VII.

One of those sinister persons who seem to smell blood and presage crime, reached Avignon from Versailles: his name was Jourdan. He is not to be confounded with another revolutionist of the same name, born at Avignon. Sprung from the arid and calcined mountains of the south, where the very brutes are more ferocious; by turns butcher, farrier, and smuggler, in the gorges which separate Savoy from France; a soldier, deserter, horse-jobber, and then a keeper of a low wine shop in the suburbs of Paris; he had wallowed in all the lowest vices of the dregs of a metropolis. The first murders committed by the people in the streets of Paris had disclosed his real character. It was not that of contest but of murder. He appeared after the carnage to mangle the victims, and render the assassination fouler. He was a butcher of men, and he boasted of it. It was he who had thrust his hands into the open breasts and plucked forth the hearts of Foulon and Berthier.[14] It was he who had cut off the head of the two gardes-du-corps, de Varicourt and des Huttes, at Versailles, on the 6th of October. It was he who, entering Paris, bearing the two heads at the end of a pike, reproached the people with being content with so little, and having made him go so far to cut off only two heads! He hoped for better things at Avignon, and went thither.

There was at Avignon a body of volunteers called the army of Vaucluse, formed of the dregs of that country, and commanded by one Patrix. This Patrix having been assassinated by his troop, whose excesses he desired to moderate, Jourdan was elevated to the command by the claims of sedition and wickedness. The soldiers, when reproached with their robberies and murders, similar to those of the Gueux of Belgium, and the sans-culottes of Paris, received the reproach as an honour, and called themselves the brave brigands of Avignon. Jourdan at the head of this band, ravaged and fired le Comtal, laid siege to Carpentras, was repulsed, lost five hundred men, and fell back upon Avignon, still shuddering at the murder of Lescuyer. He resolved on lending his arm and his troop to the vengeance of the French party. On the 30th of August Jourdan and his myrmidons closed the city-gates, dispersed through the streets, going to the houses noted as containing enemies to the Revolution, dragging out the inhabitants—men, women, aged persons, and children,—all, without distinction of age, sex or innocence, and shut them up in the palace. When night came, the assassins broke down the doors and murdered with iron crow-bars these disarmed and supplicating victims. In vain did they shriek to the national guard for aid: the city hears the massacre without daring to give any signs of animation. The daring of the crime chilled and paralysed every citizen. The murderers preluded the death of the females by derision and insults which added shame to terror, and the agonies of modesty to the pangs of murder. When there were no more to be slain they mutilated the carcases, and swept the blood into the sewer of the palace. They dragged the mutilated corpses to La Glaciere, walled them up, and the vengeance of the people was stamped upon them. Jourdan and his satellites offered the homage of this night to the French mediators and the National Assembly. The scoundrels of Paris admired—the Assembly shook with indignation, and considered this crime as an outrage; whilst the president fainted on reading the recital of this night at Avignon. The arrest of Jourdan and his accomplices was commanded. Jourdan fled from Avignon, pursued by the French; he dashed his horse in to the river of the Sargue: caught in the middle of the river, by a soldier, he fired at him and missed. He was seized and bound, and punishment awarded him, but the Jacobins compelled the Girondists to agree to an amnesty for the crimes of Avignon. Jourdan making sure of impunity, and proud of his iniquities, went thither to be revenged on his denouncers.

The Assembly shuddered for a moment at the sight of this blood, and then hastily turned its eyes away. In its impatience to reign alone, it had not the time to display pity. There was, besides, between the Girondists and the Jacobins a contest for leadership, and a rivalry in going a-head of the Revolution, which made each of the two factions afraid that the other should be in advance. Dead bodies did not make them pause, and tears shed for too long a time might have been taken for weakness.

VIII.

However, victims multiplied daily, and disasters followed disasters. The whole empire seemed ready to fall and crush its founders. San Domingo, the richest of the French colonies, was swimming in blood. France was punished for its egotism. The Constituent Assembly had proclaimed, in principle, the liberty of the blacks, but, in fact, slavery still existed. Two hundred thousand slaves served as human cattle to some thousands of colonists. They were bought and sold, and cut and maimed, as if they were inanimate objects. They were kept by speculation out of the civil law, and out of the religious law. Property, family, marriage, all was forbidden to them. Care was taken to degrade them below men, to preserve the right of treating them as brutes. If some unions furtive, or favoured by cupidity, were formed amongst them, the wife and children belonged to the master. They were sold separately, without any regard to the ties of nature, all the attachments with which God has formed the chain of human sympathies were rent asunder without commiseration.

This crime en masse, this systematic brutality, had its theorists and apologists; human faculties were denied to the blacks. They were classed as a race between the flesh and the spirit. Thus the infamous abuse of power, which was exercised over this inert and servile race, was called necessary guardianship. Tyrants have never wanted sophists: on the other hand, men of right feeling towards their fellows, who had, like Gregoire, Raynal, Barnave, Brissot, Condorcet, La Fayette, embraced the cause of humanity, and formed the "Society of the Friends of the Blacks" had circulated their principles in the colonies, like a vengeance rather than as justice. These principles had burst forth without preparation, and unanticipated in colonial society, where truth had no organ but insurrection. Philosophy proclaims principles; politics administer them; the friends of the blacks were contented with proclaiming them. France had not had courage to dispossess and indemnify her colonists: she had acquired liberty for herself alone: she adjourned, as she still adjourns at the moment I write these lines, the reparation for the crime of slavery in her colonies: could she be astonished that slavery should seek to avenge herself, and that liberty, warmly proclaimed in Paris, should not become an insurrection at San Domingo? Every iniquity that a free society allows to subsist for the profit of the oppressor, is a sword with which she herself arms the oppressed. Right is the most dangerous of weapons; woe to him who leaves it to his enemies!

IX.

San Domingo proved this. Fifty thousand black slaves rose in one night at the instigation, and under the command, of the mulattoes, or men of colour. The men of colour, the intermediary race, springing from white colonists and black slaves, were not slaves, neither were they citizens. They were a kind of freedmen, with the defects and virtues of the two races; the pride of the whites, the degradation of the blacks: a fluctuating race who, by turning sometimes to the side of the slaves, sometimes to that of the masters, inevitably produced those terrible oscillations which inevitably superinduce the overthrow of society.

The mulattoes, who themselves possessed slaves, had begun by making common cause with the colonists, and by opposing the emancipation of the blacks more obstinately than even the whites themselves. The nearer they were to slavery, the more doggedly did they defend their share in tyranny. Man is thus made: none is more ready to abuse his right than he who, with difficulty, has acquired it; there are no tyrants worse than slaves, and no men prouder than parvenus.

The men of colour had all the vices of parvenus of liberty. But when they perceived that the whites despised them as a mingled race, that the Revolution had not effaced the tinge of their skin, and the injurious prejudices which were attached to their colour; when they in vain claimed for themselves the exercise of civil rights, which the colonists opposed, they passed with the impetuosity and levity of their conduct from one passion to another, from one party to the other, and made common cause with the oppressed race. Their habits of command, fortune, intelligence, energy, boldness, naturally pointed them out as the leaders of the blacks. They fraternised with them, they became popular amongst the blacks, from the very tinge of skin for which they had recently blushed, when in company with the whites. They secretly fomented the germs of insurrection at the nightly meetings of the slaves. They kept up a clandestine correspondence with the friends of the blacks in Paris. They spread widely in the huts, speeches and papers from Paris, which instructed the colonists in their duties and informed the slaves of their indefeasible rights. The rights of man, commented upon by vengeance, became the catechism of all dwellings.

The whites trembled; terror urged them to violence. The blood of the mulatto Oge and his accomplices, shed by M. de Blanchelande, governor of San Domingo and the colonial council, sowed every where despair and conspiracy.

X.

