192

IT DEMANDS THE CONFIDENCE OF THE PEOPLE.

take the maintenance of order. Indeed what other means were there than to strengthen the local power, when the central power was so justly suspected?

Barnave said three things were necessary: well-organized municipalities, citizen guards, and a legal administration of the law that might reassure the people.

What was that legal administration to be? A deputy-substitute, Dufresnoy, sent by a district of Paris, demanded sixty jurymen, chosen from the sixty districts. This proposition, supported by petition, was modified by another deputy, who wished magistrates to be added to the jurymen.

The Assembly came to no decision. An hour after midnight, being weary of contention, it adopted a proclamation, in which it claimed the prosecution of crimes of lèse-nation, reserving to itself the right to indicate in the constitution the tribunal that should judge. This was postponing for a long time. It invited to peace, for this reason: That the king had acquired more rights than ever to the confidence of the people, that there existed a perfect accord, &c.

Confidence! And yet there never was any confidence again! At the very moment the Assembly was speaking of confidence, a sad light burst forth, and fresh dangers were seen. The Assembly had been wrong; the people had been right. However willing the people might be to be deceived, and believe all was ended, common sense whispered that the ancien régime being conquered, would wish to have its revenge. Was it possible that a power which had possessed, for ages, all the forces of the country, administration, finances, armies, and tribunals, that still had everywhere its agents, its officers, its judges, without any change, and for compulsory partisans, two or three hundred thousand nobles or priests, proprietors of onehalf or two-thirds of the kingdom,-could that immense and complicated power, which covered all France, die like one man, at once, by a single blow? Had it fallen down dead, shot by a cannon-ball of July? That is what the most simple child could not have been induced to believe.

It was not dead. It had been struck and wounded; morally it was dead; physically it was not. It might rise again. How would that phantom reappear? That was the whole question put by the people! -the one that troubled the imagination.

DISTRUST OF THE PEOPLE.

193

Common sense here assumed a thousand forms of popular superstition.

Everybody used to go and see the Bastille; all beheld with terror the prodigious rope ladder by which Latude descended the towers. They would visit those ominous towers, and those dark, deep, fetid dungeons, where the prisoner, on a level with the common sewers, lived besieged and menaced by rats, toads, and every kind of foul vermin.

Beneath a staircase they found two skeletons, with a chain and a cannon-ball which one of those unfortunates had doubtless to drag after him. Those dead bodies indicated crime. For the prisoners were never buried within the fortress; they were always carried by night to the cemetery of Saint Paul, the church of the Jesuits (the confessors of the Bastille); where they were buried under names of servants, so that nobody ever knew whether they were alive or dead. As for those two, the workmen who found them gave them the only reparation the dead could receive; twelve among them, bearing their implements, and holding the pall with respect, carried and buried them honourably in the parish church.

They were even hoping to make other discoveries in that old cavern of kings. Outraged humanity was taking its revenge; people enjoyed a mingled sentiment of hatred, fear, and curiosity, an insatiable curiosity, which, when everything had been seen, hunted and searched for more, wished to penetrate further, suspected something else, imagined prisons under prisons, dungeons under dungeons, into the very bowels of the earth.

The imagination actually sickened at that Bastille. So many centuries and generations of prisoners who had there succeeded each other, so many hearts broken by despair, so many tears of rage, and heads dashed against the stones. What! had nothing left a trace ! At most, some poor inscription, scratched with a nail, and illegible? Cruel envy of time, the accomplice of tyranny, conniving with it to efface every vestige of the victims !

There were

They could see nothing, but they listened. certainly some sounds, groans, and hollow moans. Was it imagination? Why, everybody heard them. Were they to believe that wretched beings were still buried at the bottom of

some secret dungeon known only to the governor who had perished? The district of the Ile Saint-Louis, and others, demanded that they should seek the cause of those lamentable groans. Once, twice, nay, several times, the people returned to the charge; in spite of all these searches, they could not make up their minds: they were full of trouble and uneasiness for those unfortunates, perhaps buried alive.

Then again, if they were not prisoners, might they not be enemies? Was there not some communication, under the faubourg, between the subterraneous passages of the Bastille and those of Vincennes? Might not gunpowder be passed from one fortress to the other, and execute what De Launey had conceived the idea of doing, to blow up the Bastille, and overwhelm and crush the faubourg of liberty?

