The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

MARIE ANTOINETTE

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

The Pyrenees

Paris

Hills and the Sea

On Nothing and Kindred Subjects

On Everything

Emmanuel Burden, Merchant

The Change in the Cabinet

THE LAST ACT OF THE FRENCH MONARCHY
Order given on 10th August, 1792, to the Guard at the Tuileries to Cease Fire and return to Barracks
On the authenticity of this document see [Appendix C]

MARIE

ANTOINETTE

BY

H. BELLOC

πολυ κρεισσων ἡ αναγκη

WITH THIRTY-ONE ILLUSTRATIONS AND FIVE MAPS

THIRD EDITION

METHUEN & CO.

36 ESSEX STREET W.C.

LONDON

First Published - October 14th, 1909

Second Edition - January 1910

Third Edition - 1910

TO

GEORGE WYNDHAM

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

THE eighteenth century, which had lost the appetite for tragedy and almost the comprehension of it, was granted, before it closed, the most perfect subject of tragedy which history affords.

The Queen of France whose end is but an episode in the story of the Revolution stands apart in this: that while all around her were achieved the principal miracles of the human will, she alone suffered, by an unique exception, a fixed destiny against which the will seemed powerless. In person she was not considerable, in temperament not exalted; but her fate was enormous.

It is profitable, therefore, to abandon for a moment the contemplation of those great men who recreated in Europe the well-ordered State, and to admire the exact convergence of such accidents as drew around Marie Antoinette an increasing pressure of doom. These accidents united at last: they drove her with a precision that was more than human, right to her predestined end.

In all the extensive record of her actions there is nothing beyond the ordinary kind. She was petulant or gay, impulsive or collected, according to the mood of the moment: acting in everything as a woman of her temper—red-headed, intelligent and arduous—will always do: she was moved by changing circumstance to this or that as many million of her sort had been moved before her. But her chance friendships failed not in mere disappointments but in ruin; her lapses of judgment betrayed her not to stumbling but to an abyss; her small, neglected actions matured unseen and reappeared prodigious in the catastrophe of her life as torturers to drag her to the scaffold. Behind such causes of misfortune as can at least be traced in some appalling order there appear, as we read her history, causes more dreadful because they are mysterious and unreasoned: ill-omened dates, fortunes quite unaccountable, and continually a dark coincidence, reawaken in us that native dread of Destiny which the Faith, after centuries of power, has hardly exorcised.

The business, then, of this book is not to recount from yet another aspect that decisive battle whereby political justice was recovered for us all, nor to print once more in accurate sequence the life of a Queen whose actions have been preserved in the minutest detail, but to show a Lady whose hands—for all the freedom of their gesture—were moved by influences other than her own, and whose feet, though their steps seemed wayward and self-determined, were ordered for her in one path that led inexorably to its certain goal.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

LIST OF MAPS AND PLANS

MARIE ANTOINETTE

CHAPTER I
THE DIPLOMATIC REVOLUTION

EUROPE, which carries the fate of the whole world, lives by a life which is in contrast to that of every other region, because that life, though intense, is inexhaustible. There is present, therefore, in her united history a dual function of maintenance and of change such as can be discovered neither in any one of her component parts nor in civilisations exterior to her own. Europe alone of all human groups is capable of transforming herself ceaselessly, not by the copying of foreign models, but in some creative way from within. She alone has the gift of moderating all this violent energy, of preserving her ancient life, and by an instinct whose action is now abrupt, now imperceptibly slow, of dissolving whatever products of her own energy may not be normal to her being.

These dual forces are not equally conspicuous: the force that preserves us is general, popular, slow, silent, and beneath us all; the force that makes us diversified and full of life shines out in peaks of action.

The agents and the manifestations of the conserving force do not commonly present themselves as the chief personalities and the most remarkable events of our long record. The agents and the manifestations of the force that perpetually transform us are arresting figures, and catastrophic actions. Those who keep us what we are, for the most part will never be known—they are millions. Those, on the other hand, who have brought upon our race its great novelties of mood or of vesture, the battles they have won, the philosophies they have framed and imposed, the polities they have called into existence, they and their works fill history. That power which has forbidden us to perish uses servants often impersonal or obscure; it is mostly to be discovered at work in the permanent traditions of the populace, and its effects are but rarely visible until they appear solid and established by a process which is rather that of growth than of construction. That power which keeps the mass moving glitters upon the surface of it and is seen.

There are, nevertheless, in this perennial and hidden task of maintaining Europe certain exceptional events of which the date is clear, the result immediate, and the authors conspicuous. Of early examples the victory of Constantine in the fourth century, the defeat of Abdul Rhaman in the eighth, may be cited. Among the lesser ones of later times is a decision which was taken in the middle of the eighteenth century by the French and Austrian Governments, and to which historians have given the name of the Diplomatic Revolution.

To comprehend or even to follow the career of Marie Antoinette it is essential to seize the nature and the gravity of that rearrangement of national forces, for it determined all her life. To the great alliance between France and Austria by which such a rearrangement was effected she owed every episode of her drama. Her marriage, her eminence, her sufferings, and her death were each directly the consequence of that compact: its conclusion coincided with her birth; from childhood she was dedicated to it as a pledge, a bond, and, at last, a victim. Though, therefore, that treaty can occupy but little place in pages which deal with her vivid life—a life lived after the signing of the document and after its most noisy consequences had disappeared—yet the instrument must be grasped at the outset and must remain permanently in the mind of all who would understand the Queen of France and her disaster; for it was her mother who made the alliance; the statesman who presided over all her fortunes planned and achieved it. It stands throughout her forty years like a fixed horoscope drawn at birth, or a sentence pronounced and sure to be fulfilled.

The Diplomatic Revolution of the eighteenth century sprang, like every other major thing in modern history, from the religious schism of the sixteenth.

If that vast disturbance of the Reformation which threatened so grievously the culture of Europe, which maimed for ever the life of the Renaissance, and which is only now beginning to subside, had broken the national tradition of Gaul as it did that of Britain, it may confidently be asserted that European civilisation would have perished. There was not left on the shores of the Mediterranean a sufficient reserve of energy to re-indoctrinate the West. A welter of small States hopelessly separated by the violence and self-sufficience of the new philosophy would each have gone down the roads an individual goes when he forgets or learns to despise traditional rules of living and the corporate sense of mankind. That interaction which is the life of Europe would have disappeared. A short period of intense local activities would have been followed by a general repose. The unity of the Western world would have failed, and the spirit of Rome would have vanished as utterly from her deserted provinces as has that of Assyria from hers.

If, on the other hand, the French had chosen the earliest moment of the Reformation to lead the popular instinct of Europe against the Reformers and to re-establish unity, if as early as the reign of Francis I. (who saw the peril) they had imagined a species of crusade, why, then, the schism would have been healed by the sword, the humanity of the Renaissance would have become a permanent influence in our lives rather than an heroic episode whose vigour we regret but cannot hope to restore, and the discovery of antiquity, the thorough awakening of the mind, would have impelled Europe towards new and glorious fortunes the nature of which we cannot even conjecture, so differently did the course of history turn. For it so happened that the French—whose temperament, whose unbroken Roman legend, and whose geographical position made them the decisive centre of the struggle—the French hesitated for two hundred years.

Their religion indeed they preserved. The attempt to force upon the French doctrines convenient, in France as in England, to the wealthy merchants, the intellectuals and the squires, was met by popular risings; those of the French, as they were the more sanguinary so were also the more successful. The first massacre of St. Bartholomew, when the Catholic leaders were killed in the south, was not forgotten by the north; and after the second massacre of St. Bartholomew in Paris had avenged it, the Reformation could never establish in France that oligarchic polity which it ultimately imposed upon England and Holland. In a word, the Catholic reaction in France was sufficiently violent to recover the tradition of the State; but the full consequences of that reaction did not follow, nor did France support the general Catholic instinct of Europe outside the French boundaries, because, allied with the Faith to which the nation was so profoundly attached and had barely preserved, was the political power of the Spanish-Austrian Empire, which the French nation and its leaders detested and feared.

It is difficult for us to-day to comprehend the might of Spain during the century of the Reformation, and still more difficult to grasp that external appearance of overwhelming strength which, as the years proceeded, tended more and more to exceed her actual (and declining) power.

The supremacy of Spain over Europe resided in a dynasty and not in a national idea. It did not take the form of over-riding treaties or of attempting the partition of weaker States, for it was profoundly Christian, and it was military; in twenty ways the position of Spain differed from the hegemony which some modern European State might attempt to exercise over its fellows. But it is possible to arrive at some conception of what that Empire was if we remember that it reposed upon a vast colonial system which Spain alone seemed capable of conducting with success, that it monopolised the production of gold, and that it depended upon a command of the sea which was secured to it by an invincible fleet. To such advantages there must further be added an armed force not only by far the largest and best trained in Europe, but mainly composed of the best fighters as well, and—a circumstance more important than all the rest—an extent of dominion, due to the union of the Austrian and Spanish houses, which gave to Charles V. and his successors the whole background, as it were, upon which the map of Europe was painted: in the sea of that Emperor’s continental possessions, apart from a few insignificant principalities, France alone survived—an intact island with ragged boundaries, menaced upon every side. For the Emperor, then master of the Peninsula, of the Germanies, and of the New World, was everywhere by sea and almost everywhere by land a pressing foe.

However much this Spanish-Austrian power might stand (as it did stand) for European traditions and for the Faith of civilisation which France had elected to preserve, it was impossible for the French crown and nation not to be opposed to its political power if that crown and that nation were to survive. The smaller nations of the North—the English, the Low Countries, &c.—were in less peril than the French; for these were now the only considerable exception to, and were soon to be the rivals of, the Spanish-Austrian State. Had the Armada found fair weather, Philip might have been crowned at Westminster; but the English—united, isolated, and already organised as a commercial oligarchy—would have fought their way out from foreign domination as thoroughly as did the Dutch. The duty of the French was other; their independence was not threatened: it was rather their dignity and special soul which were in peril and which had to be preserved from digestion into this all-surrounding influence of Spain. To preserve her soul, France gave—unconsciously, perhaps, as a people, but with acute consciousness as a government—her whole energies during four generations. The defence succeeded. Through a dozen such civil tumults as are native to the French blood, and through a long eclipse of their national power, they treasured and built up their reserves. After a century of peril they emerged, under Louis XIV., not only the masters, but for a moment the very tyrants of Europe.

The French did not achieve this object of theirs without a compromise odious to their clear spirit. In their secular opposition to the Spanish-Austrian power, it was the business of their diplomatists to spare the little Protestant States and to use them as a pack for the worrying of great Austria, whom they dreaded and would break down. The constant policy of Henri IV., of Richelieu, of Mazarin, was to strengthen the Protestant principalities of North Germany, to meet half-way the rising Puritanism of England, and even at home to tolerate an organised opulent and numerous body of Huguenots who formed a State within the State. At a time when it was death to say Mass in England, the wealthy Calvinist just beyond the Channel—at Dieppe, for instance—was protected with all the force of the law from the fanaticism or indignation of his fellow-citizens; he could convene his synods openly, could hold office at law or in municipal affairs, and was even granted a special form of representation and a place in the advisory bodies of the State. All this was done, not to secure internal order—which would perhaps have been better affirmed in France, as it was in England, by the vigorous persecution of the minority—but to create a Protestant make-weight to what appeared till nearly the close of the seventeenth century the overwhelming menace of the Spanish and Austrian Houses.

Such was the policy which the French Court wisely pursued during so long a period that it finally acquired the force of a fixed tradition and threatened to last on into an era of new conditions, when it would prove useless or, later, harmful to the State. The general framework of that Anti-Austrian diplomacy did indeed survive from the latter seventeenth till the middle of the eighteenth century; but from the time when Louis XIV. in 1661 began to rule alone, to that final rearrangement of European forces in the Diplomatic Revolution, which it is my business to describe, the Catholic powers tended more and more to be conscious of a common fate and of a common duty. One after another the portions of the old French diplomatic work fell to pieces as the strength of Spain diminished and as the small Protestant States advanced in their cycle of rapid commercial expansion, increasing population and military power; until, a generation after Louis XIV.’s death, Protestant Europe as a whole had formed in line against what was left of Rome.

It would not be germane to my subject were I to enter at any length into the gradual transformation of Europe between 1668 and 1741. That first date is that of the treaty which closed the last clear struggle between France and Spain; the second date is that of the first great battle, Mollwitz, in which Prussia under Frederick the Great appeared as a triumphant and equal opponent against the Catholic forces of the Empire. It is enough to say that during that period the results of the great struggle were solidified. Europe was now hopelessly, and, as it seemed, finally riven asunder; and those who proposed to continue, those who proposed to disperse the stream of European tradition, gravitated into two camps armed for a struggle which is not even yet decided.

The transition may be expressed as the long life of a man—nay, it may be exactly expressed in the life of one man, Fleury, for he stood on the threshold of manhood at its commencement and in sight of death at its close: what such a long life witnessed, between its eighteenth and its ninetieth year, was—if the vast confusion of detail be eliminated and the large result be grasped—the confirmation of the great schism and the final decision of France to stand wholly against the North. There appeared at last, fixed and consolidated, a Protestant and a Catholic division in Europe whose opposing philosophies, seen or unseen, denied, ridiculed or ignored, even by those most steeped in either atmosphere, were henceforward to affect inwardly every detail of individual life as outwardly they were to affect every great event in the history of our race, and every general judgment which has been passed upon its actions.

The Spanish Power, based as it had been not on internal resources but on a mere naval and colonial supremacy, could not but rapidly decline; it had long been separated from the German Empire; it was destined to fall into the orbit of France. On the other hand, the England of the early eighteenth century was no longer a small community absorbed in theological discussion; she had become a nation of the first rank, one that was developing its industries, its wealth, and its armed strength. She boasted in Marlborough the chief military genius of the age; she was already the leader in physics; she was about to be the leader in mechanical science (with all the riches such a leadership would bring), and she was upon the eve of acquiring a new colonial empire.

In France the privileges of the Huguenots had been withdrawn as the situation grew precise and clear, and the breach between them and the nation was made final by their active and zealous treason in whatever foreign fleets or armies were attempting the ruin of their country. In England it had been made plain that the oligarchy, and the nation upon which it reposed, would admit neither a strong central government nor the presence of the Catholic Church near any seat of power: the Stuart dynasty had been exiled; its first attempt at a restoration had been crushed.

Meanwhile there was preparing a final argument which should compel men to recognise the clean and fixed division of Europe: that argument was the astonishing rise of Prussia, for with the appearance upon the field of this new and strange force—an own child of the Reform—it was evident that something had changed in the very morals of war.

When Austria was at her weakest, when the French Court, bewildered but weakly constant to a now meaningless diplomatic habit, was watching the apparent dissolution of the Empire and was ready to urge its armies against Vienna, when England remained, and that only from opposition to the Bourbons, the only support of the Hapsburgs, there was established within five years the permanent strength of Frederick the Great and the new factor of Prussian Power: a complete contempt for the old rules of honour in negotiation and for the old rules of contract in dynastic relations had been crowned by a complete success.

This advent, when every exception and cross-influence is forgotten, will remain the chief moral and, therefore, the chief political fact of the eighteenth century. By the end of the year 1745, Silesia was finally abandoned by Austria; the Prussian soldier and his atheist theory had compassed the first mere conquest of European territory which had been achieved by any European Power since first Europe had been organised into a family of Christian communities. It had been advanced for the first time that Europe was not one, but that some unit of it might overbear and rule another by arms alone; that there was no common standard nor any unseen avenger upon appeal. That theory had appealed to arms and had conquered.

Within three years the international turmoil, of which this catastrophe was immeasurably the greatest result, was subjected to a sort of settlement. One of those general committees of all Europe with which our own time is so familiar was summoned to Aix-la-Chapelle; representatives of the various Powers confirmed or modified the results of a group of wars, and in the autumn of 1748 affixed their signatures to a complete arrangement which was well known to be unstable, ephemeral, and insincere, but which was yet of tremendous import, for it marked (though in no dramatic manner) the end of an old world.

As the plenipotentiaries left their accomplished work and strolled out of the room which had received them, they were still grouped together by such weak and complex ties as the interests of individual governments might decide. When they met again after the next brief cycle of war, these men were arranged in a true order and sat opposing: for England, Prussia, and experiment of schism on the one side; for the belt of endurance on the other. Since that cleavage these two prime bodies, disguised under a hundred forms and hidden and confused by a welter of incidental and secondary forces, have remained opposing, attempting with fluctuating success each to determine the general fortunes of the world. They will so continue balanced and opposing until perhaps—by the action of some power neither of war nor of diplomacy—unity may be re-established and Europe again may live.

Of the men who so strolled out of the room at Aix one only, still young, had grasped in silence the necessity of the great change; he saw that Vienna and Paris must in the next struggle stand together and defend together their common civilisation and their resisting Faith. He not only perceived the advent of this great reversal in the traditions of the chanceries; he designed to aid it himself, to mould it and to determine its character. That he could then perceive of how large a movement his action was to be a part no historian can pretend, for at the time no one could grasp more than the momentary issue, and this man’s very profession made it necessary for him, as for every other diplomat, to see clearly immediate things and to abandon distant speculation. But though his work was greater than himself and far greater than his intention, yet he deserves a very particular attention; for this young man of thirty-six was Kaunitz, and he, for a whole generation, was Austria.

In so determining to effect an alliance between the Hapsburgs and their secular enemy, Kaunitz equally determined, unknown to himself, the whole fortunes of Marie Antoinette; she, years later, when she came to be born to the Imperial house, was, even in childhood, the pledge he needed. It is Kaunitz who stands forever behind the life of Marie Antoinette, like a writer behind the creature in his book. It is he who designs her marriage, who uses her without mercy for the purposes of his policy at Versailles; he is the author of her magnificence and of her intrigue; he is then also indirectly the author of her fall, which, in his obscure and failing old age, he heard of far away, partially comprehended, and just survived.

Kaunitz was the original of our modern diplomatists. In that epoch of governing families not a few nobles were flattered to be called “the Coachmen of Europe”: he alone merited the cant term. He served a sovereign whose armies were constantly defeated; he was the adviser of a mere crown—and that crown worn by a woman; in a time when the divergent races of the Danube were first astir, he had at his command or for his support neither a national tradition nor any strong instrument of war, yet, by personal genius, by tenacity, and by a wide lucidity of vision, he discovered and completed a method of “government through foreign relations” which was almost independent of national feeling or of armed strength.

An absence of natural violence, as of all common emotions, was characteristic of Kaunitz. He disdained the vulgar pomp of silence; he talked continually; he knew the strength and secrecy of men who can be at once verbose and deliberate. Nor could his fluency have deceived any careful observer into a suspicion of weakness, for his curved thin nose and prominent peaked chin, his arched eyebrows, his Sclavonic type, ready and courageous, his hard, pale eyes, showed nothing but purpose and execution; and as his tall figure stalked round the billiard tables at evening, his very recreation seemed instinct with plans.

The abounding energy which drove him to success revealed itself in a thousand ways, and chiefly in this, that in the career of diplomacy, where all individuality is regarded with dread, he pushed his personal tastes beyond the eccentric. Thus he had a mania against all gesticulation, and he would present at every conference the singular spectacle of a man chattering and disputing unceasingly and eagerly, yet keeping his hands quite motionless all the while. Again, when he entered the great houses of Europe and dined with men to influence whom was to conduct the world, he did not hesitate to bring with him his own dessert, which when he had eaten he would, to the great disgust of embassies, elaborately wash his teeth at table. In the midst of the hardest toil he was so foppish as to wear various wigs—now brown, now white, now auburn. He was a constant traveller, familiar with every capital in Western Europe, yet he so loathed fresh air that he would not pass from his carriage to a palace door unless his mouth were covered. He was a dandy who, in drawing-rooms loaded with scent and flowers, loudly protested against all perfume; a gentleman who, when cards were the only pastime of the rich, expressed a detestation of all hazard; a courtier who, amidst all the extravagancies of etiquette of the eighteenth century, barely bowed to the greatest sovereigns, and who, on the stroke of eleven, would abruptly leave the Emperor without a word.

Such marks of an intense initiative, detachment, and pride were tolerated in the earlier part of his life with amusement on account of the affection he could inspire; later they were regarded with ill ease, and at last with a sort of awe, when it was known that his intelligence could entrap no matter what combination of antagonists. This intelligence, and the single devotion by which such natures are invariably compelled, were both laid at the feet of Maria Theresa.

He was older than his Empress by some seven years; there lay between them just that space which makes for equality and comprehension between a man and a woman. The year of her marriage had coincided with that of his own; he had come at twenty-five to the court of this young sovereign of eighteen. She had recognised—with a wisdom that never failed her long and active life—how just and general was his view of Europe, and it was from this moment that her interests and her career were entrusted to his genius. He had already studied in three universities, had refused the clerical profession to which his Canonry of Munster introduced him, and had travelled in the Netherlands, in France, in England, and in Italy, where he was made Aulic Councillor, and enfeoffed, as it were, to the palace.

His abilities had not long to await their opportunity. It was but four years after Maria Theresa’s marriage and his own that she succeeded to the throne and possessions of the Hapsburgs: then it was the sudden advent of Prussia, to which I have alluded, began the great change.

Maria Theresa’s succession was in doubt, not in point of right, but because her sex and the condition in which her father had left his army and his treasury gave an opportunity to the rivals of Austria, and notably to France.

Europe was thus passing through one of those crises of instability during which every chancery discounts and yet dreads a universal war, when the magazine was fired by one who had nothing to lose but honour. Frederick of Prussia was the warmest in acknowledging the title of Maria Theresa; he accepted her claims, guaranteed the integrity of her possessions, and suddenly invaded them.

From the ordering of that march of Frederick’s into Silesia—from the close, that is, of the year 1740—Kaunitz, a man not yet in his thirtieth year, was at work to repair the Empire and to restore the equilibrium of Europe. Upon the whole he succeeded; for though the magnitude of the Revolutionary Wars has dwarfed his period, and though the complete modern transformation of society has made such causes seem remote, yet (as it is the thesis of these pages to maintain) Kaunitz unconsciously preserved the unity of Europe.

In the beginning of the struggle he had already saved the interests of Maria Theresa in the petty Italian courts. At Florence, at Rome, at Turin, at Brussels, his mastery continued to increase. In his thirty-sixth year he was ambassador to London—he concluded, as we have seen, the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle; by his fortieth he had been appointed to Paris, and that action by which he will chiefly be remembered had begun. He had seen, as I have said, the necessity for an alliance between the two great Catholic Powers. Within the two years of his residence in Paris he had successfully raised the principle of such a revolution in policy and as successfully maintained its secrecy. A task which would have seemed wholly vain had he communicated it to others, one which would have seemed impossible even to those whom he might have convinced, was achieved. To his lucid and tenacious intellect the matter in hand was but the bringing forth of a tendency already in existence; he saw the Austro-French alliance lying potentially in the circumstances of his time; his business was but to define and realise it.

In such a mood did he take up the Austrian Embassy in Paris. He was well fitted for the work he had conceived. The magnificence which he displayed in his palace in the French capital was calculated indeed to impress rather than to attract the formal court of Versailles; that magnificence was the product of his personal tastes rather than of his power of intrigue, but the details of his over-ostentatious household were well suited to those whom he had designed to capture. The French language was his own; Italian, though he spoke it well, was foreign to him; the German dialects he knew but ill and hardly used at all. His habits were French, to the end of his long life French literature was his only reading, and his clothes, to their least part, must come from the hands of the French.

MARIA THERESA
FROM THE TAPESTRY PORTRAIT WOVEN FOR MARIE ANTOINETTE AND RECENTLY RESTORED
TO VERSAILLES

He moved, therefore, in that world of Paris and Versailles (as did, later, his pupil, Mercy-d’Argenteau) rather as a native than a foreigner. Even if the alliance had been as artificial as it was natural, he would have carried his point. As it was, he left Paris in 1753 to assume the Prime Ministry at Vienna with the certitude that, when next Frederick of Prussia had occasion to break his word, the wealth and the arms of the Bourbons would be ranged upon the Austrian side.

Upon that major pivot all the schemes of Vienna must turn at his dictation. Every marriage must be contrived so as to fall in with the projected alliance; every action must be subordinated to the arrangement which would prove, as he trusted, the supreme hope of the dynasty. To this one project he directed every power within him or beneath his hand, and to this he was ready, when the time should come, to sacrifice the fortunes of any member of the Royal House save its sovereign or its heir. To this aspect of Europe, long before the termination of his mission in Paris, he had not so much persuaded as formed the mind of Maria Theresa.

The great and salutary soul of that woman explains in part what were to be the fortunes of her youngest child. Not that Marie Antoinette inherited either the opportunities or the full excellence of her mother, but that there ran through the impatient energy and unfruitful graciousness of the Queen of France a flavour of that which had lent a disciplined power and a conscious dignity to the middle age of Maria Theresa.

The body of the Empress was strong. Its strength enabled her to bear without fatigue the ceaseless work of her office, and in the midst of child-bearing to direct with exactitude the affairs of a troubled State. That strength of hers was evident in her equal temper, her rapid judgment, her fixed choice of men; it was evident also in her firm tread and in her carriage, and even as she sat upon a chair at evening she seemed to be governing from a throne.

A growing but uniform capacity informed her life. She had known the value not only of industry but also of enthusiasm, and had saved her throne in its greatest peril by her sudden and passionate appeal to the Hungarians. It was this instinctive science of hers that had disarmed Kaunitz. If he allowed her to suggest what he had already determined, if he permitted her to be the first to write down the scheme of the Diplomatic Revolution he had conceived, and to send it down to history as her creation rather than his own, it was not the desire to flatter her that moved him but a recognition of her due. She it was that sent him to Paris and she that superintended the weaving of the loom he had arranged.

Her dark and pleasing eyes, sparkling and strong, controlled him in so far as he was controlled by any outer influence, for he recognised in them the Cæsarian spirit.

Her largeness pleased him. When she played at cards, she played for fortunes; when she rode, she rode with magnificence; when she sang, her voice, though high, was loud, untrammelled, and full; when she drove abroad, it was with splendour and at a noble turn of speed.

All this was greatly to the humour of Kaunitz, and he continued to serve his Empress with a zeal he would never have given to a mere ambition. In deference to her, all that he could control of his idiosyncrasies he controlled. His great bull-dog, which followed him to every other door, was kept from her palace. His abrupt speech, his failure to reply, his sudden and brief commands—all his manner—were modified in consultation with his Queen. She, on her part, knew what were the limits to which so singular a nature could proceed in the matter of self-denial. She respected half his follies, and her servants often saw her from the courtyard shutting the windows, smiling, as he ran from his carriage, his mouth covered to screen it from the outer air. Her common sense and poise forgave in him alone extravagances she had little inclination to support in others. He respected in her those depths of emotion, of simplicity, and of faith which in others he would have regarded as imbecilities ready for his high intelligence to use at will.

It was neither incomprehensible to him nor displeasing that her temper should be warmer than his intelligence demanded. The increasing strength of her religion, the personal affections and personal distastes which she conceived, above all, the closeness of her devotion to her husband, completed, in the eyes of Kaunitz, a character whose dominions and dynasty he chose to serve and to confirm; for he perceived that what others imagined to be impediments to her policy were but the reflection of her sex and of her health therein.

Kaunitz saw in Frederick of Prussia a player of worthy skill. It was upon the death of that soldier that he gave vent to the one emotional display of his life; yet he permitted Maria Theresa to hate her rival with a hatred which was not directed against his campaigning so much as against the narrow intrigue and bitterness of his evil mind.

To Kaunitz, again, Catherine of Russia was nothing but a powerful rival or ally; yet he approved that Maria Theresa should speak of her as one speaks of the women of the streets, despising her not for her ambition but for her licence.

To Kaunitz, Francis of Lorraine, the husband of the Empress, was a thing without weight in the international game; yet he saw with a general understanding, and was glad to see in detail, the security of the imperial marriage.

The singular happiness of Maria Theresa’s wedded life was due to no greatness in Francis of Lorraine, but to his vivacity and good breeding, to his courtesy, to his refinement, and especially to his devotion. It suited her that he should ride and shoot so well. She loved the restrained intonation of his voice and the frankness of his face. She easily forgave his numerous and passing infidelities. The simplicity of his religion was her own, for her goodness was all German as his sincerity was all Western and French; upon these two facets the opposing races touch when the common faith introduces the one to the other. Their household, therefore, was something familiar and domestic. Its language was French, of a sort, because French was the language of Francis; but while he brought the clarity of Lorraine under that good roof, which covered what Goethe called “the chief bourgeois family of Germany,” he brought to it none of the French hardness and precision, nor any of that cold French parade which was later to exasperate his daughter when she reigned at Versailles. He was a man who delighted in visits to his country-side, and who would have his carriage in town wait its turn with others at the opera doors.

Maria Theresa was so wedded, served by such a Minister, in possession of and in authority over such a household during those seven years between the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle and the French Alliance, between 1748 and 1755. These seven years were years of patience and of diplomacy, which were used to retrieve the disasters of her first bewildered struggle against Prussia and the new forces of Europe. They were the seven years of profound, if precarious, international peace, when England was preparing her maritime supremacy, Prussia her full military tradition, the French monarchy, in the person of Louis XV., its rapid dissolution through excess and through fatigue. They were the seven years which seemed to the superficial but acute observation of Voltaire to be the happiest of his age: a brief “Antonine” repose in which the arts flourish and ideas might flower and even grow to seeding. They were the seven years in which the voice of Rousseau began to be heard and in which was written the Essay upon Human Inequality.

For the purposes of this story they were in particular the seven years during which Kaunitz, now widowed, working first as ambassador in Paris, then as Prime Minister by the side of Maria Theresa at Vienna, achieved that compact with the Bourbons which was to restore the general traditions of the Continent and the fortunes of the House of Hapsburg.

The period drew to a close: the plans for the alliance were laid, the last discussions were about to be engaged, when it was known, in the early summer of 1755, that the Empress was again with child.

CHAPTER II
BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD

2nd November 1755 to the Autumn of 1768

ALL that summer of 1755 the intrigue—and its success—proceeded.

I have said that the design of Kaunitz was not so much to impose upon his time a new plan as to further a climax to which that time was tending. Accidents in Europe, in America, and upon the high seas conspired to mature the alliance.

Fighting broke out between the French and English outposts in the backwoods of the colonies. Two French ships had been engaged in a fog off the banks and captured; later, a sharp panic had led the Cabinet in London to order a general Act of Piracy throughout the Atlantic against French commerce. It was a wild stroke, but it proved the first success of what was to become the one fundamentally successful war in the annals of Great Britain.

In Versailles an isolated and mournful man, fatigued and silent, who was in the last resort the governing power of France, delayed and delayed the inevitable struggle between his forces and the rising power of England. Louis XV. looked upon the world with an eye too experienced and too careless to consider honour. His clear and informed intelligence would contemplate—though it could not remedy—the effects of his own decline and of his failing will. He felt about him in the society he ruled, and within himself also, something moribund. France at this moment gave the impression of a great palace, old and in part ruined. That impression of France had seized not only upon her own central power, but upon foreign observers as well; the English squires had received it, and the new Prussian soldiers. In Vienna it was proposed to use the declining French monarchy as a great prop, and in using it to strengthen and to revivify the Austrian Empire until the older order of Europe should be restored. Louis XV., sitting apart and watching the dissolution of the national vigour and of his own, put aside the approach of arms with such a gesture as might use a man of breeding whom in some illness violence had disturbed. Thus as late as August, when his sailors had captured an English ship of the line, he ordered its release. The war was well ablaze, and yet he would consent to no formal declaration of it: Austria watched his necessities.

It was in September that Maria Theresa sent word to her ambassador in Paris—the old and grumbling but pliant Stahremberg—that the match might be set to the train: in a little house under the terrace at Bellevue, a house from whose windows all Paris may be seen far away below, the secret work went on.

It has been asserted that the Empress in her anxiety wrote to the Pompadour and attempted, by descending to so direct a flattery of Louis XV.’s mistress, to hasten that King’s adhesion to her design. The accusation is false, and the document upon which it is based a forgery; but the Austrian ambassador was Maria Theresa’s mouthpiece with that kindly, quiet, and all-powerful woman. It was she who met him day after day in the little house, and when she retired to give place to the Cardinal de Bernis, that Minister found the alliance already fully planned between Stahremberg and the Pompadour. Louis XV. alone was still reluctant. Great change, great action of any sort was harsh to him. He would not believe the growing rumour that Frederick of Prussia was about to desert his alliance and to throw his forces on to the side of the English Power. Louis XV. attempted, not without a sad and patient skill, to obtain equilibrium rather than defence. He would consider an arrangement with Vienna only if it might include a peaceful understanding with Berlin.

MADAME DE POMPADOUR
FROM THE PORTRAIT BY BOUCHER IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY AT EDINBURGH

As, during October, these negotiations matured so slowly in France, in Vienna the Empress awaited through that month the birth of her child. She jested upon it with a Catholic freedom, laid wagers upon its sex (and later won them), discussed what sponsors should be bidden, and decided at last upon the King and Queen of Portugal; to these, in the last days of October, her messengers brought the request, and it was gladly accepted in their capital of Lisbon. Under such influences was the child to be born.

The town of Lisbon had risen, in the first colonial efforts of Portugal, to a vast importance. True, the Portuguese did not, as others have done, attach their whole policy to possessions over-sea, nor rely for existence upon the supremacy of their fleet, but the evils necessarily attendant upon a scattered commercial empire decayed their military power, and therefore at last their commerce itself. The capital was no longer, in the Arab phrase, “the city of the Christians”; it was long fallen from its place as the chief port of the Atlantic when, in these last days of October 1755, the messengers of the Empress entered it and were received; but it was still great, overlooking the superb anchorage which brought it into being, and presenting to the traveller perhaps half the population which it had boasted in the height of its prosperity. It was a site famous for shocks of earthquake, which (by a coincidence) had visited it since the decline of its ancient power; but of these no more affair had been made than is common with natural adventures. Its narrow streets and splendid, if not majestic, churches still stood uninjured.

The valley upon which stood the commercial centre of Lisbon is formed of loose clay; the citadel and the portion which to this day recalls the older city, of limestone; and the line which limits the two systems is a sharp one. But though the diversity of such a soil lent to these tremors an added danger, they had passed without serious attention for three or four generations; they had not affected the architecture of the city nor marred its history. In this year, 1755, they had already been repeated, but in so mild a fashion that no heed was taken of them.

By All-Hallow’een the heralds had accomplished their mission, the Court had retired to the palace of Belem, which overlooks the harbour, and the suburbs built high beyond that Roman bridge which has bequeathed to its valley the Moorish name of Alcantara. The city, as the ambassadors of Maria Theresa and the heralds of her daughter’s birth were leaving it, was awaiting under the warm and easy sun of autumn the feast of the morrow.

In the morning of that All Saints, a little after eight, the altars stood prepared; the populace had thronged into the churches; the streets also were already noisy with the opening of a holiday; the ships’ crews were ashore; only the quays were deserted. Everywhere High Mass had begun. But just at nine—at the hour when the pressure of the crowds, both within the open doors of the churches and without them, was at its fullest—the earth shook.... The awful business lasted perhaps ten seconds. When its crash was over an immense multitude of the populace and a third of the material city had perished.

The great mass of the survivors ran to the deserted quays, where an open sky and broad spaces seemed to afford safety from the fall of walls. They saw the sea withdrawn from the shore of the wide harbour; they saw next a wave form and rise far out in the land-locked gulf, and immediately it returned in an advancing heap of water straight and high—as high and as straight as the houses of the sea front. It moved with the pace of a gust or of a beam of light towards the shore. The thousands crammed upon the quays had barely begun their confused rush for the heights when this thing was upon them; it swirled into the narrow streets, tearing down the shaken walls and utterly sweeping out the maimed, the dying, and the dead whom the earthquake had left in the city. Then, when it had surged up and broken against the higher land, it dragged back again into the bay, carrying with it the wreck of the town and leaving, strewn on the mud of its retirement, small marbles, carven wood, stuffs, fuel, provisions, and everywhere the drowned corpses of animals and of men. During these moments perhaps twenty, perhaps thirty thousand were destroyed.

Two hours passed: they were occupied in part by pillage, in part by stupefaction, to some extent by repression and organisation. But before noon the accompaniment of such disasters appeared. Fire was discovered, first in one quarter of the city, then in another, till the whole threatened to be consumed. The disorder increased. Pombal, an atheist of rapid and decided thought, dominated the chaos and controlled it. He held the hesitating Court to the ruins of the city; he organised a police; as the early evening fell over the rising conflagration he had gibbets raised at one point after another, and hung upon them scores of those who had begun to loot the ruins and the dead.

The night was filled with the light and the roar of the flames until, at the approach of morning, when the fires had partly spent themselves and the cracked and charred walls yet standing could be seen more clearly in the dawn, some in that exhausted crowd remembered that it was the Day of the Dead, and how throughout Catholic Europe the requiems would be singing and the populace of all the cities but this would be crowding to the graves of those whom they remembered.

That same day, which in Lisbon overlooked the clouds of smoke still pouring from broken shells of houses, saw in Vienna, as the black processions returned from their cemeteries, the birth of the child.

Maria Theresa, whose vigour had been constant through so many trials, suffered grievously in this last child-bed of hers. She was in her thirty-seventh year. The anxiety and the plotting of the past months, the fear of an approaching conflict, had worn her. It was six weeks before she could hear Mass in her chapel; and meanwhile, in spite of the official, and especially the popular, rejoicing which followed the birth of the princess, a sort of hesitation hung over the Court. Francis of Lorraine was oppressed by premonitions. With that taint of superstition which his Faith condemned, but which the rich can never wholly escape, he caused the baby’s horoscope to be drawn. The customary banquet was foregone. The dreadful news from Lisbon added to the gloom, and something silent surrounded the palace as the days shortened into winter.

With the New Year a more usual order was re-established. The life of the Court had returned; the first fortnight of January passed in open festivities, beneath the surface of which the steady diplomatic pressure for the French alliance continued. It reached an unexpectedly rapid conclusion. Upon the 16th of January the King of Prussia suddenly admitted to the French ambassador at Berlin that he had broken faith with Louis and that the Prussian Minister in London had signed a treaty with England. For a month a desperate attempt continued to prevent the enormous consequences which must follow the public knowledge of the betrayal. The aversion of Louis to all new action, his mixture of apathy and of judgment, led him, through his ambassador, to forget the insult and to cling to the illusion of peace; but Frederick himself destroyed that illusion. His calculation had been the calculation of a soldier in whom the clear appreciation of a strategical moment, the resolution and courage necessary to use it, and an impotence of the chivalric functions combined to make such decisions absolute. It was the second manifestation of that moral perversion which has lent for two hundred years such nervous energy to Prussia, and of which the occupation of Silesia was the first, Bismarck’s forgery at Ems the latest—and probably the final—example: for Europe can always at last expel a poison.

Frederick, I say, was resolved upon war. He met every proposal for reconciliation with German jests somewhat decadent and expressed in imperfect French, which was his daily language. By the end of February 1756 the attempt to keep the peace of Europe had failed, and Louis XV., driven by circumstances and necessity, had at last accepted the design of Maria Theresa and of Kaunitz. The treaty would have been signed in March had not the illness of the French Minister, the Cardinal De Bernis, intervened; as it was, the signatures were affixed to the document on the 1st of May. By summer all Europe was in arms. The little Archduchess, who was later to lay down her life in the chain of consequence which proceeded from that signing, was six months old.

The first seven years of Marie Antoinette’s life were, therefore, those of the Seven Years’ War.

As her mind emerged into consciousness, the rumours she heard around her, magnified by the gossip of the servants to whom she was entrusted, were rumours of sterile victories and of malignant defeats; in the recital of either there mingled perpetually the name of the Empire and the name of Bourbon which she was to bear. She could just walk when the whole of Cumberland’s army broke down before the French advance and accepted terms at Kloster-Seven. Her second birthday cake was hardly eaten before Frederick had neutralised this capitulation by destroying the French at Rosbach. The year which saw the fall of Quebec and the French disasters in India was that with which her earliest memories were associated. She could remember Kunersdorf, the rejoicings and the confident belief that the Protestant aggression was repelled. Her fifth, her sixth, her seventh years—the years, that is, during which the first clear experience of life begins—proved the folly of that confidence; her eighth was not far advanced when the whole of this noisy business was concluded by the Peace of Paris and the Treaty of Herbertsburg.

The war appeared indecisive or a failure. The original theft of Silesia was confirmed to Prussia, the conquest of the French colonies to England. In their defensive against the menace to which all European traditions were exposed, the Courts of Vienna and Versailles had succeeded; in their aggressive, which had the object of destroying that menace for ever, they had failed. In failing in their aggressive, as a by-product of that failure, they had permitted the establishment of an English colonial system which at the time seemed of no great moment, but which was destined ultimately to estrange this country from the politics of Europe and to submit it to fantastic changes; to make its population urban and proletariat, to increase immensely the wealth of its oligarchy, and gravely to obscure its military ideals. In the success of their defensive, as by-products of that success, they had achieved two things equally unexpected: they had preserved for ever the South-German spirit, and had thus checked in a remote future the organisation of the whole German race by Prussia and the triumph over it of Prussian materialism; they had preserved to France an intensive domestic energy which was shortly to transform the world.

The period of innocence then and of growth, which succeeds a child’s first approach to the Sacraments, corresponded in the life of Marie Antoinette with the peace that followed these victories and these defeats. The space between her seventh and her fourteenth years might have been filled, in the leisure of the Austrian Court, with every advantage and every grace. By an accident, not unconnected with her general fate, she was allowed to run wild.

That her early childhood should have been neglected is easier to understand. The war occupied all her mother’s energies. She and her elder sister Caroline were the babies whose elder brother Joseph was already admitted to affairs of State. It was natural that no great anxiety upon their education should have been felt in such times. The child had been put out to nurse with the wife of a small lawyer of sorts, one Weber, whose son—the foster-brother of the Queen—has left a pious and inaccurate memorial of her to posterity. Here she first learnt the German tongue, which was to be her only idiom during her childhood; here also she first heard her name under the form of “Maria Antonietta,” a form which was to be preserved until her marriage was planned.

Such neglect, or rather such domesticity, would have done her character small hurt if it had ceased with her earliest years and with the conclusion of the peace; it was no better and no worse than that which the children of all the wealthy enjoy in the company of inferiors until their education begins. But the little Archduchess, even when she had reached the age when character forms, was still undisciplined and at large. There was found for her and Caroline a worthy and easy-going governess in the Countess of Brandweiss, an amiable and careless woman, who perhaps could neither teach nor choose teachers and who certainly did not do so.

All the warmer part of the year the children spent at Schoenbrünn; it was only in the depth of winter that they visited the capital. But whether at Court or in the country they were continually remote from the presence and the strong guidance of Maria Theresa.

The Empress saw them formally once a week; a doctor daily reported upon their health; for the rest all control was abandoned. The natural German of Marie Antoinette’s babyhood continued (perhaps in the very accent of her domestics) to be the medium of her speech in her teens, and—what was of more importance for the future—not only of her speech but of her thought also. In womanhood and after a long residence abroad the mechanical part of this habit was forgotten; its spirit remained. What she read—if she read anything—we cannot tell. Her music alone was watched. Her deportment was naturally as graceful as her breeding was good; but the seeds of no culture were sown in her, nor so much as the elements of self-control. Her sprightliness was allowed an indulgence in every whim, especially in a talent for mockery. She acquired, and she desired to acquire, nothing. No healthy child is fitted by nature for application and study; upon all such must continuous habits be enforced—to her they were not so much as suggested. A perpetual instability became part of her, and unhappily this permanent weakness was so veiled by an inherited poise and by a happy heart that her mother, in her rare observations, passed it by. Before Marie Antoinette was grown a woman that inner instability had come to colour all her mind; it remained in her till the eve of her disasters.

It is often discovered, when an eager childhood is left too much to its own ruling, that the mind will, of its own energy, turn to the cultivation of some one thing. Thus in Versailles the boyhood of the lonely child, who was later to be her husband, had turned for an interest to maps and had made them a passion. With her it was not so. The whole of her active and over-nourished life lacked the ballast of so much as a hobby. She was precisely of that kind to whom a wide, careful, and a conventional training is most useful; precisely that training was denied her.

The disasters and, what was worse, the unfruitfulness of the war had not daunted Maria Theresa, but her plans were in disarray. The two years that succeeded the peace produced no definite policy. No step was taken to confirm the bond with France or to secure the future, when there fell upon the Empress the blow of her husband’s death; he had fallen under a sudden stroke at Innsbruck, during the wedding feast of his son, leaving to her and to his children not only the memory of his peculiar charm, but also a sort of testament or rule of life which remains a very noble fragment of Christian piety.

Before he set out he remembered his youngest daughter; he asked repeatedly for the child and she was brought to him. He embraced her closely, with some presentiment of evil, and he touched her hair; then as he rode away among his gentlemen he said, with that clear candour which inhabits both the blood and the wine of Lorraine, “Gentlemen, God knows how much I desired to kiss that child!” She had been his favourite; there was a close affinity between them. She was left to her mother, therefore, as a pledge and an inheritance, and Maria Theresa, whose mourning became passionate and remained so, was ready to procure for this daughter the chief advantages of the world.

The loss of her husband, while it filled her with an enduring sorrow, also did something to rouse and to inspire the Empress with the force that comes to such natures when they find themselves suddenly alone. The little girl upon whom her ambitions were already fixed, the French alliance which had been, as it were, the greatest part of herself, mixed in her mind. Maria Theresa had long connected in some vague manner the confirmation of the alliance with some Bourbon marriage—in what way precisely or by what plan we cannot tell; her ambassador has credited her with many plans. It is probable that none were developed when, a few weeks after the Emperor’s death, there happened something to decide her. The son of Louis XV., the Dauphin, was taken ill and died before the end of the year 1765. He left heir to the first throne in Europe his son, a lanky, silent, nervous lad of eleven, and that lad was heir to a man nearer sixty than fifty, worn with pleasures of a fastidious kind, and with the despair that accompanies the satisfaction of the flesh. A great eagerness was apparent at Versailles to plan at once a future marriage for this boy and to secure succession. Maria Theresa determined that this succession should reside in children of her own blood.

Nationality was a conception somewhat foreign to her, and as yet of no great strength in her mixed and varied dominions. How powerful it had ever been in France, what a menace it provided for the future of the French Monarchy, she could not perceive. Of the silent boy himself, the new heir, she knew only what her ambassador told her, and she cared little what he might be; but she saw clearly the Bourbons, a family as the Hapsburgs were a family, a bond in Catholic Europe with this boy the heir to their headship. She saw Versailles as the pinnacle still of whatever was regal (and therefore serious) in Europe. She determined to complete by a marriage the alliance already effected between that Court and her own.

THE FIRST DAUPHIN: (THE FATHER OF LOUIS XVI)

She knew the material with which she had to deal: Louis XV., clear sighted, a great gentleman, sensual, almost lethargic, loyal. She had understood the old nonentity of a Queen keeping her little place apart; the King’s spinster-daughters struggling against the influence of mistresses. She understood the power of the Prime Minister Choiseul, with whose active policy the King had so long allowed his power to be merged; she knew how and why he was Austrian in policy, and she forgave him his attack upon the Church. Though Choiseul had not made the alliance he so used it, and above all so maintained it after the doubtful peace, that he almost seemed its author, as later he seemed—though he took so little action—the author of her daughter’s marriage. She did not grudge the French Minister such honours. She weighed the historic grandeur of the royal house, and what she believed to be its certain future. She sketched in her mind, with Kaunitz at her side, the marriage of the two children as, years before, she had sketched the alliance.

It was certain that Versailles would yield, because Versailles was a man who, for all his lucidity and high training, never now stood long to one effort of the will; but just because Louis XV. had grown into a nature of that kind, it needed as active, as tenacious, and as subtle a mind as Maria Theresa’s to bring him to write or to speak. Writing or speaking in so grave a matter meant direct action and consequence; he feared such responsibilities as others fear disaster.

It is in the spirit of comedy to see this dignified and ample woman—perhaps the only worthy sovereign of her sex whom modern Europe has known—piloting through so critical a pass the long-determined fortunes of her daughter. There is the mother in all of it. That daughter had imperilled her life. The child was the last of nine which she had borne to a husband whose light infidelities she now the more forgave, whose clear gentility had charmed her life, whose religion was her own, and in respect to whose memory she was rapidly passing from a devotion to an adoration. The day was not far distant when she would brood in the vault beside his grave.

The old man Stahremberg was yielding his place (with some grumbling) to Mercy. He was still the Austrian ambassador at Paris; but his term was ending. Maria Theresa would perhaps in other times have spared his pride, and would not have given him a task upon which he must labour but which his successor would enjoy; but in the matter of her little Archduchess she would spare no one. She had hinted her business to Stahremberg before the Dauphin’s death; the spring had hardly broken before she was pressing him to conclude it. Up to his very departure her importunity pursued him. When Mercy was on the point of entering his office (in the May of 1766), Stahremberg, in the last letter sent to the Empress from Paris before his return, told her that her ship was launched. “She might,” he wrote, “accept her project as assured, from the tone in which the King had spoken of it.”

Maria Theresa had too firm and too smiling and too luminous an acquaintance with the world to build upon such vague assurance. The dignity of the French throne was too great a thing to be grasped at. It must be achieved. When old Mme. Geoffrin passed through Vienna in that year, Maria Antonietta was kept in the background off the stage—but France was cultivated. The baby, who was Louis XV.’s great-grand-daughter, Theresa, Leopold’s daughter, was presented to that old and wonderful bourgeoise and made much of. They joked about taking her to France; another baby, after all not much older, only eight years older, was going to that place in her time.

And, meanwhile, the common arts by which women of birth perfect their plans for their family were practised in the habitual round. The little girl’s personality, all gilded and framed, was put in the window of the Hapsburgs. She was wild perhaps, but so good-hearted! In the cold winter you heard of (all winters are cold in Vienna) she came up in the drawing-room, where the family sat together, and begged her mother to accept of all her savings for the poor—fifty-five ducats.

Little Mozart had come in to play one night; he had slipped upon the unaccustomed polish of the floor. The little Archduchess, when all others smiled, had alone pitied and lifted him! Maria Theresa met the French ambassador and told him in the most indifferent way how her youngest, when she was asked whom (among so many nations) she would like to rule, had said, “The French, for they had Henri IV. the Good and Louis XIV. the Great.” Weary though he was of such conventionalities, the ambassador was bound by the honour of his place to repeat them.

There still stood, however, in this summer of 1766, between the Empress’s plan and its fruition a power as feminine, as perspicuous, and as exact in calculation as her own. The widow of the Dauphin, the mother of the new heir at Versailles, opposed the match.

She would not retire, as the Queen, her mother-in-law, had done, into dignity and nothingness, nor would she admit—so tenacious of the past are crowns—that the Bourbons and the Hapsburgs had all the negotiations between them. She was of the Saxon House, and though it was but small—a northern bastion, as it were, of the Catholic Houses—yet she had inherited the tradition of monarchy, and she might, but for her husband’s sudden death, have inherited Versailles itself. She was still young, vigorous, and German. She had determined not only that her son, the new heir, should marry into her house—should marry his own cousin, her niece—but that he should marry as she his mother chose, and not as the Hapsburgs chose. He was at that moment (in 1766) not quite twelve; the bride whom she would disappoint not quite eleven years old! But her plan was active and tenacious, her readiness alive, when in the beginning of the following year, in March 1767, she in her turn died, and with her death that obstacle to the fate of the little Archduchess also failed.

With every date, as you mark each, it will be the more apparent that the barriers which opposed Marie Antoinette’s approach to the French throne failed each in turn at the climax of its resistance, and that her way to such eminence and such an end was opened by a number of peculiar chances, all adjutants of doom.