Oge, deputed to Paris by the men of colour to assert their rights in the Constituent Assembly, had become known to Brissot, Raynal, Gregoire, and was affiliated with them to the Society of the Friends of the Blacks. Passing thence into England, he became known to the admirable philanthropist, Clarkson. Clarkson and his friend at this time were pleading the cause of the emancipation of the negroes: they were the first apostles of that religion of humanity who believed that they could not raise their hands purely towards God, so long as those hands retained a link of that chain which holds a race of human beings in degradation and in slavery. The association with these men of worth expanded Oge's mind. He had come to Europe only to defend the interest of the mulattoes; he now took up with warmth the more liberal and holy cause of all the blacks; he devoted himself to the liberty of all his brethren. He returned to France, and became very intimate with Barnave; he entreated the Constituent Assembly to apply the principles of liberty to the colonies, and not to make any exception to Divine law, by leaving the slaves to their masters; excited and irritated by the hesitation of the committee, who withdrew with one hand what it gave with the other, he declared that if justice could not suffice for their cause, he would appeal to force. Barnave had said, "Perish the colonies rather than a principle!" The men of the 14th of July had no right to condemn, in the heart of Oge, that revolt which was their own title to independence. We may believe that the secret wishes of the friends of the blacks followed Oge, who returned to San Domingo. He found there the rights of men of colour and the principles of liberty of the blacks more denied and more profaned than ever. He raised the standard of insurrection, but with the forms and rights of legality. At the head of a body of two hundred men of colour, he demanded the promulgation in the colonies of the decrees of the National Assembly, despotically delayed until that time. He wrote to the military commandant at the Cape, "We require the proclamation of the law which makes us free citizens. If you oppose this, we will repair to Leogane, we will nominate electors, and repel force by force. The pride of the colonists revolts at sitting beside us: was the pride of the nobility and clergy consulted when the equality of citizens was proclaimed in France?"

The government replied to this eloquent demand for liberty by sending a body of troops to disperse the persons assembled, and Oge drove them back.

XI.

A larger body of troops being despatched, they contrived, after a desperate resistance, to disperse the mulattoes. Oge escaped, and found refuge in the Spanish part of the island. A price was set upon his head. M. de Blanchelande in his proclamations imputed it as a crime to him that he had claimed the rights of nature in the name of the Assembly, which had so loudly proclaimed the rights of the citizen. They applied to the Spanish authorities to surrender this Spartacus, equally dangerous to the safety of the whites in both countries. Oge was delivered up to the French by the Spaniards, and sent for trial to the Cape. His trial was protracted for two months, in order to afford time to cut asunder all the threads of the plot of independence, and intimidate his accomplices. The whites, in great excitement, complained of these delays, and demanded his head with loud vociferations. The judges condemned him to death for a crime which in the mother-country had constituted the glory of La Fayette and Mirabeau.

He underwent torture in his dungeon. The rights of his race, centred and persecuted in him, raised his soul above the torments of his executioners. "Give up all hope," he exclaimed, with unflinching daring; "give up all hope of extracting from me the name of even one of my accomplices. My accomplices are everywhere where the heart of a man is raised against the oppressors of men." From that moment he pronounced but two words, which sounded like a remorse in the ears of his persecutors—Liberty! Equality! He walked composedly to his death; listened with indignation to the sentence which condemned him to the lingering and infamous death of the vilest criminals. "What!" he exclaimed; "do you confound me with criminals because I have desired to restore to my fellow-creatures the rights and titles of men which I feel in myself! Well! you have my blood, but an avenger will arise from it!" He died on the wheel, and his mutilated carcase was left on the highway. This heroic death reached even to the National Assembly, and gave rise to various opinions. "He deserved it," said Malouet; "Oge was a criminal and an assassin." "If Oge be guilty," replied Gregoire, "so are we all; if he who claimed liberty for his brothers perished justly on the scaffold, then all Frenchmen who resemble us should mount there also."

XII.

Oge's blood bubbled silently in the hearts of all the mulatto race. They swore to avenge him. The blacks were an army all ready for the massacre; the signal was given to them by the men of colour. In one night 60,000 slaves, armed with torches and their working tools, burnt down all their masters' houses in a circuit of six leagues round the Cape. The whites were murdered; women, children, old men—nothing escaped the long-repressed fury of the blacks. It was the annihilation of one race by the other. The bleeding heads of the whites, carried on the tops of sugar canes, were the standards which guided these hordes, not to combat, but to carnage. The outrages of so many centuries, committed by the whites on the blacks, were avenged in one night. A rivalry of cruelty seemed to arise between the two colours. The negroes imitated the tortures so long used upon them, and invented new ones. If certain noble and faithful slaves placed themselves between their old masters and death, they were sacrificed together. Gratitude and pity are virtues which civil war never recognises. Colour was a sentence of death without exception of persons; the war was between the races, and no longer between men. The one must perish for the other to live! Since justice could not make itself understood by them, there was nothing but death left for them. Every gift of life to a white was a treason which would cost a black man's life. The negroes had no longer any pity: they were men no longer, they were no longer a people, but a destroying element which spread over the land, annihilating every thing.

In a few hours eight hundred habitations, sugar and coffee stores, representing an immense capital, were destroyed. The mills, magazines, utensils, and even the very plant which reminded them of their servitude and their compulsory labour, were cast into the flames. The whole plain, as far as eye could reach, was covered with nothing but the smoke and the ashes of conflagration. The dead bodies of whites, piled in hideous trophies of heads and limbs, of men, women, and infants assassinated, alone marked the spot of the rich residences, where they were supreme on the previous night. It was the revenge of slavery: all tyranny has such fearful reverses.

Some whites, warned in time of the insurrection by the generous indiscretion of the blacks, or protected in their flight by the forests and the darkness, had taken refuge at the Cape Town; others, concealed with their wives and children in caves, were fed and attended to by attached slaves, at the peril of their lives. The army of blacks increased without the walls of the Cape Town, where they formed and disciplined a fortified camp. Guns and cannons arrived by the aid of invisible auxiliaries. Some accused the English, others the Spaniards; others, the "friends of the blacks," with being accomplices of this insurrection. The Spaniards, however, were at peace with France; the revolt of the blacks menaced them equally with ourselves. The English themselves possessed three times as many slaves as the French: the principle of the insurrection, excited by success, and spreading with them, would have ruined their establishments, and compromised the lives of their colonists. These suspicions were absurd; there was no one culpable but liberty itself, which is not to be repressed with impunity in a portion of the human race. It had accomplices in the very heart of the French themselves.

The weakness of the resolutions of the Assembly on the reception of this news proved this. M. Bertrand de Molleville, minister of marine, ordered the immediate departure of 6000 men as reinforcement for the isle of San Domingo.

Brissot attacked these repressive measures in a discourse in which he did not hesitate to cast the odium of the crime on the victims, and to accuse the government of complicity with the aristocracy of the colonists.

"By what fatality does this news coincide with a moment when emigrations are redoubled? when the rebels assembled on our frontiers warn us of an approaching outbreak? when, in fact, the colonies threaten us, through an illegal deputation, with withdrawing from the rule of the mother-country? Has not this the appearance of a vast plan combined by treason?"

The repugnance of the friends of the blacks, numerous in the Assembly, to take energetic measures in favour of the colonists, the distance from the scene of action, which weakens pity, and then the interior movement which attracted into its sphere minds and things, soon effaced these impressions, and allowed the spirit of independence amongst the blacks to form and expand at San Domingo, which showed itself in the distance in the form of a poor old slave—Toussaint-Louverture.

XIII.

The internal disorder multiplied at every point of the empire. Religious liberty, which was desire of the Constituent Assembly, and the most important conquest of the Revolution, could not be established without this struggle in face of a displaced worship, and a schism which spread far and wide amongst the people. The counter-revolutionary party was allied every where with the clergy. They had the same enemies, and conspired against the same cause. The nonjuring priests had assumed the character of victims, and the interest of a portion of the people, especially in the country, attached to them. Persecution is so odious to the public feeling that its very appearance raises generous indignation against it. The human mind has an inclination to believe that justice is on the side of the proscribed. The priests were not as yet persecuted, but from the moment that they were no longer paramount they believed themselves humiliated. The ill-repressed irritation of the clergy has been more injurious to the Revolution than all the conspiracies of the emigrated aristocracy. Conscience is man's most sensitive point. A superstition attacked, or a faith disturbed in the mind of a people, is the fellest of conspiracies. It was by the hand of God, invisible in the hand of the priesthood, that the aristocracy roused La Vendee. Frequent and bloody symptoms already betrayed themselves in the west, and in Normandy, that concealed focus of religious war.

The most fearful of these symptoms burst out at Caen. The Abbe Fauchet was constitutional bishop of Calvados. The celebrity of his name, the elevated patriotism of his opinions, the eclat of his revolutionary renown, his eloquence, and his writings, disseminated widely in his diocese, were the causes of greater excitement throughout Calvados than elsewhere.

