LAFAYETTE BECOMES ROYALIST. 315 as Mirabeau and Lafayette; this true princess of the house of Lorraine, courageous and rancorous, desired to conquer and be revenged. She risked everything inconsiderately, evidently thinking, that after all, as Henrietta of England said in a tempest, queens could not be drowned. Maria-Theresa had been on the point of perishing, and yet had not perished. This heroic remembrance of the mother had much influence over the daughter, though without reason; the mother had the people on her side, and the daughter had them against her. Lafayette, though but little inclined to be a royalist before the 6th of October, had become so sincerely ever since. He had saved the queen and protected the king. Such actions form attachments, The prodigious efforts he was obliged to make for the maintenance of order, caused him to desire earnestly that the kingly power should resume its strength; and he wrote twice to M. de Bouillé, intreating him to unite with him for the safety of royalty. M. de Bouillé, in his memoirs, bitterly regrets his not having listened to him. Lafayette had performed a service agreeable to the queen, by driving away the Duke of Orleans. He seemed to be acting the part of a courtier. It is curious to behold the general, the man of business, following the queen to the churches, and attending the service when she performed her Easter devotions.* For the sake of the queen and the king, Lafayette overcame the repugnance he felt for Mirabeau. As early as the 15th of October, Mirabeau had offered his services, by a note, which his friend Lamarck, the queen's attendant, did not show even to the king. On the 20th came another note from Mirabeau; but this one was sent to Lafayette, who had a conversation with the orator, and conducted him to the house of the minister Montmorin. This unexpected succour, though a god-send, was very badly received. Mirabeau would have wished the king to be satisfied with a million (of francs) for his whole expenditure; to withdraw, not to the army at Metz, but to Rouen, and thence *By so doing, Lafayette wanted, I think, to pay also his court to his devout and virtuous wife. He hastened to write and tell her this important event. 316 MIRABEAU EXCLUDED FROM THE MINISTRY. publish ordinances more popular than the decrees of the Assembly.* Thus there would be no civil war, the king making himself more revolutionary than the Revolution itself. A strange project, proving the confidence and easy credulity of genius! If the Court had accepted it for a day, if it had consented to act this borrowed part, it would have been to hang Mirabeau on the morrow. He might have seen very plainly, as far back as November, what he had to expect from those whom he wished to save. He wanted to be minister, and to keep at the same time his predominant position in the National Assembly. For this purpose, he desired the Court to contrive to secure for him the support and connivance, or at least the silence, of the royalist deputies; but, so far from doing so, the Keeper of the Seals warned and animated several deputies, even in the opposition, against the project. In the ministry, and at the Jacobins (this club was scarcely open), they strove at the same time to disqualify Mirabeau for the ministry. Two upright men, Montlosier on the right side of the Assembly, and Lanjuinais on the left, spoke to the same effect. They proposed, and caused it to be decreed, "that no deputy, on duty, nor for three years afterwards, could accept any place in the government. Thus the Royalists succeeded in debarring from the ministry the great orator, who would have been the support of their party (November 7th). The queen, as we have said, was unwilling to be saved by the Revolution, neither would she be so by the princes and the emigrant party. She had been too well acquainted with the Count d'Artois † not to know that he was of very little value; and she very properly distrusted Monsieur ‡ as a person of a false and uncertain character. What then were her hopes, her views, and her secret counsellors? We must not reckon Madame de Lamballe §, a pretty, little, See the documents quoted in the Histoire, by M. Droz, and in the Mémoires de Mirabeau. Afterwards Charles X.-C. C. Afterwards Louis XVIII.-C. C. § Pretty is the proper expression; nothing could be farther from beauty: very small features, a very low forehead, and very little brain. Her hands POWER OF THE HIERARCHY. 317 insignificant woman, and a dear friend of the queen's, but devoid of ideas and conversation, and little deserving the terrible reponsibility laid to her charge. She seemed to form a centre, doing gracefully the honours of the queen's private saloon, on the ground floor of the Pavilion of Flora (at the Tuileries). Many of the nobility would go there; an indiscreet, frivolous, inconsiderate race, who thought, as in the time of the Fronde, to gain the day by satirical verses, witticisms, and lampoons. There, they would read a very witty newspaper, called the Acts of the Apostles, and sing ditties about the king's captivity, which made everybody weep, both friends and enemies. The connections of Marie-Antoinette were entirely with the nobles, very little with the priests. She was no more a bigot than her brother Joseph II. The nobles were not a party; they were a numerous, divided, and disconnected class; but the priests were a party, a very close, and materially a very powerful body. The transient dissension between the curates and the prelates made it appear weak; but the power of the hierarchical system, the party spirit, the Pope, the voice of the Holy-See, would presently restore the unity of the clergy. Then, from its inferior members, it was about to derive incalculable powers in the land, and in the men of the land, the inhabitants of the rural districts; it was about to bring against the people of the Revolution a whole nation,-Vendée against France. These great She was meditating Marie-Antoinette saw nothing of all this. moral powers were to her a dead letter. victory, physical force, Bouillé and Austria. When the papers of Louis XVI. were found on the 10th of August in the iron chest, people read with astonishment that, during the first years of his marriage, he had looked upon his youthful bride as a mere agent of Austria.