The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France - Charles Duke Yonge (ereader that reads to you .TXT) 📗

of resistance, and with this view to get rid of the Constitutional Guard, the commander of which was still the gallant Duke de Brissac, a noble-minded and faithful adherent of Louis amidst all his distresses. But it was not easy to find any ground for disbanding a force which was too small to be formidable to any but traitors; and the pretext which was put forward was so preposterous that it could excite no feeling but that of amusement, if the object aimed at were not too serious and shocking for laughter. At Easter the dauphin had presented the mess of the regiment with a cake, one of the ornaments of which was a small white flag taken from among his own toys. Petion now issued orders to search the officers' quarters for this child's flag, and, when it was found, one of the Jacobin members was not ashamed to produce it to the Assembly as a proof that the court was meditating a counter- revolution and a massacre of the patriots, and to propose the instant dissolution of the Guard. The motion was carried, though some of the Constitutionalist party had the honesty to oppose it, as one which could have only regicide for its object; and Louis did not dare refuse it his assent.

He was now wholly disarmed. To render his defeat in the impending struggle more certain, one of the ministers, Servan, himself proposed a levy of twenty thousand fresh soldiers, to be stationed permanently at Paris, and this motion also was passed. Again Louis could not venture to withhold his sanction from the bill, though he comforted himself by dismissing the mover, with two of his colleagues, Roland and Claviere. Roland's dismissal had indeed become indispensable, since, on the preceding day, he had had the audacity to write him an insolent letter, composed by his ferocious wife, which in express terms threatened him with death "if he did not give satisfaction to the Revolution.[10]" Nor was Madame Roland inclined to be satisfied with the murder of the king and queen. As has been already mentioned, she at the same time urged upon her submissive husband the assassination of Dumouriez, who, having intelligence of her enmity, began in self-defense to connect himself with the Jacobins. On the dismissal of Roland and the others, he had exchanged the foreign port-folio for that of war, and was practically the prime minister, being in fact the only one whom Louis admitted to any degree of confidence; but this arrangement lasted less than a single week. Louis had yielded to and adopted his advice on every point but one. He had sanctioned the dismissal of the Constitutional Guard, and the formation of the new body of troops, which, no one doubted, was intended to be used against himself; but he was as firmly convinced as ever that his religious duty bound him to refuse his assent to the decree against the priests, and he refused to do a violence to his conscience, and to commit what he regarded as a sin. But this very decree was the one which Dumouriez regarded as the most dangerous one for him to reject, as being that which the Assembly was most firmly resolved to make law; and, as his most vigorous remonstrances failed to shake the king's resolution on this point, he resigned his post as a minister, and repaired to the Flemish frontier to take the command of the army, which greatly needed an able leader.


CHAPTER XXXV.

The Insurrection of June 20th.

Both Jacobins and Girondins felt that the departure of Dumouriez from Paris had removed a formidable obstacle from their path, and they at once began to hurry forward the preparations for their meditated insurrection. The general gave in his resignation on the 15th of June, and the 20th was fixed for an attack on the palace, by which its contrivers designed to effect the overthrow of the throne, if not the destruction of the entire royal family. It was organized with unusual deliberation. The meetings of conspirators were attended not only by the Girondin leaders, to whom Madame Roland had recently added a new recruit, a young barrister from the South, named Barbaroux, remarkable for his personal beauty, and, as was soon seen, for a pitiless hardness of heart, and energetic delight in deeds of cruelty that, even in that blood-thirsty company, was equaled by few; with them met all those as yet most notorious for ferocity--Danton and Legendre, the founders of the Cordeliers; Marat, daily, in his obscene and blasphemous newspaper, clamoring for wholesale bloodshed; Santerre, odious as the sanguinary leader of the very first outbreaks of the Revolution; Rotondo, already, as we have seen, detected in attempting to assassinate the queen; and Petion, who thus repaid her preference of him to La Fayette, which had placed him in the mayoralty, whose duties he was now betraying. Some, too, bore a part in the foul conspiracy as partisans of the Duc d'Orleans, who were generally understood to have instructions to be lavish of their master's gold, the vile prince hoping that the result of the outbreak would be the assassination of his cousin, and his own elevation to the vacant throne. In their speeches they gave Louis the name of Monsieur Veto, in allusion to the still legal exercise of his prerogative, by which he had sought to protect the priests; while the queen was called Madame Veto, though in fact she had finally joined Dumouriez in urging her husband to give his royal assent to the decree against them, not, as thinking it on any pretense justifiable, but as believing, with the general, in the impossibility of maintaining its rejection. Yet nothing could more completely prove the absolute innocence and unimpeachable good faith of both king and queen than the act of his enemies in giving them this nickname; so clear an evidence was it that they could allege nothing more odious against them than the possession by Louis, in a most modified degree, of a prerogative which, without any modification at all, has in every country been at all times regarded as indispensable to, and inseparable from, royalty; and the exercise of it for the defense of a body of men of whom none could deny the entire harmlessness.