Fauchet, whose conformity of opinions, honesty of feelings for renovation, and even whose somewhat fanciful imagination, which were subsequently destined to associate him in acts, and even on the scaffold, with the Girondists, was born at Domes, in the ancient province of Nivernais. He embraced the Catholic faith, entered into the free community of the priests of Saint Roch, at Paris, and was for some time preceptor to the children of the marquis de Choiseul, brother of the famous duke de Choiseul, the last minister of the school of Richelieu and Mazarin. A remarkable talent for speaking gave him a distinguished reputation in the pulpit. He was appointed preacher to the king, abbe of Montfort, and grand-vicaire of Bourges. He advanced rapidly towards the first dignities of the church; but his mind had imbibed the spirit of the times. He was not a destructive, but a reformer of the church, in whose bosom he was born. His work, entitled De l'Eglise Nationale, proves in him as much respect for the principles of the Christian faith as boldness of desire to change its discipline. This philosophic faith, which so closely resembles the Christian Platonism which was paramount in Italy under the Medici, and even in the palace of the popes themselves under Leo X., breathed throughout his sacred discourses. The clergy was alarmed at these lights of the age shining in the very sanctuary. The Abbe Fauchet was interdicted, and, struck off the list of the king's preachers.

But the Revolution already opened other tribunes to him. It burst forth, and he rushed headlong into it, as imagination rushes towards hope. He fought for it from the day of its birth, and with every kind of weapon. He shook the people in the primary assemblies, and in the sections; he urged with voice and gesture the insurgent masses under the cannon of the Bastille. He was seen, sword in hand, to lead on the assailants. Thrice did he advance, under fire of the cannon, at the head of the deputation which summoned the governor to spare the lives of the citizens, and to surrender.[15] He did not soil his revolutionary zeal with any blood or crime. He inflamed the mind of the people for liberty; but with him liberty was virtue; nature had endowed him with this twofold character. There were in his features the high-priest and the hero. His exterior pleased and attracted the populace. He was tall and slender, with a wide chest, oval countenance, black eyes, and his dark brown hair set off the paleness of his brow. His imposing but modest appearance inspired at the first glance favour and respect. His voice clear, impressive, and full-toned; his majestic carriage, his somewhat mystical style, commanded the reflection, as well as the admiration, of his auditors. Equally adapted to the popular tribune or the pulpit, electoral assemblies or cathedral were alike too circumscribed in limits for the crowds who flocked to hear him. It seemed as though he were a revolutionary saint—Bernard preaching political charity, or the crusade of reason.

His manners were neither severe nor hypocritical. He; himself confessed that he loved with legitimate and pure; affection Madame Carron, who followed him every where, even to churches and clubs. "They calumniated me with respect to her," he said, "and I attached myself the more strongly to her, and yet I am pure. You have seen her, even more lovely in mind than face, and who for the ten years I have known her seems to me daily more worthy of being loved. She would lay down her life for me; I would resign my life for her; but I would never sacrifice my duty to her. In spite of the malignant libels of the aristocrats, I shall go every day at breakfast-time to taste the charms of the purest friendship in her society. She comes to hear me preach! Yes, no doubt of it; no one knows better than herself the sincerity with which I believe in the truths I profess. She comes to the assemblies of the Hotel-de-Ville! Yes, no doubt of it: it is because she is convinced that patriotism is a second religion, that no hypocrisy is in my soul, and that my life is really devoted to God, to my country, and friendship."

"And you dare to assert that you are chaste," retorted the faithful and indignant priests, by the Abbe de Valmeron. "How absurd! Chaste, at the moment when you confess the most unpardonable inclinations; when you attract a woman from the bed of her husband—her duties as a mother—when you take about every where this infatuated female, attached to your footsteps, in order to display her ostentatiously to the public gaze! And who follow, sir! A troop of ruffians and abandoned women. Worthy pastor of this foul populace, which celebrates your pastoral visit by the only rejoicings that can give you pleasure—your progress is marked by every excess of rapine and debauchery." These bitter reproaches resounded in the provinces, and caused great excitement. The conforming and nonconforming priests were disputing the altars. A letter from the minister of the interior came to authorise the nonjuring priests to celebrate the holy sacrifice in the churches where they had previously done duty. Obedient to the law, the constitutional priests opened to them their chapels, supplied them with the ornaments necessary for divine worship; but the multitude, faithful to their ancient pastors, threatened and insulted the new clergy. Bloody struggles took place between the two creeds on the very threshold of God's house. On Friday, November the 4th, the former cure of the parish of Saint Jean, at Caen, came to perform the mass. The church was full of Catholics. This meeting offended the constitutionalists and excited the other party. The Te Deum, as a thanksgiving, was demanded and sung by the adherents of the ancient cure, who, encouraged by this success, announced to the faithful that he should come again the next day at the same hour to celebrate the sacrament. "Patience!" he added; "let us be prudent, and all will be well."

The municipality, informed of these circumstances, entreated the cure to abstain from celebrating the mass the next day, as he had announced; and he complied with their wishes. The multitude, not informed of this, filled the church, and clamoured for the priest and the promised Te Deum. The gentry of the neighbourhood, the aristocracy of Caen, the clients and numerous domestics of the leading families in the neighbourhood, had arms under their clothes. They insulted the grenadiers; an officer of the national guard reprimanded them. "You come to seek what you shall get," replied the aristocrats: "we are the stronger, and will drive you from the church." At these words some young men rushed on the national guards to disarm them: a struggle ensued, bayonets glittered, pistol shots resounded in the cathedral, and they made a charge, sword in hand. Companies of chasseurs and grenadiers entered the church, cleared it, and followed the crowd, step by step, who fired again upon them when in the street. Some killed and others wounded, were the sad results of the day. Tranquillity seemed restored. Eighty-two persons were arrested, and on one of them was found a pretended plan of counter-revolution, the signal for which was to be given on the following Monday. These documents were forwarded to Paris. The nonjuring priests were suspended from the celebration of the holy mysteries in the churches of Caen until the decision of the National Assembly. The Assembly heard with indignation the recital of these troubles, occasioned by the enemies of the constitution, and the adherents of fanaticism and the aristocracy. "The only part we have to take," said Cambon, "is to convoke the high national court, and send the accused before it." They deferred pronouncing on this proposition until the moment when they should be in possession of all the papers relative to the troubles in Caen.

Gensonne detailed the particulars of similar disturbances in La Vendee: the mountains of the south, La Lozere, l'Herault, l'Ardeche, which were but ill repressed by the recent dispersion of the camp of Jales, the first act of the counter-revolutionary army, were now greatly agitated by the two-fold impulse of their priests and gentry. The plains, furnished with streams, roads, towns, and easily kept down by the central force, submitted without resistance to the contre-coups of Paris. The mountains preserve their customs longer, and resist the influence of new ideas as to a conquest by armed strangers. It seems as though the appearance of these natural ramparts gave their inhabitants confidence in their strength, and a solid conviction of the unchangeableness of things, which prevents them from being so easily carried away by the rapid currents of alteration.

The mountaineers of these countries felt for their nobles that voluntary and traditional devotion which the Arabs have for their sheiks, and the Scots for the chieftains of their clans. This respect and this attachment form part of the national honour in these rural districts. Religion, more fervent in the south, was in the eyes of these people a sacred liberty, on which revolution made attempts in the name of political liberty. They preferred the liberty of conscience to the liberty as citizens. Under all these titles the new institutions were odious: faithful priests nourished this hatred, and sanctified it in the hearts of the peasantry, whilst the nobility kept up a royalism, which pity for the king's misfortunes and the royal family made more full of sympathy at the daily recital of fresh outrages.

Mende, a small village hidden at the bottom of deep valleys, half way between the plains of the south and those of the Lyonnais, was the centre of counter-revolutionary spirit. The bourgeoisie and the nobility, mingled together from the smallness of their fortunes, the familiarity of their manners, and the frequent unions of their families, did not entertain towards each other that intestine envy, hatred, and malice, which was favourable to the Revolution. There was neither pride in the one nor jealousy in the other: it was as it is in Spain, one single people, where nobility is only, if we may say so, but a right of first birth of the same blood. These people had, it is true, laid down their arms after the insurrection of the preceding year in the camp of Jales: but hearts were far from being disarmed. These provinces watched with an attentive eye for the favourable moment in which they might rise en masse against Paris. The insults to the dignity of the king, and the violence done to religion by the Legislative Assembly, excited their minds even to fanaticism. They burst out again, as though involuntarily, on the occasion of a movement of troops across their valleys. The tricoloured cockade, emblem of infidelity to God and the king, had entirely disappeared for several months in the town of Mende, and they put up the white cockade, as a souvenir and a hope of that order of things to which they were secretly devoted.

