THE DOWNFALL OF ROYALTY. (continued 6)

The possessions of the order were given to the Hospitallers of Saint John of Jerusalem, who transformed themselves into Knights of Malta toward the middle of the sixteenth century. The Temple became the provincial house of the grand-prior of the Order of Malta for the nation or language of France, and the great tower contained successively the treasure, the arsenal, and the archives. In 1607, the grand-prior, Jacques de Souvré, had a house built in front of the old manor, between the court and the garden, which was called the palace of the grand-prior. His successor, Philippe de Vendôme, made his palace a rendezvous of elegance and pleasure. There shone that Anacreon in a cassock, the gay and sprightly Abbé de Chaulieu, who died a fervent Christian in the voluptuous abode where he had dwelt a careless Epicurean. There young Voltaire went to complete the lessons he had begun in the sceptical circle of Ninon de l'Enclos. The office of grand-prior, which was worth sixty thousand livres a year, passed afterwards to Prince de Conti, who in 1765 sheltered Jean-Jacques Rousseau there, as lettres de cachet could not penetrate within its privileged precinct. Under Louis XVI. the palace of the grand-prior had served as a passing hostelry to the young and brilliant Count d'Artois when he came from Versailles to Paris. The flowers of the entertainments given there by the Prince were hardly faded when Louis XVI. suddenly entered it as a prisoner.

It was seven o'clock in the evening when the wretched King and his family, coming from the convent of the Feuillants, arrived at the Temple. Situated near the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, not far from the former site of the Bastille, the Temple enclosure at this period was not more than two hundred yards long by nearly as many wide. The rest of the ancient precinct had disappeared under the pavements or the houses of the great city. Nevertheless, the enclosure still formed a sort of little private city, sometimes called the Ville-Neuve-du-Temple, the gates of which were closed every night. In one of its angles stood the house called the grand-prior's palace.

This was the first stopping-place of the royal family, which had been entrusted by Pétion to the surveillance of the municipality and the guard of Santerre. The municipal officers stayed close to the King, kept their hats on, and gave him no title except "Monsieur." Louis XVI., not doubting that the palace of the grand-prior was the residence assigned him by the nation until the close of his career, began to visit its apartments. While the municipal officers took a cruel pleasure in this error, thinking of the still keener one they would enjoy when they disabused him of it, he pleased himself by allotting the different rooms in advance. The word palace had an unpleasant sound to the persecutors of royalty. The Temple tower looked more like a prison. Toward eleven o'clock, one of the commissioners ordered the august captives to collect such linen and other clothing as they had been able to procure, and follow him. They silently obeyed, and left the palace. The night was very dark. They passed through a double row of soldiers holding naked sabres. The municipal officers carried lanterns. One of them broke the dismal silence he had observed throughout the march. "Thy master," said he to M. Hue, "has been accustomed to gilded canopies. Very well! he is going to find out how we lodge the assassins of the people."

The lamps in the windows of the old quadrangular dungeon lighted up its high pinnacles and turrets, its gigantic profile and gloomy bulk. The immense tower, one hundred and fifty feet high, and with walls nine feet thick, rose, menacing and fatal, amidst the darkness. Beside it was another tower, narrower and not so high, but which was also flanked by turrets. Thus the whole dungeon was composed of two distinct yet united towers. The second of these, called the little tower, to distinguish it from the great one, was selected as the prison of the former hosts of Versailles, Fontainebleau, and the Tuileries.

The little tower of the Temple, which had no interior communication with the great one against which it stood, was a long quadrangle flanked by two turrets. Four steps led to the door, which was low and narrow, and opened on a landing at the end of which began a winding staircase shaped like a snail-shell. Wide from its base as far as the first story, it grew narrower as it climbed up into the second. The door, which was considered too weak, was to be strengthened on the following day by heavy bars, and supplied with an enormous lock brought from the prisons of the Châtelet. The Queen was put on the second floor, and the King on the third. On entering his chamber, Louis XVI. found a miserable bed in an alcove without tapestry or curtains. He showed neither ill humor nor surprise. Engravings, indecent for the most part, covered the walls. He took them down himself. "I will not leave such objects before my children's eyes," said he. Then he lay down and slept tranquilly.

The first days of captivity were relatively calm. The prisoners consoled themselves by their family life, reading, and, above all, prayer. Forgetting that he had been a king, and remembering that he was a father, Louis XVI. gave lessons to the Dauphin. "It would have been worth while for the whole nation to be present at these lessons; they would have been both surprised and touched at all the sensible, cordial, and kindly things the good King found to say when the map of France lay spread out before him, or concerning the chronology of his predecessors. Everything in his remarks showed the love he bore his subjects and how greatly his paternal heart desired their happiness. What great and useful lessons one could learn in listening to this captive king instructing a child born to the throne and condemned to share the captivity of his parents." (Souvenirs de Quarante Ans, by Madame de Béarn, née de Tourzel.)

All those who had been authorized to follow the royal family to the Temple—the Princess de Lamballe, Madame de Tourzel and her daughter, Mesdames Thibaud, Basire, Navarre, MM. de Chamilly and François Hue—surrounded the captives with the most respectful and devoted attentions. But these noble courtiers of misfortune, these voluntary prisoners who were so glad to be associated in their master's trials, were not long to enjoy an honor they had so keenly desired. In the night of August 18-19, two municipal officers presented themselves, who were commissioned to fetch away "all persons not belonging to the Capet family." The Queen pointed out in vain that the Princess de Lamballe was her relative. The Princess must go with the others. "In our position," has said Madame de Tourzel, the governess of the children of France, "there was nothing to do but obey. We dressed ourselves and then went to the Queen, to whom I resigned that dear little Prince, whose bed had been carried into her room without awaking him." It was an indescribable torture for Madame de Tourzel to abandon the Dauphin, whom she cherished so tenderly, and whom she had educated since 1789. "I abstained from looking at him," she adds, "not only to avoid weakening the courage we had so much need of, but in order to give no room for censure, and so come back, if possible, to a place we left with so much regret. The Queen went instantly into the chamber of the Princess de Lamballe, from whom she parted with the utmost grief. To Pauline and me she showed a touching sensibility, and said to me in an undertone: 'If we are not so happy as to see you again, take good care of Madame de Lamballe. Do the talking on all important occasions, and spare her as much as possible from having to answer captious and embarrassing questions.'" The two municipal officers said to Hue and Chamilly: "Are you the valets-de-chambre?" On their affirmative response, the two faithful servants were ordered to get up and prepare for departure. They shook hands with each other, both of them convinced that they had reached the end of their existence. One of the municipal officers had said that very day in their presence: "The guillotine is permanent, and strikes with death the pretended servants of Louis." When they descended to the Queen's antechamber, a very small room in which the Princess de Lamballe slept, they found that Princess and Madame de Tourzel all ready to start, and clasped in one embrace with the Queen, the children, and Madame Elisabeth. Tender and heart-breaking farewells, presages of separations more cruel still!

All these exiles from the prison left at the same time. Only one of them, M. François Hue, was to return. He was examined at the Hôtel-de-Ville, and at the close of this interrogation an order was signed permitting him to be taken back to the tower. "How happy I was," he writes, "to return to the Temple! I ran to the King's chamber. He was already up and dressed, and was reading as usual in the little tower. The moment he saw me, his anxiety to know what had occurred made him advance toward me; but the presence of the municipal officers and the guards who were near him made all conversation impossible. I indicated by a glance that, for the moment, prudence forbade me to explain myself. Feeling the necessity of silence as well as myself, the King resumed his reading and waited for a more opportune moment. Some hours later, I hastily informed him what questions had been asked me and what I had replied." (Dernières Années de Louis XVI., par François Hue.)

The unfortunate sovereign doubtless believed that the others were also about to return. Vain hope! During the day Manuel announced to the King that none of them would come back to the Temple. "What has become of them?" asked Louis XVI. anxiously.—"They are prisoners at the Force," returned Manuel.—"What are they going to do with the only servant I have left?" asked the King, glancing at M. Hue.—"The Commune leaves him with you," said Manuel; "but as he cannot do everything, men will be sent to assist him."—"I do not want them," replied Louis XVI.; "what he cannot do, we will do ourselves. Please God, we will not voluntarily give those who have been taken from us the chagrin of seeing their places taken by others!" In Manuel's presence, the Queen and Madame Elisabeth aided M. Hue to prepare the things most necessary for the new prisoners of the Force. The two Princesses arranged the packets of linen and other matters with the skill and activity of chambermaids.

Behold the heir of Louis XIV., the King of France and Navarre, with but a single servant left him! He has but one coat, and at night his sister mends it. Behold the daughter of the German Cæsars, with not even one woman to wait upon her, and who waits on herself, incessantly watched, meanwhile, by the inquisitors of the Commune; who cannot speak a word or make a gesture unwitnessed by a squad of informers who pursue her even into the chamber where she goes to change her dress, and who spy on her even when she is sleeping! And yet neither the calmness nor the dignity of the prisoners suffers any loss.

There was but one thing that keenly annoyed Louis XVI. It was when, on August 24, they deprived him, the chief of gentlemen, of his sword, as if taking away his sceptre were not enough. He consoled himself by prayer, meditation, and reading. He spent hours in the room containing the library of the keeper of archives of the Order of Malta, who had previously occupied the little tower. One day when he was looking for books, he pointed out to M. Hue the works of Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. "Those two men have ruined France," said he in an undertone. On another day he was pained by overhearing the insults heaped on this faithful servant by one of the Municipal Guards. "You have had a great deal to suffer to-day," he said to him. "Well! for the love of me, continue to endure everything; make no answer." At another time he slipped into his hand a folded paper. "This is some of my hair," said he; "it is the only present I can give you at this moment." M. Hue exclaims in his pathetic book: "O shade forever cherished! I will preserve this precious gift to my latest day! The inheritance of my son, it will pass on to my descendants, and all of them will see in this testimonial of Louis XVI.'s goodness, that they had a father who merited the affection of his King by his fidelity."

