind, for the assailants were reckless in their shoot- 
 ing and so fell into the ditch, and lay there, shattered. 
 But another volunteer for the perilous plank was not 
 wanting. Stanislas-Marie Maillard or was it La Reole ? 
 for accounts differ advanced on the extemporized 
 bridge. We see him in a picture of the time, poised 
 over the dangerous place with legs well stretched out, 
 with sword held well behind him in his left hand, per- 
 haps for balance, with right hand extended to seize the 
 offered paper. As a proof of the difficulty of deciding 
 any point in this perplexing siege, it may be curious to 
 mention that M. Gustave Bord in his " Prise de la Bas- 
 tille," authoritatively states that La Reole was the first 
 to attempt the plank and to fall into the ditch ; while 
 M. Georges Lseocq in his volume says that there is no 
 doubt that Maillard was the man to make the first at- 
 tempt and fail, and fall into the fosse, and that iSlie was 
 the man to successfully secure the paper handed out by 
 La Flue. After all, it matters very little. Maillard or 
 another bore back the paper, gave it to Elie or to Hulin, 
 who read it aloud. It contained these words : " We 
 have twenty tons of powder ; we will blow up the gar- 
 rison and the whole quarter if you do not accept the 
 capitulation." " We accept on the faith of an officer," 
 answered Elie, speaking too rashly for the wild world
 
 650 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XLIV. 
 
 behind him resented all idea of capitulation " lower 
 your bridge." Perhaps even then they would not have 
 obeyed if the sight of three cannon levelled at the large 
 draw-bridge had not prompted their decision. The small 
 drawbridge at the side of the large one was lowered, 
 and in a moment was leaped upon by Elie, Hulin, Mail- 
 lard, La Keole, and the others, who bolted it down. 
 The Gardes Fran9aises, executing a dexterous manoeuvre, 
 formed in front of the bridge, and prevented the wild 
 mob behind from flinging themselves into the ditch and 
 meeting death in their desire to crowd on to the narrow 
 drawbridge. The door behind this lower drawbridge 
 was then opened by an Invalide, who seems to have 
 asked a needlessly foolish question as to what Elie, Hu- 
 lin, and the others wanted. " We want the Bastille," 
 was the natural answer, and with that word they en- 
 tered and took it. Immediately they rushed to the 
 great drawbridge and lowered it, Arne leaping on it to 
 prevent any possible attempt to raise it again. It was 
 close upon six o'clock of the July evening. The mob 
 surged in ; the inevitable hour had come ; the Bastille 
 was taken. 
 
 If only that fair triumph had been quite unstained ! 
 Still, although not wholly stainless, it remains one of 
 the greatest triumphs ever won in the name of liberty. 
 A hundred years have come and gone as I write. It is 
 Sunday, July 14, 1889. The summer air is soft with 
 recent rain, the late summer roses hang their tinted 
 heads, a faint mist clings about the near woods, and a 
 gray sky, broken with hopeful gleams of silver light, 
 canopies the companionable river. All is rest, and 
 peace, and beauty in this fair river corner of the world 
 that seems almost as far from the London of to-day as 
 from the Paris of this day one hundred years ago, when
 
 1789. A HUNDRED YEARS AGO. 651 
 
 the Bastille and all that the Bastille meant, and all that 
 the Bastille represented, met its fate. From this river- 
 land of rosebush and poplar-tree, of greenest grass and 
 silver sky, a place almost as fair and peaceful as the 
 Earthly Paradise of the poet's dream, it is strangely 
 fascinating, strangely surprising, to project the mind 
 back to that July 14, just one century ago, when Paris 
 was fierce with flame and red with blood, and hoarse 
 with strange cries of triumph and revenge, and the 
 grimmest shadows fell over the darkling Seine. There 
 would be less peace here by the Thames, or yonder by 
 the Seine, or indeed by any river in the world to-day, 
 were it not for the deed of that other day, that day 
 dead a hundred years, which beat down the barriers of 
 the Bastille and gave freedom her freshest laurels.
 
 1HE FRHXCII REVOLUTION. CH. XLV. 
 
 CHAPTER XLV. 
 