The directory of the department, consisting of men strangers to the country, resolved on having the emblem of the constitution respected, and applied for some troops of the line. This the municipality opposed, in a resolution addressed to the directory, and made an insurrectional appeal to the neighbouring municipalities, and a kind of federation with them to resist together the sending of any troops into their districts. However, the troops sent from Lyons at the request of the directory approached; on their appearance, the municipality dissolved the ancient national guard, composed of a few friends of liberty, and formed a fresh national guard, of which the officers were chosen by itself from amongst the gentry and most devoted royalists of the neighbourhood. Armed with this force, the municipality compelled the directory of the department to supply them with arms and ammunition.

Such were the movements of the town of Mende, when the troops entered the place. The national guard, under arms, replied to the cry of Vive la nation, uttered by the troops, by the cry of Vive le roi. Then they followed the soldiers to the principal square in the city, and there took, in presence of the defenders of the constitution, an oath to obey the king only, and to recognise no one but the king. After this audacious display, the national guard, in parties, paraded the town, insulting, braving the soldiers: swords were drawn, and blood flowed. The troops pursued made a stand, and took to their weapons. The municipality, having the directory in check, and holding it as hostage, compelled it to send the troops orders to withdraw to their quarters. The commandant of the forces obeyed. This victory emboldened the national guard; and during the night it compelled the directory to send the troops an order to leave the city and evacuate the department. The national guard, drawn up in a line of battle in the square of Mende, saw hourly its ranks increase by detachments of the neighbouring municipalities, who came down from the mountains, armed with fowling pieces, scythes, and ploughshares. The troops would have been massacred if they had not retired under cover of the night. They retreated from the city amidst victorious cries from the royalists. The following day was a series of fetes, in which the royalists of the town and those of the city celebrated their common triumph, and fraternised together. They insulted all the emblems of the Revolution; hooted the constitution; plundered the hall of the Jacobins; burnt down the houses of the principal members of this hateful club—put some in prison. But their vengeance confined itself to outrage. The people, controlled by the gentlemen and the cures, spared the blood of their enemies.

XIV.

Whilst humiliated liberty was threatened by fanaticism in the south, it, in its turn, carried on the work of assassination in the north. Brest was the very focus of Jacobinism—the close proximity of La Vendee gave this city reason to apprehend the counter-revolution that constantly threatened them—the presence of the fleet, commanded by officers suspected of favouring the aristocratic part—a population greatly composed of strangers and sailors, accessible to corruption, and capable of being readily excited to crime—rendered this city more turbulent and more agitated than any other port in the kingdom. The clubs constantly strove to work on the sailors to mutiny against their officers, whilst the revolutionists mistrusted the navy, as that was far more independent of the people than the army, for the court could at a moment change the station of the fleet, and turn their cannon against the constitution, and the feeling of discipline, of aristocracy, and of the colonies, were all contrary to the new school of ideas; and for this reason the Jacobins had for some time striven to disorganise the fleet. The appointment of M. de Lajaille to the command of one of the vessels destined to carry assistance to San Domingo, caused an outbreak of the suspicions infused into the minds of the inhabitants of Brest, and of the officers of the navy. M. de Lajaille was designated by the clubs as a traitor to the nation, who was about to introduce the counter-revolutionary feeling in the colonies. Attacked at the moment he was about to embark, by a crowd of nearly three thousand persons, he was covered with wounds, stretched senseless on the ground, and would have been killed, but for the heroic devotion of a workman, who shielded him with his own body, and defended him until the arrival of the civic guard. M. de Lajaille was, however, to appease popular feeling, imprisoned: in vain did the king order the municipal authorities of Brest to set this innocent and valuable officer free; in vain did the minister of justice demand chastisement for this attempted murder, committed in broad daylight, in the presence of the whole town; in vain was a sabre and a gold medal voted to the courageous LANVERGENT, who had saved de Lajaille; the dread of a more formidable outbreak assured the guilty of impunity, and detained the innocent in prison. On the eve of war the naval officers, threatened with mutiny on board their vessels, and assassination on shore, had as much to apprehend from their crews as from the enemy.

XV.

The same discords were fomented in all the garrisons between the soldiers and the officers, and the insubordination of the troops was, in the eyes of the clubs, the chief virtue of the army. The people every where sided with the soldiers, and the officers were constantly disturbed by conspiracies and revolts in the regiments. The fortified towns were the theatres of military outbreaks, which invariably terminated in the impunity of the soldier, and the imprisonment or the forced emigration of the officers. The Assembly, the supreme and partial judge, always decided in favour of insubordination: unable to restrain the people, it flattered their excesses. Perpignan was a new proof of this.

In the night of the 6th of December, the officers of the regiment of Cambresis, in garrison in this town, went in a body to M. de Chollet, the general who commanded the division, and urged him to retire into the citadel, as they had learnt that a conspiracy was formed in the regiment, which threatened alike his and their lives. M. de Chollet complied with their earnest request, whilst they went to the barracks, and ordered the men to follow them to the citadel. The soldiers replied that they would only obey M. Desbordes, their lieutenant-colonel, in whose patriotism they had the greatest confidence. M. Desbordes came, and read to the soldiers the order of the general; but the inflexion of his voice, the expression of his face, his glance, alike seemed to protest against the order which his duty as a soldier compelled him to communicate to them. The troops understood this mute appeal, and declared that they would not quit their quarters, because the municipal authorities had forbidden them: the national guard joined them and patrolled the streets: the officers shut themselves up in the citadel, and shots were fired from the ramparts. Lieutenant-Colonel Desbordes, the national guard, the gendarmerie, and the regiments, stormed the citadel. The officers of the regiment of Cambresis were imprisoned by their soldiers; one, however, escaped, and committed suicide on the frontiers of Spain. The unfortunate general, Chollet, victim of the violence of the officers and soldiers, was impeached with fifty officers, or inhabitants of Perpignan. They were ordered before the high national court of Orleans; and thus were fifty victims predestined to perish in the massacre at Versailles.

XVI.

Blood flowed every where. The clubs seduced the regiments; patriotic motions, denunciations against the generals, perfidious insinuations against the fidelity of the officers, were constantly instilled into the minds of the army by the people. The officer was a prey to terror, the soldier to mistrust. The premeditated plan of the Jacobins and Girondists was to destroy in concert this body that was yet attached to the king, deprive the nobility of their command, substitute plebeians for nobles as officers, and thus give the army to the nation. In the meantime they surrendered it to anarchy and sedition; but these two parties finding that the disorganisation was not sufficiently rapid, wished to sum up in one act the systematic corruption of the army, the ruin of all military discipline, and the legal triumph of the insurrection.

We have already mentioned how prominent a part the Swiss regiment of Chateauvieux had taken in the famous insurrection of Nancy during the latter period of the existence of the Constituent Assembly. An army under M. de Bouille had been necessary to repress the armed revolt of several regiments that threatened all France with the rule of the tyrannical soldiery. M. de Bouille, at the head of a body of troops from Metz, and the battalions of the national guard, had surrounded Nancy, and after a desperate contest at the gates, and in the streets of the town, forced the rebels to lay down their arms. These vigorous measures for the restoration of order were applauded by all parties, and reflected equal glory on M. de Bouille and disgrace on the soldiers. Switzerland, by virtue of her treaties with France, preserved her right of federal justice over the regiments of her nation, and this essentially military country had tried by court-martial the regiment of Chateauvieux. Twenty-four of the ringleaders had been condemned and executed in expiation of the blood they had shed, and the fidelity they had violated, the remainder had been decimated, and forty-one soldiers now were undergoing their sentence on board the galleys at Brest. The amnesty proclaimed by the king for the crimes committed during the civil troubles, when he accepted the constitution, could not be applied to these foreign soldiers, for the right to pardon belongs alone to those who have the right to punish.

Sentenced by the judgment of the Helvetian jurisdiction, neither the king nor the Assembly could invalidate the judgment, or annul its effects. The king had, at the entreaty of the Constituent Assembly, in vain attempted to obtain the pardon of these soldiers from the Swiss confederation.