The House of Hapsburg was never a crowned nationality; it was and is a crowned family and nothing more. Its states were and are attached to it by no common bond. There is no such thing as Austria: the Hapsburgs are the reality of that Empire. The French Bourbons were, upon the contrary, the chiefs of a nation peculiarly conscious of its unity and jealous of its past. Their greatness lay only in the greatness of the compact quadrilateral they governed and of the finished language of their subjects, and in the achievements of the national temper. Such conditions favoured to the utmost the scheme of Maria Theresa, not only in the detail of this marriage, but in all that successful management of the French alliance which survived her own death and was the chief business of her reign. She could be direct in every plan, unhampered, considering only the fortunes of her House; Louis XV. and his Ministers, as later his grandson, were trammelled by the complexity of a national life of which they were themselves a part.

Versailles had not declared itself: Vienna pressed. It was in March that active opposition within the Court had died with the mother of the heir. Within a month the French ambassador at Vienna wrote home that “the marriage was in the air”: but the King had not spoken.

In that summer, as though sure of her final success, the Empress threw a sort of prescience of France and of high fortunes over the nursery at Schoenbrünn. The amiable Brandweiss disappeared; the severe and unhealthy Lorchenfeld replaced her.

The French (and baptismal form) of the child’s name, “Antoinette,” was ordered to be used: still Versailles remained dumb.

In the autumn the parallels of the siege were so far advanced that a direct assault could be made on poor Dufort, the advanced work of the Bourbons, their ambassador at Vienna.

Dufort had been told very strictly to keep silent. He suffered a persecution. Thus he was standing one evening by the card-tables talking to his Spanish colleague, when the Empress came up and said to this last boldly: “You see my daughter, sir? I trust her marriage will go well; we can talk of it the more freely that the French ambassador here does not open his lips.”

The child’s new governess was next turned on to the embarrassed man to pester him with the recital of her charge’s virtues. The approaching marriage of her elder sister Caroline with the Bourbons of Naples was dangled before Dufort.

The play continued for a year. Louis XV. bade his ambassador get the girl’s portrait, but “not show himself too eager.” He is reprimanded even for his courtesies, and all the while Dufort must stand the fire of the Court of Vienna and its exaggerated deference to him and its occasional reproaches! Choiseul was anxious to see the business ended. Dufort was as ready (and as weary) as could have been the Empress herself, but the slow balance of Louis XV. stood between them all and their goal.

In the summer of the next year, 1768, the Empress’s eldest son, Joseph, now associated with her upon the throne, determined to press home and conclude. It was the first time that this man’s narrow energy pressed the Bourbons to determine and to act; it was not to be the last. He was destined so to initiate action in the future upon two critical occasions and largely to determine the fortunes of his sister’s married life and final tragedy.

He wrote to Louis XV. a rambling letter, chiefly upon the marriage of yet another sister with the Duke of Parma. It wandered to the Bourbon marriage of Caroline; he mentioned his own child, the great-granddaughter of the King. It was a letter demanding and attracting a familiar answer. It drew its quarry. Louis, answering with his own hand and without emphasis, in a manner equally domestic and familiar, threw in a chance phrase: “... These marriages, your sister’s with the Infante, that of the Dauphin....” In these casual four words a document had passed and the last obstacle was removed.

The Empress turned from her major preoccupation to a minor one. This child of hers was to rule in France; she was now assured of the throne; she was near her thirteenth birthday—and she had been taught nothing.

CHAPTER III
THE ESPOUSALS

THE fortnightly despatches from France customarily arrived at Vienna together in one bag and in the charge of one courier. The Empress would receive at once the letters of Mercy, the official correspondence, perhaps the note of a friend, and the very rare communications of royalty. In this same batch which brought that decisive letter of Louis XV. to her son, on the same day, therefore, in which she was first secure in her daughter’s future, there also arrived the usual secret report from Mercy. This document contained a phrase too insignificant to detain her attention; it mentioned the rumour of a new intrigue: the King showed attachment to a woman of low origin about him; it was an attachment that might be permanent. This news was immediately forgotten by Maria Theresa; it was a detail that passed from her mind. She perhaps remembered the name, which was “Du Barry.”

The Court of Vienna, permeated (as was then every wealthy society) with French culture, was yet wholly German in character. The insufficiency which had marked the training of the imperial children—especially of the youngest—was easily accepted by those to whom a happy domestic spirit made up for every other lack in the family. Of those who surrounded the little Archduchess two alone, perhaps, understood the grave difference of standard between such education as Maria Antonietta had as yet received and the conversation of Versailles; but these two were Kaunitz and Maria Theresa, and short as was the time before them, they did determine to fit the child, in superficial things at least, for the world she was to enter and in a few years to govern. They failed.

Mercy, the ambassador, was instructed to find in France a tutor who should come to Vienna and could accomplish the task. He applied to Choiseul. Choiseul in turn referred the matter to the best critic of such things, an expert in the things of this world, the Archbishop of Toulouse. That prelate, Loménie de Brienne, whose unscrupulous strength had judged men rightly upon so many occasions and had exactly chosen them for political tasks, had in this case no personal appetite to gratify and was free to choose. A post was offered. His first thought was to obtain it for one who was bound to him, a protégé and a dependant. He at once recommended a priest for whom he had already procured the Librarianship of the Mazarin Collection, one Vermond. The choice was not questioned, and Vermond left to assume functions which he could hardly fulfil.

There was needed here a man who should have been appalled by the ignorance he might discover in his charge, who should be little affected by grandeur, who should be self-willed, assertive, and rapid in method; one whom the Empress might have ridiculed or even disliked, but whom she would soon have discovered to be indispensable to her plan. Such a man would have tackled his business with an appreciation of its magnitude, would have insisted upon a full control, would have communicated by his vigour the atmosphere of French thought, careless of the German shrinking from the rigidity of the French mind. He would have worked long hours with little Marie Antoinette, he would have filled the days with his one object, he would have shocked and offended all, his pupil especially, and in a year he would have left her with a good grounding in the literature of his country, with an elementary but a clear scheme of the history and the political forces which she was later to learn in full, with an enlarged vocabulary, a good accent, and at least the ability to write clearly and to work a simple sum. His pupil would have been compelled to application; her impulse would have been permanently harnessed; she would have learnt for life the value of a plan. Such a tutor would hardly have desired and would certainly not have acquired a lasting influence later on at Versailles. His work would have been done in those critical years of childhood, once and for all. He would probably have fallen into poverty. In later years he might have appeared among the revolutionaries, but he would have found, face to face with the Revolution, a trained Queen who, thanks to him, could have dealt with circumstance.

In the place of such a man, Vermond arrived.

He was a sober, tall, industrious priest of low birth; his father had let blood and perhaps pulled teeth for the needy. His reserve and quiet manners reposed upon a spirit that was incapable of ambition, but careful to secure ample means and to establish his family and himself in the secure favour of his employers. He was of middle age, a state into which he had entered early and in which he was likely long to remain. His mind within was active and disciplined; its exterior effect was small. He thought to accomplish his mission if he was but regular in his reports, laborious in his own study, and, above all, tactful and subtle in handling the problem before him.

To such a character was presented an exuberant child, growing rapidly, vivacious, somewhat proud, and hitherto unaccustomed to effort of any kind, a monkey for mimicry, clever at picking up a tune upon the keys, a tomboy shouting her German phrases down the corridors of Schoenbrünn, a fine little lady at Vienna—acting either part well. The light russet of her hair and her thick eyebrows gave promise of her future energy; she had already acquired the tricks of rank, the carriage of the head and the ready mechanical interest in inferiors—for the rest she was empty. In this critical fourteenth year of hers, during which it was proposed to fashion out of such happy German childhood a strict and delicate French princess, she did not read and she could barely write. The big round letters, as she painfully fashioned them in her occasional lessons, were those of a baby. Her drawing was infantile; and while she rapidly learnt a phrase in a foreign language by ear, a complete revolution in her education would have been needed to make her accurate in the use of words or to make her understand a Latin sentence or parse a French one.

To cultivate such a soil, exactly one hour a day was spared when the Court was at Vienna—somewhat more when it was in the country—and these few minutes were consumed in nothing more methodical than a dialogue, little talks in which Vermond was fatally anxious to bring before his pupil (with her head full of those new French head-dresses of hers, the prospect of Versailles, and every other distraction of mind) only such subjects as might amuse her inattention.

The early months of 1769 were full of this inanity, Vermond regularly reporting progress to the Austrian Embassy in France, regularly complaining of the difficulty of his task, regularly insisting upon his rules and as regularly failing in his object. In the autumn the Empress was at the pains of asking her daughter a few questions, notably upon history. The result did not dissatisfy her, but meanwhile Maria Antonietta could hardly write her name.

Side by side with this continued negligence in set training, and in the discipline that accompanies it, went a very rapid development in manner. The child was admitted to the Court; she was even permitted the experiment of presiding at small gatherings of her own. The experiment succeeded. She acquired with an amazing rapidity what little remained to be learnt of the externals of rank. The alternate phrases addressed to one’s neighbours round a table, the affectation of satiety and of repose, the gait in which the feet are hardly lifted; the few steps forward to meet a magnate, the fewer to greet a lesser man, and that smiling immobility before men of the ordinary sort which is still a living tradition in great drawing-rooms; the power of putting on an air in the very moment between privacy and a public appearance—all these came to her so naturally and by so strongly inherited an instinct, that she not only charmed the genial elders of the Austrian capital but satisfied experienced courtiers, even those visitors from France, who examined it all with the eyes of connoisseurs and watched her deportment as a work of art, whose slight errors in technique they could at once discover but whose general excellence they were able to appreciate and willing to proclaim.

She did indeed preserve beneath that conventional surface a fire of vigorous life that was apparent in every hour. Once in the foreign atmosphere of France and subject to exasperation and contrast that heat would burst forth. She became, as her future showed, capable of violent scenes in public and of the natural gestures of anger—it is to her honour that she was on the whole so often herself. Here at Vienna in this last year her young energy did no more than lend spirit and grace to the conventions she so quickly acquired.

The opening of the year 1770 found her thus, her German half forgotten, her French (though imperfect) habitual, her acquaintance with the air of a Court considerable. Though she was still growing rapidly she was now dressed as a woman and taught to walk on her high heels as did the ladies her seniors. Her hair was brushed off her high forehead in the French manner, the stuff of her frocks and the cut of them were French, her name was now permanently Frenchified for her, and she heard herself called everywhere “Marie Antoinette”; none but old servants were left to give her the names she had first known.

March passed and the moment of her departure approached. The child had never travelled. To her vivacious and eager temper the prospect of so great a journey with so splendid an ending was an absorbing pleasure. It filled her mind even during the retreat which, under Vermond’s guidance, she entered during Holy Week, and every sign of her approaching progress excited in her a vivid curiosity and expectation, as it did in her mother a mixture of foreboding and of pride.

The official comedy which the Court played during April heightened the charm: the heralds, the receptions, that quaint but gorgeous ceremony of renunciation, the mock marriage, the white silver braid and the white satin of her wedding-clothes, the salvoes of artillery and the feasts were all a fine great play for her, with but one interlude of boredom, when her mother dictated, and she wrote (heaven knows with what a careful guidance of the pen) a letter which she was to deliver to the King of France. With that letter Maria Theresa enclosed a note of her own, familiar, almost domestic, imploring Louis XV., her contemporary, to see to the child as “one that had a good heart,” ... but was ardent and a trifle wild.

These words were written upon the 20th of the month; on the morning of the 21st of April 1770 the line of coaches left the palace, and the Archduchess took the western road.

There was no sudden severance. Her eldest brother, Joseph, he who was associated with her mother in the Empire, accompanied her during the whole of the first day. Of an active, narrow, and formal intelligence, grossly self-sufficient, arithmetical in temper, and with a sort of native atheism in him such as stagnates in minds whose development is early arrested, a philosopher therefore and a prig, earnest, lean, and an early riser, he was of all companions the one who could most easily help Marie Antoinette to forget Vienna and to desire Versailles. The long hours of the drive were filled with platitudes and admonitions that must easily have extinguished all her regrets for his Court and have bred in her a natural impatience for the new horizons that were before her. He left her at Melk. She continued her way with her household, hearing for the last time upon every side the German tongue, not knowing that she heard also, for the last time, the accents of sincere affection and sincere servility: the French temper with its concealed edges of sharpness was to find her soon enough.

Her journey was not slow for the times. She took but little more than a week to reach the Rhine from Augsburg—a French army on the march has done no better. It was on the evening of the 6th of May that she could see, far off against the sunset, the astonishing spire of Strasburg and was prepared to enter France; only the Rhine was now between her and her new life.

She bore upon her person during this last night on German soil a last letter of her mother’s which had reached her but the day before yesterday. It was the most intimate and the most searching she was to receive in all the long correspondence which was to pass between them for ten years, and it contained a phrase which the child could hardly understand, but which, if texts and single phrases were of the least advantage to conduct, might have deflected her history and that of Europe. “The one felicity of this world is a happy marriage: I can say so with knowledge; and the whole hangs upon the woman, that she should be willing, gentle, and able to amuse.”

Next day at noon she crossed in great pomp to an island in mid-river, where a temporary building of wood had been raised upon the exact frontier for the ceremony of her livery.

It is possible that the long ritual of her position—she was to endure it for twenty years—was already a burden upon her versatility, even after these short weeks. Here, on this island, the true extent of the French parade first met her. It was sufficient to teach her what etiquette was to mean. The poor child had to take off every stitch of her clothes and to dress, to a ribbon or a hair-pin, with an order strictly ordained and in things all brought from Versailles for the occasion. Once so dressed she was conducted to a central room where her German household gave her to her French one, at the head of which the kindly and sometimes foolish Countess de Noailles performed the accustomed rites, and the Archduchess entered for ever the million formalities of her new world. They had not yet fatigued her. She was taken to Mass at the Cathedral; she received the courtesy of the old bishop, a Rohan, in whose great family Strasburg was almost an appanage.

There was a figure standing by the Bishop’s side. She saw, clothed in that mature majesty which a man of thirty may have for a child of fifteen, the bishop’s coadjutor, a nephew and a Rohan too. She noted his pomposity and perhaps his good looks, but he meant nothing to her; he was but one of the Rohans to be remembered. He noted her well.

Next day and for six more her journey proceeded amid perpetual deputations, Latin, flowers, bad verses, stage peasantry, fireworks, feasts and addresses, until, a week after she had crossed the Rhine, she slept at Soissons and knew that on the morrow she would see the King.

The pavement of the long road out from Soissons, the great royal road, had sounded under the wheels of her carriage for now the best part of the day. She had already found Choiseul awaiting her in state, and had exchanged with this old friend of her mother’s those ceremonial compliments of which the child was now well weary, when, through the left-hand window of her coach, which was open to the warm spring day, she saw before her a thing of greater interest—the league-long line of trees that ends abruptly against the bare plain and marks the forest of Compiègne.

Into this wood the road plunged, straight and grand, until after a declivity, where a little stream is crossed (near the place where the railway lines join to-day), there appeared awaiting her, as Choiseul had awaited her some miles before, a great and orderly group of people, of carriages, and horses; but this company was far larger and was ranked with more solemnity than others that had met her upon her progress. She knew that it was the King.

The splendour which a history full of trumpets had lent to the French name, the lineage of the Kings, the imagined glories of Versailles—all these had penetrated the nursery and the schoolroom of the Princess. As she came down from her carriage, with either hand reposing in the hands of her escort, an awe of the Capetian monarchy came upon her, and she knelt upon the roadway in the midst of the Court, of the Princesses who now first saw the little heiress of their lives, of the gilded carriages and the men-at-arms.

The King raised her up and kissed her forehead; he motioned forward a heavy, shambling, frowning boy, his grandson, for whom all this pomp existed. The lad shuffled forward, bent a little perhaps, and kissed her in his turn with due ceremony—for he was to be her husband. When this little ritual and its sharp emotions were over she had a moment, before her introductions to the Blood, to the King’s mature daughters, to the Orleans and the rest, in which to seize with that bright glance, which was always so ready for exterior things, the manner of the King.

Louis XV. was at that moment a man just past his sixtieth year. Long habit had given him, as it gives to all but the greatest of those educated to power, an attitude constrained though erect. His age had told on him, he had grown somewhat fat, he moved without alertness and—a weakness which had appeared but lately—his rare and uncompleted gestures expressed the weight of his body; but his muscles were firm, his command of them perfect, and he still had, especially in repose, so far as age can have it, grace.

The united pallor of his complexion, which had been remarkable in youth, seemed now more consonant to his years. The steady indifference to which he had reduced his features was now more dignified than when its rigidity had seemed unnatural and new. His expression had even acquired a certain strength from the immobility and firmness of his mouth, whose lines displayed a talent for exact language and a capacity for continued dignity; but his eyes betrayed him.

They were warm in spite of a habit of command, but the sadness in them (which was profound and permanent) was of a sort which sprang from physical appetites always excessive and now surviving abnormally beyond their time. There was also in those eyes the memory of considerable but uprooted affections, and, deeper, of a fixed despair, and deeper far—a veil as it were behind their brightness—the mortal tedium, to escape from which this human soul had sacrificed the national traditions and the ancient honour of the crown.

This great Monarch, whom no one since his boyhood had approached without a certain fear, received his grandson’s betrothed with an air almost paternal. It was a relaxation upon his part to which he owed, during the remainder of his life, the strongly affectionate respect which Marie Antoinette, vivacious and ungoverned, paid to him alone in the palace.

He presented the rest in turn. She heard names which were to mix so intimately with her own destiny, and when they set out again upon the road she could discreetly watch during the long ten miles to Compiègne, Chartres who would soon be Orleans, the faded faces of the King’s spinster-daughters, the old Duke of Ponthièvre; and she watched with a greater care that daughter of his whose foolish, dainty, and sentimental face, insecure upon its long thin neck, was that of a young, unhappy widow: the Princesse de Lamballe.

When they had slept at Compiègne in state, the whole pageant moved on next morning down the Paris road upon the last day’s march of that journey, and the child thought that she was now upon the threshold of nothing but an easy glory. She was nearing—amid great mobs and a whole populace come out to greet her, not only Paris and Versailles, but much more—she was nearing that woman whose name her mother had heard and half forgotten, whose name she herself had never heard. It was a name whose influence was to deflect the first current of her life: the name of Du Barry.

There is but one instrument efficacious to the government of men, which is Persuasion, and Persuasion sickens when its agent fails in dignity.

Dignity is the exterior one of the many qualities necessary to commandment; these in some cases touch closely upon virtue, so that, in some situations of authority, a dignified man is presumably a good one. But in the particular case of national government it is not so. The audience is so vast, the actor so distant and removed, that in this matter dignity resides mainly in the observance of whatever ritual the national temper and the national form of the executive demand. Such functions of ritual endanger rather than strengthen the soul of him who is called upon to assume them. To his intimates they appear as mummeries. It is often a sign of personal excellence in a ruler when he is himself disgusted with them and even casts them aside; but they are necessary to the State. For if such ritual is ill-observed, dignity fails; in its failure persuasion, I say, sickens, and when persuasion sickens, government, upon which depends the cohesion of a nation and the co-ordination of its faculties, breaks down.

The method of government in France at this time was a true personal monarchy.

The institution had increased in consciousness and in executive power down the long avenue of fourteen hundred years. Its roots were in Rome. It stood up in the seventh century as a memory of the Roman Peace, in the eighth as a promise to restore the Roman order. From the ninth onwards it was vested in a Gaulish family and already had begun to express the Gaulish unities; by the thirteenth its mission was ardent and victorious. When the religious wars of the sixteenth century were resolved in a national settlement and the Bourbon branch was finally acknowledged, the crown was supreme and the whole people held to and were summed up in the Monarchy. It had made a yeoman of the serf, it had welded the nation together, it had established the frontiers, it had repressed the treason of the wealthy Huguenots: it was France.

The person of the Monarch was public and publicly worshipped. His spoken words were actually law: he could impose a peace; his private decision could suspend a debt, imprison a transgressor, ruin or create an industry. Into such a mould had the French energy forced the executive when the genius of Richelieu and the cunning of Mazarin confirmed the powers of the throne, and left them in legacy to the virile sense of Louis XIV.

This King was very great and cast accurately also to the part he should fill. The conventions and the trappings of the part delighted him; he played it royally, and when he died, though he left the crown to an infant great-grandson, yet its security seemed as permanent as does to-day the security in similar powers of our English rich. But that great-grandson, at first gradually and at last rapidly, undermined the stable seat he had inherited. Louis XV., by his good qualities as well as by his evil, tended more and more to reject the ritual necessary to his kingship. His good breeding and his active physical appetites, his idleness and his sincerity, all combined to weary him of the game, so that at the end of his long reign he had almost ceased in the eyes of the populace to be a King at all.

The Monarchy therefore perished, and mainly through Louis XV.’s incapacity to maintain its essential livery. Its collapse, its replacement (with consequences enormous to the whole of Europe) by that other French formula which we call “The Revolution” or “The Republic,” was so exactly contemporaneous with Marie Antoinette’s marriage and with her presence at Versailles, that far too great a part in the catastrophe is assigned to her own misjudgments and misfortunes. No error or disaster of hers gave the death shock to the institution with which her life was mingled; that stroke had been delivered before the child crossed the Rhine, and the moment when the blow was struck was that in which Mercy had penned the name “Du Barry,” which Maria Theresa had read so carelessly in Vienna on the same day that brought the letter sealing her daughter’s marriage.

The public appearance of Madame Du Barry was the turning-point in the history of Versailles, and the little Archduchess, when she came upon French earth, did not bring a curse to her new country, for the destiny of that country was already determined; rather this France which she had entered had prepared a tragedy for her and a fate expected by her own unhappy stars.

Those who have watched the destruction of an old and strong wall will remember that it seemed at first to resist with ease every battery of the assault. At last there came one effort, more violent than the rest, which broke long, zig-zag lines throughout the fabric. The work was done. A few succeeding impacts visibly disintegrated the now loosened stones until the whole fell rapidly into ruin. So it was with the French Monarchy. The Regency, the floating theories of public criticism, the indeterminate foreign policy, the military reverses of the Seven Years’ War, the careless lethargy of Louis XV. in State affairs, had impaired the fabric of tradition, but that fabric still stood. It might yet have been restored and made whole had not the King in his last years chosen the particular mistress and presented her in a particular manner, which threw chaos into the scheme that every Frenchman took for granted when he considered his sovereign. This last thud, coming after so many accumulated tremors, loosened all the wall. The trials and distractions of the next reign did but pull apart, and that easily, the loosened stones. The imposing posture which the French demand of their symbols had been dropped by the old King; the new one could not restore it. Choose at random any man or woman of your acquaintance in history, put them upon the throne after the death of Louis XV., and though the succeeding quarter of a century would have varied somewhat with various individualities in power, the doom of the Monarchy would by none have been averted.

Let us see what happened when that fatal news of Madame Du Barry’s advent spread through the Court and the capital of France and reached, like the ripple of a wave, the shores of Vienna.

The King (as has almost every other King in history) had indulged his body; he had also indulged his desire for intimate companionship, his man’s whim for an expression, a tone of voice, or a gesture. This licence, which to their bane is granted to privileged and symbolic men, had led him into every distraction. His amours were many, but middle age had fixed his routine, if not his constancy, upon one woman of remarkable character.

Madame de Pompadour, as she came later to be called, was not of the nobility. To have taken a mistress publicly from the rank of business people was a serious reproach to the King; but though the mass condemned such an alliance, and though the wealthy, both of the middle class and of the courtiers, found an added blame in the financial reputation of her father and the notorious lightness of her mother, yet there was about this young, vigorous, and commanding hostess something that could prevent too violent a reaction of opinion.

She was extremely rich; her drawing-room had held all the famous men of her day; her education was wide and liberal, her judgment excellent. She played and sang with exceptional charm. She had good manners; she rode, spoke, read, and entertained as might the principal of her contemporaries.

The acknowledged position of such a woman at Court, though a new degradation, was a tolerable one. It was easy for the most reserved to understand how, in those years between thirty and forty when the strongest affections take root, the King had found in her company a sort of home. Her character was, moreover, comprehensible and secretly sympathetic to that vast proprietary body, the Bourgeoisie, which then were and are now the stuff of the nation.

She was prudent, she could choose a friend or a servant; her vivacity did not lack restraint. She was decent, fond of quiet silk, of good taste in decoration and of management. Her position at Versailles was a sort of conquest effected by the middle classes over the Court. Such a mistress, ruling for many years, the nation received at last with far more calm than could the buzzing nobles of the palace. As she (and the King) grew older, as her power became absolute and his individual presence grew remote, the situation was acceptable to Paris even more than to those who immediately surrounded the throne.

She died. There was an interval of puzzled silence about the person of the King. No one dreamt of a new power at Court. A nullity of action in the King himself, a few more stories, obscure and scandalous, the end of the reign and the accession of the heir who should bring with him such reforms as all the intellect of the country demanded: these were the expectations which followed her death, and especially were they the hope or the certitude of that group of men, mostly not noble, who had long managed both law and finance.

This prospect had, however, omitted one capital factor in the calculation. Louis XV., during these long years of regular habit, had grown old, and age in such a character, thus isolated, thus re-entrant, and yet hungry for whatever might tempt the senses, could only lead to some appalling error. In years he was, when Madame de Pompadour died, but little past fifty, but that blindness to exterior opinion and that carelessness for the future which properly belong to an age much more advanced, had already spread like a mist over his mind. After an interval of less than four years from the Pompadour’s death, the nation and the capital and those leaders of opinion who awaited a mere negative decline full of petty rumours but controlled as to great affairs by that Choiseul whom the Pompadour herself had chosen for Minister, were presented with the Du Barry: the scandal and its effect were overwhelming.

This woman was a prostitute.

CHAPTER IV
THE DU BARRY

THE presence of the Du Barry at the Court of Versailles, the fact that this presence preceded the Austrian child’s arrival, that it was first publicly admitted at the first public appearance of the Dauphiness, and that the four years of her tutelage were overshadowed by the new Royal Mistress was the initial and irretrievable disaster of Marie Antoinette’s life. It moulded her view of the nation and of the family with whom she had now to mingle; it deeply affected the populace she was to attempt to rule; it cloistered, warped and distracted her vision of France at a moment in adolescence when vision is most acute and the judgment formed upon it most permanent. All the Queen’s tragedy is furnished by the early spell of this insignificant and licentious woman.

With her advent was introduced for the first time into the Court that insolent and calculated disregard for rule in gesture and vocabulary wherein which the rich will often secretly relax their ordered lives, but which, when it appears publicly amidst their daily furniture, is as shocking as nakedness or as blood.

Judged in the pure light of human morals the position of the Du Barry was surely less offensive to God than that of any mistress any King has ever chosen. Louis wronged no one by this whim. He wrecked no remains of chastity—the woman had never known the meaning of the word. He wronged no subject (as has and does almost every royal lover in every amour)—her marriage had been but a hurried form run through to satisfy etiquette, “that she might be presented at Court.” He provided himself with a companion too inferior to make political intrigue her main ambition, and with one that could and did surround him with an abject but constant, familiar, and comfortable affection. It was such a vagary of old age as those in which have terminated countless lives, when old gentlemen of breeding but of enfeebled will surround their last years with youth and with the vigour, tainted vigour, that is inseparable from vulgarity. There is not one of us but has come upon a dozen such unions: they are often confirmed by a tardy marriage.

But in the case of Louis and this scandal of his a necessary element to such disgrace, the element of retirement, was lacking. Those symbols which, if they are insisted upon, are mere hypocrisies, but which, taken normally, are the guardians of a tolerable life, were outraged. The eyes of the noble-women at Versailles were full, some of a real or affected timidity, others of a real or affected dignity. Such ladies as chose to be sprightly or even to advertise their loose habit with over-brilliant and vivacious looks, retained, considered, and could always assume refinement; but the beautiful eyes of the Du Barry were brazen. The mignardises, which are always ill-suited to a woman, might be deliberately affected by the less subtle of the more elderly beauties: with the Du Barry, despite her evident youth, they had already become native and ineradicable. She lisped alarmingly; she lolled, or, when it was necessary for her to sit erect, was awkward. Her entry into a room was conscious; her assertions loud, her amiability oiled, her animosities superficially violent. It is upon solemn occasions that such deficiencies are most glaring, and solemn occasions were of continual recurrence at Versailles. In a word, she was most desperately out of place, and therefore produced an effect as of dirt, jarring against whatever was palatine and splendid in the evil of the Court by her parade of the loose good-nature and the looser spites of the Parisian brothels.

Yet it is not difficult to see what had brought the King into so fixed a relation with her. Whoever will compare any of the portraits of her by Drouais with any by Boucher of the Pompadour will see, not the same character indeed, but the same brows and forehead.

Louis could not continue in those early and familiar relations with her which had become a necessity to him, unless in some way her place were publicly acknowledged; but to force such a personality upon the Court, to give it precedence and to see that its position should be permanent, was an effort he had avoided for months. A scene was intolerable to him. He suffered from the most common defect attaching to men of lineage and wealth in that he feared, or rather could not endure, the prospect of violence. Orders even and debate, if they were of a personal and verbal kind, he shrank from as do some men from loud noises. The more important and decisive of his actions were effected in short notes, every line of which, as we read them to-day, manifest his urgent need of isolation: of getting the business done without the friction of another presence, and once done, put aside for ever.

For the public presentation of the Du Barry the marriage of his grandson, and especially the presence of the little Archduchess, offered a fatal opportunity. It would be impossible for the malicious to allude to the office of the Mistress in the presence of the child; the occasion would compel the princes and princesses of the blood to attend, and would equally forbid any general revolt. He determined to give the Archduchess a formal banquet on the journey before the Court and its company had reached Versailles, to summon to it the chief members of the Court, and to let them find at table, without warning, the woman whose existence had hitherto not been spoken of in his presence.

The official limit of Paris upon the west—in those days—a line drawn far beyond the houses and enclosing many fields, gardens, and suburbs, ran from what is now the Trocadero to what is now the Arc de Triomphe. Outside the gate or barrier was an empty space of land but partially cultivated and with no more than a scattered house or two upon it, save where, along the waterside and on the hill above it, clustered the village of Passy. This empty space merged gradually into what were then the wild and unfrequented Boulogne woods. Just on the edge of these, in a situation which was close to the town and yet upon one side accessible to the forest, stood a royal hunting-box called “La Muette,” which had gradually developed into a little palace. Here, on the evening of the day after Compiègne, the long and splendid train of the Court arrived, bearing in the chief coach the King, the Dauphin, and this new Austrian girl for whom Louis had already shown so much respect and tenderness, and whose entry into her rank he was yet to distort.

The day had been long for the child, but her curiosity and the vitality of her years had forbidden her to feel fatigue.

Dense mobs of people, cheering and running by the side of the carriages, had indeed been familiar to her since her babyhood, but the vivacity and the shrillness and the surprising contrasts of this active civilisation—its solemn roads, its simple architecture, broken by an occasional and unexpected magnificence, the long lines of ordered trees which here seemed as native as in her own country they had seemed artificial and foreign; the half-hour’s glimpse of an austere French convent which she had had when she visited at St. Denis (in passing); the King’s daughter, veiled among the Carmelites; the outskirts of a gigantic city such as she had never known—all these sufficed to distract her until the fall of the cold spring evening, when the line of carriages clattered into the paved courtyard of La Muette.

As though such experiences were not sufficient to bewilder her with the new world, the girl found when she came to her room, attended by Madame de Noailles and the ladies of her suite, such a parade of diamonds upon her table as to-day one will see only in the vulgar surroundings of a public show.

The instinct for gems which was latent in her, but which the extreme simplicity of the Austrian Court had not permitted to arise, awoke at once. They were the diamonds of the woman who would have been her mother-in-law had she lived, or rather who, had she lived, would never have permitted this marriage. They had reverted to the Crown upon her death, and Louis XV. had had them placed there upon Marie Antoinette’s table in readiness for her appearance; he had so sent them partly from a sort of paternal kindness, partly from a desire typical in him to exceed even in giving pleasure; but also, perhaps, partly to atone for the harm he was about to do her. For when the child came down, some two hours later, and was led in the strict etiquette of the Court procession into the dining-hall of the little palace, she could not but notice throughout the meal that followed a constraint less natural than that regular constraint of the French Court life which, in twenty-four hours of experience, had already struck her quick apprehension. It was not that men and women waited for the King to speak, but that their answers were given without vivacity, and with that curious mixture of restraint and purpose which she had already perhaps noticed, in her brief acquaintance with the French, to be the mark of their conversation in anger. She saw also that the old King looked straight before him with something of sullenness in his dignity, and she saw sitting next to him a woman whose presence there must have perpetually intrigued her imagination. That woman was the Du Barry.

To whatever adventures and novelties the children of gentle-folk are exposed, there is always one note of vulgarity which they can make nothing of and which, while it offends them, disturbs and astonishes them much more than it offends. In the midst of that curiously silent, erect, and very splendid table, where forty of her sex and of her rank were present, the presence of this one woman was in its nervous effect like the intolerable reiteration of a mechanical sound interrupting a tragic strain of music. The Du Barry had not the art, so common to the poorest members of the nobility or of the middle class, when they would slip in among the wealthy, of remaining silent and of affecting a reverence for her new surroundings. She held herself with a loose ease before them all, was perhaps the only one to laugh, and permitted herself an authority that was the more effective because it hardly concealed her very great hesitation in this first public recognition of her place.

What the child Marie Antoinette made of such an apparition will never be known. Her first letters to her mother upon the matter come later, when she had fully understood the insult or at least the indignity which had been done her. The only record we possess of her emotion is this: that when just after supper some courtier was at the pains to ask her, with infinite respect and a peculiar irony, what she had thought of Madame Du Barry, she said, “Charming,” and nothing more.

Next day in the early morning the coaches took on again the last steps of the journey to Versailles. Twelve miles which were a repetition of those scenes, those crowds, and those cheers of which the little Archduchess was now sufficiently weary, but which were leading up to that event toward which her childhood had been directed, and which could not but drive out of her mind the doubts of the evening before.

By ten o’clock the procession had passed the great gates of Versailles; three hours were spent in the long, distressing, and rigid ceremonies of the Court in whose centre she was now placed and whose magnificence now first enveloped her. It was one before the procession formed for the marriage ceremony, and had placed at the head of it the girl, and the boy whom, in this long trial of two days, she had but little regarded.

She came under the high vault of the new, gilded chapel as full of life as the music that greeted her entry. On her left the boy, to whom so much publicity was a torture, went awkwardly and with the nervous sadness of his eyes intensified; his gold braid and his diamonds heightened his ill-ease. He managed to give her the ring and the coins proper to the ceremony, to kneel and stand when he was told; but she went royally, playing, as girl children so easily play, at womanhood, and smiling upon all around.

The contrast was gravely apparent when they passed together down the aisle with the Quête, and when they sat—he effaced, she triumphant—during the little sermon which the Grand Almoner was bound to deliver. The heir was not relieved till the Mass was over and the book was brought wherein the signature of the witnesses and principals to a marriage are inscribed.

It is natural to the extreme of privilege that it should affect occasional and absurd simplicities. The last generation of Versailles was eager for such things, and it had become the custom that a royal marriage should be registered not in any grand and parchment manner but in the common book of a parish church, the church to whose parish the palace was nominally attached. Father Allart, the rector of this, in whose hard and unimportant life such days were set, came in to give the book. The Grand Almoner set it before them and they signed—the King first, with his large and practised name; the Dauphin next in a writing that was thin, accurate, and null. He passed the pen to this little new wife of his, who was to sign third. At so practical a test her womanhood dropped off her, her exceedingly ignorant childhood returned. She got through the “Marie” with no mistake of spelling, but the letters were a trifle uncertain and the word askew. Why had not some one ruled a line as lines are ruled in copy-books? “Antoinette,” the second word, was larger and gave more trouble; the last letters fell away deplorably. And when it came to the third name, “Josepha,” it was too much for her altogether. She did her best with the “J”—it ended in a huge blot, and she became so flurried that she spelt her last name anyhow, without the “e,” and let it go to pieces. She was relieved to give the pen to Provence, who, though he was yet so young, wrote his name strongly like a man. Artois, Mesdames, the Orleans followed. Each as they signed could see at the head of the page that deplorable and dirty scrawl which the child, whose advent each of them feared, had left as a record of her fifteenth year.

The Court left the chapel. As they passed into the outer galleries of the palace before the enormous and increasing crowd which thronged the stairways and the landing-floors, the air seemed much darker than when they had passed in an hour before. Through the great windows the sky could be seen lowering for a storm. As she entered the private apartments to receive homage the darkness increased; the ceremony was not over before a first loud clap of thunder startled them; the rain fell with violence upon the populace that had crowded the gardens, the fireworks set out for that evening were drenched, the fine dresses of the Paris shop-women were spoiled: all the grandeur in front of the palace was lost in umbrellas. It cleared, and they crushed in, with their muddy boots well scraped, to file in thousands, a long procession urged on by the Guards and passing, behind a barrier, down the immense hall, where the tables were set for cards. The King and his Court played solemnly like actors who must pretend to see no audience, sitting thus as a public symbol of the nation.

The crowd passed thus, company after company, staring at Monarchy and at the dresses and the gems till the West grew dark, and the myriads of candles, reflected on a wall that was all mirrors, lent that evening its true colours. When the last reluctant sightseer had looked his last over his shoulder and had felt the tapestry drop behind him, the ceremony ceased, the tables were cleared, the King rose and conducted the bride to her room. A full ceremonial of etiquette was wearily and thoroughly performed, the Grand Almoner (once again) blessed the children’s bed, and that was the end of the marriage.

Outside, the crowd went back through the May night to their lodgings or to Paris, full of feasting, damp, surrounded by the fresh air that follows rain. They carried with them a confused memory of a great outing—music, grandeur, diamonds, innumerable lights, no fireworks, and a storm.

CHAPTER V
THE DAUPHINE

Wednesday, 16th of May 1770 to Tuesday, 10th of May 1774

WHEN the mock-marriage was over and the night passed, and when, with the Thursday morning, the long routine that was to be her life opened upon her, the child could watch with less excitement and with less illusion the nature of that new world. Her vivacity was not diminished, but her spirit immediately adopted a permanent attitude of astonished observation towards emotions and conventions whose general scheme she could not grasp at all. Daily the incidents which passed before her while they violently moved also repelled her senses; she was reconciled to them only by their repetition.

Versailles was the more bewildering to her because, in all its externals, it was the world she had known from her birth. The French cooking, architecture, dress, and social manner had for a century imposed themselves upon the palaces of Europe; but the French mind, now first in contact with her own, remained to her a marvellous and unpleasing revelation, which, even after years of regarding its energy, still shocked her.

There was a ball that night. She danced with her bright-eyed and tall young brother-in-law. At what he was sneering she could not understand, nor even if the boy’s expression was a sneer: she knew that it was strange. She did not notice the absence of half the Court; she did not know that her mother’s request for Precedence to be given to the Princesses of Lorraine had raised this silent French storm; had she been told she would not have comprehended. The extreme and individual French jealousies, the furious discussions that underlie the united formality of French etiquette, were alien and inhuman to her German breeding; for active and living, almost Southern, as was this Viennese girl, she enjoyed to the end the good simplicity of her mother’s race. She danced with young Chartres. If something in him chilled her, she could not divine what it was in that character which even then seemed closed, and which later was to make him vote her husband’s death, and sit at wine in his palace while she sat a prisoner and widowed in her prison at hand.

For days the feasts continued and for days her unexpected experiences of persons and of a strange nationality were relieved by pageants and popular clamours which, at her age, could distract her from weary questions. It was at one of these that there sounded once more that note of disaster which came at rhythmic intervals across her life and continued to come until a climax closed it. She had leave to go with her aunts, the King’s daughters, by night with a small escort to see the public holiday in Paris which celebrated her marriage. She was to go without ceremony, not to be recognised, merely to satisfy a child’s curiosity for a spectacle in her own honour. As the coach came up the river road towards what is now the Trocadero hill she could already see far off the flash of the rockets, and she heard with increasing pleasure the roar of a great crowd met to do her honour. As she neared the great square which is called to-day the Place de la Concorde she was disappointed, as children are, to see that the coach was late; the great scaffolding and final set-piece in which her initials were interlaced with those of the Dauphin was sputtering out in the inglorious end of fireworks—but something more intimate to her (had she known herself) and worse than her childish disappointment had marked the moment of her arrival. The coach was stopped abruptly, the guards closed round it, and it was turned back at once towards Versailles. As it rumbled through the darkness more quickly than it had come, she seemed to hear in the distant clamour both fierceness and terror. It was a sound of panic. She heard the news whispered respectfully and fearfully to her aunts during a halt upon the way. Perhaps they thought her too young to be told. She complained as she went that the truth was concealed from her, and when they reached the palace late that night she was crying. Next day the news was public, and she learned that after this first rejoicing, in what was to be her capital city, there had been crushed and maimed and killed many hundreds of her people; it proved one of those misfortunes which, as much from their circumstance as from their magnitude, remain fixed for years in the memory of a nation, and the day on which she learned it was the last of the month of her wedding.

During the summer that followed this presage she learnt the whole lesson of Versailles. She was still a child. Mercy still wrote of her to her mother in a tone which, for all its conventional respect, was a tone now of irritation against, now of amused admiration for, a child. She had her daily childish lessons with the Abbé Vermond and daily exasperated him by her distractions. She still wrote painfully her childish letters to Maria Theresa, took her little childish donkey-rides, and was strongly impressed, as a child would be, by those of her elders who alone could show some authority over her—Mesdames, her husband’s aunts. She was growing fast; and there is nothing more touching in the minute record of her life than the notes of her increasing stature during this year, so oddly does the nursery detail contrast with the splendour of her place in Europe and the titles of her rôle.

She was still a child; but as her fifteenth birthday approached and was passed she had learnt (while it wearied her) the full etiquette of her part, and she had begun, though imperfectly, to recognise what were the politics of a Court and in what manner intrigue would approach her: how to avoid or master it she discovered neither then nor at any later time throughout her adolescence and maturity.

With the advent of winter and its long and brilliant festivals, another thing which she had begun to comprehend in the palace became for her a fixed object of hatred: the position and influence of the Du Barry.

She knew now what this official place was which the Favourite held. Her disgust for so much regulation and pomp in such an office would in any case have been strong, for Marie Antoinette came from a Court where the sovereign was herself a woman and where all this side of men’s lives was left to the suburbs: that disgust would in any case have been sharp, for she was too young and too utterly inexperienced to be indulgent; it would in any case have been increased by a sense of isolation, for all around this German child were the French gentry taking for granted that everything touching a King of France, from his vices to his foibles, must be dressed up in a national and symbolic magnificence. Her disgust would, I say, in any case have risen against so much complexity allied to so much strength, but that disgust turned into an active and violent repulsion when she saw the Du Barry not only, as it were, official but also exercising power. This to her very young and passionate instincts, whether of sex, of rank, or of policy, was intolerable; it was the more intolerable in that the Du Barry’s first exercise of power happened to go counter to interests which the Dauphine regarded rather too emphatically as those of Austria and of her family.

The chief Minister of the Crown, the Duc de Choiseul, kindly, sceptical, well-bred and rather hollow, had been, if not the mere creation or discovery, at any rate the ally of Madame de Pompadour. Madame de Pompadour had been a statesman herself: Choiseul had perpetually supported her and she him, more especially when he ran in the rut of the time, showed himself conventionally anti-Christian, and (having been educated by the Jesuits) was drawn into the intrigue by which that order was suppressed. He had been ambassador at Vienna, though that in a year when Marie Antoinette was a baby, so that she had no early memories of his snub-nose and happy, round face; but she had known his name all her life from the talk of the palace in Vienna, and she had known it under the title which he had assumed just after her birth. The Duc de Choiseul was for her, as for every foreigner, a name now permanently associated with French policy and a Minister who was identical with Versailles. Maria Theresa was grateful to him for having permitted the marriage of her daughter: that daughter after some months of the French Court very probably imagined that he had not only permitted but helped to design the alliance. It was against this man that the Du Barry stumbled.

It would not be just to accuse the young woman Du Barry of design. The State was a very vague thing to her. She held good fellowship with many, owed her advancement to Choiseul’s enemies, and was, in general, the creature of the clique opposed to him, while for D’Aiguillon, who already posed as the rival of the elder man, she felt perhaps a personal affection. She was very vain and full of that domestic ambition which comes in floods upon women of her sort when they attain a position of some regularity. She loved to feel herself possessed of what she had learned in the old days to call (in the jargon of her lovers) “office,” “power”; to feel that she could “make” people. As for the pleasure of an applauded judgment, or the satisfaction of that appetite for choice which inspires women of Madame de Pompadour’s sort in history, the Du Barry would not have understood the existence of such an emotion. The most inept and the most base received the advantage of her patronage, not because she believed them capable of administration, but simply because they had shown least scruple in receiving her, or later, amid the general coldness of the Court, had been the first to pay her an exaggerated respect. As for those with whom she could recall familiarities in the past, she was willing to make the fortunes of them all.

Though such an attitude could easily have been played upon by the courtiers of her set, it could never have supplied a motive force for her demands nor have nourished the tenacity with which she pressed them; that force and that tenacity were supplied to her by her own acute sensitiveness upon her new position. The angry pique to which all her kind can be moved in the day of their highly imperfect success was aflame at every incident which recalled to her the truth of her origin and the incongruity of her situation: in her convulsive desire to revenge against every slight, real or imagined, she found an ally in the old King, her lover. He also knew that he was in a posture of humiliation, and under his calm and tired bearing he suffered a continual irritation from that knowledge. As he pottered about his frying-pans, cooking some late dish to his liking, or went alone and almost furtively down the hidden stair between her little, low, luxurious rooms and his own rooms of state, his silent mind was even less at ease than in the days, now so long past, when an utter weariness with the things of the flesh and a despair of discovering other emotions had first put into his eyes the tragedy that still shines from them upon the walls of Versailles.

All, therefore, that the Du Barry did through Louis XV. as her power increased was not for this or that person whom she feared or loved; it was rather against this or that person whose presence she found intolerable. All that she suggested, so far as persons were concerned, the King was ready to achieve.

Had some married woman of force and subtlety formed the centre of opposition to the Favourite, the reign would have ended easily. Mary of Saxony, the Dauphin’s mother, had been such a woman, and would, had she lived, have conducted affairs to a decent close. Fate put in the place of such a woman first three old maids—the King’s daughters—and next this little girl, the Dauphine.

The origins were slight, but in its course the quarrel gathered impetus. At first came that silent great supper-party at La Muette and the instinctive repulsion which the child felt and which this woman from the streets as instinctively resented. Next, in the summer, one of the Dauphine’s women had a sharp quarrel with the Favourite in the stalls of the Court theatre. The Favourite had her exiled from Court, and the Dauphine, crying secretly with anger in her rooms, could obtain no redress. During the summer absences of the Court in the country palaces a perpetual travel and larger room to move prevented an open battle; in the following winter that very grave event, the exile of Choiseul, sealed the difference.

It was the error of Choiseul not that he had opposed the Favourite’s entry—on the contrary, he had thought it a useful whim that would amuse and occupy his sovereign—but that he could not take her seriously. His “world,” his relatives, his intimates, those whom he had placed and salaried during twelve years of power, were outspoken in their contempt for the Du Barry. Her own simple spite lumped all together and made the Minister the cause of her difficulties and their victim. For months she had half amused, half frightened Louis by an increasing insolence to De Choiseul at cards and at table. He had met this insolence at first with the ironic courtesy that he must have shown during his life to a hundred such women; later, by a careful and veiled defence; last of all by a resigned and somewhat dignified expectation of what he saw would be the end.

When a society approaches some convulsion the pace of change increases enormously with every step towards the catastrophe. “This at least no one dreams of. That at least cannot happen!” But this and that do happen, and at last all feel themselves to be impotent spectators of a process so forcible and swift that no wisdom can arrest it. Political literature in such moments turns to mere criticism and speculation; it no longer pleads, still less directs. So it is to-day with more than one society of Western Europe; so it was with the close of Louis XV.’s reign.

In May 1770, when the Austrian alliance was consummated by the arrival of Marie Antoinette and by the wedding at Versailles, the revocation of the one conspicuous statesman in France would have seemed impossible. He had no more capacity than have the most of politicians, but he did at least read the rough standard demanded in that trade, and his name was rooted in the mind of his own public and of Europe. If the dismissal of Choiseul had been proposed in the summer, there still remained enough active force opposed to this new Du Barry woman to have prevented the folly; but at the rate things were going every month weakened that force; by the end of the year it was too late to act in his defence.

On Christmas Eve fat Hilliers came lurching out of the Favourite’s room and brought Choiseul a note in Louis’ hand. It was a short note exiling him to his place at Chanteloup and relieving him of office.

There was no one to replace the Minister: the action was that of a common woman who exercised a private vengeance and could conceive no reasons of State. Yet no one was astonished—save perhaps the child to whom so vast a change was the climax of all that had bewildered her since she had first spoken to the French Court.

Maria Theresa and Mercy, her ambassador to Versailles, had that knowledge of the world which permitted each to find footing, even in such a welter. Each from a long experience knew well that the depth of political life moves slowly for all the violent changes of machinery or of names. Each felt the alliance—the object of all their solicitude—to be still standing, in spite of Choiseul’s fall; and each divined that their little Princess, who was the pledge of that alliance at the French Court, and whom they destined, when she was Queen, to be its perpetuator, might at this moment weaken and ruin it: her probable indiscretion and her simplicity were the points of danger. Her plain-spoken anger might ruin their plans for a recovery of Austrian influence. Each therefore concentrated upon a special effort—Mercy by repeated visits from the Austrian Embassy in Paris to the Court at Versailles and by repeated admonitions; Maria Theresa (in whom the fear for her daughter’s future and position was even greater than her solicitude for the Austrian policy) by repeated letters, too insistent perhaps and too personal wholly to effect their object.

Marie Antoinette was persuaded to a certain restraint, but she was neither convinced nor instructed. She saw the whole situation as a girl would see it, in black and white: Madame du Barry was of the gutter, and had yet been able to destroy a name she had always heard associated with the fortunes of her own family and the dignity of the French Crown. The complexity of the situation, the short years it was likely to last, the necessity during those years of weighing the intricate and changing attachments of the great families in their interlacing groups—all this escaped her.

So little did she see the intricate pattern of politics that, when Louis XV., less than two months later, exiled the higher courts of law and all but roused a rebellion, she did not connect with the reign of her enemy this act of violence which isolated and imperilled the Crown; she thought it royal, immediate, and just, still seeing mere kingship, as children see it in a fairy tale, beneficent and paternal.

The six months of administrative anarchy that followed meant nothing to her. When in July, D’Aiguillon—inept, a mere servitor of the Favourite’s—was at last appointed to the vacant post of Prime Minister, this act—in its way more astounding than the dismissal of Choiseul—was only remarkable to her because it was the Du Barry’s doing. And during the whole of her sixteenth year she represented at Court a fixed indignation which, in her alone, steadily increased as the powers of the Favourite became absolute; for as Marie Antoinette approached womanhood she developed a quality of resistance which was the one element of strength of her early character, but from which was fatally absent any power to design. That obstinate power of resistance was to raise around her multiplying and enduring enmities; it was to mature her in her first severe trials, but was also to bring her to the tragedy which has lent her name enduring and exaggerated nobility.

This opposition which the Dauphine offered to Madame du Barry, an opposition which did but rise as that woman (during 1771) opened, one after the other, all the avenues of power to her lowest or least capable courtiers, took on no form of violence.

Marie Antoinette, as the pale auburn of her hair and her thick eyebrows darkened, as her frame strengthened and her voice took on a fuller tone, added to the vivacity of her childhood a new note of passionate emphasis which was ill-suited to her part, and which in any circumstances but those of luxury would have approached vulgarity. In many minor matters she forbore to put the least restraint upon a momentary annoyance; she would have some design she disapproved destroyed; a bookcase, though it was Gabriel’s, she had broken before her eyes to appease her discontent. But in the major matter of this quarrel she put on a sort of solemnity, and her resistance took the simple but unconquerable form of silence. She would not recognise the Favourite, though she were to meet her five times a day, and she would not address one word to her.