* Having been married by M. de Choiseul, against his will, were rather large, says Madame de Genlis. The portrait at Versailles shows very plainly her extraction and her country; she was a nice little Savoyard. Her hair, concealed by powder, was luxuriant and admirable. (Alas! this appeared but too plainly!) *He caused her correspondence with Vienna to be watched by Thugut, in whom she confided.-Letter dated October 17th, 1774, quoted by Brissot, Mémoires, iv., 120. 318 DEATH OF MARIA-THERESA. into that twice hostile house of Lorraine and Austria, and, obliged to receive into his palace the abbé de Vermond, spy of Maria-Theresa, he persevered so long in his distrust as to remain nineteen years without speaking to this Vermond. It is well known how the pious empress had distributed among her numerous family their several parts, employing her daughters especially as the agents of her policy. By Caroline, she governed Naples; and by Marie-Antoinette she expected to govern France. The latter, a true Lorraine-Austrian, persecuted Louis XVI. to oblige him to give the ministry to Choiseul, himself a Lorraine and the friend of the empress. She succeeded at least in making him accept Breteuil, who, like Choiseul, had been at first ambassador at Vienna, and, like him again, belonged entirely to that court. It was again the same influence (Vermond's over the queen) which, at a more recent period, overcame the scruples of Louis XVI., and made him take for his prime minister an atheist, the Archbishop of Toulouse. The death of Maria-Theresa, and the severe language of Joseph II. on his sister and Versailles, would, one would think, have rendered the latter less favourable towards Austria. Yet it was at this very time that she persuaded the king to grant the millions which Joseph II. wanted to extort from the Dutch. In 1789 the queen had three confidants,—three advisers,— Vermond, ever in the Austrian interest; Breteuil, no less so; and lastly, M. Mercy d'Argenteau, the Austrian ambassador. Behind this old man, we may perceive another urging him forward,-old Prince de Kaunitz, for seventy years a minister of the Austrian monarchy; these two coxcombs, or rather these old women, who seemed to be entirely occupied with toilet and trifles, directed the queen of France. A fatal direction, a dangerous alliance! Austria was then in so bad a situation, that, far from serving Marie-Antoinette, she could only be an obstacle to her in acting, a guide to lead to evil, and impel her towards every absurd step that the Austrian interest might require. That Catholic and devout Austria having become half philosophical in her ideas under Joseph II., had found means to have nobody on her side. Hungary, her own sword, was turned THE TWO REVOLUTIONS. 319 against her. The Belgian priests had robbed her of the LowCountries, with the encouragement of the three Protestant powers, England, Holland, and Prussia. And what was Austria doing in the meantime? She was turning her back on Europe, marching through the deserts of the Turks, and exhausting her best armies for the advantage of Russia. The emperor was in no better plight than his empire. Joseph II. was consumptive; he was dying and beyond the power of remedy. He had showed, in the Belgian business, a deplorable vacillation of conduct : first furious threats of fire and sword, and barbarous executions which excited horror throughout Europe; next (on the 25th of November) a general amnesty, which nobody would accept. Austria would have been lost if the Revolution of Belgium had found support in the Revolution of France.* Here in France, everybody thought that the two revolutions were about to act in concert and march forward together. The most brilliant of our journalists, Camille Desmoulins, had, without awaiting events, united in one hope these sister countries by intitling his journal Revolutions of France and Brabant. Vander The obstacle to this was that the one was a revolution made by priests, and the other by philosophers. The Belgians, however, being aware that they could not rely upon their protectors, the three Protestant powers, applied to France. Noot, the champion of the clergy of the Low-Countries, the great agitator of the Catholic mob, did not scruple to write to the Assembly and the king. The letter was sent back (December 10th). Louis XVI. showed himself the true brotherin-law of the emperor.† The Assembly despised a revolution * Any vigorous movement, even a counter-revolutionary one, might have been prejudicial to her. If our bishops, for instance, had been aided by the king in their attempts, and obtained any advantage, their success would have encouraged the Belgian prelates who had expelled Austria. She found it expedient for the time being to turn moderate, nay, liberal, in order to gain over the Belgian progressists, whose moderate liberal principles were very similar to Lafayette's. If Lafayette had lent his support to those progressists, they would most certainly have rejected the alliance of Austria, and preferred the assistance of France. Therefore the interest of Austria was, that nothing should be done in France, either one way or the other. +I do not think that the idea to make the Duke of Orleans King of Brabant was ever seriously entertained at the Tuileries, as some writers have |