These fruitless negotiations served the Jacobins and the National Assembly as food for accusation against M. de Montmorin. In vain did he justify himself by alleging the impossibility of obtaining such an amnesty from Switzerland, at a moment when this country, who had suffered from civil commotions, sought to restore order by the laws of Draco. "We shall be then the compulsory gaolers of this ferocious people," cried Guadet and Collot d'Herbois. "France must then degrade herself so far as to punish in her very ports those heroes who have gained the people a triumph over the aristocratic officers, and shed their blood for the nation instead of pouring it out in the cause of despotism."

Pastoret, an influential member of the moderate party, and who was said to concert all his measures with the king, supported Guadet's motion, in order to give the king popularity by an act agreeable to the nation; and the freedom of the soldiers of Chateauvieux was voted by the Assembly. The king, having delayed his sanction for some time, in order not to wound the cantons by this violent usurpation of their rights over their own countrymen, afforded the Jacobins fresh ground for imprecation and invective against the court and the ministers. "The moment is come when one man must perish for the safety of all," cried Manuel, "and this man must be a minister; they all appear to me so guilty, that I firmly believe the Assembly would be free from crime did it cause them to draw lots for who should perish on the scaffold," "All, all," vociferated the tribunes. But at this very moment Collot d'Herbois mounted the tribune, and announced, amidst loud applause, that the royal assent to the decree for their liberation had been given the previous evening, and that in a few days he should present to his brother deputies these victims of discipline.

The soldiers of Chateauvieux were in reality advancing to Paris, having been liberated from the galleys at Brest, and their march was one continued triumph, but Paris prepared for them a still more brilliant one through the exertions of the Jacobins. In vain did the Feuillants and the Constitutionalists energetically protest, through the mouth of Andre Chenier, the Tyrtaeus of moderation and good sense, of Dupont de Nemours, and the poet Roucher, against the insolent oration of the assassins of the generous Desilles. Collot d'Herbois, Robespierre, the Jacobins, the Cordeliers, and the very commune of Paris, clung to the idea of this triumph, which, according to them, would cover with opprobium the court and La Fayette. The feeble interposition of Petion, who appeared as though he wished to moderate the scandal, served only to encourage it, for he of all men was most fitted to plunge the people into the last degree of excess. His affected virtue served only to cloak violence, and to cover with an hypocritical appearance of legality the outbreaks he dared not punish; and had a representative of anarchy been sought to be placed at the head of the commune of Paris, it could have found no fitter type than Petion. His paternal reprimands to the people were but promises of impunity. The public force always arrived too late to punish; excuse was always to be found for sedition, amnesty for crime. The people felt that their magistrate was their accomplice and their slave, and yet whilst they despised they loved him.

XVII.

"This fete that is preparing for these soldiers," wrote Chenier, "is attributed to enthusiasm. For my part, I confess I do not perceive this enthusiasm. I see a few men who create a degree of agitation, but the rest are alarmed or indifferent. We are told that the national honour is interested in this reparation,—I can scarcely comprehend this; for, either the national guards of Metz, who put down the revolt of Nancy, are enemies of the public weal, or the soldiers of Chateauvieux are assassins: there is no medium. How, then, is the honour of Paris interested in feting the murderers of our brothers? Other profound politicians say, this fete will humiliate those who have sought to fetter the nation. What! in order to humiliate, according to their judgment, a bad government, it is necessary to invent extravagances capable of destroying every species of government—recompense rebellion against the laws—crown foreign satellites for having shot French citizens in an emeute. It is said, that in every place where this procession passes, the statues will be veiled:—Ah! they will do well to veil the whole city, if this hideous orgy takes place; but it is not alone the statues of despots that should be veiled, but the face of every good citizen. It will be the duty of every youth in the kingdom, of every national guard in the kingdom to assume mourning on the day when the murder of their brothers confers a title of glory on foreign and seditious soldiers; it is the eyes of the army that should be veiled, that they may not behold the reward of insubordination and revolt; it is the National Assembly—the king—the administrators—the country—that should veil their faces, in order that they may not become complaisant or silent witnesses of the outrages offered to the authorities and the country. The book of the law must be covered, when those who have torn and stained its pages by musket-balls and sabre-cuts receive the civic honours. Citizens of Paris, honest yet weak men, there is not one of you who, when he interrogates his own heart, does not feel how much the country—how much he its child—are insulted by these outrages offered to the laws,—to those who execute them, and those who are for them. Do you not blush that a handful of turbulent men, who appear numerous because they are united and make a noise, should constrain you to do their pleasure, by telling you it is your own, and by amusing your puerile curiosity by unworthy spectacles? In a city that respected itself, such a fete would find before it silence and solitude, the streets and public places abandoned, the houses shut up, the windows deserted, and the flight and scorn of the passers-by would tell history what share honest and well-disposed men took in this scandalous and bacchanalian procession."

XVIII.

Collot d'Herbois insulted Andre Chenier and Roucher in his reply. Roucher replied by a letter full of sarcasm, in which he reminded Collot d'Herbois of his falls on the stage and his misadventures as an actor. "This personage of comic romance," said he, "who has leapt from the trestles of Punch to the tribune of the Jacobins, rushes at me, as though to strike me with the oar the Swiss have brought him from the galleys."

Placards for or against the fete covered the walls of the Palais Royal, and were alternately torn down by groups of young men or Jacobins.

Dupont de Nemours, the friend and master of Mirabeau, laid aside his philosophical calm, to address a letter on the same subject to Petion, in which his conscience, as an honest man, braved the popularity of the tribune. "When the danger is imminent, it is the duty of all honest men to warn the magistrates of it. More particularly, when the magistrates themselves create it. You told a falsehood when you asserted that these soldiers had aided the Revolution on the 14th of July, and that they had refused to combat against the people of Paris. It is untrue that the Swiss refused to combat against the people of Paris, and it is true that they assassinated the national guards of Nancy. You have the audacity to term those men patriots who dare command the legislative body to send a deputation to the fete prepared for these rebels; these are the men whom you adopt as your friends; it is with them that you dine at la Rapee, so that the general of the national guard is obliged to gallop about for two hours to receive your orders before he can find you, and you seek in vain to conceal your embarrassment by high-flown phrases. You seek in vain to conceal this banquet given to assassins beneath the pretext of a banquet in honour of liberty. But these subterfuges are no longer available; the moment is urgent, and you will no longer deceive the sections, the army, or the eighty-three departments. Those who rule you, as they would a child, have agreed to surrender Paris to ten thousand pikes, to whom the bar of the Assembly will be thrown open the day the national guard is disarmed; the men destined to bear them arrive every day, and Paris receives an accession of twelve or fifteen hundred bandits every twenty-four hours, and beg, until the day of pillage arrives, which they await as ravens await their prey.—I have not told all;—generals are prepared for this hideous army. The friends of Jourdan, impatient to behold the man whom the amnesty had not delivered sufficiently soon, have broken open his prison at Avignon. Already, he has been received in triumph in several cities of the south, like the Swiss of the Chateauvieux, and will arrive at Paris to-morrow; Sunday he will be present at the fete with his companions—with the two Mainvielle—with Pegtavin;—with all those cold-blooded scoundrels who have killed in one night sixty-eight defenceless persons, and violated females before they murdered them. Catiline!—Cethegus!—march forward, the soldiers of Sylla are in the city, and the consul himself undertakes to disarm the Romans. The measure is full,—it overflows!"

Petion strove miserably to justify himself in a letter in which his weakness and connivance revealed themselves beneath the multiplicity of excuses. At the same time Robespierre, mounting the tribune of the Jacobins, exclaimed, "You do not trace to their source the obstacles that oppose the expansion of the sentiments of the people. Against whom think you that you have to strive? against the aristocracy?—No. Against the court?—No. Against a general who has long entertained great designs against the people. It is not the national guard that views these preparations with alarm; it is the genius of La Fayette that conspires in the staff; it is the genius of La Fayette that conspires in the directory of the department; it is the genius of La Fayette that perverts the minds of so many good citizens in the capital who would but for him be with us.

"La Fayette is the most dangerous of the enemies of liberty, because he wears the mask of patriotism; it is he who, after having wrought all the evil in his power in the Constituent Assembly, has affected to withdraw to his estates, and then comes to strive for this post of mayor of Paris, not to obtain it, but to refuse it, in order to affect disinterestedness; it is he who has been appointed to the command of the French armies, in order to turn them against the Revolution. The national guards of Metz were as innocent as those of Paris, they can be nothing but patriots; it is La Fayette who, through the medium of Bouille his relation and accomplice, has deceived them. How can we inscribe on the banners of this fete, Bouille is alone guilty? Who sought to stifle the revolt at Nancy, and cover it with an impenetrable veil? Who demands crowns for the assassins of the soldiers of Chateauvieux? La Fayette. Who prevented me from speaking? La Fayette. Who are those who now dart such threatening glances at me? La Fayette and his accomplices." (Loud applause.)

