VI.

Public favour towards him was such that had he been a Duc de Guise, and Louis XVI. a Henry III., the States-General would have finished, as did those of Blois, by an assassination or usurpation. Uniting with the tiers etat, to obtain equality and the friendship of the nation against the nobility, he took the oath of the Tennis Court. He took his place behind Mirabeau, to disobey the king. Nominated president by the National Assembly, he refused this honour in order to remain a citizen. The day on which the dismissal of Necker betrayed the hostile projects of the court, and when the people of Paris named its leaders and defenders by acclamation, the name of the Duc d'Orleans was the first uttered. France took in the gardens of the palace the colours of his livery for a cockade. At the voice of Camille Desmoulins, who uttered the cry of alarm in the Palais Royal, the populace gathered, Legendre and Freron led them; they placed the bust of the Duc d'Orleans beside that of Necker, covered them with black crape, and promenaded them, bareheaded themselves, in the presence of the silent citizens. Blood flowed; the dead body of one of the citizens who carried the busts, killed by the mob, serving as a standard to the people. The Duc d'Orleans was thus mixed up from his palace—his name and his image—with the first struggle and first murder of liberty. This was enough to make it believed that his hand moved all the threads of events. Whether from lack of boldness or ambition, he never assumed the appearance of the part which public opinion assigned to him. He did not then appear to push things beyond the conquest of a constitution for his country, and the character of a great patriot for himself. He respected or despised the throne. One or other of these feelings gave him importance in the eyes of history. All the world was of his party except himself.

Impartial men did honour to his moderation, the revolutionists imputed shame to his character. Mirabeau, who was seeking a pretender to personify the revolt, had had secret interviews with the Duc d'Orleans; had tested his ambition, to judge if it aspired to the throne. He had left him dissatisfied; he had even betrayed his dissatisfaction by angry phrases. Mirabeau required a conspirator; he had only found a patriot. What he despised in the Duc d'Orleans was not the meditation of a crime, but the refusal to be his accomplice. He had not anticipated such scruples; he revenged himself by terming this carelessness about the throne the cowardice of an ambitious man.

La Fayette instinctively hated in the Duc d'Orleans an influential rival. He accused the prince of fomenting troubles which he felt himself powerless to repress. It was asserted that the Duc d'Orleans and Mirabeau had been seen mingled with groups of men and women, and pointing to the chateau. Mirabeau defended himself by a smile of contempt. The Duc d'Orleans proved his innocence in a more serious manner. An assassination which should kill the king or queen would still leave the monarchy, the laws of the kingdom, and the princes inheritors of the throne. He could not mount to it except over the dead bodies of five persons placed by nature between himself and his ambition. These steps of crime could only have incurred the execrations of the nation, and must have even wearied the assassins themselves. Besides, he proved by numerous and undeniable witnesses that he had not gone to Versailles either on the 4th or 5th of October. Quitting Versailles on the 3rd, after the sitting of the National Assembly, he had returned to Paris. He had passed the day of the 4th in his palace and gardens at Mousseaux. On the 5th, he again was at Mousseaux; his cabriolet having broken down on the boulevard, he had gone on foot by the Champs Elysees. He had passed the day at Passy with his children and Madame de Genlis. He had supped at Mousseaux with some intimate friends, and slept again in Paris. It was not until the 6th, in the morning, that, informed of the events of the previous evening, he had gone to Versailles, and that his carriage had been stopped at the bridge of Sevres, by the mob carrying the bleeding heads of the king's guard.[17] If this was not the conduct of a prince of the blood, who flies to the succour of his king and places himself at the foot of the throne, between the threatened sovereign and the people, neither was it that of an audacious usurper who tempts revolt by occasion, and at least presents to the people a completed crime.

The conduct of this prince was but that of one who looks to a contingent reversion: either that he would not receive the crown except by a fatality of events, and without thrusting forth his hand to fortune, or that he had more indifference than ambition for supreme power, or that he would not place his royalty as a check upon the way of liberty; that he sincerely desired a republic, and that the title of first citizen of a free nation appeared to him greater than that of king.

VII.

However, a short time after the days of the 5th and 6th October, La Fayette desired to break off the intimacy between the Duc d'Orleans and Mirabeau. He resolved at all risks to compel the prince to remove from the scene, and by an exercise of moral restraint or the fear of a state prosecution, to absent himself and go to London. He made the king and queen enter into his plans, by alarming them as to the prince's intrigues, and designating him as a competitor for the throne. La Fayette said one day to the queen, that this prince was the only man upon whom the suspicion of so lofty an ambition could fall. "Sir," replied the queen, with a look of incredulity, "is it necessary then to be a prince in order to pretend to the throne?" "At least, madam," replied the general, "I only know the Duc d'Orleans who aspires to it." La Fayette presumed too much on the prince's ambition.

VIII.

Mirabeau, discouraged at the hesitations and scruples of the Duc d'Orleans, and finding him above or below crime, cast him off like a despised accomplice of ambition, and tried to ally himself with La Fayette, who, possessed of the armed force, and who saw in Mirabeau the whole of the moral force, smiled at the idea of a duumvirate, which could assume to themselves empire. There were secret interviews at Paris and at Passy between these two rivals. La Fayette rejecting every idea of an usurpation profitable to the prince, declared to Mirabeau that he must renounce every conceived plot against the queen if he would come to an understanding with him. "Well, general," replied Mirabeau, "since you will have it so, let her live! A humbled queen may be fit for something, but a queen with her throat cut is only good as the subject of a bad tragedy!" This atrocious remark, which treated the bloodshed of a woman as a jest, was subsequently known by the queen, who however forgave Mirabeau, and did not allow it to interfere with her liaisons with the great orator. But the cold-blooded infamy must have found its way to her heart as an ominous warning of what she might fear hereafter.

La Fayette, sure of the consent of the king and queen, supported by the feelings of the national guard, who were growing weary of factions and the factious, ventured to assume quietly towards the prince the tone of a dictator, and to pronounce against him an arbitrary exile under the appearance of a mission freely accepted. He sent to request of the Duc d'Orleans a meeting at the Marquise de Coigny's, a noble intelligent lady attached to La Fayette, and in whose salon the Duc d'Orleans occasionally met him. After a conversation, heard by the walls alone, but the result of which showed its tenor, and which Mirabeau, to whom it was communicated, termed very imperious on the one side, and very resigned on the other, it was agreed that the Duc d'Orleans should forthwith set out for London. The friends of the prince induced him to change his resolution that same night, and he sent La Fayette a note to this effect. La Fayette requested another interview, in which he called upon him to keep his word, enjoined him to depart in twenty-four hours, and then conducted him to the king. There the prince accepted the feigned mission, and promised to leave nothing neglected to expose in England the plots of the conspirators of the kingdom. "You are more interested than any one," said La Fayette in the king's presence, "for no one is more compromised than yourself." Mirabeau, cognisant of this oppression of La Fayette and the court over the mind of the Duc d'Orleans, offered his services to the duke, and tempted him with the last offers of supreme power. The subject of his address to the Assembly was already prepared: he intended to denounce, as a conspiracy of despotism, this coup d'etat against one citizen, in which the liberty of all citizens was attempted. "This violation of the inviolability of the representatives of the nation in the palpable exile of a prince of the blood; he was to point out La Fayette, making use of the royal hand to strike the rivals of his popularity, and to cover his own insolent dictatorship under the venerated sanction of the chief of the nation and the head of the family." Mirabeau had no doubt of the resentment of the Assembly against so odious an attempt, and promised the friends of the Duc d'Orleans one of those returns of opinion which raise a man to a higher elevation than that from which he has fallen. This language, backed by the entreaties of Laclos, Sillery, Lauzun, a second time shook the prince's resolution. He saw now disgrace in this voluntary exile, where at first he had only seen magnanimity. At the break of day he wrote that he declined the mission. La Fayette then sent for him to the minister for foreign affairs. There the prince, again overcome, wrote to the Assembly a letter, which destroyed beforehand all the denunciation of Mirabeau. "My enemies pretend," said the duke to La Fayette, "that you boast of having against me proofs of my share in the attempts of the 5th of October." "They are rather my enemies who say so," replied La Fayette: "if I had proofs against you I should already have arrested you. I have none, but I am seeking for them." The Duc d'Orleans went. Nine months had passed away since his return. The Constituent Assembly had left, without any other defence than anarchy, the constitution it had so lately voted. Disorder prevailed throughout the kingdom: the first acts of the Legislative Assembly announced the hesitation of a people which halts on a declivity, but is doomed to descend to the very bottom.

IX.

The Girondists, at the first step going a-head of the Barnaves and Lameths, showed a disposition to push France, all unprepared, into a republic. The Duc d'Orleans, whose long residence in England had allowed him to reflect at a distance from the attractions of events and factions, felt his Bourbon blood rise within him. He did not cease to be a patriot, but he understood that the safety of the country on the brink of a war was not in the destruction of the executive power. Unquestionably pity for the king and queen awakened in a heart in which hatred had not stifled every generous feeling. He felt himself too much avenged by the days of 5th and 6th October, by the humiliation of the king before the Assembly, by the daily insults of the populace under the windows of Marie Antoinette, and by the fearful nights of this family, whose palace was but a prison; and perhaps also he feared for himself the ingratitude of revolutions.

