XLII. 1786–1793. DUPE AND VICTIM.

What became of the Dupe—Cardinal Prince Bishop Louis-René-Édouard de Rohan? Finding the bleak air of the Auvergne mountains sorely trying to his constitution, broken as it was by excesses and long confinement in the Bastille, the cardinal asked and obtained permission of the king to choose another place of residence. Either he or the Baron de Breteuil fixed upon the Abbey of St. Bénoît, on the Loire, near Orléans, but the lady superior of this establishment, alarmed at the prospect of the cardinal and his large retinue of servants coming there and eating them out of house and home, besides being very backward in his payments, protested that she was unable to afford the cardinal the necessary accommodation.⁠[444] Eventually he was taken in at the Abbey of Marmontier, near Tours, where, we are told, he was ever lamenting the mad hopes in which he had permitted himself to indulge with regard to the queen, and the blind confidence he had reposed in Madame de la Motte.⁠[445] Growing tired after a time of his new home, the cardinal made various efforts to obtain permission to return to his diocese, and even sent medical certificates to his old enemy, the Baron de Breteuil, setting forth that the air of his native Alsace was absolutely necessary to the restoration of his health. The king at last gave an unwilling consent, and for a time the cardinal lived in something like his old accustomed luxurious state at pleasant Saverne. On the approach of the Revolution he was nominated, by the influence of the popular party—who thought that his desire to be revenged upon the court would secure him to their side—a deputy of the clergy of Alsace. Being still under sentence of exile he did not dare accept the nomination, and a certain Abbé Louis was elected in his place. The abbé dying, the cardinal was again chosen, and the National Assembly having cancelled his sentence of exile, after some delay he came to Paris and took his seat, amidst loud shouts of applause—much, however, against the wish of his illustrious relatives, who, one and all, hated the Revolution as a certain individual is said to hate holy water. For a time the cardinal, with the view of self-preservation, went with the revolutionary current, and even took the civic oath; but when his co-reformers began to meddle with the property of the clergy, decreeing the sale of their lands and superfluous edifices, he cut himself adrift from them, and retired once more to his loved Saverne, to dream, however, no more mad dreams of love and ambition while pacing up and down his once-favourite “Promenade de la Rose.”

Any mere wordy formula the cardinal was willing enough to swallow, but he could not tolerate sacrilegious hands being laid upon church property, and particularly church property that he was interested in. “Messieurs of the clergy,” said a wag of the time, “it is your turn to be shaved; if you wriggle too much you will be certain to get cut;” and cut the cardinal, and with him the unfortunate crown jewellers, certainly did get, for the latter’s security on the rich revenues of the Abbey of St. Waast, of which the nation had taken possession, was now only so much waste paper, and bankruptcy was the result. Shortly after the grand national oath-taking ceremony in the Champ de Mars, the cardinal was summoned by the Assembly to resume his functions as deputy within fifteen days, but instead of doing so, he wrote a letter, stating that as it was impossible for him to give his adhesion to the new civil constitution of the clergy, he placed his seat at the Assembly’s disposal. The cardinal was now looked upon as one “suspect,” and had ere long to retire to Ettenheim, a dependency of his Strasbourg bishopric, lying beyond the French frontier on the opposite bank of the Rhine. Here, in his capacity of prince of the German empire, he caused levies of troops to be made to swell the army under the command of his relative, the Prince de Condé, whom he aided in every possible way. These proceedings of his greatly exasperated the revolutionary party; he was constantly being denounced in the National Assembly, and on one occasion Victor de Broglie brought forward a proposition to indict him before the national high court; but the Assembly, knowing the cardinal to be beyond its reach, sensibly enough refused to entertain the proposal, although it was renewed again and again. It contented itself, on first hearing of the cardinal’s flight, with instructing the municipality of Strasbourg to seize and make an inventory of his effects, of which they were to retain custody until further orders.⁠[446] “Deprived of his vast revenues,” says the cardinal’s biographer, “he lived a modest and frugal life, intent only on securing the happiness of his diocese, now reduced to a small patch of territory on the right bank of the Rhine.”⁠[447] This life of virtuous restraint which the old spendthrift and debauchee, stripped of his fat benefices, was compelled to lead in his declining years, was perhaps as severe a punishment as could have been meted out to him. He died on the 16th of February, 1803, having attained an age only a little more than a year short of the allotted three score years and ten.