XIX.

The preparations for this ceremony gave rise to a still more exciting drama at the National Assembly. At the opening of the sitting, a member demanded that the forty soldiers of Chateauvieux should be admitted to pay their respects to the legislative body. M. de Jaucourt opposed it: "If these soldiers," said he, "are only admitted to express their gratitude, I consent to their being admitted to the bar; but I demand that afterwards they be not allowed to remain during the debate." The speaker was interrupted by loud murmurs, and cries of a bas! a bas! from the tribunes. "An amnesty is neither a triumph nor a civic crown," continued he; "you cannot dishonour the names of the brave Desilles, or of those generous citizens who perished defending the laws against them; you cannot lacerate by this triumph the hearts of those among you who took part in the expedition of Nancy. Allow a soldier, who was ordered on this expedition with his regiment, to point out to you the effects this decision would have on the army. (The murmurs redouble.) The army will see in your conduct only an encouragement to insurrection; and these honours will lead the soldiers to believe that you look on these men, whom an amnesty has freed, not as men whose punishment was too severe, but as innocent victims." The tumult here became so great that M. de Jaucourt was forced to descend. But one of the members, who, it is evident to all, was almost overpowered by emotion, took his place. It was M. de Gouvion, a young officer, whose name was already gloriously inscribed in the early pages of the annals of our wars. He was clothed in deep black, and every feature of his face wore an expression of intense grief, which inspired the Assembly with involuntary interest, and the tumult was instantly changed into attention. His voice was tremulous and scarcely audible at first; it was evident that indignation as much as sorrow choked his utterance.

"Gentlemen," said he, "I had a brother, a good patriot, who, through the estimation in which he was held by his fellow citizens, had been successively elected commandant of the national guard, and member for the department. Ever ready to sacrifice himself for the revolution and the law, it was in the name of the revolution and the law that he was called upon to march to Nancy at the head of the brave national guards, and there he fell pierced by five bayonet-wounds, and by the hand of those who, ... I demand, if I am condemned to behold here the assassins of my brother." "Well, then, leave the chamber," cried a stern voice. The tribunes applauded this speech, more cruel and poignant than the thrust of a dagger. Indignation enabled M. de Gouvion to overcome his contempt. "Who is the dastard who himself in order to insult the grief of a brother?" cried he, glancing around to discover the speaker. "I will tell my name—'tis I," replied the deputy Choudieu, rising from his seat. Loud applause from the tribunes followed this insult of Choudieu's; it would seem as though this crowd had no longer any feeling, and that passion triumphed over nature. But M. de Gouvion was sustained by a sentiment stronger than popular fury—that of generous despair; he continued: "As a man, I applauded the clemency of the National Assembly when it burst the fetters of these unhappy soldiers who were misled." He was again interrupted, but continued: "the decrees of the Constituent Assembly, the orders of the king, the voice of their officers, the cries of their country, all were unavailing; without provocation on the part of the national guards of the two departments, they fired on Frenchmen, and my brother fell a victim to his obedience to the laws. No, I cannot remain silent, so long as the memory of the national guards is disgraced by the honours decreed to these men who murdered them."

Couthon, a young Jacobin, seated not far from Robespierre, from whose eyes he seemed to gain his secret inspirations, rose and replied to Gouvion, without insulting him. "Who is the slave of prejudices that would venture to dishonour men whom the law has absolved; who would not repress his personal grief in the interest and the triumph of liberty?" But Gouvion's voice touched that chord of justice and natural emotion that always vibrates beneath the insensibility of opinion. Twice did the Assembly, summoned by the president to vote for or against their admission to the debate, rise in an even number for and against this motion. And the secretaries, the judges of these decisions, hesitated to pronounce on which side the majority was; they at length, after two attempts, declared that the majority was in favour of the admission of the Swiss; but the minority protested, and the appel nominal was demanded. This pronounced a feeble majority that the Swiss should be admitted; and they instantly entered, amidst the applause of the tribunes, whilst the unfortunate Gouvion left the chamber by the opposite door, his forehead scarlet with indignation, and vowing never to set foot in that Assembly, where he was forced to behold and welcome the murderers of his brother. He instantly applied to the minister of war to join the army of the north, and fell there.

XX.

The soldiers were introduced, and Collot d'Herbois presented them to the admiring tribunes. The national guard of Versailles, who had followed them to the Assembly, defiled in the hall amidst the sound of drums, and cries of "Vive la Nation!" Groups of citizens and females of Paris, with tricoloured flags and pikes brandished over their heads, followed them; then the members of the popular societies of Paris presented to the president flags of honour given to the Swiss by the departments which these conquerors had just traversed. The men of the 14th of July, with Gouchon, the agitator of the faubourg St. Antoine, as their spokesman, announced that this faubourg had fabricated 10,000 pikes to defend their liberties and their country. This legitimate ovation, offered by the Girondists and Jacobins to undisciplined soldiers, authorised the people of Paris to decree to them the triumph of such an infamous proceeding (le triomphe du scandale).

It was no longer the people of liberty, but the people of anarchy; the day of the 15th of April combined all its emblems. Revolt armed against the laws, for instance, mutinous soldiers as conquerors; a colossal galley, an instrument of punishment and shame, crowned with flowers as an emblem; abandoned women and girls, collected from the lowest haunts of infamy, carrying and kissing the broken fetters of these galley-slaves; forty trophies, bearing the forty names of these Swiss; civic crowns on the names of these murderers of citizens; busts of Voltaire, Rousseau, Franklin, Sidney, the greatest philosophers and most virtuous patriots, mingled with the ignoble busts of these malefactors, and sullied by the contact; these soldiers themselves, astonished if not ashamed of their glory, advancing in the midst of a group of rebellious French-guard, in all the glorification of the forsaking of flags and want of discipline; the march closed by a car imitating in its form the prow of a galley, in this car the statue of Liberty armed in anticipation with the bludgeon of September, and wearing the bonnet rouge, an emblem borrowed from Phrygia by some, from the galleys by others; the book of the constitution carried processionally in this fete, as if to be present at the homage decreed to those who were armed against the laws; bands of male and female citizens, the pikes of the faubourg, the absence of the civic bayonets, fierce threats, theatrical music, demagogic hymns, derisive halts at the Bastille, the Hotel-de-Ville, the Champ-de-Mars; at the altar of the country the vast and tumultuous rounds danced several times by chains of men and women round the triumphal galley, amidst the foul chorus of the air of the Carmagnole; embraces, more obscene than patriotic, between these women and the soldiers, who threw themselves into each others' arms; and in order to put the cope-stone on this debasement of the laws, Petion the Maire of Paris, the magistrates of the people assisting personally at this fete, and sanctioning this insolent triumph over the laws by their weakness or their complicity. Such was this fete: an humiliating copy of the 14th of July, an infamous parody of an insurrection, which parodied a revolution!

France blushed; good citizens were alarmed; the national guard began to be afraid of pikes; the city to fear the faubourgs, and the army herein received the signal of the most entire disorganisation.

The indignation of the constitutional party burst forth in ironical strophes in a hymn of Andre Chenier, in which that young poet avenged the laws, and marked himself out for the scaffold.

"Salut divin triomphe! Entre dans nos murailles! Rends nous ces soldats, illustres Par le sang de Desilles et par les funerailles De nos citoyens massacres!"[16]



BOOK XI.

I.

The echo of these triumphs of insubordination and murder was felt every where in the mutinous conduct of the troops, the disobedience of the national guard, and the risings of the populace; whilst at Paris they feted the Swiss of Chateauvieux, the mob of Marseilles demanded with much violence that the Swiss regiment of Ernst should be expelled from the garrison at Aix, under pretext that they favoured the aristocracy, and that the security of Provence was thereby menaced. On the refusal of this regiment to quit the city, the Marseillaise marched upon Aix as the Parisians had marched upon Versailles in the days of October. They by violence compelled the national guard to accompany them, who had been destined to repress them; they surrounded the regiment of Ernst with cannon, made them lay down their arms, and shamefully drove them before sedition. The national guard, a force essentially revolutionary, because it participates, like the people, in the opinions, feelings, and passions, which, as a civic guard, it ought to repress, followed in every direction, from weakness or example, the fickle impressions of the mob. How could men, just leaving clubs, where they had been listening to, applauding, and frequently exciting sedition in patriotic discourses,—how could they, changing their feelings and part at the door of popular societies, take arms against the seditious? Thus they remained spectators, when they were not accomplices, of insurrections. The scarcity of colonial produce, the dearness of grain, the rigour of a hard winter, all contributed to disturb the people: the agitators turned all these misfortunes of the times into accusations and grounds of hatred against royalty.