In the evenings the Queen made the Dauphin recite this prayer: "Almighty God, who created and redeemed me, I adore Thee. Spare the lives of the King, my father, and those of my family! Defend us against our enemies! Grant Madame de Tourzel the strength she needs to support the evils she endures on our account." And the angel of the Temple, Madame Elisabeth, recited every day this sublime prayer of her own composition: "What will happen to me to-day, O my God! I do not know. All I know is, that nothing will happen that has not been foreseen by Thee from all eternity. It is enough, my God, to keep me tranquil. I adore Thy eternal designs, I submit to them with my whole heart; I will all, I accept all; I sacrifice all to Thee; I unite this sacrifice to that of Thy dear Son, my Saviour, asking Thee by His sacred heart and His infinite merits, the patience in our afflictions and the perfect submission which is due to Thee for all that Thou wiliest and permittest." One day when she had finished her prayer, the saintly Princess said to M. Hue: "It is less for the unhappy King than for his misguided people that I pray. May the Lord deign to be moved, and to look mercifully upon France!" Then she added, with her admirable resignation: "Come, let us take courage. God will never send us more troubles than we are able to bear."

The prisoners were permitted to walk a few steps in the garden every day to get a breath of fresh air. But even there they were insulted. As they passed by, the guards stationed at the base of the tower took pains to put on their hats and sit down. The sentries scrawled insults on the walls. Colporteurs maliciously cried out bad tidings, which were sometimes false. One day, one of them announced a pretended decree separating the King from his family. The Queen, who was near enough to hear distinctly the voice which told this news, not exact as yet, was struck with a terror from which she did not recover.

And yet there were still souls that gave way to compassion. From the upper stories of houses near the Temple enclosure there were eyes looking down into the garden when the prisoners took their walk. The common people and the workmen living in these poor abodes were affected. Sometimes, to show her gratitude for the sympathy of those unknown friends, Marie Antoinette would remove her veil, and smile. When the little Dauphin was playing, there would be hands at the windows, joined as if to applaud. Flowers would sometimes fall, as if by chance, from a garret roof to the Queen's feet, and occasionally it happened that when the captives had gone back to their prison, they would hear in the darkness the echo of some royalist refrain, hummed by a passer-by in the silence of the night.

The Temple tower is no longer in existence. Bonaparte visited it when he was Consul. "There are too many souvenirs in that prison," he exclaimed. "I will tear it down." In 1811 he kept his promise. The palace of the grand-prior was destroyed in 1853. No trace remains of that famous enclosure of the Templars whose legend has so sombre a poetry. But it has left an impress on the imagination of peoples which will never be effaced. It seems to rise again gigantic, that tower where the son of Saint Louis realized not alone the type of the antique sage of whom Horace said: Impavidum ferient ruinae, but also the purest ideal of the true Christian. Does not the name Temple seem predestinated for a spot which was to be sanctified by so many virtues, and where the martyr King put in practice these verses of the Imitation of Jesus Christ, his favorite book: "It needs no great virtue to live peaceably with those who are upright and amiable; one is naturally pleased in such society; we always love those whose sentiments agree with ours. But it is very praiseworthy, and the effect of a special grace and great courage to live in peace with severe and wicked men, who are disorderly, or who contradict us.... He who knows best how to suffer, will enjoy the greatest peace; such a one is the conqueror of himself, master of the world, the friend of Jesus Christ, and the inheritor of heaven."

XXXIV.

THE PRINCESS DE LAMBALLE'S MURDER.

The Princess de Lamballe, after being taken from the Temple in the night of August 18-19, had been examined by Billaud-Varennes at the Hôtel-de-Ville, and then sent, at noon, August 19, to the Force. This prison, divided into two distinct parts, the great and the little Force, was situated between the rues Roi-de-Sicile, Culture, and Pavée. In 1792 it supplemented the Abbey and Châtelet prisons, which were overcrowded. The little Force had a separate entry on the rue Pavée to the Marais, while the door of the large one opened on the rue des Ballets, a few steps from the rue Saint-Antoine. The register of the little Force, which is preserved in the archives of the prefecture of police, records that, at the time of the September massacres, this prison in which the Princess de Lamballe was immured, contained one hundred and ten women, most of them not concerned with political affairs, and in great part women of the town. Here, from August 19 to September 3, the Princess suffered inexpressible anguish. She never heard a turnkey open the door of her cell without thinking that her last hour had come.

The massacres began on September 2. On that day the Princess de Lamballe was spared. In the evening she threw herself on her bed, a prey to the most cruel anxiety. Toward six o'clock the next morning, the turnkey entered with a frightened air: "They are coming here," he said to the prisoners. Six men, armed with sabres, guns, and pistols, followed him, approached the beds, asked the names of the women, and went out again. Madame de Tourzel, who shared the Princess de Lamballe's captivity, said to her: "This threatens to be a terrible day, dear Princess; we know not what Heaven intends for us; we must ask God to forgive our faults. Let us say the Miserere and the Confiteor as acts of contrition, and recommend ourselves to His goodness." The two women said their prayers aloud, and incited each other to resignation and courage.

There was a window which opened on the street, and from which, although it was very high, one could see what was passing by mounting on Madame de Lamballe's bed, and thence to the window ledge. The Princess climbed up, and as soon as her head was noticed on the street, a pretence of firing on her was made. She saw a considerable crowd at the prison door.

Very little doubt remained concerning her fate. Neither she nor Madame de Tourzel had eaten since the previous day. But they were too greatly moved to take any breakfast. They dared not speak to each other. They took their work, and sat down to await the result of the fatal day in silence.

Toward eleven o'clock the door opened. Armed men filled the room and demanded Madame de Lamballe. The Princess put on a gown, bade adieu to Madame de Tourzel, and was led to the great Force, where some municipal officers, wearing their insignia, subjected the prisoners to a pretended trial. In front of this tribunal stood executioners with ferocious faces, who brandished bloody weapons. The atmosphere was sickening: full of the steam of carnage, and the odors of wine and blood. Madame de Lamballe fainted. When she recovered consciousness she was interrogated: "Who are you?"—"Marie Louise, Princess of Savoy."—"What is your rank?"—"Superintendent of the Queen's household."—"Were you acquainted with the conspiracies of the court on August 10?"—"I do not know that there were any conspiracies on August 10, but I know I had no knowledge of them."—"Swear liberty, equality, hatred to the King, the Queen, and royalty."—"I will swear the first two without difficulty; I cannot swear the last; it is not in my heart." Here an assistant said in a whisper to Madame de Lamballe: "Swear it! if you do not swear, you are a dead woman." The Princess made no answer; she put her hands up to her eyes, covered her face with them and made a step toward the wicket. The judge exclaimed: "Let some one release Madame!" This phrase was the death signal. Two men took the victim roughly by the arms, and made her walk over corpses. Hardly had she crossed the threshold when she received a blow from a sabre on the back of her head, which made her blood flow in streams. In the narrow passage leading from the rue Saint-Antoine to the Force, and called the Priests' cul-de-sac, she was despatched with pikes on a heap of dead bodies. Then they stripped off her clothes and exposed her body to the insults of a horde of cannibals. When the blood that flowed from her wounds, or that of the neighboring corpses, had soiled the body too much, they washed it with a sponge, so that the crowd might notice its whiteness better. They cut off her head and her breasts. They tore out her heart, and of this head and this heart they made horrible trophies. The pikes which bore them were lifted high in air, and they went to carry around these excellent spoils of the Revolution.

At the very moment when the hideous procession began its march, Madame de Lebel, the wife of a painter, who owed many benefits to Madame de Lamballe, was trying to get near the prison, hoping to hear news of her. Seeing the great commotion in the crowd, she inquired the cause. When some one replied: "It is Lamballe's head that they are going to carry through Paris," she was seized with horror, and, turning back, took refuge in a hairdresser's shop on the Place Bastille. Hardly had she done so when the crowd entered the Place. The murderers came into the shop and required the hairdresser to arrange the head of the Princess. They washed it, and powdered the fair hair, all soiled with blood. Then one of the assassins cried joyfully: "Now, at any rate, Antoinette can recognize her!" The procession resumed its march. From time to time they called a halt before a wine-shop. Wishing to empty his glass, the scoundrel who had the Princess's head in his hand, set it flat down on the lead counter. Then it was put back on the end of a pike. The heart was on another pike, and other individuals dragged along the headless corpse. In this manner they arrived in front of the Temple. It was three o'clock in the afternoon.

On that day the royal family had been refused permission to go into the garden. They were in the little tower when the cries of the multitude became audible. The workmen who were then employed in tearing down the walls and buildings contiguous to the Temple dungeon, mingled with the crowd, increased also by innumerable curious spectators, and uttered furious shouts. One of the Municipal Guards at the Temple closed doors and windows, and pulled down curtains so that the captives could see nothing.