He had gone to England on compulsion, and had remained there under the idea, which was perfectly just, that his name might be used as a pretext for agitation in Paris. Laclos had gone to him in London from time to time to try again to tempt the exile's ambition, and make him ashamed of a deference for La Fayette, which France took to be cowardice. The prince's pride was roused at this, and he threatened to return; but the representations of M. de la Luzerne, minister of France in England, those of M. de Boinville, one of La Fayette's aides-de-camp, and his own reflections, had prevailed over the incitements of Laclos. Proof of this is found in a note of M. de la Luzerne's, found in an iron chest amongst the king's secret papers. "I attest," says M. de la Luzerne, "that I have presented to M. the Duc d'Orleans, M. de Boinville, aide-de-camp of M. de La Fayette, that M. de Boinville declared to the Duc d'Orleans that they were very uneasy as to the troubles which might at this moment be excited in Paris by malcontents, who would not scruple to make use of his name to disturb the capital, and perhaps the kingdom; and he was urged on these grounds to protract the time of his departure. The Duc d'Orleans, unwilling in any way to afford plea or pretext for any disturbance of public tranquillity, consented to delay his return."

X.

He at last left England, and on his return made several fruitless attempts to be again employed in the navy. Whilst his mind was thus wavering, he received the intelligence, through M. Bertrand de Molleville, that the king had nominated him to the rank of admiral. The Duc d'Orleans went to thank the minister, and added that, "He was rejoiced at the honour the king conferred on him, as it would give him an opportunity of communicating to the king his real sentiments, which had been odiously calumniated. I am very unfortunate," continued he; "my name has been involved in all the crimes imputed to me, and I have been deemed guilty, because I disdained to justify myself; but time will show whether my conduct belies my words."

The air of frankness and good faith, and the significant tone with which the Duc d'Orleans uttered these words, struck the minister, who until then had been greatly prejudiced against his innocence. He inquired if his royal highness would consent to repeat these expressions to the king, as they would rejoice his majesty, and he feared that they might lose some of their force if repeated by himself. The duke eagerly embraced the idea of seeing the king, if the king would receive him, and expressed his intention of presenting himself at the chateau the next day. The king, informed of this by his minister, awaited the prince, and had a long and private conference with him.

A confidential document, written with the prince's own hand, and drawn up in order to justify his memory in the eyes of his children and his friends, informs us of what passed at this interview. "The ultra-democrats," said the Duc d'Orleans, "deemed that I wished to make France a republic; the ambitious, that I wished, by my popularity, to force the king to resign the administration of the kingdom into my hands; lastly, the virtuous and patriotic had the illusion of their own virtue concerning me, for they deemed that I sacrificed myself entirely to the public good. The one party deemed me worse than I was; the others, better. I have merely followed my nature, and that impelled me, above all, to liberty. I fancied I saw her image in the parliaments, which at least possessed her tone and forms, and I embraced this phantom of representative freedom. Thrice did I sacrifice myself for those parliaments; twice from a conviction on my part; the third, not to belie what I had previously done. I had been in England; I had there seen true liberty, and I doubted not that the States-General, and France also, wished to obtain freedom. Scarcely had I foreseen that France would possess citizens, than I wished to be one of these citizens myself, and I made unhesitatingly the sacrifice of all the rank and privileges that separated me from the nation: they cost me nothing; I aspired to be a deputy—I was one. I sided with the tiers etat, not from factious feeling, but from justice. In my opinion, it was impossible to prevent the completion of the Revolution, although some persons around the king thought otherwise. The troops were assembled, and surrounded the National Assembly. Paris imagined it was threatened, and rose en masse; the Gardes Francaises, who lived amongst the people, followed the stream, and the report was circulated that I had bribed this regiment with my gold. I will frankly declare my opinion: if the Gardes Francaises had acted differently, I should in that case have deemed they had been bought over; for their hostility against the people of Paris would have been unnatural. My bust was earned with that of M. Necker on the 14th of July. Why? because this minister, on whom every public hope reposed, was the idol of the nation, and because my name was amongst the list of those deputies of the Assembly, who, it was said, were to have been arrested by the troops summoned to Versailles. Amidst all these events, so favourable to a factious man, what was my behaviour? I withdrew from the eyes of the people: I did not flatter their excesses, but retired to my house at Mousseaux, where I passed the night; and the next morning I went, unattended, to the National Assembly at Versailles. At the fortunate moment when the king resolved to cast himself into the arms of the Assembly, I refused to form one of the deputation of members despatched to Paris to announce these tidings to the capital, for I feared lest some of the homages which the city owed to the king alone might be paid to me. And such was again my conduct on the days of October; I again absented myself, not to add fresh fuel to the excitement of the people; and I only reappeared when calm again prevailed. I was met at Sevres by the bands of straggling assassins, who bore back the bleeding heads of the king's guards: these men stopped my carriage, and fired on the postilion. Thus I, who was the pretended leader of these men, narrowly escaped being their victim, and owed my safety to a body of the national guard, who escorted me to Versailles; and as I went to wait on the king I repressed the last murmurs of the people in the Cour des Ministres I signed the decree which declared the Assembly inseparable from the person of the king. It was at this time that M. de La Fayette called on me, and informed me of the king's desire that I should quit Paris, in order to afford no pretext for popular tumult. Convinced now, that the Revolution was accomplished, and only fearing the troubles with which attempts might be made to fetter its onward progress, I unhesitatingly obeyed, only demanding the consent of the National Assembly to my departure; this they granted, and I left Paris. The inhabitants of Boulogne, who had been worked upon by an intrigue which may be laid to my charge, but to which I was a stranger, since I would not yield to it, wished forcibly to detain me, and opposed my embarkation. I confess I was much touched, but I did not yield to this violent manifestation of public favour, and I myself persuaded them to return to their allegiance. Advantage has been taken of this voyage and my absence to impute to me, without refutation on my part, the most odious crimes. It was I who wished to force the king to fly with the Dauphin from Versailles,—but Versailles is not France; the king would have found his army and the nation when once he left this town, and the only result of my ambition would be civil war, and, a military dictatorship given to the king. But the Count de Provence was alive; he was the natural heir to the throne thus abandoned. He was popular; he had, like myself, joined the commons,—thus I should only have laboured for him. But the Count d'Artois was in safety in another country, his children were secure from my pretended murders, they were nearer the throne than myself. What a series of follies, absurdities, or useless crimes! The French nation, amidst the Revolution, have neither changed their character nor their sentiments. I fully believe that the Count d'Artois, whom I have myself loved, will prove this. I believe that by drawing nearer to a monarch whom he loves, and by whom he is loved, and to a people to whose love his brilliant qualities give him so great a right, he will, when these troubles have ceased, enjoy this portion of his inheritance, the love which the most sensible and affectionate of nations has vowed to the descendants of HENRI IV."

XI.

These excuses, mingled doubtless with expressions of repentance and tears, and heightened by those attitudes and gestures, more eloquent than words, that add so much pathos to solemn explanations, convinced the heart if not the mind of the king; and he forgave—he excused, and he trusted. "I am of your opinion," said he to his minister, yet a prey to the emotion of this scene, "that the Duc d'Orleans really regrets his past errors, and that he will do all in his power to repair the evil he has done, and in which perhaps he has not had so great a share as we believed."

The prince left the king's apartments reconciled with himself, and more than ever resolved to withdraw himself from the factious party. It had cost him but little to sacrifice his ambition, for he had none; and his popularity of her own accord had quitted him for other men of inferior rank and station than his own, and he could only hope to find security and an honourable refuge at the foot of the throne, to which he was alike guided by inclination and duty. Louis XVI. as a man had far more influence over him than as a king, but the adulation and resentment of the court ruined all.

The Sunday following this reconciliation, the Duc d'Orleans presented himself at the Tuileries to pay his respects to the king and queen. It was the day and hour of the grandes receptions, and crowds of courtiers thronged the courts, the staircases, the corridors, some hoping that fortune might yet be propitious; others, come from the provinces to the court of their unfortunate master, drawn thither by the double tie of misfortune and fidelity. At the sight of the Duc d'Orleans, whose reconciliation with the king had not as yet transpired, astonishment and horror appeared on every face, and an indignant murmur followed the announcement of his name. The crowd opened and shrank from him, as though his touch was odious to them. In vain did he seek one glance of respect or welcome amongst all these gloomy visages. As be approached the king's chamber, the courtiers and guards barred his entrance by turning their backs, and crowding together as if by accident, repulsed him: he entered the apartments of the queen, where the royal family's dinner was prepared. "Look to the dishes," cried voices, as though some public and well-known poisoner had been seen to enter. The indignant prince turned alternately pale and red, and imagined that these insults were offered him, at the instigation of the queen, and the order of the king. As he descended the stairs to quit the palace, fresh cries and outrages followed him; some even spat on his coat and head. A poignard stab would have been far less painful to bear than these withering marks of hatred and contempt. He had entered the palace appeased, he quitted it implacable; he felt that his only refuge against the court was in the last ranks of democracy, and he enrolled himself resolutely in them to find safety or vengeance.