 AFTEKMATH. 
 
 IF only that fair triumph had been quite unstained ! 
 If only that embracing of the conquered by the con- 
 querors had been kept up ! If only there had been no 
 killing of Swiss, no killing of Invalides ! One Swiss 
 was killed at once ; one luckless Invalide was killed at 
 once ; it was, of all the victims that passion-driven mob 
 could have chosen, none other than Bequart, whose hand 
 held back De Launay's hand from firing the powder at 
 the Liberty Tower, and who it is said had fired no single 
 shot during that wild day. The hand that saved the 
 Bastille and saved Saint- Antoine was savagely hewn off 
 with a sabre-stroke ; Bequart's body was pierced with 
 two sword-thrusts and then dragged off to be hanged 
 with another victim, Asselin, at the Place de la Greve, 
 while the bleeding hand was borne aloft and ahead in 
 triumph. The masses of men now rushing over the 
 Bastille were wild beyond control. They were goaded, 
 it is said, by some last shots fired from the higher plat- 
 forms by soldiers who were unaware of the capitulation 
 and who thought themselves still free to carry on the 
 fight. The firing became so reckless on the part of the 
 victors that some of their own party fell victims to it. 
 Humbert was wounded, and Arne only succeeded in 
 stopping it at the peril of his life. De Launay, conspic- 
 uous in his gray coat and red ribbon, formed one more 
 valiant determination and once more failed to carry it
 
 1789. WOE TO THE CONQUERED. (553 
 
 out. When the place fell, and triumphant Saint- An- 
 toine swarmed into it, a Roman thought seems to have 
 struck him, and he attempted to kill himself with the 
 sword-blade concealed in his cane. He did not succeed 
 in this any more than he had succeeded in firing the 
 powder. Maillard, Cholat, Arne, and many another, lynx- 
 eyed, strong-handed, were upon him. Arne snatched 
 the sword-blade away from De Launay's uncertain hold. 
 The crowd gathered around raving at him, howling for 
 that death which he had striven to inflict upon himself. 
 Hulin, Elie, and the other leaders closed around him ; 
 they wished to keep their word and bring him away 
 from the Bastille in safety. But it was easier to take 
 the Bastille than to keep De Launay alive. Elie might 
 have promised, but Saint-Antoine had not promised, 
 would not be bound by any promise. Saint-Antoine 
 wanted De Launay's blood, and now encircled the little 
 knot of men who stood around De Launay endeavoring 
 to protect him, and urging with pale, earnest faces that 
 the prisoners should be carried to the Hotel de Ville and 
 duly tried there for their offences in resisting Saint-An- 
 toine. With the greatest difficulty, iSlie, Hulin, Arne, 
 Maillard, and the others got De Launay out of the Bas- 
 tille. Saint-Antoine was snatching at him with its hun- 
 dred hands, pouring imprecations upon him from its 
 hundred throats. Saint-Antoine wanted De Launay's 
 blood and meant to have it. Already it had dragged, 
 nearly dead, poor Registrar Clouet, captured near the 
 Saltpetre Arsenal, to the Hotel de Ville. Clouet's blue- 
 and-gold uniform had made him seem suspiciously like 
 Governor de Launay to insurgent patriotism. He was 
 with difficulty released from their reluctant hands on 
 the assurance of the committee that Clouet was not De 
 Launay, and by the determined courage of the Mar-
 
 654 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XLV. 
 