That silence, which kept open at Court a sharp wound and which stood a permanent and a most powerful menace to all that had power at Versailles, became for Mesdames the King’s daughters (who had first given this example) and for all the defeated parties a welcome symbol—though for the Princess herself it was a most perilous one. To break that silence was the effort of every converging force about her. Her mother in repeated warnings; Mercy, the King, and most of all the Favourite herself, came to think it a first point of policy that what might have been pardoned in the child should not remain a cause of acute offence in the woman. She was now nearly eighteen months at Versailles; she had entered her seventeenth year. But whenever the Du Barry crossed her in the receptions or met her eyes at table, whatever beginnings of a salute may have escaped the loose manner of the Favourite, she suffered the mortification of a complete refusal. The feminine comedy was admirably played, and for the Dauphine the King’s mistress remained a picture or an empty chair—sometimes to be blankly gazed at; never to be recognised or addressed.

There was indeed a moment in August when the Dauphine’s resolution wavered. Mercy had visited the Du Barry; he had spoken to her intimately and with gallantry. He had probably promised her the graces of the Dauphine; he returned to Marie Antoinette to press his advice. So pressed she promised her mother’s ambassador that she would speak, but when the moment came and the meeting had been carefully arranged, after cards at evening, she remembered too much: she remembered perhaps most keenly a recent thing, the choice of one of this woman’s friends, in spite of her protests, for one of her ladies-in-waiting. She strolled to the table where Mercy and the Favourite were talking together. As she came up Madame du Barry put on an air of expectation which invited her approach. The girl hesitated and turned back. A scene not consonant to that society was avoided only by Madame Adelaide, who had the presence of mind to summon her niece at the critical moment of the insult; but the fiasco led to further and more peremptory orders from her mother, to a long and troubled interview between Mercy and the King, and at last to the conclusion which they all desired. The Dauphine recognised the Du Barry; but the recognition came in a manner so characteristic of Marie Antoinette that it would have been better for her and for them if they had not won their battle.

Upon the New Year’s Day of 1772 at Versailles, on which day it was agreed (and this time most solemnly vowed) that a greeting should be given, and during the formal reception held at Court that day, there came a moment when, in an uneasy silence, the moving crowd of the Court saw the Dauphine approach the Favourite, pass before her, and say as she passed—not so directly nor so loudly as might be wished, but still so that the Du Barry might have taken the words as addressed to herself: “There are very many people at Versailles to-day.” Before a reply could be given her she had passed on. Next day she said to Mercy: “I shall not let that woman hear the sound of my voice again.”

The moment of time during which this quarrel reached its height was one of extreme anxiety to Maria Theresa, and indeed to all. It was that during which the first public renunciation of the international morality which had hitherto ruled in Christendom was in negotiation at the instance of Prussia. It was secretly proposed that an European government should be disregarded without treaty and subjected to mere force without the sanction of our general civilisation. Frederick had suggested to Russia long before with deference, recently to Catholic Austria with a sneer, the partition of Poland.

It is characteristic of the more deplorable forms of insurgence against civilised morals that they originate either in a race permanently alien to (though present in) the unity of the Roman Empire, or in those barbaric provinces which were admitted to the European scheme after the fall of Rome, and which for the most part enjoyed but a brief and precarious vision of the Faith between their tardy conversion and the schism of the sixteenth century. Prussia was of this latter kind, and with Prussia Frederick. To-day his successors and their advisers, when they attempt to justify the man, are compelled still to ignore the European tradition of honour. But this crime of his, the partition of Poland, the germ of all that international distrust which has ended in the intolerable armed strain of our time, has another character attached to it: a character which attaches invariably to ill-doing when that ill-doing is also uncivilised. It was a folly. The same folly attached to it as has attached to every revolt against the historic conscience of Europe: such blindnesses can only destroy; they possess no permanent creative spirit, and the partition of Poland has remained a peculiar and increasing curse to its promoters in Prussia; to their mere accomplices in St. Petersburg it has caused and is causing less weakness and peril; while it has left but a slight inheritance of suffering to the Hapsburgs, whose chief was at the moment of the crime but a most reluctant party to it.

There is not in Christian history, though it abounds in coincidence or design, a more striking example of sin suitably rewarded than the menace which is presented to the Hohenzollerns to-day by the Polish race. Not even their hereditary disease, which has reached its climax in the present generation, has proved so sure a chastisement to the lineage of Frederick as have proved the descendants of those whose country he destroyed. An economic accident has scattered them throughout the dominions of the Prussian dynasty; they are a source everywhere of increasing danger and ill-will. They grow largely in representative power. They compel the government to abominable barbarities which are already arousing the mind of Europe. They will in the near future prove the ruin of that family to which was originally due the partition of Poland.

Enormous as was the event, however, both in its quality of evil and in its consequences to mankind, it must not detain the reader of these pages. Its interest here lies only in the first and principal example which it affords of Marie Antoinette’s direct and therefore unpolitical temper. She was indeed only upon the verge of womanhood—she had but completed her sixteenth year—but her failure to understand the critical, and, above all, the complex necessities of the Hapsburgs at that moment was characteristic of all the further miscalculations that were to mark her continual interference with diplomacy for twenty years. It was imperative that Austria should find support in the grave issue to which Maria Theresa had been compelled against her conscience and her reason. Berlin and St. Petersburg suddenly having agreed to a mutual aggrandisement, help was imperative, and help could only come from her ally at Versailles. Upon this one occasion, if upon no other, the young daughter of the Empress was justified in working for her family, and that could only be done through the woman whose influence was now the one avenue of approach to Louis XV. A recognition of the Du Barry was essential to Vienna in that new year of 1772. The Dauphine made it, but she made it in such a way that it was a worse insult even than had been her former silence. Had war broken out that spring, at the melting of the snow, it is possible or probable that Versailles would not have supported Vienna against Prussia and Russia in arms.

There was almost a quarrel between the growing girl and the Empress her mother. To that mother she still remained the child who had left Vienna two years before; but then, in Versailles and to those who saw her, this year made her a woman.

That she had passed the boundary of adolescence was apparent in many ways. She was more and more enfranchised from the influence of elder women—notably of her husband’s aunts, her intimacy with whom faded throughout 1772 and disappeared in 1773. Her step had acquired that firm and rather conscious poise which was to distinguish her throughout her life. The growth of her stature was now accomplished, and she was tall, and though her shoulders had not the grace and amplitude which they later assumed, her figure had, in general, achieved maturity. Her hair, now a trifle darker and browner in its red, her eyebrows, always pronounced but now thicker and more prominent, announced the same change. Her motives also, though insufficient in judgment, were deeper in origin. Her resistance to her mother’s and to Mercy’s most pressing insistence in the matter of the Favourite was a resistance no longer even partially suggested to her by others; it was due now to a full comprehension of the old King’s degradation, and to a formed abhorrence of the Du Barry. Moreover, when she yielded for a moment—as she did perhaps three times in the course of two years—it was with some measure of thought: she consented to approach the King’s mistress at moments when the ambassador or her mother had convinced her by speech or letter of an acute necessity; but already, in her excuses when she refused, she began to use the argument of a woman, not of a child—she pleaded the “authority of her husband”: it was a phrase in which she, least of all, put faith!

With this advent of womanhood there came, of necessity to a character so ardent, fixed enmities. She was no longer despised as a child; she was hated as an adult. Mesdames the King’s daughters, whose influence over her had disappeared, joined, in their disappointment, the over-large group of her detractors. The fatal name of “Autrichienne,” the foreign label that clung to her at the scaffold, originated in the drawing-rooms of the three old maids, and all around her, as her power to order or to fascinate increased, there increased also new hatreds which attained to permanence, because her German memories, her eager action, her crude and single aspect of the multitudinous and subtle French character, her rapid turning from this pleasure to that, her ignorance of books and of things, lent her no power to wear these courtiers down or to play a skilful game against them.

Forgetfulness was easy to her. To help her to forget she had the intoxication of that moment which comes once in life and is the powerful blossoming of our humanity. Her eighteenth year, the last year before she ascended the throne, was the great moment of her youth.

She had not been beautiful as a child, she was not destined to real beauty in her womanhood; but at this moment, with the spring of 1773 and on to that of 1774, there radiated from her the irresistible appeal of youth.

Paris, which had learnt to despise and half to hate the Crown, which had felt itself widowed and abandoned by the emigration of the Bourbons to Versailles, caught her charm for a day. When she made with the Dauphin her first official entry into the city, great crowds acclaimed her perpetually; she had that emotion, so dear to women that it will drive them on to the stage itself, of a public applause directed towards their persons: the general applause of Paris was almost an applause of lovers. For just these passing hours on a sweet day in early June she saw and loved the city wherein her doom was written upon every stone, and for these hours the Tuileries which she inhabited were faëry and so full of delight that she could not tell whether the air was magical or owed its fragrance only to the early flowers.

In such a mood, daily drinking in happiness and a certain sense of power, admired almost openly by distant men and—very likely—by Artois, her young brother-in-law, who had known her all these years, she passed the high tide of the summer and autumn, and found in the ensuing winter for the first time that lively and absorbing interest in social pleasure which very largely determined her life.

Of the balls in which she danced, of the masked balls that were her special delight, one stands out in history—and stood out in her own memories, even to her last hour, a night unlike all others.

The reader has divined that the marriage of May 1770 had been no marriage. It was contracted between children; and years must pass—years which were those of the school-room for both of them—before Maria Theresa could expect an heir with Hapsburg blood for the French throne. But those years passed; the child was now a woman, and still the marriage remained a form.

From an accident to which I will return in its proper place, the Dauphin and herself were not wife and husband; and to this grave historical fact must largely be attributed the disasters that were to follow. For the moment, however, this misfortune did little but accentuate her isolation and perhaps her pride. In her childish advent to the Court it could mean nothing to her. Lately she had understood a little more clearly; but she was pure; her training was in admirable conformity to her faith; she was not yet troubled—until the opening of that last year ’74, with its gaiety and pride. This season of vigour, radiance and youth lacked the emotion which has been so wisely and so justly fitted by God to that one moment through which we make our entry into a full life. She was married to the heir of France: her virtue and her pride forbade her to be loved. Yet was she also not married to that heir, and her life now lacked, and continued to lack, not only love, but the ardent regard that was her due.

No Frenchman could have turned her gaze. Between her temperament and that of her husband’s nation the gulf was far too deep. But one night, late, as she moved, masked in her domino, through the crowd of a Paris ball-room, she saw, among so many faces whose surface only was revealed to her, another face of another kind—a boy’s. It arrested her. The simple and sincere expression which Versailles had never shown her, the quiet manliness which, in Northerners, is so often allied to courage and which stands in such contrast to the active virility of Gaul—all that which, in the secret places of her German heart, unknown to herself, she thought proper to a man, all that whose lack (though she could not analyse it) had disturbed and wounded her in the French palace, was apparent in the face before her. She asked his name, and heard that it was Fersen. He was a Swede, the son of a considerable political noble, sent here on his travels with a tutor. She went up and spoke to him.

She could look into his eyes and see their chivalry. His low, handsome forehead, his dark brows, his refined, firm lips, his large and gentle eyes completed in detail the profound impression with which that first glance had struck her. Once she had begun to speak to him, so masked, she continued to speak continually. A boy of eighteen is far younger than a girl of his age—they were born within six weeks of each other, and he was a child compared with her; he desired her, she consenting, and he became hers in that moment. When they had separated and he reached his rooms at morning there was ready in his heart what later he wrote down, that the Dauphine was delightful, and that she was the most charming Princess he ever had known. She upon her side had followed him with her eyes to the door of the great assembly. She was not to see him again for four years, but during all those years she remembered him.

This was the way in which Marie Antoinette entered life, and almost simultaneously with that entry came her ascent of the throne: the old King was changing.

He suffered: his digestion failed; from time to time he would abandon his hunting. It was in the January of 1774 that the Dauphine had met Axel de Fersen. Before the spring of that year Louis XV.’s increasing infirmities were to reach their end.

Gusts of strong faith swept over him in these failing years, as strong winds, filled with a memory of autumn, will sweep the dead reeds of December. His fear of death, and that hunger for the Sacraments which accompanies the fear, came to him in dreadful moments. For thirty-eight years he had neither communicated nor confessed. All his life he had avoided the terrace of St. Germain’s, because a little lump far off against the Eastern sky was St. Denis, the mausoleum of the Kings, and he had not dared to look on it. But, with no such memorial before him, Death now appeared and reappeared.

Once in his little private room—it was late at night and November—he played at cards with the Du Barry. They were alone, save for an old crony of his pleasures, Chauvelin, which well-bred and aged fellow stood behind the woman’s chair, leaning upon it and watching the woman’s cards in silence, his rapacious features strongly marked in the mellow light of the candles. Something impelled the woman to glance up at him over her shoulder. “Oh, Lord! M. de Chauvelin, what a face!” It was the face of a dead man. She leapt and started from it, and the body fell to the floor.

The King, his age and apathy all shaken from him, shouted down the empty corridors: “A priest! a priest!” They came, and in the presence of the King absolved what lay immovable upon the shining floor, in a hope or wish that some life lingered there. But Chauvelin was quite dead.

Now, in his last Easter, the dread came back for ever and inhabited the King. Upon the Maundy Thursday of ’74 (it was the last day of March) the Court were all at Mass, and the sermon was ending. The priest, strong in that tradition of Bossuet which had not perished, turned to the royal chair and related for his peroration the legend of an ancient curse: “Forty days, and Nineveh shall be no more.” All the Court heard it and forgot it before the chanting of the creed was done—but the King was troubled. He reckoned in his mind; he counted dates and was troubled.

The liturgical times went by; he abandoned his mistress; he lived apart and gloomy: but his Easter duties were not accomplished, nor did he communicate or confess, nor was he absolved. Then the cloud lifted and he began to forget, and the tie which held him to the Du Barry, and which had in it now something of maturity and routine, was very strong upon him. He yielded and returned to her where she waited for him down the park at the little Trianon. His domesticity returned—but not for long.

It was upon Tuesday the 26th of April that he came in from hunting changed. He would not eat. He wandered a little and was cherished by his companion, but his fever grew. Next day he woke to suffering. He attempted to hunt, but his knees were weakened and he could not ride his horse; and coming back to Trianon, he groaned with his head in torment. His dread increased; but his doctors, who had been long familiar with his moody interludes, thought little of the thing. They carried him back through the trees to the palace, to his own room in the northern wing, and that day and the next, as the fever grew, rumours went louder and louder in the palace. On the Friday, at eventide, as a candle chanced near the face of the sick man, the doctor looked closer; and in the next hour, before midnight, the Princess Clothilde, talking in Madame de Marin’s room in whispers to the Duke of Crois, opened a note from the Dauphine. She cried aloud: “They say it is the small-pox!”

They dared not tell him. He had the assurance to demand the truth, and when he heard it he said, “At my age a man does not recover.” He maintained from that moment, through the increasing torment and disfigurement of his disease, a complete mastery over himself and even to some extent the powder of ordering the Court. He saw to it that his grandson the Dauphin should not come near his room, for of all the royal families in Europe the French Bourbons alone had not been vaccinated. He accepted the services of his daughters.

One thing alone he hesitated on, and that was to relinquish the society of his Favourite.

He was too proud and too silent a man for his contemporaries or for ourselves to know the full cause of his hesitation. Passion at that moment it could not have been. The possibility of his recovery he had himself denied, and his every phrase and act showed how clearly he felt the approach of death. He himself had drawn the secret of his malady from the reluctant Cardinal whose duty it was, as Grand Almoner, first to inform him of his danger, but whose worldly fear of consequence had kept him from speaking—though he was urged to his duty by every other prelate at Court. The King was in no doubt as to the nature of the soul, nor as to the scandal which, under the special conditions of his throne, his one great frailty had given. He knew the Church; he could not, as might a philosopher, take refuge in the memory of good deeds to outweigh the evil, or (as might a monarch of a different civilisation) in the deep hypocrisies which there shield birth and wealth from self-knowledge. His Christian faith was strong and clean. Yet he hesitated. If he still clung to the Du Barry, it was perhaps because nothing was left him in the visible world but the gaiety and the assiduous care which had endeared this woman to him.

She kept near him throughout the first hours of his malady, and every evening, when the Princesses had left their father’s room, she would come in by a private further door and sit beside the little camp-bed on which he lay. She overcame all repugnance; she soothed his pustuled forehead with her hand. He felt, perhaps, as though to abandon her was a first breaking with life.

The aged Archbishop of Paris, himself suffering grievously from the stone, bore, not without groaning, the jolting journey to Versailles; he came to undertake himself what the Grand Almoner dared not do—to demand the dismissal of the Favourite. He was not allowed into the King’s room. The group of courtiers continually present in the outer chamber, the Œil de Bœuf, could watch with much amusement the gestures of command and of refusal that passed between the Archbishop and the Duke of Richelieu in the antechamber beyond. At last he was admitted, but it was arranged that others should be present, and nothing passed between him and the King save a word of condolence from each for the other’s suffering.

It was by no stimulation from without but by his own act that the King took the last step in his penance. Upon Tuesday the 3rd of May, towards midnight, Madame du Barry being with him, as was her custom, to tend him through the night, he said to her, in those brief sentences of his which had for years forbidden discussion or reply, that he must prepare for his end and that she must leave him; he told her that a refuge was prepared, and that she should want for nothing. She stumbled half fainting from the room to the Minister whose career she had made, the Duke of Aiguillon, believing with justice that he was not ungrateful, and in his rooms she cried and lamented through what remained of darkness.

With the morning the King gave D’Aiguillon his orders, and that afternoon the Duke, worthily loyal although his career was ended, sent his own wife to take her in a hired carriage, without circumstance and therefore without disgrace, to their country house some miles away. It was the thirty-fourth of the forty days.

That evening the King asked Laborde, his valet, for Madame du Barry. The servant answered that she was gone. “Already?” he sighed, and her name was not heard again.

Thursday and Friday passed: the first with a rally which the more foolish hoped would save the life of the King; the second with the disappointment of all that corrupt and intriguing clique which depended upon his recovery.

Meanwhile the Dauphine kept her rooms. She knew what desperate court would be pressed upon her husband and herself were the doors to be opened; nor did the Dauphin give a single order of the hundred that were already solicited of him, save that all should be ready for the whole Court to leave for Choisy. Early upon the morning of Saturday this seclusion was broken: long before the common hour of the palace, at half-past five, a roll of drums awakened its people, and the Princess came down with all her ladies to see the Sacrament carried through Versailles.

LOUIS XVI
FROM THE PRINCIPAL BUST AT VERSAILLES

Between a double row of the Guard, under the great canopy that was reserved for such solemnities, the priests carried the Viaticum, and about It in a long procession as It passed were the torches and the candles. She stood with her sister-in-law at the head of the crowd in the great hall outside the bedroom door; she endured the stench of corruption that filled the air, though every window was open to the morning; she caught, by her tall stature and straight carriage, the scene that was acting within.

Between the purple robes and the surplices, in the ring of waxen lights, she saw the old man whom alone she had respected and indeed loved in her new home attempt to raise himself, calling: “My great God has come to me.... My great God!” She saw him with what strength he had plucking the cotton cap from his head and failing in his effort to kneel. His face was no longer the face she had known, but crusted dark and hideous, swollen, horrible. She heard the Grand Almoner repeat the King’s strong phrase of repentance, passionately solemn, and she knew the voice so well that perhaps she also heard the mumble in which he urged its repetition. Then the doors closed; the Court dispersed. She regained her apartments, and the isolation and the strain returned. They told her of his increasing delirium, of the crowds that came from Paris daily, of the certain approach of death. So Sunday and Monday went by—the thirty-eighth, the thirty-ninth day.

The dawn of Tuesday broke upon a clear sky. It was the fortieth day.

The spring on that fine morning turned to summer, and before noon the Park was full of a crowd which moved as though on holiday. The Parisians had come increasingly since Sunday into Versailles. The inns were full, and at all the tables outside the eating-houses of the town the people eat their mid-day meal with merriment in the open air. Between the Park and the town, huge and isolated, already old, the palace alone was silent. There, each group shut close in its own rooms, awaited—the one dismissal, another the fruit of long intrigue, another, in a mixture of eagerness and dread, the new weight of royalty. It was the 10th of May, and still the agony endured. A candle burnt in a window above the courtyard. Passing groups looked up at it furtively; grooms, with bridles ready in their hands, glanced at it from beneath the distant doors of the guard-room, and saw it twice renewed, as one o’clock and two struck through the afternoon from the chimes of St. Louis. Three struck. They looked again and it was still shining.

Within, his head supported by Laborde the valet, his mind still clear, the old King still attempted with his distorted lips the answers to the prayers for the dying. He heard them faintly and more faintly in that increasing darkness which each of us must face. When the priest at last came to those loud words, “Go forth, thou Christian soul,” his murmuring ceased. The candle at the window was extinguished. The clatter of horse-hoofs rose from the marble court and the jangling of stirrups against mounting spurs. The Duke of Bouillon came to the door of the room, stood before the silent crowd in the Œil de Bœuf, and said with ritual solemnity: “Gentlemen, the King is dead!”

At that same hour on that same day a British man-of-war sailed into Boston harbour: she bore orders to impose the tax on tea which ultimately raised America.

CHAPTER VI
THE THREE YEARS

Tuesday, the 10th of May 1774 to Easter Sunday, April 19, 1778

FROM the death of Louis XV. to the close of the summer of 1777 is a period of somewhat over three years. In those three years the fates of the French monarchy and of the Queen were decided. For though no great catastrophe marked them nor even any considerable fruit of policy, and though an onlooker would have said no more than that something a little disappointing had, in the process of these years, chilled the first enthusiasm for the new reign, yet we can to-day discover within their limits most of those origins from which the ruin of the future was to come.

For the Queen especially, whom hitherto her minority, her seclusion and the deliberate silence of her childhood had guarded, the opportunities for action which her husband’s accession suddenly offered were opportunities of fate, and the three years with which this chapter has to deal were for her young and exalted innocence of eighteen like that short week of spring when seeds are sown in a garden: they were a brief season of warmth, of vigour, and of clarity during which circumstance sowed for her in every variety the seeds of misfortune and of death. All is there: the advent of an uneasy gaiety; the solace of gems, of cards, of excessive friendships; the vivid but wholly personal, erratic and capricious intervention in matters of State; the simple confidence in the policy of her mother’s Austrian government and the continual support of it; the enmities which all active natures provoke, but which hers had a talent for confirming; the friction of such an activity against the hard and, to her, the alien qualities of the French mind—all these, which the Princess could try to ignore when her husband was but heir and she in her retirement, appear with the first months of her liberty as Queen, strike root, and are seen above ground before she has completed her twenty-second year. And with these positive irritants their negative reactions also come: the Court assumes its divisions; the stories and the songs and the nicknames begin against her; the popular legend concerning her is conceived; the trend of the Orleans faction in antagonism to her is established, and a new generation contemporary with, or but slightly senior to, her own has become fixed within the same three years in a direction which—though none then saw it—could not but destroy her in the progress of years.

To understand in what way the common accidents of that brief three years’ term moved to their great effects it is necessary to know two things: first, the physical infirmity under which Louis XVI. suffered, and, secondly, the nature of the Bourbon Crown he wore; for it is the conjunction of such an infirmity with such an office that lends to the first years of his reign and to the first errors of his wife their capital importance in the history of that one woman and of the world.

Louis, it had first been whispered, and was now upon his accession commonly asserted, could have no heir.

When first the mere form of marriage between him in his boyhood and Marie Antoinette (a child) had been solemnised, no public and no familiar regard was paid to the relations between them. The great ceremony was necessarily esteemed a solemn and irrevocable betrothal rather than a wedlock, and (as I have already said) it was taken for granted that in some two or three years the process of nature would continue the royal line.

But as the Princess advanced to her sixteenth, to her seventeenth year; as her upstanding and vigorous youth achieved first a full growth, then ripeness, then maturity, and yet provoked no issue, the common explanation of such an accident could not but be generally given, and the impotence of the Dauphin was universally accepted. At eighteen, in the last autumn of the old King’s reign, the young wife had stood apparent and triumphant, clothed with a charm which, if it was not that of beauty, was certainly that of exuberant life; a whole ball-room had been arrested at her entrance; the crowds of Paris had quickened at her approach; the lively look, the deep brows, and the full hair tender and vaguely red, which Fersen had seen suddenly revealed, were those of a woman informed with an accumulated and expectant vitality. It was not in her that the defect could lie. Louis, so it plainly seemed, was deficient and was in title only her husband.

A conjunction of this kind is not uncommon even in an active, healthy, and laborious lineage of the middle rank; among the wealthy it is frequent; in the genealogy of families which carry a public function, such as those of monarchs or of an oligarchy, for all the careful choice which their marriages involve, it is often present. Such accidents are provided for. In many cases probably, in some certainly, a supposititious child is introduced. When that course is difficult or repugnant the situation is acknowledged; the consort chooses between her devotions and a lover; all the planning and all the necessary preparation which attach to the succession regard the brother or cousin, who is henceforward accepted as the heir, and his position is the more highly established from the contrast his vigour may afford to the defect in the reigning incumbent.

I say such a conjunction is of a known type in history; there were precedents for action and a certain course to be pursued. Monsieur, the King’s brother, would have attracted the service and respect to which his then vigorous intellect was fitted. The Queen’s vagaries would have been contemptuously excused, for she would have stood apart from the line of succession, and her character would have been indifferent to her husband’s subjects. The Crown as an institution would have suffered little, though its immediate holder would have lost personal prestige, had the conjecture of Louis’ impotence, which was, upon the King’s accession, common to the Court and the populace, been confirmed.

Now that conjecture was, as the future showed, erroneous. A very careful, sceptical, and universal observer might have discovered, even as early as this year of Louis’ accession, that it was erroneous.

In the first place the gestures, habits, and character of the King were not such as should be associated with this kind of imbecility. His body was indeed unhealthy and diseased; it was the body of a nervous, overgrown, loose-limbed child, inherited from a nervous father and from an exhausted race; a body which nature would have removed as it removed his son’s, had not the doctors built up upon its doomed frame an artificial bulk of flesh. I say he was diseased, but not in the manner then believed. The febrile attachment to violence, the lack of humour, the weary eye, which betray an insufficiency of sex and which we so frequently suffer in political life and at the university, were quite absent in Louis. Contrariwise he was good-humoured and kindly (saving to cats), very fond of hard riding and capable in that exercise; he was further of an even though astonishingly slow judgment, and possessed that desire to make (to file, saw, fit, design, ply a trade of hand and eye) which is an invariable accompaniment of virility. He loved and practised mechanical arts, such as the locksmith’s or the watch-maker’s. There was nothing in him of what is nowadays called (by a French euphemism) “The Intellectual.”

Were positive evidence lacking such general contrasts between what he was supposed to be and what he was would still have great weight; but evidence more exact can be discovered. The letters written by Marie Antoinette to her mother afford it.

Maria Theresa was in an increasing torment, as each passing month excited her bewilderment, lest her daughter should furnish no heir to the French throne and the object at once of her strong motherly affection and of her political scheme should fail. Her questions were frequent, urgent and clear: her daughter replied to them in terms which a very little reading will suffice to illumine. Marie Antoinette was young and, as I have said, essentially pure; she did not fully comprehend the nature of a situation which was undermining her serenity and gravely marring her entry into life, but she was able both to express her dissatisfaction and yet to assure the Empress upon more than one occasion that she had at last a reasonable hope of maternity. These hopes were in each case disappointed. That such hopes, on the one hand, certainly existed, and that the whole atmosphere of her married life was, upon the other, false and almost intolerable, depended upon the fact that Louis suffered from a partial—and only a partial—mechanical impediment. This impediment a painful operation would suffice to remove; but the knowledge that it was but partial, the divergent advice of doctors and the lethargy which invariably deferred his decisions, all impelled the young man towards procrastination, with the result that in a few months—the brief period immediately and before his accession—his wife had learnt that fever of the mind which accompanies alternations of nervous incertitude; she had weighing upon her a perpetual and acute anxiety which was the more corroding in that it contained so considerable an element of physical ill-ease.

The detail is highly intimate and would merit no place in any biography but this. It must be fixed, and has been fixed here, first because to neglect it is to ignore the misfortune from which (if from one origin) flowed the destruction certainly of the Queen, and very probably of the French monarchy itself—a matter of moment to every European; secondly, because history has never yet given it its true place nor fully set forth its nature and importance.

In such a situation Marie Antoinette’s quick nature took refuge in every stimulant; wine she disliked—it was among her few but marked eccentricities that throughout her life she would taste nothing but water—but gaming, jewels, doubtful books, many and new voices about her, violent contrasts, caprice upon caprice, unexpected visits, sudden passions for this or that new friend, excessive laughter (and excessive pique), emotions seized wherever they could be found—watching in merry vigils for summer dawns, masked balls that took up all the winter nights, escapades: in a word, a swirl of the fantastic and the new became for her a necessity that—had it taken some one form—would have been called a vice. Her dissipation was driven, as vice is driven, with a spur; it was compatible, as vice is compatible, with her original virtues; it produced, as vice produces, a progressive interior ill-ease. She was a tortured woman in those years.

Children became a craving to her.

One day as she went with the lady who was supposed to control the etiquette of her life, as she went sadly in her coach along the western road, she turned off it along a by-lane for her pleasure, and reached that village of St. Michel which lies upon the slope of the hill above Bougival. As she passed through the village in her grandeur and took the Louveciennes road, she saw a peasant child and, by a sudden but most intense and profound impulse, caught it up and said she would make it hers. It was a little tiny boy, still a baby, toddling upon the road; it had been christened James; the name of its parents was Amand. The freak was good news for them; they blessed her, and she went away. And the child was to be adopted and brought up at her expense, and she was to watch it in Versailles.

Very many years later his name came up again, obscure, but fixed, in the roll-call of a battle, and we shall read it once more, stamped across the strange sequence of her life.

If any one desires to see, in a very modern and tawdry mirror, what evil had possessed the mind of this well-born lady, let him watch (from some distance) a certain financial world in London and that cosmopolitan gang in Paris to which that world is allied by blood and in whose support—whenever it is endangered—they are to be found, for in Paris and London they are one. With far more refinement and with infinitely greater variety, she (like those modern money-dealers) sought in a rush of fantastic and novel experience to assuage a thirst. They have no plea save the coarseness of their lineage. She had for excuse the gnawing of a position which none about her comprehended, and which she herself, though her body resented it, saw but dimly with her young mind, and which disturbed her as a confused, intolerable thing.

From within, therefore, she is amply to be excused; but consider the effect of her fever upon those who saw her. Consider the effect of this new manner of hers upon the public function of the French monarchy.

The French have, with their own hands, destroyed the conception of “a king”: in Europe to-day we look around and find nothing of monarchy remaining. A few impoverished symbols, a few indebted, a few insufficiently salaried men, of whose true character the public knows nothing, afford or do not afford unifying titles for a bureaucracy there, an oligarchy here: in Italy a national name, in Spain a moribund tradition. But that monarchy which the Gaulish energy had drawn out of the stuff of old Rome was another matter; it was a sacramental alliance between an idea and a thing.

The Idea was that of the Gallic formula “without Authority there is no life”—for Authority is Authorship: this Gallic formula also sustains the Faith.

The Thing was one lineage of actual and living men: devoted, from father to son—sacrificed almost as in a public sacrifice—condemned to the perpetual burden of being mixed into this Idea and of supporting the burden of its intensity and power.

There had descended from the Merovingian and the Carolingian families to the Capetian, bearing a power that increased with every century, the conception of a creative executive made flesh; an executive that should reside in the living matter of a family of men who should be seen, known, touched, loved, or hated; who should rapidly pronounce new and necessary laws, actively preserve the yet more necessary body of ancient and fundamental custom, observe in public the religion of the community, and, above all, lead in battle. That was the rôle; that was the mould. The bond of heredity forced many an incongruity into that mould (a child sometimes and sometimes a madman), yet—so short is one human life in the general story of a nation—the gap thus formed was rapidly filled by a successor, and the permanent impression remained of a soldier incarnating a community of soldiers.

This institution had now endured for much more than a thousand years. This Gallic institution had impressed itself (here, as in Germany, by imitation; there, as in Britain, by direct importation) upon all the civilisation of the West. It had grown old, as must all human institutions that have no direct sustenance from forces outside time; but even so it maintained a mysterious vitality. Its kings were anointed. It held a sort of compact with the Divine, and in this its old age was still alive with a salutary if a grotesque publicity.

The King and Queen of France were the least protected of any in the realm from insult, satire, and gibe; even where their own law protected them, a general conspiracy, as it were, the instinct of all society, defended the pamphleteer.

The King and Queen were publicly owned: all they had was public money; all they did they did before a crowd. Every week they dined at a table in a vast hall. Their nobles stood by but did not eat—before them a thousand or (according to the weather) ten thousand of the populace defiled curiously and unceasingly. They prayed in public. They were expected to receive in public the applause or the condemnation of all. They were public for the destruction of secret things, conspiracies, masonries, Templars, trusts, rings. They were publicly approached by any at random and publicly claimed as the public redressers of wrong—always in theory and often in actual fact. Nay, their physical acts were public. They dressed and undressed before an audience—or rather were dressed and undressed by these. The birth of every royal child was witnessed by a mob crowding the Queen’s chamber.

The vast inconvenience of such a part was but one aspect of its sanctity, and the Crown united, as in the heart of a mystery, the functions of Victim and of Lord.

Amid the great new wealth of the eighteenth century, and in the glare of its brilliant new intelligence, it may be imagined with what a fence of tradition and precedent public opinion and its own nature insisted on defending this national centre. Anecdotes of that rigid, minute, and often inhuman etiquette are too well known to need repetition here. Two instances may suffice.

The Queen could drink nothing by night or by day but from the hand of the highest in rank of the women present, nor could this last accept the glass and the water save from the hand of a page. The King must not eat at all until he had performed an ablution like a priest: the vessels of this and the napkin were sacred; rather than put them to a profane use, when they had once done their service they were destroyed by fire.

Such extravagances in the old age of an institution lend themselves to ridicule, as do (for instance) the fantastic ceremonies of the House of Commons or the comic-opera costumes of court officials and of peers. But though, isolated, they present this weakness, collectively, and seen in relation to the function they serve, such survivals have a meaning, and a consideration of such ceremonial helps men to a comprehension of the institution it surrounds.

Conceive, then—for it is the note of all this chapter—the impact of such a mood as that of the distracted Queen upon such a Court, stiff with such traditions and living under such a bright beam of publicity, the mark of a million eyes all keen to discern whatever trifle was done between mid-day and dawn. Marie Antoinette chafed impatiently against this central national institution. The fever now upon her caused her always to despise and sometimes to neglect the rules that were of the essence of her position. The moral and internal constraint which tortured her inflamed her to “live her life”; but for those of great wealth and opportunity such a mood is and must be dissipation; dissipation in its fullest sense: the dispersion not only of character and of self-discipline, but of responsibility, of externals even, and at last of power. It meant, and necessarily meant, the patronage of those far below her and their consequent estrangement; the contempt of those immediately beneath her and their consequent enmity.

Just after the old King’s death the Court was at La Muette. She must needs, to prove her liberty, go up and talk familiarly to an old gardener like any Lady Bountiful. The old gardener’s annoyance is not recorded; that of her ladies is. They complained to the King, who was troubled, but who, knowing the truth, answered, “Let her be.”

That same day, when a deputation of the Burgesses’ wives paid her their court, coming from the city at her gate and full of ceremony, she could do nothing more dignified than giggle at their awkwardness and at their dress. In the intervals of, according to each, a pompous greeting, she must whisper to one or other of her ladies most unpompously; the very servants were rendered uneasy by her manner.

In how many ways and how rapidly this mood (this physical, fatal, necessary mood) was to wear down her position immediately after her accession to the throne many examples will show. The best and the most general aspect from which one may first regard it is her attempted immixture in public affairs, for that also was a fretful and personal thing, part of her mood.

The first six or seven months of the new reign cover the period which was officially that of mourning for Louis XV. and are for the general historian of this importance: that in them was fixed the new ministerial tradition which culminated in the summoning of the States-General.

This new tradition owed nothing to the Queen. She was hardly aware of its presence. For her the choice of new Ministers was a personal and almost a domestic business in which she somehow had a right (and could find it entertaining) to play a part—she knew not what nor how. That part of hers turned out, as a fact, a small part and indecisive, utterly without plan; but such as it was it marks her necessity for action and change, and exhibits her place beside the King. In the intervals of choosing a new hairdresser and a new dressmaker, she paused now half-an-hour, now an hour, in the cabinet, hearing names which she hardly knew, and giving random advice which must have strained her audience to the very limits of toleration.

It was not mere Austrian action. Her brother the Emperor would often beg her not to meddle; the Austrian ambassador Mercy deplored her innocence of affairs and her inability to follow any one interest for one hour. Her mother wrote affectionately and worriedly, giving her the stale old advice of supporting Vienna—but fearing her capacity to do so. Meanwhile the Queen herself acted from the simple motive of being seen about, and added to this the equally simple motives of private tastes. Thus she would have restored Choiseul to some office. He came up a month after the accession, and she greeted him very kindly. He had helped to make her Queen, he was the traditional ally of Vienna, and though Vienna certainly did not want him now, Marie Antoinette went by the name and its associations alone: she judged as a child would judge. The King, who had no intention of accepting Choiseul, made a little awkward conversation with him, the opening of which turned pleasantly upon the old man’s baldness, and next day Choiseul went back home, “to see to the tedding of his hay.”

Again, the choice of Maurepas for chief Minister, four weeks before, was not—as has been represented—hers. The King chose his father’s old friend rather for permanent adviser and companion than as a first Minister—which title indeed he never received, and that Maurepas entered at all was the work not even of the King himself but of his aunt, Madame Adelaide. In the confusion of the first two days, when Sartines, Choiseul, Machault were all possible as Prime Ministers and all discussed, Madame Adelaide repeatedly suggested Maurepas’ name. To her and her sisters he was a tradition, part of a time which these old maids looked back to with regret as the last time of dignity, before mistresses had destroyed their father’s Court and half exiled them to their apartments.

Maurepas was seventy-three; he had left office between forty and fifty, and had done so from a quarrel with the Pompadour. This alone recommended him to Louis XV.’s daughter; that he should have been untouched by the vile interregnum of the Du Barry recommended him still more. Madame Adelaide had known him in power when, as a girl of seventeen, the eldest of the sisters, she was certain of life, in tune with her great position, and pleased with all she saw. Now after twenty-five years, which had been increasingly marred by a distant and bitter isolation from the Court, his name recurred to her as that of a fellow-sufferer and a memory of her youth. Madame Adelaide’s devoted service in her father’s last illness (she had caught the small-pox herself in attending him) gravely increased the weight of her advice. It was through her that Louis XVI. received the old man, and, once received, he remained. True, Marie Antoinette had carried the message to the King from his aunt, but she had done no more than this.

If it is asked why, with so little influence, the Queen’s perpetual interference was none the less permitted, and why this girl of eighteen, vivacious as she was ignorant, might ceaselessly bustle in and out of the council chamber, the answer is not that she was Queen—for no Queen had yet acted thus at Versailles, nor would any woman conscious of power have done so—but first that her whole self was now restless beyond bearing, and next that the King was ashamed to withstand her whom, afflicted as he was, he could hardly propose to command or regulate. With every fresh opening of the council door she made an enemy, with none a friend; but Louis all the while could only answer “Let her be.”

In one thing only during these months had she a clear object—and that was not a policy: she was determined to be rid of the Du Barry’s name. That woman was far away, exiled to Burgundy from the moment of the accession, to return afterwards to Louveciennes, but some of her clique remained, hated by all the populace and half the Court as much as by the Queen. With so much support Marie Antoinette succeeded. Three weeks after the death of Louis XV., D’Aiguillon was relieved of the department of Foreign Affairs: the grant of public money which he received on his resignation—it was but £20,000—would seem to us in modern England pitifully small, for we take it for granted that public officials should have a share in the public funds. But it is significant of the time and of the French temper that the grant was vigorously opposed and was obtained only on the personal demand of old Maurepas, who (by one of those coincidences so frequent in aristocracies) happened to be the uncle of this his chief political opponent.

Here was Marie Antoinette’s one success. The Austrian Court and Embassy had desired to keep D’Aiguillon—he could be played upon. Marie Antoinette had rejected their advice; she had gone, day after day, to the King, until he had consented to deprive D’Aiguillon of his post—and immediately her deficiency was apparent. To deprive D’Aiguillon was, in politics, not necessary, and, if accomplished, not final. To find some one for the Foreign Office who should at once be able and yet work contentedly under old Maurepas was of both immediate and of weighty importance. She refused to interest herself in the matter!

Luckily for France, Vergennes, then the representative of Louis at the Court of Stockholm, was chosen by the good judgment of the King, in spite of an impossible oriental wife.

Vergennes, approaching his sixtieth year, tenacious, silent, industrious, highly experienced, and microscopic, as it were, in the detail of diplomacy, was just such an one as the French needed to conserve the forces of their nation, to balance the smaller States against the rivals of Versailles, and to choose the very moment for the attack on England which, later, was to establish the United States. It is probable that, but for him, in the embarrassment of French finance and the consequent weakness of French arms, the nation would have fallen into some German conflict or have been abused before some German contention. As it was, the French owe in great part to Vergennes that peaceful accumulation of energy which permitted the Revolution to triumph.

In the nomination of this considerable diplomatic force the Queen had no part at all.

She had no part in the nomination of Turgot.

It is difficult to write the name of “Turgot” without admitting a digression, though such a digression adapts itself but ill to any account of the Queen.

Turgot is the name that dominates the first two years of the reign for every historian. The time has hardly come to criticise him. Criticism of his faults is easy; a full appreciation is difficult, so near are we still to his time, and so exactly did he represent the spirit which was at that moment germinating in every intellect, so active was he in its expression. The over-simple economies, the plain egalitarian political theory, the positive scepticism (the Faith was then at its lowest throughout the world), the glorious self-possession, the rectitude, yes, and the interior glow of the “Philosophers,” all the Genius of the Republic was incarnate in this man. When upon that singular date (it was the 14th of July) he entered the Ministry, there entered with him the figure, winged for victory yet austere, whose mission it was to create the great and perilous Europe we now know. I mean the Republic. Already Napoleon was born.

Marie Antoinette had no knowledge of this spirit. It had not approached her. She knew vaguely that it was indifferent to her religion (to which the very young woman was already sensibly though slightly attached). She knew much more clearly from current talk that it (and Turgot) stood at that moment especially for Retrenchment; and that word Retrenchment she approved, for she had no conception of the sensations that might ensue upon it to her own life if from a word it should become a policy. And Turgot himself had spared her sensibilities by doubling her pin-money.

I say she had no part in the nominating of Turgot—in his fall she was to have too great a part.

By the end of August the new Ministry and its policy were complete. All the Du Barry gang and all the memories of Louis XV.’s end were gone—burnt and hanged in effigy by the populace as well. In their place sat a Council whose actual head and principal figure was the young King, slow, large, assiduous, freckled, pale, in a perpetual obese anxiety, ardently seeking an issue to the entanglement of his realm; whose senior was the chiselled old Maurepas, intensely national, witty, experienced in men, but neither instructed nor of a recent practice in affairs; whose foreign affairs were dealt with by the methodical gravity of Vergennes; whose navy was in the honest hands of Sartines, and whose finance—the pivot of every policy, but in France of ’74 life and death—lay under the complete control of Turgot.

I have said that finance had become for the French in 1774 a matter of life and death; and the point is of such capital importance to the Queen’s story that I must beg the reader to consider it here, at the outset of her reign.

What was the economic entanglement of the French Crown at this moment? The reply to that question is not part of Marie Antoinette’s character and conduct, but it so persistently and gravely affected her life and it is so dominating a feature of revolutionary history that a clear conception of it must be entertained before any general understanding of the period can be achieved. Not that the financial difficulty was the main cause of the Revolution—to assert as much would be to fall into the puerile inversion which makes of history an economic phenomenon—but that the financial difficulty was a limiting condition which perpetually checked and warped the political thought of the time whenever that thought attempted to express itself in action.

The clearest background against which to appreciate the finance of old monarchical France is that of the England which was its triumphant rival.

The United Kingdom had at that time less than half the population of France. The territory of England was in much the same proportion—at least, her arable and industrial territory. Her white colonial population was larger then, in proportion to her home population, than it is now, but she had not then the full wealth of India to tax nor the vast revenues now drawn, both in usury and in true profit,[^[1]] from Australasia, Southern America, and Africa. In other words, the prosperity of England at that time was domestic and real; it contained no parasitic or perilous element which a war could interrupt and a defeat destroy. This England bore with ease a national debt of over 130 million pounds. She was about to engage in a struggle which would nearly double that debt, and yet to feel no weakness. She raised a revenue of ten to eleven millions, which in a few years rose without effort to fifteen—then at the end of it all she was free to triple her debt during the great European war against Napoleon, and yet triumphantly to increase, and, when the war was over, to survive, the only nation with a credit, and at once the bank and the workshop of Europe.

[1]. I mean by usury interest levied upon unproductive loans; I mean by true profit the share of produce legitimately claimed by the lender of funds which have been put to productive use.

France, so much larger in area and population and inheriting so superior a tradition of magnitude, had all but failed. With citizens double the English in number, and with an arable soil in proportion, the French Crown could only with the utmost difficulty attract to the exchequer a sum of barely twelve—at the most, and counting every expedient, thirteen—million pounds from the national income. Briefly, England could support with ease a larger debt than could this neighbouring nation twice her size; England could spend with prodigality as much as that nation was compelled to spend with parsimony; and England could raise without effort a revenue already equal, soon to be superior, to that which the rival government could but barely extract from its subjects.

Nor does this comparison exhaust the contrast between financial health and disease upon either side of the Channel. England thus prosperous was increasingly at ease. France thus exhausted was increasingly embarrassed. Deficit followed deficit; that expenditure should exceed revenue had become a normal annual incident publicly discounted, nay, a sort of fixed ratio appeared between what should be and what was the income of the government, and the expenditure exceeded revenue with a solemn regularity much in the proportion of forty-four to thirty-seven. In the American War, which either nation was approaching, England, defeated, was to incur 170 million of debt and yet to emerge, a few years after the defeat, financially stronger than ever in the Wars of the Revolution. France, victorious, was to incur but a third of that liability, and yet in the Revolution France was compelled to declare herself insolvent.

Why did so startling a contrast appear? To us to-day it is almost inconceivable. The French are now somewhat less in population than the English, they pretend to no serious empire beyond the Mediterranean, yet they raise for national purposes a larger revenue, and they raise it with far greater facility; they support a debt double our own, without troubling the least gullible and most thrifty investing public in Europe. Considerable additions to their total liability hardly affect their credit, when ours falls by a fifth of its index upon the issue of 150 millions. The value of their agricultural land rises rapidly as does that of their urban; they find public money for enterprises which we starve or neglect. Their universities, though dependent on public funds, abound; their national church, deprived of official assistance, flourishes on but a fraction of their surplus wealth; their historical buildings are kept up in magnificence upon public funds. It is difficult, I say, for an Englishman to try to appreciate the overwhelming economic advantage which, under George III., England enjoyed over the Bourbons, who were her rivals; because in the course of a century, and especially of the present generation, the tables have been turned. It is England now that is in doubt as to her financial position and her fiscal methods. It is in England that money is lacking for necessary social reforms. It is English credit which fluctuates with violence, and English direct taxation which is strained to breaking-point.

In the time of which I write all these perils and disadvantages attached to France and to France alone. The France which England faced in the great struggle was a France labouring in anxiety for money, and the cause of that increasing pressure is apparent to History: the method of public economics had failed in France then as perhaps it is now failing here in England.

Men inherit, and of necessity every generation is shut in with custom. Who would in England to-day dream of taxing the mass of Englishmen—or rather, of taxing them directly and to their own knowledge? The very idea is laughable! There may be coming into a coal-miner’s cottage in Durham twice the income of a clerk, but who would dare send in an assessment or talk of a shilling in the pound? The clerk must pay; the miner go free—for such is the tradition of the Fisc. Who would rate the houses of the wealthiest class as the houses of the middle class are rated? It would seem madness. So, but in a more acute fashion, did the financial system of France suffer at the end of the eighteenth century. Its data, its conventions were those of an older state of society long departed. It presupposed the manor, and the manor was dead; it presupposed the self-contained country-side at a moment when the various provinces of the whole State had long been intimately bound together by commerce and when strong international links of exchange had already begun to arise. The evil was a fiscal system out of touch with the realities of the time. The remedy was a violent and rapid remodelling of that system. All could perceive the evil, many the remedy; but custom and the collective force of private avarice in the individual minds checked, and checked sharply, with the blind control of a natural force, all reform that attempted to act and to do. The attempt at reform was baulked, as a natural force baulks human purpose, by a million atomic actions. The million separate interests refused it.

For such an attempt, for such audacity, Turgot with his austere, convinced, and isolated mind was better suited than any other man; yet even he in a very few months had refused to level the hard-grained social knots which blunted every tool of the reformer who would level the inequalities of the State. Within two years his attempt had failed and he had resigned—but while the resistance of the tax-payer counted for much in his resignation, the increasing ill-balance of his young Queen counted for more.

During the first part of his administration of finance Marie Antoinette’s ill-balance was not so marked as to give promise of what was to come. No folly, no conspicuous extravagance marred the first weeks of her reign—her inchoate and girlish irruptions into the Council were alone of ill-omen; but as the new Court settled down into its stride, accumulated its first traditions and began to take on a character of its own, her aspect in the public eye was daily fixed with greater clearness, and the impression so conveyed to a nation already in rapid transition was a further element of irritation and confusion.

For the permanently present threat of poverty and embarrassment, which with every year corroded more and more deeply the public service and rendered less and less stable the general equilibrium of the State, lent to the habits the Queen was about to form, and still more to the public exaggeration of those habits, a gravity they could never otherwise have assumed. It was part of her lot that she could not, from the very nature of her position, understand the relationship between her petty extravagances and the popular ill-ease.

She was right. Her extravagance, such as it was, came slowly—nay, though that extravagance was a proof of excess in her character, it was never really excessive in amount; the sums we mention when we speak of it are trifling when we compare them with the financial debauchery of our own age. Why, that whole annual increase in her allowance which Turgot has been blamed for making would not have paid for one night’s riot in the house of some one of our London Jews. Even when her expenses did exceed the limit she should have set upon them; even when, as month followed month, the love of jewellery and the distraction of cards involved her in private debt, the sums so wasted in a whole year were not what some of our moderns have scattered in a few days. Her total debts after two years were less than £20,000! Moreover, careless and wasteful as the girl was for those well-ordered times, her excesses never bore an appreciable proportion to the scale of the public embarrassment. Her difficulties were never so great but that the sale of a farm or two could meet them. Had the Bourbon Crown enjoyed private as well as a public revenue, her lack of economy and of order would perhaps never have been heard of.

But it is the characteristic of any morbid condition that the slightest irritant produces an effect vastly beyond its due consequence. The financial embarrassment from which the Kingdom suffered may or may not have been relievable by the plain and harsh methods of Turgot—it is a question to which I will return—but even if they were so relievable, their immediate application could not but be an aggravation of popular suffering; and just in the years when increasing economic difficulty and sharp economic remedies for it were catching the public between two millstones of poverty below and retrenchment above, the populace had presented to them, upon a pinnacle whence she could be observed on every side, a young woman who in some sense summed up the State, and yet who, in mere externals at least, showed a growing disregard for method and a pursuit of every emotion that might distract her from what the French thought the duty, but what she knew to be the tragedy, of her marriage.

