Part 10 (2/2)

When the news of the fall of the Bastille reached Versailles, the king, still failing to realize the gravity of the situation, exclaimed, ”Then it is a revolt!” ”Sire,” said the Duke de Liancourt, ”it is a Revolution!”

The king found himself deserted. His terrified n.o.bles almost in a body were fleeing from the kingdom. Bewildered, not knowing what to do, or what not to do, and desiring to a.s.sure the people that he was their friend, he appeared before the National a.s.sembly and made the last sacrifice--accepted the Tricolor; adopted the livery of the revolutionary party! The act was received with immense enthusiasm, and the outlook became more rea.s.suring.

Then the garrison at the palace was reenforced by a regiment from the country, and a dinner was given to welcome the new officers. The king and queen were urged to enter the room for a few moments, simply as an act of courtesy. Marie Antoinette most reluctantly consented to pa.s.s through the banqueting-hall. The officers, when they saw the beautiful daughter of Maria Theresa, sprang to their feet, and, flushed with wine, and in a transport of enthusiasm, committed a fatal act.

Throwing their tricolors under the table, they drank to the toast, ”_The king forever_!”

When this was reported in Paris the storm burst anew. A thousand terrible women, led by one still more terrible than the rest, started for Versailles. This crowd of base and degraded beings, re-enforced on the way by all that is worst, arrived at the palace, and the howling mob encamped outside in the rain all night. Entrance at last was found by someone, and they were inside and at the queen's door; she barely escaping by a hidden pa.s.sageway leading to the king's room.

”The king to Paris!” was the cry; and in the morning the wretched Louis appeared upon the balcony and indicated his willingness to go to Paris as they desired. And then the queen, hoping to touch their hearts, also appeared upon the balcony, holding in her arms the dauphin, with the tricolor on his breast. And with this horrible escort they did go back to Paris, leaving Versailles forever, and were virtually prisoners at the Tuileries.

The position of Lafayette at this time is a singular one: an agent of the National a.s.sembly, protecting the king from the Jacobins, and saying to Robespierre and Marat, ”If you kill the king to-day, I will place the dauphin on the throne to-morrow.”

But the currents of a cataract nearing the fall are difficult to guide.

Three parties were forming in the National a.s.sembly: the _Girondists_, the party of genius and eloquence and of moderation; the _Jacobins_, the party of the extremists and radicals; and a third party, undecided, waiting to see what was safest and best.

All that was n.o.ble and true and fine in the French Revolution was in the party of the Girondists. Dreamers, idealists, their dream was of a republic like the one in America, and their ideal an impossible perfection of condition in which human reason was supreme. The excesses of the Revolution they did not approve, but were willing to sacrifice the king and even the royal family, if necessary. They did not realize the forces with which they were airily playing, nor that the time was at hand when the Girondists would vainly strive to restrain the horrible excesses; that, after they had sacrificed the royal family, the Jacobins would sacrifice them; the slayers would be slain!

Lafayette, neither a Girondist nor a Jacobin, was a loyal Frenchman and patriot, with the American ideal in his heart, vainly trying to mediate between a feeble king and a people who had lost their reason. The time was near when he would give up the hopeless task and flee to escape being himself engulfed.

A wretchedly planned attempt at the escape of the royal family aggravated the situation. They were recognized at Varennes, brought back with great indignity, and placed under closer surveillance than before. On the 10th of August, 1792, the mob attacked the Tuileries.

The royal family fled to the National a.s.sembly for protection, while their Swiss guards vainly defended the palace with their lives.

This was the end of the monarchy. Louis, the brave queen and her children, and Princess Elizabeth, sister of the king, were removed from the a.s.sembly to the prison in ”The Temple,” and the National Convention formally declared France a republic.

The grim prison to which they were taken, with its central square tower flanked by four round towers, had stood since the time of Philip Augustus. It was built for the Knights Templar, and was chateau, fortress, prison, all in one, and was the home of the grand master and those others who were burned when Philip IV. ruthlessly destroyed the order. The central tower, one hundred and fifty feet high, had four stories. The king and the dauphin were imprisoned in the second story, and the queen, her young daughter, and the Princess Elizabeth in the story above.