 quis de la Salle and the Chevalier de Saudiy. De Lau- 
 nay's thin face, sharp nose, wrinkled forehead, furrowed 
 cheeks, sunken eyes, and hard mouth were the centre 
 of attraction for all that furious crowd. In vain the un- 
 happy man, with the terrors of death upon him, pleaded 
 to Hulin, pleaded to Elie, for the protection they had 
 promised. They had promised and they did their best 
 to perform, but they could not perform the impossible. 
 The wrath of the mob began to extend from De Launay 
 to his protectors. One, L'Epine, was struck down, was 
 nearly killed. Hulin observed that the mob seemed 
 only to know De Launay by the fact that he was bare- 
 headed. He conceived the heroic idea of putting his 
 own hat upon De Launay's head ; and from that mo- 
 ment he received the blows intended for the governor. 
 The royalist tradition of which M. Ch. d'Hericault is 
 chief champion, insists, perhaps with truth, that De 
 Launay, still more heroic than Hulin, gave him his hat 
 back again, wishing rather to die than endanger him. 
 At last Hulin, in spite of his great strength, was forced 
 aside at the Place de la Greve. Then Saint-Antoine 
 closed upon its victim. The last words of De Launay 
 as his murderers fell upon him stabbing and striking 
 was, " Friends, kill me quickly, do not let me languish." 
 They did kill him quickly. His head was swiftly hewn 
 off and held aloft on the point of a pike. This was the 
 first time of the many times that heads were so sti'icken 
 off and carried on pike-point through Paris. Every one 
 knows or should know the ghastly sketch by Girodet of 
 De Launay's head on the pike, with its grim expression 
 of startled horror. That expression of startled horror on 
 dead uplifted faces soon became familiar enough to Paris- 
 ian eyes. A fearful fashion had been set. De Launay 
 had a companion in his death in a far better man than
 
 1789. SAINT-ANTOINE CONQUERS. 655 
 
 himself, Major de Losrae-Salbray, who had always been 
 exceedingly gentle to the Bastille prisoners, and whom 
 now, at the Place de la Greve, Saint- Antoine began to kill. 
 The young Marquis de Pelleport, who had known five 
 years' imprisonment in the Bastille for libels written in 
 England, made a determined effort to save De Losme 
 and came very near to sharing his fate. De LosmeV 
 head was cut off and thrust, too, upon a pike. Of the 
 other prisoners, De Miray was killed in the Rue des 
 Tournelles, and M. de Persan, lieutenant of the Invalides, 
 by the Port au Ble. As for the rank and file, the smock- 
 frocks of the Swiss led the mob to think that they were 
 prisoners, and so saved them from the first fury of the 
 attack. The Invalides came very near to perishing to a 
 man. But the Gardes Francaises protected them, suc- 
 ceeded in shielding them and carrying them off to bar- 
 racks. The murders could not be prevented, but the 
 wholesale massacre of the Bastille defenders was averted. 
 But the vengeance of Saint-Antoine was not sated. 
 All through the day it had been nursing its wrath 
 against De Flesselles, till that wrath had swollen to 
 blood-madness. Was it not said now by De Flesselles' 
 enemies that a letter from the provost had been found 
 in the pockets of the dead De Launay, and did not that 
 letter bid him hold good and hope for succor till even, 
 while he, De Flesselles, amused the Parisians with cock- 
 ades and promises? Saint-Antoine had got its hand in 
 at killing now. Raging, with the heads and hands of 
 the Bastille victims on pikes, it foamed now into the 
 Hotel de Ville, where Flesselles sat, pale, patient, and 
 weary, and shouted wild accusations, wild condemnations 
 at him. De Flesselles behaved composedly. "Since 
 my fellow-citizens suspect me," he said, "I will with- 
 draw." Saint Antoine yelled to him to go to the Palais
 
 656 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XLV. 
 
 Royal. "Very well, sirs," he answered, quietly, "let 
 us go to the Palais Royal." His composure seems to 
 have impressed the crowd, for though they pressed 
 about him as he descended the stair, they followed him 
 without doing him any harm across the Place de la 
 Greve. He might even have got off, but a young man 
 ' suddenly sprang forward, presented a pistol at him with 
 the words, " Traitor, you shall go no farther !" fired, and 
 shot him dead. Then Saint- Antoine swooped upon the 
 prone body and hewed off its head, which in another 
 moment was lifted high on a pike-point by the side of 
 the head of De Launay. So through the Paris streets 
 those ghastly trophies were paraded in terrifying pro- 
 cession, with the beatings of drums, the shouting of 
 strange cries, the waving of banners. Patriotism was 
 awake, and was doing grim work. 
 