Public searches were made, and a solemn and authentic inquiry, in order to tranquillise the minds of the people. The imagination then transported its dream elsewhere. It transferred its mine and its fears to the opposite side of Paris, into those immense cavities whence our monuments were dug, those abysses whence we have drawn the Louvre, Notre Dame, and other churches. There, in 1786, had been cast, without there being any appearance of it (so vast are those caverns) all who had died in Paris for a thousand years, a terrible mass of dead bodies, which, during that year, were transported by night in funeral cars, preceded by the clergy, to seek, from the Innocents to the Tombe Issoire, a final repose and complete oblivion.

Those dead bodies were calling for others, and it was doubtless there that a volcano was preparing; the mine, from the Pantheon to the sky, was going to blow up Paris, and letting it fall again, would confound the shattered and disfigured members of the living and the dead,-a chaos of palpitating limbs, dead bodies, and skeletons.

Those means of extermination seemed unnecessary; famine was sufficient. A bad year was followed by a worse; the little corn that had grown up about Paris was trodden, spoilt, or eaten by the numerous cavalry that had been collected. Nay, the corn disappeared without horse-soldiers. People saw, or fancied they saw, armed bands that came by night and cut the unripe corn. Foulon, though dead, seemed to return on purpose to perform to the letter what he had promised: "Mow France."

ALARM OF THE PROVINCES.

195

To cut down the green corn and destroy it in the second year of famine, was also to mow down men.

Terror went on spreading; the couriers, repeating those rumours, spread it every day from one end of the kingdom to the other. They had not seen the brigands, but others had; they were at such and such places, marching forwards, numerous, and armed to the teeth; they would arrive probably that night or on the morrow without fail. At such a place, they had cut down the corn in broad daylight, as the municipality of Soissons wrote in despair to the National Assembly, demanding assistance; a whole army of brigands were said to be marching against that town. They hunted for them; but they had disappeared in the mists of evening or in the morning fog.

What is more real, is, that to the dreadful scourge of famine, some had conceived the idea of adding another, which makes us shudder, when we do but remember the hundred years of warfare which, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, made a cemetery of our unfortunate country, They wanted to bring the English into France. This has been denied; yet why? It is more than likely, since it was solicited at a subsequent period; attempted, and foiled at Quiberon.

But then, the question was not to bring their fleet on a shore difficult of access and destitute of defence, but to establish them firmly in a good, defensible place, to hand over to them the naval arsenal, wherein France, for a whole century, had expended her millions, her labours, and her energies; the head, the prow of our great national vessel, and the stumbling-block of England. The question was to give up Brest.

Ever since France had assisted in the deliverance of America, and cut the British empire asunder, England had desired not its misery, but its ruin and utter destruction; that some strong autumnal tide would raise the ocean from its bed, and cover with one grand flood all the land from Calais to the Vosges, the Pyrenees, and the Alps.

But, there was something still more desirable to be seen, which was, that this new inundation should be one of blood, the blood of France, drawn by herself from her own veins, that she should commit suicide and tear out her intestines.

The conspiracy of Brest was a good beginning. Only, there was reason to fear that England, by making friends with the

villains who were selling her their native land, might unite against her all France reconciled in one common indignation, and that there should be no longer any party.

Another thing might have sufficed to restrain the English government, which is, that, in the first moments, England, in spite of her hate, smiled upon our Revolution. She had no suspicion of its extent; in that great French and European movement, which was no less than the advent of eternal right, she fancied she perceived an imitation of her own petty insular and egotistical revolution of the seventeenth century. She applauded France as a mother encourages the child that is trying to walk after her. A strange sort of mother, who was not quite sure whether she would rather the child should walk or break its neck.

Therefore, England withstood the temptation of Brest. She was virtuous, and revealed the thing to the ministers of Louis XVI., without mentioning the names of the parties. In that half revelation, she found an immense advantage, that of perplexing France, to complete the measure of distrust and suspicion, have a terrible hold on that feeble government, and take a mortgage upon it. There was every chance of its not inquiring seriously into the plot, fearful of finding more than it wished and of smiting its own friends. And if it did not inquire, if it kept the secret to itself, England was able at any time to unveil the awful mystery. It kept that sword suspended over the head

of Louis XVI.

Dorset, the English ambassador, was an agreeable man; he never stirred from Versailles; many thought he had found favour in the eyes of the queen, and had been well received. Nevertheless, this did not prevent him, after the taking of the Bastille, the importance of which he fully appreciated, as well as the weight of the blow that the king had received, from seizing every opportunity of ruining Louis, as far as lay in his power.

A rather equivocal letter from Dorset to the Count d'Artois having been intercepted by chance, he wrote to the minister that they were wrong in suspecting him of having in the least influenced the disturbances of Paris; far from it, added he quietly, your Excellency knows well the eagerness I evinced in imparting to you the infamous conspiracy of Brest, in the begin