On the street in front of the enclosure a tricolored ribbon had been fastened across, with this inscription: "Citizens, you who know how to ally the love of order with a just vengeance, respect this barrier; it is necessary to our surveillance and our responsibility." This was the sole dike they meant to oppose to the torrent. At the side of this ribbon stood a municipal officer named Danjou, formerly a priest, who was called Abbé Six-feet, on account of his height. He mounted on a chair and harangued the crowd. He felt his face touched by Madame de Lamballe's head, still on the end of a pike which the bearer shook about and gesticulated with, and also by a rag of her chemise, soaked with blood and mire, which another individual also carried on a pike. The naked body was there likewise, with its back to the ground and the front cut open to the very breast. Danjou tried to make the crowd of assassins who wanted to invade the Temple understand that at a moment when the enemy was master of the frontiers, it would be impolitic to deprive themselves of hostages so precious as Louis XVI. and his family. "Moreover," he added, "would it not demonstrate their innocence if you dare not try them? How much worthier it is of a great people to execute a king guilty of treason on the scaffold!" Thus, while preventing an immediate massacre, he held the scaffold in reserve. Danjou said that the Communal Council, in order to show its confidence in the citizens composing the mob, had decided that six of them should be admitted to make the rounds of the Temple garden, with the commissioners at their head. The ribbon was then raised and several persons entered the enclosure. They were those who carried the remains of Madame de Lamballe. With these were the laborers who had been at work on the demolitions. Voices were heard demanding furiously that Marie Antoinette should show herself at a window, so that some one might climb up and make her kiss her friend's head. As Danjou opposed this infernal scheme, he was accused of being on the side of the tyrant. Was the dungeon of the Temple to be forced? Were the assassins about to seize the Queen, tear her in pieces, and drag her, like her friend, through streets and squares to the rolling of drums and the chanting of the Marseillaise and the Ça ira?

A municipal officer entered the tower and began a mysterious parley with his colleagues. As Louis XVI. asked what was going on, some one replied: "Well, sir, since you desire to know, they want to show you Madame de Lamballe's head." Meanwhile the cries outside were growing louder. Another municipal came in, followed by four delegates from the mob. One of them, who carried a heavy sabre in his hand, insisted that the prisoners should present themselves at the window, but this was opposed by the municipal officers, who were less cruel. This man said to the Queen in an insulting tone: "They want us to hide the Princess de Lamballe's head from you when we brought it to let you see how the people avenge themselves on their tyrants. I advise you to show yourself if you don't want the people to come up." Marie Antoinette fainted on learning her friend's death in this manner. Her children burst into tears and tried by their caresses to bring her back to consciousness. The man did not go away. "Sir," the King said to him, "we are prepared for the worst, but you might have dispensed yourself from informing the Queen of this frightful calamity." Cléry, the King's valet, was looking through a corner of the window blinds, and saw Madame de Lamballe's head. The person carrying it had climbed up on a heap of rubbish from the buildings in process of demolition. Another, who stood beside him, held her bleeding heart. Cléry heard Danjou expostulating the crowd in words like these: "Antoinette's head does not belong to you; the departments have their rights in it also. France has confided these great criminals to the care of Paris; and it is your business to assist us in guarding them until national justice shall avenge the people." Then, addressing himself to these cannibals as if they were heroes whose courage and exploits he praised, he added, in speaking of the profaned corpse of the Princess de Lamballe: "The remains you have there are the property of all. Do they not belong to all Paris? Have you the right to deprive others of the pleasure of sharing your triumph? Night will soon be here. Make haste, then, to quit this precinct, which is too narrow for your glory. You ought to place this trophy in the Palais Royal or the Tuileries garden, where the sovereignty of the people has been so often trampled under foot, as an eternal monument of the victory you have just won." Remarks like these were all that could prevent these tigers from entering the Temple and destroying the prisoners. Shouts of "To the Palais Royal!" proved to Danjou that his harangue had been appreciated. The assassins at last departed, after having covered his face with kisses that smelt of wine and blood. They wanted to show their victim's head at the Hôtel Toulouse, the mansion of the venerable Duke de Penthièvre, her father-in-law, but were deterred by the assurance that she did not ordinarily live there, but at the Tuileries. Then they turned toward the Palais Royal. The Duke of Orleans was at a window with his mistress, Madame de Buffon. He left it, but he may have seen the head of his sister-in-law.

Some of the cannibals had remained in the neighborhood of the Temple. Sitting down at table in a wine-shop, they had the heart of the Princess de Lamballe cooked, and ate it with avidity. "Thus," says M. de Beauchesne in his excellent work on Louis XVII., "this civilization which had departed from God, surpassed at a single bound the fury of savages, and the eighteenth century, so proud of its learning and humanity, ended by anthropophagy." In the evening, when some one was giving Collot d'Herbois an account of the day's performances, he expressed but one regret,—that they had not succeeded in showing Marie Antoinette the remains of the Princess de Lamballe. "What!" he spitefully exclaimed, "did they spare the Queen that impression? They ought to have served up her best friend's head in a covered dish at her table."

XXXV.

THE SEPTEMBER MASSACRES.

Lovers of paradoxes have tried to represent the September massacres as something spontaneous, a passing delirium of opinion, a sort of great national convulsion. This myth was a lie against history and humanity. It exists no longer, Heaven be thanked. The mists with which it was sought to shroud these execrable crimes are now dissipated. Light has been shed upon that series of infernal spectacles which would have made cannibals blush. No; these odious massacres were not the result of a popular movement, an unforeseen fanaticism, a paroxysm of rage or vengeance. They present an ensemble of murders committed in cool blood, a planned and premeditated thing. M. Mortimer-Ternaux, in his Histoire de la Terreur, M. Granier de Cassagnac, in his Histoire des Girondins et des Massacres de Septembre, have proved this abundantly. They have exhumed from the archives and the record offices such a mass of uncontested and incontestable documents, that not the slightest doubt is now permissible. Edgar Quinet has not hesitated to recognize this in his book, La Révolution. He says: "The massacres were executed administratively; the same discipline was everywhere displayed throughout the carnage.... This was not a piece of blind, spontaneous barbarism; it was a barbarity slowly meditated, minutely elaborated by a sanguinary mind. Hence it bears no resemblance to anything previously known in history. Marat harvested in September what he had been sowing for three years." The Parisian populace, eight hundred thousand souls, was inert; it was cowardly, it trembled; but it did not approve, it was not an accomplice. It was a monstrous thing that a handful of cut-throats should be enough to transform Paris into a slaughter-house. One shudders in thinking what a few criminals can accomplish in the midst of an immense population. "The people, the real people—that composed of laborious and honest workmen, ardent and patriotic at heart, and of young bourgeois with generous aspirations and indomitable courage—never united for an instant with the scoundrels recruited by Maillard from every kennel in the capital. While the hired assassins of the Committee of Surveillance established in the prisons what Vergniaud called a butcher's shop for human flesh, the true populace was assembled on the Champ-de-Mars, and before the enlistment booths; it was offering its purest blood for the country; it would have blushed to shed that of helpless unfortunates."[1] In 1871, the murder of hostages and the burning of monuments was no more approved by the population than the massacres in the prisons were in 1792. The crimes were committed at both epochs by a mere handful of individuals. The great majority of the people were guilty merely of apathy and fear.

The hideous tableau surpasses the most lugubrious conceptions of Dante's sombre imagination. Paris is a hell. From August 29, it is like a torpid Oriental town. The whole city is in custody, like a criminal whose limbs are held while he is being searched and put in irons. Every house is inspected by the agents of the Commune. A knock at the door makes the inmates tremble. The denunciation of an enemy, a servant, a neighbor, is a death sentence. People scarcely dare to breathe. Neither running water nor solid earth is free. The parapets of quays, the arches of bridges, the bathing and washing boats are bristling with sentries. Everything is surrounded. There is no refuge. Three thousand suspected persons are taken out of houses, and crowded into prisons. The hunt begins anew the following day. The programme of massacres is arranged. The Communal Council of Surveillance has minutely regulated everything. The price of the actual work is settled. The personnel of cut-throats is at its post. Danton has furnished the executioners; Manuel, the victims. All is ready. The bloody drama can begin.

On September 2, Danton said to the Assembly: "The tocsin about to sound is not an alarm signal; it is a charge upon the enemies of the country. To vanquish them, gentlemen, all that is needed is boldness, and again boldness, and always boldness." Two days before, he had been still more explicit. "The 10th of August," said he, "divided us into republicans and royalists; the first few in number, the second many...; we must make the royalists afraid." A frightful gesture, a horizontal gesture, sufficed to express his meaning.

Robbery preceded murder. It was a veritable raid. The Commune caused the palaces, national property, the Garde-Meuble, the houses and mansions of the émigrés to be pillaged. One saw nothing but carts and wagons transporting stolen goods to the Hôtel-de-Ville. All the plate was stolen from the churches likewise. "Millions," says Madame Roland in her Memoirs, "passed into the hands of people who used it to perpetuate the anarchy which was the source of their domination." When will the men of the Commune render their accounts? Never. Who are the accomplices of Danton and Marat in organizing the massacres? A band of defaulting accountants, faithless violators of public trusts, breakers of locks, swindlers, spies, and men overwhelmed with debts. What interest have they in planning the murders? That of perpetuating the dictatorship they had assumed on the eve of August 10, and, above all, of having no accounts to render. A few weeks later on, Collot d'Herbois will say at the Jacobin Club: "The 2d of September is the chief article in the creed of our liberty."

The jailors were forewarned. They served the prisoners' dinner earlier, and took away their knives. There was a disturbed and uneasy look in their faces which made the victims suspect their end was near. Toward noon the general alarm was beaten in every street. The citizens were ordered to return at once to their dwellings. An order was issued to illuminate every house when night fell. The shops were closed. Terror overspread the entire city.

It was agreed that at the third discharge of cannon the cut-throats should set to work. The first blood shed was that of prisoners taken from the mayoralty to the Abbey prison. The carriages containing them passed along the Quai des Orfèvres, the Pont-Neuf and rue Dauphine, until it reached the Bussy square. Here there was a crowd assembled around a platform where enlistments were going on. The throng impeded the progress of the carriages. Thereupon one of the escort opened the door of one of them, and standing on the step, plunged his sabre into the breast of an aged priest. The multitude shuddered and fled in affright. "That makes you afraid," said the assassin; "you will see plenty more like it."

The rest of the escort followed the example set them. The carriages go on again, and so do the massacres. They kill along the route, and they kill on arriving at the Abbey. Towards five o'clock, Billaud-Varennes presents himself there, wearing his municipal scarf. "People," says he—what he calls people is a band of salaried assassins—"people, thou immolatest thine enemies, thou art doing thy duty." Then he walks into the midst of the dead bodies, dipping his feet in blood, and fraternizes with the murderers. "There is nothing more to do here," exclaims Maillard; "let us go to the Carmelites."