 A more agreeable procession was formed a little later, 
 when the prisoners in the Bastille, who had been forgot- 
 ten in the first wild excitement of victory, were un- 
 earthed, set free, and escorted in triumph through the 
 streets. The actual number of prisoners did not keep 
 up the popular character of the Bastille for horrors. 
 Only seven prisoners were found in the dungeons. 
 Four of these were imprisoned as forgers. Another, 
 the Count de Solages, was imprisoned by his father's 
 wish to curb his riotousness and extravagance. The 
 two others were old men who had gone mad in prison, 
 and had been kept in prison because the authorities did 
 not very well know what else to do with them. One 
 was Tavernier, natural son of Paris-Duvernay, who had 
 been in the prison since 1759. The other was James 
 Francis Xavier Whyte, who had been incarcerated for 
 mental derangement since 1781. These two prisoners 
 were afterwards placed in the Charenton madhouse.
 
 EEVEILLON. 65 f 
 
 The seven prisoners were solemnly conducted from 
 the Bastille to the house of Santerre, where the wound- 
 ed brewer entertained them sumptuously. Then they 
 were led along the Hue Saint-Antoine to the Palais 
 Royal by the Gardes Fran9aises, with drums beating 
 and banners waving. An excited populace thronged 
 eagerly to behold these victims of tyranny, and might 
 perhaps have crushed them to death in their sympa- 
 thetic enthusiasm if it had not been for the butt-ends 
 of the escort's muskets. One person we might have ex- 
 pected to find among the occupants, but history, so far 
 as we have searched, yields no trace of him. Reveillon 
 the paper-manufacturer the unwilling hero of the famous 
 riot which had proved so momentous in its consequences, 
 had fled for safety to the Bastille, and therein vanished 
 from knowledge. Mr. Stephens, in his account of the 
 Bastille on the morning of July 14, says, "At present 
 it contained but seven prisoners, together with poor 
 Reveillon, the paper-manufacturer;" but he forgets all 
 about poor Reveillon when he comes to the release of 
 the prisoners, and I have striven in vain to find any 
 trace of him. It does not seem likely that, if he had 
 been in the Bastille at the time of its capture, his name 
 would have escaped public notice. Wherever he was, 
 he certainly has vanished from knowledge. There 
 were more important matters going than the fate of a 
 paper-manufacturer, and yet it is curious that, consider- 
 ing how inevitably his name will be associated with the 
 early hours of the Revolution, it is seemingly impossi- 
 ble to follow his fortunes farther than the threshold of 
 the Bastille. 
 
 The news of the liberation of the Bastille prisoners 
 soon spread to the other prisons, and prompted a keen 
 desire for like liberty in the breasts of the inmates, 
 I. 42
 
 658 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XLV. 
 
 The poor prisoners imprisoned for debt at La Force and 
 the Chatelet broke out, took the key of the fields, and 
 rejoiced to find themselves free. Among them was an 
 Irish peer, the Earl of Massareene, who had been nine- 
 teen years a prisoner. Irish peers had a way of turning 
 up in the most unexpected places witness that pair, 
 father and son, who were slaves to the barbarous Turk, 
 and played their curious part in the history of Morocco. 
 But no one perhaps is hero of a stranger story than this 
 indebted gentleman, who passed his life very pleasantly 
 within the four walls of a jail and who owed his liberty 
 at last to a revolution. The mighty cause that threw 
 down the Bastille and destroyed the Old Order prompted 
 Lord Massareene to force his way out of his prison at 
 the head of his fellow-prisoners. So the wind that up- 
 roots the oak may release the acorn. 
 
 Paris, as a whole, did not disgrace itself on the night 
 of July 14. The murders, horrible as they were, were 
 but the work of a few persons, and were regarded at 
 the time, rightly or wrongly, as the acts of a wild jus- 
 tice. But there was practically no pillaging, no dis- 
 order, no repetition of the unworthy acts of July 12. 
 The great city had done a great work, and was perhaps 
 calmer in its victory than it had been in its expectation. 
 It had had its victims and its martyrs; it had its heroes. 
 It had lie, with his battered sword. It had sleepless 
 Moreau de Saint-Mery. It had Fauchet, and Marceau, 
 and Hulin, and many another man. These were unlike in 
 all things else, but alike in their determination to keep 
 for the people the Paris they had won. The Parisians 
 showed a determination worthy of their leaders. In 
 the full flush of victory they did not forget prudence. 
 An attack seemed inevitable. They prepared to receive 
 it. Every one helped in the task of protecting the town.
 
