312 RESISTANCE.-THE QUEEN AND AUSTRIA. The pillagers were checked, the peasantry kept in order, and gradually initiated and interested in the march of the Revolution. To whom, indeed, could it be more profitable than to them? It had delivered from tithes such of them as were proprietors; and among the rest it was going to create proprietors by hundreds and thousands. It was about to honour them with the sword, to raise them in one day from serfs to nobles, to conduct them throughout the earth to glory and adventures, and to create from them princes and kings,-nay, more, heroes! CHAPTER V. RESISTANCE. THE QUEEN AND AUSTRIA (OCTOBER TO FEBRUARY.) Irritation of the Queen, October.-Plottings of the Court.-The King the Prisoner of the People (November-December ?)-The Queen distrusts the Princes.-The Queen but little allied with the Clergy.-She had always been governed by Austria.-Austria interested that the King should not act.-Louis XVI. and Leopold declare themselves friendly to Constitutions, February and March.-Trial of Besenval and Favras.Death of Favras, February 18th.-Discouragement of the Royalists.Great Confederations of the North. FROM the sublime spectacle of fraternity, I fall, alas! to the earth, among intrigues and plots. Nobody appreciated the immensity of the movement; nobody fathomed that rapid and invincible tide rising from October to July. Whole populations, till then unknown to one another, met and united. Distant towns and provinces, which even lately were still divided by an ancient spirit of rivalry, marched forth, as it were, to meet one another, embraced and fraternised. This novel and striking fact was scarcely remarked by the great thinkers of the age. If it had been possible for it to be noticed by the queen and the Court, it would have discouraged all useless opposition. For who, whilst the ocean is rising, would dare to march against it? The queen deceived herself at the very outset; and she remained mistaken. She looked upon the 6th of October as an affair prepared by the Duke of Orleans, a trick played THE QUEEN'S WANT OF PRUDENCE. 313 against her by the enemy. She yielded; but, before her departure, she conjured the king, in the name of his son, to go to Paris only to wait for an opportunity to escape. * On the very first day, the Mayor of Paris, on entreating him to fix his residence there, and telling him that the centre of the empire was the natural abode of the kings, obtained from him only this answer: "That he would willingly make Paris his most habitual residence." On the 9th appeared the king's proclamation, in which he announced that if he had not been in Paris, he should have been afraid of causing a great disturbance; that, the constitution being made, he would realise his project of going to visit his provinces; that he indulged in the hope of receiving from them proofs of their affection, of seeing them encourage the National Assembly, &c. This ambiguous letter, which seemed to provoke Royalist addresses, decided the commune of Paris to write also to the provinces; it desired to comfort them, it said, against certaint insinuations, casting a veil over the plot which had nearly overthrown the new order of things; and it offered a sincere fraternal alliance to all the communes in the kingdom. The queen refused to receive the conquerors of the Bastille, who had come to present to her their homage. She gave an audience to the market-women (dames de la Halle), but at a distance, and as though separated and defended by the wide. baskets of the ladies of the court, who placed themselves before her. By thus acting, she estranged from her a very royalist class; several of the market-women disavowed the 6th of October; and themselves arrested some female vagrants who were entering houses to extort money. These sad mistakes committed by the queen were not calculated to increase confidence. And how indeed could it have existed amid the attempts of the Court, ever miscarrying and always discovered? Between October and March, a plot was discovered nearly every month (those of Augéard, Favras, Maillebois, &c.) On the 25th of October, Augéard, the queen's keeper of the seals, was arrested, and at his house was found a plan to conduct the king to Metz. *Beaulieu, ii, 203. 312 RESISTANCE. THE QUEEN AND AUSTRIA. The pillagers were checked, the peasantry kept in order, and gradually initiated and interested in the march of the Revolution. To whom, indeed, could it be more profitable than to them? It had delivered from tithes such of them as were proprietors; and among the rest it was going to create proprietors by hundreds and thousands. It was about to honour them with the sword, to raise them in one day from serfs to nobles, to conduct them throughout the earth to glory and adventures, and to create from them princes and kings,-nay, more, heroes! CHAPTER V. RESISTANCE. THE QUEEN AND AUSTRIA (OCTOBER TO FEBRUARY.) Irritation of the Queen, October.-Plottings of the Court.-The King the Prisoner of the People (November-December ?)—The Queen distrusts the Princes.-The Queen but little allied with the Clergy.-She had always been governed by Austria.-Austria interested that the King should not act.-Louis XVI. and Leopold declare themselves friendly to Constitutions, February and March.-Trial of Besenval and Favras.Death of Favras, February 18th.-Discouragement of the Royalists.