At the Carmelites, one hundred and eighty priests, crowded into the church and convent, were awaiting their fate with pious resignation. Two days before, Manuel had said to them ironically: "In forty-eight hours you will all be free. Get ready to go into a foreign country and enjoy the repose you cannot find here." And on the previous day a gendarme had said to the Archbishop of Arles, blowing the smoke from his pipe into his face as he did so: "It is to-morrow, then, that they are going to kill Your Grandeur." A short time before the massacre began, the victims were sent into the garden. At the bottom of it was an orangery which has since become a chapel. Mgr. Dulau, Archbishop of Arles, and the Bishops of Beauvais and de Saintes, both of whom were named de la Rochefoucauld, kneeled down with the other priests and recited the last prayers. The murderers approached. The Archbishop of Arles, who was upwards of eighty, advanced to meet them. "I am he whom you seek," he said; "my sacrifice is made; but spare these worthy priests; they will pray for you on earth, and I in heaven." They insulted him before they struck him. "I have never done harm to any one," said he. An assassin responded: "Very well; I'll do some to you," and killed him. The other priests were chased around the garden from one tree to another, and shot down. During this infernal hunt the murderers were shouting with laughter and singing their favorite song: Dansez la Carmagnole!

The massacre of the Carmelites is over. "Let us go back to the Abbey!" cries Maillard; "we shall find more game there." This time there is a pretence of justice made. The tribunal is the vestibule of the Abbey; Maillard, the chief cut-throat, is president; the assassins are the judges, and the public, the Marseillais, the sans-culottes, the female furies, and men to whom murder was a delightful spectacle. The prisoners are summoned one after another. They enter the vestibule, which has a wicket as a door of exit. They are questioned simply as a matter of form. Their answers are not even listened to. "Conduct this gentleman to the Force!" says the president. The prisoner thinks he is safe; he does not know that this phrase has been agreed upon as the signal of death. On reaching the wicket, hatchet and sabre strokes cut him down in the midst of his dream. The Swiss officers and soldiers who had survived August 10 were murdered thus. Their torture lasted a longer or shorter time, and was accomplished with more or less cruel refinements, according to the caprice of the assassins, who were nearly all drunk.

Night came, and torches were lighted. No shadows; a grand illumination. They must see clearly in the slaughter house. Lanterns were placed near the lakes of blood and heaps of dead bodies, so as plainly to distinguish the work from the workmen. There were some who were bent on losing no details of the carnage. The spectators wanted to take things easy. They were tired of standing too long. Benches for men and others for dames were got ready for them. The death-rattle of the agonizing, the vociferations of the assassins, the emulation between the executioners who kill slowly and the victims who are in haste to die, give joy to the spectators. There is no interruption to the human butchery. There has been so much blood spilled that the feet of the murderers slip on the pavement. A litter is made of straw and the clothes of the victims, and thereafter none are killed except upon this mattress. In this way the work is more commodiously accomplished. The assassins have plenty of assurance. Morning dawns on the continuation of the murders, and the wives of the murderers bring them something to eat.

On September 2, the only persons handed over to the cut-throats, were at the Abbey, the Carmelites, and Saint-Firmin. On September 3, the massacre became more general. The assassins had said: "If there is no more work, we shall have to find some." Their desire realizes itself. Work will not be lacking. There is still some at the Force, where the Princess de Lamballe, the preferred victim, is murdered. The assassins, who at the Abbey had been paid at the rate of eight francs a day, get only fifty sous at the Force. They work with undiminished zeal, even at this reduction. If necessary, they would work for nothing. To drink wine and shed blood is the essential thing. The negro Delorme, servant to Fournier "the American," distinguishes himself among them all. His black skin, reddened with blood, his white teeth and ferocious eyes, his bestial laugh, his ravenous fury, make him a choice assassin. There is work too at the Conciergerie, at the great and little Châtelet, the Salpêtrière, and the Bicêtre. A great number of those detained are people condemned or accused of private crimes which had absolutely nothing in common with politics. No matter; blood is wanted; they kill there as elsewhere. At the Grand Châtelet, work is so plenty, and the assassins so few, that they release several individuals imprisoned for theft, and impress them into their service. One of these unfortunate accidental executioners begins in a hesitating way, strikes a few undecided blows, and then throws down the hatchet placed in his hands. "No, no," he cries, "I cannot. No, no! Rather a victim than a murderer! I would rather receive death from scoundrels like you, then give it to innocent, disarmed people. Strike me!" And at once the veteran murderers kill the inexperienced cut-throat. There was a woman, known on account of her charms as the Beautiful Flower Girl, who was accused of having wounded her lover, a French guard, in a fit of jealousy. Théroigne de Mericourt, an amazon of the gutters, was her rival. She pointed her out to the assassins. They fastened her naked to a post, her legs apart and her feet nailed to the ground. They burned her alive. They cut off her breasts with sabre strokes. They impaled her on a hot iron. Her shrieks carried dismay as far as the outer banks of the Seine. Théroigne was at the height of felicity.

At the Salpêtrière there was still another spectacle. This prison for fallen women is a place of correction for the old, of amendment for the young, and an asylum for those who are still children. More than forty children of the lower classes were slain during these horrible days. The delirium of murder reached its height. Gorged with wine mingled with gunpowder, intoxicated with the fumes and reek of carnage, the assassins experienced a devouring, inextinguishable thirst for blood which nothing could quench. More blood, and yet more blood! And where can it now be found? The prisons are empty. There are no more nobles, no more priests, to put to death. Very well! for lack of anything better, they will go to an asylum for the poor, the sick, and the insane; to the Bicêtre. Vagabonds, paupers, fools, thieves, steward, chaplains, janitor, all is fish that comes to their net. The butchery lasts five days and nights without stopping. Massacre takes every form; some are drowned in the cellars, others shot in the courts. Water, fire, and sword, every sort of torture.

The cut-throats can at last take some repose. They have worked all the week. There are still some, however, who have not yet had enough, and who are going to continue the massacres of Paris in the provinces. The Communal Council of Surveillance has taken care to send to every commune in France a circular bearing the seal of the Minister of Justice, inviting them to follow the example of the capital.

September 9, the prisoners who had been detained at Orleans to be tried there by the Superior Court, entered Versailles on carts. At the moment when they approached the grating of the Orangery, assassins sent from Paris under the lead of Fournier "the American" sprang upon them and immolated every one. Thus perished the former Minister of Foreign Affairs, de Lessart, and the Duke de Brissac, former commander of the Constitutional Guard. Fournier "the American"[2] returned on horseback to Paris and began to caracole on the Place Vendôme; Danton loudly felicitated him on the success of the expedition, from the balcony of the Ministry of Justice.

During all this time, what efforts had the Assembly made to put a stop to the murders? None, absolutely none. Never has any deliberative body shown a like cowardice. Neither Vergniaud's voice nor that of any other Girondin was heard in protest. Indignation, pity, found not a single word to say. Speeches, discussions, votes on different questions, went on as usual. Concerning the massacres, not a syllable. During that infamous week, neither the ministers, the virtuous Roland not more than the others, neither Pétion, the mayor of Paris, nor the commander of the National Guard sent a picket guard of fifty men to any quarter to prevent the murders. A population of eight hundred thousand souls and a National Guard of fifty thousand men bent their necks under the yoke of a handful of bandits, of two hundred and thirty-five assassins (the exact number is known). People trembled. At the Assembly the old moderate party had disappeared. There were not more than two hundred odd deputies present at the shameful and powerless sessions. Terrorized Paris was in a state of stupor and prostration.

The murderers ended by execrating themselves. Tormented by remorse, they could see nothing before them but vivid faces, reeking entrails, bleeding limbs. "Among the cut-throats," M. Louis Blanc has said, "some gave signs of insanity that led to the supposition that some mysterious and terrible drug had been mingled with the wine they drank." Some of them became furious madmen. Others sought refuge in suicide, killing themselves the moment they had no one else to kill. Others enlisted. They were chased out of the army. Among these was the man who had carried the head of the Princess de Lamballe on a pike. One day when he was boasting of his murders, the soldiers became indignant and put him to death. Others still were tried as Septembrists and sent to the scaffold. The guilty received their punishment, even on this earth. Well! there are people nowadays who would like to rehabilitate them! In vain has Lamartine, the founder of the Second Republic, exclaimed in a burst of noble wrath: "Has human speech an execration, an anathema, which is equal to the horror these crimes of cannibals inspire in me, as in all civilized men?" In vain have the most celebrated historians of democracy, Edgar Quinet and Michelet, expressed in eloquent terms their indignation against these crimes. In vain has M. Louis Blanc said: "Every murder is a suicide. In the victim the body alone is killed; but what is killed in the murderer is the soul." There are men who would not alone excuse, but glorify the assassinations and the assassins!

XXXVI.

MADAME ROLAND DURING THE MASSACRES.

Madame Roland's hatred was appeased. The ambitious bourgeoise throned it for the second time at the Ministry of the Interior, and the Queen groaned in captivity in the Temple tower. The Egeria of the Girondins had not felt her heart swell with a single movement of pity for Marie Antoinette. The fatal 10th of August had seemed to her a personal triumph in which her pride delighted. The parvenue enjoyed the humiliations of the daughter of the German Cæsars. Her jealous instincts feasted on the afflictions of the Queen of France and Navarre.