The mourning of the Court forbade display until the autumn of 1774, and though with the autumn and the winter there was some relaxation of ancient rules and some revolt already observable upon Marie Antoinette’s part against the fixed and inherited rules of her station, yet there was nothing which had yet seized the popular imagination nor even gravely affected her position within the narrow circle of her equals. It was not until the next year, 1775, that the error and the misfortune began.

It had long been intended that her brother, the Emperor Joseph, should visit France, and by his more active character persuade Louis XVI. to an operation which he perpetually postponed. The repeated adjournment of this visit (which was to resolve so many doubts) was among the fatal elements of the Queen’s early life. In the place of that sovereign, the youngest child of the Hapsburgs, Maximilian, little more than a boy, fat, and what would have been called in a lower rank of society deficient, waddled into the astonished Court at La Muette in the opening of February.

The accident of his arrival did neither the Queen nor the Court any great hurt among the crowds of the capital. His startling ignorance and heavy lack of breeding amused the crowd; they were glad to repeat the amusing anecdotes of his awkwardness as later in their Republican armies they were glad to caricature his obesity when he had achieved the ecclesiastical dignity of a princely archbishopric. But among her intimate equals the visit was disastrous. The Princes of the Blood insisted upon receiving his call before they paid their court to him, since he was travelling incognito. It was a point (to them) of grave moment. The Queen rubbed it in with spirit. She would not let him pay such a call. She told them that her brother “had other sights to see in Paris and could put off seeing the Princes of the Blood.” The King stood by during the quarrel, irresolute, upon the whole supporting his wife. The King’s brothers for the moment supported her also; but the kernel of the affair lay in her disregard of inherited tradition, in her contempt for those fine shades of mutual influence and deference which to the French are all important indications of authority, but which to her were meaningless extravaganzas of parade. Chartres, during the progress of what he thought an insult, she a piece of common sense, deliberately left the Court, publicly showed himself in Paris, and was applauded for his spirit.

This wilfulness, this picked quarrel, sprang from the same root as, and was similar to, whatever other fevers disturbed her entry into her twentieth year.

The Queen had conceived a violent affection for the Princesse de Lamballe, a young woman of the Blood, but Piedmontese, the widow of a debauchee—a simpering, faithful, stupid, sentimental and most unfortunate young woman, often gushing in her joy, next, in grief, wringing her enormous hands. It was an attachment almost hysterical and subject to extreme fluctuations. The Queen had conceived a second attachment, with the opening of this year 1775, for another woman, as good-natured indeed, but more solid and more capable of intrigue than Madame de Lamballe, the Comtesse de Polignac. In the empty society of the one, in the full and babbling coterie of the other, Marie Antoinette expended the greater part of her energy. Finding to hand, as it were, the Guémenées (and Madame de Guémenée constitutionally fixed as “Governess to the children of France”—children that did not exist), she plunged also into the Guémenée set, and there she discovered, for the first time in her young life, a powerful drug for the stimulation of whatever in adventurous youth has been wounded by disappointment and youth’s hot despair—gambling. The gambling took root quickly in this girl who hated wine and had desired so much of life. It was large in ’75; in ’76 it was to be ruinous to her watched and doled allowance.

Meanwhile the tailors and the milliners and all the ruck of parasites were taking advantage of the new reign to play extravagant experiments in fashion, to build fantastic head-dresses and to load humanity with comic feathers. She did not create such novelties, but she was willing to follow them.

The young bloods, in one of those recurrent fits of Anglomania to which the wealthy among the French are subject, must introduce horse-racing. She passionately approved. It gave her gambling the familiarity or lack of restraint which she was determined to breathe for the solution of her ills; it gave her the feeling of crowds about her, of pulse and of the flesh.

Young Artois, the youngest of the King’s brothers, because he was the most vivacious of those nearest her, must be her constant companion. Mercy noted his “shocking familiarity”; he feared that scandals would arise.... They did.

Again, as the new reign advanced, her unpolitical and most unwise concern for personalities showed more vividly than ever. Because the ambassador in London was in her set she must take up his cause with a sort of fury, when he was accused of abusing his position for the purposes of commerce. He was acquitted, but, much more than the trial or any of its incidents, the open and passionate attitude of the Queen struck the society of the time. So in the very moment of the coronation she again openly received Choiseul, though she knew that he could never return to Court, that her mother and all Austria disapproved.

Much worse than all of these, the constant jar upon her nerves broke down a certain decent reticence, the barrier of silence, which should, always in a woman of her age, and doubly in a woman of her position, be absolutely immovable. She publicly ridiculed the painful infirmity of the King. Her sneers at his incapacity were repeated; they crept into malicious, unprinted songs; she permitted herself similar confidences, or rather publicities, in her correspondence; she wrote them with her own hand, and there is little doubt that others besides those to whom they were addressed saw that writing. He, poor man, went on painfully with his duty, hour by hour in his councils, considering the realm, distantly fond of her, but necessarily feeling in her presence that mixture of timidity, generosity and shame, the secret of which was no longer private to his wife and him, but, through her lack of elementary discipline, spreading grotesquely abroad in an exaggerated and false rumour to the world.

So much had been accomplished by her own character and destiny when a full year had passed after the old King’s death. She had made the Crown a subject of jest, her character suspect, her husband, that is, the foundation of her own title, ridiculous, when the date had arrived in the summer of ’75 for the solemn coronation of Louis at Rheims.

Mercy, with an inspiration sharper than that which diplomats commonly enjoy, had suggested her coronation side by side with that of the King. Such a ceremony might have retrieved much. Precedent was against it, but after so very long an interval precedent was weak; at best it could but have afforded a spiteful and small handle for the enmities which Marie Antoinette had already aroused. She had but to insist, or rather only to understand, and her fate would have halted. She was indifferent. The miraculous moment when high ceremonial and the subtle effect of historic time combined to impress and to transform the French nation, the moment of the unction of the King, found her nothing more than the chief spectator in the gallery of the Cathedral transept looking down upon all that crowd of peers and officers whose position in the ceremony was exactly fixed.

She had come in to Rheims the night before under a brilliant moon, driving in her carriage as might any private lady. The “chic” of such an entry pleased her. She had allowed the King to precede her by some days, and whatever magic attached to the ritual descended upon him alone, and left her unsupported for the future. Her letter to her mother, written upon the morrow of the occasion, shows how little she knew what she had missed. The Court returned to Versailles, the careless vigour of her life was renewed, the thread of her exaggerated friendships and her exaggerated repulsions was caught up again.

When her young sister-in-law was married a few weeks later to the heir of Piedmont and Savoy, she did not conceal her relief at the departure from her Court of this child, with whom, for some reason or another, she could not hit it off. When Madame de Dillon, with her Irish beauty, passed through the Court, that lady moved Marie Antoinette to yet another violent friendship—luckily of short duration. As for the Princesse de Lamballe, she had already revived for her the post of Superintendente of the Queen’s Household (a post that had not existed for thirty years), and later she insisted upon there being attached to it the salary (which France imagined enormous) of £6000 a year.

It is of great interest to note that public dissipation or abandon of this kind, glowing familiarities, long-lit and brilliant nights, an ardent pursuit of what had become to her a very necessity of change—all, in a word, that was beginning to fix her subjects’ eyes upon her doubtfully, and not a little to offend the mass of the nobility around her, all that was found in her insufficient to the niceties and balance of the French temper, was easily excused by foreign opinion. Just that something which separates the French from their neighbours was lacking to the foreign observance of this foreign woman. Her carriage, which to the French was a trifle theatrical, seemed to foreigners queenly; her lively temper, which the French had begun to find forward, was for the foreigner an added charm.

There is no need to recall the rhetoric of Burke, for Burke was not by birth or training competent to judge; but Horace Walpole, who was present that very summer at the Court of Versailles, and saw the Queen in all her young active presence at her sister-in-law’s wedding-feast, writes with something of sincerity, and, what is more, with something for once of heart in his words. He thinks there never was so gracious or so lovely a being.

One judgment I, at least, would rather have recovered than any of theirs. It has not been communicated. I mean that of Doctor Johnson. For Doctor Johnson some months later stood by the side of his young girl friend, behind the balustrade at Fontainebleau, watching curiously with his aged and imperfect eyes this young Queen at the public ceremony of the Sunday Feast. The old, fat, wheezy man, who now seems to us England incarnate, stood there in the midst of the public crowd behind the railing, blocking its shuffling way as it defiled before royalty dining, and took in all the scene. The impression upon a man of such philosophy must have been very deep. I believe we have no record of that impression remaining.[^[2]]

[2]. The life of Doctor Johnson has become an object of such wide national study that more than one reader may be acquainted with his judgment of the scene. If it exists, it should be published to the advantage of history.

Though Marie Antoinette’s carriage and her manner had founded of her so beneficent a legend abroad and had begun in her new home so much of her future disaster, with those who knew her most intimately and who were of her own blood, with the Hapsburgs of Vienna, her conduct, certainly not queenly, seemed not even tragic. They scolded sharply, and the Emperor, her brother, crowned a series of violent notes by one so violent that Maria Theresa kept it back. To her childlessness (which was for them a fault in her), to her conduct (which her own family who had known her as a child exaggerated at such a distance) was added the exasperation of remembering that with some elementary caution she might have acted as the agent of the allied Austrian Court whose daughter she was; they were angered in Vienna to see that, instead of so acting, she wasted her position in private spites and private choices.

In fine, when the Day of the Dead came round and the leaves of ’75 were falling, she could look back from her twentieth birthday to her accession, and the view was one of eighteen months of mental chaos wherein one emotion rapidly succeeded another, each sought for the purposes of distraction and oblivion, and of feeding in some sort of firework way that appetite for life which Louis could not nourish with a steady flame. With the next year further elements were to be added to those existing elements of dissipation. The foundations of the future which she had already levelled out were to be strengthened. The public judgment of her was to become more apparent, and the legend which at last destroyed her was to take a firmer root.

The year 1776, for ever famous in the general history of the world, was the climax and the turning-point of this early exuberance and excess. In its first days, during the hard winter which marked the turn of the year, she had begun amusements which for the first time permitted her to cross the barrier which divides the reproach of one’s intimates from public scandal. Her play had grown from mere extravagant gambling to dangerous indebtedness, and she had been bitten by the love of jewels, especially of diamonds. In this year, too, the simple and somewhat empty friendship which she still slightly bore to Madame de Lamballe was finally replaced by more violent caprices; she began to associate with the powerful Guémenées, with the gentle but subtle and intriguing Countess of Polignac.

Her indiscretion rose continually. In February she was seen with the Princesse de Lamballe whirling over the snow into Paris, without an escort, as a private woman might, to the disgust and the hatred of the crowd.

The exhilaration of the cold—for her who was from Vienna—the exhilaration of her twentieth year, her love of merry domination over the timid little tall companion, whom she was so soon to abandon, drove her from audacity to audacity. Her sledges, which had been but a domestic scandal at Versailles, dared to reach Sèvres, St. Cloud; they crossed the river, because the hunting wood of Boulogne invited them. Upon one fatal morning she traversed that last screen and shot through Paris on her shining toy.

The sledge was daringly, impudently alone. There was no guard, no decent covering for royalty, no dignity of pace or even of ornament; its pace was a flash, and its high gilding a theatrical décor; mixing with that flash and that gilding was the jangling of a hundred little bells.

The streets were all aghast at such a sight. Sèvres and the villages round Versailles had stared, bewildered, to see a Queen go by in such a fashion; but Paris was too great to be merely bewildered, and Paris grew angry, as might an individual at a personal insult offered.

The next month saw her first reckless purchase of gems; she pledged her name for £16,000, and acquired in exchange of that debt diamonds not only expensive beyond the means of her purse, but unworthy of her rank and of the traditions of her office.

To such follies she added her personal interference in the matter of Turgot. That bright-eyed, narrow, intelligent, and most un-Christian man had missed the problem ready to his hands. In time of war, with a good army and a soldier behind him, he might have solved it; in a time of luxury, misery, and peace he could not. In the very days when he was propounding his theories of unfettered exchange and of direct taxation for the salvation of the Monarchy, the harvest of ’75 had failed. In the one exceptional moment of famine when interference with trade was certainly necessary to French markets, his free trade doctrine was imposed. A popular hatred rose against him, and he was hated not only by the populace, who felt the practical effects of his economic idealism, but by the rich handful who were still devout and who could not tolerate his contempt for the Faith, by the corrupt who could not tolerate his economy, and by the vivacious who could not tolerate his sobriety. His rapid and fundamental reforms, moreover, were opposed by the Parlement of Paris[^[3]] as by a wall. They refused to register the edicts. He had still great influence with the King, though hardly with any other effective power in the State, and in the month of March the King in a Bed of Justice compelled the Parlement to register Turgot’s decrees and give them the force of law. It registered them; but none the less Turgot was doomed.

[3]. It should be made clear, though it is elementary, that the Parlement of Paris, by nature a supreme court of law, exercised also the anomalous but traditional function of registrar of royal decrees. Nor was a law a law until this body had consented to enroll it or had been overcome by a grave, rare and solemn public ritual of the King’s called “a Bed of Justice.”

Mercy, who saw very clearly that the man must go, but who also saw clearly the extreme danger that the Queen ran in taking upon herself any part in his going, did all that his influence could command to prevent her interference. He spent his energy and his considerable persuasion in vain. The one motive force and the only one that could persuade her to public action had already stirred the Queen; she believed herself to have received a personal affront; the Cabinet had recalled a favourite in her set from the Embassy of St. James’s. The girl was determined upon revenge, and because Turgot as Comptroller-General showed most prominently in the Cabinet, it was upon Turgot that her wrath fell, or rather it was Turgot falling from power whom she precipitated by her final influence. Upon the 10th of May, Guines, whom the Cabinet had recalled from London, was raised to a Duchy in a public note; by the 12th, Maurepas had told the Comptroller-General that his office was vacant, and Marie Antoinette talked wildly of sending him to the Bastille.

There was at this time in Paris a man called Necker, with whom history would have little concern had not the accident of the Revolution later thrown his undetermined features into the limelight. He was a product of Geneva, a money-dealer therefore, and a Calvinist by birth and trade—in no way by individual conviction, for his energies had long been directed to the accumulation into his own hands of the wealth of others. His reputation as a solid business man was therefore high, and he was very rich; of moral reputation, as the Catholic French understand the term, he had none.[^[4]] His dealings with the treasury had brought his name forward, and in a few months, under a different title, he replaced Turgot at the head of the embarrassed finances of the country!... Societies in dissolution do such things.

[4]. His vivacious and ugly daughter was to be a catch famous throughout Europe. Years later Fersen—of all men!—was suggested to her. Pitt in ’85 had a bite at her ill-gotten dowry. Luckily for the girl, she escaped him, but she married De Staël, became famous, wrote her lively and didactic comments on the Revolution, grew uglier still, showed a small black moustache, at last wore a turban and drove Napoleon to despair.

His conception of reform was what one might expect from such a lineage. He cooked the public accounts, flattered all to remain in power, was hopelessly void of any plan, and, to meet the crisis, just borrowed: the first of modern stock-jobbers to conduct a State, and the model to all others. He was destined to become a sort of symbol of liberty ... and therein he is an example to democracy as well as to money-changers.

To the signal folly of precipitating Turgot’s fall the Queen was content to add further marks of excess. As though her purchases earlier in the year had not been sufficient, she must buy bracelets now worth three years of her income—bracelets, the news of which reached Vienna—and she must give rein to every conceivable indulgence in the passion of gambling. All the world talked of it, and all that summer, as the influence of her new friends rose and as her careless excitement reached its limit, the fever grew.

At Marly, during the summer visit of the Court, later in the year at Fontainebleau, she carried on the scandal. One autumn night and day in this last place bankers from Paris kept the faro tables open for thirty-six hours; they were the hours before her birthday, and the Mass of All Saints was sung to a Court pale and crumpled with the lack of sleep. The morrow, her twenty-first birthday, was sour with the memory of the reproach against that debauch. The Court returned for the winter to Versailles, and Maria Theresa determined that it was time for the Queen’s brother, the Emperor Joseph, to make the journey he had long promised, and to stem these rapids which threatened to become a cataract in which everything might be swept away. Her scolding letters to her daughter were accompanied by active plans for the journey of her son. She expected, and not without reason, that that son’s advent would change all, for she knew that he would have the direct mission to persuade Louis to an operation, to relieve the imperfect marriage of the burden that pressed upon it, and to remove from the life of that young wife the intolerable nervous oppression whence all this increasing violence proceeded.

It is to the Emperor’s journey, therefore, that all one’s attention should be directed as one reads her life from the closing days of 1776 to his appearance in Paris, after repeated delays, in the spring of the following year.

Meanwhile that other spirit whose action was to come in upon her life, America, was born. The week that had seen Turgot’s dismissal had seen passed in Philadelphia the Pennsylvania Resolution of Separation from the English Crown, and in the keener intellectual life of Virginia it had seen produced upon the same day the first statement of those general principles which the Colonies had drawn from Rousseau and upon which were to be based, for whatever good or evil fortunes still attended it, the democracy of our time. The revolt grew from those skirmishes of ’75 that had begun a Civil War to the Separatist decisions of ’76; the strain upon England’s tenure of her empire increased, and Vergennes all the while watched closely, hoping from that embarrassment to find at one moment or another the opportunity for relieving his country from the permanent threat of an English war.

It was a difficult and a perilous game. A British success might be, or rather would be, followed by swift vengeance against the embarrassed and fettered Crown of France. The Cabinet of Versailles would need allies against what was believed to be an all-powerful navy, and for eighteen months Vergennes was working to obtain these allies, in spite of the terror which the British fleet inspired. This policy, whose ultimate results were to be so considerable and so unexpected, took a new shape upon a certain day which should perhaps be more memorable in the history of the United States than any other. I mean the 28th of November of this year 1776.

Early that morning, the weather being clear and the wind southerly, a pilot from the rocks of Belle Isle had made out three ships in the offing, but they were hull-down; later, he saw one bearing a strange, quite unknown flag. He sailed towards it. The colours were those of the new Republic, and the stars and stripes flew above a sloop of war that carried Franklin; she had with her two English prizes for companions. Franklin landed. Within three weeks he was in Paris, and by the first week of the New Year he was at Passy in the suburbs, the guest of Chaumont, from whose great house and wide park proceeded the careful intrigue by which the Thirteen States were finally established in their Independence.

All who can pretend to history have respect for Vergennes, but that respect is far heightened by the close reading of what followed.

Alone of the European States Great Britain could not be balanced but could balance. Great Britain was secure among them and their insecurity. Great Britain alone in her growing monopoly of industry and in her impregnable self-sufficiency, economic and military, could not be pinned down into a diplomatic system; she alone could afford to scorn alliance and could in a moment change from friend to foe and strike at any exposed and vulnerable part of the European group—especially at a maritime neighbour. The British army maintained a proved excellence of a hundred years; it was particularly famous for its endurance; its records of capitulation were rarer than those of any other; it could afford to be small; its infantry stood fire brutally and could charge after losses that would have been fatal to its rivals; it had for framework the squires and the yeomen of solid country-sides, for material the still manly remains of a peasantry in the English shires, the Highlands, whose native language, diet, and race were at that time corrupted by nothing more alien than a little garrison. Finally, there was then available to the full for purposes of war the vigour of an as yet unruined and not yet wholly alienated Ireland.

A navy, adequate in numbers, but no drain upon the productive power of the nation, gave mobility to this force, the soil of these Islands fed the people upon it, and meanwhile an industry, textile and metallic, such as no other country dreamed of, supplied an increasing and overflowing resource for war. It is but a hundred and thirty years since things were thus. A vast change has passed, and it is difficult for the modern student, perplexed and anxious for the future of his country, to enter into the international policy of his fathers; yet must he grasp it if he is to understand what a revolution was effected by the issue of the American War; for it is probable that when the first complete survey of modern Europe is taken, the separation of the American colonies will establish a fixed date which marks not only the division between the monarchical and the bureaucratic, the old and the new Europe, but also, in our province, the division between what had been England and what later came to be called “the Empire”—with the destinies befitting such a title and the colonies to which it is attached.

Vergennes saw that this England, free upon the flank of his embarrassed country, was now suddenly engaged in the most entangling of nets, an unpopular and distant civil war. He knew that with a Protestant population of her own blood (at that time the States were in philosophy wholly Protestant, in tradition entirely English) would only be attacked by the governing families with the utmost reluctance. There was no fear of extreme rigours, or of sharp, cruel, and decisive depression; there was sympathy and relationship on both sides. Therefore the war would drag.

Vergennes had seen, two years before, the little English garrison permitting the inhabitants to arm and drill without interference; he knew that opinion in England was divided upon the rebellion. His whole attention was concentrated upon the prolongation of that struggle and upon postponing to the last the intervention of France. His attention, so given, was successful, and he secured his object.

At first and for as long as might be he would support, unseen, the weaker of the combatants. He received Franklin, though privately; he refused ships or a declaration of war. Arms and ammunition he liberally supplied—but he did so through a private and civilian person, whom he vigorously denounced in public, who had to go through the form of payment from the United States, as might any other dealer, and who was very nearly compelled to go through the form of receiving heavy punishment as well. The private firm so chosen was “Roderigo Hortalez et Cie”; the modern cheat of anonymity in commerce had begun, and Roderigo Hortalez was, in reality, that same shifty, witty, courageous, and unsatisfied man who had already played upon Versailles and Vienna and whose pen was later to deliver so deep a thrust at the Monarchy. Caron, or, to call him by the title of nobility he had purchased, “De Beaumarchais.”

While Vergennes was acting thus, every effort was being made at Vienna to advance the journey of the Emperor: postponed from January to February, from February to March, that journey was at last undertaken, and with the first days of April 1777 Joseph was present upon French soil, and driving down the Brussels road towards Paris.

THE EMPEROR JOSEPH II
FROM THE TAPESTRY PORTRAIT WOVEN FOR MARIE ANTOINETTE
AND RECENTLY RESTORED TO VERSAILLES

But all that while, in spite of his advent, the rush of the Court had increased, and to the twenty other fashions and excitements of the moment one more had been added—enlistment for America. The youngster, who was typical of all that wealthy youth, not yet sobered or falsified by fame, La Fayette, was determined to go; and almost as a pastime, though it was a generous and an enthusiastic one, the American Revolution was the theme of the Court in general. It became the theme of the Polignac clique in particular, a theme sometimes rivalling the high interest of the cards, or lending an added splendour to fantastic head-dress and to incongruous jewels.

And the Queen meanwhile, quite lost, pushed the pace of all the throng about her, despairing of any remedy to that evil which her brother was posting to reform.

If Fersen had been there!

Upon Friday evening, the 18th of April, the Emperor Joseph drove past the barrier of St. Denis and entered Paris. It was already dark, but the stoic was in time for dinner. He was in strict incognito, that he might be the more admired, and had given out the arrival of “Count Falkenstein” to all the world. He slept in the humblest way at his Embassy; he had hired two plain rooms in Versailles by letter—at a hotel called “the Hotel of the Just,” presumably Huguenot; next day he paraded as The Early Riser and was off to Versailles before the gentry were out of bed: the whole thing was as theatrical as could be. He wished to meet his sister alone—but he let everybody know it. He came up to her room by a private stair—and spoke of it as an act of simplicity and virtue. The man was of the kind to whom—most unhappily for them and their founder—Marcus Aurelius provides a model. His certitudes were in words or negations; his pride in things facile and dry; his judgments, vapid, determined, superficial, and false—in a manner Prussian without the Prussian minuteness; in a manner French, but with none of the French clear depth and breadth. Of hearty Germany he had nothing; and among all the instruments of action designed in Gaul he could choose out only one, the trick of sharp command, which the accident of despotic power permitted him to use over a hotch-potch of cities and tongues.

The task before him, which was the re-establishment at Versailles of the interests of Austria, comprised two parts: first, he must counsel or compel the Queen—who stood for Austria at Versailles—to such conduct and dignity as would permit her to exercise permanent political power; secondly, and much more important, he must force the King to that operation from which he so shrank and yet by which alone the succession of the Crown through Marie Antoinette could be assured.

For the first of these tasks, the reform of his sister’s conduct, Joseph’s empty character, without humour and without religion, was wholly insufficient—nay, it provoked the opposite of its intention. The obvious truth of his harsh criticism moved the Queen, but his bad manners, his public rebuke, offended her more. His precise (and written!) instructions forced upon her one irksome and priggish month of affected rigidity; she did but react with the more violence from the absurd restraint.

With the second and more positive task he was more fortunate. His brutal questions, his direct affirmation and counsel, his precise instructions, all conveyed in the sergeant-major manner which is of such effect upon the doubtful or the lethargic, accomplished their end. Louis inclined to the advice which had for now three years urged medical interference; he submitted to an operation, and the principal question at issue for two great States was in this secret manner accomplished: it was the one success, the only one, of Joseph’s tactless and unwise career. It was of the highest consequence to him and his house and all Europe; for, his counsels once obeyed, the maternity of Marie Antoinette was ultimately sure. When the Queen should have borne a child there could but follow the rage of disappointed successors, a secure and increasing influence upon her part over her husband, through this the antagonism of the Monarchy to the nation, and at last the Revolution and all its wars.

The reader may inquire the precise date of so momentous a detail. It is impossible to fix it until (if it still exist) the document once in the hands of Lassone be published; but we can fix limits within which the operation must have taken place. It must have been within that summer of 1777 in one of three months, June, July, or August; probably in late August or the very beginning of September. It was certainly later than the 14th of May, when, according to Mercy, the private interviews upon the matter between Joseph and Louis were still unfinished. Marie Antoinette’s letter of June 16th makes it probably later than that date. A phrase of Maria Theresa’s on the 31st of July, referring to news of the 15th (the last news from Mercy), makes it possible that she thought all accomplished by 15th of July. A phrase of Mercy’s on the 15th of August makes it more probable still. By the 10th of September a phrase used by Marie Antoinette in her correspondence with Maria Theresa makes it certain.[^[5]]

[5]. See [Appendix A].

Compared with this capital consequence of his journey the rest of Joseph’s actions, opinions, and posings in France are indeed of slight importance. His affectation of retirement and simplicity, his common cabs, his perpetual appearance in public and as perpetual pretence of complaint at his popularity are the tedious trappings of such men. In some things he was real enough; in his acute annoyance with the Queen’s set, for instance—especially with Madame de Guémenée, and her late hours, high play and familiar, disrespectful tones. He was sincere, too, in his astounding superficiality of judgment; he was keen on science, eager for the Academies, and in that scientific world of Paris which boasted Lavoisier and the immortal Lamarck discovered that “when one looks close, nothing profound or useful is being done.”

At the end of May he left for a tour in the French provinces. His ineptitudes continue. He has left notes of his opinions for us to enjoy. He judges the army, and condemns it—all except the pipe-clay and white facings of the Artois Regiment. That pleased him. He saw nothing of the cannon which were to break Austria and capture a woman of his house for Napoleon. He judges the navy after a minute attention, and finds it—on the eve of the American War!—thoroughly bad. One thing he does note clearly, that Provence, the King’s brother, has been seen going through France in state, as though sure of the succession. After what had passed at Versailles, such expectations on the part of Louis XVI.’s brother must have bred in Joseph a mixture of anxiety and amusement.

He returned to Vienna, and began to address himself to his next failure in policy and judgment—he coveted Bavaria. The death of the Elector of Bavaria would raise the issue of his succession. That death was approaching, and Joseph began to intrigue through Mercy, through his mother, and as best he could through his sister, for the succession to the Duchy and for the support of France against Prussia in his outworn, out-dated ambition. While he still played with such toys, much larger forces were ready to enter the scene, and changes that would make the little balances of German States forgotten; for as that summer of 1777 heightened, dry, intensely hot, and as all the air of the life around Versailles was cleared by the new intimate relations of the Queen and her husband; as the chief domestic problem of the reign was resolved, as it became increasingly certain that the royal marriage would soon be a true marriage and the way to the succession secure, there had come also the certitude of war with England in the matter of the American colonies.

It is upon this latter certitude that attention must now be fixed, before one can turn to the tardy accomplishment of the Queen’s hopes for an heir. The foreign policy of that moment is essential to a comprehension of her fate, for upon the unexpected turn of that unexpected conflict with Great Britain was to depend the fatal respite which destiny granted to the French Monarchy: a respite of years, during whose short progress the financial tangle became hopeless, the Queen’s ill-repute fixed, and the Crown’s last cover of ceremony destroyed.

I say there had come a certitude of war with England.

Of three things one: either England would reduce the rebels; or, having failed so to reduce them, she would compromise with them for the maintenance of at least a nominal sovereignty; or, she would wholly fail and would be compelled wholly to retire. In the first case it must be her immediate business to attack the French Government whose secret aid had alone made the prolongation of rebellion possible; in the second case, with still more security and a still more confident power, she could attack an enemy which, because it had not dared openly to help her foes, had earned their contempt and lost its own self-confidence. In the third case she would find herself free from all embarrassment and at liberty to destroy a rival marine, whose inferiority was incontestable but whose presence had been sufficient to embarrass her complete control of the North Atlantic and to sustain—however disingenuously—her rebellious subjects.

In any one of these three issues a war with England must come. But these three issues had not an equal chance of achievement. A complete victory of the British troops, probable as it was, could hardly result in a permanent military occupation of a vast district, English in blood and speaking the English tongue. A complete defeat of British regulars at the hands of the varied and uncertain minority of colonists, and the acknowledgment of American independence by a Britain unembarrassed in Europe, was an absurdity conceivable only to such enthusiastic boys as was then the young La Fayette, to such wholly unpractical minds as that of Turgot, or to popular journalists of the type which then, as to-day, are uninstructed whether in historical or in military affairs.

The middle issue was so much the more probable as to appear a calculable thing: the troops of George III. would determine the campaign, but the settlement following the expensive success of the British army would be a compromise whereby the colonies should be free to administer their own affairs, should be bound in some loose way to Great Britain, and should stand benevolently neutral towards, if not in part supporters of, her position in Europe.

The formula which guides a commercial State such as Britain in its colonial wars has long been familiar to its rivals; it is as simple as it is wise. Though we give it the epithet of “generous” and speak of the “granting of self-government,” while enemies will call it, with equal inaccuracy, “a capitulation” followed by “an alliance,” the nature and purpose of such compromises are those of a fixed policy and one upon whose unalterable data the British Empire has been built up.

It was in the nature of things that the British Government in this summer of ’77 should first seek to master the Americans in the field, next compromise with the defeated colonials, set them up as a nation nominally dependent, really allied, and so find itself free in Europe for the great duel with France. At Versailles Vergennes prepared not attack but resistance, and pulled with an accurate proportion of effort all the strings that should delay Great Britain, on the one hand, and, on the other, unite into one body of resistance against her the Atlantic seaboard of Europe and the principal navies of the Continent—that is, the Powers of France and the Peninsula; the admiralties of Versailles, Lisbon and Madrid.

As the Emperor Joseph’s carriage rolled westward along the main road of Brittany, approaching the gates of Brest, Vergennes was signing for despatch to the Spanish Court that note of his which inaugurated the active part of his plan of defence against England. Precisely a week later, Burgoyne and his forces started southward from Canada upon what should have been the decisive march of the British campaign in America.

A consideration of the map will at once convince the reader, first, that Great Britain was in a position suitable to immediate victory, and secondly, that the military advisers of her Government had formed the best possible plan for its rapid accomplishment.

What was the military object of the war? The control of a seaboard: a seaboard stretching indeed through fifteen degrees of latitude and extending in its contour over far more than fifteen hundred miles, but a seaboard only. Behind it lay districts which for military purposes did not exist—untouched, trackless, resourceless. The life of the colonies, especially their life during the strain of a war, flowed through the ports.

Again, this band of territory ran from a long southern extremity, whose climate was unsuited to active work by Europeans, through a middle temperate interval to another extremity of winter fogs and rigorous winter cold. A continental climate rendered the contrast of North and South less noticeable, for the warm continental summer embraced it all, and the cold continental winter penetrated far south; but that contrast between the two halves of that seaboard was sufficient to afford a line of social and political cleavage already apparent in the eighteenth century and destined in the nineteenth to occasion a great domestic war.

Again, there lay behind this seaboard, at a distance nowhere greater than three hundred miles nor anywhere much less than two, that valley of the St. Lawrence which Great Britain firmly held; her tenure was secure in the diversity of its race, religion and language from those of the rebels and in the unity which the admirable communications of its great waterway confirmed.

Here then was a line already wholly held, the St. Lawrence, and parallel to it a line already partially held, and always at the mercy of the British fleet—the ports of the sea-coast. Up and down the belt of land between those parallel lines went the scattered bands of the rebels. Even their organised armies were loosely co-ordinated in action and expanded or diminished with the season.

The obvious strategy for the British was to cut that intervening belt in a permanent fashion by establishing a line from the St. Lawrence to the sea, so to separate for good the forces of their opponents and then to deal with them in detail and at leisure.

An accident of topography afforded to this simple problem an obvious key: just down that dividing-line, which separates the northern climate and the Puritan type of colony from the rest, a sheaf of natural ways leads from the coast to the valley of the St. Lawrence, and of these the plainest and by far the best is the continuous and direct depression which is afforded by the long, straight valley of the Hudson and continued in one easy line along the depression marked by Lakes George and Champlain. There is not upon all that march one transverse crest of land to be defended nor one position capable of natural defence, and in its whole extent water-carriage is available to an army save upon the very narrow water-shed where (according to the amount and weight of supplies) two—or at most three—days must be devoted to a land portage. But even here, between the foot of Lake George and the Upper Hudson, existed then what is rare even to-day in the New World, a road passable to guns.

Under such conditions, even had the rebellion been universal and homogeneous, the strategy imposed was evident. The sea was England’s; the English forces had but to land in force, to occupy one or more of the ports at the outlet of these ways leading to the valley of the St. Lawrence, and simultaneously to march down from that valley to the sea. They would thus cut the rebellion in half; the cut so made could easily be permanently held, and the English henceforth could operate at their choice and in increasing numbers from any point of the coast against either section of a divided enemy.

I say this was the obvious plan even had the rebellion been homogeneous or universal; but it was neither—and nowhere was it weaker or more divided against itself than on this very line of cleavage. It was precisely in the valley of the Hudson and at its mouth that the British could count upon the greatest hesitation on the part of their opponents and upon most support, sometimes ardent support, on the part of their friends. New York was thoroughly in the Royal power, and the plan of marching from the St. Lawrence down to that harbour seemed certain to conclude the campaign. Leaving such garrison as New York required, Howe sailed with 20,000 men in this opening of the summer of 1777 to attack some one of the harbours; after a cruise of some hesitation he sailed up the Delaware and landed to march on the rebel source of supply, Philadelphia. At the same moment Burgoyne set out upon his march from the St. Lawrence valley to the sea.

Each was easily successful. Washington, covering Philadelphia from a position along the Brandywine, was completely defeated. Philadelphia was in British hands before the close of September; an attempt at relief was crushed in the suburbs within a week. As for Burgoyne, his force, though it amounted to less than a division, was equally at ease. He swept easily down Lake Champlain: the American irregulars abandoned the isthmus and their positions near Ticonderoga, which were militarily identical with that pass. He pursued the enemy to the extremity of the water, and on southward up the valley, towards the water-shed, defeating every rally and confident of immediate success.

It was but early in July, and he had already accomplished half his route, and could boast the capture of over a hundred cannon—mainly of French casting.

All had gone well. The news reaching London, reached Paris and Madrid by the mouths of English Ministers and Envoys, whose tone was now of an increasing firmness, and who, in the immediate prospect of success, began to ask in plain terms how matters stood between France and Spain, and whether these two Bourbon Crowns were prepared for open war.

Vergennes was in an agony of writing, of secrecy and of defence, urging Spain to draw secretly close to France that both might stand ready for the inevitable blow which England would deliver when the colonies were once subdued.

What followed was Burgoyne’s woodland march of a few miles across the portage from the lakes to the Hudson.

The cause of that march’s amazing delay, and of the disaster consequent upon such delay, will never be fully explained; because, although not a few acquainted with European roads and European discipline and arms are also acquainted (as is the present writer) with the un-made country traversed by that force, yet there was no contemporary who, by a full double experience of American and European conditions, could present in his account the American advantage in such a country at that time and the corresponding difficulties of European troops. From Fort Anne, where the last American force had been scattered, to Fort Edward, where the Hudson is reached, is one day’s easy walking. It took Burgoyne’s army twenty-one. I have neither space nor knowledge to say why: German slowness (half the army was German), the painful construction of causeways, officers (one may suppose) drinking in their tents, a vast train, an excess of guns, a fancied leisure—all combined to protract the delay. The month of July was at an end when the British reached the river, and, having reached it, the men were on fatigue duty day after day bringing in the guns and supplies that had come by water to the extremity of Lake George.

In this way August was wasted, and an attempt to raid draught cattle a few miles to the south-east at Bennington in Vermont was, in spite of the active loyalty or treason of many colonists, defeated and destroyed—a disaster due to the foreign character, the small number employed, and the dilatory marching of the troops so detached. It was mid-September before the army crossed the Hudson to its western bank, where a small auxiliary force approaching from the Mohawk valley was to have joined it. That force failed to effect a junction. All were bewildered, and now a heavy rain began to soften the green ways and to swallow the wheels of the guns. Burgoyne reached no further south than to the site of a drawn struggle before the mouth of the Mohawk. And already the American irregulars, on hearing of the British difficulties, had gathered and grown in number; they were at last near double the invading force, and September was ending. The woods were full of colour as Burgoyne’s little army fell back—but a few miles, yet back; an irresolution was upon it, because advance was no longer possible, and yet a full retreat would mean the failure of all the large plan of England. There was a rally, a success, a failure, and the loss of guns. With October they were beneath the heights of Saratoga. Certain supplies attempted to reach them by crossing the river; the far bank was found to be held by the increasing forces of the rebellion.

It was determined to abandon the effort and to retire—at last, but too late. The road to the lakes was blocked; more guns were lost; the enemy were gathering and still gathering, a random farmer militia whom such an entanglement tempted: they were soon four to one. An attempt at relief by the force down river from New York had failed. On the 12th of October, a Sabbath, the harassed army reposed. On the 13th, a Monday, Burgoyne ordered an exact return of forces, forage, and supply; some five thousand were to be found, but not four thousand men could stand to roll-call armed; not two thousand of these were British; perhaps a week’s supply remained; of all his park, thirty-five pieces alone were left to him. He called a council, to which every officer above the rank of lieutenant was summoned, and that afternoon the proposals to treat were drawn up and despatched; by ten, Gates, in command of the American force, had sent in his reply. Tuesday and Wednesday were taken up in the terms of an honourable surrender—not exactly observed. On Thursday the 16th these terms were signed, and on that day, that repeated day the 16th of October, the keystone of the British plan in North America had crumbled, and the strong arch of a wise strategy was ruined.

It was but a small force that surrendered in those lonely hills to a herd of irregulars. The causes of the failure were many, tedious, gradual, and therefore obscure; but the effect was solemn and of swelling volume. It roused the colonies; it slowly echoed across the Atlantic; it changed the face of Europe.

The French Court, at the moment of that surrender in the woods three thousand miles away, sat at Fontainebleau decided upon pleasure.

Goltz, watching all things there for the King of Prussia his master, wrote (on that very day, the 16th of October!) that the French had let their moment slip: England was now secure, he thought—for one of the great weaknesses of Prussia is that, like self-made men, she has no instinct for fate.

Florida Blanca (upon the very day that Burgoyne’s troops piled arms) was writing from Madrid to Vergennes that “the two Courts” (of France and Spain) “should do all to avoid cause of complaint on the part of Great Britain at such a time.”

Vergennes himself, gloomily alone amid the foolish noise of Fontainebleau, in the sweat of late hours and gaming, thus abandoned by Spain and seeing his hopes of a Spanish alliance going down, wrote (on that same 16th of October, the day that Burgoyne’s troops piled arms!): “The Ministers of England think her the mistress of the world.... My patience has been hard tried ... true, the two (Bourbon) Crowns must go warily.... I hope the constraint may end, but I have no wish for war.... I only ask that England shall not compel us to do what she dares not do herself, that is, to treat these Americans as pirates and outlaws.”

In such a mood of despondence and of anxiety the French Foreign Office awaited the first blow England might choose to deliver; in such a mood of reluctance and fear Spain refused to declare herself on the side of the French should England choose to strike; and in such a tension Western Europe stood for one week, another, and a third, when, early in November, came the first rumours of the truth. How they came it is impossible to determine. They came before known or common methods could have brought them; they came before true news, like a shadow or a presage. On the 7th of November Vergennes had written to Noailles of a hint of some English defeat, “not too much to be trusted.” On the 15th he was wondering at the insistence of the English Ministers upon their Pennsylvanian successes, at the English silence upon the Hudson march. As the month wore on, as the English insistence grew gentler, the English silence more profound, Vergennes determined his final policy; but even as he was drawing up his memorandum in favour of recognition to be granted to, and of alliance to be concluded with, the United States, on the 4th of December, and before this document was signed, full news came and all was known.[^[6]] The 4th of December is a day propitious for arms; it is the gunners’ festival.

[6]. It is important to remember that Vergennes’ report in favour of recognising the United States was drawn up before, signed after, the news of Saratoga had reached Versailles.

The issue was not long in doubt. Upon the 5th the story and consequence of Saratoga were drawn up and despatched on every side. Upon the 6th the fateful document calling the American delegates to an audience with Louis was submitted to that King, and he wrote in his little sloping hand at the foot of it that word “approuvé,” which you may still read.

Upon the 8th, Franklin at Passy drafted, Deane, Lee, and he also signed, their memorable acceptance. The days that followed, to the end of ’77 and beyond it, were occupied in nothing more than the confirmation of this revolution in policy, and it was certain that by the New Year the French Crown would support the Rebellion in arms.

Such were the three years in which the seeds of the Queen’s tragedy were sown: they were sown deep. The stock of her disaster was established in a vigorous soil; but during the silent period of its growth, before the plant had come to its evil maturity, a few deceitful years were still to hide from her the sequence of her fate. For the two glories of life were upon her—victory and the birth of children.

In common with all her Court the Queen could now, in the hale winter of ’77-’78, imagine herself upon the threshold of a new and fruitful life. Her chief anxiety was now dispelled, for she might await securely the advent of an heir. Her vivacity and her distractions seemed now as harmless as her habit of changing pleasures was now fixed; her casual but active excursions into public affairs had now in her husband’s eyes an excuse or motive they formerly had lacked, and her political interference, though utterly without plan, was even destined to achieve for a moment a peculiar, if deceptive, success.

This period of her life ends with a scene which the reader may well retain, for it sums up the change; a scene which forms the happy conclusion of so much unrest and the introduction to a brief, a most uncertain, but—while it lasted—an enlarged and a conquering time.

The new year had come. The winter festivities of early ’78 were at their height awaiting their end at the approaching carnival. It was the 21st of January—a date thrice of great moment to the French people—and the Queen was holding a ball (characteristically hers) in the palace. There was a fuller life that evening, in the glare of a thousand candles, than had yet been known, a more continuous and a more vivacious noise of laughter and of music. Paris had come more largely than usual; there were many strangers, and the air seemed full of an exultant conciliation. Upon this joy and movement there fell a sudden silence; it was a silence the Queen well comprehended and had expected too, for Provence, coming straight from the Council, had entered the room and had given her the message she awaited. The message was repeated, whispers first, then louder and more eager questions and replies were everywhere heard; voices rose louder: young Artois openly cheered.

The English ambassador had turned at the unusual scene and knew its meaning; he despatched to his Government that night the news that the Independence of the United States had been recognised and orders to the French navy signed.

What followed may be briefly told. In somewhat over a fortnight the treaty of recognition and of alliance with the new Republic was concluded. The approaching affair with England began to equal, very soon it wholly surpassed, in interest and peril the petty Bavarian quarrel, and though war was not formally declared, French ships were in February already attacked by English. In mid-March the treaty was notified by the French ambassador in London to the Prime Minister of England; forty-eight hours later Lord Stormont at Versailles had demanded and received his papers. A month of preparation passed.

At last, upon Easter Sunday (the 19th of April in that year) two couriers riding crossed each other at the royal gate of Versailles—the one reaching, the other leaving, the palace. He that drew rein and was ending his journey bore great news: D’Estaing had sailed from Toulon with twenty ships of the fine, and the campaign was opened. He that set spurs and was but just beginning his post bore great news also, for he had upon him that letter (it is still preserved) in which Marie Antoinette told her mother that now she was certainly with child.

CHAPTER VII
THE CHILDREN

Easter Sunday, April 19, 1778, to Monday, October 22, 1781

THE expectation of an heir, the Queen’s ascendency over her husband, the promise of adventurous war, proceeded with the year. Meanwhile the little business of Bavaria somewhat marred the hopes of the now renewed and invigorated Monarchy. It is a business history should make little of; hardly a combat—rather a diplomatic rupture soon arranged. It covered the year exactly—it was settled with the close of it; but it had its significance in the Queen’s life, for her political action in it confirmed and extended the popular idea that Marie Antoinette was treasonable to French interests in the department of foreign affairs.

The most apparent thing of that moment was the new certitude and strength of the Queen now that she was to be a mother. Her love of change became less frivolous, more mixed with character; her old passionate friendships, her appetite for colour of every kind—in jewels, in fantasies, in voices—took on some depth and permanence. Even her interference with public affairs was no longer the mere whim that had been the bane of Turgot: it had objects; those objects were pursued, though they were personal and unwise. Unfortunately her mother and Mercy persuaded her, just as her strength appeared, not to the aggrandisement of her husband’s throne, but to the mere fending off of Prussia from Maria Theresa’s land in the Bavarian quarrel. There arose concerning her action a swarm of whispers, voices not yet of moment, though numerous in the taverns and clear at Court.

MARIE ANTOINETTE
FROM THE PRINCIPAL BUST AT VERSAILLES

The Elector of Bavaria had died while Versailles and all the Court were in the height of their absorption in the American Rebellion; just in that last December which had been full of the first active approach of Vergennes towards the American envoys. The passing of the Electorate to another branch of the family, and that branch childless, or rather lacking direct legitimate issue, threw the musty anarchy of German archives open to the lawyers; they were rummaged, and a dust arose. The various fragments out of which the old Duchy and the newer Electorate were pieced together found claimants everywhere, and the two heads of antagonism were necessarily Vienna and Berlin: Berlin, which would support the heir to the old Duchy—at a price; Vienna, which would protect the reigning Elector for the reversion—on doubtful pleas of inheritance—to some half of the mosaic over which he ruled.

There was here no plain conscience of civilised right against a northern and blundering atheism such as had earlier supported the defence of Maria Theresa against the too successful cynicism of Frederick the Great. The ambitions of Joseph were the ambitions of a philosopher; they were at least as empty and by no means as thorough as the soldierly ambitions of his opponent the King of Prussia: the injury was mutual, the contempt of justice equal, for Joseph was a pupil of Frederick’s in wrong-doing. To each, however, the complex little territorial quarrel seemed of secular magnitude. Maria Theresa was maddened with anxiety, and wrote, so maddened, despairing appeals to her daughter at Versailles. Mercy moved all his persuasion to persuade the intervention of France. Vergennes as resolutely refused to be involved. England was approaching Austria, to the detriment, it was hoped, of the Bourbons, the whole weight of diplomatic thought was at work, and Europe was warned and threatened with incredible futures as one or the other of the two enemies armed for the acquisition of a titular sovereignty over the tortuous and overlapping boundaries of a feudal ruin. Such were the petty concerns of statesmen and even of demagogues in a year when the young men who were to fight at Valmy were already boys. The politicians wrangled over the Bavarian succession as we to-day wrangle over colonial things, imagining them to contain the future fate of Europe.

The Queen at first did little. Mercy complained of her detachment. She was occupied in the greater matter of her maternity, passing all the time of the first leaves and the early summer rains in quietude at Marly; she would have no Court about her, and when she wrote to Maria Theresa it was perpetually of the child. That seclusion and that hope so much attached to her the new affections and the new pride of Louis that when at last she spoke to him, and spoke with increasing violence, for her family and for Vienna, she largely accomplished her aim. She did not intend to involve the Foreign Office—Vergennes was apparently immovable—but so great was now her influence with Louis that by autumn she did obtain a tardy intervention, and until she obtained it she showed in every way her determination to be heard. The first acts of war in July moved her to countermand a feast at Trianon; during August she frequently disturbed the Council by her presence. In September she put forward an uncertain proposal for mediation. It was refused, and her anger added to the difficulties of the French Crown. But she did obtain—the forgotten act was to re-arise, enormous, at her scaffold—she did obtain a subsidy. Treaty demanded it: it had been refused: the whole duty of the Bourbon Crown was to watch finance—yet fifteen million went to Austria. The taverns made it a whole convoy of gold; there were songs against the Queen, accusing her of “paying out French gold.” Older and worse stories about her were revived. The printed obscenities from London and Amsterdam began to flow. The set at Court which had called her openly “the Austrian” before her accession, and since her accession had in secret still so called her, passed on the term to the street, and the nickname was common in Paris before the end of the year.

All these things she had forgotten before the winter closed upon her and her hour approached. They were indeed little things, seedlings. Much greater was the coming of an heir—and Fersen’s return.

He had come back late in August. The moment she had seen him, with his tall, upstanding gait and serious eyes, she came forward and reminded him (and those about her) of his old acquaintance—he was a friend. The lad was still quite young; here was she now a woman, and the effect of four years, changing her so greatly in body had less changed him in body; it had less changed her in heart. For as the days fell shorter and autumn lapsed into winter, his rare and brief notes betray the growing charm of the woman who perpetually remembered him. All through the months of the cold, through the time of her approaching childbirth, and through the gaieties of the new year that succeeded, he remained. Many noted her visage and her tone, once especially when she sang and looked at him during her singing. At last he also—when in April he left the Court, bitten with the gallant adventure of America, like so many of his rank—he also had understood. She followed him perpetually with her eyes; she followed him as he left her rooms again for the last time, and it was noted that there were tears in her eyes.... A wealthy woman rallied Fersen, as he left, upon his conquest; he was now old enough to deny gravely that any woman of that Court had deigned to consider him: having so denied it, he was gone.

As for the Queen, she wrote or spoke of him in public as a young nobleman only, now known and worthy of advancement, and since she kept the rest strictly in her heart no emphasis here of that which lay at the root of her life would give it dignity or value in these pages. Yet throughout these pages the name of Fersen should be the chief name.

He was gone for five more years after so brief a sight of new things.

Meanwhile the Court awaited the birth of an heir.

There was a murmur all around. Monsieur had written frankly enough to the King of Sweden that his hope of the succession was gone. The Court was transformed, and Marie Antoinette especially was a new power: the light calumnies were grown heavy now; the revenge for personal touches was becoming a State affair; a weight of office was upon her, for she was now to be half the Crown and the true wife of a King who governed, and the mother of a King after him.

It was on the 19th of December, in the very early hours long before dawn, that her husband was warned: in the forenoon her travail began.

I have said that the French Monarchy was a sacramental and therefore a public thing. The last act of its public ritual was about to be accomplished; for the last time it rose to the mystical duties of its office and dared to mix with the nation, not as a person, but as an Institution for whom, being immortal, peril was nothing, and, being impersonal, decency and comfort nothing. Could it have so dared again it would have been saved, but it did not dare.

The populace demanded admittance to the birth, and were admitted in the ancient way. The square room in which the Queen lay, upon a low little camp-bed before the fire, was crowded in a moment; upon the carved marble of the chimney-piece two street arabs were seen climbing. The market-women were there, mixed with the ladies of the Court, and a great press of the poor from the streets had found an entry and were packed also upon the great stairs outside. Everything was a-buzz and a-tiptoe, questioning, craning for the news; the market-women commiserated and complained; the ladies-in-waiting stood silent, each estimating the event—the change there would be at Court, the strong place the King would now hold, and, above all, the new power of the mother—the little heir, the boy who should dispossess Monsieur, exile Artois perhaps, and recapture the heart of the crowds to the Bourbon name.