On the night of the 19th the appointed leaders of the different bands into which the insurgents were to be divided separated; the watch-word, "Destruction to the palace," was given out; and all Paris waited in anxious terror for the events of the morrow. Louis was as well aware as any of the citizens of the intended attack, and prepared for it as for death. On the afternoon of the 19th he wrote to his confessor to desire him to come to him at once. "He had never," he said, "had such need of his consolations. He had done with this world, and his thoughts were now fixed on Heaven alone. Great calamities were announced for the morrow; but he felt that he had courage to meet them." And after the holy man had left him, as he gazed on the setting sun he once more gave utterance to his forebodings. "Who can tell," said he, "whether it be not the last that I shall ever see?" The Royalists felt his danger almost as keenly as himself, but were powerless to prevent it by any means of their own. The Duke de Liancourt, who had some title to be listened to by the Revolutionary party, since no one had been more zealous in promoting the most violent measures of the first Assembly, pressed earnestly on Petion that his duty as mayor bound him to call out the National Guards, and so prevent the intended outbreak, but was answered by sarcasms and insults; while Vergniaud, from the tribune of the Assembly itself, dared to deride all who apprehended danger.

On the morning of the 20th, daylight had scarcely dawned when twenty thousand men, the greater part of whom were armed with some weapon or other--muskets, pikes, hatchets, crowbars, and even spits from the cook-shops forming part of their equipment--assembled on the place where the Bastile had stood. Santerre was already there on horseback as their appointed leader; and, when all were collected and marshaled in three divisions, they began their march. One division had for its chief the Marquis de St. Huruge, an intimate friend and adherent of the Duc d'Orleans; at the head of another, a woman of notorious infamy, known as La Belle Liegeoise, clad in male attire, rode astride upon a cannon; while, as it advanced, the crowd was every moment swelled by vast bodies of recruits, among whom were numbers of women, whose imprecations in ferocity and foulness surpassed even the foulest threats of the men.

The ostensible object of the procession was to present petitions to the king and the Assembly on the dismissal of Roland and his colleagues from the administration, and on the refusal of the royal assent to the decree against the priests. The real design of those who had organized it was more truthfully shown by the banners and emblems borne aloft in the ranks. "Beware the Lamp,[1]" was the inscription on one. "Death to Veto and his wife," was read upon another. A gang of butchers carried a calf's heart on the point of a pike, with "The Heart of an Aristocrat" for a motto. A band of crossing-sweepers, or of men who professed to be such, though the fineness of their linen was inconsistent with the rags which were their outward garments, had for their standard a pair of ragged breeches, with the inscription, "Tremble, tyrants; here are the Sans-culottes." One gang of ruffians carried a model of a guillotine. Another bore aloft a miniature gallows with an effigy of the queen herself hanging from it. So great was the crowd that it was nearly three in the afternoon before the head of it reached the Assembly, where its approach had raised a debate on the propriety of receiving any petition at all which was to be presented in so menacing a guise; M. Roederer, the procurator-syndic, or chief legal officer of the department of Paris, recommending its rejection, on the ground that such a procession was illegal, not only because of its avowed object of forcing its way to the king, but also because it was likely to lead into acts of violence even if it had not premeditated them.

His arguments were earnestly supported by the constitutionalists, and opposed and ridiculed by Vergniaud. But before the discussion was over, the rioters, who had now reached the hall, took the decision into their own hands, forced open the door, and put forward a spokesman to read what they called a petition, but which was in truth a sanguinary denunciation of those whom it proclaimed the enemies of the nation, and of whom it demanded that "the land should be purged." Insolent and ferocious as it was, it, however, coincided with the feelings of the Girondins, who were now the masters of the Assembly. One orator carried a motion that the petitioners should receive what were called the honors of the Assembly; or, in other words, should be allowed to enter the hall with their arms and defile before them. They poured in with exulting uproar. Songs, half blood-thirsty and half obscene, gestures indicative some of murder, some of debauchery, cries of "Vive la nation!" interspersed with inarticulate yells, were the sounds, the guillotine and the queen upon the gallows were the sights, which were thought in character with the legislature of a people which still claimed to be regarded as the pattern of civilization by all Europe. Evening approached before the last of the rabble had passed through the hall; and by that time the leading ranks were in front of the Tuileries.

There were but