The king and queen, who were soon informed of these insults, of which, however, they were utterly innocent, took no steps to make any reparation for them; possibly they were secretly flattered by the wrath of their adherents, and the humiliation of their enemy. The queen was too prodigal of her favour, and too hasty in her displeasure; the king did not want kindness, but grace; one word, such as Henri IV. knew so well how to employ, would have punished these insulters, and have brought the prince to his feet, yet he knew not how to say it; resentment brooded over her wrongs in silence, and destiny took its course.

XII.

The Duc d'Orleans severed himself on that day from the Girondists, to whom he was alone held by Petion and Brissot, and passed over to the side of the Jacobins; he opened his palace to Danton and Barrere, and no longer followed any but the extreme party, which he adopted without hesitation in silence, even to the republic, to regicide, to death.

XIII.

However, the alarm with which the preparations of the emperor inspired the people, and the mischief excited by the speeches of the Girondists against the court and the ministers, agitated the capital more and more every day. At each fresh communication from M. de Lessart, minister of foreign affairs, the party of the Gironde raised a fresh cry of war and treason. Fauchet denounced the minister. Brissot exclaimed, "The mask has fallen,—our enemy is now known,—it is the emperor. The princes, who hold possessions in Alsace, whose cause he affects to espouse, are but the pretexts of his hate; and the emigres themselves are but his instruments. Let us despise these emigres: it is the duty of the high national court to execute justice on these mendicant princes. The electors of the empire are not worthy of your anger; fear causes them beforehand to prostrate themselves at your feet—a free people does not crush a fallen foe: strike at the head—this head is the emperor."

He communicated his own ardour to the Assembly; but Brissot, although a skilful politician, and the able counsellor of his party, did not possess that sonorous oratory that elevates an opinion to the level of the voice of a nation. Vergniaud alone was gifted with a soul, in which was combined all the passion and eloquence of a party: by meditating on the annals of the past, he elevated his mind to scenes that passed then analogous to those in which he was an actor, and communicated an importance and solemnity to every word. "Our revolution," said he at the same sitting, "has spread alarm amongst every throne, for it has given an example of the destruction of the despotism that sustains them. Kings hate our constitution because it renders men free, and because they would reign over slaves. This hate has been manifested on the part of the emperor by all the measures he has adopted, to disturb us or to strengthen our enemies, and encourage those Frenchmen who have rebelled against the laws of their country. We must not believe that this hate has ceased to exist, but it must cease to work. The genius of Liberty watches over our frontiers, which are less defended by our troops and our national guards than by the enthusiasm of freedom. Liberty, since its birth, has been the object of a shameful and secret war, waged against it even in its very cradle. What is this war? Three armies of reptiles and venomous insects breed and creep in your own breast: one is composed of paid libellists and hired calumniators, who strive to arm the two powers against each other by inspiring them with mutual distrust; the other army, equally dangerous, is composed of seditious priests, who feel that their God is forsaking them, and that their power is crumbling away with their prestige, and who, to retain their empire, term vengeance religion, and crime virtue. The third is composed of greedy speculators and financiers, who can grow rich only on our ruin: national prosperity would be destruction to their egotistical speculations; and our death would be their life. They are like those beasts of prey, who wait the issue of the battle that they may batten and feast on the corpses of the slain. (Loud applause.)

"They know that the expenses of your preparations for defence are numerous; and they reckon upon the failure of the credit of the treasury, and the scarcity of specie; they reckon upon the weariness of those citizens who have abandoned their wives, their babes, to hasten to the frontiers, and who will abandon them, whilst millions, distributed at home, will arouse insurrections, in which the people, armed by madness, will themselves destroy their rights, whilst they imagine they are defending them; then the emperor will advance at the head of a powerful army to rivet your fetters. Such is the war that they make on you, and that they seek to make. (Loud applause.)

"The people has sworn to maintain the constitution, because in that lies its honour and its liberty; but if you suffer it to remain in a state of troubled immobility, that weakens its force and exhausts all our resources, will not the day of this exhaustion be the last of the constitution? The state in which we are kept is one of annihilation that may lead us to disgrace or to death. (Applause.) To arms, citizens! to arms, freemen! defend your liberty! assure the hope of that liberty to the whole human race, or you will not deserve even pity in your misfortunes. (Applause.) We have no other allies than the eternal justice, whose rights we defend: but is it forbidden us to seek others, and to interest those powers who, like ourselves are threatened by the rupture of the equilibrium in Europe? No, doubtless, let us declare to the emperor, that from this moment all treaties are broken. (Vehement applause.) The emperor has himself violated them; and if he does not attack us, it is because he is not yet prepared; but he is unmasked; felicitate yourselves upon this. The eyes of Europe are fixed upon you, show them what is really the National Assembly of France. If you display the dignity that befits the representatives of a great nation, you will gain esteem, applause, and assistance. If you evince weakness, if you do not avail yourselves of the occasion offered you by Providence, of freeing yourselves from a situation that fetters you, dread the degradation that is prepared for you by the hatred of Europe, of France, of your own time and of posterity. (Applause.) Do more; demand that your flag be respected beyond the Rhine; demand that the emigres be dispersed. I might demand that they be given up to the country they insult, and to punishment. But no. If they have been greedy for our blood, let us not show ourselves greedy for theirs; their crime is having wished to destroy their country; let them be vagrants and wanderers on the face of the earth, and let their punishment be never to find a country. (Applause.) If the emperor delays to answer your demands, let all delay be deemed a refusal, and every refusal on his part to explain, a declaration of war. Attack whilst you yet may. If, in the Saxon wars, Frederic had temporised, the king of Prussia would at this moment be marquis of Brandenbourg, instead of disputing with Austria the balance of power in Germany which has escaped from your grasp.

"Up to this period you have only adopted half measures and I may well apply to you the language which Demosthenes addressed to the Athenians, under similar circumstances: 'You act towards the Macedonians,' said he, 'like the barbarians, who combat in our games, towards their adversaries; when they are struck on the arm they raise their hand to their arm; if struck on the head, they raise their hand to their head; they never dream of defending themselves when they are wounded, nor of parrying the blows dealt them. Does Philip take up arms, you do the same; does he lay them down, you also lay down yours. If he attack one of your allies, you immediately despatch a numerous army to the assistance of your ally. If he attack a city, you despatch a numerous army to the relief of the city. Does he again lay down his arms, you do the same, without thinking of any means of forestalling his ambition; and placing yourself beyond the reach of his attacks. Thus you are at the orders of your enemy, and he it is who commands your army.'

"And I, I tell you the same of the emigres. Do you hear that they are at Coblentz,—the citizens hasten to combat them; are they assembled on the banks of the Rhine,—two corps d'armee are despatched thither; do foreign powers afford them shelter,—you propose to attack them; do you learn, on the contrary, that they have withdrawn to the north of Germany,—you lay down your arms; do they again offend you,—your indignation is again aroused; do they make you specious promises,—you are again appeased. Thus, it is the emigres and the cabinets that support them—who are your leaders, and who dispose of your counsels, your treasures, and your armies. (Applause.) It is for you to consider whether this humiliating part be worthy of a great nation. A thought flashes across my mind, and with that I will terminate. It appears to me, that the manes of past generations arise, to conjure you, in the name of all the evils that slavery has inflicted on them, to preserve from it future generations, whose destinies are in your hands; fulfil this prayer, and be for the future a second providence. Associate yourself with the eternal justice that protects the people. By meriting the title of benefactors of your country, you will also merit that of benefactors of the human race."

Loud and prolonged applause succeeded the different emotions that had been excited by this speech in every heart; for Vergniaud, following the example of the ancient orators, instead of suffering his eloquence to grow cold in political combinations, heated it at the flame of his daring genius. The people comprehends only that which it feels; its sole orators are those who excite it, and emotion is the conviction of the populace. Vergniaud felt this, and knew how to communicate it. The knowledge that they laboured for universal good, and the prospect of the gratitude of future ages shed a halo—a noble pride around France, and of sanctity around liberty. It was one of the characteristics of this orator, that he almost invariably elevated the Revolution to the dignity of an apostleship, that he extended his humanity to all mankind, and that he only impassioned and worked upon the people by his virtues; such words produced an effect over all the empire, against which neither the king nor his ministers could strive.

XIV.

Moreover, as has been shown, Vergniaud and his party had friends in the council. M. de Narbonne and the Girondists met and concerted their plans at Madame de Staeel's, whose salon, in which some warlike measure was always being discussed, was called the camp of the Revolution: the Abbe Fauchet, the denouncer of M. de Lessart, here imbibed fresh ardour for the overthrow of this minister. M. de Lessart, by weakening as much as possible the threats of the court of Vienna and the anger of the Assembly, sought to gain time for better and wiser resolutions. His loyal attachment to Louis XVI., and his wise and prudent foresight, showed him that war would not restore, but shake the throne; and in this shock of Europe and France, the king would inevitably be crushed. The attachment of M. de Lessart to his master supplied the place of genius; he was the only obstacle in the path of the three parties who wished for war; it was necessary, at all risks, to remove him. He might have shielded himself by withdrawing from the contest, or by yielding to the impatience of the Assembly. But, though fully aware of the terrible responsibility that rested on him, and that this responsibility was death, he braved all, to afford the king a few days more for negotiation.—These days were numbered.