Lamartine, indignant at this cruelty on Madame Roland's part, has repented of the eulogies he gave her in his Histoire des Girondins. In his Cours de Littérature (Volume XIII. Conversation XXIII.), he says: "I glided over that medley of intrigue and pomposity which composed the genius, both feminine and Roman, of this woman. In so doing, I conceded more to popularity than to truth. I wanted to give a Cornelia to the Republic. As a matter of fact, I do not know what Cornelia was, that mother of the Gracchi who brought up conspirators against the Roman Senate, and trained them to sedition, that virtue of ambitious commoners. As to Madame Roland, who inflated a vulgar husband by the breath of her feminine anger against a court she found odious because it did not open to her upstart vanity, there was nothing really fine in her except her death. Her rôle had been a mere parade of true greatness of soul." What Lamartine finds fault with most of all is her hostility to the martyr Queen. He adds: "She inspired the Girondins, her intimate friends, with an implacable hatred against the Queen, already so humiliated and so menaced; she had neither respect nor pity for this victim; she points her out to the rebellious multitude. She is no longer a wife, a mother, or a Frenchwoman. She poses as Nemesis at the door of the Temple, when the Queen is groaning there over her husband, her children, and herself, between the throne and the scaffold. This ostentatious stoicism of implacability is what, in my view, kills the woman in this female demagogue."

Alas! if Madame Roland was guilty, she was to be punished cruelly. The colleague of the virtuous Roland was the organizer of the September massacres. The republican sheepfold dreamed of by the admirer of Jean-Jacques Rousseau was invaded by ferocious beasts. Human nature had never appeared under a more execrable aspect than since its so-called regeneration. Madame Roland was filled with a naïve astonishment. After having sown the wind she was utterly surprised to reap the whirlwind. What! she said to herself, my husband is minister, or, to speak with great exactness, I am the minister myself, and yet there are people in France who are dissatisfied! Ungrateful nation, why dost thou not appreciate thy happiness? Madame Roland resembled certain politicians, who, having attained to power, would willingly disembarrass themselves of those by whose aid they reached it. For the second time she had just arrived at the goal of her ambition. Who dared, then, to pollute her joy? Why did that marplot, Danton, come with his untimely massacres to destroy such brilliant projects and banish such delightful dreams? The man who, as if in derision and antithesis, allowed himself to be called the Minister of Justice, produced the effect of a monster on Madame Roland. The republic as conceived by him had not the head of a goddess, but of a Gorgon. Its eyes glittered with a sinister lustre. The sword it held was that of an assassin or a headsman.

Madame Roland was greatly astonished when, on Sunday, September 2, 1792, toward five in the evening, when the massacres had already begun, she saw two hundred men of forbidding appearance arrive at the Ministry of the Interior and ask for her husband, who was absent. Lucky for him he was; for albeit a minister, they had come to arrest him in virtue of a mandate of the Communal Council of Surveillance. Not finding Roland, the two hundred men retired. One of them, with his shirt-sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and a sabre in his hand, declaimed furiously against the treachery of ministers. A few minutes later, Danton said to Pétion: "Do you know what they have taken into their heads? If they haven't issued a decree to arrest Roland!"—"Who did that?" demanded the mayor.—"Eh! those devils of committeemen. I have taken the mandate; hold! here it is!"

What was Madame Roland doing the next day, when the worst of the massacres were going on? She gave a dinner, and allowed the Prussian, Anacharsis Clootz, who came, moreover, uninvited, to make a regular defence of these horrible murders. "The events of the day," she says in her Memoirs, "formed the subject of conversation. Clootz pretended to prove that it was an indispensable and salutary measure; he uttered a good many commonplaces about the people's rights, the justice of their vengeance, and of its utility to the welfare of the species; he talked a long while and very loudly, ate still more, and fatigued more than one listener."

And yet, revolutionary passions had not extinguished every notion of humanity and justice in Madame Roland's soul. On that very day she induced her husband to write a letter to the National Assembly concerning the massacres. But how weak and undecided is this letter, and how public opinion must have been lowered and debased when it could regard Roland as a courageous minister! In place of scathing the murderers with the energy of an honest man, he pleads extenuating circumstances in their favor. "It is in the nature of things and according to the human heart," he said in his pale missive, "that victory should lead to some excesses. The sea, agitated by a violent storm, continues to roar long after the tempest; but everything has its limits and must finally see them determined. Yesterday was a day over whose events we ought, perhaps, to draw a veil. I know that the terrible vengeance of the people carries with it a sort of justice; but how easy it is for scoundrels and traitors to abuse this effervescence, and how necessary it is to arrest it!" This language produced not the least effect. The massacres went on, and Roland remained minister; although in his letter of September 3 he had written: "I ask the privilege of resigning if the silence of the laws does not permit me to act." The virtuous Roland sat in the Council beside his colleague, the organizer of this human butchery. September 13, he addressed a letter to the Parisians in which he burnt incense to himself, bragged about his character, his actions, and his firmness, and carried his infatuation so far as to write: "I have twice accepted a burden which I felt myself able to bear." Ah! how difficult it is to renounce even a shadow of power, and of what compromises with their consciences are not ministers capable in order to retain for a few days longer the portfolios that are slipping from their hands! In the depths of his soul Roland, like his wife, had the profoundest horror of the murders and the murderers. And yet notice how he extenuates them in his letter to the Parisians: "I admired August 10; I trembled over the results of September 2; I carefully considered what the betrayed patience of the people and their justice had produced, and I did not blame a first impulse too inconsiderately; I believe that its further progress should have been prevented, and that those who were seeking to perpetuate it were deceived by their imagination or by cruel and evil-minded men. If the erring brethren recognize that they have been deceived, let them come; my arms are open to them." That was a very prompt amnesty. Already the assassins are but erring brethren, and the minister welcomes them to his arms!

The Gironde kept silence, or, if it spoke, it was to attribute, like Vergniaud, the massacres "to the émigrés and the satellites of Coblentz." Later on, they were horrified by the crimes, but it was when others were to profit by them. Each taken by himself, the Girondins did not hesitate to condemn the murders; but taken as a whole, they considered merely the interests of their party. Were not three of them still in the Ministerial Council? What had they to complain of, then? The September massacres are the most striking expression of what abominations the ambitious may commit or allow to be committed in order to maintain themselves a few weeks longer in power.

But there is a voice in the depths of conscience which neither interest nor ambition can succeed in stifling. Madame Roland could not blind herself. The odious reality appeared to her. At last she saw the yawning gulf beneath her feet, and she uttered a cry of terror. A secret voice warned her that her fate would be like that of the September victims. After the 9th of that fatal month her imagination was vividly impressed. Bloody phantoms rose before her. She wrote on that day to Bancal des Issarts: "If you knew the frightful details of these expeditions.... You know my enthusiasm for the Revolution; well, I am ashamed of it; it has become hideous. In a week ... how do I know what may happen? It is degrading to remain in office, and we are not permitted to leave Paris. We are detained so that we may be destroyed at the propitious moment."

From that time a rising anger and indignation took possession of the mind and heart of the Egeria of the Girondins, and constantly increased until the hour when she ascended the steps of the scaffold. She writes in her Memoirs, apropos of the September massacres: "All Paris witnessed these horrible scenes executed by a small number of wretches (there were but fifteen at the Abbey, at the door of which only two National Guards were stationed, in spite of the applications made to the Commune and the commandant). All Paris permitted it to go on. All Paris was accursed in my eyes, and I no longer hoped that liberty might be established among cowards, insensible to the worst outrages that could be perpetrated against nature and humanity, cold spectators of attempts which the courage of fifty armed men could have prevented with ease.... It is not the first night that astonishes me; but four days!—and inquisitive people going to see this spectacle! No, I know nothing in the annals of the most barbarous peoples which can compare with these atrocities."

What a striking lesson for those who play with anarchical passions and end by falling themselves into the snares they have laid for others! Nothing is more deserving of study than this retaliatory punishment which is found, one may say, on every page of revolutionary histories. The hour was coming when the Girondins and their heroine would repent of the means they had employed to overset the throne. This was when the same means were employed against them, when they recognized their own weapons in the wounds they received. Then, when they had no more interest in keeping silence, they sought to escape a complicity that gained them nothing. Instead of the luminous heights which in their golden dreams they had aspired to gain, they fell, crushed and overwhelmed, into a dismal gulf, full of tears and blood. How bitter then were their recriminations against men and things! It was only to virtue that the dying Brutus said: "Thou art but a name." The Girondins said it also to glory, to country, and to liberty. Those among them who did not succeed in fleeing, disavowed, denounced, and insulted each other before the revolutionary tribunal. At the Conciergerie they intoned the Marseillaise, but parodying the demagogic chant in this wise:—

Read the Memoirs of Louvet, Buzot, Barbaroux, Pétion, and Madame Roland, and you will see to what extremes of bitterness the language of deceived ambition can go. They are paroxysms of rage, howls of anger, shrieks of despair. Consider the difference between philosophy and religion! The philosophers curse, and the Christian pardons. Yes, as Edgar Quinet has said, "Louis XVI. alone speaks of forgiveness on that scaffold to which the others were to bring thoughts of vengeance and despair. And by that he seems still to reign over those who were to follow him in death with the passions and the furies of earth." Louis XVI. will be magnanimous and calm. A celestial sweetness will overspread his royal countenance. An infernal rage will distort the heart and the features of the Girondins. What pains, what tortures, in their death-struggle! Earth fails them, and they do not look to heaven. What accents of disgust and hatred when they speak of their former accomplices, now become their executioners!

"Great God!" Buzot will say, "if it is only by such men and such infamous means that republics can arise and be consolidated, there is no government more frightful on this earth nor more fatal to human happiness." He will address these insults, worthy of the imprecations of Camillus, to the city of Paris: "I say truly, that France can expect neither liberty nor happiness except from the irreparable destruction of that capital."