 1789. PARIS READY TO RESIST ATTACK. 659 
 
 Barricades were made, entrenchments dug, weapons dis- 
 tributed. The militia kept watch and ward. The night 
 of victory was passed under arms. Paris was ready to 
 face the uttermost.
 
 660 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XLVI. 
 
 CHAPTER XLVI. 
 
 THE STONES OF THE BASTILLE. 
 
 So the Bastille stands, much as it stood once before 
 now, four centuries ago, gaunt, gutted, the imperfect 
 shell of a prison-house. Then, those four centuries 
 earlier, busy Parisian hands laid stone upon stone with 
 infinite care, thinking to build till doomsday. Now busy 
 Parisian hands were pulling stone from stone in fierce 
 impatience. Poor Aubriot, who was kind to Jews and 
 Jewesses, if his ghost might revisit the glimpses of the 
 waning July moon, would think that doomsday had in- 
 deed come. So it had in a sense, the doomsday of that 
 whole system which Aubriot thought as enduring as 
 the firmament. Paris, waking up next morning and 
 staring at the abandoned walls, knew its strength at last. 
 It is impossible, perhaps unprofitable, to speculate upon 
 what might have happened if De Launay had surren- 
 dered at once, and if the first heralds of insurgent Saint- 
 Antoine had been permitted to walk their free way 
 through its corridors and lay their patriotic hands upon 
 whatever weapons they could find. Perhaps the lease 
 of life of the house of Capet might have been a little fur- 
 ther prolonged. But with that desperate struggle, that 
 wild, astonishing triumph, the sudden conquest of the long 
 unconquerable, the rising revolution received the revela- 
 tion of its power. The Bastille was an unimportant place 
 enough. But being taken, and taken in such a way, it be- 
 came the symbol and the inspiration of a new world.
 
 H89. PRECIOUS RELICS. 
 
 661 
 
 A contemporary writer declares that if the towers of 
 this edifice, of which there were many, had been giants, 
 instead of inanimate masses of mortar and stone, they 
 could not have more effectually kept alive the indigna- 
 tion of the people against them. The mob appeared to 
 be resolved not to allow one particle to stand beside an- 
 other. That such may be the fate of all similar burying- 
 places for living virtue must, says the observer piously, 
 be the wish of every man who is not a monster at heart. 
 A piece of one of the stones of this so detestably cele- 
 brated building soon became scarce. Every one gath- 
 ered what he could, and converted it into tablets and 
 ornaments. Even rings and ciphers were engraved from 
 pieces, and made into patriotic presents. That which a 
 short time before had been hideous to look on, now w as 
 esteemed as a precious relic. In this form, the philos- 
 opher meditates, the traditional history of the disgrace- 
 ful and abject condition of man in the eighteenth century 
 will be best handed down to future ages. It is said that, 
 on the morrow after the taking of the Bastille, the crowds 
 of people which came from all parts to see it were so 
 great that five hundred of the militia could not keep 
 them at a distance while the walls were being thrown 
 down. Everything that could be found in the doomed 
 prison-house, from rusty iron chains to mouldering ar- 
 chives, was eagerly dragged into the daylight, sub- 
 jected to an eager scrutiny. 
 
 One hundred times since that day has the fourteenth 
 of July come round again ; one hundred times the civ- 
 ilized world has had good reason to rejoice that a Pa- 
 risian mob stormed and destroyed a worthless fortress. 
 As we look back over the lapsed century, we can see 
 that with the passage of every year the importance and 
 the dignity of the taking of the Bastille has grown and
 
 662 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 1 . CH. XLVI. 
 