For some critical moments there was a silence.

Vermond (the tutor’s brother), who was her doctor, or her midwife, had ordered every crevice to be closed. Even the chinks of the window had paper gummed to them. In such an air and under such an ordeal the Queen fainted. Louis in a passion of sense thrust his arm through a pane of glass and let in the winter cold; Vermond lanced a vein, and with the bleeding and the fresh draught of air the Queen returned to life. They told her that the child was a girl.

There were great crowds at her churching and some eagerness. The Latin Quarter was impassable with folk as her coach crawled up the hill towards the shrine of Ste. Genevieve. The square in front of the Cathedral was very full—but they lacked a Dauphin. The King was glad enough. When, upon Christmas Eve, the child had grasped his finger, he had told his pleasure to all. Her name and godparents, her household and her future were discussed as solemn things. But in Versailles the air was dull with anti-climax; they had depended upon, or braced themselves for, or begun their intrigue against, a son of France—and none was there.

The little girl who thus was born alone survived. Her brothers perished—the heir in prison; her father and her mother both were publicly destroyed. She lived. The country house of her old age I well remember, a solemn and lonely place, small and grey and deep in the woods—long empty. It fell into ruins, was sold for stone, and a road driven over it; but after nightfall horses refused to pass the place, and legends of darkness clung to the last blood of the Bourbons.

It was but the close of January when the Queen returned from La Muette and her churching to Versailles and the disappointment of Versailles. It was just a year from the ball-room scene that had meant war with the English. That year had done nothing but maintain the struggle, to the surprise and encouragement of the French Ministry; it had done no more, but even that was much. The naval actions had been at the worst indecisive, the English communications along the rebel coast were now in perpetual jeopardy, and would so remain until a French fleet was destroyed: none was destroyed. Even an attempt to blockade the French in Boston harbour had failed, and in November D’Estaing had slipped away from Byron under the advantage of a storm. Of all the operations of that year perhaps the most momentous to history was the chance and inconclusive fight of July in the Atlantic, for it gave the Queen occasion to doubt the courage of Chartres and to ridicule it: and Chartres, soon to be Orleans, found his growing hatred of her fixed for ever.

As for her, she kept her carnival, the carnival of 1779. Her less light purpose now earned her reproaches far more deep than those which had pursued her first childless years; but in her new hopes she could forget them, and her much rarer omissions did not remain in her mind. She did not see how solidly the foundations of her fate were being laid in the dark, and how every trivial folly was her foe; no act of hers proved great enough to destroy the last effect of these trivial follies.

She went to the Opera-ball on Shrove Tuesday with the King—it was a folly (they said) to leave Versailles so soon. She went without him a week later—it was a folly to go alone. That night, her coach breaking down, she must take a public fly—a piece of common sense. She spoke of the adventure, and it pleased her hugely, but the populace twisted it into I know not what adventures, repeated and enlarged in a thousand ways.

When in April the measles incommoded her, she must retire to Trianon for a month—it was common sense; but it was “breaking roof” with the King, and therefore a lesion in the constant etiquette of the Crown. She took with her her young sister-in-law, Madame Elizabeth, whom she had once petulantly avoided, and now, saner, loved; and Madame de Lamballe was there too. It was common sense; but her absence from the Court was hateful, was an insult to the courtiers, and the presence at Trianon during the day of four gentlemen, her friends, was more hateful still. The lies poured out in a printed stream from London; and the Paris coffee-shops, and the drawing-rooms too, had now woven round her an enduring legend of debauchery more real than things witnessed or heard. The calumny was fixed.

If a moment must be chosen of which one can say that it was the decisive moment in her public ill-repute, the moment before which that repute was yet fluid, the moment after which it was set, then that moment must be found in this summer of her twenty-fourth year, 1779. It was an effect coming well after its cause: the high tide of a wave that the first reckless three years had raised.

It may be asked whether, had some shock or some necessity wholly changed her, had she given up every lightness as she had already given up most excesses, she might not yet have warded off the approaches of a distant judgment. No, she could not. The character of the attack upon her she could have modified; but she could only have diminished its volume by increasing its intensity, or its rapidity by extending its already almost universal vogue: she could not have escaped it. The most sober actions of that enthusiastic nature would now for ever be criticised. Had no money gone on slight pleasures, the money spent in every error of foreign policy would have been put down to her; every unpopular dismissal she was to be guilty of, innocent or no, and her name was to be, in every story of intrigue, however incredible, pre-judged. She was destined henceforward to be forgotten in victory and remembered in defeat, nor could anything have saved her save a sudden comprehension of France. No God revealed it to her, and to the general protest that was rising beneath her came accident after accident, some hardly of her doing, some not at all, but every one pointing towards the single issue of her fate, not one in aid of her.

The nights of August were hot and the early autumn also. The customary tours of the Court had been countermanded to save money. The princesses walked at evening and mingled with the crowd on the terrace of the palace, where was the band. It gave scandal. It gave scandal that the Queen should walk later with Artois. It gave most scandal that Madame de Polignac, with her refined and silent face, her gentle deep-blue eyes under that dark hair—a type not national—should so entirely possess the Queen.

The Polignac clique demanded and obtained on every side. It was a double evil: a proof to the Court that the aristocracy as a whole were excluded from favour and that a faction ruled; a proof to the nation that, at a time when finance was the known burden, and when, in the midst of prosperity, a permanent crisis weighed on the impatient poor and the public forces alike, the executive, the King, could blindly spend money and endow every Polignac claim. The sums involved in this patronage of the Polignacs, as in every other public extravagance of the French, were small. The debts of a Pitt or a Fox were far larger, the luxuries of our modern money-dealers are mountainous compared to them; but they fell on a nation wholly egalitarian, unused to and intolerant of government by the wealthy, and a nation which regarded (and regards) its government as the principal engine to use against the rich, not in their aid.

Trianon, not enormous in its cost, grew to be yet another legend, and that legend was not diminished when, in the summer of 1780, a little theatre was opened there, a little stage for the Queen.

All the world did such things! None could blame her—yet all did. After all, one great house after another had put up its show—most of them more costly than hers: but there was in her gradual extension of the amusement something that aggrandised it and made it a public talk; her invitation to the great Paris companies of actors, her very seclusion at first, with its opportunity for rumour, later her open doors, swelled the comment and the offence of Paris. Paris detested this private theatre from the first. There was in it a mixture of carelessness for the State and of personal abasement which Paris could not tolerate in a French Queen; yet how simple was the distraction to her, and how could the subtleties of these Paris critics, themselves the best actors in the world, deriding acting and despising it, be comprehensible to her? She played on.

The King came often. He applauded. She permitted—in this year 1780 at least—no one but the royal family to witness her from the audience ... but the parts were many and needed many players. She made dull Campan, her librarian, manage for her; she gave no place in the distraction to those who thought their presence about her to be a most solemn right and duty. In the autumn to the acting she must add singing, though her voice was not always in tune and was often displeasing in its lack of volume. Stage parts demanded stage lovers, and, learning this, Mercy in his turn opposed. He came at her invitation (but he insisted on being hidden behind the lattice of a box), he applauded her acting somewhat, was courtier-like to her singing—but he disapproved.

Silent, a little bent, low-voiced, a man of but fifty-three—though seeming older—Mercy was now at the height of that long career during which for twenty-two years he was Austria itself permanently present before Marie Antoinette, a spy over her for her mother’s sake and for her own, a devoted servant of the Hapsburgs and Lorraine.

His nobility was of the Empire: a Belgian from Liège, a man without nationality, and with no comprehension of the rising religion of patriotism, he had from his childhood formed part of that cosmopolitan soldiery which was the shield of Maria Theresa; he lived for that Great Lady who maintained him in his embassy, and in his manner and tradition he maintained the character it had had under his master, Kaunitz.

He had passed all his early manhood in that splendid river-side house in Paris which the dandyism of the great diplomatist his teacher had demanded. His youth—reserved, awkward and probably laborious—had left him very observant. He had adopted for life all the externals of the Parisians, but—with the narrowness of his profession—he had failed to see that inmost part of them which was so soon to launch a tempest of wars against all that bunch of private interests on which he depended, and to destroy it. The French Crown was nothing to him, and whether in Paris, at Versailles, or down river in his great country house at Conflans, the French nation left him careless. He was lord of a French manor in Lorraine, of another near his château on the river. His wines were French, and marvellous, and cellared in 15,000 bottles, which the peasants of the Oise drank for him joyfully in ’92—nothing more saddened the old man in his exile when the Revolution was on.

His horses were superb. Even of coachmen he boasted two—each beautiful and large; each equal in domestic rank.

Unmarried, he maintained with dignity an opera-singer of some fame and of the refinement customary in that trade; at the close of his life he left upon record their “close and rooted friendship.”

Such was the man who for nine years had watched his Princess as she grew to womanhood and at last to motherhood at the French Court, and for nine years had sent those long, regular, and careful letters to Maria Theresa which are now our source for quite half the history of the place and time. His life also was at a crisis and a change in this year of 1780, for in the autumn of it his great sovereign died.

Maria Theresa was sixty-three. She was still vigorous in body, powerful in voice, alert in brain, but for many years a great melancholy had not abandoned her. She had continually contemplated her husband’s tomb; her letters to her children, and especially to the Queen of France, were full at the last of an approaching silence. The Bavarian trouble had broken her; in the long expectation of a grandson to the French throne she had been disappointed; the future of her daughter had terrified her—for she saw the gulf. It was upon the 24th of November that she felt her fatal illness; until the 29th she wrote and dictated her affairs of State, and on that very date wrote at length to the Queen. Then she saw Death coming visibly; she staggered into a chair, and with words of rational charity upon her lips she died.

It was a week—Wednesday, the 6th of December—before the news could reach Versailles. It came at evening. Marie Antoinette saw suddenly receding, as the sea had receded from Lisbon at her birth, the principal aspect of her life. The memory of her mother, and the constant letters—scolding, anxious, loving, or imperious—had been her only homely things where everything around her had been alien and increasingly alien. Her mother for nine years, her mother and Mercy’s voice, had been tangible: all the rest was strange. That deep and inner part which she did not or could not show, which she herself perhaps did not know, and which appeared but three times upon the surface of her life, rose through its eager and not profound levels of sense. Her whole frame was broken; she spat blood. She put herself that hour in black of every kind disordered, and she met the coming year charged with a sorrow that could now never wholly leave her. But that year was to give her the two chief things of that phase in her life—the news of a successful battle, and the birth of a son; and a third—the woman La Motte, through whom the chief of her evils were to come upon her.

Far off in Virginia, La Fayette lay at Richmond with a handful of men. Cornwallis made a dash for him and failed, marched back, burning and plundering, to the coast, received a confused tangle of orders, entered Yorktown and awaited the English fleet. Washington had heard how Grasse in the West Indies would sail with the French fleet; he marched southward to join the French commanders. With him was young Fersen, who for so long had not seen France and who was there volunteered for America; with him also was Rochambeau and all his men, and they hurried to victory together through the wet, heavy summer of 1781 along the Atlantic plain.

Meanwhile in Versailles nothing was toward. The Court had lost its old gaiety in the stress of the war and of the “economies.” The Queen awaited and implored a son. The Emperor, coming in July 1781 for the second time to a country he despised, “found much improvement,” was entertained at Trianon, and went away. It was August, hot, drowsy, and silent; it was September, and an intense anxiety for the birth—now at last, if it might be—of an heir.

And as that September passed, two things came into this strange life upon which so many varied things arose and joined darkly in their dates; each accident was quite unknown to the Queen.

The first was this, that the British fleet coming up to save Cornwallis found Grasse already within the bay, was beaten off, and with it the chance of succour; so that La Fayette and Washington meeting could and did, just as the month ended, lay siege.

The second was this: that up in the mountains of Alsace a lady, a friend, introduced a younger lady and a poor one to the notice of the Bishop of Strasburg. He was that coadjutor to the see, now succeeded to it, whom Marie Antoinette had seen as a child—the first to meet her in France after her crossing of the Rhine. He was now the Grand Almoner, and was spending the end of the hot season in his palace of Saverne. It was thus that the woman La Motte first touched her victim, the Cardinal de Rohan. And it so happened that the Cardinal de Rohan, who had been the first to greet the Queen on her passage of the Rhine as a child, now aspired to be her lover, or—as his fatuous misconception of her would have put it—“one of her lovers.” She for her part had resolutely avoided him. He was odious to her. Upon his ambition and credulity this woman La Motte was to play.

It had been upon April 25 that Cornwallis in the Carolinas had broken camp and started northward, to conquer and to hold the central seaports of the rebels as he had conquered and held Charlestown. On the 20th of May his two hundred miles were marched, and he had joined the troops in Virginia.

That march was not followed in Versailles—and even had it been followed, nothing would have been thought of its progress. The war had lingered so long, the issue had so dragged, that no chance could be foreseen, and the tangle of those wildernesses without roads, hardly with towns, was beyond European imagining. They knew that young La Fayette was still desolate somewhere there—they knew no more. Fersen—if more than his bright image came to her, if rumours of his letters home could come to her—must have given the woman who remembered him something of his own lassitude: cooped up as was that Swede in New England, without supplies, without money, cursing the Americans, telling the French Cabinet they were masters of folly, saying the Southern States were conquered by the British, and complaining with a Northern complaint of the indiscipline of the French. But there was greater business to engage attention at Versailles: the Queen was again with child; and Necker, failing at the vast financial tangle, had fallen.

Just as Cornwallis and the army in Virginia met to complete the war, Necker had been sent back from his command of the exchequer to those private and less reputable dealings with which the Puritan was more familiar and at which he was more successful than in the financing of a military nation. The Queen, who had not driven him forth at all, who would have had him remain, was blamed because she did not save him. The rising democratic opinion of Paris had already vaguely begun to favour Necker’s ineptitude: he was a foreigner; he had no faith (save the Genevese mask); but he was novel, he was a change—he was therefore demanded, and his dishonesty was not comprehended; yet that dishonesty was even then about to cost some price to the French State, for by his counsel and after his dismissal appeared that first sham Exchequer Statement to deceive the nation, to cajole it into a loan, to embitter it for the future; and the blame of the trick was to fall on the Crown and not on him, its author.

It was October 1781: Cornwallis was surrounded in Yorktown: the British fleet had failed to relieve him and the siege advanced; the parallels were opened; they were firing at six hundred yards, and Cornwallis still held on. The third week, and they were firing at three hundred: two redoubts still forbade a nearer approach. On the 14th the two redoubts were carried by the French, and next day came the storming.

The river lay near a mile broad behind Yorktown: Cornwallis might yet cross to Gloucester; his guns were dismantled and his force shattered, more by sickness than by fire, but he made the attempt, and the wind defeated him. Upon that ominous Friday, the 19th, he laid down his arms, and England had lost the war. By an accident native to lingering campaigns a series of chances and one coincidence at the end—the entry of the French fleet—had suddenly determined the issue: the young Boys of the French Court, heretofore grumbling and themselves disliked, were suddenly become heroes; the colonists, “half savages,” “mostly traitors to the English,” were suddenly become “the athletes of Liberty”; many in England and all the Rivals of England made up their minds that the business of England in the history of the world was at an end.

It was Fersen, with his command of French and English, who had negotiated that surrender. Soon he would return.

THE COUNTESS OF PROVENCE
FROM THE BUST AT VERSAILLES

At Versailles that October Friday and the week-end following it were still. For the few days the Court was silent. The issue of the expected childbirth had been debated or feared; it was now not mentioned in an intensity of expectation. The morning of the Monday that silence continued. The King had ordered his hunt; four of the carriages had already started, when he bethought him before he left to see the Queen again. He thought her to be in pain, and though she denied the pain, he ordered the Hunt to return, and an unusual rumour and press at once filled the great galleries. It was a little after eleven o’clock when the passages and halls were full of a gathering crowd, and the cold and splendid staircase which made the royal life at Versailles a public thing, a thing of the open air, were already crammed before noon by a mob of the populace; but this time custom was disdained and the doors were shut fast. Within, the Queen lay groaning on her pallet-bed before the fireplace, but there was air around her: no such press as had all but killed her three years before. Yet that exclusion of the populace helped to kill the Monarchy.

At one o’clock a Swedish noble, chancing to be at the Queen’s door, was told the news. He was caught and electrified by it as though he had been of the French blood. He turned to the first woman he met and said: “We have an heir!” Now that woman happened to be Provence’s wife, and the scene—her red anger and her disdain, his bewilderment—were taken up at once into the laughter of the moment. All the world laughed or cried: it was like the excitement of a great victory turning the tide of a disastrous war.

The Queen, when she could speak, noting the silence round her pallet and hearing the noise without, said faintly and smiling: “I have been a good patient.... Tell me the truth.” They were still silent, and she was sure that another daughter had been born, till the King came in and said to her:—

“The Dauphin begs leave to come in.”

CHAPTER VIII
FIGARO

Monday, October 22, 1781, to April 27, 1784

THE birth of an heir struck, as it seemed, an epoch in the evident transformation of the Monarchy and in the increasing position which Marie Antoinette occupied upon that scene; not that such a birth was either unexpected or unlikely. The Court and the nation had known for now three years that the royal family was established; it was certain that children would now support and surround the throne, and even in the preceding year nothing but a natural accident had postponed the hope of a prince. But the living presence of the child, the founding of a secure succession within so short a period from the earlier disappointment, had, as have all symbols, an effect greater than that which calculable chances could expect.

A wide popular enthusiasm, though later it was extinguished, did for the moment rise spontaneously to the encouragement of Government, and that initiative which the French had for centuries demanded and still demanded from the custodians of their State was, as it were, thrust into the hand of Louis.

Of all qualities in ruling that which this people will least forgive is ease: in their delight at the news of a Dauphin, France, and particularly Paris, implicitly urged to energy if not the good-humoured and slow-thoughted man who was in theory the whole executive, at least the machinery of which he was the centre. A new phase of one sort or another had certainly begun.

Sudden causes of change are never unaccompanied by coincidence; allied forces invariably converge upon the main cause of change and unite for a common effort. Three such advancing supports synchronised in these last months of 1781—the new aspect of the Austrian Alliance, the success in America, and the death of old Maurepas, who since the accession of Louis XVI. had presided at the Council. Each of these accidents was singly powerful; in their combination they were irresistible; and a moment of opportunity, to which a man of rapid decision might have given great effect, was apparent even to Louis in the close of that year.

The result of Maria Theresa’s death and of Joseph II.’s uncontrolled power in Austria had now matured. The naïf but persistent enmity of the Emperor towards the Faith—whose doctrines were in his little vision as barbaric as the Gothic architecture, and whose rapid elimination from European culture he took for granted—was, if not the mainspring, at least the chief expression of that general action whereby he imperilled his house and profoundly modified the situation of Austria. His preparation to rob and destroy the religious orders, his unconcealed contempt for the ideal they represented, his similar pretension that patriotism was a superstition, his petty but sincere conviction that none save material benefits guided by moral abstractions were of use to mankind—in a word, his despotic atheism—culminated in an “Edict of Toleration,” which, when allowance is made for a century’s development, may be compared for its affront against the customs of his subjects to that which had cost James II. of England his throne. In itself it had no bearing upon France and was hardly heard of in that country, but it was a recantation of all that Maria Theresa had stood for; it meant an open admiration for Frederick of Prussia, his method and his principle; it argued a philosophy which would, not reluctantly and of necessity, but eagerly and of set purpose, overset old traditions and sacred landmarks, that had attempted the suppression of a national language in Hungary, and was to suggest time and again, as a simple solution of political problems, the denial of all that for which men have always been prepared to die.

This act, the precursor and the type of so many others of his, was signed in Vienna during that same month of October 1781 which saw the happy delivery of his sister at Versailles and the culmination of the American War upon the Chesapeake. Nay, these capital events fell within one week. It was upon a Monday that the Edict was promulgated, upon the following Monday that the Dauphin was born, upon the Friday between that the English and German garrison in Yorktown laid down its arms.

The success of the war in America, especially the dramatic finale of Cornwallis’ surrender, had an effect upon opinion in Paris which, though it was sudden and short, was yet very powerful. The French, having of all nations by far the most general experience of war, are slow to adventures of such a kind as had been their intervention in America: the Court had been especially slow; the King perhaps the most reluctant of all—in the last peril of death he exclaimed against the memory of that campaign. Once engaged, therefore, if matters had gone ill (as the French troops in America most characteristically swore they would go ill!), or even if a long and indefinite campaign had dragged on through succeeding years so that the full financial effect of the struggle could have been felt before its close, then the whole weight of blame would have fallen upon Versailles. At it was, Yorktown came like the thrust of a spur, and the Monarchy, doubtful as was its course, leapt forward.

The death of Maurepas was the last coincidence of these three; it was as exactly synchronous and as full of effect as either of its fellow accidents. The capitulation of Lord Cornwallis was known in Paris precisely thirty-one days after it had taken place. It was upon the 19th of November, a Monday, that Louis had the news. The Queen had not yet risen from child-bed, Louis was sitting with her in her room, when the Duc de Lauzun was announced, and gave the message that Yorktown had surrendered. Upon the Wednesday following, De Maurepas was dead. The importance of that passing lay in this, that Louis, at such a juncture, now first attempted to be free.

All men are chafed, and that perpetually, by what they know of their own defects, and Louis could not forget, from his accession onwards, that it was always in him to yield to a quicker brain. He thought it shameful in a King. He never yielded from weakness, but often from bewilderment. His own decision would come to him after he had acted on the decision of another. He understood, he desired to act, later than did his advisers: often so late that, by the time his will was formed, occasion had passed. If, when his slow judgment had matured, he found it different from that upon which immediate action had been taken, he was angered. If that immediate action had proved disastrous, he was secretly indignant that his slower wit had not prevailed. But, stronger than all these reasons, the mere instinct of the imperfect warned him to a distaste of guidance.

He had, however, come to the throne a boy; in years but twenty, in experience (save in the excellent art of horsemanship) null. He had found ready to hand this old Minister, Maurepas, courteous, active, with a good though a too facile judgment; a patriot whose career had been ruined by the mistress of Louis XV. (in itself this was a recommendation to the young King), and a courtier whom his father, the Dauphin, had, upon his deathbed, pointed out to be the true counterweight to the irreligion of Choiseul: Louis XVI. had accepted such a guide and had upon the whole not repented of his choice. For seven years the young King had received the counsel of this old man; a habit had been formed, and a strong affection with it. But as Maurepas approached his end, as the gout forbade him his former clearness of thought, and a continual confinement interfered with his attendance at the Council, the maturer judgment of Louis began, though secretly, to assert itself. He showed for the depositary of so lengthy a Court tradition a filial devotion; he would come in person, and familiarly, to bring news to the old man’s room—notably the news of the Dauphin’s birth was so given, domestically and alone. There subsisted between them one of those intimate relations which so often arise between the permanent official upon the one side and the responsible authority upon the other: it became a personal tie, and when, Maurepas died Louis would renew it with no one. After some hesitation the King lit for a first Minister upon Vergennes, but he would not give to this new officer the official title of Premier; he was jealous of a fuller power which he now proposed to exercise continuously and with a more direct affirmation than in the past. Louis was incapable of the task he so attempted, but if ever there was a time in the reign when such a task could be attempted, this autumn and winter of 1781 was that time.

Here then was the field: a treasury embarrassed, but relieved, in appearance at least, by a frank audit—for the “cooked” accounts Necker had prepared before his dismissal bore the aspect and title of a public audit; great and unexpected success in a doubtful foreign war; a monarch possessed of a power approaching that of a modern Cabinet, and now ready to experiment with that power; abroad, Joseph II., who was the chief element of international politics and the national ally of France, had entered upon a new direction of the Austrian House. Upon such a field was to work the increasing influence of the Queen.

It is true that a certain part of her repute was now fixed in public opinion: that she was extravagant, that she was bound to favourites, that she was foreign. The legend had arisen in Paris, and no detail of her action, no appreciation of complexity could easily alter the simple conclusions of the Parisian populace. But, on the other hand, she was the mother of the heir, her position was stable while the opinion of the capital was not so, and it did not seem impossible that in the long course of years the great and dumb national mass should be indoctrinated in her favour, as the growth of her children, an older judgment in her, and perhaps a continued peace and a return to prosperity, should restore the tradition of the Monarchy, or rather confirm it in its new characters.

If the King was now ready to act and to reform the State, Marie Antoinette was of far more influence with him than ever she had been before. It was hers, if she chose, to regulate the new phase of Government. She did in part so choose, and she might have succeeded. Her habits would, indeed, have continued—her cards, her theatre, her gems, her familiarity—but all, as it were, tinctured, accepted, taken with the life of the Court and little affecting a new-found order. Had the problems presented to her been of those that fitted her intuition or experience, she might even then have lifted her fate. For a year and for more than a year—all 1782 and on into 1783, the solidity of her position was assured; the future was apparently prepared. A group of trifling incidents passed her quite, or almost, unperceived in the midst of an established leadership in Europe, of royal visits that cemented a general alliance, and of accomplished hopes; another year passed, she was presented—her influence being then at its height—with the affair of the Scheldt, a problem in which the interests of her Austrian House clashed with that new patriotism which, least of all things French, could she understand. She blundered, she necessarily blundered; but as she looked around to see what forces were left her, she found not only the results of that blunder confronting her, but an appalling menace proceeding from a direction wholly unconnected with her life—from the business of the diamond necklace—and beside it, grown suddenly quite loud like an offensive chorus of disdain, the voice of a writer whom she had half patronised and wholly despised, the neglected voice of Caron—Beaumarchais: by the beginning of ’84, one of those accidents—the pen of Beaumarchais—had shaken her influence and that of all the Monarchy; by the end of ’85 the other—the affair of the necklace—had destroyed it.

The year 1782 opened upon the new gladness of the Queen; her churching at Notre Dame (now customary) was marked, if not by a vivid popular greeting, yet by no coldness. At the Hôtel de Ville in the evening she met an official and commercial world that was warmly hers; she shared as warmly in the glories of the American news; she would have driven home in her own carriage the wife of La Fayette to show her enthusiasm for his triumph and his return. Her ampler manner, her more contained and settled bearing was consonant with the position she had gained; it promised her, in those who saw and approved it among the magistracy of the city, a continuance and an increase of influence. Back at Versailles she continued without scandal, and yet at a fast-rising expenditure, the habits which had now become permanently hers: new fashions in dress perpetually changing and in head-dress, cards into the small hours, and her private theatre at Trianon still receiving her upon its stage to the applause now, not of a half-dozen or so of the royal family, but of a full audience; many courtiers, many friends of friends, and even the officers of the Guard were permitted to see her painted behind the foot-lights, to note her true rendering of vivacious parts, and to accept when she sang her imperfectly-trained, insufficient, and somewhat violent voice. Of these regular dissipations the last was the most criticised, though even that seemed by this time so normal that of itself it did not lessen her growing power; but in distant connection with her taste for such things there arose, and precisely at this critical moment, a discussion which was largely to affect her life: it was the discussion upon the “Mariage de Figaro.”

The “Mariage de Figaro” was no great thing; it was a well-written play from the pen of a man, now advanced in middle age, whose diction and care for letters were typical of his own time, but whose vices were entirely modern. Born in a low position, his darting mind had carried him to a sort of fluctuating eminence, especially in wit. He had taught music to princesses, married an infatuated widow, adopted her name of Beaumarchais, purchased some insignificant post and with it a nominal right to the “de” of nobility, preserved his health, speculated, probably robbed, certainly made and lost considerable sums, traversed and thoroughly understood English society, repaid its hospitality by advancing the American cause in France, speculated upon the commissariat of that campaign, rendered jealous years ago the equally cynical Voltaire, and now at fifty was getting talked of again in the matter of his new play.

He and it were little things to Marie Antoinette, but the rumour of them was considerable, for, a few months before, at the end of the past year, the King had heard that this “Mariage de Figaro” was not tolerable: it was a satire upon all established things. The play was already ordered for the Théâtre Français. Louis had it read to him privately, and for once made a rapid decision. As literature he could not judge its considerable merits; as politics he put his foot down: such laughter at such an expense to government and all tradition was not to be borne—and the licence was withdrawn. The public rumour rose and grew.

Every witty lady about the Court and in the capital, many more who desired a reputation for wit, insisted upon reading the play; upon hearing it read aloud; upon having Beaumarchais come and read it aloud. All the Polignac world was mad on it. Loménie de Brienne boasted that he had heard it oftenest. The Princess de Lamballe moved heaven and earth to have it read by the author in her very rooms.

The “Mariage de Figaro” was, therefore, to the Queen a perpetual phrase on the lips of the smart, literary and unliterary: it is doubtful if she read a line of it, but she heard of it and heard of it again. She forgot it for the moment; later she remembered it again—not to her good.

Meanwhile a much larger matter vexed her. In the midst of her active and interested life, of promotions, personal successes and habitual pleasures, the insistence of her brother Joseph continually pursued her, and a mixed anxiety, an anxiety to be political, an anxiety to escape responsibility, came to her almost daily—from Mercy immediately, ultimately from Vienna: she felt upon her the uneasy burden of the Hapsburgs.

While her mother still lived there had at least been between her and Marie Antoinette an unbroken habit of command upon the one side, obedience and protest upon the other. The pressure of Vienna had been a natural one then. Maria Theresa possessed, moreover, the tact not only of a woman, and of a religious woman, but the large vision of a careful and perilous diplomacy brought to success. Joseph lacked all these: religion, honour, tact, acquaintance, experience. His commands to Mercy were as crude as any of his judgments upon the world: “Had Mercy seen the Queen?” “Was she doing her duty by the House of Austria?” “Would Mercy suggest this, that?” “Since the Queen was so powerful with the King, why had this, that detail of French policy not exactly suited the demands of the Empire?” Broken by the buffer of Mercy’s long experience these arid and unfruitful hastes came less brutally to the ears of Marie Antoinette. She never felt herself the servant of her family, nor in direct antagonism to the Crown of her husband; she felt only that she was perpetually required to be doing—she hardly knew what—much as in her mother’s time, but without the aid of her mother’s handwriting and remembered voice—certainly without her mother’s wisdom to control.

The pressure from Joseph II. continued; it was to be two years before it took effect in a great matter, but when that matter arose the Queen’s plain service to Vienna—something far in excess of what she had done in the Bavarian affair—showed how much that irksome and long pressure had effected. She came to act as an Austrian army would have acted, and quite understanding all she did, she came very near to betraying her allegiance to the French throne.

For the rest these early months of ’82 were filled, among her pleasures and her rising power, with other annoyances; notably that from time to time her friends in that excessive society of hers spoke to her of their debts, and she knew well that in the matter of money grants at that moment of increasing embarrassment in public finance the King himself was slow to listen to her.

There were many such friends. The greatest and the nearest perhaps of those whom Marie Antoinette knew to be embarrassed were the Guémenées, and the Duchesse de Guémenée, the titular governess of the Dauphin, a woman whom she met most constantly and cherished, closely concerned her.

She further suffered the ceaseless and recurrent advances of the Cardinal de Rohan.

It had become enough for her to see his handwriting upon a note to make her burn the thing unread. Her dislikes were now often reasoned, always steady: it was enough that she had to meet the Grand Almoner upon State occasions of religion or ceremonial; her society she forbade him. Had the Cardinal wanted proof of that stupidity which he was later to plead in Court as the excuse of his follies, he could have given none better, nor any of more weight with posterity, than his complete ignorance of such a woman as was this daughter of Maria Theresa, and his absurd pretensions to gain her intimacy, her support, and possibly her heart. Had he known women even vaguely, by types, this florid and handsome man would have abandoned at fifty the attempt to interest a vital, impetuous woman of twenty-seven, loving swift pleasure, but superior to him in rank, chaste, a mother, and carrying against him in particular a traditional grudge for the loose jests which, during a brief embassy at Vienna, he was wont to pass at the expense of her own people. But the Cardinal de Rohan did not know women even in the mass, and it was necessary, as he thought, that he should play cards with her and be from time to time one of the fifty or so who eat supper with her at Trianon. He had the weakness of stupid men when they are well born and have attained office—I mean the ambition for political titles.

A thousand lesser incidents of this time she could not herself, had you asked her daily, have recorded. One among such petty details it is worth the reader’s while to recall, though it had made upon her even less impression than the babble about Beaumarchais’ play; though it passed completely from her memory. It was the presence now and then upon the stairways of Versailles, and for moments only, of a short woman, very fair, with a small, well-arched foot, and delicate hands, quick and even furtive of glance, not beautiful but attractive and provoking in face, dressed in a manner that combined excess with the evidences of poverty, but in her gestures of a passable breeding. This figure was often seen; now leaving the room of some lady of the Court, now crossing the courtyard on foot towards the town.

The Queen may or may not have heard that this woman, though an adventuress, was (from over the left) a Valois; of some birth, therefore, but very poor, and given to borrowing small sums: Marie Antoinette’s sister-in-law of Provence, Madame, may or may not have told the Queen that she had got this woman a tiny advance of thirty pounds upon her tiny pension of twenty-four. Whether her name of “De la Motte,” or so much as the presence of this chance passer, was noted by Marie Antoinette is not known, but certainly if either were, it took no more place in her mind than any other of the hundred insignificant names she heard and forgot every day. Moreover, after the early spring of 1782, this woman was no longer seen at Versailles; she had borrowed a few pounds, and was gone.

With May the true life of the Court and the active interests of the Queen awoke to receive the first of those great political visits which form the historical pageant of Versailles: the heir of Catherine of Russia came with his wife, and the whole year might almost have been named from so conspicuous an event.

The inordinate pomp of royalty in its old age had led to a fashion of incognito which did not have, and was not intended to have, its occasional modern effect of privacy, but which, by cutting short interminable and necessary ritual, left crowned travellers the freer for luxury and dissipation. It saved them the judges, the orators, the Governors, the Universities—in general the middle classes, and left them free for actors, wine, and their own company, and the frenzied plaudits of the innumerable poor. The Emperor of Austria had set the fashion five years before; it was followed now by the Russian Court, and Catherine’s son chose to present himself in France under the somewhat theatrical alias of the “Comte du Nord.”

The Grand-Duke Paul had the face of a Tartar, and—what was piquant—the manners, and, above all, the ready epigrams of a Parisian. His wife was a huge German woman, rather absolute and—what was curious—learned. For exactly a month they dominated the Court of France; from the end of May to the end of June they filled it with their presence, and not a little of the hankering after French things and French alliances, which, much later, distinguished Paul III. during the revolutionary wars, may have sprung from this short and vivid episode of his twenty-eighth year.

It is characteristic of Marie Antoinette that the prospect of a great encounter and of the society of equals confused her; it is equally characteristic of her that once she had got over that nervousness she drew the young man and his wife at once into that rather isolated and over-familiar circle of intimates with which Mercy, her brother, and the French reproached her, but without which, as it seemed, she could not live. Behind the solemn and rare functions, the regal hospitality of the Condés at Chantilly and the Court ball at Versailles, was a whole atmosphere of gambling and private theatricals; of plays at Trianon, intimate suppers, costly presents given at a moment’s thought, and, very late at night, in the rooms of Madame de Polignac or in the Queen’s, when the King had left them, a complete ease full of little improvised dances and familiar jests. In such an atmosphere the German Grand-Duchess maintained, perhaps a little stiffly, her formal compliments, but the Russian Grand-Duke went headlong; he suffered the spell; there was even a moment when he confided to the Queen his humiliation at home and the tyranny of his mother Catherine.

Upon one matter the husband and the wife most certainly agreed, for to the second it was belles-lettres, to the first Parisiana: they must have things read to them “by the authors.” All the little tricks with which the wealthy and leisured enveigle the masters of the pen to visit their palaces, to amuse them for an hour, were set at work.

Of the many so caught one was especially demanded, and the Queen heard again, not without boredom, the perpetual name of Beaumarchais. “Oh yes, you must hear Beaumarchais!” Madame de Lamballe had got him to her rooms. It was difficult, but she had got him. The Archbishop of Toulouse knew him well. He was splendid. “You must hear him read this play of his; it has been forbidden, you know. It is seditious. It is so witty, and he does read it so well!” The Comte du Nord and his wife asked no better than to be in the swim. Beaumarchais was willing enough; he came and read to them, and they heard from his thin ironic lips, saw illustrated by his exact gesture and brilliant, ambitious little eyes, the edge and sharpness of a drama that worked—once it was public—like an acid, to the destruction of all their world. How they applauded!

That warm month of long evenings that fade into early dawns shining with lamps in the park, with candles and mirrors in the vast length of the palace, was approaching its end, when, for the last time, Marie Antoinette devised her last considerable fête—once more at Trianon.

It was to be a garden fête at night: by this time certainly wearisome to the Grand-Duchess, but to the Grand-Duke attractive—with this one flaw, that on the morrow he would be gone. The fête was held; it was brilliant and full. At its close when, as custom demanded, the royal party passed out, down a lane of guests on either side, the Queen saw—for a moment—a pair of red stockings; the legs were neither meagre nor young. All the rest of the figure was a large dark cloak, but she caught beneath the hat of it the somewhat flushed and large face of the Grand Almoner.

This little incident disturbed her. Here was a private gala of her own, given only to those of her private circle privately invited by her, and this odious man must creep in. Next day when her guests were gone she spent some portion of her considerable energy in ferreting out the culprit. The incident was traced to the lodge-keeper of Trianon, who had taken a bribe from the Cardinal under a promise that if he were let in he would keep a strict disguise and would not penetrate into the gardens. The lodge-keeper was sent his way to starve, and later—since he really did begin to starve—was given back his place by this impulsive woman.

It was a very little though a very exasperating incident that a great officer of the Crown, whom etiquette compelled her to meet in chapel, but whom she had carefully excluded from her intimacy and her privileges, should have appeared by a trick at a party so especially her own. Perhaps she remembered it as one remembers for a long while petty accidents that have sharply moved us for an hour. He certainly remembered it, for he had been found out in no very dignified manœuvre. He was certainly sore; but in men of his stupidity, of his privileges, and of his habits of luxury, hatred is no enduring passion. His ambition, however, such as it was, remained; he was the more determined to succeed in that high object of recognition and of friendship with the Queen, from the results of this disastrous attempt and from the failure of his appearance on that June night at Trianon.... It was but a week later that Madame de la Motte came in to Paris, called at his palace in the Marais, and reminded him of his earlier charities.

The uneventful summer came and passed, full of the customary glories and the customary distractions. No date marked evil or good. The American War, though it languished, was now decided, and England had given up the struggle. The reform of the French finances, though ceaselessly a topic of council, was as ceaselessly neglected. The Emperor continues to badger Mercy, and Mercy to badger the Queen upon matters of no importance save to Joseph II.’s ill-considered plans of aggrandisement.

Fersen, pottering between Philadelphia and Baltimore, wrote home—wearily—but not to her.

It was a long summer of nothingness during which Marie Antoinette’s position was confirmed, her public view a trifle, if but a trifle, enlarged. With her habits permitted, her popularity sufficient, her influence established, she had a foretaste of that security such as should accompany middle life, and such as is native to women for whom such satisfaction is allied with maternity; she turned for an added interest to her children.

The little Princess Royal could talk and run; the baby Dauphin knew his sister already and moved his arms at her approach. The two children between them filled daily a larger and more natural place in the Queen’s thoughts. They could not indeed weaken the habits which those first feverish three years had rooted and the next had done nothing to destroy, but their innocence and the nameless bond of the flesh enlarged her; their growth, their surprising discovery of new days. It was not wholly without reason that the King their father grew at this moment to listen in smaller things to her advice beyond that of others.

Ceremonial, or rather lucrative, as were the functions of the Princesse de Guémenée, she was yet constantly in attendance upon the children, of which she was titular governess, and the Queen was constantly in her society. The charge was a great one; if it had first been granted as a favour to one of the set of favourites, it had now ripened into something more, for the common interest in such a couple as Madame Royale and the heir gave rise, in this middle of ’82, to an occasional communion between the Queen and the gouvernante which neither found in the general and much more continual amusement of their set. Their intimacy was the greater that the children had been sent through the park to Trianon during the hot weather, that the Princesse de Guémenée was with them secluded there, and that there she and the Queen were necessarily often alone together. In her favourite retreat and under her domestic trees, the approaching vaccination of the little girl—a matter of moment at that time—and a dozen details of the sort concerned them. By a petty accident of a sort common to aristocracies the Cardinal de Rohan, the Queen’s aversion, happened to be own brother to Madame de Guémenée, the Queen’s chief friend. Not a word was said in favour of that brother, for these were matters upon which even the Queen’s favourites were compelled to keep silence; but the populace, who do not understand such complexities, remembered the relationship.

The complaints of the lesser woman upon the debts of herself and her husband—though such complaints are wearying to the closest friendships—did no more than slightly weary the Queen. They were soon forgotten, for Marie Antoinette held in a profound manner that faith in chance good fortunes and in ultimate relief from embarrassment without which those who never labour could not live; and when the complaints were done with, she turned to speak of the children.

So August went by and most of September, when, one morning at the close of that month, Monsieur de Guémenée very suddenly declared that he could not so much as attempt to pay his debts, and threw himself upon his creditors.

It was a shock. I have repeatedly insisted in this book upon the insignificance of French extravagance in the close of the eighteenth century, in comparison with the modern figures of our Plutocracy, and on the modesty of the sums the historian has to deal with—£5000 a year was a princely fortune; the Cardinal de Rohan’s £30,000 a year seemed almost the revenue of a State, an income beyond computation. Well, in such a world, accustomed to such a scale of wealth, the Guémenées went bankrupt for a solid million of our English pounds. It opened a whirlpool in the finances of the time, and the creditors, to make matters worse, were of every rank and spread throughout the kingdom; there were peasants among them, prelates, farmers-general, and—most clamorous of all—a few large and many small shopkeepers of Paris. To these last—especially to the smaller ones—delay would be fatal. Delay was precisely the expedient chosen.

There exists a little, ill-written scrawl addressed to the Princess; it is ill-spelt, with words omitted in its haste. It runs: “You have heard that my daughter’s vaccination has gone off well—I breathe again!... The King will see you get those letters all right.” That scrawl was written by Marie Antoinette, and the “letters” mentioned were the Moratorium which a French King could of his own free will impose as might the caprice of a judge upon the process of law. It was a royal decree forbidding during the King’s pleasure the recovery of a debt. The creditors must wait till it was lifted.

That little scrap of paper was not known to the populace—it was not discovered till a few years ago—but the populace, with an instinct that rarely failed them during the pre-revolutionary and revolutionary time, guessed by what influence had been granted this privilege of delay, with all its fatal consequences to the smaller folk, who spread their anger until Paris was humming with it; and even the remoter provinces (notably Brittany), wherever there was a wretched unpaid creditor to be found, whispered the name of the Queen.

She, upon her part, felt she had done next to nothing—an obvious and small act of courtesy for a dear friend. She had chosen that very moment to be at La Muette with the Court—not at Versailles, to which such things were native, but right at the gates of Paris, and there thought fit to do something more for her friend than the trifle already effected. She went to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Fleury—at a time when the Treasury in its deep embarrassment was expecting the counter-shock of the American War, at a time when the last additional taxes could hardly be paid—to ask him if (irony of ignorance!) “something could not be done” for the Guémenées. Fleury could do nothing, and it was as well.

All this while and all that summer and autumn the little active, furtive woman, De La Motte, the Valois with the well-arched foot and the shifty but provocative eye, was pecking at De Rohan: now knocking discreetly at his palace doors in Paris, now travelling, as cheaply as could be, to his great château in the Vosges—borrowing a few pounds, and again a few pounds. It was a very little thing, like a drifting rag in a great city—but a rag infected with the plague.

In such a commotion as the crash of the Guémenées made, no one noticed that the Queen procured for her chief friend, for one who hardly desired it and who was ill fitted for it, for Madame de Polignac, the high post which Madame de Guémenée had been compelled to resign. The new charges such an appointment involved were forgotten in the torrent of feeling that followed the great bankruptcy. It came just as the excitement upon America had thoroughly died down, just as the bills for that war had to be met, and just as winter was upon the populace. The new taxes were collecting, the whole financial system was at a breaking-point, when, early in ’83, Fleury resigned the finances. His fall was furthered by the Queen, who remembered his refusal.

If, a year before, the satire of Beaumarchais had been wisely suppressed by the King, and if, nine months before, even the reading by heirs apparent of so fierce a piece of wit was thought hazardous, now it was plainly a peril. To extend the fame of that solvent of society, even by discreet recitations within the palace, was unwise; to act it, to add to its native force of aggression gesture, life, and publicity of the stage, would be a piece of madness. Most ardently was that amusing piece of madness desired by the lassitude of the Court and by those amateurs in changing pastime who surrounded the Queen. It is said that she pleaded again for her friends, and begged, as she had before, for the piece to be licensed. If she did so, she failed; for leave to act the “Mariage de Figaro,” even upon the private stage of a courtier, was again refused.

Side by side with such details went the growth of yet another great European conflict, and with it once again the pressure of Austria upon Marie Antoinette.

For over a century the Scheldt had been closed to commerce by international treaty, and the trade that should naturally flow along that magnificent estuary of which Antwerp is the port had been artificially deflected to Holland. The Austrian Netherlands were therefore mechanically starved of a trade that had once been pre-eminent in Europe. It was as though Lancashire should be forbidden by a parchment to use Liverpool to-day, and should be dependent upon Preston or—as would more probably follow—upon Bristol and Glasgow. That part of the Low Countries which is, roughly speaking, the Catholic part and most of which is now included in Belgium formed, by an accident of history, an isolated fragment of the Hapsburg domain, and the closing of the Scheldt acutely affected a monarch whose mind, being narrow, was especially alive to anomalies that interfered with the rotundity of his rights. There was to Joseph II. something monstrous in the decay of Antwerp and the silence of that vast waterway—something out of nature, like the diversity of tongues, within his empire; it was a sentiment he felt less keenly in matters less disadvantageous to himself.

The chief beneficiary by this quaint artifice was, of course, Holland, but, among the greater Powers, England. If any one would know why, he has but to travel to-day from the Pool of London to Antwerp, and wonder next morning at the orderly and teeming crescent of the quays. Antwerp is London’s chief and most dangerous rival.

It was, therefore, during the failure of England in America that Joseph proposed the destruction of so ancient an instrument as the Peace of Westphalia and determined upon the opening of the river. To such a project the assent of France was essential, but the Cabinet of Versailles, in one of those acts of wisdom which were not unknown to the decaying Monarchy, postponed the discussion till the close of the war. The war had been over since the autumn of ’82; the peace had been signed at Paris in the new year. It was in 1783, therefore, that there began the growing pressure of Joseph II. upon Mercy, of Mercy upon Marie Antoinette, to see that the interests of Austria in this matter, as in others of the past, should predominate at Versailles. This purely Austrian move, though it took months to mature, was the political motive of the whole year, and side by side with it, like a tiny instrument accompanying a loud orchestra, went the rising popular demand for Beaumarchais’ play: also, just once or twice and for a moment only, one can hear in the background the occasional note of Madame de La Motte. Thus on Candlemas Day (a feast of the 2nd of February) she was seen at Versailles. It was a brief episode; she stood patiently in the rank of petitioners waiting for the Queen to pass upon her way to High Mass, and presented some modest demand—directly or indirectly—for money. It was refused, with a crowd of others, by the secretaries appointed to examine such things; and, if the Queen’s eyes had rested upon her face at all, no sort of impression of her remained. The Queen entered the chapel, and the Cardinal de Rohan pontificated there.

“Figaro” was more amusing and deserves a greater mention. All the jokes of the spring and all the society question was of “Figaro.” By June, somehow or other, by some intrigue, very possibly by a word from the Queen, the scandalous, the delightfully tickling attack upon all their privileges, their scandals—their very life; the comedy that half of them already knew by heart, and from which the younger could recite whole passages in Beaumarchais’ very manner, was to be acted at last—but only for the Court. Of course, such a scandal could not be allowed in Paris, or in the town. The Hall of the Menus Plaisirs was got ready, the parts were learnt, the actors of the Comédie Française were come, the courtiers and their wives had their tickets in hand, the carriages were at the door, the theatre half full, when a messenger came from the King bearing a lettre de cachet, a peremptory, secret and immediate order: the “Mariage de Figaro” was not to be played.

All who have seen a jostle of the wealthy suddenly deprived of some pleasure—especially of a satire upon themselves—may imagine the anger that arose. Meanwhile the King, who had bethought him so late of this vigorous act, murmured thoughtfully in his room that probably in the long run Beaumarchais would have the best of it.

He had. By September M. de Vandreuil had the play ready for “the ladies” and young Artois—he had put up a private stage. The smart and the literary were assured there would be no disappointment—nor was there. Beaumarchais had been recalled by a special secret messenger from England, whither he had retired in a pretended pique; secret permission was given, the “Mariage” was secretly played (before two hundred people), and the thing was done. Play-acting and a sort of passionate frivolity had conquered the State. I must ask pardon for wasting so many lines upon so light a matter.

Two greater things were at hand: Calonne was about to be put at the head of the finances; Joseph II. was beginning to be decisive about the Scheldt.

The business of the Scheldt had dragged all through 1783. The active hostility of France and England had ceased a year before—to the grave disadvantage of England. Peace had been actually signed for nine months, yet nothing had been done, and the Cabinet of Versailles still temporised. To Joseph this recalcitrance upon the part of his ally was not only irritating, as had been years ago the French hesitation to support him in the Bavarian chance of war, it was incomprehensible; he could lay it to nothing but folly. To what depths of folly Versailles might descend he would admit even his clear brain incapable of judging. The French lay, as he conceived, open to every attack; theirs was a power visibly in decay which had made indeed a chance lucky move beyond the Atlantic, but which could not long continue great. It was surely their duty, as it was obviously their policy, to be guided by Vienna. It was not till now—after so many years!—that he had come across the sharp French “jib” which has since his time disconcerted so many diplomatists.

For the statesmen of that people, under every régime—at least, every modern régime (wherein I count the later Ministers of Louis XV. and the anti-clericals of the present Republic)—have much in them, whatever their rank, of their own peasantry. It is as though the Frenchman, when he acts as a Minister for the collectivity of France, was collectively inspired and thought like the mass of ploughmen that build up his nation. As the peasants perpetually bewail the weather, so he the times. As the peasants curse authority (which they are so zealous to maintain as a guarantee of property), so the Statesman the régime of his epoch. As they will speculate rashly once in a generation, so he in the Seven Years’ War or in 1870. As they for years after such an error build up a fortune in the stodgiest securities, so he will build up alliances and an army in the long periods of national repose. As they with protestations of ruin and yet with courtesy will relinquish as make-weight to a bargain some article wholly worthless to them, so he will reluctantly throw into the diplomatic scale some barren or untenable possession overseas. As they in a bargain ask with the most natural air a most fantastic price, so he in a diplomatic proposition. But, above all, as the French Peasantry, when their apparent stupidity tempts the city man to ask for something that really concerns them, become first dumb, then nasty, so the French Statesman, quite unexpectedly and in one day, clouds over and reveals an astonishing obstinacy to yield any point of material value to his nation.

The opening of the Scheldt was of no advantage to France. The existence of a strong Austrian State to the north of her was a thing to avoid; the diplomatic tradition of a hundred years was in support of Holland, and, though the Austrian Alliance had changed much, it had been made to exercise pressure towards the Elbe, not towards the North Sea. Hence for all the courtesy, the postponements, the protestations of a continued warmth in the Alliance and the rest of it, France steadily refused to move. The Emperor Joseph did something he had been slow to do of recent years: he wrote directly to his sister.

Far off in the Vosges Madame La Motte, the little, proud, active woman with the furtive eyes, was closeted with the Cardinal de Rohan in his château of Saverne. She had, she told him, all but recovered her true place as a Valois; she needed aid for a very little time longer. Here was a bill upon a Jew, down on the plain in Nancy; quite a small bill—not a hundred and fifty pounds. The Cardinal backed her bill.

