--, 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