BOOK XII.

I.

Leopold, a pacific and philosophic prince, who had he not been an emperor, would have been a revolutionist, had sought by every means in his power to adjourn the concussion between the two principles; he only demanded from France such concessions as would enable him to repress the ardour of Prussia, Germany, and Russia. The prince de Kaunitz, his minister, continually wrote to M. de Lessart in this strain; and the private communications which the king received from his ambassador at the court of Vienna, the Marquis de Noailles, breathed the same spirit of conciliation. Leopold only desired that guarantees should be given to the monarchical powers for the establishment of order in France, and that the constitution should be vigorously enforced by the executive power. But the last sittings of the Assembly, the armaments of M. de Narbonne, the accusations of Brissot, the fiery speeches of Vergniaud, and the applause he had gained, began to weary his patience; and the desire for war, so long repressed, now, in spite of himself, took possession of him. "The French wish for war," said he one day; "they shall have it—they shall see that the peaceful Leopold can be warlike when the interest of his people demands it."

The cabinet councils at Vienna became more frequent, in presence of the emperor. Russia had just concluded peace with the Ottoman empire, and was thus enabled to turn her eyes to France; Sweden fanned the flame of all the princes; Prussia yielded to the advice of Leopold; England observed, but pledged herself to nothing, for the struggle on the Continent would increase her importance. The armaments were decided upon, and on the 7th of February, 1792, the definitive treaty of alliance between Austria and Prussia was signed at Berlin. "Now," wrote Leopold to Frederic William, "it is France who menaces—who arms—who provokes: Europe must arm."

The party in favour of war in Germany triumphed. "It is very fortunate for you," said the elector of Mayence to the Marquis de Bouille, "that the French were the aggressors; but for that we should never have had a war." War was resolved upon in the councils, yet Leopold still hoped. In an official note, which the prince de Kaunitz transmitted to the Marquis de Noailles, for the king, Leopold yet showed himself willing to be reconciled. M. de Lessart replied confidentially to these last overtures, in a despatch which he had the honesty to communicate to the diplomatic committee of the Assembly, composed of Girondists. In this reply the minister palliated the charges made against the Assembly by the emperor, and seemed rather to excuse France than justify. He acknowledged that there were some disturbances in the kingdom, some excesses in the clubs, some licence in the press; but he attributed these disorders to the excitement produced by the movements of the emigres, and the inexperience of a people who essay their constitution and wound themselves with it.

"Indifference and contempt," said he, "are the fittest weapons with which to combat this pest. Could Europe stoop so low, as to quarrel with the French nation, because some few demagogues and madmen dwell amongst them, and would honour them so far as to reply to them by cannon balls?"

In a despatch of the prince de Kaunitz, addressed to all the European cabinets, was this phrase,—"Latest events give us cause to hope, for it is evident that the majority of the French nation, struck by the evils they are preparing for themselves, are returning to more moderate principles, and are inclined to restore to the throne the dignity and authority which form the bases of monarchical government." The Assembly remained silent from suspicion, and this suspicion was awakened whilst diplomatic notes and counter notes were exchanged between the cabinet of the Tuileries and the cabinet of Vienna. But no sooner had M. de Lessart descended from the tribune, and the Assembly closed the sitting, than the murmurs of mistrust were changed into loud and sullen exclamations of indignation.

II.

The Jacobins burst out into threats against the perfidious minister and the court, who united in a treasonable combination, called the Austrian Committee, concerted counter-revolutionary plans in the Tuileries, made signals to the enemies of the nation from the very foot of the throne, and secretly communicated with the court of Vienna, and dictated the language necessary to intimidate France. The Memoirs of Hardenberg, the Prussian minister, which have since been published, prove that these accusations were not entirely the dreams of the demagogues; and that in order to promote peace the two courts did all in their power to adopt the same tone with each other. It was resolved that M. de Lessart should be impeached, and Brissot, the leader of the diplomatic committee, the advocate of war, undertook to prove his pretended crimes.

The constitutional party abandoned M. de Lessart, without any defence, to the hatred of the Jacobins; this party had no suspicions, but vengeance to wreak upon M. de Lessart. The king had suddenly dismissed M. de Narbonne, the rival of this minister in the council. M. de Narbonne, feeling himself menaced, caused La Fayette to write a letter, in which he conjured him to remain at his post so long as the perils of his country rendered it necessary.

This step, of which M. de Narbonne was cognisant, appeared to the king an insolent act of oppression against his liberty and that of the constitution. The popularity of M. de Narbonne diminished proportionately as that of the Girondists became greater and inspired them with more audacity. The Assembly began to change its applause into murmurs when he mounted the tribune, whence a short time before he had been shamefully forced to withdraw, because he had wounded the plebeian susceptibility by appealing to the most distinguished members of the Assembly. The aristocracy of his rank showed itself beneath his uniform, whilst the people wished for members of its own stamp in the councils; and thus between the offended king and the suspicious Girondists, M. de Narbonne fell. The king dismissed him, and he went to serve in the army he had organised. His friends did not conceal their resentment. Madame de Staeel lost in him her ambition and her ideal at the same time; but she did not abandon all hope of regaining for M. de Narbonne the confidence of the king, and of seeing him play a great political part. She had sought to render him a Mirabeau, she now dreamed of making him a Monk. From this day she conceived the idea of rescuing the king from the power of the Jacobins and Girondists—of carrying him off through the agency of M. de Narbonne and the constitutionalists—of re-seating him on the throne—of crushing the extreme parties, and establishing her ideal government—a liberal aristocracy. A woman of genius, her genius had the prejudices of her birth; a plebeian, who had found her way to court, it was necessary for her to have patricians between the throne and the people. The first blow at M. de Lessart was dealt by a man who frequented the salon of Madame de Staeel.

III.

But a more terrible and more unexpected blow fell on M. de Lessart: the very day on which he thus surrendered himself to his enemies, the unexpected death of the emperor Leopold was known at Paris, and with this prince expired the last faint hope of peace, for his wisdom died with him; and who could tell what new policy would arise from his tomb? The agitation that prevailed filled every one with terror, and this was soon changed into hatred against the unfortunate minister of Louis XVI. He had neither known, it was said, how to profit by the pacific disposition of Leopold whilst this prince yet lived, nor to forestall the hostile designs of those who succeeded him in the dominion of Germany. Every thing furnished fresh accusation against him, even fatality and death.

At the moment of his decease all was ready for hostility. Two hundred thousand men formed a line from Bale to the Scheldt. The duke of Brunswick, on whom rested every hope of the coalition, was at Berlin, giving his last advice to the king of Prussia, and receiving his final orders. Beschoffwerder, the general and confidant of the king of Prussia, arrived at Vienna to concert with the emperor the point and time of attack. On his arrival the prince de Kaunitz hastily informed him of the sudden illness of the emperor. The 27th Leopold was in perfect health, and received the Turkish envoy; on the 28th he was in the agonies of death. His stomach swelled, and convulsive vomitings put him to intense torture. The doctors, alarmed at these symptoms, ordered copious bleeding, which appeared to allay his sufferings; but they enervated the vital force of the prince, who had weakened himself by debauchery. He fell asleep for a short time, and the doctors and ministers withdrew; but he soon awoke in fresh convulsions, and died in the presence of a valet de chambre, named Brunetti, in the arms of the empress, who had just arrived.

The intelligence of the death of the emperor, the more terrible as it was so unexpected, spread abroad instantly, and surprised Germany at the very moment of a crisis. Terror for the future destiny of Germany was joined to pity for the empress and her children: the palace was all confusion and despair; the ministers felt power snatched from their grasp; the grandees of the court, without waiting for their carriages, hurried to the court, in the disorder of astonishment, and grief and sobs were heard in the vestibules and staircases that led to the apartments of the empress. At this moment, this princess, without having time to assume black, appeared, bathed in tears, surrounded by her numerous children, and leading them to the new king of the Romans, the eldest son of Leopold, she threw herself at his feet, and implored his protection for these orphans. Francis I., mingling his tears with those of his mother and brothers, one of whom was only four years old, raised the empress, and embracing the children, vowed to be a second father to them.

IV.