 strengthened. Men have not been wanting, we have 
 seen, who try to minimize its importance, to diminish 
 its historic dignity. They urge that the Bastille, at the 
 time of its fall, was a place of no importance. They 
 say that it had ceased to be the terror-house of political 
 prisoners. They maintain that it was not, in any mili- 
 tary sense, taken at all. They protest that the whole 
 episode was an absurd blunder which attached to the 
 Bastille an importance that it had long outdated, and 
 which gave its captors a burlesque air of pseudo-hero- 
 ism. They even assert that it was a crime, the herald 
 of a long catalogue of crimes. There is little or noth- 
 ing to be said for such arguments. It was not the 
 captors of the Bastille who were responsible for the 
 blunders and the bloodshed of the Revolution. It was 
 the condition of things which made the capture of the 
 Bastille so momentous. The very fact that at the time 
 people of all parties thought its fall so momentous is 
 enough to prove the case. Even if the Bastille itself 
 had ceased to terrify, it still represented the old, ter- 
 rific idea. It was a very strong argument in stone in 
 favor of the feudal system, and all that the feudal sys- 
 tem meant. It had long been the dread and the curse of 
 Paris, the merciless answer to all freedom of thought, 
 of word, of deed. If the first wave of the rising tide 
 of democracy beat against it and overwhelmed it, it 
 was not for nothing. Its mighty keep, its eight porten- 
 tous towers, were the solid, visible presentment of all 
 that was worse in the Old Order of things. It was a 
 symbol, and symbols are the most potent influences in 
 the struggles of political forces. But it was not merely 
 a symbol. It still held prisoners ; it was still ready to 
 hold prisoners ; its guns were a standing menace to 
 Paris. If we were to imagine a London mob of to-day
 
 1789. THE BASTILLE KEY. ggg 
 
 besieging the Tower of London, the event would cer- 
 tainly have little historic dignity or importance. Long 
 generations have gone by since the Tower of London 
 represented any despotic system, or had any political 
 significance or symbolism whatever. But every man 
 who attacked that Bastille upon that midsummer day, 
 one hundred years ago, looked upon the Bastille as the 
 petrifaction of the Old Order and the old despotism. 
 The youngest could remember how it had been used for 
 the basest political purposes, how it had been employed 
 to stifle freedom. It was hated, it was justly hated ; 
 it was natural and significant that the first popular 
 stroke should be levelled against it ; its fall is an event 
 of moment in the history of man, a day of thanksgiv- 
 ing in the history of civilization. 
 
 The first fury of popular success conceived of nothing 
 better to do with the Bastille than to destroy it utterly, 
 to blow it as far as possible from the face of the earth. It 
 would send its key across the Atlantic to Washington 
 to lie on his table at Mount Vernon. It would destroy 
 all the rest. The thought was not unhappy if it had 
 been but confined to the mere bricks and mortar of the 
 famous keep and eight terrible towers. But this was 
 not so. General de Gribeauval had collected together 
 within the walls of the Bastille quite a little museum 
 of models, and of objects connected with sling instru- 
 ments of war. The luckless Gribeauval collection was 
 scarcely likely to be sacred in the eyes of irritable Pa- 
 risians seeking arms. Whatever was 'serviceable, what- 
 ever was weaponable among the specimens of an an- 
 tique warfare, was seized upon eagerly and converted 
 to new uses. The rest was pulled apart, scattered 
 abroad, thrown aside, dispersed, a mere wreck, the de- 
 spair of military archaeologists. Unhappily, too, patri-
 
 664 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XLV1 
 
 otism, inspired by a kind of Omar-like passion, con- 
 ceived the idea that the archives of the Bastille, all the 
 vast mass of papers it contained, were as detestable as 
 the rest, and as deserving of destruction. The ground 
 about the Bastille was littered for days with a wealth 
 of documents. Much of the mass was wantonly de- 
 stroyed ; much went into the prudent hands of the 
 butterman and the trunk-maker. A small part was 
 rescued by collectors. Some portion went to Russia. 
 Some portion of it passed into the hands of the State, 
 which suddenly awoke to the importance of these pa- 
 pers before it was all too late. These have since, in 
 various ways, at least, seen the light. Beaumarchais, 
 like the adventurous, intelligent man he was, guessed 
 that there were good gleanings to be gathered from this 
 harvest of flying paper, and laid burglarious hands on a 
 considerable quantity. Either less fortunate envy or purer 
 patriotism, however, noted and denounced him, and 
 Beaumarchais had, somewhat reluctantly, to disgorge 
 his treasure, which, as he gracefully explained, he had 
 gathered from under the feet of the people on July 15, 
 while he was visiting the Bastille at the head of a party 
 of armed men. 
 