II.

The government, powerless and disarmed, was rendered responsible for the severities of nature. Secret emissaries, armed bands, went amongst the towns and cities where markets were held, and there disseminated the most alarming reports, provoking the people to tax grain and flour, stigmatising the corn-dealers as monopolists—the perfidious charge of monopoly being a sure sentence of death. The fear of being accused of starving the people checked every speculation of business, and tended much more than actual want to the dearth of the markets. Nothing is so scarce as a commodity which is concealed. The corn-stores were crimes in the eyes of consumers of bread. The Maire of Etampes, Simoneau, an honest man, and an intrepid magistrate, was one victim sacrificed to the people's suspicions. Etampes was one of the great markets that supplied Paris. It was therefore necessary for it to preserve the liberty of commerce and the supply of flour. A mob, composed of men and women of the adjacent villages, assembling at the sound of the tocsin, marched upon the city one market-day, preceded by drums, armed with guns and pitchforks, in order to carry off the grain by force from the proprietors, divide it amongst themselves, and to exterminate, as they declared, the monopolists, amongst whom sinister voices mingled in low tones the name of Simoneau. The national guard disappeared, a detachment of one hundred men of the eighteenth regiment of cavalry were at Etampes, and the sole force at the Maire's disposal.

The officer answered for these soldiers as for himself. After long conversations with the seditious, to bring them back to reason and the law, Simoneau returned to the maison commune, ordered the red flag to be unfurled, proclaimed martial law, and then advanced upon the rebels, surrounded by the municipal body, and in the centre of the armed force; on reaching the square of the town, the crowd surrounded and cut off the detachment. The troopers left the Maire exposed—not one drew his sword in his defence. In vain did he summon them, in the name of the law, and by the weapons they wore, to render aid to the magistrate against assassins—in vain did he seize the bridle of one of the horsemen near him, crying, "Help, my friends."

Struck by blows of pitchforks and guns, at the moment when he appealed to the soldiery, he fell, shot, grasping in his hands the bridle of the cowardly trooper whom he was entreating: the fellow, in order to disengage himself, struck with the back of his sabre the arm of the Maire already dead, and left his body to the insults of the people. The miscreants, remaining in possession of the carcase, brutally mangled the palpitating limbs, and deliberated together as to cutting off the head. The leaders made their followers defile passing over the body of the Maire, and trampling in his blood. Then they went away beating their drums, and went to get drunk in the suburbs; and the taking away the grain, the apparent motive of the riot, was neglected in the moment of triumph. There was no pillage—either the blood made the people forget their hunger, or their hunger was but the pretext for assassination.

III.

At the moment when all was thus crumbling to pieces round the throne, a man, celebrated by the vast part attributed to him in the common ruin, sought to reconcile himself with the king: this was Louis-Philippe Joseph, Duc d'Orleans, first prince of the blood. I pause for this man, before whom history has hitherto paused, without being able to discover the real place which should be assigned to him amongst the passing events. An enigma to himself, he remains an enigma for posterity. Was the real solution of this enigma ambition or patriotism, weakness or conspiracy? Let facts reply.

Public opinion has its prejudices. Struck by the immensity of the work it accomplishes; giddy, as it were, by the rapidity of the movement which urges things on, it cannot believe that a series of natural causes, combined by Providence with the rise of certain ideas in the human mind, and aided by the coincidence of the times, can of itself produce such vast commotions. It seeks, then, the supernatural—the wonderful—fatality. It takes pleasure in imagining latent causes acting with mystery, and compelling with hidden hand men and events. It takes, in a word, every revolution for a conspiracy; and if it meets at starting, in the middle, or at the end of such crises some leading man, to whose interest these events may tend, it supposes itself the author, attributes to itself all the action of these revolutions, and all the scope of idea that accomplishes them; and, fortunate or unfortunate, innocent or guilty, claims for itself all the glory or demerit of the result. It renders its name divine, or its memory accursed. Such, for fifty years, was the destiny of the Duc d'Orleans.

IV.

It is a historic tradition amongst people from the highest antiquity, that the throne wears out royal races, and that whilst the reigning branches grow enervated by the possession of empire, younger branches become stronger and greater, by nourishing the ambition of becoming more powerful, and inspiring more closely to the people an air less corrupt than that which pervades courts. Thus, whilst primogeniture gives power to the elder, the people confer popularity on the juniors.

This singularity of a handsomer and more popular family than the reigning family, increasing near the throne, and having a dangerous rivalry with the throne in the mind of the nation, had always existed in the house of Orleans, since the time of Louis XIV. If this equivocal situation gave to the princes of this family some virtues, it gave them also corresponding vices. More intelligent and more ambitious than the king's sons, they were also more restless. The very restraint in which the policy of the reigning house kept them, condemned their idea or their courage to inaction, and forced them to misapply, in irregularities or indolence, the faculties with which nature had endowed them, and the immense fortune for which they had no other occupation: too great for citizens, too dangerous at the head of armies or in affairs, they had no place either amongst the people or at court; and thus they assumed it in opinion.

The Regent, a very superior man, long kept down by the inferiority of his part, had been the most brilliant example of all the virtues and all the vices of the blood of Orleans. Since the Regent, the princes endowed, like himself, with natural wit and courage, had felt the glory of great actions in their early youth. They had then again fallen back into obscurity, pleasures or devotion, by the jealousy of the reigning house. At the first show of brilliancy attached to their name, it had been darkened. Guilty by their very merit, their name urged them on to glory; and as soon as they proved themselves deserving, it was forbidden to them. These princes were destined to transmit with their family honours that impatience of a change of government which allows them to be men.

Louis-Philippe Joseph, Duc d'Orleans, was born at the precise epoch, when his rank, fortune, and character were to throw him into a current of new ideas, which his family passions called on him to favour, and into which, once drawn, it would be impossible for him to pause except at the throne or the scaffold. He was twenty when the first symptoms of the Revolution manifested themselves.

He was handsome, like all his race. Slender figure, firm step, smiling countenance, piercing glance, limbs made supple by all bodily exercises, with a heart disposed to love, and a splendid horseman, that great accomplishment of princes; a condescension void of familiarity, a ready eloquence, unquestionable courage, liberal to the arts, even to extravagance; those faults which are only due to the luxuries of the age, all marked him out as a popular favourite. He took every advantage of it; and, perhaps, his early intoxication with it somewhat affected his natural good sense. The love of the people appeared to him a means of avenging himself for the contempt in which the court neglected him. In his mind he braved the king of Versailles, feeling himself king of Paris.

He had married a princess of a race as beloved by the people; the only daughter of the Duc de Penthievre. Lovely, amiable, and virtuous, she brought to her husband as dowry, with the vast fortune of the Duc de Penthievre, that amount of consideration and public esteem which belonged to her house. The first political act of the Duc d'Orleans was a bold resistance to the wishes of the court, at the period of the exile of the parliaments. Exiled himself in his chateau of Villars-Cotterets, the esteem and interest of the people followed him. The applauses of France sweetened the disgrace of the court. He believed that he comprehended the part of a great citizen in a free country; he desired to do so. He forgot too easily, in the atmosphere of adulation which surrounded him, that a man is not a great citizen only to please the people, but to defend—serve—and frequently to resist them.