Marie Antoinette could not for the life of her have shown you the Scheldt on the map; she knew her own incompetence, the advice she proffered was null or uncertain, and, in any case, whatever slight suggestion she may have made was quite passed by in the counsels of her husband. From that moment Joseph was turned, if somewhat slowly, towards action. He would clear the Scheldt by force, and compel the Cabinet of Versailles to follow; he took his time and made his plan—but he did not succeed.

The advent of Calonne was not the least of the accidents that impeded him, and Calonne’s appointment with its large consequences was partly—as were now so many things—the work of the Queen. A man of fifty, provincial, a gentleman, a good lawyer, Calonne was also a friend of the Polignacs; and Marie Antoinette, on that account alone, supported his candidature to the Direction of Finance: when she knew him she grew to dislike him. He was intensely national, vigorous, gay, a trifle too rapid in thought, ambitious, virile with a Latin virility; he was of a type she could never affect, and it is certain that he despised her intellect and resented her interference with affairs—he probably showed it.

But once he was appointed to the Treasury, her distaste came too late. That department, as the entanglement of the public fortune increased in complexity, grew to absorb in importance every other. The complete autonomy of each Minister within his department (which was a necessary consequence of Autocracy and the mark of government at Versailles) left him independent of his colleagues. The vast consequence of any Exchequer Act at that moment and thenceforward made the Exchequer supreme over War, over Home, and even over Foreign affairs.

It is difficult to describe the man: his acts must describe him. It is enough to say that he was not corrupt, that he carried through his attempt with courage, that he spent the public money largely and gaily in order to forward his plan of procuring a large increase of revenue rather than a large reduction of expenditure; that he was saddled with the remains of the American War debt; was heir in office to the dishonest and incompetent Necker, and that, so far as mere administration could, it was he in particular who later opened the Revolution by one act of courage, and not without deliberation, when he clearly saw that an active nation needed action to live: for it was he who summoned the Notables and so convened the first of the Assemblies.

The winter of ’83-’84 was very hard. The new taxes—imposed in the desperate attempt to fill the Treasury during the preceding year, before Calonne came, were just beginning to tell. The new loans—which were Calonne’s own—hung over the prosperity of the State.... The Queen was at ease; the letters of Rohan no longer came for her to burn; he no longer crept by tricks into her presence.... Then there was “Figaro.” “Figaro” was being talked of more than ever.... The King must give his consent ... he had given it to a private stage.... Come, would he not give it for the public? The play lay there, in the minds of the leisured and the wealthy; it was potentially a destroyer of the State on which they battened; but boredom is stronger than appetite with the smart, and the smart urged “Figaro” on towards its full and final publicity.

The winter drew on towards spring. It still froze hard. Calonne continued loans and largesse. “To be free of a tangle, you must borrow; to borrow, you must be at ease; to be at ease, you must spend.” He spent largely upon the poor of Paris; he consented to fêtes; he took the thing at a charge. As a nation in the grasp of a dreadful foe might win through by loan upon loan and pouring out fresh millions, bribing colonial soldiers recklessly—five, six, seven, ten shillings a day, and to hell with the commissariat—so he in the grasp of an embarrassed fiscal system that was dying in an agony and that nothing could recover. Such procedure invited force of itself; it paved the way for a vast physical, armed change to effect renewal. With the old régime no man could have done anything, not the gayest or the most daring; and what régime has ever changed itself? Calonne was killing the old régime.

He even attempted to feed the people of Paris by free gifts. But still the people of Paris were not contented, and above them, in the ranks that make “Opinion,” there was an increasing demand, an insistence for the “Mariage de Figaro.” It was already March, and the play was still disallowed.

In his bishop’s palace that March, the woman La Motte was telling the Cardinal de Rohan one of those truly considerable lies upon which history turns; a lie comparable to the lie of Bismarck at Ems—or to any other that any of my readers may cherish. The Cardinal sat listening, his florid, proud, prominent, unintelligent face all ears. “She had reached the result of so much patient waiting. Her dignity of Valois (and she was a Valois) was to be recognised; her lands (she had no lands) were to be restored to her. It was the Queen whom she had conquered: the Queen was now her friend, her intimate friend. The Queen would do anything in the world for her. Through her was Rohan’s avenue to the Queen. Her poverty was at an end. She could soon repay so many years of his kindness.”

Marie Antoinette was concerned with little in those weeks; it is just possible she again spoke a word for that eternal “Figaro.” If she did she was but one of a hundred—and the King gave way. The censorship should be removed, but on condition that certain passages most offensive to the established order of the State should be deleted. On that point Louis would not budge ... it made all the difference. They were deleted, and the King—misjudging now—said (not without foreboding): “I hope it will be a frost.” On the first night the Public answered him.

A vast crowd broke for hours against the railings of the Comédie Française, a crowd in which every kind of man was crushed against every kind. The doors opened to a mob that stormed the theatre like a citadel, and that, when it entered, could see, in reserved places and entered earlier than the public, every head in Paris that counted. Even Monsieur, deep in his private box, was there, and there behind their bars were the Parliament, the Ministry—even, discreetly, the Church.

The play began.... To-day, in a society which it has helped to create, its jests seem obvious, its epigrams platitudes. To that eager people, starved of reform in the midst of a huge transformation of society, they were brilliant exactitudes of wit, struck off like bright coins—precisely the thing desired. This man found satisfied as the play proceeded his revenge against bought law, that man his brooding against an old insult of privilege, that other his disgust at an apparent national decline, yet another his mere hunger: and all these Frenchmen found in the play an echo of their national contempt for a government that cannot excuse itself, even by logic; all found and each found his necessity for passion against existing things assuaged by the sparkle and the venom of the play. They roared at it with delight as men do at the close of successful assault. They laughed as do men satisfied to repletion. They felt a common enemy gone under. There was not one so privileged but had heartily supped of ridicule against some aspect of the society he had learnt to despise.

The curtain fell to a storm of triumphant noise. The Parisians went out into the darkness full and fed with the idea of change, and a great crack had opened in the walls of the palace. It was the 27th of April 1784.

CHAPTER IX
THE DIAMOND NECKLACE

From April 27, 1784, to August 15, 1785

AS the summer of 1784 broadened through May and June it led on the Queen to every grace of life, and at last, as it might have been imagined, to security. The season itself was fruitful and serene: the establishment of prestige abroad—so often a forerunner of evil to European nations—was now triumphantly achieved. There was now about the Court an air of solidity and permanence which the visit of foreign princes continued to confirm, and this air (thanks to Calonne’s largesse) seemed less poisoned by that financial ill-ease which had turned even the last victories of the American War into doubtful and anxious things.

Marie Antoinette had entered into that content and calm which often introduces middle age after a youth tormented by an inward insecurity. Her inheritance was sure. Her children had not yet betrayed the doom of their blood. The legend of her follies meant daily a little less, because daily it became more and more of a legend worn by time, dangerous only if its set formula should be filled with life and reality by some new scandal. The violence of her youth now seemed exorcised; her fulness of feature, which had shocked the taste of Louis XV.’s Court, accorded with these her later functions of authority. She was indeed in that full flower of womanhood which later so perturbed the memories of Burke and lent one famous passage of sincerity to his false political rhetoric.

As Marie Antoinette so entered at last into maturity, and, it would seem, into peace, the comedy which was to bring upon her every humiliation entered upon the Stage of this World. In the waters below her, Jeanne de La Motte de Valois, fishing for goldfish, struck and landed her Cardinal.

MARIE ANTOINETTE
AFTER THE PAINTING BY MADAME VIGEE LE BRUN

Gustavus of Sweden, Northerner and Flibbertigibert, the same that had slung diamond necklaces round the Du Barry’s little dog and the same that had despised the Dauphine, was at Court in the early days of that June, and saw the Queen now a woman; his affections were immediately moved. There was a touch of flirtation between them; on her side also a real friendship which for years continued in correspondence—for the softness of the North never failed to soothe and to relieve this Austrian woman caught in the hardness of French rules and the pressure of French vitality. He had come as the “Comte de Haga,” and she feasted him well. That new toy, a balloon, was sent up to amuse him—she had it called by her name—and he was shown all that Trianon could show by day or by night. She was the more gracious from the awkwardness of Louis, who came ill-dressed to meet Gustavus and who was slow with him. She gave him deference. She consented, at one great supper of hers, to stand with her women and supervise all, while he was seated. Only she would not dance with him; she said she danced no more....

Meanwhile accompanying the King of Sweden and ever at his side, Fersen was come again to Versailles.

Fersen was now a man. War had made him. Marie Antoinette could silently watch in him a very different carriage and a new alertness of the visage, but his eyes still bore the tender respect that she had known and remembered.

He was now for some years to come and go between Versailles and the world. He was a colonel of French Horse, and his place was made....

The King of Sweden went down well; the Court was full of him. The Queen surpassed herself in well-receiving him.

The month of June was filled with this sincere and pleasing gaiety; but all that June, far off, the La Motte was going and coming in her secret ways, talking to the Cardinal of letters to her “from the Queen,” assuring him that these letters gave proof of his growing favour. She did more and boldly; she affected to show him those royal letters!

There was a soldier of sorts, cynical, ramshackle, hard up, like all her gang, Rétaux de Villette by name; he it was who wrote these letters whenever the La Motte might ask him—so much a time. They must have amused him as he wrote them! He was at no pains to disguise his hand; he wrote straight out to his “dear heart,” the Countess de La Motte Valois, anything she asked him to write—especially praise of Rohan—and when he had written it (at so much a time) he would boldly sign “Marie Antoinette” with a flourish; and the La Motte would show the letter to Rohan, and Rohan (that is the amazing and simple truth) would believe them to be the Queen’s!

If the Cardinal had any doubts at all they were easily dispersed. Cagliostro, who enjoyed the Illumination of the Seventh House and had powers from the other world, most strongly reassured him—for a fee; the seen and unseen powers all combined to reassure the fatuous Rohan, and he was ready, as June ended, to believe not only that he was in favour with the Queen but in very peculiar favour indeed, and that all this show of avoidance and silence upon her part was a mask necessary to conceal a deeply-rooted tenderness. She might turn her head away when the Grand Almoner passed on his rare and pompous occasions of ecclesiastical office in the galleries of Versailles. She might refuse to speak to him a single word. She might, whenever she deigned to speak of him to others, speak with complete contempt and disgust. She might (as she had and did) successfully prevent the smallest honour or moneys coming to him. But, oh! he saw it all! It was but a mask to hide her great love—and, sooner or later, he would have his reward for such long and patient waiting!

He in his turn wrote—constantly. To the letters the La Motte showed him—dainty scented notes on little dainty sheets of gilded blue (but written, alas! by such rough hands)—he would answer, with imploring, respectful, adoring lines, handed to the La Motte, that she might give them to her great and high friend. Now he could understand why Cagliostro had promised him in oracular enigmas that “glory would come to him from a correspondence,” and that “full power with the Government” was immediately awaiting him. He was ready to assume it.

July was empty enough for the Queen. Her guest was gone; there was little doing at Versailles. Her amusements, especially her theatre, she had deliberately given up, determined to let the legend against her die. She waited through the dull month a little worried. Her brother the Emperor was still fussing about his diplomatic quarrel, the opening of the Scheldt, and the rest of it; she was anxious for him and for peace. Henry of Prussia would soon be visiting Versailles, there intriguing (as she dreaded) against her Austrian House. But, on the whole, the month of July 1784 was a dull month for her. It was not dull for the La Mottes.

The male La Motte in early July sauntered, on those fine sunny days, in the Palais Royal. He was looking for something; he was looking for a face and a figure not too unlike those of the Queen of France. It was not a difficult thing to find; the type was common enough, and in the first days of his search he found it. The woman was a woman of the town, young, with a swelled heart, as it were, and no brains; she was timid, she was ready to swallow anything offered her. He followed her with gallantry, and found that her professional name was d’Oliva; her true name the more humble one of Le Quay. For a week or so this new lover of hers went on like any other, he appeared and reappeared most naturally; but when the week was over and he had grown most familiar to her—and perhaps with his birth and high accent most revered—La Motte confided to her great and flattering news. There was a great Lady at Court who sought her aid in a matter of vast importance, and that great Lady spoke perhaps for a Lady greater still. The grandeur of the position was left to brew, and on the 22nd of July, when it was already dusk, the great Lady (who was the female La Motte) swept into the poor girl’s humble lodgings—a vision of the Court and the high world; she told the wide-eyed hussy things that seemed too lofty for human ears. The Queen had need of her.

For herself, said the La Motte, she was the Queen’s one great, near friend (she showed a letter—one of the famous letters), and if the d’Oliva would do as she was begged to do, the gratitude of the Queen would far excel in effect the paltry 400 pounds that she, La Motte, would give. Come, would she help the Queen?

Oh yes! the d’Oliva would help the Queen! She would come next day to Versailles!

Why, then, all was well.... And that very night, posthaste, the interview over, Madame de La Motte galloped off to Versailles to take a room with her maid.

For the Queen the dreary month was ending—there was no trouble upon her horizon. She had written again to Sweden; she asked for, and obtained, the reversion of the See of Albi for a friend of the King of Sweden’s. There was no other news.

History does not show perhaps one situation more wonderfully unlike the common half-happenings, complexities and reactions of real life, nor one more wonderfully fulfilling the violent and exact, simple, and pre-arranged ironies of drama, than the contrast of that night: the Queen in the palace, ignorant of any ill save the old and dwindling tales against her, listless after a summer month of idleness and of restraint—and coming right up at her, down the Paris road, the woman who was to destroy her altogether.

The La Motte and her maid got in to Versailles very late. They took rooms at the Belle Image. Next day La Motte and Rétaux, the soldier, came, bringing the poor girl d’Oliva with them; and after a short walk in the town, during which she was left in the hotel with that “great Lady,” before whom she trembled, they told the d’Oliva that they had seen the Queen and that all was well. They waited till the morrow. On the evening of that morrow, the 24th of July, Madame de La Motte warned the d’Oliva that the time was come. She dressed her all in white, magnificently; she gave her a letter and a rose, and said: “To-night we go into the Park together, and there you will see for a moment a great Lord. Give him this letter and that rose, and say these words: ‘You know my meaning!’ You will have no more to do.” It was about eleven, a dark night and no moon, when the two women went together into the vast gardens of the palace.

As you stand in the centre of the great façade of Versailles and look westward down a mile of formal lawn and water, there lie to your left in the palace what were the Queen’s rooms, and to your left in the gardens a large grove called “the Queen’s Grove,” in which are the trees that can be seen nearest to her windows or to be reached most quickly from what were her private doors.

Near and within this grove, by an appointment which the La Motte had sworn him to observe, paced and repaced the Cardinal. The La Motte had told him he would see the Queen.

In an enormous cloak of dark mysterious blue that covered his purple to the heels, in a broad soft hat that flapped down and hid his face, this fool of magnitude paced the gardens of Versailles and waited for the delicious hour. Behind him as he paced followed respectfully a man of his—one Planta, a sort of insignificant noble. The hour came. The_La Motte found the Cardinal. She led him along a path among the high trees—and there for a moment, near a hornbeam hedge that grew there, he saw dimly a woman in white, showing tall and vague in the darkness. This figure held forward to him in some confusion a rose, and said very low, “You know my meaning!” Rohan seized the hem of the white dress and kissed it passionately, but before another word could pass a man came forward at speed and whispered as in an agony: “Madame! D’Artois is near—Madame!” The La Motte said “Quick!...” The thing in white slipped back into the shadow of a bush, the Cardinal was hurried away—but his life had reached its summit! He had heard dear words from the lips of the Queen!...

Marie Antoinette was asleep perhaps, or perhaps chatting, muffled, with Polignac’s wife, or perhaps, more likely, by her children’s nursery beds, watching their repose and questioning their nurse in the wing of the great palace hard by. A hundred yards away, in the darkness of the grove outside, that scene had passed which set the train of her destiny alight; and the explosion caused by it ruined all that creviced society of Versailles and cast it down, casting down with it the Queen.

There existed at that time necklace. Fantastic stories have been told of its value; of those sovereigns to whom it was offered, and who, with a sigh, had been compelled to refuse it. It may very likely have been offered to Marie Antoinette (with her old passion for jewels) some years before, in ’79, after the birth of her first child. It may be that the King would have given her the expensive thing—£64,000 was the price of it—it may be he had never seen it. At any rate, all the world knew that the unrivalled necklace existed, and had for some years existed as the property of two Court jewellers who worked in partnership, Boehmer and Bassange, and that they could not find a purchaser. The reader should remember this necklace, for though it will not be before him till six months after this July of ’84, yet, but for the scene in the “Queen’s Grove,” Rohan would never have handled it, and had Rohan never handled it, there would not have arisen that enormous scandal that came so opportune to new rumours and new angers, and in the end dragged down the Queen.

With August came Prince Henry of Prussia and all the bother of him. The Emperor was pressing the Dutch more and more. France was half inclined to prevent that pressure, in spite of the Austrian Alliance. France was determined, at any rate, to prevent Austria, allied or not, from strengthening herself upon the North and East. England, to keep the Scheldt shut, was more than half inclined to prevent that pressure, in spite of Holland’s attitude during the American War. Prussia stood by to gain—and part of Prussia’s chance was the opportunity of feeling and influencing Louis XVI.’s Cabinet.

Prince Henry came, as Frederick’s brother, to feel and to influence; to see how much could be done by way of separating Vienna from Versailles. It was a strain on the Queen. What could she know of these intrigues and counter-intrigues? She saw things, now as ever, few and plain; she saw a Prussian attempt to separate her House and the House into which she had married. Therefore Prince Henry’s visit was a difficulty to her. She solved it as one might expect of her character, by avoiding him. She wrote to the King of Sweden a little too familiarly, and assured him that she had hardly seen the visitor: she “was at Trianon continually, with intimates only.” Paris thought much of him (for Prussia was then, as now, efficient); she was very properly fatigued, but, improperly, she did not conquer her fatigue. During all his stay he saw her perhaps not half-a-dozen times, though he (as might be expected of his character or of any of his descendants, ancestors, or collaterals) stayed on and on and on.... He stayed steadily on in France till November!—and before November enough had happened!

The little Dauphin was really ill. His mother was anxious. St. Cloud was bought for him, in some vague hope that the “air” was better there—as though the “air” of one suburb more than another could cure the rickets of the Bourbons.

Next, it was known that the Queen was again with child. She wrote of it (familiarly enough) to the King of Sweden.

More than this, war was apparent. The Emperor’s smouldering quarrel with the Dutch had broken into flame; upon the 4th of October 1784 an Imperial ship had sailed up the Scheldt to see if the Dutch would oppose an entry. The Dutch did oppose it; they shot at the Imperial ship and took it, and every ruler in Europe put his hand to the hilt of his sword.

So far Marie Antoinette had done little at Versailles but be worried by all this complex quarrel; a fortnight before the incident she had told her brother that “really she was not so important at Versailles”; she hoped it was a thing to shirk. Now that the guns had begun, she was in a panic and made a call upon her old and natural violence. She effected little: Vergennes and the tradition of French diplomacy were too much for such tantrums, but the superficial aspect of her action was striking. It was known that she continually saw the King, that she made scenes, that she stormed. It was known that she was “Austrian” in all this—if it was not understood by the people that she had failed. On the contrary, when in the upshot a compromise was arranged, she appeared once more in that most odious light—a woman sending French tribute to Vienna.

For when the Emperor consented to the closing of the Scheldt (it was not till February of the next year that he gave way), the French Cabinet, which had firmly supported Holland, was gradually influenced to guarantee the indemnity which the dignity of the Imperial Crown demanded: it was close on ten million florins.[^[7]] The Dutch refused so large a sum. The Queen wrote, cajoled, insisted in favour of her brother, her House and Austria. The French Foreign Office, true to its tradition of taking material interests seriously, stood firm and backed Holland steadily. At last the French agreed to take over and to pay as sponsors for Holland one-half the sum demanded of the Dutch Government, if thereby they might avoid war in Europe.

[7]. The fiction of the indemnity is entertaining. The Dutch were to “yield” Maestricht as the equivalent to the Emperor’s granting the closing of the Scheldt. The indemnity was to “redeem” Maestricht.

The payment was due to the Queen’s vigour or interference, and meanwhile there had arisen one of those large and sudden affairs which give everything around them a new meaning, which emphasise every coincident evil, and draw together into their atmosphere every ill-will and every calumny. Just before Marie Antoinette appeared before the populace as one who was sending millions of French treasure to her foreign brother came the explosion—in the interval of all this diplomacy and negotiation—of what is called in history “The Affair of the Diamond Necklace.” The truth with regard to that famous business is as follows:—

When the Cardinal de Rohan left the Park that midnight of July after the rapture of a word from the ridiculous d’Oliva, he was fallen wholly in the hands of the La Motte. She it was, as he thought, who had done this great thing for him. She had given him the Queen; and he was now entirely sure of his right to act for Marie Antoinette and to serve her. The La Motte began by begging money of him for the Queen’s pet charities. She obtained it: first, two or three thousand pounds at the end of August. Rétaux wrote the letter: “It was for people whom she wanted to help.” Rétaux signed it with his “Marie Antoinette”: and Rohan paid. A few pounds of it went to the unhappy woman whom La Motte had used, the rest to creditors or show. Much at the time when the Scheldt business was at its height, just as Prince Henry was leaving and all were talking of the Queen, in the autumn of 1784 a new letter came (again from Rétaux’ hand) asking for four thousand. There was the signature “Marie Antoinette,” there the beloved terms, and Rohan blindly paid: his man took the money to the La Motte, “to give the Queen.” The Cardinal was sure of his way now; he was a master; the Queen was under obligations to him. The money was spent in a very lavish display by the male and the female La Motte. They travelled with grandeur; they visited in a patronising manner the earlier home of their poverty; they lived high. With the end of the year 1784 more money was needed—and here enters into history that diamond necklace which had so long been waiting its cue to come upon the stage.

PORTRAIT BUST OF THE DUKE OF NORMANDY, THE SECOND DAUPHIN,
SOMETIMES CALLED LOUIS XVII, WHO DIED IN THE TEMPLE
THIS BUST WAS BROKEN IN THE FALL OF THE PALACE,
AND HAS RECENTLY BEEN RECOVERED AND RESTORED TO VERSAILLES

The name of La Motte was now current—in the mouth alone and among the populace, not at Court—for one who could do much. Bassange heard, from a friend, of the La Mottes: of Madame de La Motte. He sent the friend to see whether his white elephant of a necklace could be moved towards that quarter. Madame de La Motte said wisely that she must see the jewels, a day or two after Christmas. She saw them; for three weeks they were kept on the hook. Upon the 21st of January 1785, a date that has appeared before and will appear again in this history, she sent and told them that the Queen would buy, but (in her usual manner) a “great lord” would be the intermediary; and on the 24th, by the time it was full daylight, the great lord came in the winter morning to do that little thing which led to so much at last. It was the Cardinal de Rohan who came, handled the jewels, bargained, promised four payments (at six-monthly intervals) of £16,000 each, the first for the 1st of August (the date should be noted), and demanded delivery on the 1st of February. The jewellers brought the gems on that day to his great palace in the Marais, and he then told them frankly that the buyer behind him was the Queen.

They saw a signature, “Marie Antoinette de France”; they saw a part at least of a letter, to the effect that she the Queen was not accustomed to accommodation and therefore begged him to negotiate. They were satisfied, left the necklace, and were gone. That night the Cardinal gave it to Madame de La Motte at Versailles, or rather, hiding himself in an alcove, saw it given to a man who acted the part of the Queen’s messenger and who was, of course, Rétaux.

All this, I say, passed on the 1st of February 1785.

Next day, Candlemas—just two years after Madame de La Motte had made her desperate effort to approach the Queen with a petition—Rohan and the jeweller, one as Grand Almoner in the high religious function of the day, the other as a man in the crowd, each watched the royal party go by and noted the Queen; each missed the jewel that surely she should be wearing on the morrow of its purchase, and each saw that it was not yet worn. Each for different reasons wondered, but each for different reasons was silent, and each determined, for different reasons, to wait. Meanwhile the necklace was in the custody of the male La Motte ready for its journey to London, the refuge of the oppressed.

Lent passed. On Easter Sunday the Queen’s third child—he who became the Dauphin of the Imprisonment—was born. If, thought Rohan, the Queen had purposely waited before putting on the necklace, in order to avoid a coincidence of date between his visit to the jewellers and her first wearing of the gem, surely a long enough space would have passed by the time of the Relevailles, the ceremonial churching in Notre Dame which followed the birth of every member of the Blood Royal. The Relevailles approached. It was more than eight months since the Cardinal had been given that rose at midnight, and he began to grow anxious. The necklace haunted him.... Far off in London the male La Motte was selling, stone by stone, the better part of it; the rest Rétaux was carefully disposing of in Paris itself.

It was on May 24 that the Queen proceeded to Paris for the ceremony of the Relevailles. All the antique grandeur was there and the crowds, but over all of it and over the crowds a new and dreadful element of popular silence. The guns saluted her through a silent air. In the streets of the University the very wheels of her carriage could be heard, so hushed was the crowd. The rich in the opera that evening cheered her, but going in and coming out through popular thousands she heard no cheers. She supped in the Temple with Artois, whose appanage the liberties of the Temple were, and she could see through the night in his garden, as she had seen so often before in his feasts and his receptions, the dimmer and more huge from the blaze of light near by, that ominous great Tower which, it is said, she had always dreaded and dreaded more acutely now with an access of superstitious fear. “Oh! Artois, pull it down!”

The Grand Almoner was present at this high function; he watched her and marvelled that the necklace should still be hidden away.

The next morning she could be certain how Paris had changed. There was throughout its air a mixture of indifference and of dislike that poisoned her society with it. Paris now thought of her fixedly as the living extravagance of the Court. St. Cloud was at their gates to reproach her, with its title of the “Queen’s Palace,” its printed “Queen’s” orders on the gate. The Deficit was there to reproach her. Her very economies, the lessened festivities, the abandoned journeys of the Court, her rarer and more rare appearances in the capital, the lack of noise in Trianon, were, in the public mouth, a consequence of past excesses. The judgment was false, but it stood firm.

Her undue influence over the King and the councils of the King was another legend, less false than that of gross extravagance. There was no proof, but a crowd has more judgment than an isolated man, and the crowd divined what we now know. They had divined it in this critical year which saw France balancing on the verge of war with Austria, and which, before its close, saw the payment of the Dutch indemnity by the French to the Queen’s brother at Vienna. All her action for twelve months was wholly Austrian in their eyes, and they were wholly right. It was in such a popular atmosphere, so sullen and so prepared, full for a year past of “Figaro’s” ironic laughter against a régime already hurrying to its end, that the explosion of that summer was to come; for the 1st of August was near, and with it the time for the first instalment upon the necklace.

In June the Count de La Motte was back from London paying part of the money he had received for the diamonds to a Paris banker—one Perregaux.

In July—on the mid-Tuesday of the month—Boehmer in his capacity of Court Jeweller brought to Versailles certain jewels. He brought with him also a letter which he gave to the Queen at mid-day as she came out of Mass; he gave her the letter with mystery and with profound respect, and was gone. The Queen read that note; it was incomprehensible to her. It assured her of her jewellers’ unalterable devotion; it begged her to believe that Boehmer and Bassange were willing to accept her “latest proposals,” and it ended with their satisfaction that “the finest set of diamonds in the world should adorn the greatest and the best of its Queens.” Whether Marie Antoinette had even heard of the necklace in the past we cannot tell, though probably, like all the rest of the world, she had. Whether she had or not, the note was equally mysterious to her. The Comptroller of the Household, the Baron de Breteuil, was told of the little bother; he sent for Boehmer, asked him what on earth the note meant, but he only received mysterious replies leading nowhere.

If it be asked by the reader why, seeing a complication of some sort before her, Marie Antoinette did not at once order an investigation to be pursued by the police, the answer is simple enough to any one acquainted with her character: the annoyance bored her. Her instinct was simply to avoid it. She may (some say so) have spared herself trouble upon some theory that the jeweller was mad: anyhow, she spared herself trouble.

If it be asked how the complication ever arose, why that enigmatical letter was written, and why, once written and delivered, Boehmer should have hesitated and equivocated meaninglessly in his answers to Breteuil, the answer is simple when one hears what had just passed in that lower world of duped Cardinal and intriguing, most impudent of adventurers, rapscallions and spiritualists.

Madame de La Motte had been driving Rétaux of late to write more frequently than ever his “Marie Antoinette” letters to the Cardinal. The poor soldier was not a woman, he was not even a writer of fiction, and he had been kept hard at it to force the note of love so often and in such various ways; until at last, one letter had been ordered of him saying, as the date of the first instalment approached, that “really the price was too high.” Couldn’t the Cardinal, for her sake, get some £8000 off the price? If he could, the Queen would pay on the 1st of August, not the £16,000 then due, but a full £28,000. The Cardinal read and obeyed. The jewellers were agreeable. Hence Boehmer’s note of July 12th, and hence (since he was convinced that the Queen, by the very method of her purchase, desired secrecy above all things) his evasive replies to De Breteuil.

Thus, in that world beneath of which she knew nothing, things were coming to an issue against Marie Antoinette: one last event did all. Upon the Saturday before the payment was due, the Cardinal (acting upon a further letter) gave Boehmer something over £1000 and said to him that it was free money—over and above the fixed price—to console him for the unwelcome news that the first instalment could not be met quite punctually. Come, the Queen would certainly pay on the 1st of October; it was but two months to wait. He had seen it in a note of the Queen’s which the Countess de La Motte had just shown him.

It is probable that even the Cardinal had become suspicious now—he says as much himself—but his pride and his fear of exposure held him. As for the jeweller, the interview of that Saturday broke his back; he was distracted. On the Tuesday (or the Wednesday) the climax of the comedy was reached. The Countess de La Motte met the two partners Boehmer and Bassange together, and told them boldly that the signature “Marie Antoinette de France” was a forgery—so there! In the stupefaction that followed she added the quiet advice that for their money they must bleed the Cardinal—“He had plenty”—and so left them.

Then followed that general scurry which is the note of embroglios as they flare up towards their end. Bassange runs here, Boehmer runs there; the one to Rohan in his Episcopal Palace, the other to those who can help him with the Queen—notably to Madame Campan, who has left an exaggerated and distorted account of the interview. To Bassange the Cardinal (anything to gain time in the hurly-burly) swears the signature is true; to Boehmer Madame Campan, with her solid, upper-servant face, announces the redundant truth that he seems to have been let in. As for the La Motte, she flies to Rohan, and he (anything to keep things dark and to protect a witness to his incalculable stupidity of a coxcomb) consents to hide her; he gives her asylum in his great house.

Next Boehmer goes to Versailles—at once—and implores the Queen to see him. The Queen has really had her fill of this kind of thing; she refuses. But next week she consents, and the revelations begin.

It was at such a moment, with such storms about her, in the full and growing unpopularity of her Austrian influence in the affair of the Dutch indemnity, in the full and growing renascence of the legend of her extravagance, that Marie Antoinette had determined not only to play once more in her theatre at Trianon—the chief reproach of the past, a legend with the populace for unqueenly exposure, for lack of dignity, for expense—not only to break her wise resolve, which had been kept for more than a year, that her plays should cease, but actually to play another piece by that same Beaumarchais whose wit was the spear-head of the attack upon the old régime. The decision came neither of cynicism nor of folly upon her part; it came of tragic ignorance.

It was while she was rehearsing her part of “Rosine” that she was persuaded—probably by Madame Campan herself—to send for Boehmer and to hear his tale. He came upon the 9th of August, Tuesday, by the Queen’s command, to Trianon. At first he simply asked for the money he believed his due. When he saw that Marie Antoinette neither understood why it should be paid, nor for what, nor by whom, he told the whole story as he had heard it. He was sent off to write down coherently and at length in a clear memorandum the details of this amazing thing, and when he had gone the Queen raved.

Each consequence and aspect of the abomination, as each successively appeared to her, struck her with separate and aggravated blows. Her name linked with a libertine whom, of all libertines, she most loathed—a man who was the object of her dead mother’s especial contempt! The half-truths that would come in; her love of jewellery—now long conquered, but now widely remembered! Her secret debts—now long paid, but already a fixed idea in the public mind! At the best that such a man had thought it conceivable that she should be such a woman; at the worst that the world might believe it!

Upon Friday the report of Boehmer came in. She mastered it that day and the next, and on Sunday the 14th, the eve of the Assumption, she begged her husband to spend all the day with her at Trianon. He willingly came. They together—but surely at her initiative—determined on a public trial. Mercy would have done what we do now in England when there is danger of public scandal and the weakening of government; he would have paid the La Motte woman something to be off. Vergennes was strongly in favour of silence—as strongly as Downing Street would be to-day—for he was of the trained diplomatic kind. The King’s honour, the Queen’s intense and burning indignation against calumny persuaded them to risk publicity.

The course taken was, I repeat, not a course easy for my modern readers to understand; we take it for granted in the modern world, and especially in England, that a matter of this sort, involving, as it were, all the social fabric, is best snuffed out. Thus the French Foreign Office were willing to destroy the Pannizardi telegram, and rather give a traitor the advantage of concealing damning evidence against himself than to risk a rupture with Italy. Thus the English Home Office allows criminals of a certain standing to go free rather than endanger social influences whose secrecy is thought necessary to the State; nor do we allow any to know what sums or how large are paid for public honours, nor always to what objects secret subscriptions of questionable origin—in Egypt, for instance—are devoted. Louis XVI. and his wife at this critical moment decided otherwise and upon another theory of morals. They decided to clear by public trial the honour of the Crown. That decision, more than any other act, cost them their thrones. It has preserved the truth for history.

The Feast of the Assumption has for centuries attracted the French by its peculiar sanctity. Even during that phase of infidelity, which, before the Revolution, covered all their intellect and still clings to the bulk of their lower middle classes, the French maintained it. Even to-day, when a fierce anti-Christian masonry has moulded groups of artisans and intellectuals into ardent champions against the Faith, the Assumption is universally observed. In the Court of Versailles, though now but a ceremony, it was the noblest ceremony of the year.

It was warm noon upon that 15th of August. The Court in all its colours stood ranked outside the Chapel Royal. The Grand Almoner, the Cardinal de Rohan, taller than the prelates and the priests around him, stood ready in procession to enter and to celebrate the Pontifical High Mass as soon as the King and Queen might appear; but the King and Queen and a Minister or two in attendance were waiting behind closed doors in Louis’ private room. The procession still halted: the Court was already impatient: the doors still stood closed. They opened; a servant came out and told the Cardinal that the King wished to see him a moment. The servant and he went in together, and the doors shut behind the purple of Rohan’s robes and the lace upon his wrists and shoulders.

The Court outside grew weary of waiting. A quarter of an hour, twenty minutes passed; it was near the half-hour when those doors opened again and the Head of the King’s Household, the Baron de Breteuil, appeared with the Cardinal at his side. A lieutenant of the Guard happened to be by. Breteuil summoned him and said aloud: “The King orders you not to leave the Cardinal as you take him to his palace: you are answerable for his person.”

So Rohan was arrested, and there is no record who sang Mass that day.

CHAPTER X
THE NOTABLES

August 15, 1785, to August 8, 1788

FOR the Queen the decision to send the Cardinal to trial was a final action. The thing was done—and, for that matter, nearly done with.

When she could find time in an interval of her occupations to write to her brother Joseph—it was not till a fortnight later—the whole letter, though it dealt in detail with the affair as one deserving a full explanation, was written upon a tone of relief. It was tuned all of it to one key-phrase: “I am delighted to think that we shall never hear of this filthy business again.”

Hardly was that decisive act accomplished than there suddenly appeared upon twenty points of the horizon, not only in frontal advance but upon either flank and in either rear of the perilous position she occupied, as many separate forces unconnected or but vaguely in touch with one another; some directly antagonistic to others, but all having it in common that the Queen was their objective, and that the trial of the Cardinal had been their signal for mobilisation and the march.

It is in the character of unwisdom to analyse and to proceed upon the results of analysis: in the character of wisdom to integrate the whole. The analysis of the situation just before the Cardinal’s arrest showed clearly one great factor of opposition—the Rohan clan. They were everywhere in France contemporary and in France historical; they filled Marie Antoinette’s generation and a hundred years. The sisters, cousins, brothers-in-law were ubiquitous. Paris was conspicuous with their palaces, the Court with their functions, the provinces with their loyal dependants or necessary adherents. They were the nucleus of the strongest group that remained to the wealthy nobility. The Guémenées, the Soubises, even the Condés, were one with all the Rohans. A Rohan put to open trial would have in that day the effect which a chief of our modern financial gang put to open trial might have to-day. Imagine one of our judges forced to try a Rothschild!

The Queen saw clearly—it is always easy to see one simple thing clearly—that one Rohan force opposed to her; she determined to brave it; but latent, unconscious of themselves until her own action called them into being, how many other forces were there not!

There was no member of the higher nobility but to a greater or less degree felt vaguely a right to immunity from such publicity—and this man was of the highest of the nobility, a type. There was no member of the clergy but could formulate a clear historical and legal right to the exemption of a cleric from the judgment of a lay tribunal—and this man was of the highest of the clergy.

Had he been Archbishop of Toulouse or Sens, or any wholly Gallic see even, his case would have been simpler; he was Bishop of Strasburg and his metropolitan was of Mainz: the Archbishop of Mainz was a conceivable opponent.

He was a prince of the Church: Rome had a right to speak—and almost did.

He was a prince of the Empire: Vienna had a right to speak—and almost did.

Austria and France had for now two years been at a strain: it was just two years since Joseph had written his first serious letter upon the Scheldt to his sister: the government of Austria was embittered, and had for sovereign a man who would not refuse to trade upon the embarrassment of Versailles. The last negotiations for indemnity against the opening of the Scheldt were still pending. The moment was opportune.

The Cardinal could be judged by but one tribunal of the King’s, and that a quasi-governmental body which had for a generation stood in increasing opposition to the Crown—the Parlement. For them also the moment was opportune.

He could be tried in but one town, and that town the capital, which had now taken up such a definite position of hatred against the Queen; in but one part of that town, in the Palais, right in the heart of Paris upon which all the crowds of that unity so easily converge, and whose towers were a perpetual symbol of the Monarchy which had deserted its ancient seat for the isolated splendour of Versailles.

But of much more weight than even these considerable and separate bases of resistance was that indefinitely large body of smaller and more fluctuating dangers whose integration the Queen should have seized if she was to save herself from destruction.

There are in politics, as in physics, conditions of unstable equilibrium in which a mass of fragments, seemingly in repose, may at a shock be exploded. Their energy lies ready to be released by the least disturbance. It is the business of statesmanship to remove or to dissolve such as these before large things are undertaken, lest a violent motion explode them. A thousand such lay about the palace of Versailles, threatening the Queen. Whatever particular grudges (even in friends) had had time to grow, the memories of hatred in enemies, the last of the Du Barry’s faction, the last of D’Aiguillon’s. The suspicions of the devout against her frivolity, the contempt of the philosophical for her religion, the irritation of the politician against her presence at the Council, the necessary enmity of Calonne—all the imperfect and capricious pleasures she had failed to pursue, all the losses, dismissals, and humiliations rightly or wrongly laid to her charge, were there, not consciously prepared, but fatally bound to spring to life if once a body of action against her took visible form. That form the trial of the Cardinal was to present. When such a body of opposition was in motion all would attach themselves to it, each from an aspect of its own. All the old dangers, as each appeared, made alliance with the new and immediate perils.

Madame de La Motte was arrested three days after the Cardinal, in the early hours of the 18th of August, just back at dawn in pomp from a great provincial party in Champagne. Her husband fled to London, there to meet a sympathy readily extended to such exiles, and to keep in touch with those centres of enmity against the French Crown and religion with which he was familiar. It was on the very day when Paris was in the first busy rumour upon the whole matter—when it was learnt that the Cardinal had been allowed to burn half his papers, that La Motte had got away, that suspicion was permitted to attach to the Queen—it was upon such a day, the 19th of August—that the Queen chose to re-open the theatre at Trianon and to re-open it with a play of Beaumarchais’.

Many tragedies in history contain some such coincidences, but none so many or so exact as those which accompany and determine the tragedy of Marie Antoinette.

Consider the position: the legend of her extravagance has re-arisen—unjustly. Trianon is—unjustly—the chief popular symbol of that extravagance. The theatre of Trianon, the most in view, the most obvious of its expenses, she had wisely suppressed during many months. The park at St. Cloud, at the gates of Paris, is a further count in the indictment against her. Her visit to Paris for her churching in May has proved her grievously unpopular: the hated financial agreement with Austria in regard to the Scheldt is developing, as it is believed (and rightly believed), under her guidance. Upon all this comes the thunder-clap of Rohan’s arrest—and just as men are beginning to comprehend and to explain it, just as the public and foreign enmity necessarily suggest her complicity, say that “there is more than meets the eye,” that “you will see, the Queen will make victims of them all; but she is responsible for the purchase of the gems!” just as the obvious lies were establishing themselves through the embryonic press of those days and the café gossip—in that very Assumption week she chooses to appear upon her stage at Trianon, dressed and painted for a part written by whom? By the man Caron—Beaumarchais by purchase—whom all the vulgar now associated with the most successful attack upon the existing régime, whom the older and the higher world remembered as the associate and perhaps the partner of the Jewish clique in London that had published the first dirty lie against Marie Antoinette’s chastity when she was as yet but a child of eighteen.

Why was such a folly committed? The answer to that question is all around the reader to-day. That society did not know its doom. It was “chic,” it was “the thing” for the ruling powers to read and to see acted criticism upon themselves. The little spice of danger—they could think it no more—was a piquant addition to jaded and well-known pastimes. But the Queen! How terribly more great and more real the living consequences were to be to her than to any such abstraction as “a régime”: she was to see and to feel continued physical violence, to be menaced with muskets, to be forced from her husband before his death, to have her child dragged from her; she was to be wholly abandoned, tortured silently by a subterranean silence, and at last publicly killed.

To the coincidence of that piece of folly another was soon added. All the succeeding month was full of the last negotiations with Austria: on the 19th of September public discussion of the necklace had gone far enough to move her to a long letter; she wrote and explained disdainfully to her brother—on the 20th was definitely signed the obligation on the part of France for half the Dutch indemnity. Austria received—for no reason save the Queen’s pressure and an imaginary relief from war—about a million pounds. With the public debt already a matter for debate and about to become the critical matter for action, it was a monstrous thing.

Budget for budget—stating the proportions in terms of modern revenue—it corresponded to what a payment of between ten millions or twelve would be to-day. Stated in terms of ease of payment, of ability to pay, it represented far more than such a sum would represent in a modern budget—and not a penny of that humiliating obligation need have been incurred but for the Queen.

Those historians who regard as beneath discussion the great popular cry of the Revolution that Marie Antoinette “sent money to Austria” are too ready to neglect whatever is rhetorical. Tumbrils of gold did not pass—as the populace believed—but this enormous obligation was incurred, and incurred through her and in favour of her brother.

That autumn, winter, and spring the necklace was the theme. The confused currents of opinion had this in common that all accused the Queen, just as, in the great modern parallel of the Dreyfus case, the confused currents of opinion, differing widely and sometimes in direct opposition on vital points, had it all in common that Catholic society was the real defendant throughout and the real villain of the piece. According to some Rohan was the Queen’s lover, afraid to accuse her or perhaps too fond—but at any rate he had purchased the necklace by her orders. According to others the La Motte had been the Queen’s cat’s-paw in tricking Rohan. According to others again, more extreme, the Queen had been herself the actual agent throughout, and would now, by an official pressure, procure a verdict against her lover and her friend in order to whitewash her own character. In general the absurdity which took most hold was nearer to the latter theory than to any other: it became a test point simply whether Rohan would be acquitted or condemned. Rohan acquitted, the Queen (by some wildly illogical process of general opinion!) was supposed to be proved guilty of authorship in the whole affair. Rohan condemned, she was equally guilty of authorship—only, in that case the mob and the foreigner would say that wicked judges had proved pliant to Court influence.

As in the modern trial which I have already quoted as the great historic parallel to the trial of Rohan, no evidence could affect the minds of those who had already concluded: to make their fixed conclusion fit in with the facts any contradiction of human psychology and human probabilities was admitted. Did some pornographer attack the Queen and defend Rohan? Straightway he was a hero! Had there been a Pantheon he would have had his burial there. Did some anonymous pamphleteer assert his conviction of the Queen’s guilt? Straightway he was an authority. Did some obscure and needy man take money to support the immense power and fortunes of the Rohans against the impoverished crown? Straightway (like those who supported Jewish finance in the modern parallel I have quoted) he became a being full of self-sacrifice defending the weak and the oppressed against haughty power. The document whereby the necklace was ordered was signed “Marie Antoinette de France,” a signature quite impossible in form and not even remotely resembling in handwriting that of the Queen. No matter. It must be supposed, “for this occasion only,” that she wrote thus—once at least. Or, if that lie was too hard to swallow, then she had made Rohan sign thus, or get it signed thus, precisely in order to cover her tracks by an improbable signature. Anything at all was said and believed—especially in foreign countries—provided it implicated the Queen.

The preliminary stages of the trial were long. Oliva was not arrested till late in the winter, at Brussels, fluttering and confused; Rétaux not till the spring, at Geneva.

The Queen endured those months of increasing public insult and increasing doubt. She was in her fourth pregnancy, and, what was more, her character, to some extent her body, had aged somewhat. She had passed that thirtieth year which her mother had foreseen to be critical for her; she had come to what a superstition or a coincidence made her regard as the beginning of bitter years.

Meanwhile in his room at the Bastille, where he was confined, the Cardinal held his court, enjoyed his receptions, and continued to impress the Parisians with all the pomp of his rank. It was not till the end of May that he was taken to the Conciergerie—the last step before the public trial; he went by night upon the 29th of the month. On the next day, the 30th of May 1786, in the morning, the Parlement met in the Grand Salle, the indictments were read, and the pleadings opened.

That trial has been described a thousand times. The Rohans of every degree were packed at the doors of the court. The deference they met with, the immense crowds which, during those long two days, awaited the verdict, the anxiety at Versailles—all these are the theme of every book that has dealt with this best known of historic trials: they need not be repeated here. At the close of the proceedings came the significant thing: the public prosecutor demanded no more than that the Cardinal should apologise for having thought the Queen capable of such things, and should resign the Grand Almonry—on that small point, the forty-nine judges deliberated a whole day long.

It was dark, it was nine o’clock on the 31st of May when their conclusion was announced: some would have condemned him to the mere apology and resignation thus demanded, a few to apology but not to resignation, the majority were simply for acquittal, and at last, by twenty-six votes to twenty-three, Rohan left the court completely absolved. For the rest the La Motte was ordered to be flogged, branded, and imprisoned at Salpetière. Her husband—in contumacy—to the galleys. Rétaux to be transported. As for the Oliva, they declared her not to fall under the matter they had to try—she was free.

In Paris the acquittal of the Cardinal (which meant to the mob simply the condemnation of the Queen) caused an immediate popular outburst of cheering and congratulation. They surrounded his palace. They demanded and obtained its illumination. He was compelled to show himself and to be acclaimed. Then, as must ever be the case with such false heroes, he was completely dropped. Those who had done most to secure the verdict were most in a position to know the perils of further ovation. When the King had stripped him of every possible function and emolument and had exiled him to the Velay, the Rohans themselves were the most assiduous to impose silence upon him and to force him back into obscurity. He lived, unnoticed and unremembered, remote in Strasburg; was advised, on election to the States-General two years later, not to sit; sat, refused the civil oath, emigrated, survived the Queen by some ten years, and died, doing after that no more evil.

No public insult could more deeply have wounded the Queen than this verdict and that demonstration. Her health was touched, but much more her very self was overshadowed as she feared—and she was right—for ever. She had not even, as have we, the resource of history. She did not know how thoroughly history can deal with these Popish plots and Royal Necklaces and Dreyfus Innocencies and the rest, nor how contemptuously time and learning together expose at last every evil intrigue. She only knew—and she was right—that in her time the calumny would never be set right. And indeed this one of the great historical enthusiasms for falsehood was not set right till our own time. Napoleon, musing years after upon the verdict, called it, with his broad judgment and his opportunities for comparison and knowledge, the beginning of the Revolution, the gate of her tomb. Marie Antoinette was of no great judgment—she was contemporary to it all; no experience or research, but only instinct, could guide her—but some such dreadful presentiment of the capital importance of the affair stood fast in her mind: in part it greatly ripened her view of this bad world; much more it oppressed or broke the springs of her spirit; and while there is henceforward in all she did new tenacity and much calculation of effort, there is, much more, an inner certitude of doom.

The King went off to Cherbourg, where Calonne, still seeking to re-establish the finances by an extended public employment of labour and by display, had achieved the first stage of that magnificent artificial harbour, the model of all of its kind that were to follow in Europe and on the Mediterranean. Everywhere Louis met with easy but fervid acclamation. He had never seen the provinces before. He came back radiant. The new warmth and zeal, which, under another aspect and reacting against other stimuli, were so soon to produce the great change, had already touched the people, and he had bathed, as it were, in a public energy which, till then, cabined in Versailles or wearied by the cliques of Paris, he had never known. All that enthusiasm, his and his people’s, he communicated in many letters to the Queen; but she had suffered her blow, and nothing now could undeceive her but that fate was coming. Her relation the Archduke, the last of so many royal visitors at Versailles, had gone. In July her fourth child was born—a girl; and that same summer every stranger that passed through Paris noted the beginnings of the storm. The pamphlets were awake; the press had risen to a continuous pressure of suggestion, anecdote, and attack, and the necessity for facing and solving the insistent fiscal problem was no longer a theory to be discussed politically but a thing to be done.

The Court was brilliant in a last leaping flame. Fontainebleau that autumn was glorious with colours and men; the balls at Versailles that winter of ’86 shone with a peculiar and a memorable splendour—but it was the end. There were to be no more glories: the last ball had been given, the last progress made.

Calonne, whose French audacity might a little earlier have saved the State, dared an experiment which failed—but which, from its nature and the things it could but breed, led on to the Revolution. He determined (and he persuaded the King) to summon, for consultation upon the finances and the betterment of the realm, a council of all those who led in the nobility, the Church, the Parlements, the Services, the great municipalities. This convention was to be named, upon the parallel of the last similar summons—now some two centuries old—an assembly of “the Notables.” The Ministry were given the King’s decision suddenly, upon the 29th of December. The Notables were to meet upon that day month. More than one critic—especially among the aged—foresaw, the dyke once opened, what a flood would follow; all, wise or unwise, felt that the meeting would be the end of most that they had known and the beginning of quite new perils and perhaps new energies or a new world.

Whether or no the Queen was hurt at a sudden determination in which she had taken no part nor even had a voice, she very rapidly in the next six months rose to hold the Government in her hands: thenceforward to the meeting of the States-General and the opening of the Revolution, her decision and her vigour take part in all those acts—a dozen at the most—which proved ultimately the authors of her destruction.

The Notables met—or rather did not meet—upon the day named, the 29th of January ’87. They came to Paris on the appointed day, they met in the streets of Paris, in drawing-rooms and elsewhere; but those provincial mayors, great judges, and members of the high nobility had to wait and chafe for many days before they were legally convened. Criticism and violence of tongue had time to grow; there was a sense of weakness, of anarchy even, in the petty details of governmental action following on such delay. When they did meet, before their debates had time to develop, one event after another was transforming everything around the Queen.

The Polignacs had quarrelled with her; Madame de Polignac, her life-long friend, had threatened to retire from her post with the Children of France. Many—most—had followed them; all whom the Polignacs had benefited, through the Queen, for so many years. A last and new faction, more intimate, more wounding, more in possession of her secrets, and more dangerous than any other was thus formed.

Vergennes was just dead; the King, should Calonne fail in the great business of Reform which the Assembly of Notables had opened, would be left without a Chief Minister, and the Queen’s place was plainly ready for her in his council-room.