The power swiftly pa.s.sed from Girondists to Jacobins, and a Revolutionary Tribunal was created in charge of the terrible triumvirate--Robespierre, Marat, and Danton.

An awful travesty upon a court of justice was established in that historic hall in the Palais de Justice. Its walls, which had looked down upon generations of Merovingian, Carlovingian, and Capetian kings, now beheld the condemnation of the most innocent and well-intentioned of all the kings of France.

The king was arraigned at this court upon the charge of treason, convicted, and condemned to die on the 21st of January, 1793. He was allowed to embrace for the last time his adored wife and children. At the scaffold he tried to speak a last word to his people. The drums were ordered to drown his voice, and an attendant priest uttered the words, ”_Fils de Saint Louis, montez au ciel_!”--Son of Saint Louis, ascend to heaven!--and all was over. The kindest-hearted, most inoffensive gentleman in Europe had expiated the crimes of his ancestors.

More and more furious swept the torrent, gathering to itself all that was vile and outcast. Where were the pale-faced, determined patriots who sat in the National a.s.sembly? Some of them riding with dukes and marquises to the guillotine. Was this the equality they expected when they cried, ”Down with the Aristocrats”?

Did they think they could guide the whirlwind after raising it? As well whisper to the cyclone to level only the tall trees, or to the conflagration to burn only the temples and palaces.

With restraining agencies removed, religion, government, king, all swept away, that hideous brood born of vice, poverty, hatred, and despair came out from dark hiding-places; and what had commenced as a patriotic revolt had become a wild orgy of bloodthirsty demons, led by three master-demons, Robespierre, Marat, and Danton, vying with each other in ferocity.

Then we see that simple girl thinking by one supreme act of heroism and sacrifice, like Joan of Arc, to save her country. Foolish child! Did she think to slay the monster devouring Paris by cutting off one of his heads? The death of Marat only added to the fury of the tempest, and the falling of Charlotte Corday's head was not more noticed than the falling of a leaf in the forest.

The slaughter of the people had been reduced to an admirable system.

The public prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville, went every day to the ”Committee of Public Safety” to procure the list of the proscribed, who were immediately placed in the Conciergerie to await trial. This list was then submitted to Robespierre, who with his pencil marked the names of those who would be executed on the morrow.

The mockery of the trial of Charlotte Corday was not delayed. This girl belonged to a family of the smaller n.o.bility. In her secluded life in the country, a mind of superior quality had fed upon the new philosophy of the period. An enthusiasm for liberty, and a horror of tyranny, had taken possession of her. In pa.s.sionate sympathy with the early purposes of the Revolution, Marat seemed to her a monster, the incarnation of the spirit which would defeat the cause of Liberty. It was believed that his list of the proscribed was not confined to Paris, but that the names of thousands of victims all over France were already designated. In that extraordinary scene at her trial, when questioned, she impatiently said, ”Yes, yes, I killed him. I killed one man to save a hundred thousand!”

Nothing was lacking to make this, with one exception, the most dramatic incident of the Revolution. Her eloquent address, to the French people, found pinned to the waist of her dress after her execution, and her splendid courage to the end, rounds out the picturesque story of her useless martyrdom. A Girondist waiting in the Conciergerie, when he heard of her crime and end, exclaimed: ”It will kill us! But she has taught us how to die!”

The end did not come so swiftly for the queen, who, after being removed from the Temple, spent seventy-two days and nights in the dark cell in that abode of horrors, the Conciergerie. Then came the trial, the inquisitorial trial, lasting all through the night in the gloom of that dimly lighted hall. And at half-past four in the morning she heard without a tremor the terrible words, ”Marie Antoinette, widow of Louis Capet, the Tribunal condemns you to die.” Not for a moment did this intrepid woman quail; and a small detail brings before us vividly her wonderful calmness. As she reached the stairs in her pitiful return to her cell, she said simply to the lieutenant of the gendarmes, who was at her side, ”Monsieur, I can scarcely see (_Je vois a peine_); will you lead me?”

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