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

being useful to his royal mistress; but none offered. The Assembly did him the honor to set a price on his head; and at last he thought himself fortunate in being able to save himself. Those who had co-operated with him had worse fortune. Those in authority had no proofs on which to condemn them; but in those days suspicion was a sufficient death-warrant. Michonis and Cortey were suspected, and in the course of the next year a belief that they had at least sympathized with the queen's sorrows sent them both to the scaffold.

With the failure of De Batz every project of escape was abandoned; and a few weeks later the queen congratulated herself that she had refused to flee without her boy, since in the course of May he was seized with illness which for some days threatened to assume a dangerous character. With a brutality which, even in such monsters as the Jacobin rulers of the city, seems almost inconceivable, they refused to allow him the attendance of M. Brunier, the physician who had had the charge of his infancy. It would be a breach of the principles of equality, they said, if any prisoner were permitted to consult any but the prison doctor. But the prison doctor was a man of sense and humanity, as well as of professional skill. He of his own accord sought the advice of Brunier; and the poor child recovered, to be reserved for a fate which, even in the next few weeks, was so foreshadowed, that his own mother must almost have begun to doubt whether his restoration to health had been a blessing to her or to himself.

The spring was marked by important events. Had one so high-minded been capable of exulting in the misfortunes of even her worst enemies, Marie Antoinette might have triumphed in the knowledge that the murderers of her husband were already beginning that work of mutual destruction which in little more than a year sent almost every one of them to the same scaffold on which he had perished. The jealousies which from the first had set the Jacobins and Girondins at variance had reached a height at which they could only be extinguished by the annihilation of one party or the other. They had been partners in crime, and so far were equal in infamy; but the Jacobins were the fiercer and the readier ruffians; and, after nearly two months of vehement debates in the Convention, in which Robespierre denounced the whole body of the Girondin leaders as plotters of treason against the State, and Vergniaud in reply reviled Robespierre as a coward, the Jacobins worked up the mob to rise in their support. The Convention, which hitherto had been divided in something like equality between the two factions, yielded to the terror of a new insurrection, and on the 2d of June ordered the arrest of the Girondin leaders. A very few escaped the search made for them by the officers--Roland, to commit suicide; Barbaroux, to attempt it; Petion and Buzot reached the forests to be devoured by congenial wolves. Lanjuinais,[6] whom the decree of the Convention had identified with them, but who, even in the moments of the greatest excitement, had kept himself clear of their wickedness and crimes, was the only one of the whole body who completely eluded the rage of his enemies. The rest, with Madame Roland, the first prompter of deeds of blood, languished in their well-deserved prisons till the close of autumn, when they all perished on the same scaffold to which they had sent their innocent sovereign.[7]

But it may be that Marie Antoinette never learned their fall; though that if she had, pity would at least have mingled with, if it had not predominated over, her natural exultation, she gave a striking proof in her conduct toward one from whom she had suffered great and constant indignities. From the time that her own attendants were dismissed, the only person appointed to assist Clery in his duties were a man and woman named Tison, chosen for that task on account of their surly and brutal tempers, in which the wife exceeded her husband. Both, and especially the woman, had taken a fiendish pleasure in heaping gratuitous insults on the whole family; but at last the dignity and resignation of the queen awakened remorse in the woman's heart, which presently worked upon her to such a degree that she became mad. In the first days of her frenzy she raved up and down the courtyard declaring herself guilty of the queen's murder. She threw herself at Marie Antoinette's feet, imploring her pardon; and Marie Antoinette not only raised her up with her own hand, and spoke gentle words of forgiveness and consolation to her, but, after she had been removed to a hospital, showed a kind interest in her condition, and amidst all her own troubles found time to write a note to express her anxiety that the invalid should have proper attention.[8]