More than these, the La Motte had escaped from prison, and had fled (of course) to London.

There was not then, as there is to-day, in London a vast and organised journalistic system by which news is afforded, withheld, or falsified at will. Nay, even had there been such a monopoly, journals had not one-hundredth of the power they have to-day. Again, those who governed England then were usually well travelled and were acquainted with the French tongue. Again, there existed, what has since failed us, strong independent opinion and a cultivated middle class. The female La Motte was, therefore, not welcomed in London with those transports of affection or homage which she would receive to-day; but there was already sufficient horror at continental procedure and sufficient certitude in the baseness of all administration of justice abroad to stand her in very good stead. The nourishment of the public conscience upon the sins of foreigners had already begun. La Motte was something of a martyr, and, as she seemed poor, could make some livelihood out of the public folly. She began that series of pretended “Revelations” which were in some few months to be among the principal torments of the Queen. Whether (like Esterhazy by our Press in the parallel I have already drawn) she was bribed to say such things, we have no record. At any rate her publications paid her—for a time.

It has been said that Marie Antoinette helped the La Motte to fly from prison. It may be so. When in a great public quarrel the innocent side is blundering and unwise, its acts of unwisdom are incalculable. Marie Antoinette had certainly sent to have the woman visited in prison. It is possible that, as she had hoped a public trial could help her, so she hoped now the La Motte loose would do less harm than the La Motte imprisoned and gagged, with every rumour free to circulate. Perhaps she was wholly ignorant of the whole matter. Anyhow the La Motte was loose—and the flood of calumny springing from London flowed against the Queen and did its work. She, at Versailles, grew every day to be more and more absorbed in the crisis which was developing with such rapidity—for it was already apparent as March proceeded that the experiment of the Notables had failed. Calonne had still his native courage and his peculiar rapidity of manœuvre; he fought his hand hard—but the opposition was too plain, too large, and too strong for him. His plan had been just—he had conceived the reformation of lightening the worst taxes and of arranging a more equal redistribution of the burdens upon land—a new redistribution in which no privilege should exist of rank or custom—and, more daring, but still, in the tradition of Turgot, he had planned an adumbration of the Revolution by proposing provincial, local, and parochial assemblies.

Two currents of hostility met him: one that the Notables in the main stood personally for privilege; the other that every one in France desired more change, and, above all, more “democratisation” of the centre of the national machinery.

There was an appetite for debate, for “facts”; a demand for exact accounts and public audit and public consent to taxes.

These two currents gained their intensity, however, from the legend which had gathered round Calonne, as the Financier of the Deficit and the Adviser of the Throne. A symbolic character, which was never his but which has endured almost to our own time, was popularly superimposed upon him, a character of mere frivolity, of mere extravagance in time of security, especially of subservience to fancied expensive whims of the Queen.

She, alas! thought to do a public service and a strong one by persuading Louis to the dismissal of his Minister when his failure with the Notables was proved. She won. On the 8th April 1787 Calonne fell, to be exiled, to fly (of course) to London, and thence, only too probably, to help swell that river of evil speaking and writing which, since her thirtieth year, had flowed so regularly against the character of Marie Antoinette; but which now broke all bounds and filled half the pamphlets.

If in this she acted publicly, decidedly, and to her hurt, in her next equally decisive step the Queen acted even more publicly, more decisively, and more both to her own hurt and that of the alien populace whom she already detested but desired, in such a crisis, to rule. After some mention of Necker, she forced Loménie upon the King.

The writing of history, more than any other liberal occupation, suffers from routine. I will not detain the reader of this chronicle with any long digression upon the effect of the French Revolution, upon the nature, the prodigious force and the universality of what may be called, according to the taste of the scholar, the Catholic reaction or the Catholic renaissance of our day. Still less would I disturb the progress of my story with a divagation upon the ease with which our academies here fall into every trap set them by the enemies of the Faith abroad—whether those enemies be random politicians, high stoics, sceptics of a noble temper, common usurers, or men fanatical against all restriction of the senses. But I will so far delay the reader at this moment as to state plainly a succession of undoubted historical and contemporary truths in no particular order, and to beg him to reach a conclusion by a comparison of them all.

It is in the routine of our universities to say that Catholicism was struck to death by two great upheavals: the Reformation opened it to attack; the Revolution dealt the mortal blow: it is now said to be dying, and especially in France. This is the first truth: that our universities say these things; some regret, some are pleased: but it is believed and said in either camp. Next, it is true that Louis XVI. practised his religion and believed in it. Next, it is true that his Queen, never wholly abandoning the rule of religion—far from it—was now, in 1787, particularly devoted and increasingly exact in her observance; daily, as she daily suffered, more penetrated inwardly by the spirit of the Church. A fourth truth is that no single man pretending to high intelligence in that generation of Frenchmen believed in more than a God: the only quarrel was between those who believed in such a Being and those who denied this last of dogmas. The fifth truth is, that but yesterday all the French hierarchy and all the 80,000 priests of the Church—save, perhaps, three—suffered the loss of all corporate property and all established income rather than vary in one detail from the discipline of Rome. The sixth truth is that the prominent and outstanding names of the French hierarchy or of the Church’s defenders before and during this revolutionary crisis were: Rohan, an evil liver, a cheat, a fool, and a blackguard; Talleyrand, something even lower in morals than he was higher in wit; the Archbishop of Narbonne—living six hundred miles from his See with his own niece for mistress; Grégoire, a full schismatic and in his way an honest man; Maury, a vulgar politician, like one of our own vulgar politicians to-day, a priest out for a fortune, a sort of “Member of Parliament,” a petty persecutor of the Pope in person and of the Papacy, in time a Cardinal—and this man Loménie. The seventh truth is that Marie Antoinette (who practised her religion) ardently supported Loménie and befriended him, and that, therefore, Louis (who was devout) accepted him for Chief Minister.

Read these undoubted truths together and decide whether the Faith has advanced or receded in a hundred years.

Who was Loménie de Brienne? He had had, these twenty years, a reputation for what is vaguely called in aristocracies “ability.” He had presented the address of the Clergy in the Coronation year. He was Archbishop of Toulouse. He suited La Fayette’s idea of honesty. He had inordinate passions. He was yet further and later Archbishop of Sens—for the sake of the pickings. He had led with no scruple of honour the opposition to Calonne in the Notables. Mercy favoured him. Vermond, the Queen’s old tutor, who owed all to him, supported his claim, and Marie Antoinette imposed him. But who was he?

He was an active, careful, and laborious atheist to whom the King, by a scruple, refused the See of Paris, holding that the See of Paris was peculiar and had always better be held by a man who believed in God. He was a wit, he loved wealth inordinately—and that was all. He had his reputation with the wealthy, but no action of his remains. Such was the hierarchy that moment, and to a circle of such men was power restricted. And Loménie de Brienne was made and put into his seat by the advice of Vermond, Marie Antoinette’s old tutor, by the advice of Joseph II., a protector of religious doubt; he repaid her by a constant devotion.

It was on May Day 1787 that this personage was put, with an inferior title, at the head of the finances, a position which—now more than ever—was necessarily the chief post in the French State. On the 25th the Notables, from whom he came and whom he had led, were dissolved....

Fersen, eager to spend one last day in Versailles, had come for a few flying hours. He watched their dissolution as a show ... he did not return till the eve of the Revolution, and, once returned, he remained a pledged sacrifice, a servant, to the end....

The Notables had done nothing, and Loménie himself proceeded to do much the same; or rather to bring forward for the third time as an active proposition—for the millionth as a theory propounded—the scheme of financial reform which every predecessor had, in one shape or another, presented. The destruction of the fossil compartments—walls which separated various antique forms of taxation, a larger total tax, a more equitable distribution; the abolition of imposts uselessly vexatory; loans to oil the wheels of change.

The Notables had gone: but to register such decrees a power parallel to that of the Throne must—as we saw in the case of Turgot—concur. The permanent body of legal advisers to the Prince—a conception as old as Rome and morally in continuity with the Empire—the body which had tried Rohan—the Parlement—pleading the absence of a regular budget and of public discussion, refused to register, and within three months of Loménie de Brienne’s appointment, the Parlement in session had proceeded from Sabattier’s famous pun[^[8]] to affirm that no permanent impost could be levied upon the nation without the summons and consent of the States-General.

[8]. “Vous demandez l’état des recettes—ces sont les états generaux qu’il nous faut.”

The reader should pause upon that phrase.

The conception that All should rule is coeval with society. But the words so used by Sabattier were not a mere opinion nor a mere reiteration of justice. They were spoken in that assembly of lawyers which formed the chief body of the State, and once spoken in such an air they were creative.

This memorable declaration of July 1787 launched the Revolution.

Nothing can reinvigorate itself or snatch itself from decay save by a return upon itself and a recapture of its own past. To revive the States-General was to bring back to life the vigour of the Middle Ages, and to renew—at the close of this last long and glorious but exhausted phase in the national life—the permanent energy of Gaul.

When in the eleventh century the great transition from the Dark Ages to mediæval civilisation was accomplished, there came, along with the new Gothic architecture and the new national tongues, as the last fruit of that florescence, an institution known in each province of Christendom by some local name (for the creation was local and spontaneous) but everywhere bearing the same characters, in formation, object, and inner nature. This Institution had for its purpose the affirmation of a doctrine fundamental in the Faith, that sovereignty lies and can only lie with the community. This Institution had for instrument wherewith to enforce that right a conception at once as mystical and as plain as any that the Faith has admitted or revealed in her strict dogmas, the conception of representation: two men should speak for thousands; the spirit of a community should enter and be seen through individuals who should speak with the voice of districts; these representatives should be the very numbers for whom they stood: an institution as tangible, as real, as visible as the Sacrament; as mysterious as the Presence of the Lord. It was a miracle of faith, but it conquered; and even to-day, woefully corrupt, there resides in Representation something of majesty and a power in moments of great dangers or of great national desire to gleam for a moment through the dead body of an Institution whose whole principle of popular sanctity has been forgotten.

The theory of Representation sprang, I say, naturally from that young and happy time when Europe arose from sleep: the century of the Christian reaction against Asia.

The valleys of the Pyrenees, a scene of continual armed endeavours, spurred on by the constant pressure of Islam, first organised the idea.

The cool and cleanly little town of Jaca—an outpost on the Roman road into Spain that led down to the frontiers of the Moors—the little frontier town of Jaca saw the first strict gathering of the kind in the very first of the Crusades: but Jaca was not alone; it was throughout Christendom a natural, a simultaneous growth. The southern cities of Gaul, the great provinces, Languedoc, Bearn, distant and isolated Brittany, the compact England of the thirteenth century, followed; lastly, and not till the opening of the fourteenth century, a united and majestic gathering of Representatives, designed to bring before the Crown at Paris the voice, complaint, or will of all its subjects, emerged.

These assemblies, a Cortes in Spain, a Parliament in England, were in France called Estates—and that rare one which stood, not for one province of Gaul, but for all combined, was known as the States-General. Like every other institution of its kind it was alive with the mediæval passion for Reality. Not abstract statistics nor some crude numerical theory, but the facts of society were recognised in, or rather everywhere translated into, these representative bodies. There were corps of nobles—since the Middle Ages, descending from the Roman centuries and their rich landed class, had nobles for a reality. The priests were separate; the commoners. In some cases (notably in towns) special corporations had special delegates; in all—especially in the States-General of France—the various aspects of the State were present in the shape of innumerable statements and mandates enforced upon the Representatives (and therefore the servants) of clerical and commercial corporations, of territorial units, of municipal authorities.

So long as the high attempt of the Middle Ages was maintained so long these councils flourished. That attempt bent down and failed in the sixteenth century—and with it declined, corrupted, or disappeared the corporate assemblies which were to the political sincerity of the Middle Ages what the universities were to its intellectual eagerness, the Gothic to its majestic insistence upon eternal expression.

In certain places the advent of the Renaissance in the sixteenth century closed the story of Representation; in others, under the influence of the Reformation, it became a form. In the two chief centres of the West two varied fortunes attached to the two failing branches of that great mediæval scheme. In Protestant England the form of Representation survived; in Catholic France the memory. By one of those ironies in which History or Providence delights, the English oligarchy, which, in the phrase of a principal English writer, “had risen upon the ruins of Religion,” the Howards, the “Cromwells,” the Cecils, and the rest, maintained the form of The House of “Commons.” The squires used that organ in the seventeenth century to destroy the power of a Crown whose own folly had, through the plunder of the Monasteries, led to its own complete impoverishment and to the enrichment of the gentry. The squires maintained that Crown but kept it as their salaried servant, and thus throughout the eighteenth century the fossil of a representative system was in England not only cherished but actively cherished to serve us as the armour of privilege. Parliament remained intensely national, full of sacred ceremonies and forms, and still using conveniently to the rich some shadow of that theory of national sovereignty which, in breaking with the Faith, the nation had broken with perhaps for ever: whether for ever or not our own immediate future will show.

For Europe the strange accident by which dry-bones Representation thus survived in England was of vast consequence. This fossil bridged the gulf between the living Parliaments of the Middle Ages and the advent of modern democracy—and by a curious inquiry into the archæology and the extinct functions of English public life, Catholic Europe has begun to reconstruct its own past. For England the consequences of the survival are known to all who have watched the complexion of the Commons and type of membership that House to-day enjoys—and the strange mode of recruitment of the Lords!

In France the fortunes of Representation, that mediæval thing, became, from the moment when the Middle Ages failed, very different. The Gallic States-General had stood by the side of, and nominally informing, a Roman and centralised sovereignty: they were not, like the English Parliament, an institution immixed in and at last identical with a wealthy oligarchy; they were an institution that stood by the side of and was at last suppressed by a national despotism. They ceased abruptly (in 1614), but they never lost their soul. Should they hear the call to resurrection they could rise whole and quick, a complete voice of the nation to counsel or to command. In July 1787, with the protestation of the Parlement of Paris and its appeal to the past, that call had come, and from that moment onward it was plain that all France would now soon be found in action. Within two years the thing was decided.

What was the Queen’s position during those two years? She was in the saddle. Her fulness of life, her firmness of purpose, had come upon her quickly. She was already divorced from joy; she was already, and for the first time, mixed constantly with public affairs. It is sometimes written that Loménie de Brienne “gave her a place in the Council.” That is nonsense. She chose to enter publicly what, in private, had been hers since the March of 1787 at the latest: what had been partly hers long before. Her strength of utterance, her now formative disillusions (for disillusionment is formative in women), her apparent peril (for peril is formative in those who desire to govern), her recent grievous humiliation and suffering (for these are formative in all), formed her and gave her fixed and constructive power. Her power was most imperfectly, at moments disastrously, used; but if the reader would understand the violent five years which follow this moment and culminate in the crash of the throne, he must first seize the fact that, though vast impersonal forces at issue were melting and recasting France, and therefore Europe, the personality nearest the French Executive throughout was that of Marie Antoinette.

In her room at Versailles met the coming intriguers during the struggle with the Parlement under Brienne. She it was against whom the dishonoured Orleans, with the instinct of a demagogue, intrigued and whispered. She it was who spoke of “a necessary rigour” when the fighting begun; she—we may presume or be certain—who forbade the King to fly in the days of October; she certainly upon whom the great effort of Mirabeau turned; she who planned or rather guided the escape to Varennes; she who principally suffered from the recapture; she who constantly and actively advised Vienna, Mercy, Fersen, Mallet, in the perilous months that followed that failure; she who sustained the Court after the 20th of June; she against whom Paris charged on the 10th of August: hers was that power the memory of which exasperated the Revolution and drove even its military advisers to useless reprisals, and to her death at last.

I do not say that the powers of that awful time were personal or of this world—far from it. Nor do I say that you will not find crowded into that little æon of years a greater host of high and individual wills than a century may count in meaner times—there were a regiment of active, organising, and creative minds astir within a mile of Notre Dame. Still less do I pretend that the Queen’s judgment, her rapidity, her energy, and her certitude were comparable to any of a hundred or more in that arena. She was nothing compared with their greatest, little compared with their least. But I say that close to the executive—to that which, until August ’92, could command soldiers, sign edicts, and, above all, correspond with foreign Powers—its adviser, its constant moderator, at times its very self, was the Queen.

Her last child, the baby of eleven months, was now in the July of 1787 dead. It was the second death of a thing loved that she had known—her mother’s the first; it was the first death she had seen of a thing loved. In the desertion of her friends, the great part she had to play, the open wound of the necklace verdict, she took that death as but one more poignant sorrow. The little girl had been ailing for but four days: Marie Antoinette shut herself up with her husband and his sister for one day in Trianon to recover that shock. She returned to act.

She applauded and sustained her husband—or rather Brienne—during the struggle with the Parlement all July. She heard (and despised) the call for the States-General. When the Lit de Justice, the solemn ceremony by which the King could enforce the registration of his edicts in spite of the Parlement’s refusal, was held on the 6th of August, it was held at Versailles, as it were under the Queen’s eye: the Parlement replied by refusing to admit the registration so made.

The Parisian crowd surrounded the Parlement in Paris and applauded: not for this or that, nor for the nature of the taxes protested, nor for anything but for that prime principle—that the States-General should be summoned. The Queen ordered economies: they came into force at once, that very week. Those who lost their posts became new enemies of hers: the economies were nothing to the crowd: she gained nothing with the public: she lost more with Versailles. It was dangerous for her to approach the capital.

If she had hoped, by an economy that seemed to her so important, to affect the Parlement, Marie Antoinette was in grievous error: in error from that lack of perspective and of grip which her position, and above all her character, had left in her. Within a week of it all the Parlement had replied by a renewed refusal to register, a renewed demand for the States-General, and was away at Troyes, exiled but sitting in full power, deliberating and enthusiastically supported by Paris old and new. At Versailles, Loménie de Brienne, the Queen’s man, demanded the title, beyond the practical power, of Chief Minister: such a demand led to the resignation of what little brains were left in the Council. In September he compromised with the Parlement, and let it return.

Loménie next formulated decrees which proposed indeed to rely on ordinary taxation—but to an extraordinary extent and on a novel scheme—and to call the States-General within five years: he intended (as did the Queen) to adjourn and surely to drop the meeting of the States-General altogether. In November, when a majority in the Parlement was secured by the absence of some, perhaps the purchase of others, he caused the King to meet that body—and then raised its anger again by registering without counting votes and, as it were, by the autocratic power of the King. If, as is possible, the Queen did not advise or countenance this last act, at any rate the whole tone of her correspondence applauds the decision.

The consequences following on this error were immediate. Orleans, now the Queen’s chief enemy, made himself a spokesman of discontent and was exiled to the provinces; he attributed his disgrace to the Queen. Sabattier and Tieteau de St. Just were arrested on the bench itself. The States-General, precisely because it had been proposed to consider them “in five years,” and because the Parlement had insisted on an earlier date, were more in the public mouth than ever; and as the year closed, Brienne, and all Brienne stood for, bethought them of some wide action that should remove all this friction and leave government secure.

That action had the Queen for its authoress. It was an attempt at despotic reform without representation, an Austrian model, and it was named “The New Order.”

No year in Marie Antoinette’s life had more affected her experience, her character, and her position in the State than this of 1787, her thirty-second year, which now drew to an end. She had made a Ministry; she had influenced, supported, in part created a policy; she had reaped the full harvest of pain in the first death of a child, in the growing illness of her eldest son, in the flood of calumny which had succeeded the La Motte’s escape from prison. She had come rapidly to actual power, she was exercising it with facility—and every act of hers led more nearly and more directly to the cataclysm before her.

The public hatred of her had immensely grown—in intensity, in volume, but especially in quality, since she had manifestly become the chief adviser of her husband and the creator of a scheme of government. The Polignacs, as I have said, had joined the enemy. Orleans was now definitely the head of her bitter opponents. The drawing-rooms of Paris had joined the populace against her. It had been actually proposed to mock her effigy during the rejoicing at the return of the Parlement from exile. The wits had renewed their nicknames: she was “Madame Deficit” as well as “the Austrian” she had always been—and by the winter all the quarrel in which the Parlement, the crowd, and nearly every permanent force was now ranged against the Crown, saw in her the core of the resistance and the personal object of attack.

The year 1788 at its very opening showed clearly how far the development had gone. That system of “a new order”—a powerful, uncriticised Crown, thorough reform, the negation of ideals—saw, risen up against such feminine and practical conceptions, those much stronger things—dogmas. The civic religion of the French and the creed of the era they were framing emerged. Before Easter the Parlement had denied the right of the executive to imprison at will, as also the right of the Prince to assimilate his edict to a public law, and had demanded the complete freedom of the three lawyers who had been arrested. But—an ominous thing—the Parlement claimed no privileges. It demanded the release of its members as citizens—and of human right against the arbitrary power of the Crown.

Against such a force as this—a creed—the only weapon that “The New Order” and the Queen could imagine was a reform of machinery. In this, as in so much else during the furious struggle of those eighteen months, “The New Order” fore-planned much that the Revolution itself was to achieve: it was modern, it was suited to circumstance, but lacking first principles it was apparent and direct, but lacking nationality and being opposed to the summoning of the States-General it was doomed. The scheme of “The New Order” included a replacing of all this antique, corporate, and privileged power of the Parlement by a High Court more fully reflecting the governing classes of the nation. It was not unwise, and Marie Antoinette—to judge again from her correspondence and from the universal opinion of contemporaries—was largely its originator and wholly its ally. It miserably failed.

The secret plan of it—surrounded with fantastic precautions—was divulged. The threatened Parlement (and it had the whole nation behind it) met at once, and D’Epresmenil explained the peril, and declared once more, but far more directly than before, for the principles upon which the Revolution was to turn, and especially the right of the States-General alone—regularly and periodically summoned—to grant supply. The arrests that followed—arrests which the Queen called with quite singular blindness “acts of rigour”—perilous as she saw, but necessary as she imagined—were the signal for an approach to civil war.

“The New Order” was resisted forcibly in the provinces by the privileged, by custom, by the populace (who feared new taxes), by local patriotism which feared the loss of local character and (what indeed so soon did come) the merging of all in one homogeneous State. All the troops were out; revolt had begun.

In June 1788 the Clergy—summoned to meet and grant an aid, as a last desperate resource for means—replied by an assertion in turn of their immutable custom and peculiar right. In July “The New Order” broke down. The demand for the States-General was acceded to by the Crown and by the Queen. On the 8th of August 1788 they were definitely summoned for the May Day of the following year.

CHAPTER XI
THE BASTILLE

August 8, 1788, to September 30, 1789

THE decision was taken. France was alive with the advent of the States-General. The autumn of 1788 had come. Fersen was with the Queen.

It was more than fourteen years since, a boy of eighteen, Northern, dignified, and grave, his large and steady brown eyes had met hers from far off among the hundreds in the Masked Ball at the Opera. He was then a child. She also was a child, pure, exiled, of an active timidity, and not yet even Queen. I have written what happened then: the rare occasions on which he had come and gone. Now he was here with her at Versailles.

The something permanent which every human life has known had entered in that moment of her girlhood and settled finally within her heart. The accidents of living did little to disturb so silent and so secure a thing. He had been but a chance visitor to Paris—a Swedish lad on his Grand Tour—when they had thus met for ever; during the critical first three years of her reign he had been away in his own country. He had returned, as I have said, in the summer of 1778. The worst of her torments was settled then: she was to be a mother; she might expect an heir to the throne; the adventure, the successful adventure, of America had begun. A position of womanhood and of rule, such dignities and such repose, might have paled or rendered ridiculous the chance passion of extreme youth: they did neither. Whether he came or went, his quiet image—the one fixed thing she had known in a world she could not know—remained. He had been received at once right into the tiny inner circle of the Polignacs before he left for the American War. He had been with the Queen continually, reserved and of that breeding which she longed for, the unpassionate poise of the North. Her child, her husband’s child, was born; ’79 and its war news came, and Fersen had resolved at last to go. He also by that time, as has been read, knew what had entered his life.

The Queen, as he inhabited the halls of Versailles during his farewells, had followed him with her eyes, and very often they had filled with tears. All the world saw the thing. He had gone off at last to America, to wonder at the swamps and the bare landscape, the odd shuffling fighting and the drag of an informal war. His English gave him work enough interpreting between his own French Generals and Washington; he wrote home from time to time to his father, he busied himself in learning his military trade—but of Versailles or to Versailles there was not a word. During all the three years, ’80-’83, that he suffered the new countries, the Queen and he heard nothing the one of the other.

He had returned to Europe; but it was only the journey of his sovereign Gustavus that kept him some months in France, though a colonelcy, more or less honorary, and a pension of some hundreds had been given the young man there. A wealthy marriage, long arranged in England for him, he let slip without concern. The proposal (a year before the affair of the necklace) that he should marry Necker’s ugly daughter he resigned at once in favour of his friend, young Staël, his sovereign’s ambassador. With a commission in Sweden as well as in France, it was his own country he preferred. His moments at Versailles were rare, his visits very brief—such as that in which he saw the Notables dissolved (of which scene he records his judgment); in none did he more than appear, silent, for a very few hours or days at Versailles. The girl who had met him, a boy, in ’74, was now a woman of thirty and more; chance glimpses alone had lit up the very long space of those years: she had suffered all the business of the necklace, all the rising hatred of Paris, without any too close a word from him; she was entering the Revolution and the way to death when he reappeared: henceforward he did not leave her.

That bond, which time had neither increased nor diminished and which permanent absence and silence had left unfalsified, now became a living communion between them. He was never what is called her “lover”; the whole sequence is that of a devotion as in a tale or a song, and yet burning in living beings: a thing to the French incomprehensible, to men of other countries, to Englishmen, for instance, comprehensible enough—but, whether comprehensible or not, as rare as epic genius.

Brienne had fallen: the Queen, and the Queen alone, had put back Necker in his place. Why had she done this? From a desire to rule, and an opportunity for it.

There are those who discover in themselves the capacity to govern, that is to organise the wills of men. Often great soldiers find this in themselves, and are led to govern a whole State at last: such was Napoleon.

There are others to whom cheating, intrigue and cunning are native: such are, at bottom, however high their station, the slaves, not the dictators or the helpers, of their fellow-beings; they have a keen nose for the herd; they will always follow it, and it is their ambition to fill posts where they can give favours and draw large salaries. Of this sort are parliamentary politicians to-day: from such we draw our Ministers. They have of poor human nature an expert knowledge such as usurers have and panders; they are, therefore, not unsuited to choose permanent officials or to recommend to others places of trust and power.

There is a third kind, and to this third kind Marie Antoinette belonged—as many another woman and feminine man has belonged. It neither organises nor intrigues; it desires to do neither, and is incapable of both. All it desires is to be able to say “I govern.” The accident of the last two years had permitted her to say this—but, having said it, she could say nothing more. She knew the outcry against Calonne: she undid him. She knew the reputation of Brienne: she made him. She saw Brienne most evidently out of favour with opinion: she un-made him. She heard shouts for Necker—and Necker was summoned to her little room, was regally examined, graciously received and installed.

Those who can govern through a period of peril (that is, those who can organise the wills of men during the short and indeterminate time before any resultant of clashing social forces has yet appeared) note, decide, order, speak, and do—and when it is too late to act, their genius tells them that it is too late. In the early winter of 1788 it was not yet too late. What would one possessed of the power of government have done? In the first place, such an one would have stated the evil publicly in detail and with authority; in the next, chosen not one but a body of men to deal with particular difficulties (as, for instance, a particular légiste for the troubles of that absurdity, the Common Law; a particular soldier to suggest a reform of the army, &c.); in the third, used as allies all the positive forces available, all the enthusiasms, all the tide—to this force (by persuasion) how much may not be harnessed? So Mirabeau would have done; so Napoleon did; so some ready eye in 1788 might have planned. The States-General is the fever? You shall have it: in Paris, with splendour. The Commons are the cry? They shall be in full double number and with special new powers—a new dress, perhaps, as well. The nation is crying out for Government? Give them the Crown: the King on horseback day after day.

Had some such judgment controlled that moment, France would have preserved the Monarchy, old institutions clothed in their old names would have been squeezed and fitted into new moulds; France so changing, there would have been some change in Europe—an episode well worthy of memory and noted by special historians. The Bishops of the Church in France would—to-day—have been what Rohan and Narbonne were then; the Faith, already derelict, would by this time very probably have descended to be a ritual for wealthy women or an opinion for a few valueless, weak men: that self-praise and that divorce from reality which is the mark of our backwaters in Europe and of the new countries everywhere would (perhaps) have settled in the succeeding century upon all Europe, and, for the first time in its long history, our civilisation would have missed one of its due resurrections. As it was, God intended the Revolution. Therefore, every error and insufficiency in those directing its inception was permitted, and therefore, on account of such insufficiency, the full force of a military people ran freely, as run natural things, and achieved what we know.

The Queen had nominated Necker from a mere desire to rule, and had therefore simply chosen the man most loudly called for. Necker, on his side, was well worthy of so facile a judgment; he was all that is meant by Geneva.

By his own standards, which were those of a company promoter, he was just barely honest—by those of chivalric honour he was deplorably tainted. Full of avarice, order and caution, a very Huguenot, he sought everywhere an economic solution for political problems; unsoldierly, of course, and in the presence of danger worthless, he was none the less patient in detail and of a persevering kind; very vacillating in the presence of fierce and conflicting desires around him, he was yet tenacious of a general plan. To all these characters he added that kind of ambition which is avid of popularity on condition that it shall face no bodily risk and that it shall labour in words or on paper only. He had his reward: his insignificant figure was for a year the symbol of all the great ferment; his presence with, or absence from, the Council was the test of advance or of retreat in the revolutionary movement. So for one year—then for a few months he is forgotten; then he hears a mob in the streets, and flies.

With such a man as figurehead it is not difficult to judge the obvious development of the autumn and winter which produced the first great Parliament of the Revolution. Opinion was invited: the pamphlets poured in. On matters already fixed in public opinion Necker could be decisive, as, for instance, that the Commons in the approaching Assembly should be as numerous as the clergy and the nobles combined—for this was the universal rule in provincial parliaments; but when (two days after Christmas) this point (which had afforded food for violent writing but was in reality certain to be conceded)—when, I say, this point was fixed by King and Queen and Council, Necker so drafted the decision as to make it appear all his own to the populace: while at Court the angry higher nobility said it was all the Queen’s. A far more decisive matter—and one that escaped the partisans—was whether the Nobles, Clergy, and Commons should sit and vote together, as the necessity for a Popular Will—for one voice—demanded, or should play the antique fool and, in a crisis so actual and vivid, solemnly vote separately, checking each other’s decisions, nullifying the public mandate—all for the sake of custom. Here Necker could have decided and changed history: but there was not an opinion sufficiently unanimous to guide him in his nullity. He left that essential piece of procedure to be settled by the Estates themselves when they should have met; he thus (as will be seen) made of the first and most necessary act of the States-General, the insistence of the Commons that all should vote together, an illegal thing—and so coloured all their succeeding action with the colour of rebellion. One thing Necker had done of his own judgment, and it was idiotic. He had summoned the Notables again for a month in the autumn—he was soon glad to be rid of that folly: the decree I have mentioned followed, and in February 1789—legally before the end of January—the elections to the States-General began.

No such complete representation of a great nation has been attempted since that day; no such experiment could be attempted save with political energy at white heat and under the urgent necessity of a secular charge. The confused noise which filled the rising spring of ’89 was, for once, the voice of all: thousands upon thousands of little primary assemblies, of advisory letters, of plaints, of legal suggestions, of strict orders and mandates to the elected (without which no political freedom can exist), of corporate actions by guilds, by townships, by chapters, by every form of political personality, filled and augmented the life of France. So vast was the thing that to this day, amid the libraries of monographs that seem to exhaust the Revolution, all have shrunk from the delineation of this rising ocean of men. There is no final work upon the elections of ’89. No one has dared.

April passed. The deputies began to stream into Paris. Paris, in the last days of that month and the first of the next, began to overflow into the royal town at its gates. Sunday, the 3rd of May, saw one long procession of every kind and fortune pouring, in spite of the drenching weather, from the capital up into the hills of Versailles. Upon the morrow the opening religious ceremony of the Session was to be held.

At about six o’clock of the morning of Monday, the 4th of May, it was still raining—not violently, but still raining; the dawn struggled in wet clouds over the woods and the plain of Paris beyond, and the pavements of Versailles were shining flat under the new day, with large puddles in their worn places. As the light broadened the rain ceased. The uniform and dull low sky began to break and gather: the innumerable crowd moved. Some thousands were sodden after a night spent out of doors; many thousands more, moving from their packed rooms, where a bed was a guinea and the mere shelter of a roof a well-let thing, began to crowd the pavements, the roofs, the cornices; as for the windows, every window had its bouquet of heads at high price, well-dressed heads and eager. The morning rose and grew warm.

The palace of Versailles looks east and north down towards the woods that hide Paris; it looks down three broad, divergent avenues, spreading like the fingers of a hand, and starting (as from the palm of such a hand) from a wide space called the “Place d’Armes,” which forms a huger outer court, as it were, to the huge Court of the Kings. To the right and to the left of this main square and its avenues, as you look from the palace, lie the two halves of the town: the northern, to the left, has for its principal church Notre Dame; the southern, to the right, has for its principal church St. Louis, which is now the Cathedral; each building is by situation and plan the centre of its quarter. The way from Notre Dame to St. Louis is up the Rue Dauphine, across the great Place d’Armes, and then down the Rue Saborg—all in a straight line not half a mile long, with the great Place taking up more than the middle third. From the one church to the other was the processional way of Versailles; it was chosen for that day. From seven onwards the Parliament had been gathering in Notre Dame; not till ten did the royal carriages arrive, all plumed and gilded, swung low and ridiculous: the King and his household, the Queen and hers; the Princes of the Blood—but as for Orleans he was already with the lords in the church, disdaining his rank and making a show of humility. They all set out in procession for St. Louis, the clergy of Versailles in a small surpliced body leading, the dark Commons next, the embroidered and feathered Nobility, the Priests, the Household, the music, the Bishop; then the Blessed Sacrament in the Archbishop of Paris’ hands, with Monsieur and his brother and two more of the Blood at the corners of the canopy; last of all the Queen and her ladies—all in the order I have named; two thousand and more four-front, the length of a brigade—and every one of them (save the Archbishop who held the Monstrance) with a blessed candle in his or her hand. By the time the head of the line was at St. Louis, the tail had hardly left Notre Dame[^[9]] and as each detachment took the line, young Dreux Brézé, Master of Ceremonies, on foot since seven, ordered them.

[9]. Carlyle, of course, puts one church for the other and makes the procession walk wrong way about. The Cambridge history, however, is accurate in this detail.

The myriads of people saw them go by. The sun was shining at last: all could be seen, yet the cheers were pointed and full of meaning; the silence also was full of meaning. They cheered the Commons as those six hundred went by, in black without swords—all in black save for a Breton amongst them. Some curiously picked out Mirabeau; they were silent at the lords’ blaze of colour, half cheering only Orleans, his face such a picture! the sacred candle flickering in his hands; they did not (as would a modern crowd) all uncover to the Blessed Sacrament; they cheered the King. Then, as the Queen passed, there passed with her a belt of silence. As she went slowly with her ladies along that way silence went with her; cheering went before and after. At one place only was that silence broken, where a group of rough women suddenly shouted out as she passed insulting vivats for Orleans: it may be that she stumbled when she heard them.

From the advanced colonnade of the great stables (where the sappers are lodged to-day) upon the roof of the colonnade, there was a truckle-bed and many cushions laid, and on it was lying the broken body of her son, the Dauphin, who would not inherit all these things: he was very visibly dying. His miserable little frame, all bent and careless, lay there at its poor ease. His listless and veiled eyes watched the procession go by. It is said that his mother, in that half-mile of ordeal, glanced up to where he lay, and smiled.

The sun still shone upon the double row of soldiers—the blue of the Gardes Françaises upon this side, the red of the Swiss upon that; the crowd was in gaiety—the wet were now dry; the last of the line were now gone and the doors of St. Louis had closed on them. It had been a great show, and all the place and its pleasures were open to the people. Next day the Session was opened in that same hall which had been raised two years before for the Notables.

A member of the Commons, sitting in the back row of his order, would have seen before him, rank upon rank, the dense mass of black uniform menace which his six hundred presented, half-filling the floor of the great oblong hall; to left of him, against a row of columns, the clergy of every rank; to the right, against the opposite row of columns, the blaze of the Nobles—among them Orleans, his face insolently set towards the Throne. Far above and beyond them all, at the end of the hall, like an altar raised upon its steps, was the last splendour of the Throne. The golden threads of the lilies shone upon the vast canopy of purple velvet that overshadowed it. Seated upon it, alone above his kingdom, the last of the kings possessed a great majesty, in which the known hesitation of his gait, the known lethargic character of his person, were swallowed up in awe: an enormous diamond gleamed in the feather of his hat. Below and around him were grouped the Princes of the Blood and the great officers of State, and in front of the group in a long line sat the Ministry. Necker among these—the only one dressed as the Commons were dressed—appealed to the Commons; while at the foot of the throne, in purple and silver white, a little diamond circlet and a heron’s feather in her hair, stood the Queen.

This the Commons could see, under the light that fell from high windows near the roof; it fell over two thousand of the public—guests chosen rather than a true public; they filled the galleries above, they swarmed in the dark aisles beneath, undivided from the three orders—a familiarity shocking to our historians who, craning their necks, have watched as a privilege and with respect the fag-end of the House of Commons or the County Council from a pen.

To the command of Dreux Brézé all that great hall rose: the King rose also, read his short speech in a firm voice, and put on his hat to sit down. The Nobles covered themselves at the King’s gesture: among the Commons there was confusion—they did not know the etiquette, or rather some did, some did not. The incident was insignificant and comic: a graver thing followed it. Barentin rose, the Keeper of the Seals; he spoke for an hour. Had he spoken for three minutes and spoken but one sentence it would have been all he had to do, for he was there to tell them that it was left to the Three Orders to sit separately or together as they might choose. All the Revolution was latent in that command.

The Nobles would vote to sit separate; possibly the clergy: the “National Assembly”—as all thought of it, as all called it—would be turned into a “Lords and Commons”—an absurd, complicated and do-nothing machine with privileges and customs, quaintnesses and long accommodations between this house and that; it would lose touch with the general; the sap of national life would be cut off from it; it would not be able to create; it would be the jest of that which really governed. As in England to-day our various elected bodies are the jests of the plutocracy, so in 1789 the “National Assembly,” tripartite, played upon by vanity and ignorance, would have become the jest of the Crown. But in France an institution, once unreal, disappears, and before July the Assembly was, according to this plan, to disappear. It was deliberately conceived as a means of nullifying and destroying the Parliament.

Necker spoke next. He spoke for three hours, and was listened to throughout, for he dealt with finance. His speech was full of lies—but his name had not yet lost the titular place of idolatry. When he had ended his Genevese falsehoods, the ceremony was over and all were free to dine. But with Barentin’s words the Revolution had begun.

All May Gaul worked and seethed. The instinct of numbers aimed straight for the objective upon which all turned, and the Commons demanded the accession to one corporate Assembly of the Nobles and Clergy. They negotiated with the privileged houses; they affirmed the principle of combined voting: Necker sent for soldiers. By the end of the month the last attempt at some voluntary arrangement had failed. Meanwhile the King, by some lethargy or through the intrigue of some cabal, had not yet formally received a deputation of the Commons.

What did the Queen make of that May? The days seemed to her first an ugly rumour throughout Versailles, buzzing round the palace—soon an uproar. She stood with the few that actively maintained privilege against the Commons; but, a trifle wiser than they, she conveyed their counsels in a moderated form to the King. It was not enough: the troops still came into Paris—Gaul still rose higher and higher; and through the tumult something much more to her, more intimate, infinitely more acute and true, ran and held her as a physical pain will pin the mind and hold it during the playing of some loud and meaningless music: it was the dying of her little son—he lay at Meudon dying.

The end of the French Monarchy was mirrored in the fate of the last bodily forms that were to contain its Idea. The Bourbon heirs, one after another, died before succession. Louis XV., a great-grandson, himself delicate from birth, was succeeded by a grandson again, a boy painfully saved by the doctors—a man throughout life partially infirm. The line had come at last to this child, the Dauphin, whose advent had been the opportunity for such strong joy throughout the country and in whom the New Age was to find its first King. All the phases of doom had shown themselves: first, the high promise, then the vague doubts, the mysteries of a general disease; lastly, the despairs. For a month, ever since the opening of the States-General, which he had languidly witnessed, it had been but a question of the day on which the boy would die. That day had come.

It was the 3rd of June at Meudon. The King and the Queen had come in answer to sudden and graver news of their child; they reached the place in the early afternoon—and they were implored to return. The boy was within, at his agony. The King sank into a chair and cried that his son was dead, and the poor lad’s mother, suddenly broken in the midst of so many and such great public alarms, of her government, her resistance and her perils, suddenly knelt down and cried wildly, rocking her head in her hands, burying her face on Louis’ knees: she called out to God. They were left thus together, and at one the next morning the Dauphin was dead.

It was as though two majesties or angels challenged each other in those days: the majesty which reigns inwardly and which everywhere makes of a son’s death the supreme agony of the world, though sons die hourly; the majesty which reigns outwardly and which commands, once in a thousand years, the passing of societies and kingdoms. For while this death was doing at Meudon, in the Commonwealth the last decisions also were at hand. Two days after the sad procession of ranks and delegates had done honour to the dead child, the Commons summoned for the last time the Clergy and the Lords to join them and form one body to mirror the nation. It was but three days after the little body had been taken to lie at St. Denis among the kings that the next step was taken. The Revolution broke with law—it now first began to be the Revolution and to do. The Commons declared themselves to be no longer the “Commons,” but—with all of the privileged orders who would join them—they declared themselves to be the “National Assembly”: those who would not join them were no part of the body which was to remake the world: their legality was not to avail them: the Commons had “made act of sovereignty,” and the strain between two centres of authority, the Crown and the Representatives, had begun.

It was this that the Queen must watch and parry and try to understand, now, when the first part of her flesh had gone down into the grave, and her brain, shaken with despairs, must attempt to control and to comprehend the wave; and her eyes, weary of weeping, to read orders, to note faces, and her voice, with which she could no longer call her son, to command. She was in the centre of the resistance for a month, and it failed.

For a few days, in spite of the call for troops which had been heard—and the troops were coming—for a few days more, speech was still formidable, and every phase of the debate ringing through the great shed of the Menus was a further affirmation of the new and violent sovereignty of those usurpers, the Assembly. In twenty-four hours a decision was taken by the Crown.

To the assumption of sovereignty by the Commons the Court replied. There was to be a Royal Session on the Monday following, the King present, and all the division between the orders settled by his final voice—as to the Commons declaration it was ignored.

And meanwhile Speech was silenced. Barentin, Keeper of the Seals, had seen to that. He wrote to the King that it was imperative the Commons should be silenced until the Royal Session was held. He wrote: “Coupez Court.” Have done with the business! A simple way to silence the Commons was found.

It was upon Friday the 19th of June that Barentin had written his letter to the King. Upon the Saturday morning, the 20th, the weather having turned to rain and the streets being deserted, the first stray members of the Commons came up to the door of the Menus to resume their debates. No notice had reached them, nor even their elected Speaker, Bailly, the worthy astronomer. They came with umbrellas dripping above them, the mud splashing their black stockings and black knee-breeches, the rain driving in upon their black Court coats. They tried the door; it was locked, and a sentry came forward. They saw, streaked under the rain, a little scrap of writing nailed to the door. The Hall was “closed by royal order,” and, within, the sound of hammering marked the carpenters at work preparing for Monday’s ceremonial. They wondered: others came; the group grew until at last many hundreds of the Commons stood there without, upon the pavement of the wide-planted avenue. Mirabeau was there and Robespierre was there, Sieyès, Bailly—all the Commons. Up at the end of the way the King’s great palace lay silent and, as it were, empty under the rain. No one crossed its vast open courtyard; its shut streaming windows stared dully at the town. The Commons moved away in a herd, leaving the sentry and his comrade to pace and be drenched, and the little scrap of writing to be washed and blurred on the locked door. As they moved off the noise of hammering within grew fainter till they heard it no more.

That very middle-class sight, a great mob of umbrellas wandering in the streets, was full of will: wandering from one place to another they landed at last in a tennis court which was free, just where a narrow side-street of the southern town makes an elbow. Into that shelter they poured: and over against them, watching all they did from above, from his home just across the lane, was Barentin, Keeper of the Seals. He saw the umbrellas folded at the door, the hundreds pressing in, damply; he saw through the lights of the Court their damp foot-prints on the concrete of the hall—a table brought: Bailly, the president, standing upon it above the throng and reading out the oath that they “would not disperse till they had given the nation a constitution”—then he saw the press of men signing that declaration one by one.

He heard the mob gathering outside and filling the street. Among them at least one witness has left a record of what could be heard through the open doors—how Mirabeau reluctantly signed, pleading popular pressure; how one man only refused to sign, thinking it, what it was, rebellion. He was Martin, of Auch.

It was the summer solstice, a date unlucky to the Bourbons.

The King heard all these things—but there was nothing to be done. Sunday passed, and Monday—the Royal Session was postponed. It was not till Tuesday morning, the 23rd, at ten that the procession formed and that Louis prepared to attend it. It was still raining.

All the pomp that could be gathered had been gathered for that occasion, though the very skies were against it. Four thousand men stood to arms lining that less than half a mile from the palace to the Menus. Hidden in the woods beyond, camped up on Satory and dispersed in the suburbs around, six regiments more were ready. A vast crowd, wholly silent, watched the Court go by. The Queen unbroken (but carrying such recent agony!), Artois vivacious and trim, the Ministers hurried, Louis somewhat bent, fat, suffering.

A man who saw that sight has written that he thought to see some great funeral go by: he was right. Of the two million dead which the Revolution demanded from Moscow to the Tagus, the first was passing in the splendid coach of the kings—I mean, Unquestioned Security. That fixity of political creed and that certitude in social structure, which hitherto no wars had shaken in Europe for century upon century of Christian order, had perished. Men cannot live or breathe without political security, yet for now more than a hundred years Europe has in vain awaited its return.

The King had reached his throne in the great shed of the Menus; the Queen was beside him; the Orders, the Nobles and the Clergy stood ranked on either side; then after some delay the Commons were permitted to enter by a mean side-door and to fill the dark end of the place with their dark numbers.... Where was Necker? The Symbol of the New Age was not there; the fatuous Genevese had stayed at home. He had presided at the Council which had drawn up the declaration the King was about to read. He may have suggested certain softenings of phrase in it; they may have been rejected by the Queen or another—but it was a document the responsibility of which he, in duty, bore; it was for him to resign or to be present: he hedged by his absence and let it be thought that he protested.

With a rumble and a shuffling the twelve hundred of them sat down. When they were all well sat down, Barentin in a loud voice proclaimed: “Gentlemen, the King gives you leave to be seated!” The King turned to the Queen upon his left and bade her also take her throne. She courtesied with an exaggerated grandeur and chose to stand while the whole long speech was delivered—a royal witness to the Crown of which she was now much more the strength and principle than any other there.

The speech was decisive. It willed this and that in strong imperatives—even the voice of the King, into whose mouth these words were put, was firm: he willed very liberal and modern things—but no divided authority—above all, no divided authority! The new and rival sovereign, the Usurper, must resign. The Commons were but the Commons. Of their recent claim no word, but, upon the contrary, an assertion that the States-General might not, even were they to vote in common, determine their own procedure.

As he read, here and there a man would applaud—even from among the Commons.

“Remember, gentlemen, that none of your plans, none of your schemes can become Law without my express approval. It is I that have, till now, given my subjects all their happiness....” And the speech closed with: “I command you, therefore, gentlemen, to disperse at once. To-morrow you shall come each into the Hall assigned to his order.”

When he had read these words the King sat down: the speech was ended. There was but a moment between his ending and his rising again to go. The Queen, very dignified, rose with him. Together, and followed by their train, they left the hall. It was just noon.

The Nobles rose in their turn and left the building: the Bishops preceded them, but of the lower clergy many—half perhaps—lingered. The body of the Commons refused to move.

They sat massed, in silence, at the far end of the great gaudy shed. Over against them, at the further end, the workmen had begun to take down the scenery of that royal play; the curtains were being lowered, the carpets rolled up, and there was hammering again. Across the empty benches of the Nobles and the Hierarchy, in the empty middle of the hall, every exclamation, however subdued, of the bewildered but determined Commons echoed: but the background of that interval was astonishment and silence.

This curious and dire silence, a silence of revolt, lasted perhaps half-an-hour, when there entered into it the Master of the Ceremonies, young Dreux Brézé.

He was little more than a boy, just married, of a refined and rather whitened sort, tall, covered with cloth of gold. He was not ashamed to stud his hands with diamonds, like an Oriental or a woman; he shone with light against the dark mass of the Commons, and he alone wore a sword. He bore no signed or sacred letter, and his mere office was not awful.[^[10]] He advanced, and in that slightly irritable but well-bred drawl of his he muttered something as though ashamed. They cried, “Speak up!” He spoke louder. “They had heard the King’s orders....” He repeated the phrase. Various cries and exclamations arose. Then Mirabeau, standing forward, said—What did he say? It is uncertain, and will always be debated, but it was something like this: “We are here by the will of the people, and only death can dismiss us.” Dreux Brézé walked out with due ceremony, backwards.

[10]. It had originally been created to provide a salary for one, Pot, who was further dignified with the title of Rhodes—names curiously English.

Well, then, why was Death not brought in to sweep the Commons? Here were soldiers all around—foreigners, Germans, and Swiss—in number a full division: why was no shot fired? Because, although apparently no force lay opposed to them save the mere will of less than a thousand unarmed debaters, there did in fact lie opposed to them the potential force of Paris. Close on a million souls, say two hundred thousand men, capable of bearing arms, almost homogeneous in opinion, lay twelve miles down the valley, as full of rumour as a hive—at the sound of a musket they might rise and swarm. It was not a calculable thing; Paris might after half-an-hour of scuffle turn into a mere scattered crowd; there might be a fierce resistance, prolonged, bleeding authority to death unless a sufficient force contained Paris also, as the debaters at Versailles were already contained. That force was summoned.

Thirty regiments moved. All the last days of June the great roads sounded with their marching from every neighbouring garrison. The rattle of new guns one morning woke from sleep the unknown Robespierre, who watched them from his window passing interminably under the July dawn; they baited their horses in the stables of the Queen. Of nearly all the troops so gathering one little portion, the half-irregular militia body (militia, but permanently armed) called “the French Guards,” was other than foreign. The “French Guards” might not indeed be reliable; but, as it was thought, they hardly counted. The rest were for the most part German-speaking mercenaries, the solid weapon of the Crown: and still they gathered.

Neck to neck with the advance of that mobilisation the Assembly raced for power; for every brigade appearing you may count a new claim. In the first hours of their revolt, when Dreux Brézé had but just retired, they proclaimed themselves “Inviolable”—that is, in their new sovereignty, they declared an armed offence to that sovereignty to be treason.

The sight of Paris, heaving as for movement on the 24th of June, Wednesday, when the news of the royal session and its sequel came, determined the Duke of Orleans to take a line. He desired to profit by the dissensions. He continually bribed and flattered and supported, by his wealth and through his parasites, the vast and spontaneous surge of opinion, adding perhaps a fraction to its power. He was among the stupidest of the Bourbons, for he thought in his heart he might be King. This null and dissipated fellow led a minority of the Nobles to the Commons and declared their adhesion to the Assembly: that was the Thursday, the 25th—the next day the Court itself, the King, deliberately advised the union of all the orders!

The Court had yielded—for the moment. The Court thought it was better so: the troops were gathering, soon a blow was to be struck, and the less friction the better while it was preparing....