— Great Confederations of the North. FROM the sublime spectacle of fraternity, I fall, alas! to the earth, among intrigues and plots. Nobody appreciated the immensity of the movement; nobody fathomed that rapid and invincible tide rising from October to July. Whole populations, till then unknown to one another, met and united. Distant towns and provinces, which even lately were still divided by an ancient spirit of rivalry, marched forth, as it were, to meet one another, embraced and fraternised. This novel and striking fact was scarcely remarked by the great thinkers of the age. If it had been possible for it to be noticed by the queen and the Court, it would have discouraged all useless opposition. For who, whilst the ocean is rising, would dare to march against it? The queen deceived herself at the very outset ; and she remained mistaken. She looked upon the 6th of October as an affair prepared by the Duke of Orleans, a trick played THE QUEEN'S WANT OF PRUDENCE. 313 against her by the enemy. She yielded; but, before her departure, she conjured the king, in the name of his son, to go to Paris only to wait for an opportunity to escape. * On the very first day, the Mayor of Paris, on entreating him to fix his residence there, and telling him that the centre of the empire was the natural abode of the kings, obtained from him only this answer : "That he would willingly make Paris his most habitual residence.' On the 9th appeared the king's proclamation, in which he announced that if he had not been in Paris, he should have been afraid of causing a great disturbance; that, the constitution being made, he would realise his project of going to visit his provinces; that he indulged in the hope of receiving from them proofs of their affection, of seeing them encourage the National Assembly, &c. This ambiguous letter, which seemed to provoke Royalist addresses, decided the commune of Paris to write also to the provinces; it desired to comfort them, it said, against certain insinuations, casting a veil over the plot which had nearly overthrown the new order of things; and it offered a sincere fraternal alliance to all the communes in the kingdom. The queen refused to receive the conquerors of the Bastille, who had come to present to her their homage. She gave an audience to the market-women (dames de la Halle), but at a distance, and as though separated and defended by the wide baskets of the ladies of the court, who placed themselves before her. By thus acting, she estranged from her a very royalist class; several of the market-women disavowed the 6th of October; and themselves arrested some female vagrants who were entering houses to extort money. These sad mistakes committed by the queen were not calculated to increase confidence. And how indeed could it have existed amid the attempts of the Court, ever miscarrying and always discovered? Between October and March, a plot was discovered nearly every month (those of Augéard, Favras, Maillebois, &c.) On the 25th of October, Augéard, the queen's keeper of the seals, was arrested, and at his house was found a plan to conduct the king to Metz. *Beaulieu, ii., 203. 314 THE KING UNDER SURVEILLANCE. On the 21st of November, in the Assembly, the committee of inquiry, provoked by Malouet, silences the latter by telling him there exists a new plot to carry off the king to Metz, and that he, Malouet, is perfectly well acquainted with it. On the 25th of December, they arrest the Marquis de Favras, another agent for carrying off the king, who was recruiting partisans in Paris. If their object had been to trouble the minds of the people for ever, and drive them mad with distrust and fear, thus involving them in dark plottings and snares, they had but to do what they did: to show them, by a series of awkward conspiracies, the king absconding every instant, putting himself at the head of the armies, and returning to take Paris by famine. Doubtless, supposing liberty to have been firmly established, and the opposition less vigorous, it would have been better to have allowed the king and the queen to escape, to have conducted them to their proper place,—the frontier, and made a present of them to Austria. But, in the fluctuating and uncertain state in which our poor country then was, having for her director an assembly of metaphysicians, and against her men of execution and vigour, like M. de Bouillé, our naval officers, and the nobles of Brittany, it was very difficult to part with so great an hostage as the king, and thus bestow on all those powers that unity of which they were in want. Therefore, the people kept watch night and day, prowling around the Tuileries, and trusting to nobody. They went every morning to see whether the king had not departed; and they held the national guard and its commander responsible for his presence. A thousand reports were in circulation, copied by violent furious newspapers, which were denouncing plots at a venture. The moderate party felt indignant, denied, and would not believe them. . . And yet the plot was not the less discovered the next day. The result of all this was that the king, who was by no means a prisoner in October, was so in November or December. The queen had overlooked one admirable irreparable opportunity, the moment when Lafayette and Mirabeau were united in her favour (the end of October). She was unwilling to be saved by the Revolution, or men such |