Barbaroux will be still more severe. His anathemas are launched not only at Paris, but at all France. "The people," he says, "do not deserve that one should become attached to them, for they are essentially ungrateful. It is the absurdest folly to try to conduct to liberty people without morals, who blaspheme God and adore Marat. These people are no more fit for a philosophic government than the lazzaroni of Naples or the cannibals of America.... Liberty, virtue, sacred rights of men, to-day you are nothing but empty names." Pétion, before dying, will write to his son this letter, which is like the testament of the Gironde: "My greatest torment will be to think that so many crimes went unpunished; vengeance is here the most sacred of duties.... My son, either the murderers of thy father and thy country will be delivered to the severities of the law and expiate their crimes upon the scaffold, or thou art under obligation to free thy country from them. They have broken all the ties of society; their crimes are of such a nature that they do not fall under ordinary rules. From such monsters every one is authorized to purge the earth."

Madame Roland will be not less vehement than Buzot, Barbaroux, and Pétion. She will address these severe but just reproaches to her friends who had not been valiant enough in their own defence: "They temporized with crime, the cowards! They were to fall in their turn, but they succumb shamefully, pitied by nobody, and with nothing to expect from posterity but utter contempt.... Rather than obey their tyrants, than descend from the bar and go out of the Assembly like a timid flock about to be branded by the butcher, why did they not do justice to themselves by falling on the monsters to annihilate them rather than be sentenced by them?" It is not her friends alone whom her anger will lash, but the sovereign people, the people once so flattered, whom she will pursue with her anathemas. "The people," she will say, "can feel nothing but the cannibal joy of seeing blood flow, in order that they may run no risk of shedding their own. That predicted time has come when, if they ask for bread, dead bodies will be given them; but their degraded nature takes pleasure in the spectacle, and the satisfied instinct of cruelty makes the dearth supportable until it becomes absolute." The Egeria of the Girondins will comprehend that all is lost, that even her blood will be sterile, and that France is condemned either to anarchy or a dictatorship. "Liberty," she will exclaim, "was not made for this corrupt nation, which leaves the bed of debauchery or the dunghill of poverty only to brutalize itself in license, and howl as it wallows in the blood streaming from scaffolds." Like the damned souls in Dante, Madame Roland will leave all hope behind, and when, a few days after Marie Antoinette, she ascends the steps of the guillotine, instead of thinking of heaven, like the Queen, she will address this sarcastic speech to the plaster statue which has replaced that of Louis XV.: "O Liberty! how they have betrayed thee!"

But let us not anticipate. The Girondins are still to have a glimmer of joy. The Republic is about to be proclaimed.

XXXVII.

THE PROCLAMATION OF THE REPUBLIC.

"One of the astonishing things in the French Revolution," says one of the most eminent writers of the democratic school, Edgar Quinet, "is the unexpectedness with which the great changes occur. The most important events, the destruction of the monarchy and the advent of the Republic, came about without any previous warning." The most ardent republicans were royalists, not merely under the old régime, but after 1789, and even up to August 10, 1792. Marat wrote, in No. 374 of the Ami du Peuple, February 17, 1791: "I have often been represented as a mortal enemy of royalty, but I claim that the King has no better friend than myself." And he added: "As to Louis XVI. personally, I know very well that his defects are chargeable solely to his education, and that by nature he is an excellent sort of man, whom one would have cited as a worthy citizen if he had not had the misfortune to be born on the throne; but, such as he is, he is at all events the King we want. We ought to thank Heaven for having given him to us. We ought to pray that he may be spared to us." Marat praying, Marat thanking Heaven! and for whom? For the King. Does not that prove what deep root royalty had taken in France? April 20, 1792, the same Marat bitterly reproached Condorcet with "shamelessly calumniating the Jacobin Club, and perfidiously accusing it of wishing to destroy the monarchy" (L' Ami du Peuple, No. 434). June 13, he attacked those who violated the oath taken at the time of the Federation, and said: "To defend the Constitution is the same thing as to be faithful to the nation, the law, and the King" (L' Ami du Peuple, No. 448).

During the entire continuance of the Legislative Assembly, when Robespierre, having left the tribune, was pretending to educate the people by means of his journal, what he defended to the utmost was the royal Constitution. Madame Roland relates that after the flight to Varennes, when the prospect of a republic loomed up, possibly for the first time, at a secret meeting, Robespierre, grinning as usual, and biting his nails, asked ironically what a republic might be. In June, 1792, the entire Jacobin Club was royalist still. It proposed to drop Billaud-Varennes, because Billaud-Varennes had dared to put the monarchical principle in question. On the 7th of July following, two months and a half, that is, before the opening of the Convention, at the time of the famous Lamourette Kiss, all the members of the Assembly swore to execrate the Republic forever. Three weeks after September 2, Danton alleged the paucity and the weakness of the republicans, compared with the royalists, as motives for the massacres. Pétion has said: "When the insurrection of August 10 was undertaken, there were but five men in France who desired a republic."

Buzot, Madame Roland's idol, has written: "A wretched mob, unintelligent and unenlightened, vomited forth insults against royalty; the rest neither desired nor willed anything but the Constitution of 1791, and spoke of the republicans just as one speaks of extremely honest fools. This people is republican only through force of the guillotine." And yet, September 21, 1792, the Convention, holding its first sitting in the Hall of the Manège, began by proclaiming the Republic.

Buzot, in his Memoirs, has thus described the deputations that were sent to the bar, and the public that occupied the galleries: "It seemed as if the outlet of every sewer in Paris and other great cities had been searched for whatever was most filthy, hideous, and infected. Villainously dirty faces, surmounted by shocks of greasy hair, and with eyes half sunk into their heads, they spat out, with their nauseating breath, the grossest insults mingled with the sharp snarls of carnivorous beasts. The galleries were worthy of such legislators: men whose frightful aspect betokened crime and poverty, and women whose shameless faces expressed the filthiest debauchery. When all these with hands and feet and voice made their horrible racket, one seemed to be in an assembly of devils."

When the session opened, Collot d'Herbois was the first speaker. He said: "There is a matter which you cannot put off until to-morrow, which you cannot put off until this evening, which you cannot defer for a single instant without being unfaithful to the wishes of the nation; it is the abolition of royalty." Quinet having objected that it would be better to present this question when the Constitution was to be discussed, Grégoire, constitutional Bishop of Blois, exclaimed: "Certainly, no one will ever propose to us to preserve the deadly race of kings in France. All the dynasties have been breeds of ravenous beasts, living on nothing but human flesh; still it is necessary to reassure plainly the friends of liberty; this magic talisman, which still has power to stupefy so many men, must be destroyed." Bazire remarked that it would be a frightful example to the people to see an Assembly which they had entrusted with their dearest interests, resolve upon anything in a moment of enthusiasm and without thorough discussion. Grégoire replied with vehemence: "Eh! what need is there of discussion when everybody is of the same mind? Kings, in the moral order, are what monsters are in the physical order. Courts are the workshop of crime and the lair of tyrants. The history of kings is the martyrology of nations; we are all equally penetrated by this truth. What is the use of discussing it?" Then the question, put to vote in these terms: "The National Convention declares that royalty is abolished in France," was adopted amidst applause.

At four in the afternoon of the same day, a municipal officer named Lubin, surrounded by mounted gendarmes and a large crowd of people, came to read a proclamation before the Temple tower. The trumpets were sounded. A great silence ensued, and Lubin, who had a stentorian voice, read loud enough to be heard by the royal family confined in the dungeon, this proclamation, the death knell of monarchy: "Royalty is abolished in France. All public acts will be dated from the first year of the Republic. The seal of State will be inscribed with this motto: Republique française. The National Seal will represent a woman seated on a sheaf of arms, holding in one hand a pike surmounted by a liberty-cap." Hébert (the famous Père Duchesne) was at this moment on guard near the royal family. Sitting on the threshold of their chamber, he sought to discover a movement of vexation or anger, or any other emotion on their faces. He was unsuccessful. While listening to the revolutionary decree which snatched away his throne, the descendant of Saint Louis, Henry IV., and Louis XIV. experienced not the slightest trouble. He had a book in his hand, and he quietly went on reading it. As impassive as her spouse, the Queen neither made a movement nor uttered a word. When the proclamation was finished, the trumpets sounded again. Cléry then went to the window, and the eyes of the crowd turned instantly towards him. As they mistook him for Louis XVI., they overwhelmed him with insults. The gendarmes made threatening gestures, and he was obliged to withdraw so as to quiet the tumult. While the populace was unchained around the Temple prison, one man alone was calm, one man alone seemed a stranger to all anxiety: it was the prisoner.

A new era begins. The death-struggle of royalty is over. Royalty is dead, and the King is soon to die. Grégoire, who had stolen the vote (there were but 371 conventionists present; 374 were absent; that is to say, more than half), is both surprised and enthusiastic about what he has done. He confesses that for several days his excessive joy deprived him of appetite and sleep. Such joy will not last very long. M. Taine compares revolutionary France to a badly nourished workman, poor, and overdriven with toil, and yet who drinks strong liquors. At first, in his intoxication, he thinks he is a millionnaire, loved and admired; he thinks himself a king. "But soon the radiant visions give place to black and monstrous phantoms.... At present, France has passed through the period of joyous delirium, and is about to enter on another that is sombre; behold it, capable of daring, suffering, and doing all things, whenever its guides, as widely astray as itself, shall point out an enemy or an obstacle to its fury."