This catastrophe was inexplicable to scientific men; politicians suspected some mystery; the people poison. These reports of poison, however, have neither been confirmed nor disproved by time. The most probable opinion is that this prince had made an immoderate use of drugs which he compounded himself, in order to recruit his constitution, shattered by debauchery and excess. Lagusius, his chief physician, who had assisted at the autopsy of the body, declared he discovered traces of poison. Who had administered it? The Jacobins and emigres mutually accused each other, the one party to disembarrass themselves of the armed chief of the empire, and thus spread anarchy amongst the federation of Germany, of which the emperor was the bond that united them; the others had slain in Leopold the philosopher prince, who temporised with France, and who retarded the war. A female was spoken of who had attracted the notice of the emperor at the last bal masque at the court, and it was said that this stranger, favoured by her disguise, had given him poisoned sweetmeats, without its being possible to discover from whose hand they came. Others accused the beautiful Florentine, Donna Livia, his mistress, who, according to them, was the fanatical instrument of a few priests. These anecdotes are the mere chimeras of surprise and sorrow, for the people can never believe that the events which have had so vast an influence over their destiny are merely natural. But crimes, universally approved, are rare; opinion may desire, but never commits them. Crime, like ambition or vengeance, is personal: there was neither ambition nor vengeance around Leopold,—nought but a few female jealousies; and his attachments were too numerous and too fugitive to kindle in the heart of a mistress that love that arms the hand with poison or poignard. He loved at the same time Donna Livia, whom he had brought with him from Tuscany, and who was known in Europe as "La belle Florentine," Prokache, a young Polish girl, the charming countess of Walkenstein, and others of an inferior rank. The countess of Walkenstein had for some time past been his avowed mistress; he had given her a million (francs) in drafts on the bank of Vienna, and he had even presented her to the empress, who forgave him his weaknesses, on condition that he gave no one his political confidence, which up to that time he had confided to her alone. He was a devoted admirer of the fair sex, and it would be necessary to refer to the most shameful epochs of Roman history to find any emperor whose life was as scandalous as his own; his cabinet was found after his death to be filled with valuable stuffs, rings, fans, trinkets, and even a quantity of rouge. These traces of debauch made the empress blush when she visited them with the new emperor. "My son," said she, "you have before you the sad proof of your father's disorderly life, and of my long afflictions: remember nothing of them except my forgiveness and his virtues. Imitate his great qualities, but beware lest you fall into the same vices, in order that you may not, in your turn, put to the blush those who scrutinise your life."

The prince in Leopold was superior to the man: he had made trial of a philosophical government in Tuscany, and this happy country yet blesses his memory; but his genius was not suited for a more enlarged field. The struggle, forced on him by the French Revolution, compelled him to seize on the helm in Germany; but he did so without energy. He opposed the temporising policy of diplomacy to the contagion of new ideas; he was the Fabius of kings. To afford the Revolution time was to ensure it the victory. It could be only vanquished by surprise, and stifled in its own stronghold; the genius of the people was its negotiator and accomplice, and its increasing popularity was its army. Its ideas found new adherents in princes, people, and cabinets. Leopold would have given it a share, but the share of the Revolution is the conquest of every thing that opposes its principles. The principles of Leopold could conciliate the Revolution, but his power as the arbitrator of Germany could not conciliate the conquering power of France. His part was a double one, and his position false. He died at a right moment for his renown; he paralysed Germany, and checked the impetus of France, and, by disappearing between the two, he left the two principles to clash together, and destiny to take its course.

V.

Opinion, already agitated by the death of Leopold, received another shock from the news of the tragical death of the king of Sweden, who was assassinated on the night of the 16th of March, 1792, at a masked ball. Death seemed to strike, one after another, all the enemies of France. The Jacobins saw its hand in all these catastrophes, and even boasted of them through their most audacious demagogues; but they proclaimed more crimes than they committed, and their wishes alone shared in these assassinations.

Gustavus, this hero of the counter-revolution, this chevalier of aristocracy, fell by the blows of his nobility. When he was ready to set forth on the expedition he projected against France, he had assembled his diet to ensure the tranquillity of the kingdom during his absence. His vigorous measures had put down the malcontents; yet it was foretold to him, like Caesar, that the ides of March would be a critical period of his destiny. A thousand traces revealed a plot, and his intended assassination was rumoured over all Germany before the blow was struck. These rumours are the forerunners of projected crimes: some indication escapes the heart of the conspirator, and it is by this means that the event is predicted before it happens.

The king of Sweden, warned by his numerous friends, who entreated him to be upon his guard, replied, like Caesar, that the stroke when once received was less painful than the perpetual dread of receiving it, and that if he listened to all these warnings, he could no longer drink a glass of water without trembling. He braved danger, and showed himself more than ever to the people. The conspirators had made several fruitless attempts during the Diet, but chance had preserved the king. Since his return to Stockholm, the king frequently went to pass the day alone at his chateau at Haga, a league from the capital. Three of the conspirators had approached the chateau, at five o'clock on a dark winter's evening, armed with carbines, and ready to fire on the king. The apartment he occupied was on the ground floor, and the lighted candles in the library enabled them to see their victim. Gustavus, on his return from hunting, undressed, and fell asleep in an arm chair, within a few feet of the assassins. Whether it was that they were alarmed by the sound of footsteps, or that the solemn contrast of the peaceful slumber of this prince with the death that threatened him, softened their hearts, they again abandoned their project, and only revealed this circumstance on their trial after the assassination, when the king acknowledged the truth and precision of their details. They were ready to renounce their intention, discouraged by a sort of divine intervention, and by the fatigue of having so long meditated this design in vain, when a fatal occasion tempted them too strongly, and made them resolve on the murder of the king.

VI.

A masked ball was given at the opera, which the king was to attend, and the conspirators resolved to take advantage of the mystery of the disguise and tumult of the fete to strike the blow, without allowing the hand to appear. A short time before the ball the king supped with a few of his most intimate courtiers. A letter was brought to him, which he opened, and reading it jestingly, then threw it on the table. The anonymous writer informed him that he was neither a friend to his person nor an approver of his policy, but that as a loyal enemy he desired to inform him of the death that menaced him. He counselled him not to go to the ball; or, if he persisted, he advised him to mistrust the crowd that might press around him, for that was the signal for the blow to be aimed at him. That the king might not doubt the warning thus given, he recalled to his memory his dress, gesture, his sleep in his apartment of Haga in the evening that he had believed himself quite alone. Such convincing proofs must have struck and intimidated the mind of the prince, but his intrepid soul made him brave, not only the warning, but death: he rose and went to the ball.

VII.

Scarcely had he reached the apartment, when he was surrounded, as he had been warned, by a group of masks, and separated, as if by preconcerted movement, from the body of officers who were in attendance. At this moment an invisible hand fired at his back a pistol loaded with slugs. The blow struck him in the left flank above the hip. Gustavus fell into the arms of Count d'Armsfeld, his favourite. The report of the fire arm, the smell of powder, the cries of "fire," which resounded through the apartment, the confusion which followed the king's fall, the real or feigned anxiety of persons who hurried forward to save him, favoured the escape of the assassins: the pistol had been dropped on the ground. Gustavus did not lose his presence of mind for a moment. He ordered the doors to be immediately closed, and desired all to unmask. Carried by his guards into an apartment in the opera-house, he was confided to his surgeons. He admitted some of the foreign ministers into his presence, and spoke to them with all the calmness of a strong mind. Even his pain did not inspire him with any feeling of vengeance. Generous even in death, he demanded anxiously if the assassin had been apprehended. He was told that he was unknown. "Oh God, grant," he said, "that he may not be discovered."

Whilst the king was receiving the first attentions, and being conveyed to the palace, the guards stationed at the doors of the ball-room compelled all to take off their masks, asked their names, and searched their persons: nothing suspicious was discovered. Four of the chief conspirators, men of the highest nobility in Stockholm, had succeeded in escaping from the apartment in the first confusion produced by the report of the pistol, and before the doors had been closed. Of nine confidants or accomplices in the crime, eight had already gone away without exciting any suspicion: only one was left in the apartment, who affected a slow step and calm demeanour as guarantees of his innocence.

He left the apartment last of all, raising his mask before the officer of police, and saying, as he looked steadfastly at him, "As for me, sir, I hope you do not suspect me." This man was the assassin.

They allowed him to pass; the crime had no other evidence than itself, a pistol, and a knife, sharpened as a poignard, found beneath the masks and flowers on the floor of the opera. The weapon revealed the hand. A gunsmith at Stockholm identified the pistol, and declared he had recently sold it to a Swedish gentleman, formerly an officer in the guards, named Ankastroem. They found Ankastroem at his house, neither thinking of exculpation nor of flight. He confessed the weapon and the crime. An unjust judgment, he averred, in which however the king spared his life, the wearisomeness of an existence which he had cherished to employ and make illustrious at its close for his country's advantage, the hope, if he succeeded, of a national recompence worthy of the deed, had, he declared, inspired this project; and he claimed to himself alone the glory or disgrace. He denied all plot and all accomplices. Beneath the fanatic he masked the conspirator.