The cardinal and his “familiar” do not appear to have met again on this side of the grave. Cagliostro, as we have seen, had to make a rapid retreat to England, and here he remained for about a couple of years. Then he went to Switzerland, to Savoy, and finally to several of the chief cities of Italy. On December 27th, 1789, when the proceedings of the revolutionary party in France were exciting the utmost alarm in the minds of members of the sacred college, Cagliostro had the ill-luck to get arrested, denounced, it is said, by his wife as chief of a society of Illuminati. He was confined in the Castle of St. Angelo, and after fifteen months detention, was found guilty of practising freemasonry, and sentenced to death, which sentence was commuted to perpetual imprisonment in the Castle of St. Leo, where he is believed to have died in 1795. His wife was condemned to a life of religious seclusion in the Convent of Ste. Apolline.⁠[448]⁠

And what became of the Victim?—the Austrian she-wolf!—the Austrian tigress!—the Iscariot of France! Messalina, Brunehaut, Frédégonde, and Médicis! as she was indifferently called by her relentless persecutors? A more powerful pen than our own shall record her cruel fate:—

“On Monday, the 14th of October, 1793, a cause is pending in the Palais de Justice, in the new Revolutionary Court, such as these old stone walls never witnessed—the trial of Marie-Antoinette. The once brightest of queens, now tarnished, defaced, forsaken, stands here before Fouquier Tinville’s judgment-bar, answering for her life. The indictment was delivered her last night.⁠[449] To such changes of human fortune what words are adequate? Silence alone is adequate.

“There are few printed things one meets with of such tragic, almost ghastly, significance as those bald pages of the Bulletin du Tribunal Révolutionnaire, which bear title ‘Trial of the Widow Capet.’... The very witnesses summoned are like ghosts: exculpatory, inculpatory, they themselves are all hovering over death and doom; they are known, in our imaginations, as the prey of the guillotine. Tall, ci-devant Count d’Estaing, anxious to show himself patriot, cannot escape; nor Bailly, who, when asked if he knows the accused, answers, with a reverent inclination towards her, ‘Ah, yes! I know madame.’ Ex-patriots are here sharply dealt with, as Procureur Manuel; ex-ministers shorn of their splendour. We have cold aristocratic impassivity, faithful to itself even in Tartarus; rabid stupidity of patriot corporals—patriot washerwomen—who have much to say of plots, treasons, August tenth, old insurrection of women,—for all now has become a crime in her who has lost.

“Marie-Antoinette, in this her utter abandonment and hour of extreme need, is not wanting to herself, the imperial woman. Her look, they say, as that hideous indictment was reading, continued calm; ‘she was sometimes observed moving her fingers as when one plays on the piano.’ You discern, not without interest, across that dim revolutionary bulletin itself, how she bears herself queen-like. Her answers are prompt, clear, often of laconic brevity; resolution, which has grown contemptuous without ceasing to be dignified, veils itself in calm words. ‘You persist, then, in denial?’ ‘My plan is not denial: it is the truth I have said, and I persist in that.’ Scandalous Hébert has borne his testimony as to many things—as to one thing concerning Marie-Antoinette and her little son, wherewith human speech had better not further be soiled. She has answered Hébert; a juryman begs to observe that she has not answered as to this. ‘I have not answered,’ she exclaims with noble emotion, ‘because nature refuses to answer such a charge brought against a mother. I appeal to all the mothers that are here.’ Robespierre, when he heard of it, broke out into something almost like swearing at the brutish blockheadism of this Hébert,⁠[450] on whose foul head his foul lie has recoiled. At four o’clock on Wednesday morning, after two days and two nights of interrogating, jury-charging, and other darkening of counsel, the result comes out: sentence of Death! ‘Have you anything to say?’ The Accused shook her head, without speech. Night’s candles are burning out; and with her, too, time is finishing, and it will be Eternity and Day. This Hall of Tinville’s is dark, ill-lighted, except where she stands. Silently she withdraws from it, to die.

“Two processions, or royal progresses, three-and-twenty years apart, have often struck us with a strange feeling of contrast. The first is of a beautiful arch-duchess and dauphiness, quitting her mother’s city, at the age of fifteen, towards hopes such as no other Daughter of Eve then had. ‘On the morrow,’ says Weber, an eye-witness, ‘the Dauphiness left Vienna. The whole city crowded out, at first with a sorrow which was silent. She appeared: you saw her sunk back into her carriage, her face bathed in tears; hiding her eyes now with her handkerchief, now with her hands; several times putting out her head to see yet again this Palace of her Father’s, whither she was to return no more. She motioned her regret, her gratitude to the good Nation which was crowding here to bid her farewell. Then arose not only tears, but piercing cries, on all sides. Men and women alike abandoned themselves to such expression of their sorrow. It was an audible sound of wail in the streets and avenues of Vienna. The last courier that followed her disappeared, and the crowd melted away.’⁠[451]⁠