 If it is hard to forgive the destruction of so much 
 precious historical matter, it is easier to forgive and 
 easy to understand the spirit which prompted the total 
 annihilation of the Bastille itself. On July 16 it was 
 decided by the Assembly of Electors that the building 
 should be obliterated, and a committee was formed to 
 see that the determination was carried out. The com- 
 mittee found a zealous and a faithful servant in the 
 patriot Palloy. Out of the ruins of the Bastille a cu- 
 rious figure rises, the figure of the patriot Palloy. The 
 patriot Palloy, who weathered the Revolution better
 
 PALLOY. 665 
 
 than many a better man, was, at the time of the taking 
 of the Bastille, a master mason of some five-and-thirty 
 years. He had prospered and made money by his trade. 
 He was associated with the royal hunting buildings. 
 He had always a keen eye to the main chance, and a 
 kind of half-humorous, half-buffoon insight into the 
 popular temper which guided him with sufficient shrewd- 
 ness to serve his turn. He took a part in the .attack 
 upon the Bastille, but his real attack was reserved for 
 the days succeeding its fall. Under the directions of 
 the committee of demolition he fell upon the Bastille 
 at the head of a large body of workmen, and set to 
 work with a will. His quick and crafty wit saw a way 
 of turning the Bastille to good account. It was not 
 enough for him, he said, merely to throw down the walls 
 of the hated fortress, he wished to perpetuate the hor- 
 ror of its memory. So he set to work at once to turn 
 every possible fragment of the Bastille to ingenious 
 account. Out of its stones he constructed eighty-three 
 little models of the Bastille, which he sent, one each, to 
 each of eighty-three departments. What, we may won- 
 der, have become of all of those eighty-three miniature 
 Bastilles now? Some are lodged securely in local mu- 
 seums. With the bars and bolts he fabricated swords, 
 and struck any quantity of medals. Every dismembered 
 morsel of the Bastille was turned to account to make 
 statuettes of Liberty, patriotic busts, snuff-boxes, paper- 
 weights, and all manner of toys and trinkets for true pa- 
 triotism to wear around its neck or at its watch-chain. 
 It became promptly the fashionable thing to carry some 
 souvenir of the Bastille on one's person, thanks to the 
 enterprise of Palloy, and the patronage of the Orleanist 
 princes who set the example. The larger stones were 
 employed, many of them, to help in the construction of 
 the Bridge of the Revolution, that the people of Paris
 
 666 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XL VI. 
 
 might forever tread beneath their feet the stones of the 
 hated building. Even private individuals had stair- 
 cases constructed of the same materials and for the same 
 patriotic purpose. Perhaps the grimmest fact in con- 
 nection with all this wholesale distribution of the Bas- 
 tille was the present which Palloy made to the Dauphin 
 of a set of dominoes which had been made from the 
 marble of the chimney of the governor of the Bastille. 
 Rumor has inaccurately reported that the dominoes 
 were constructed from the bones of prisoners found in 
 the Bastille. Jt does not need that additional touch to 
 make the thing more tragic. It is infinitely, ironically 
 pathetic to think of the poor little lad playing, or being 
 asked to play, with the fragments of the great fortress 
 which had for so long represented the power and terror 
 of his race, and which now, reduced to a mass of trink- 
 ets and rubbish, was but the helpless herald of his own 
 destruction and the destruction of his house. That the 
 king, Louis XVI. himself, should have accepted and 
 made use of a Bastille paper-weight with his own por- 
 trait engraved thereon, which was presented to him, is 
 less pathetic and not at all surprising. 
 