But very soon a fresh blow was struck at the hapless queen which made her indifferent to all else that could happen, and even to her own fate, of which it may be regarded as the precursor. At ten o'clock on the 3d of July, when the little king was sleeping calmly, his mother having hung a shawl in front of his bed to screen his eyes from the light of the candle by which she and Elizabeth were mending their clothes, the door of their chamber was violently thrown open, and six commissioners entered to announce to the queen that the Convention had ordered the removal of her boy, that he might he committed to the care of a tutor--the tutor named being the cobbler, Simon, whose savageness of disposition was sufficiently attested by the fact of his having been chosen on the recommendation of Marat. At this unexpected blow, Marie Antoinette's fortitude and resignation at last gave way. She wept, she remonstrated, she humbled herself to entreat mercy. She threw her arms around her child, and declared that force itself should not tear him from her. The commissioners were not men likely to feel or show pity. They abused her; they threatened her. She begged them rather to kill her than take her son. They would not kill her, but they swore that they would murder both him and her daughter before her eyes if he were not at once surrendered. There was no more resistance. His aunt and sister took him from the bed and dressed him. His mother, with a voice choked by her sobs, addressed him the last words he was ever to hear from her. "My child, they are taking you from me; never forget the mother who loves you tenderly, and never forget God! Be good, gentle, and honest, and your father will look down on you from heaven and bless you!" "Have you done with this preaching?" said the chief commissioner. "You have abused our patience finely," another added; "the nation is generous, and will take care of his education." But she had fainted, and heard not these words of mocking cruelty. Nothing could touch her further.

If it be not also a mockery to speak of happiness in connection with this most afflicted queen, she was happy in at least not knowing the details of the education which was in store for the noble boy whose birth had apparently secured for him the most splendid of positions, and whose opening virtues seemed to give every promise that he would be worthy of his rank and of his mother. A few days afterward Simon received his instructions from a committee of the Convention, of which Drouet, the postmaster of Ste. Menehould, was the chief. "How was he to treat the wolf cub?" he asked (it was one of the mildest names he ever gave him). "Was he to kill him?" "No." "To poison him?" "No." "What then?" "He was to get rid of him,[9]" and Simon carried out this instruction by the most unremitting ill-treatment of his pupil. He imposed upon him the most menial offices; he made him clean his shoes; he reviled him; he beat him; he compelled him to wear the red cap and jacket which had been adopted as the Revolutionary dress; and one day, when his mother obtained a glimpse of him as he was walking on the leads of the tower to which he had been transferred, it caused her an additional pang to see that he had been stripped of the suit of mourning for his father, and had been clothed in the garments which, in her eyes, were the symbol, of all that was most impious and most loathsome.

All these outrages were but the prelude of the final blow which was to fall on herself; and it shows how great was the fear with which her lofty resolution had always had inspired the Jacobins--fear with such natures being always the greatest exasperation of hatred and the keenest incentive to cruelty--that, when they had resolved to consummate her injuries by her murder, they did not leave her in the Temple as they had left her husband, but removed her to the Conciergerie, which in those days, fitly denominated the Reign of Terror, rarely led but to the scaffold. On the night of the 1st of August (the darkest hours were appropriately chosen for deeds of such darkness) another body of commissioners entered her room, and woke her up to announce that they had come to conduct her to the common prison. Her sister and her daughter begged in vain to be allowed to accompany her. She herself scarcely spoke a word, but dressed herself in silence, made up a small bundle of clothes, and, after a few words of farewell and comfort to those dear ones who had hitherto been her companions, followed her jailers unresistingly, knowing, and for her own sake certainly not grieving, that she was going to meet her doom. As she passed through the outer door it was so low that she struck her head. One of the commissioners had so much decency left as to ask if she was hurt. "No," she replied, "nothing now can hurt me.[10]" Six weeks later, an English gentleman saw her in her dungeon. She was freely exhibited to any one who desired to behold her, on the sole condition--a condition worthy of the monsters who exacted it, and of them alone--that he should show no sign of sympathy or sorrow.[11] "She was sitting on an old worn-out chair made of straw which scarcely supported her weight. Dressed in a gown which had once been white, her attitude bespoke the immensity of her grief, which appeared to have created a kind of stupor, that fortunately rendered her less sensible to the injuries and reproaches which a number of inhuman wretches were continually vomiting forth against her."

Even after all the atrocities and horrors of the last twelve months, the news of the resolution to bring her to a trial, which, it was impossible to doubt, it was intended to follow up by her execution, was received as a shook by the great bulk of the nation, as indeed by all Europe. And Necker's daughter, Madame de Stael, who, as we have seen, had been formerly desirous to aid in her escape, now addressed an energetic and eloquent appeal to the entire people, calling on all persons of all parties, "Republicans, Constitutionalists, and Aristocrats alike, to unite for her preservation." She left unemployed no fervor of entreaty, no depth of argument. She reminded them of the universal admiration which the queen's beauty and grace had formerly excited, when "all France thought itself laid under an obligation by her charms;[12]" of the affection that she had won by her ceaseless acts of beneficence and generosity. She showed the absurdity of