He failed in his part, after a few days, beneath the truth and his remorse. He avowed the conspiracy, named the guilty, and the reward of his crime. It was a sum of money, that had been weighed, rix-dollar by rix-dollar, against the blood of Gustavus. The plot, planned six months before, had been thrice frustrated, by chance or destiny—at the diet of Jessen, at Stockholm, and at Haga. The king killed, all his favourites—all the instruments of his government—must be sacrificed to the vengeance of the senate and the restoration of the aristocracy. Their heads were to have been carried at the tops of pikes, in the streets of the capital, in imitation of the popular punishments of Paris. The duke of Sudermania, the king's brother, was to be sacrificed. The young monarch, handed over to the conspirators, was to serve as a passive instrument to re-establish the ancient constitution, and legitimate their crime. The principal conspirators belonged to the first families in Sweden; the shame of their lost power had debased their ambition, even to crime. They were the Count de Bibbing, Count de Horn, Baron d'Erensward, and Colonel Lilienhorn. Lilienhorn, commandant of the guards, drawn from misery and obscurity by the king's favour, promoted to the first rank in the army, and admitted to closest intimacy in the palace, confessed his ingratitude and his crime; seduced, he declared, by the ambition of commanding, during the trouble, the national guard of Stockholm. The part played by La Fayette in Paris seemed to him the ideal of the citizen and the soldier. He could not resist the fascination of the perspective; half-way in the conspiracy, he had endeavoured to render it impossible, even whilst he meditated it. It was he who had written the anonymous letter to the king, in which the king was warned of the failure in the attempt at Haga, and that which threatened him at this fete; with one hand he thrust forward the assassin—with the other he held back the victim, as though he had thus prepared for himself an excuse for his remorse after the deed was done.

On the fatal day he had passed the evening in the king's apartments—had seen him read the letter—had followed him to the ball. Enigma of crime—a pitying assassin! the mind thus divided between the thirst for, and horror of, his benefactor's blood.

VIII.

Gustavus died slowly: he saw death approach and recede with the same indifference, or the same resignation; received his court, conversed with his friends, even reconciled himself to the opponents of his government, who did not conceal their opposition, but did not push their aristocratic resentment to assassination. "I am consoled," he said, to the Count de Brahe, one of the greatest of the nobility and chief of the malcontents, "since death enables me to recover an old friend in you."

He watched to the very last over his kingdom; nominated the Duke of Sudermania regent, instituted a council of regency, made his friend Armsfeld military governor of Stockholm, surrounded the young king, only thirteen years of age, with all that could strengthen his position during his minority. He prepared his passage from one world to another, awaiting his death, so that it should be an event to himself alone. "My son," he wrote, a few hours before he died, "will not come of age before he is eighteen, but I hope he will be king at sixteen;" thus predicting for his successor that precocity of courage and genius which had enabled him to reign and govern before the time. He said to his grand almoner, in confessing himself, "I do not think I shall take with me great merits before God, but at least I shall have the consciousness of never having willingly done harm to any person." Then, having requested a moment's repose to acquire strength, in order to embrace his family for the last time, he bid adieu, with a smile, to his friend Bergenstiern, and, falling asleep, never waked again.

The prince royal, proclaimed king, mounted the throne the same day. The people, whom Gustavus had emancipated from the yoke of the senate, swore spontaneously to defend his institutions in his son. He had so well employed the day, which God had allowed him between assassination and death, that nothing perished but himself, and his shade seemed to continue to reign over Sweden.

This prince had nothing great but his soul, nor handsome but his eyes. Small in size, with broad shoulders, his haunches badly set on, his forehead singularly shaped, long nose, large mouth, the grace and animation of his countenance overcame every imperfection of figure, and rendered Gustavus one of the most attractive men in his dominions; intelligence, goodness, courage, beamed from his eyes, and pervaded his features. You felt the man, admired the king, appreciated the hero. There was heart in his genius, as there is in all really great men. Well informed, deeply read, eloquent, he applied all his endowments to the empire; those whom he had conquered by his courage, he vanquished by his generosity, and charmed by his language. His faults were display and pleasure; he liked the glory of those enjoyments and amours which are found and pardoned in heroes; his vices were those of Alexander, Caesar, and Henri IV. The revenge of a disgraceful amour had something to do with the conspiracy which destroyed him; to resemble these great men, he only wanted their destiny.

When almost a child, he had rescued himself from the tutelage of the aristocracy; in emancipating the throne, he had emancipated the people. At the head of an army, recruited without money, and which he disciplined by its enthusiasm, he conquered Finland, and went on from victory to victory to St. Petersburgh. Checked in his greatness by a revolt of his officers, surrounded in his tent by his guards, he had escaped by flight, and had gone to the succour of another portion of his kingdom, invaded by the Danes. Again a victor against these deadly enemies of Sweden, the gratitude of the nation had restored to him his repentant army; and his sole vengeance was in again leading them to conquest.

He had subdued all without, tranquillised all within, and had only one ambition left—disinterested from every consideration but fame—to avenge the forsaken cause of Louis XVI., and to secure from her persecutors a queen whom he adored at a distance. This was the vision of a hero; it had but one mistake—his genius was vaster than his empire. Heroism with disproportioned means makes the great man resemble an adventurer, and transforms gigantic designs into follies. But history does not judge like fortune, and it is the heart rather than success that makes the hero. The romantic and adventurous character of Gustavus is still the greatness of a restless and struggling soul in the pettiness of its destiny. His death excited a shriek of joy amongst the Jacobins, who deified Ankastroem; but their burst of delight on learning the end of Gustavus, proved how insincere was their affected contempt for this enemy of the constitution.

IX.

These two obstacles removed, nothing now kept France and Europe on terms but the feeble cabinet of Louis XVI. The impatience of the nation, the ambition of the Girondists, and the resentment of the constitutionalists wounded through M. de Narbonne, united them to overthrow this cabinet. Brissot, Vergniaud, Guadet, Condorcet, Gensonne, Petion, their friends in the Assembly, the council-chamber of Madame Roland, their Seids amongst the Jacobins balanced between two ambitions—equally open to their abilities—to destroy power or seize on it. Brissot counselled this latter measure. More conversant with politics than the young orators of the Gironde, he did not comprehend the Revolution without government; anarchy, in his opinion, did not destroy the monarchy more than it did liberty. The greater were events, the more necessary was the direction of them. Placed disarmed in the foremost rank of the Assembly and of opinion, power presented itself, and it was necessary to lay hands upon it. Once in their grasp, they would make of it, according to the dictates of fortune and the will of the people, a monarchy or a republic. Ready for any thing that would allow them to reign in the name of the king or of the people, this counsel was pleasing to men who had scarcely emerged from obscurity, and who, seduced by the facility of their good fortune, seized on it at its first smile. Men who ascend quickly, easily become giddy.

Still a very profound line of policy was disclosed in the secret council of the Girondists, in the choice of the men whom they put forward, and whom they presented for ministers to the king.

Brissot in this gave evidence of the patience of consummate ambition. He inspired Vergniaud, Petion, Guadet, Gensonne, as well as all the leading men of his party, with similar patience. He remained with them in the twilight close to power, but not included in the projected ministry, being desirous of feeling the pulse of popular opinion through secondary men, who could be disavowed or sacrificed at need, and keeping in reserve himself and the leaders of the Girondists, either to support or overthrow this weak and transitory ministry, if the nation should resolve upon more decisive measures. Brissot, and those who acted with him, were thus ready at all points, as well to direct as to replace power—they were masters without any responsibility. The doctrines of Machiavel were very perceptible in this tactic of statesmen. Besides, by abstaining from entering into the first cabinet, they would remain popular, and maintain, in the Assembly and Jacobins, those voices of power which would have been stifled in an administration. Popularity was requisite for their contest with Robespierre, who was treading so closely on their heels, and who would soon be at the head of opinion if they abandoned it to him. On entering upon their course they affected for this rival more contempt than they really felt. Robespierre, single-handed, balanced their influence with the Jacobins. The vociferations of Billaud, Varennes, Danton, Collot d'Herbois, did not in the least alarm them. Robespierre's silence gave them considerable uneasiness. They had been successful in the question of war; but the stoical opposition of Robespierre, and the desire of the people for war, had not affected his reputation. This man had redoubled his power in his isolation. The inspiration of a mind alone and incorruptible was more powerful than the enthusiasm of a whole party. Those who did not approve, still admired him. He had stood aside to allow war to pass by him, but opinion always had its eyes on him, and it might have been said that a secret instinct revealed to the people that in this man was the destiny of the future. When he advanced, they followed him; when he did not move, they waited for him. The Girondists, therefore, were compelled, from prudential motives, to distrust this man, and to remain in the Assembly between their own course and him. These precautions taken, they looked about them for the men who were nullities by themselves, and yet, engrafted on their party, of whom they could make ministers. They required instruments, and not masters,—Seids attached to their fortune, whom they could direct at will either against the king or against the Jacobins—could elevate without fear, or reject without compunction. They sought them in obscurity, and believed they had found them in Claviere, Roland, Dumouriez, Lacoste, and Duranton,—they made only one mistake: Dumouriez, under the guise of an adventurer, had talents equal to any emergency.[18]

X.