How quickly the disenchantments come! Already Lafayette, the man of generous illusions, has had to imitate the conduct of those émigrés on whom he has been so severe. He has fled to a foreign land, and found there not a refuge, but a prison. He will remain more than five years in the gloomy fortress of Olmutz. The victor of Valmy, Dumouriez, will hardly be more fortunate. He will go over to the enemy, and live in exile on a pension from foreign powers. How close together deceptions and recantations come! Marat, who had already said to the inhabitants of the capital: "Eternal cockneys, with what epithets would I not assail you in the transports of my despair, if I knew any more humiliating than that of Parisians?"[1] Marat, who had said to all Frenchmen: "No, no; liberty is not made for an ignorant, light, and frivolous nation, for cits brought up in fear, dissimulation, knavery, and lying, nourished in cunning, intrigue, sycophancy, avarice, and swindling, subsisting only by theft and rapine, aspiring after nothing but pleasures, titles, and decorations, and always ready to sell themselves for gold!"[2] Marat will write, May 7th, 1793, that is to say, at the apogee of his favorite political system: "All measures taken up to the present day by the assemblies, constituent, legislative, and conventional, to establish and consolidate liberty, have been thoughtless, vain, and illusory, even supposing them to have been taken in good faith. The greater part seem to have had for their object to perpetuate oppression, bring on anarchy, death, poverty, and famine; to make the people weary of their independence, to make liberty a burden, to cause them to detest the Revolution, through its excessive disorders, to exhaust them by watching, fatigue, want, and inanition, to reduce them to despair by hunger, and to bring them back to despotism by civil war."[3]

There were six ministers appointed on August 10. Two of them, Claviére and Roland, will kill themselves; two others, Lebrun-Tondu and Danton, will be guillotined; the remaining two, Servan and Monge, are destined to become, one a general of division under Napoleon, and the other a senator of the Empire and Count of Péluse; and when, at the beginning of his reign, the Emperor complains to the latter because there are still partisans of the Republic to be found: "Sire," the former minister of August 10 will answer, "we had so much trouble to make them republicans! may it please Your Majesty kindly to allow them at least a few days to become imperialists!" Of the two men who had so enthusiastically brought about the proclamation of the Republic, one, Collot d'Herbois, will be transported to Guiana by the republicans, and die there in a paroxysm of burning fever; the other, Grégoire, will be a senator of the Empire, which will not, however, prevent him from promoting the deposition of Napoleon as he had promoted that of Louis XVI. There are men who will exchange the jacket of the sans-culotte for the gilded livery of an imperial functionary. The conventionists and regicides are transformed into dukes and counts and barons. David, the official painter of the Empire, Napoleon's favorite, will paint with joy the picture of a pope, and be very proud of his great picture of the new Charlemagne's coronation. But listen to Edgar Quinet: "When I see the orators of deputations taking things with such a high hand at the bar, and lording it so proudly over mute and complaisant assemblies, I should like to know what became of them a few years later." And thereupon he sets out to discover their traces. But after considerable investigation he stops. "If I searched any further," he exclaims, "I should be afraid of encountering them among the petty employés of the Empire. It was quite enough to see Huguenin, the indomitable president of the insurrectionary Commune, so quickly tamed, soliciting and obtaining a post as clerk of town gates as soon as absolute power made its reappearance after the 18th Brumaire. The terrible Santerre becomes the gentlest of men as soon as he is pensioned by the First Consul. Hardly had Bourdon de l'Oise and Albitte, those men of iron, felt the rod than you see them the supplest functionaries of the Empire. The great king-taker, Drouet, thrones it in the sub-prefecture of Sainte-Menehould. Napoleon has related that, on August 10, he was in a shop in the Carrousel, whence he witnessed the taking of the palace. If he had a presentiment then, he must have smiled at the chaos which he was to reduce so easily to its former limits. How many furies, and all to terminate so soon in the accustomed obedience!"

Is not history, with its perpetual alternatives of license and despotism, like a vicious circle? And do not the nations pass their time in producing webs of Penelope, whose bloody threads they weave and unweave again with tears? All governments, royalties, empires, republics, ought to be more modest. But all, profoundly forgetful of the lessons of the past, believe themselves immortal. All declare haughtily that they have closed forever the era of revolutions.

With the advent of the Republic a new calendar had been put in force. The equality of days and nights at the autumnal equinox opened the era of civil equality on September 22. "Who would have believed that this human geometry, so profoundly calculated, was written in the sand, and that in a few years no traces of it would remain? ... The heavens have continued to gravitate, and have brought back the equality of days and nights; but they have allowed the promised liberty and equality to perish, like meteors that vanish in empty space.... The sans-culottes have not been able to make themselves popular among the starry peoples.... An ancient belief which the men of the Revolution had neglected through fear or through contempt was again met with; a spectre had appeared; a chilly breath, like that of Samuel, had made itself felt; and lo, the edifice so sagely constructed, and leaning on the worlds, has vanished away."[4]

There lies at the foundation of history a supreme sadness and melancholy. This never-ending series of illusions and deceptions, errors and afflictions, faults and crimes; this rage, and passion, and folly; so many efforts and fatigues, so many dangers, tortures, and tears, so much blood, such revolutions, catastrophies, cataclysms of every sort,—and all for what? Wretched humanity, rolling its stone of Sisyphus from age to age, inspires far more compassion than contempt. The painful reflections caused by the annals of all peoples are perhaps more sombre for the French Revolution than for any other period. Edgar Quinet justly laments over the inequality between the sacrifices of the victims and the results obtained by posterity. He affirms that in other histories one thing reconciles us to the fury of men, and that is the speedy fecundity of the blood they shed; for example, when one sees that of the martyrs flow, one also sees Christianity spread over the earth from the depth of the catacombs; while amongst us, the blood which streamed most abundantly and from such lofty sources, did not find soil equally well prepared. And the illustrious historian exclaims sadly: "The supreme consolation has been refused to our greatest dead; their blood has not been a seed of virtue and independence for their posterity. If they should reappear once more, they would feel themselves tortured again, and on a worse scaffold, by the denial of their descendants; they would hurl at us again the same adieu: 'O Liberty! how they have betrayed thee!'"

INDEX.

Abbey prison, the, massacre of the prisoners of, 363.

Ankarstroem, Captain, the assassin of Gustavus III., 37, 41.

Arles, Archbishop of, massacre of, 364.

Assassins, the, of the September massacres, 362 et seq.; their fate, 370.

Assignats created, 128.

Aubier, M. d', on the King's unwar-like disposition, 288; with the King in the Convent of the Feuillants, 330.

Barbaroux, visionary schemes of, 271; declares the King might have maintained himself, 285; anathemas of, on the Septembrists, 381.

Barry, Madame du, her letter to Marie Antoinette, 138.

Beaumarchais compared with Dumouriez, 95.

Belgium, the invasion of, a failure, 136.

Beugnot, Count, his description of Madame Roland, 87, 92; philosophic remarks of, on woman, 108.

Billaud-Varennes, 246; at the Abbey, 363.

Blanc, M. Louis, quoted, 370.

Bonne-Carrère, director of foreign affairs, portrait of, 101.

Bossuet quoted, 134.

Bouillé, Count de, warns Gustavus III. of the conspiracy against him, 38; his judgment on Gustavus III., 43.

Bouillé, Marquis de, suppresses the insurrection at Nancy, 111, 133.

Brissac, Duke of, his devotion to royalty, 137 et seq.; intolerable to the Jacobins, 141; accused in the Assembly, 144; assassinated, 147, 369.

Brunswick, Duke of, his manifesto, 267.

Buzot, Madame Roland's affection for, 64; quoted, 386.

Calvet, M., sent to the Abbey, 144.

Campan, Madame, describes the Queen's emotion on hearing of her brother's death, 28; her account of Dumouriez' interview with the Queen, 155; in peril in the Tuileries, 324.

Carmelite church, massacre at, 364.

Chateaubriand, quotation from, 9.

Chateauvieux, the fête of, 110 et seq., mutinous soldiers of, punished, 112; fêted by the Jacobins, 113, 118; admitted to the Assembly, 117.

Chénier, André, patriotic conduct of, 113, 124; his ode to David, 119; his fate, 124.

Clavière made Minister of the Finances, 103, 160.

Clootz, Anacharsis, defends the September massacres, 375.

Comédie-Française, the, in the Revolution, 10.

Commune, insurrectionary, formed in the Hôtel-de-Ville, 281; refuse to extinguish the fire at the Tuileries, 325, 335, 345, 355; invites every commune in France to follow the example of massacre in Paris, 369; terrorize the Assembly, 370; order the arrest of Roland, 374, 378.

Constitutional Guard, the composition of, 140; disarmed, 145.

Cordeliers, club of the, 7; chiefs of, 7; decide to attack the Tuileries, 274.

Danjou turns the mob bearing the Princess de Lamballe's head away from the Temple, 355.

Danton, cowardice of, 271, 316; his bloodthirsty speech to the Assembly, 361, 374; fate of, 391.

Dauphin, the, the red cap set on his head, 213; his interest in the guard, Drouet, 217, 219; his prayer for the King, 220; on the morning of August 10, 284; taken from his mother's arms by an insurrectionist, 297; in the Assembly, 299; in the Convent of the Feuillants, 329, 333; prayer taught him by his mother, 347.

David, his part in the fête of Chateauvieux, 119; conversation of, 319; under the Empire, 392.

Delorme, the negro assassin, 367.

Desilles, killed in the insurrection at Nancy, 111.

Drouet, the royalist guard, 217.

Dumouriez, portrait of, by Madame Roland, 94; Minister of Foreign Affairs, 95; "a miserable intriguer," 95; his career, 96; Masson's description of him, 98; plays a double part, 101; his description of Louis XVI., 104; made Minister of Foreign Affairs, 103; Memoirs of, quoted, 127, 129, 130; urges the King to sign the decree for the transportation of the clergy, 150; has an interview with the Queen, 153; refuses to be Madame Roland's puppet, 158; aids the King to be rid of Roland and his faction, 164; takes the portfolio of War, 166; before the Assembly, 167; resigns, 169; final interview of, with the King, 171; entreats him not to veto the decrees, 172 et seq.; goes to the army, 174.

Duranton, made Minister of Justice, 103, 160.

Elisabeth, Madame, letter of, concerning the fête of Chateauvieux, 120; remains with the King during the invasion of the Tuileries, 200; mistaken by the mob for Marie Antoinette, 202; rejoins the Queen, 212; letter of, to Madame de Raigecourt, 239; cherishes false illusions, 265; pious maxim of, 276; her gentleness, 295; prayer of, in the Temple, 347.