Returned to Paris, he was desirous of joining the prestige of glory of arms to the civic crowns, with which his name was already decorated. He solicited of the court the dignity of grand-admiral of France, the survivorship of which belonged to him, after the Duc de Penthievre, his father-in-law. He was refused. He embarked as a volunteer on board the fleet, commanded by the Comte d'Orvilliers, and was at the battle of Ouessant on the 17th of July, 1778. The results of this fight, when victory remained without conquest, in consequence of a false manoeuvre, were imputed to the weakness of Duc d'Orleans, who wished to check the pursuit of the enemy. This dishonouring report, invented and disseminated by court hatred, soured the resentments of the young prince, but could not hide the brilliancy of his courage, which he displayed in caprices unworthy of his rank. At St. Cloud he sprang into the first balloon that carried aerial navigators into space. Calumny followed him even there, and a report was spread that he had burst the balloon with a thrust of his sword, in order to compel his companions to descend. Then arose between the court and himself a continual struggle of boldness on the one hand and slander on the other. The king treated him, however, with the indulgence which virtue testifies for youth's follies. The Comte d'Artois took him as the constant companion of his pleasures. The queen, who liked the Comte d'Artois, feared for him the contagion of the disorders and amours of the Duc d'Orleans. She hated equally in this young prince the favourite of the people of Paris and the corrupter of the Comte d'Artois. She made the king purchase the almost royal palace of St. Cloud, the favourite seat of the Duc d'Orleans. Infamous insinuations against him were incessantly transpiring from the half confidences of courtiers. He was accused of having induced courtezans to poison the blood of the Prince de Lamballe, his brother-in-law, and of having enervated him in debauches, in order that he might be the sole heir of the immense property of the house of Penthievre. This crime was the pure invention of malice.

Thus persecuted by the animosity of the court, the Duc d'Orleans was more and more driven to retirement. In his frequent visits to England he formed a close intimacy with the Prince of Wales, heir to the throne, who took for his friends all the enemies of his father; playing with sedition, dishonoured by debts, of scandalous life, prolonging beyond the usual term those excesses of princes—horses, pleasure of the table, gaming, women; abetting the intrigues of Fox, Sheridan and Burke, and prefacing his advent to royal power by all the audacity of a refractory son and a factious citizen.

The Duc d'Orleans thus tasted of the joys of liberty in a London life. He brought back to France habits of insolence against the court, a taste for popular disturbances, contempt for his own rank, familiarity with the multitude, a citizen's life in a palace, and that simple style of dress, which by abandoning the uniform of the French nobility, and blending attire generally, soon destroyed all inequalities of costume amongst citizens.

Then given up entirely to the exclusive care of repairing his impaired fortune, the Duc d'Orleans constructed the Palais Royal. He changed the noble and spacious gardens of his palace into a market of luxury, devoted by day to traffic, and by night to play and debauchery—a complete sink of iniquities, built in the heart of the capital—a work of cupidity which antique manners never could forgive this prince; and which, being gradually adopted like the forum by the indolence of the Parisian population, was destined to become the cradle of the Revolution. This Revolution was striding onwards. The prince awaited it in supineness, as if liberty of the world had been but one more mistress.

His well-known hatred against the court had naturally drawn into his acquaintance all who desired a change. The Palais Royal was the elegant centre of a conspiracy with open doors, for the reform of government: the philosophy of the age there encountered politics and literature: it was the palace of opinion. Buffon came there constantly to pass the latter evenings of his life. Rousseau there received at a distance the only worship which his proud sensitiveness would accept even from princes. Franklin and the American republicans; Gibbon and the orators of the English opposition, Grimm and the German philosophers, Diderot, Sieyes, Sillery, Laclos, Suard, Florian, Raynal, La Harpe, and all the thinkers or writers who anticipated the new mind, met there with celebrated artists and savans. Voltaire himself, proscribed from Versailles by the human respect of a court, which admired his genius, had arrived thither on his last journey. The prince presented to him his children, one of whom reigns to-day over France. The dying philosopher blessed them, as he did those of Franklin, in the name of reason and liberty.

V.

If the prince himself had not a love of literature and a highly refined mind, he had sufficiently cultivated his mind to appreciate perfectly the pleasures of the understanding; but the revolutionary feeling instinctively counselled him to surround himself with all the strength that might one day serve liberty. Early tired of the beauty and virtue of the Duchesse d'Orleans, he had conceived for a lovely, witty, insinuating woman a sentiment which did not enchain the caprices of his heart, but which controlled his inconsistency and directed his mind. This woman, then seducing and since celebrated, was the Comtesse de Sillery-Genlis, daughter of the Marquis Ducret de Saint Aubin, a gentleman of Charolais, without fortune. Her mother, who was still young and handsome, had brought her to Paris, to the house of M. de la Popeliniere, a celebrated financier, whose old age she had taken captive. She educated her daughter for that doubtful destiny which awaits women on whom nature has lavished beauty and mind, and to whom society has refused their right position—adventuresses in society, sometimes raised, sometimes degraded.

The first masters formed this child by all the arts of mind and hand—her mother directed her to ambition. The second-rate position of this mother at the house of her opulent protector, formed the child to the plasticity and adulation which her mother's domestic condition required and illustrated. At sixteen years of age her precocious beauty and musical talent caused her to be already sought in the salons. Her mother produced her there in the dubious publicity between the theatre and the world. An artiste for some, she was, with others, a well educated girl; all were attracted by her: old men forgot their age. Buffon called her "ma fille." Her relationship with Madame de Montesson, widow of the Duc d'Orleans, gave her a footing in the house of the young prince. The Comte de Sillery-Genlis fell in love with her, and married her in spite of his family's opposition. Friend and confidant of the Duc d'Orleans, the Comte de Sillery obtained for his wife a place at the court of the Duchesse d'Orleans. Time and her ability did the rest.

The duke attached himself to her with the twofold power of admiration for her beauty and admiration of her superior understanding—the one empire confirmed the other. The complaints of the insulted duchess only made the duke more obstinate in his liking. He was governed, and desirous of having his feelings honoured, he announced it openly, merely seeking to colour it under the pretext of the education of his children. The Comtesse de Genlis followed at the same time the ambition of courts and the reputation of literature. She wrote with elegance those light works which amuse a woman's idle hours, whilst they lead their hearts astray into imaginary amours. Romances, which are to the west what opium is to the Orientals, waking day-dreams, had become necessities and events for the salons. Madame de Genlis wrote in a graceful style, and clothed her characters and ideas with a certain affectation of austerity which gave a becomingness to love: she moreover affected an universal acquaintance with the sciences, which made her sex disappear before the pretensions of her mind, and which recalled in her person those women of Italy who profess philosophy with a veil over their countenances.

The Duc d'Orleans, an innovator in every thing, believed he had found in a woman the Mentor for his sons. He nominated her governor of his children. The duchess, greatly annoyed, protested against this; the court laughed, and the people were amazed. Opinion, which yields to all who brave it, murmured, and then was silent. The future proved that the father was right: the pupils of this lady were not princes but men. She attracted to the Palais Royal all the dictators of public opinion. The first club in France was thus held in the very apartments of a prince of the blood. Literature, concealed from without these meetings as the madness of the first Brutus concealed his vengeance. The duke was not, perhaps, a conspirator, but henceforth there was an Orleans party. Sieyes, the mystic oracle of the Revolution, who seemed to carry it on his pensive front, and brood over it in silence; the Duc de Lauzun, passing from the confidence of Trianon to the consultations of the Palais Royal; Laclos, a young officer of artillery, author of an obscene romance, capable at need of elevating romantic intrigue to a political conspiracy; Sillery, soured against his order, at enmity with the court, an ambitious malcontent, awaiting nothing but what the future might bring forth; and others more obscure, but not less active, and serving as unknown guides for descending from the salons of a prince into the depths of the people: some the head, others the arms, of the duke's ambition, attended these meetings. Perhaps they might be ignorant of the aim, but they placed themselves on the declivity, and allowed Fortune to do as she pleased. Fortune was a revolution. The wonderful, that marvel of the masses, which is to the imagination what calculation is to reason, was not wanting to the Orleans party. Prophecies, those popular presentiments of destiny, domestic prodigies, admitted by the interested credulity of numerous clients of this house, announced the throne shortly to one of these princes. These rumours were rife amongst the people, from themselves, or the skilful insinuations of the partisans of the house of Orleans. In the convocation of States-General, the duke had not hesitated to pronounce in favour of the most popular reforms. The instructions which he had drawn up for the electors of his dominions were the work of the abbe Sieyes. The prince himself intrigued for the name and style of Citoyen. Elected deputy of the noblesse of Paris at Crespy and at Villars-Cotterets, he selected Crespy, because the electors of this bailiwick were the more patriotic. At the procession of the States-General he left his own place vacant amongst the princes, and walked in the midst of the deputies. This abdication of his dignity near the throne to assume the dignity of a citizen, procured him the applauses of the nation.