The party thus distributed, and Madame Roland informed of the proposed elevation of her husband, the Girondists attacked the ministry in the person of M. de Lessart, at the sitting of the 10th of March. Brissot read against this minister a bill of accusation, skilfully and perfidiously fabricated, in which the appearance presented by facts and the conjecture derived from proofs, cast on the negotiation of M. de Lessart all the odium and criminality of treason. He proposed that a decree of accusation should proceed against the minister for foreign affairs. The Assembly was silent or applauded. Some members, with a view of defending the minister, demanded time in order that the Assembly might reflect on the charge, and thus, at least, affect the impartiality of justice. "Hasten!" exclaimed Isnard; "whilst you are deliberating perhaps the traitor will flee." "I have been a long time judge," replied Boulanger, "and never did I decree capital punishment so lightly." Vergniaud, who saw the indecision of the Assembly, rushed twice into the tribune to combat the excuses and the delays of the right side. Becquet, whose coolness was equal to his courage, desirous of averting the peril, proposed that it should be sent to the diplomatic committee. Vergniaud began to fear that the moment would escape his party, and said, "No, no we do not require actual proofs for a criminal accusation—presumptive proofs are sufficient. There is not one of us in whose minds the cowardice and perfidy which characterises the acts of the minister have not produced the most lively indignation. Is it not he who has for two months kept in his portfolio the decree of the reunion of Avignon with France? and the blood spilled in that city, the mutilated carcases of so many victims, do they not cry to us for vengeance against him? I see from this tribune the palace in which evil counsellors deceive the king whom the constitution gives to us, forge the fetters which enchain us, and plot the stratagems which are to deliver us to the house of Austria. (Loud acclamations.) The day has arrived to put an end to such audacity and insolence, and to crush such conspirators. Dread and terror have frequently, in the ancient times, come forth from this palace in the name of despotism: let them return thither to-day in the name of the law (loud applauses); let them penetrate all hearts; let all those who inhabit it know that the constitution promises inviolability to the king alone; let them learn that the law will reach all the guilty, and that not one head convicted of criminality can escape its sword."

These allusions to the queen, who was accused of directing the Austrian committee, this threatening language, addressed to the king, went echoing into the king's cabinet, and forced his hand to sign the nomination of a Girondist ministry. This was a party manoeuvre, executed beneath the appearance of sudden indignation in the tribune—it was more, it was the first signal made by the Girondists to the men of the 20th of June and the 10th of August. The act of accusation was carried, and De Lessart sent to the court of Orleans, which only yielded him up to the cut-throats of Versailles. He might have fled, but his flight would have been interpreted against the king. He placed himself generously between death and his master, innocent of every crime except his love for him.

The king felt that there was but one step between himself and abdication: that was, by taking his ministry from amongst his enemies, and giving them an interest in power, by placing it in their hands. He yielded to the times, embraced his minister, and requested the Girondists to supply him with another. The Girondists were already silently occupied in so doing. They had previously made, in the name of the party, overtures to Roland at the end of February. "The court," they said to him, "is not very far off from taking Jacobin ministers: not from inclination, but through treachery. The confidence it will feign to bestow will be a snare. It requires violent men in order to impute to them the excesses of the people and the disorders of the kingdom: we must deceive its perfidious hopes, and give to it firm and sagacious patriots. We think of you."

XI.

Roland, whose ambition had soured in obscurity, had smiled at the power which came to avenge his old age. Brissot, himself, had gone to Madame Roland on the 21st of the same month, and repeating the same words, had requested from her the formal consent of her husband. Madame Roland was ambitious, not of power but of fame. Fame lightens up the higher places only, and she ardently desired to see her husband elevated to this eminence. She spoke like a woman who had predicted the event, and whom fortune does not surprise. "The burden is heavy," she said to Brissot, "but Roland has a great consciousness of his own powers, and would derive fresh strength from the feeling of being useful to liberty and his country."

This choice being made, the Girondists cast their eyes on Lacoste, an active commissioner of the navy, a working man, his mind limited by his duties, but honest and upright; his very candour of nature preserving him from faction. Put into council to watch over his master, he naturally became his friend. Duranton, an advocate of Bordeaux, was called to the bureau of justice. The Girondists, who knew him, boasted of his honesty, and relied on his plasticity and weakness. Brissot intended for the finance department Claviere, a Genevese economist, driven from his native land, a relation and friend of his own; used to intrigue; rival of Necker; brought up in the cabinet of Mirabeau, in order to bring forward a rival against this finance minister, so hateful to Mirabeau: a man without republican prejudices or monarchical principles, only seeking in the Revolution a part, and with whom the great aim and end was—to get on. His mind, indifferent to all scruples, was on a level with every situation, and at the height of all parties. The Girondists, new to state affairs, required men well conversant in the details of war and finance departments, and who yet were the mere tools of their government: Claviere was one of these. In the war office they had De Grave, by whom the king had replaced Narbonne. De Grave, who from the subaltern ranks of the army had been raised to the post of minister of war, had declared relations with the Girondists. The friends of Gensonne, Vergniaud, Guadet, Brissot, and even Danton, hoped, through their instrumentality, to save at the same time the constitution and the king. Devoted to both, he was the link by which he hoped to unite the Girondists to royalty. Young, he had the illusions of his age: constitutional, he had the sincerity of his conviction; but weak, in ill health, more ready to undertake than firm to execute, he was one of those men of the moment who help events to their accomplishment, and do not disturb them when they are accomplished.

The principal minister, however, he to whose hands was to be confided the fate of his country, and who was to comprise in himself all the policy of the Girondists, was the minister for foreign affairs, destined to replace the unfortunate De Lessart. The rupture with Europe was the most pressing matter with the party, and they required a man who would control the king, detect the secret intrigues of the court, cognisant of the mysteries of European cabinets, and who knew how, by his skill and resolution, at the same time to force our enemies into a war,—our dubious friends into neutrality,—our secret partisans to an alliance. They sought such a man: he was close at hand.



BOOK XIII.

I.

Dumouriez combined all the requisites of boldness, devotion to the cause, and talent that the Girondists required, and yet, until then, a second-rate man, and almost unknown, had no fortune to hope for but as theirs culminated. His name would not give umbrage to their genius, and if he proved incompetent, or rebelled against their projects, they would remove him without fear, or crush him without pity. Brissot, the diplomatic oracle of the Gironde, was evidently to be the minister who was one day to control our foreign relations, and who en attendant was to govern for the moment under the name of Dumouriez.

The Girondists had discovered Dumouriez in the obscurity of an existence, until then very insignificant, through Gensonne, whose colleague Dumouriez had been in the mission which the Constituent Assembly had given him to visit and examine the position of the western departments, already agitated by the secret presentiment of civil war and the early religious troubles. During this inquiry, which lasted several months, the two commissioners had frequent opportunities for an interchange of their most private thoughts on the great events which at this moment agitated men's minds. They became much attached to each other. Gensonne detected with much tact in his colleague one of those intellects repressed by circumstances, and weighed down by the obscurity of their lot, which it is enough to expose to the open daylight of public action, in order to shine forth with all the brilliancy with which nature and study had endowed it: he had too found in this mind the spring of character strong enough to bear the movements of a revolution, and sufficiently elastic to bend to all the difficulties of affairs. In a word, Dumouriez had on the first contact exercised over Gensonne that influence, that ascendency, that empire which superiority, when it displays and humbles itself, never fails to acquire over minds to which it condescends to disclose itself.

This attractive power, the confidence of genius, was one of the characteristics of Dumouriez, and by that he subsequently made a conquest of the Girondists, the king, the queen, his army, the Jacobins, Danton,—Robespierre himself. It was what great men call their star,—a star which precedes them, and prepares their way. Dumouriez's star was fascination of manner; but this fascination was but the attraction of his just, rapid, quick ideas, into whose orbit the incredible activity of his mind carried away the mind of those who heard his thoughts or witnessed his actions. Gensonne, on his return from his mission, had desired to enrich his party with this unknown man, whose eminence he foresaw from afar. He presented Dumouriez to his friends of the Assembly, to Guadet, Vergniaud, Roland, Brissot, and De Grave: communicated to them his own astonishment at, and confidence in, the twofold faculties of Dumouriez as diplomatist and soldier. He spoke of him as of a concealed saviour, whom fate had reserved for liberty. He conjured them to attach to themselves a man whose greatness would enhance their own.

They had scarcely seen Dumouriez before they were convinced. His intellect was electrical: it struck before they had time to anatomise it. The Girondists presented him to De Grave, and De Grave to the king, who offered him the temporary management of foreign affairs, until M. de Lessart, sent before the Haute Cour, had proved his innocence to his judges, and could resume the place reserved for him in the council. Dumouriez refused the post of minister pro tempore, which would injure and weaken his position before all parties by rendering him suspected by all. The king yielded, and Dumouriez was appointed.

II.

History should pause a moment before this man, who, without having assumed the name of Dictator, concentrated in himself during two years all expiring France, and exercised over his country the most incontestible of dictatorships—that of genius. Dumouriez was of the number of men who are not to be painted by merely naming them, but of those whose previous life explains their nature; who have in the past the secret of their future; who have, like Mirabeau, their existence spread over two epochs; who have their roots in two soils, and are only known by the perusal of every detail.