“The young imperial maiden of fifteen has now become a worn, discrowned widow of thirty-eight, gray before her time. This is the last procession: ‘Few minutes after the trial ended, the drums were beating to arms in all sections. At sunrise the armed force was on foot, cannons getting placed at the extremities of the bridges, in the squares, crossways, all along from the Palais de Justice to the Place de la Révolution. By ten o’clock numerous patrols were circulating in the streets; thirty thousand foot and horse drawn up under arms. At eleven Marie-Antoinette was brought out. She had on an undress of piqué blanc. She was led to the place of execution in the same manner as an ordinary criminal, bound on a cart, accompanied by a constitutional priest in lay dress, escorted by numerous detachments of infantry and cavalry. These and the double row of troops all along her road she appeared to regard with indifference. On her countenance there was visible neither abashment nor pride. To the cries of Vive la République and Down with Tyranny, which attended her all the way, she seemed to pay no heed. She spoke little to her confessor. The tricolour streamers on the house-tops occupied her attention in the streets du Roule and Saint-Honoré; she also noticed the inscriptions on the house fronts. On reaching the Place de la Révolution, her looks turned towards the Jardin National, whilom Tuileries; her face at that moment gave signs of lively emotion. She mounted the scaffold with courage enough. At a quarter past twelve her head fell; the executioner showed it to the people amid universal, long-continued cries of Vive la République.’”⁠[452]⁠

And this was the fate reserved for her of whom Burke had said that he thought “ten thousand swords would have leapt from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult;”—who, on her first entry into Paris, was welcomed by a wild sea of human beings, that surged along her line of route and filled the vast space of the Place du Carrousel;—the fair young dauphiness, to whom, as she looked forth from the gallery of the Tuileries upon the swaying mass beneath, the old Duke de Brissac gallantly said, “Madame, you have under your eyes two hundred thousand lovers;”—the young queen who, when called upon to share her husband’s throne, with mixed feelings of gratitude and pride wrote thus respecting her adopted country to her mother:

“Though God caused me to be born in the rank I now occupy, I cannot but admire the order of His providence which has selected me, the last of your children, for the finest realm in Europe. I feel more than ever how much I owe to the tenderness of my august mother, who took so much pains and care to procure for me this great establishment.”⁠[453]⁠

“Beautiful Highborn that wert so foully hurled low!... Oh! is there a man’s heart that thinks, without pity, of those long months and years of slow wasting ignominy: of thy Birth, soft-cradled in Imperial Schönbrunn, the winds of heaven not to visit thy face too roughly, thy foot to light on softness, thy eye on splendour; and then of thy Death, or hundred Deaths, to which the Guillotine and Fouquier Tinville’s judgment-bar was but the merciful end? Look there, O man born of woman! The bloom of that fair face is wasted; the hair is grey with care; the brightness of those eyes is quenched, their lids hang drooping; the face is stony pale, as of one living in death. Mean weeds, which her own hand has mended, attire the Queen of the World. The death-hurdle, where thou sittest pale, motionless, which only curses environ, has to stop; a people, drunk with vengeance, will drink it again in full draught, looking at thee there! Far as the eye reaches, a multitudinous sea of maniac heads; the air deaf with their triumph-yell! The Living-dead must shudder with yet one other pang; her startled blood yet again suffuses with the hue of agony that pale face, which she hides with her hands. There is no heart to say, God pity thee! O think not of these; think of HIM whom thou worshippest, the Crucified,—who, also treading the wine-press alone, fronted sorrow still deeper; and triumphed over it, and made it holy; and built of it a ‘Sanctuary of Sorrow,’ for thee and all the wretched! Thy path of thorns is nigh ended. One long last look at the Tuileries, where thy step was once so light—where thy children shall not dwell. The head is on the block: the axe rushes—dumb lies the World. That wild-yelling World, and all its madness, is behind thee!

“Beautiful Highborn that wert so foully hurled low!... Thy fault in the French Revolution, was that thou wert the Symbol of the Sin and Misery of a thousand years; that with Saint Bartholomews, and Jacqueries, with Gabelles, and Dragonades, and Parcs-aux-cerfs, the heart of mankind was filled full, and foamed over in all-involving madness. To no Napoleon, to no Cromwell wert thou wedded; such sit not in the highest rank, of themselves; are raised on high by the shaking and confounding of all the ranks! As poor peasants, how happy, worthy had ye two been! But by evil destiny ye were made a King and a Queen of; and so both once more are become an astonishment and a by-word to all times.”⁠[454]⁠