 Palloy was consumed by a very high sense of his own 
 importance. He organized the workmen under his con- 
 trol into a kind of solemn and apostolic guild; he called 
 the emissaries whom he despatched with the models of 
 the Bastille to the different departments, Apostles of 
 Liberty. Palloy and his workmen were bound together 
 by solemn oaths of fidelity and mutual assistance, and 
 their organization held together for some years, and 
 figured often in connection with the conquerors of the 
 Bastille, who formed a sort of armed and official corpo- 
 ration, in many ceremonies and functions of the early 
 revolutionary years. When the Bastille was finally 
 made up into models and medals, Palloy's fertile mind
 
 1789. PALLOY THE WEATHERCOCK. 66 7 
 
 conceived the notion of a column to stand upon its site. 
 But that conception was not destined to be carried out 
 for many a long year not until the reign of Louis Phi- 
 lippe, when the absurd plaster elephant which Napoleon 
 set up, and in which Victo.r Hugo's Gavroche used to 
 hide, was in its turn abolished. 
 
 Palloy himself, as we have said, weathered the Revo- 
 lution and many rules besides, but we may part company 
 with him here, after casting a prophetic glance over his 
 grotesque career. He proved to be the most perfect 
 French parallel to our illustrious Vicar of Bray. To 
 him whatever was, in the way of government, was right. 
 A fairly good craftsman, a wretched writer and rhymer, 
 he employed his talents and his half-crazy wits in turn 
 for the benefit of every party. At first a constitutional 
 Royalist, he took the revolutionary fever in all its va- 
 rious stages, and became in turn Girondist, Montagnard, 
 Hebertist, a devotee of Thermidor, a follower of Robes- 
 pierre, a partisan of the Directory. The moment Napo- 
 leon came to power our Palloy became a furious Bona- 
 partist, but his fury faded with the return of the 
 Bourbons, and the loyal royalism which had long lain 
 dormant reasserted itself. Forgetting the clumsy cari- 
 catures with which he had insulted the agony of Louis 
 XVI. and Marie Antoinette, he took to writing Royalist 
 songs of a sufficiently ridiculous and despicable nature ; 
 but he veered again to zealous Orleanism the moment 
 that Louis Philippe came to the throne. He died at 
 last in 1835, the weathercock of that wild period, the 
 picture in little of every successive phase of the politi- 
 cal events of his life. It may be fairly said that the 
 Revolution did not produce a more ridiculous figure. 
 His tergiversations, his impudence, his crack-brained 
 self-conceit rank him at least among the most remark- 
 able caricatures of history.
 
 668 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. CH. XLVI. 
 
 Palloy's mean, foolish, cunning countenance may still 
 be familiar to the curious in the engravings of the day. 
 That porcine face grinned its pitiful approval of all 
 powers that be ; those fish-shaped eyes saw with servile 
 indifference so many good and gallant things go down 
 into the dust. A fulsome epigram composed or prompt- 
 ed by himself, and inscribed at the foot of his likeness, 
 informed the world that a future age, impressed by the 
 greatness of this good man, would confuse the word 
 "patriot" with the word "Palloy." Well, the term 
 patriot has remained with Palloy, remained as the most 
 curious brand of ignominy that could well be attached 
 to his despicable name. 
 
 Such as he was, he helped to set the fashion of what 
 may be called " Bastillism." His little effigies, con- 
 structed from the veritable stone of the Bastille, were 
 the precursors of all manner of miniature Bastilles. 
 Ingenious potters, commended by Camille Desmoulins, 
 devised large stoves in the shape of the Bastille, where- 
 with to warm the feet of deputies in the Convention. 
 These served the double purpose of keeping the actual 
 temperature comfortable, and feeding by the sight of 
 their significant shape the patriotic hearts within the 
 legislative bosoms. Plates were fabricated represent- 
 ing, more or less ably according to the capacity of the 
 artist, the taking of the Bastille. It was quite a glo- 
 rious thing to eat one's food off a platter which served 
 to perpetuate such memories and inspire such heroic 
 aspirations. Those plates were common enough then, 
 but the Bastille has been re-destroyed time and time 
 again in their destruction, and specimens of them are 
 worth their weight in gold now. Which thing is also 
 a sermon. 
 
 END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.
 
 A 000 045 427