Dumouriez, son of a commissioner in the war department, was born at Cambrai in 1739; and although his family lived in the north, his blood was southern by extraction. His family, originally from Aix, in Provence, evinced itself in the light, warmth, and sensibility of his nature; there was perceptible the same sky that had rendered so prolific the genius of Mirabeau. His father, a military and well-read man, educated him equally for war and literature. One of his uncles, employed in the foreign office, made him early a diplomatist. A mind equally powerful and supple, he lent himself equally to all—as fitted for action as for thought, he passed from one to the other with facility, according to the phases of his destiny. There was in him the flexibility of the Greek mind in the stirring periods of the democracy in Athens. His deep study early directed his mind to history, that poem of men of action. Plutarch nourished him with his manly diet. He moulded on the antique figures drawn from life by the historian the ideal of his own life, only all the parts of every great man suited him alike: he assumed them by turns, realised them in his reveries, as suited to reproduce In him the voluptuary as the sage, the malcontent as the patriot; Aristippus as Themistocles; Scipio as Coriolanus. He mingled with his studies the exercises of a military life, formed his body to fatigue, at the same time that he fashioned his mind to lofty ideas; equally skilled in handling a sword and daring in subduing a horse.

Demosthenes, by patience, formed a sonorous voice from a stammering tongue. Dumouriez, with a weak and ailing constitution in his childhood, enured his body for war. The stirring ambition of his soul required that the frame which encased it should be of endurance.

III.

Opposing the desires of his father, who destined him for the war office, the pen was his abhorrence, and he obtained a sub-lieutenancy in the cavalry. As aide-de-camp of marshal d'Armentieres, he made the campaign of Hanover. In a retreat he seized the standard from the hands of a fugitive, rallied two hundred troopers round him, saved a battery of five pieces of cannon, and covered the passage of the army. Remaining almost alone in the rear, he made himself a rampart of his dead horse, and wounded three of the enemy's hussars. Wounded in many places by gun-shot and sabre wounds—his thigh entangled beneath a fallen horse—two fingers of his right hand severed—his forehead cut open—his eyes literally singed by a discharge of powder, he still fought, and only surrendered prisoner to the Baron de Beker, who saved his life, and conveyed him to the camp of the English.

His youth and good constitution restored him to health at the end of two months. Destined to form himself to victory by the example of defeats, and want of experience in our generals, he rejoined marshal de Soubise and marshal de Broglie; and was present at the routs which the French owe to their enmity and rivalry.

At the peace he went to rejoin his regiment in garrison at Saint Lo. Passing by Pont Audemer, he stopped at the house of his father's sister. A passionate love for one of his uncle's daughters kept him there. This love, shared by his cousin, and favoured by his aunt, was opposed by his father. The young girl, in despair, took refuge in a convent. Dumouriez swore to take her thence, and went away. On his road, overcome by his grief, he bought some opium at Dieppe, shut himself up in his apartment, wrote his adieus to his beloved, a letter of reproaches to his father, and took the poison. Nature saved him, and repentance ensued—he went, and, throwing himself at his father's feet, they were reconciled.

At four and twenty years of age, after seven campaigns, he brought from the wars only twenty-two wounds, a decoration, the rank of captain, a pension of 600 livres, debts contracted in the service, and a hopeless love, which preyed upon his mind. His ambition, spurred by his love, made him seek in politics that success which war had hitherto refused him.

There was then in Paris one of those enigmatic men who are at the same time intriguers and statesmen. Unknown and unconsidered, they play under some name parts hidden, but important in affairs. Men of police, as well as of politics, the governments that employ and despise them pay their services, not in appointments, but in subsidies. Manoeuvrers in politics, they are paid from day to day—they are urged onwards, compromised, and then disavowed, and sometimes even imprisoned. They suffer all, even captivity and dishonour, for money. Such men are things to buy and sell, and their talent and utility stamp their price. Of this class were Linguet, Brissot, even Mirabeau in his youth. Such at this period was one Favier.

This man, employed in turns by the duc de Choiseul and M. d'Argenson, to draw up diplomatic memoranda, had an infinite knowledge of Europe; he was the vigilant spy of every cabinet, knew their back-games, guessed their intrigues, and kept them in play by counter-mines, of which the minister for foreign affairs did not always know the secret. Louis XV., a king of small ideas and petty resources, was not ashamed to take into his confidence Favier, as an instrument in the schemes he contemplated against his own ministers. Favier was the go-between in the political correspondence which this monarch kept up with the count de Broglie, unknown to, and against the policy of, his own ministers. This confidence, suspected by, rather than known to, his ministers, talent as a very able writer, deep knowledge of national eras, of history, and diplomacy, gave Favier a credit with the administration, and an influence over affairs very much beyond his obscure position and dubious character; he was, in some sort, the minister of the intrigues of high life of his time.

IV.

Dumouriez seeing the high roads to fortune closed before him, resolved to cast himself into them by indirect ways; and with this view attached himself to Favier. Favier attached himself to him, and in this connection of his earlier years, Dumouriez acquired that character for adventure and audacity which gave, during all his life, something skilful as intrigue and as rash as a coup de main to his heroism and his policy. Favier initiated him into the secrets of courts, and engaged Louis XV. and the Duc de Choiseul to employ Dumouriez in diplomacy and war at the same time.

It was at this moment that the great Corsican patriot, Paoli, was making gigantic efforts to rescue his country from the tyranny of the republic of Genoa, and to assure to this people an independence, of which he by turns offered the patronage to England and to France. On reaching Genoa, Dumouriez undertook to deceive at the same time the Republic, England, and Paoli, united himself with Corsican adventurers, conspired against Paoli, made a descent upon the island, which he summoned to independence, and was partially successful. He threw himself into a felucca, to bring to the Duc de Choiseul information as to the new state of Corsica, and to implore the succour of France. Delayed by a tempest, tossed for several weeks on the coast of Africa, he reached Marseilles too late; the treaty between France and Genoa was signed. He hastened to Favier, his friend in Paris.

Favier informed him confidentially, that he was employed to draw up a memorial to prove to the king and his ministers the necessity of supporting the republic of Genoa against the independent Corsicans; that this memorial had been demanded of him secretly by the Genoese ambassador, and by a femme de chambre of the Duchesse de Grammont, favourite sister of the Duc de Choiseul, interested, like the brothers of the Du Barry[19], in supplying the army: that 500 louis were the price of this memorial and the blood of the Corsicans; and he offered a portion of this intrigue and its profits to Dumouriez who pretended to accept this, and then hastening to the Duc de Choiseul, revealed the manoeuvre, was well received, believed he had convinced the minister, and was preparing to return, conveying to the Corsicans the subsidies and arms they expected. Next day, he found the minister changed, and was sent from the audience with harsh language. Dumouriez retired, and made his way unmolested to Spain. Aided by Favier, who was satisfied with having jockeyed him, and pitied his candour; assisted by the Duc de Choiseul, he conspired with the Spanish minister and French ambassador to effect the conquest of Portugal, whose topography he was empowered to study in a military point of view, as well as its means of defence. The Marquis de Pombal, first minister of Portugal, conceived suspicions as to Dumouriez's mission, and forced him to leave Lisbon. The young diplomatist returned to Madrid, learned that his cousin, over-persuaded by the priests, had abandoned him, and meant to take the veil. He then attached himself to another mistress, a young Frenchwoman, daughter of an architect established at Madrid, and for some years his activity reposed in the happiness of a participated love. An order of the Duc de Choiseul recalled him to Paris,—he hesitated: his beloved herself compelled him, and sacrificed him as if she had from afar anticipated his fame. He reached Paris, and was named quartermaster-general of the French army in Corsica, where, as everywhere else, he greatly distinguished himself. At the head of a detachment of volunteers, he seized on the Chateau de Corte, the last asylum and home of Paoli. He retained for himself the library of this unfortunate patriot. The choice of these books, and the notes with which they were covered in Paoli's hand, revealed one of those characters which seek their fellows in the finest models of antiquity. Dumouriez was worthy of this spoil, since he appreciated it above gold. The great Frederic called Paoli the first captain of Europe: Voltaire declared him the conqueror and lawgiver of his country. The French blushed at conquering him—fortune at forsaking him. If he did not emancipate his country, he deserved that his struggle should be immortalised. Too great a citizen for so small a people, he did not bear a reputation in proportion to his country, but to his virtues. Corsica remains in the ranks of conquered provinces; but Paoli must always be in the ranks of great men.

V.

After his return to Paris, Dumouriez passed a year in the society of the literary men and women of light fame who gave to the society of the period the spirit and the tone of a constant orgy. Forming an attachment with an old acquaintance of Madame Du Barry, he knew this parvenue courtezan, whom libertinism had elevated nearly to the throne. Devoted to the Duc de Choiseul, the enemy of this mistress of the king, and retaining that remnant of virtue which amongst the French is called honour, he did not prostitute his uniform to the court, and blushed to see the old monarch, at the reviews of Fontainebleau, walk on foot with his hat off before his army, beside a carriage in which this woman displayed her beauty and her empire. Madame Du Barry took offence at the forgetfulness of the young officer, and divined the cause of his absence. Dumouriez was sent to Poland on the same errand that had before despatched him to Portugal. His mission, half diplomatic, half military, was, in consequence of a secret idea of the king, approved by his confidant, the Count de Broglie, and by Favier, the count's adviser.