Emigration of the nobility the rule in 1792, 2.

Federation, fête of the, 249 et seq.

Fersen, Count de, new information concerning, 14; his chivalric devotion to Marie Antoinette, 15; their correspondence, 16; secret mission of, 18; sees the King and Queen, 19; his melancholy end, 21, 22.

Feuillants, Convent of the, royal family imprisoned in, 328 et seq.

Feuillants, club of, 6.

Force, the, prison of, 350.

Fournier, "the American," 369.

Francis II., warlike acts of, 127.

Geoffrey, M., remarks of, on Gustavus III., 33; quoted, 132.

Girondins, the, 177; hesitate to depose the King, 271; tacitly approve the massacres, 377.

Gouges, Olympe de, 240.

Gouvion, M. de, protests against admitting the Swiss to the Assembly, 116; death of, 167.

Grand Châtelet, massacres at, 367.

Grave, de, made Minister of War, 103; replaced by Servan, 160.

Grégoire urges the abolition of royalty, 387; career of, after the Revolution, 391.

Guadet, hostility of, to Lafayette, 234.

Guillotine, Doctor, and his invention, 12.

Guillotine, the, 12; diversion of society over, 13.

Gustavus III., his interest in Marie Antoinette, 17; trusted by her, 17; letter of, to her, 18; at Aix-la-Chapelle, 32; his superstition, 34; his promises to Louis XVI., 36; conspiracy against, 37 et seq.; assassination of, 40 et seq.; scenes at his death, 42; character of, 43.

Hannaches, Mademoiselle d', 30, 77.

Hébert, Abbé, confesses the King, 276.

Hébert (Père Duchesne) on guard at the Temple, 388.

Heine, Heinrich, quoted, 278.

Herbois, Collot d', his part in the affair of the regiment of Chateauvieux, 112 et seq.; attacks Andre Chénier, 114; fate of, 125; boasts of the 2d of September, 362; urges the abolition of royalty, 387; fate of, 391.

Hervelly, M. d', brings the order to the Swiss to cease firing, 310.

Hue, François, with the King in his captivity, 331; receives from the King a lock of his hair, 346.

Huguenin, the orator of the insurrectionists of June 20, 192; chief of the Commune, 316.

Insurrectionists of June 20, organization of, 182; enter the hall of the Assembly, 193; break into the Tuileries, 198.

Isle, Rouget de l', author of the Marseillaise, 269.

Jacobin Club, place of its meeting, 5; its affiliations, 6; Lafayette's remarks on, 9; joy of at, the death of Gustavus III., 44; the insurrectionary power of, 177; of Brest and Marseilles, send two battalions to Paris, 268; royalist, in June, 1792, 385.

Jourdan, the headsman, 120.

June 20, insurrection of, 186 et seq.

La Chesnaye commands the force in the Tuileries, 293.

Lacoste, made Minister of the Marine, 103.

Lafayette, letter of, to the Assembly, 178 et seq.; his letter not published, but referred to a committee, 181; his relations to the Jacobins, 230; before the National Assembly, 232; distrusted by the King and Queen, 236; anxious that the King should leave Paris, 256.

Lalanne, the grenadier, and Louis XVI., 200.

Lamartine, quoted, 131; his observations on Lafayette, 231; on Madame Roland, 372.

Lamballe, Princess of, 121, 321, 331; not allowed to go to the Temple with the Queen, 343; sent to the Force, 350 et seq.; examination and execution of, 352 et seq.; her body mutilated and her head carried on a pike to the Temple, 355; her heart eaten, 358.

Lamourette, Abbé, his career, 241; his speech to the Assembly and his proposition for harmony, 242.

Laporte burns the Countess de la Motte's book at the Queen's order, 142.

Lebel, Madame de, 353.

Legendre, addresses the King insolently, 202.

Leopold II., his interest in French affairs, 23; death of, 27.

Lessart, de, report of, disapproved by the Assembly, 28; impeached, 30; massacre of, 369.

Lilienhorn, Count de, one of the assassins of Gustavus III., 37, 45.

Logographe, box of the, 299 et seq.

Louis XVI., despised by the émigrés, 25; letter of, to Gustavus III., 36; appoints a ministry chosen by the Gironde, 103; his deference to his ministers, 104 et seq.; declares war on Austria, 126, 129; sufferings of, 132; not a soldier, 133, 139; has no plan, 135; anecdotes of, by M. de Vaublanc, 139, 140; sacrifices his guard, 145; repents his concessions, 148; for several days in a sort of stupor, 151; insulted by Roland and his faction, 160; Madame Roland's letter to him read in the Council, 164; asks Dumouriez to help rid him of Roland's faction, 164; refuses to sign the decree against the priests, 169; accepts the resignation of Dumouriez, 169; resists Dumouriez' entreaties not to veto the decrees, 172; vetoes the decrees, 181; permits the gate of the Tuileries to be opened to the mob, 195; his conduct at the invasion of the Tuileries, 199 et seq.; his reception of the mob in the Tuileries, 201; addressed by the butcher Legendre, 202; in bodily peril, 203; returns to the bedchamber, 208; letter of, to the Assembly relative to the invasion of the Tuileries, 223; interview of, with Pétion, 224; incident of the red bonnet, 226; conversation of, with Bertrand de Molleville, 227; repugnance of, to Lafayette, 236; address of, to the Assembly, 243; letter of, to the Assembly, 245; his plastron, 248; takes part in the fête of the Federation, 249 et seq.; too timorous and hesitating to act, 257; nominates a new cabinet, 269; conciliatory message of, to the Assembly, 270; declines to entertain any plan of escape, 273; consents that the royalist noblemen should defend him, 284; unwarlike character of, 288; reviews the troops in the Tuileries garden and narrowly escapes from them, 289; urged by Roederer, goes with his family to the Assembly, 292 et seq.; his escort, 295; addresses the Assembly, 300; compelled to remain in the reporters' gallery, 300; orders the defenders of the Tuileries to cease firing, 305; deposition of, proposed in the Assembly, 317; acts like a disinterested spectator, 318; taken to the Convent of the Feuillants, 328; transferred to the Temple, 334, 339; his quarters, 341; gives lessons to the Dauphin in the Temple, 342: deprived of his sword, 346; hears the proclamation abolishing royalty without emotion, 388.

Louvet, the author of Faublas, 54; editor of the Sentinelle, and Madame Roland's confidant, 89 et seq.

Maillard, president of the tribunal at the Abbey, 365.

Mailly, Marshal de, the chief of the two hundred noblemen in the Tuileries, 284.

Malta, Knights of, 338.

Mandat, M. de, receives from Pétion an order to repel force, 280; goes to the Hôtel-de-Ville and is massacred, 281.

Marat incites to the deposition of the king, 270; on Louis XVI., 384.

Marie Antoinette, chivalric devotion of Count de Fersen for, 15; her correspondence with him, 16; places absolute confidence in Gustavus III., 17; letter of, to her brother Leopold, 25; condition of, in 1792, 73; has an interview with Dumouriez, 153; annoyed and insulted by the populace, 156, 157; during the invasion of the Tuileries, 210 et seq.; opposed to vigorous measures, 222; her distrust of Lafayette and preference for Danton, 237; present at the fête of the Federation, 251 et seq.; her alarm at the King's peril, 253; midnight alarms of, 259; insulted by federates and forced to keep to her apartments, 261; her estimate of the King's character, 263; on the night of August 9, 276; takes refuge in the Assembly, 299; her hopes excited by the sound of artillery, 304; in the box of the Logographe, 321; in the Convent of the Feuillante, 332; in the Temple, 343; faints when she hears of the Princesse de Lamballe's death, 356.

Marseillaise, the, Rouget de l'Isle's new hymn, 269.

Marseilles, federates of, arrive in Paris, 268; the scum of the jails, 269; at the Tuileries, 290, 306 et seq., 309.

Masson, M. Frédéric, his description of Dumouriez, 98.

Ministry appointed by the King resign; new, appointed, 176.

Mirabeau cautions the Queen against Lafayette, 236; and Abbé Lamourette, 241.

Molleville, Bertrand de, conversation of, with the King, 227; quoted, 273.

Monge, senator of the Empire, reply of, to Napoleon, 391.

Moniteur, the, on the fête of Chateauvieux, 121.

Mortimer-Ternaux, M., quoted, 279, 282; his Histoire de la Terreur, 359.

Mouchy, Marshal de, his devotion to the King and Queen, 220.

Napoleon, a witness of the invasion of the Tuileries, 209; asserts the King could have gained the victory, 286; a witness of the attack of the Marseillais on the Tuileries, 310, 314; visits the Temple, and has it destroyed, 348.

National Assembly, place of meeting of, 5; impeach the King's brothers and confiscate the émigrés' property, 26; impeach De Lessart, 30; order the King's guard disbanded, 143; decrees of as to the clergy and an army before Paris, 150; Madame Roland's letter to the King, read to, 167; letter of Lafayette read in the, 178; receive a deputation from Marseilles, 183; consider the admission of the resurrectionists to the chamber, 187; the place of meeting of, 188; deputation from, to the King during the invasion of the Tuileries, 208; question the Queen, 216; maintain an equivocal attitude, 222; the majority of, royalists and constitutionalists, 272; affect not to recognize the King's danger, 280; send a deputation to receive the King and his family, 296; number of members present when the decree of deposition was voted, 320; terrorized by the Commune, 370; royalty abolished and the republic proclaimed by, 387.

National Guard, at the Tuileries, 196; the choice troops of, broken up, 268; royalist, in the Tuileries, 279, 288.

Noblemen, royalist, fidelity of, to the King, 278, 284; fate of, 322.

Orleans, Duke of, and the Palais Royal, 4; and his party clamor for the deposition of the King, 270.