So, as the first week of July went by, everything was preparing: the Electoral College of Paris had met and continued in session, forming spontaneously a local executive for the capital; certain of the French Guard in Paris had sworn to obey the Assembly only, had been imprisoned ... and released by popular force ... and pardoned. The last troops had come in; the Assembly was finally formed. On the day when it named its first Committee to discuss the new Constitution, the Queen and those about the Queen had completed their plan, and the Crown was ready to re-arise and to scatter its enemies.

There was in this crisis a military simplicity as behoved it, for it was a military thing. No intriguing. Necker, the symbol of the new claims, was to go—booted out at a moment’s notice, and over the frontier as well. A man of the Queen’s, a man who had been ambassador at Vienna, a very trusted servant of over fifty years continually with the Monarchy, a man of energy, strong stepping, loud, Breteuil was in one sharp moment to take his place. Old Broglie, brave and renowned, was to grasp the army—and the thing was done: the Assembly gone to smoke: the debating over: silence and ancient right restored. And as for the dependence on opinion and on a parliamentary majority for money!... why, a bold bankruptcy and begin again.

So the Queen saw the sharp issue, now that all the regiments were assembled. A corps of German mercenaries were in the Park, encamped; their officers were cherished in the rooms of the Polignacs: they were a symbol of what was toward. Paris might or might not rise. If it rose, there would be action; if not, none. In either case victory and a prize worth all the miserable cajoling and submission to which the Court had been compelled while the soldiers were still unready. They were ready now. So the Queen.

On Saturday the 11th of July, at three in the afternoon, Necker was sitting down with his wife and a certain friend to dinner: the excellent dinner of a man worth four millions of money—doubtfully acquired. Ten thousand men lay at arms within an hour of Versailles; at all the issues of Paris were troops amounting to at least two divisions more—mainly German cavalry: one regiment at Charente, Samade; one regiment at Ivry; one, of German hussars, at the Champ de Mars; one, of Swiss infantry, with a battery, at the Étoile (where is now the Arc de Triomphe). Two more, German, south of the river; a whole camp at the northern gate—and many others. No food could enter the city save by leave of that circle of arms.... To Necker, so sitting there at table, was brought a note from the King; he opened it: it told him he was ordered out of office and ordered out of the kingdom too. He finished his dinner, and then took horse and coach and drove away along the Brussels road.

There followed three days which very much resembled, to the Queen and the General Staff of the Resistance, those days during which a general action is proceeding at the front and a stream of accounts, true and false, exaggerated, distorted, coming pell-mell and in the wrong order, confuse rather than inform the anxious ears at headquarters far in the rear. Men tore galloping to and fro continually up and down the twelve miles of road between the palace and the gates of Paris. “Paris had risen.” “No, only an unarmed mob parading the streets.” “Yes, there had been a collision with Lambesc’s cavalry.”... On Sunday, late, a cloud of dust was Lambesc’s orderly coming to Versailles with news: there had been no bloodshed. Monday more rumours: “They are forging weapons.”... “They cannot move: ... they lack ammunition.”... “They have formed patrols: ... the streets are patrolled.” Then, at night, fires were reflected on the cloudy sky down the valley—the populace were burning the Octroi Barriers.

It was determined by the chiefs of the army to force the northern gate of Paris and so to subdue the tumult—but there was neither fear nor haste: the tumult was a mere civilian tumult: the thousands roaring in Paris had no arms—and then what about organisation? How can a mob organise? Tuesday came, the 14th of July, a memorable day, and in the forenoon news or rumours reached Versailles that a stock of arms had been sacked. It was the arsenal—no, this time came details; it was the Invalides that had been sacked—twenty thousand muskets. More news: powder had been found and seized by the mob; in the great square before the Town Hall a jolly priest, sitting astride of a barrel, was seeing to the serving out of powder and of ball—one almost heard the firing. “The Bastille has most of the ammunition in Paris. No mob can take that! the pieces have been trained on the street a whole fortnight since.” “The Bastille has checked the mob.” “No, they have sacked that also, with all its ammunition.” “They have captured artillery.” “Nonsense! a mob cannot capture guns!” Then again, more definite and certain, longer accounts, eye-witnesses, as the afternoon drew on to evening. One: “It has fallen.” Another: “I saw the governor killed ... a thousand men in the crowd were hit, but the crowd kept on.... How many dead? A hundred, at least a hundred.” “They have cannon on Montmartre—the northern gate cannot be forced.” Berthier wrote to the King alone: “To-night the troops will master the streets.” And meanwhile, like a chorus of human voices to all this roar of powder, the Assembly was pouring out decisions and acting the moral sovereign manfully in the face of material arms—sitting “permanently.” Even at midnight, when nearly all was known and the popular victory assured, Bailly the Speaker was still sitting there presiding after a sitting of seventy-two hours over the drowsy Commons. And they had voted! They had voted regrets for Necker; they had voted the responsibility of all advisers of the King for these calamities: they had voted bankruptcy “infamous.” So many moral broadsides fired at the Queen.

The morning of the 15th dawned; the firing had ceased, the smoke had rolled away, and with the new day the issue of the action lay plain. Paris had conquered.

The King alone with his brother, unarmed, unguarded, walked to the Parliament House and announced the withdrawal of the mercenaries; the Queen—bitterness of irony!—had to stand smiling, with her children, at the central balcony of the palace above the courtyard and to receive the ardent homage of the people for the failure of her great design—in a few months, in October, she was to stand on that balcony again.

All that day and the next the King sat anxiously with his Council debating only one thing—Marie Antoinette’s purpose that he should fly. She urged it with vehemence: her jewels were packed and ready—they would fly to Metz and conquer in a civil war. But the majority outweighed her, notably old Broglie, who feared the issue of German mercenaries against French troops—and the King remained. She with angry tears gave way: it was decided that the King should, upon the contrary, seek Paris on the morrow, accept and legalise the acts of the city, its new popular armed force, its new elected Mayoralty—La Fayette the chosen head of the one, Bailly occupying the other.

AUTOGRAPH NOTE OF LOUIS XVI, RECALLING NECKER,
ON THE 16TH OF JULY, AFTER THE FALL OF THE BASTILLE

The royal plan had failed: let the King accept the new conditions and meet Paris half-way. Such were the decisions, and Louis wrote to Necker recalling him—the abortive Ministry of the Resistance was ended.

But that night, in the dead darkness, Artois fled from the coming terror; old Vermond also, the friend and tutor; Enghien, Condé, many another; and the Queen, with passionate love, compelled one who was now once more her friend to fly: the Madame de Polignac. She fled and was saved, bearing with her two ill-spelt, blotted lines in Marie Antoinette’s untrained and hurried hand: “Good-bye, dearest of my friends; it is a dreadful and a necessary word. Good-bye!”

In this way did the Assembly enter into its sovereignty, and in this way did Marie Antoinette first meet—though she never knew or grasped it—the temper of the French people, who, perhaps alone in Europe, can organise from below.

That creative summer of ’89, in which the Assembly now victorious began its giant business, was in the Queen’s eyes nothing but a respite for the Throne, or a halt in a retreat between one sharp action lost and the next to be ventured later, when new troops should be at hand and a new occasion serve. That these speech-makers hard by should declare a new creed of Rights, should—in words—abolish Feudal Dues, should debate the exact limits of the King’s power—all that was wind. Even the anarchy coincident with that vast transition, powerfully as it affected her spirit (and her letters show it) with horror, affected it still more with hatred and with a determination so to hold or tame this wild beast, her husband’s people, that her son should have his right at last, and that she herself might be free from a ceaseless humiliation.

They were killing men everywhere: they had killed the offensive and corrupt old Foulon in the streets of Paris—he and his powerful loathsome son-in-law, Berthier: square-jawed, an oppressor grievous to God, Berthier who, so lately, in those abortive three days of the Resistance, had sat at the King’s elbow promising that Paris should be held; Berthier had been clubbed to death and shot down as he swung a musket in defence of his big body. In the provinces everywhere the country houses burned.

The Queen waited. She wrote to her brother, to her dear friend Madame de Polignac; she chose (in the absence of that friend) a new governess for the Children of France, the worthy widow of Tourzel, a duchess for the occasion. She waited and did nothing. All September was a wrangling over the King’s Veto—his right to refuse a law: she may have known vaguely that to her the nickname of “Veto” was thereby attached: she did not heed it. In the last days of the month a vigorous attempt to persuade the King to fly was once more made and once more failed. By October new troops would have come—their numbers were to prove insufficient for attack but fatally sufficient for enthusiasm, and that enthusiasm of loyal courtiers (breaking out almost within earshot of a Paris fretting at every delay, hungry, mystified) provoked the next disaster.

CHAPTER XII
OCTOBER

September 23, 1789, to Maundy Thursday, April 1, 1790

ON the 23rd of September the Regiment of Flanders marched into Versailles.

To seize all that follows two things must be clearly fixed: first, that the Queen was now separate from all the life around her; secondly, that the accidents of the next fortnight determined all that remained of her life.

The Revolution, now organised, possessed of regular authorities and of a clear theory, was in action, moving with the rapidity of some French campaign towards clean victory, or, upon an error or a check, defeat—a defeat absolute, as are ever the failures of high adventure.

The Queen has been called the chief opponent of that Revolutionary idea and of those new Revolutionary authorities: it is an error so to regard her; she did not meet their advance in so comprehensive a fashion. She saw nothing but a meaningless storm whirling about her; she cared for nothing in the great issue but the preservation during the tempest, and the full restoration at the end of it, of all that was to have been her little son’s; she feared as her only enemy a violent and beastly thing, the mob, in whose activity she recognised all that had so long bewildered her in the French people; but while she feared it she also despised it as a thing less than human, incapable of plan, able to hurt but certain at last to be tamed. The march of Paris upon Versailles which was now at hand, with its flaming brutality, its anarchy of thousands and of blood, confirmed in her for ever her wholly insufficient judgment. From those days until she died her only appeal was to the foreigner, her only strategy the choice of manner and of time for using an actual or a potential invasion.

It may next be asked why the Regiment of Flanders marching in led to such abrupt and to such enormous consequences? It was accompanied by a section of guns only, and though its ready ammunition was high for a mere change of garrison in those days,[^[11]] it was but one unit more where, three months before, division after division had been massed round Paris and throughout Versailles.

[11]. They were eleven hundred strong, with about half-a-dozen reserve cartridges a man and the pouches full; also one waggon of grape for the guns attached to the regiment.

The answer to the question is to be found in the temper of those who watched that entry. It took place in the afternoon with imposing parade; the grenadiers of Flanders filed up the Paris road between the ranks of the Body-Guard—a new regiment of the Guard which was still stranger and somewhat hostile to the temper of the crowd. Again, Flanders was a quasi-foreign regiment, comparable to those which the Crown had drafted in before the rising of Paris destroyed the plan of a civil war and had since, on a deliberate pledge, withdrawn. Again the reinforcement coincided with that long verbal struggle upon the acceptation by Louis of the Decrees (of the Rights of Man and the abolition of Feudal Dues)—a verbal struggle apparently futile, but in essence symbolic of the Veto of the Crown. To this it must be added that Paris, in which, in spite of harvest, a partial famine reigned, was again roused for adventure; that now for weeks the opposition of the King to the Decrees of the Assembly had exasperated the leaders of opinion—those innumerable writers and those orators who could now voice, inflame, and even guide an insurrection; finally, it must be remembered that there remained but one solid and highly disciplined body intact throughout the insurrections of that summer, the desertions and the siding of the troops with the populace—this was the Army of the East that lay along the frontier under the command of Bouillé. It was of no great size—some 25,000 men—but it was largely foreign (Swiss and German) in composition, was excellently led, well drilled, already political in the united spirit of its command. Thither it was feared and hoped the King would fly: a regiment or two to flank his evasion and to escort it would be sufficient: this was the meaning of the Regiment of Flanders.

All this, however, would not alone have provoked an uprising: the departure of the King actually attempted might have done so, but we now know, and most then believed, that though the Queen urged flight, Louis would not consider it. The true cause of the catastrophe; the disturbance, which ruined the unstable equilibrium of political forces that October, was a manifest exaltation or crisis of emotion observable in the officers of the newly arrived regiment, still stronger in the Guards, pervading the whole Court, and nowhere centred more fiercely than in the heart of the Queen. It was as though the tramp of that one column of relief, added to so much restrained and impatient emotion, coming after the silent angers of that long summer, coinciding with a critical intensity of indignation and of loyalty within the palace, was just the final sound that broke down prudence. All the commissioned, many of the rank, betrayed the new glow of loyalty in chance phrases and in jests; chance swords were drawn and shown, chance menaces or chance snatches of loyal songs in taverns led on to the act which clothed all this rising spirit with form, and stood out as a definite challenge to Paris and to the Assembly.

It was customary (and still is) for the officers resident in a French garrison to entertain the officers of a newly-come regiment. The Guards had never done so yet. They were all of the gentry, the general custom of the army affected them little, for in all ranks, the gentlemen of the Guard were in theory, to some extent in reality, equal in blood. Nevertheless their officers chose, for the purposes of a political demonstration, the pretext of a custom hitherto thought unworthy of their corps. The Guard had fixed upon Thursday, the 1st of October, to show this civility to Flanders. In the atmosphere of these days the occasion could not but become a very different matter from such a dinner as the mess of even the premier corps—so acting for the first time—could offer to a provincial body of the line.

In the expenses determined,[^[12]] and the place chosen, it was evident that all the Court was moving: the great theatre of the palace, unused for so long and reserved for the greatest and most official ceremonies, was made ready, lavishly; the tables were set upon its stages, the lights, the decorations were the King’s; and when the officers of Flanders, all, perhaps (save their Colonel), unready for so much splendour, found themselves in the Salle d’Hercule—the guests of the palace rather than of the Guards—it was apparent that some large affair was before them: they were led to the theatre and the banquet began.

[12]. The dinner alone, apart from wine, ices, lights, &c., was, even in the prices of that day, over £1 a head—say nowadays £2. Yet the individual hosts were asked for but five shillings each: the difference must have been paid! And the wine!

It was just three o’clock: down in the town the Assembly was voting the last clauses of the Constitution. In the courtyards of the palace the private soldiers of Flanders had gathered, buzzing at the gates—later, and for a purpose, some few were admitted, but that was not until some hours had passed: they pressed curiously, now and then making way for some belated member of the band, which, with that of the Guards, was to play at the banquet.

The tables were set in a horse-shoe, and two hundred and ten places were laid: more than the two messes were concerned! Eighty seats were for the Guards—for all that could be found connected with the Guards—and the Guards were there in full; double their usual number were in Versailles: there were others, strange guests and chosen volunteers. There were others, men whose presence proved a certain plan, officers of the local national militia, the new armed force of the Revolution, but officers picked carefully for their weakness or their secret disapproval of the national movement. So they sat down and began to eat and drink; there were provided two bottles a man.[^[13]]

[13]. 210 men, 400 bottles.

Outside the great empty theatre the autumn evening closed; within, by the thousand lights of it, the ladies of the Court, coming, as the banquet rose higher, into the boxes to applaud, saw one by one the white cockades of the Guards transferred to their guests. The national colours were regulation for Flanders; they were the essential mark of the new national Militia—yet, first one guest then another, eagerly or reluctantly, weakly or defiantly, took on the white cockade of the old Monarchy which the Guards still legally wore. The women folded paper cockades and threw them down ... at last all seated there were under the emblem; some say that black cockades for the Queen were also shown. They drank to the King, the Queen, the Heir; the noise of laughter and of enthusiasm grew, the toasts and the cheers were exchanged from the boxes to the stage; the floor of the theatre filled with new-comers—speech and the exhilaration of companionship gained on them and rose. Some there in wine felt now again, like a memory in the blood, the old and passionate French love of the kings. Some, who had come to Versailles secretly determined for the Crown, now at last gave full rein and let the soul gallop to its end. All were on fire with that Gallic ardour for adventure against great odds, and in all that Gallic passion for comradeship was aflame. Some few of the rank and file were admitted ... the heavy men of Flanders ... they also drank. The Queen (the meat being now gone, the fruits served) was seen, whether come by reluctance or willing, in her box.... They cried her name and swords were drawn. They clamoured for her to come down from where she sat there radiant, hearing at last the voices and the mood upon which (so little did she understand of war) she imagined and had imagined her victory to depend.

She came down and passed slowly before them and their delirium, smiling highly, holding in her arms her little son; and the King, less certain of the issue, heavy, splashed with the mud of his hunting, went with her as she proceeded. They passed. The height of their fever was upon these soldiers; one leant over to the band and suggested, “Pleasant it is to be....” The band consulted; they were not sure of the tune. “Well, then, play ‘O Richard! O my King!’” That everybody knew, any one could sing it; it was a tune of the day—and with the music madness took them. They poured out into the cold night air of the marble court, singing, cheering, all armed—defiant of the new world. The whole life of the palace and its thousands, invigorated, mixed with music and re-heightened the strain. Sundry bugles were blown as though for a charge. The noise of that clamour rang through the town, the populace without the gate was gathering, the Militia armed; and the crowd thus alarmed in the far night could see, beyond the palace railings under the brilliant windows of the front, a herd of men still cheering madly, the gleam of swords raised, and one dark figure climbing to the King’s window to seize and kiss his hand; and against the lights within, the shadows of the family approving.

The colonel of the Versailles Militia went to the palace and returned: the crowd dispersed, the cheering of the revellers died away. Next day was sober; yet even all next day the exaltation, though now sober, grew. The national uniform of the Militia was insulted and challenged in Versailles, turned out of the palace. The Queen, ineffably ignorant, gave colours to a deputation of that Militia, and begged them, with a smile, to believe that yesterday had pleased her greatly—she had seen certain of their officers at the feast—and so little was enough to deceive her! There was another milder meeting (for the men), a mere exchange of glasses, and all Saturday, the 3rd of October, the armament of the Crown, such as it was—some thousands—stood ready and did not forget the valour and the ardent loyalty which their chiefs had lit with such memorable cheers and songs.

But another noise and another life began beyond that fringe of woods which eastward veiled Paris. The million of that place were in a hum: messages came from them and to them. Marat had explored the new force in Versailles, the Presses in Paris were raining pamphlets—something confused and enormous, a vision of their national King abandoning them, a nightmare of treason; all this mixed with hunger oppressed the mind of the million. I say “mixed with hunger,” for though there was by this time plenty of grain there was little flour, and in the lack of bread violent angers had risen: some thought the Assembly (their talisman), the very nation itself, to be again in peril from the soldiers. So all Sunday, October 4, the hive of Paris droned in its narrow streets and gathered; upon Monday, for the second time that year, it swarmed.

To the west and to the south of Paris there runs a ring of clean high land against the sky, and it is clothed with forest; one part of it, still charming and in places abandoned, is called the Forest of Meudon, and many who read this have walked through it and have seen at the end of some one of its long rides the great city below.

In the morning of Monday, the 5th of October 1789, the far corner of these woods near Chatillon rang with shots, and down one alley or another would come from time to time the soft and heavy beat of horses at a canter, as grooms and servants moved with the guns. The King was shooting. A south-west wind blew through the trees with no great violence; some rain had fallen and more threatened from the shredded, low, grey clouds above. Of all the company in those alleys and between those high trees, on which the leaves, though withering, still hung, the King alone was undisturbed. His pleasure in horsemanship and his seven miles’ ride from the palace, his delight in the morning air, and his keen attention to the sole occupation that called out his lethargic energy, forbade him to consider other things; but all his suite were wondering, each in his degree, what might be happening in the plain below them, or in Paris, or in the town of Versailles which they had left—for it was known that Paris was moving.

All morning long they shot in those woods until, when it was already perhaps past noon and rain had again begun to fall, a sound of different riding came furiously up the main alley which follows the ridge and springs from the high road. It was the riding of a man who rides on a fresh horse and changes post, and is a courier. His name was Cubieres, and he was a gentleman of the Court flying with news, straight in the long French stirrup, with a set face, and his mount belly to ground. He took one turning, then another, came thundering up to the King and drew rein.

The King, as this messenger reached him, was noting his bag in a little book. The message of Cubieres was that Paris had marched upon Versailles, that the great avenue road was black with tattered women and with men, seething and turning, and demanding food and blood. He brought no rumours, and he could tell the King nothing of the Queen. The King mounted. All mounted and rode at speed. They turned their mounts westerly again, and rode at speed toward Versailles. And as they rode two feelings dully contended in the mind of Louis: the first was anxiety for his wife; the second annoyance at the sudden interruption of his business; and later, as the bulk of the palace appeared far off through the trees, he was filled with that irritant wonder as to what he should do, what his action should be: the trouble of decision which cursed him whenever he and action came face to face. The wind had fallen, and now the rain poured steadily and drenched them all.

Consider that grey morning in the town also—I mean in the town of Versailles—and how under that same covered sky and those same low shreds of flying cloud the empty streets of Versailles were arming.

Upon the broad deserted avenue before the gates of the National Assembly there were no passers-by; the drip from the brown leaves of the trees, the patter from the eaves of the stately houses, and the gurgling of water in the gutters enforced the silence. Now and then an official or a member in black knee-breeches and thin buckled shoes, delicately stepping from stone to stone, would hurriedly cross over the paving, cloaked and covered by an ample umbrella, as was the habit of those heroes when it rained; but for the rest the streets were empty, the setts shining with wet under the imperfect autumn light. Far off, beside the railing and before the wrought-iron gates of the palace, the troops were beginning to form, for it was already known that the bridge of Sèvres had been left unguarded and that the mob was pouring up the Paris road. The troops came marching from one barrack and another in the various quarters of the town, converging upon this central place, and some, the Swiss, were issuing from the outlets of the palace itself, and some, the Mounted Guard, were filing out of the half-moon of the royal stables, where now the Sappers and the 22nd of Artillery may be found. They formed and formed under the weather. The Body-Guard upon their great horses, deeply mantled and groomed as for parade, lined all the front; behind them the Swiss on foot filled the square of the courtyard; Ragged Flanders, the Ragged Regiment of Flanders, famous in song for its rags as for its amours and its drums,[^[14]] stood by companies before them all in the wide public place, where all the roads of Versailles converge and make an approach to the Court and form an open centre for the royal city.

[14]. “Y’avait un grenadier,” &c.

The formation was accomplished, food was served, arms piled. They stood there in rank alone, with no civilians to watch or mock them under the rain, and behind them the great house they were guarding stood empty of Monarchy. And before them the wide avenue from Paris, the Avenue which was the artery of opinion, of energy, and all the national being at that moment, stood empty also, and it rained and rained. The great body of troops, red, yellow and blue in bands, were the only tenants of the scene.

Within the Assembly a debate not over-full of purpose had alternately dragged and raged: it had been known almost from the opening of the sitting that Paris would move. Those premonitions which have led the less scholarly or the more fanatical of historians to see in the Revolution a perpetual pre-arrangement and cabal, those warning things in the air which you find at every stage of the great turmoil (rumours flew before the King all the way to Varennes, and the victory upon the right wing at Wattignies was known in Paris an hour before the final charge), those inexplicable things had come, and immediately upon their heels had come direct news from one messenger after another: how the wine merchants’ shops had been sacked, how the bridge of Sèvres was passed, how the rabble were now but five miles off and breasting the hill. That futility, which the Revolutionary Assemblies suffered less perhaps than other Parliaments, but which is inherent in all discussion, condemned this engine of the new Democracy to discuss on such a day nothing of greater moment than the order of that day, and the order of that day was the King’s letter: for the King had written that he would “accede” to the Decrees (of Rights of Man and to the extinction of the Feudal Dues) but that he would not “sanction” them. And on the verbal discussion between the word “accede” and the word “sanction” legal tomfoolery was fated to batten, while up in the woods of Meudon the King who had written that letter was still shooting peacefully and innocent of guile, and while so many thousands, desperately hungry, were marching up the road, having black Maillard—as who should say murder—for their Captain, and dragging behind them a section of their guns.

From such futility and from such tomfoolery the debate was just saved by the strength of personality alone. Mounier, in the Speaker’s chair, lent energy to them all, though of a despairing kind; and when some one had said to him, “All Paris is marching upon us,” and had foreseen the invasion of the palace and perhaps the ruin of the Crown, he had answered, according to one version, “The better for the Republic,” according to another version, “The sooner shall we have the Republic here.”

At the back of the great oblong colonnaded hall, trim Robespierre, fresh from “The Sign of the Fox” and from his farmer companions, was, in that vibrating and carrying little voice of his, laying down decisions. There should be no compromise; if they compromised now, the Revolution was lost. But he was careful to be strictly in order—he was always careful of that—and the thing on which he advised “no compromise” was not the mob, but the letter of the King.

A larger man touched nearer to the life, though it was but an interjection; for Mirabeau, ever vividly grasping facts and things, had hinted at the Queen: that mob was marching on the Queen. He had said that he would sign if, in whatever might follow, “The King alone should be held inviolate.” And there is one witness who affirms that he added in a whisper, which those on the benches about him clearly heard, that he meant specifically to exclude from amnesty and from protection the woman against whom so many and such varied hatreds had now converged, and who stood to a million men for innumerable varied reasons a legendary enemy, but one in her flesh and blood to be hated—the negation of all the hope of the moment and of French honour and of the national will.

This woman, upon whom already lay the weight of so much discontent and terror, sat that morning for the last time in Trianon, where the rain was beating against Gabriel’s graceful, tall windows and streaming down the panes. Some ill-ease compelled her, though the place was protected, remote and silent, and though the weather was so drear, to wander in her gardens and to cross the paths between the showers. In the early afternoon she was in the Grotto, and it was there that the news came to her, for a messenger found her also as that other one had found her husband. He bade her come at once to the palace, and told her that the mob had filled the town.

She came; it was still the middle afternoon, and such light as the day afforded was still full, when she saw from the windows of the ante-chamber, looking over the full length of the courtyard, beyond the line of soldiers, that eddying volume of the populace and heard the noise of their mingled cries. It was the first time in her life that she had seen the people menacing. She listened to the distant roaring for a long time in silence, with her women about her, until the noise of horse-hoofs clattered upon the flags below, and she knew that Louis had returned. He came, booted and splashed, up the great stairs; there members of his Ministry and his advisers were ready. Marie Antoinette entered with them into the Council Room, and as the door was shut behind her there was shut out, though barely for an hour, the instant noise of that peril.

This is the way in which Paris came to Versailles and began its usurpation of the Crown.

There is a tall window in Versailles in the corner of the Council Room whence one can see the Courts opening outwards before the palace and so beyond to the wide Place d’Armes. Through that window, streaming with rain under the declining light of the pouring October day, could be seen the tumult.

All the wide enclosure before the palace was guarded and bare. Over its wet stones came and went only hurried messengers—orderlies from the armed forces or servants from the Court. Holding the long 300 yards of gilded railing was the double rank of the Guards, mounted, swords drawn; next, the Dragoons, a clear and detached line of cavalry; in front of these, in triple rank, the Regiment of Flanders.

Three armed bodies thus guarded the sweep of the railings and the approach to the palace in parallel order, and beyond them, right into the depths of the landscape, stretched a vast and confused mob filling up the three great avenues and crowding half the Place d’Armes; in that mob many of the armed Militia of Versailles, met at first in formation but now mingled with the populace, could be distinguished. At such a distance no distinct voices could be heard, but a roaring sound or murmur like the noise of a beach rose from the multitude and outweighed the furious patter of the rain on the glass: at rare intervals a shot was fired, wantonly, but no news of bloodshed came. From time to time a patrol of the Guard could be seen, towering on chargers high above the populace, forcing its way through; swords also sometimes striking could be distinguished. This uncertain and menacing sight, blurred in the rain, was all that the Queen could distinguish.

Within the King’s room was a deputation of women, and Mounier, the President of the Assembly, had been received; council upon council was held, that the Queen at least should retire to some neighbouring town, that the King should fly—but nothing was determined, and to that reiterated policy of flight so often suggested since July, now so pressing, the King murmured as he paced back and forth, “A King in flight!...” It is said that the horses were ordered; but with every moment the plan became more difficult. Darkness fell upon a sky still stormy; the troops still held their lines, but the noises seemed nearer and more menacing. It was imagined better to withdraw the Guard at least, as the pressure upon them increased.

That order may be criticised, but it may also be defended. La Fayette was marching on Versailles from Paris with a considerable force of partly trained Militia. The Guards, round whom the legend of the supper had grown, and whose white cockades were an insult to the national colours, exasperated the populace beyond bearing, and were, it was thought, the main cause of the pressure to which the troops were subjected. Wisely or foolishly, the Guard was withdrawn; the line regiments alone were left to contain the mob.

It was eight o’clock, and for two hours further a futile deliberation proceeded in the royal rooms. In those hours first one messenger then another convinced the King of a thing inconceivable in those days—personal danger to himself and especially to the Queen. At ten o’clock he signed the Decrees, the refusal of which were thought to be the political cause of the tumult. At midnight could be heard at last the regular marching of drilled men: La Fayette had arrived with 20,000 from Paris—not soldiers, if you will, men of but three months’ training, but in uniform, capable of formation and well armed—the Militia of Paris.

So profound was the mental distance between the surroundings of the King and the leaders of the reform that not a few at Court feared this relieving force, thinking that such a man as La Fayette might be tempted to capture the Monarchy with it and to betray it to the mob! They understood him little. He showed that night some statesmanship, great activity, and an admirable devotion to duty: it was his judgment that failed. He judged falsely of what the crowd were capable; he underestimated his countrymen, and he judged falsely of what his Militia could do; he over-estimated uniform and an imperfect drill. He urged that the regular troops, the pressure upon whom after all these hours was now almost intolerable, should be withdrawn; he further urged that he should be permitted with his Militia and with some few of the Guard to police the open spaces and to protect the palace.

His advice—the advice of the only man with a large armed force behind him—was accepted. By two o’clock there was silence and, as it was thought, security. Men slept as they could in such shelter as they might find or in the open. Far off there was the glare of a fire, where, in the midst of the crowd, a wounded horse had been killed and was roasting for food. The hubbub within the palace had died down; nothing was heard but the rhythmic clank of a sentry, or, as the hours passed, the challenge of a relief. The Queen also slept.

What followed has been told a thousand times. Her great bedroom looked east and south; it was the chief room in her wing, which, just beyond the central Court, corresponded to the King’s upon the northern side. From that room to the Council Chamber and to the King’s private apartments there were three ways: the way by the main gallery of mirrors which her household took upon Sunday mornings and on all sorts of grand occasions to join the King for High Mass; a second shorter way through little rooms at the back, which were her own private cabinets; and, thirdly, a secret passage worked now in the thickness of a wall, now in the space between two floors, and leading directly from the King’s room to her own.

All that afternoon and evening the new strength of her character had conspicuously appeared. Her friends, her enemies remarked it equally. There was something almost serene in her during these first experiences of peril; but they were to grow far more severe. Her children she had sent into the King’s wing. She was assured of peace at least until morning, and she slept.[^[15]]

[15]. Fersen was in the palace that night. It has been affirmed that he was with her. The story is certainly false.

Further along than the tall chapel whose roof so dominates Versailles, towards what is now the limit of the Hotel of the Reservoirs, in the Court which is called that of the Opera House, one of the great iron gates which gave entry into the palace grounds stood open on that gusty night of rain. A single sentinel, chosen from the Militia, stood before it. By this gate not a few of the crowd found their way into the palace gardens, and, coming to the southern wing, vaguely knew, though the interior of the place was doubtful to them, that they stood beneath the windows of the Queen.

Marie Antoinette had slept perhaps three hours when she awoke to hear cries and curses against her name, and staring in the bewildered moment which succeeds the oblivion of sleep she saw that it was dawn. Then next she heard somewhere, confused, far off, in the centre of the building, a noise of thousands and their cries. Her maid threw a petticoat upon her and a mantle, and delayed her a perilous moment that she might have stockings on as she fled. She made for the private rooms that would take her to the King’s wing, when, as the noise of the invading mob grew louder and their leaders (missing her door) poured on clamouring to find and to kill her, one of her Guards half-opened the door of her room and cried, “Save the Queen!” The butt of a musket felled him: the Queen was already saved.

The violence of those who thus poured past her door found no victim. She had run through her little library and boudoir, knocked at the door of the Œil de Bœuf and had it hurriedly opened to her; she had knocked and knocked and some one had opened the door fearfully and shut it again when she had passed through. She saw the Œil de Bœuf barricaded. A handful of the Guard went desperately piling up chairs, sofas and foot-stools against the outer doors, while she slipped through to the King’s room. He meanwhile, as the assault on the palace had awakened him also, had run along the secret passage to her room, and, seeing it empty, had come back to find her in his own.

The eruption of the mob had been as rapid as the bursting of a storm. The immediate forming of the La Fayette’s Militia Guard and its victory proved almost as rapid. The first shot had been fired at six, probably by one of the Guards at the central door: within an hour the Militia had cleared the rabble out, even the tenacious pillagers were dislodged, and the populace stood, thrust outside the doors and massed in the narrow marble Court beneath the King’s windows, in part discomfited but much more angry, and with a policy gradually shaping in the common mouth: a policy expressed in cries that “they would see the King,” that “the King was their King,” that “they must bring back the King to Paris.”

The morning had broken clear and fine and quite calm after the rain of yesterday and the wind of the night; its light increased with the advancing hours: the energy of the mob remained—and in the midst of it a long-bearded man, half mad, an artist’s model, was hacking off the heads of the two Guards who had been killed when the palace was rushed.

The Queen looked down upon the flood of the people from the windows of her husband’s room. Her sister-in-law was at her shoulder, her little daughter close to her left side, and in front of her, standing upon a chair, the Dauphin was playing with his sister’s hair and complaining that he was hungry: and all the while the mob shouted for the King.

The King showed himself. They would see the Queen too: and La Fayette, still their adviser and still trusted in a bewildered way as a sort of saviour, told her it was imperative that she should come. She went, therefore, to the great central room of all that house, the room which had been the state bedroom of Louis XIV., and stepped out upon the balcony of its central window, holding her children by the hand. The mob roared that they would have no children there. She waved them back into the room, and stood for some moments surveying the anger of the unhappy thousands packed beneath, with the new and serene day rising in the eastern heaven behind them. Her hands were on the rail of the balcony. She hardly moved. There were weapons raised in the tumbling crowd: one man aimed at her and then lowered his musket. La Fayette came forward, took her right hand, knelt and kissed it, and the little scene was over.

How could she have known until that moment that there were such things?

It was certain more and more as the day grew to noon that the Court must obey and that the populace had morally conquered. In a little inner room the King and Queen sat together, and together they decided (or, the King deciding, she could not but decide in the same necessity) that they would return to Paris. She turned to her husband and said: “Promise me at least this: that when next such an occasion shall come, you will fly while yet there is time.” Louis, to whom the idea of flight was hateful, let his eyes fill with tears, but did not answer.

Louis’ decision to return was a wise decision. The popular demand was not to constrain but to possess their King. It was not until later that the changing mood of Paris and its success seemed to make of that moment of October the beginning of the King’s captivity; with some little difference in persons and in wills, this yielding to what all the national sentiment demanded might even yet have made of the Crown once more an active national emblem and of the person of the King a leader.

It was half-past one when the carriages with difficulty came to the palace. It was two before the march to Paris began.

The road from Versailles to Paris falls and falls down a long easy valley which the woods still clothe on either side of the very broad and royal highway: the woods rose in that autumn afternoon dense and unbroken for many miles. Two things contrasted powerfully one against the other: the howling turbulence of the crowd, the stillness of nature all around. It was as though some sort of astonishment had struck the trees and the pure sky, or as though these were spectators standing apart and watching what tempests can arise in the mind of man.

The season was late; the foliage was but just turning; the gorgeous leaves hung tremulous in that still air: none fell. The masses of colour in the thickets of Viroflay were tapestried and immovable; and all this silence of the world was soft as well. The air had about it that tender, half-ironical caress which it possesses on perfect autumn days in the Parisis, and the sky was of that misty but contented blue which they know very well who have wandered in that valley upon such days. Cleaving through such beatitude, a long line of shrieking and of clamouring, of laughter and of curses, of the shrill complaints of women, of the moans of pain and of fatigue, mixed with the sudden wanton discharge of muskets, went, for mile after mile; the populace were drawing back their King to Paris.

THE TUILERIES FROM THE GARDEN OR WEST SIDE, IN 1789

It is not seven miles from the palace to the river—not another four to what were then the barriers of the city. They took for these eleven miles all but seven hours. The coaches crawled and pushed through the swarm of the angry poor. The Queen, her husband and her children, Monsieur, Madame Elizabeth, the governess of the royal children—all sat together in one great coach rumbling along in the midst of insult and of intolerable noise. From where she sat, facing the horses near the window, the Queen could see far off at the head of that interminable column two pikes slanting in the air. The heads of the Guards who had saved her were upon them.[^[16]] She could see here and there, close under those trophies, glints of yellow, where certain of the Foot Guards were marched like prisoners along, with the blue of the national Militia flanking and escorting them on either side; and, mixed in the crowd, the Mounted Guardsmen were there, prisoners also, with the Mounted Militia holding them. Of all that followed after she could see nothing; but she could hear. There was the rumbling of the wheels of the two cannon, the great sixty waggons loaded with flour, and she could hear the cries that cursed her own name. The afternoon wore on. The sun lay low over the palace they had left. It was dusk by the time they reached the river; it was dark before they came to the barriers of the town.

[16]. Or else they were not: there are two versions.

There, by the same gate of entry which the first of the Bourbons had traversed two hundred years before, the Monarchy re-entered that capital which, for precisely a century, it had, with a fatal lack of national instinct, abandoned. Bailly, the Mayor, met them under torches in the darkness and presented the keys of the city. The Royal Family must needs go on, late as it was and they lacking food, to the Hotel de Ville, that the crowds of the city might see them. It was not until ten o’clock that the unhappy household, the little children broken by such hours and so much fasting, found themselves at last under the roof of the Tuileries.

The Tuileries were a barracks.

The huge empty line of buildings, which, had they been thus abandoned to-day, would have been made a Sunday show, had in that age been put to no use; they had become in the absence of the Court but a warren of large deserted rooms. Furniture was wanting; there was dust and negligence everywhere; the discomfort, the indignity, the friction were but increased by the hasty swarms of workmen who had been turned on in a few hours to fit the place for human living. No more exact emblem of the divorce between the Crown and Paris could be found than the inner ruin of that royal town-house, nor could any deeper lesson have been conveyed—had the last of the Bourbons but heeded it—than the reproach of those rooms.

As for Paris—Paris believed it had recovered the King. The month and more that followed was filled with a series of receptions and of plaudits. The Bar, the University, the Treasury, last of all the Academy—all the great bodies of the State were received in audience and joined in a general welcome. Parliament was at work again before the end of the month, first in the Archbishop’s palace upon the Island, later in the great oval manège or riding-school which lay along the north of the palace gardens. It was there that all the drama of the Revolution was to be played.[^[17]]

[17]. Those curious to retrace the very sites of history may care to know exactly where the manège stood, since in the manège, as a great phrase goes, “La France fit l’eternel.” The major axis of its ellipse corresponded to the pavement to the north of the Rue de Rivoli under the Arcades, and the centre of this axis was where the Rue Castiglione now falls into the Rue de Rivoli. Its southern wall slightly overlapped the line of the present railing of the Tuileries Gardens; its northern was about in a line with the northern limit of the property now occupied by the Continental Hotel.

That drama began to work, as the winter of 1789 advanced, with a new, a more organised, and, as it were, a more fatal rapidity; and as the volume of the reform grew and its momentum also rose, the Queen sank back further and further into the recesses of her religion.

Her energy was not diminished. Those few months of silence did but restore her power to act with speed and even with violence in the succeeding year, but for the moment, like a sort of foil to the speed of the current around her, she steadfastly regarded the only things that remain to the doomed or the destitute.

The communion of her daughter chiefly concerned her then. To this it was that she looked forward in the coming spring, and this (insignificant as the matter may seem to those who know little of such minds) was the fixed interest of that winter for the Queen.

Her letters during those months betray that momentary isolation. She inclined once more, after the tumults and defeats, to a not very worthy contempt for the slow, insufficient, and absolutely just mind of her husband. There are phrases of violence like the sudden small flames of banked fires in those letters of hers in that season; but her reserve remains absolute. She boasts that she “had seen death from near by.” But “she will keep to her plan and not meddle.” “My business is to see the King at ease.” Then again, later, in Lent she sneers: “One at my side is prepared to take things in a modest way.” She follows with a phrase that is reminiscent of the audacity she so recently showed and was again so soon to show: “I shall not let the power of the Throne go at so cheap a rate.” This letter, which, read to-day after so many years, breathes the too jagged vigour of the woman, has about it an awful character; for she wrote it to a man who, even as she wrote it, was lying dead—her brother and her mainstay, the Emperor. The desire to return to the arena is still in her: she writes once, wistfully, “I must get hold of the leaders.” There are other letters, passionate, womanish letters to her woman friends. To Madame de Polignac, out in exile at Parma, letter after letter. In these, as in all the rest, you read her interval of seclusion from the fight. That interval was one of five months.

She in those five months, from the Day of the Dead in November 1789 to the very early Easter of 1790, was like an athlete who, in the midst of some furious game, stands apart for a moment recovering his breath and relaxing his muscles while the struggle grows more active, separate from him, but acted before his eyes. Soon he will re-enter the press with a renewed vigour. And so did she when after that sad winter she combined with Mirabeau, and the driving force in those two minds tried to work in a yoke together. But for the rest, I say, religion chiefly held her. Her isolation was not so much a plan (as she pretended) as a physical and necessary thing. She was exhausted. She had done with the body for a moment; she was concerned with the soul.

If one could portray graphically the accidents of that tragic life, if a mould could be taken of her great hopes and her great sufferings, if a cast in relief could be made of her passion, you would find, I think, in such a map of her existence two high peaks of exalted suffering and vision: the death of her son—so small in history, so great to her—would be the first; and the second would be those hours in October when she, to whom all such things had been mere words, was for the first time in her wealthy life threatened with cold air against her body, the vulgar in her bedroom, and death; when she first saw a weapon levelled at her and first came in physical contact with violence, a thing that all save the wealthy and their parasites daily know. These were the two strong, new, and terrible days which had bitten into her experience. These were and remained her isolated memories. The rest, her future evils, came by a more gradual slope: her very death was to her less enormous. Her dumbness during these winter months of ’89 and the working inwards of her life was a reaction of repose after the shock of October.

By the vast mass of the Louvre there is a church dedicated to that Saint Germanus who preached against Pelagius in Britain, and who, as an old man, had laid his hand upon the head of the young Saint Geneviève, the goose-girl, near Mount Valerian and had foreseen her glory. This church has much history. From its tower rang the call to arms which roused the populace of Paris against the wealthy oppressors of the Huguenot faction and maddened the poor to take their revenge in the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. It was and is the parish church of the palace. Here, before Lent was over (upon Wednesday in Holy Week), the little girl, her daughter, knelt at her first Communion. The Queen stood in the darkness of the nave, dressed without ornament, her fine head serious, her commanding eyes at once tender and secure.

I cannot write of her or hear of her without remembering her thus; and that last power of hers, a power made of abrupt vivacity tamed at last by misfortune into dignity and strength, here, I think, begins. Such a power was not henceforward the permanent quality of her soul—far from it, but it appeared and reappeared. It was strong more than once for a moment in the last hours before she died; and how well one sees why such as had perceived in her the seeds of this force of the spirit, even when she was distraught and played the fool in youth, now, when it had blossomed, worshipped her! Upon this last mood her legend is built and survives. She had a regal head.

She stood in the nave unnoticed in her black dress without ornament, and saw the little girl go up in white and veiled to the altar-rails. There was no one there. Never since Constantine had the Faith been lower in France; but the Faith is a thing for the individual mind and not for majorities.

They went back homewards. They gave alms.

Meanwhile, though this was her true life for those months, one must speak of what went on without: the rising of the Revolutionary song and the noises at her feet. For out of this swelling energy and increasing peril was to grow her experiment of an alliance with the virile brain of Mirabeau.

There stands, side by side with the activity of mortal life, a silent thing commonly unseen and, even if seen, despised. It has no name, unless its name be religion: its form is the ritual of the altar; its philosophy is despised under the title of Theology. This thing and its influence should least of all appear in the controversies of a high civilisation. With an irony that every historian of whatever period must have noted a hundred times, this thing and its influence perpetually intervene, when most society is rational and when most it is bent upon positive things; and now at the moment when the transformation of society towards such better things seemed so easy and the way so plain, now in late ’89, before any threat had come from the King or any danger of dissolution from within, this thing, this influence, entered unnoticed by a side-door; it was weak and almost dumb. It and it alone halted and still halts all the Revolutionary work, for it should have been recognised and it was not. It demanded its place and no place was given it. There is a divine pride about it and, as it were, a divine necessity of vengeance. Religion, if it be slighted, if it be misunderstood, will implacably destroy.

It was the Queen’s Birthday, the Day of the Dead, November 2, 1789, one of those fatal and recurrent dates to which her history is pinned, which saw the sowing of that seed and the little entry of what was to become the major and perhaps the unending feud of our modern democracies.

The clergy of the French Church were then national to a degree hitherto unknown in the history of the Church in any of her provinces. The national movement swept them all. The Episcopacy represented, in some few of the greatest sees, the Revolutionary enthusiasms, in the mass of bishops the resistance to the Revolution which was exactly parallel to the attitude of the lay nobility. The parish clergy reflected with exact fidelity the homogeneous will of the nation. It was a priest who furnished the notes of the Revolutionary movement in the capital of Normandy. Later it was a priest who wrote the last (and the only literary) stanza of the Marseillaise. Even the religious, or what was left of them (for monastic life had never fallen to a lower state or one more dead since first St. Martin had brought it into Gaul), met the movement in a precisely similar fashion, suspected it in proportion to their privilege or their wealth, welcomed it in proportion to their knowledge of the people and their mixing with them. It was the poor remnant of the Dominicans of Paris that received and housed and gave its name to the headquarters of pure democracy, the Jacobins.

The clergy, then, were but the nation. The long campaign against the Faith, which had so long been the business of the Huguenot, the Deist, the Atheist, and the Jew, had indeed brought the Faith very near to death, and, as has so often been insisted in the course of these pages, it is difficult for a modern man to conceive how tiny was the little flickering flame of Catholicism in the generation before the Revolution, for he is used to it to-day as a great combative advancing thing against which every effort of its enemies’ energies must be actively and constantly used. The clergy as a body of men were national and willing to aid the nation; the Faith, which should have been their peculiar business, had almost gone—therefore it was that to put to national uses what seemed the grossly exaggerated endowments of religion seemed a national policy in that embarrassed time. Therefore it was that the endowments so attacked could ill defend themselves, for the philosophy of their defence, which lay in their religion, was forgotten. Obviously necessary and patriotic as the policy seemed, it awoke that influence of which I speak, which does not reside in men and which is greater than men, which only acts through men, but is not of them; and Religion—seemingly all but dead—rose at once when it felt upon it the gesture of the civil power.

It was, I have said, the 2nd of November, the Queen’s Birthday, the Day of the Dead, that the vote was taken upon the confiscation of religious endowments. The light was failing as that vote began. The candelabra of the great riding-school were lit, and it was full darkness before the vote was ended, for five-sixths of all possible votes were cast and nearly one thousand men voted each to the call of his name upon a roll. When the figures were read, a majority of 222 had decided the thing, and, in deciding it, had determined the dual fortunes of Europe thenceforward to our own time. The Revolution, a thing inconceivable apart from the French inheritance of Catholic Dogma, had raised an issue against the Catholic Church. For three weeks had the matter been debated; the days of October had launched it, and while yet the Parliament was in Versailles a bishop—one later to be famous under his own name of Talleyrand—had moved in favour of that Act.

It was a simple plan, and to see how immediate and necessary it seemed we have but to read the figures of the clerical funds and of their iniquitous distribution; yet it failed altogether and had for its effect only one effect much larger than any one dreamt—the creation of enmity in the only Thing that could endure, indefinitely opposed to the Revolution, mobile, vigorous, and with a life as long or longer than its own.

The figures were these: In a nation of 25 millions now raising, by a grinding and most unpopular taxation, less than 18,000,000 in the year, and of that paying quite one-half as interest upon a hopeless and increasing debt, was present a body of men, 40,000 in number, whose revenues had always been considered as the retribution of a particular function now universally disregarded; and these revenues would almost suffice to pay the amount which would save the nation from bankruptcy. The property from which these revenues were derived was sufficient to cancel the debt and to set the nation free upon a new course of readjusted taxation, an increased and unencumbered activity and, as it seemed to all at that moment, to save the State. Talleyrand himself in his clear and chiselled speech put the matter with the precision of a soldier. The reform would wipe out all encumbrances, permit the destruction of the old and hateful taxes, notably the salt tax, suppress the purchase of public offices, and meanwhile permit the nation in its new course to pay without grievous burden regular salaries to the clergy as civil servants according to their rank, which salaries would abolish the gross inequalities which had arisen in the economic development of fifteen centuries. No ordained priest would have less than what was in those days regarded as a sufficient maintenance. The monstrous revenues of certain sees, which were of no service to Religion or to the State, would disappear.

The plan was simple, it seemed most rational, and, as I have said, it was voted—from it was to proceed directly within two months the creation of those Government notes upon the security of Church lands, whose very name is for us to-day a summary of the disaster—the Assignats: the Assignats, which have become a cant term for worthless paper. Before Christmas that ominous word was to appear. Before spring the false step of dissolving the moribund religious orders was to be taken. Before summer the plan to establish a national Church controlled by the State was to be formulated; within a year that simple plan of disendowment had bred schism and the fixed resistance of the King, later it engendered Vendée, Normandy, all the Civil Wars, and—with a rending that has all but destroyed Europe—a separation between the two chief appetites native to mankind, the hunger for justice in the State, and that other hunger for God, who is the end of the soul. The wound is not yet healed.

Such was the principal act passing during those months of the winter and spring under the eyes of the Queen in her retirement and silence; accompanying that act was much more. The first of the plots had broken out, the first of those recurrent and similar plots for saving the person of the King; the first of the victims, Favras, had been hanged; the first hint, therefore, of a distinction between the King as head of the nation and the King as a person to be preserved had appeared. It was to grow until it threw into the whirlpool of the Revolution the flight to Varennes.

Just before the end of February, the force upon which Marie Antoinette now most relied—her brother Joseph—died. Leopold, a character of no such readiness or maturity, succeeded him, and the Queen, reading his letter upon the 27th, knew that she had come to that turn of human life after which, even for the most blest, everything is loss without replacement, until we stand alone at the tomb. Even for the most blest: for her the turn had come just as she and all of hers must sail into the darkness of a great storm.

I have said that it was on the last day of March, Spy Wednesday, that she had stood obscure in her plain black, blotted against the darkness of the nave and watching the Communion of her child. Upon the next day, Holy Thursday of 1790, was published, by order of the Revolutionary Parliament, that official paper called “The Red Book,” which suddenly heralded to all the public all that her Court had been, which gave body and form to all those hitherto vague rumours and legends of extravagance and folly which had been the chief weapons of her enemies. It was as though a malarial, impalpable influence weakening her had suddenly distilled into a palpable and definite material poison. It was as though some weapon of mist, which though formidable was undecided, had become suddenly a weapon of steel. The publication of that list of pensions, of doles, of bribes effected in her fortunes a change like the change in the life of some man whose reputation has hitherto suffered from hints and innuendoes, and who suddenly finds himself with the whole thing published in the papers upon the witness and record of a Court of Law.

Let a modern reader imagine what that publication was by so stretching his fancy as to conceive the delivery to general knowledge in this country of what is done in payment and receipt by our big money-changers, our newspapers, our politicians, and let him imagine (by another stretch of fancy) a public opinion in this country already alive to the existence of that corruption and already angry against it: then he will see what a date in the chances of the Queen’s life was this Holy Thursday!

The business now before herself and such as were statesmen around her was no longer to make triumphant, but rather to save the Monarchy.

CHAPTER XIII
MIRABEAU

From April 1, 1790, to midnight of the 20th June 1791