582 PORTRAIT OF CHARLES I. that of the Abbé Royou was likewise burnt, after having been previously dragged in the gutter. The pope has fallen very low since the fourteenth century. At the blow given to Boniface VIII., the world shuddered with horror; and the Bull burnt by Luther, filled it again with trepidation; but now, the pope and Royou end their career quietly together, without anybody caring about the matter,-executed in the gutter of the Rue Saint-Honoré ! In proportion as the pope retreats, his adversary advances. This immortal adversary (which is no other than Reason), whatever be the disguise it may assume, a juris-consult in 1300, a theologian in 1500, and a philosopher in the last century, triumphs in 1791; and France, as soon as she has found a tongue, returns thanks to Voltaire. The National Assembly decrees to the glorious liberator of religious opinions the honours of victory. It is gained; and he has conquered. Let this king of the mind now triumph and return to Paris, his own capital. Let this exile, this fugitive, who had no place on earth, who lived on the confines of three kingdoms, scarcely daring to settle, like a bird that has no nest, let him now come and sleep in peace in the bosom of France! His was a cruel death! He had revisited Paris, and its adoring population that had so well appreciated him, only to suffer a more poignant grief at separation! After being persecuted even to his deathbed, banished even after his death, carried off by night by his friends, on the 30th of May, 1778, and hidden in an obscure grave, his return is decreed on the 30th of May, 1791. He will now return, but in broad daylight, in the sun-shine of justice, and carried in triumph upon the shoulders of the people to the temple of the Pantheon. To complete his glory, he will behold the downfall of those who banished him. Voltaire is returning; and priests and kings are departing. By a remarkable coincidence, his return is decreed at the time when the priests, overcoming the indecision and scruples of Louis XVI., are about to urge him towards Varennes, to treason and infamy. How could we dispense with Voltaire for so grand a spectacle? He must come to Paris to witness the rout of Tartufe; for he is the hero of the festival. The moment the priest allows his dark conspiracy to appear in broad daylight, Voltaire cannot fail to rise also from the grave. Warned by the audacious revelation of Tartufe, he reveals himself at the same time, lifts his head out of the sepulchre, and says to the other, with that fearful laugh which shakes temples and thrones to the ground: "We are inseparable; when you appear, I appear also!" CHAPTER XIII. THE PRECEDENTS OF THE KING'S FLIGHT. I CANNOT visit the museum of the Louvre without stopping and musing, -often for a long time in spite of myself,-before Vandyck's picture of Charles I. That picture contains at once the history of England and that PORTRAIT OF CHARLES I. 583 of France. It has had upon our affairs a direct influence such as works of art seldom possess; and the great painter had unwittingly enshrined therein the destiny of two monarchies. The history of the picture itself is curious. We must begin it at a rather remote period, and say how this picture came to France. When the Aiguillon-Maupeou ministry wanted to persuade Louis XV. to quash his parliament, there was a preliminary operation to perform, to restore to an old worn-out king the faculty of having a will, to make him once more a man. To do so, it was necessary to shut up the seraglio in which he was wasting away, make him accept a mistress, and confine him to one woman; but nothing could be more difficult. It was necessary that this mistress, some wild, bold, amusing person,-should exclude all the others; that she should not possess a superior mind, and act the part of a Pompadour, but yet have enough wit to repeat every hour a well-taught lesson. The Marshal de Richelieu, a great connoisseur in these matters, having well sought, we dare not say where, found a fit person, and, at the same time, to dignify her a little, he found also a simpleton of a good family who undertook to marry her, before she was bestowed on the king. Madame Du Barry, for such was her name, played her part admirably. She surprised the king by her boldness and familiarity, amused him by laughing at him from morning to night, rousing him as far as she was able, and challenging him to be a man and a king. The royal aspirations which were excited in him by these means, were not to be relied upon; accordingly, she scarcely ever left his side; following him boldly even to the council, before the chancellor and all those grave personages, and, without any respect for decency, perching, like an ape, upon his arm-chair. This singular Egeria, whispering royalty into his ear night and day, would not perhaps have succeeded with such a man, if, to the aid of language, she had not summoned the assistance of vision,-and thus rendered palpable and visible the lesson she repeated. Vandyck's picture was bought for her in England, on the strange pretence that the page therein depicted being named Barry, she esteemed it as a family picture. This noble canvass, so worthy of respect, both as a work of genius, and as a monument of the tragedies of destiny, was, shameful to relate, hung up in the boudoir of this favourite, to witness her mad laughter and impudent frolics. She would take the king by the neck, and, pointing to Charles I., exclaim: "Look, France (for thus she used to call Louis XV.), there is a king whose head was cut off, because he was indulgent towards his parliament. Go now, and be indulgent to yours!" In that small apartment, so low, (a long row of attics still to be seen in the upper story of Versailles), this large, full-length picture, beheld so closely, an 1 face to face, would have had a painful effect upon any man whose heart had been less degraded and senses less corrupt. No other than Louis XV. could have endured, without suffering, that melancholy noble look, wherein we behold a whole revolution, and that eye, so full of fatality, which pierces as it gazes on you. The reader may remember that the great master, by a kind of divination, has painted Charles I., by anticipation, as in the last days of his 584 THE KING'S DISTRUST OF EUROPEAN POWERS. flight you see him as a simple cavalier, in a campaign against the roundheads. He seems as though he had been gradually forced to retreat to the sea, where he stands solitary and forlorn. This king of the seas, this lord of the isles, has now the sea for his enemy; before him lies the roaring ocean, and behind, the scaffold awaits him. This melancholy picture, transferred, under Louis XVI., to the king's apartments, naturally followed him to Paris with the furniture of the palace of Versailles. No other could make a greater impression on his mind, which was exceedingly engrossed with the history of England, and especially with that of Charles I. He used constantly to read Hume and other English historians, in their own language; and he had retained thus much that Charles I. had been put to death for having made war on his people, and that James II. had been declared to have abdicated for having forsaken his people. If there was one fixed idea in his mind, it was not to expose himself to the fate of either: never to draw the sword, and never to quit the soil of France. Although undecided in his language, and slow in forming a resolution, he was very obstinate in the ideas that he had once conceived; and no influence, not even the queen's, could then shake his opinion. This resolution of not acting, in order not to compromise himself, was moreover perfectly consonant to his natural indolence. He was much vexed with the emigrants who were agitating on the frontier, exclaiming, threatening, and boasting of what they would do, without caring how they aggravated the position of the king, whose friends they termed themselves. In December, 1790, at the council held at Turin, Prince de Condé proposed to enter France and march on Lyons, "in spite of whatever might happen to the king." Louis XVI. had moreover another scruple that prevented him from making war; which was the necessity of seeking foreign assistance. Now, he was well acquainted with the state of Europe, and the interested views of the different powers. He beheld the intriguing ambitious spirit of Prussia, which, believing itself to be a young, vigorous, and very military nation, was promoting discord on all sides, in order to find some prize for itself. As early as 1789, Prussia came forward to make an offer to Louis XVI. to enter France with a hundred thousand men. On the other hand, the Machiavelism of Austria appeared to him no less suspicious; he did not like that double-faced Janus, at once devout and philosophical. That country was a tradition for him, both on his father's side and on his mother's: his mother was of the house of Saxony; and his father, the Dauphin, had believed he died poisoned by Choiseul, a Lorrain minister, a creature of Lorrain-Austria, a pupil of MariaTheresa, and who had married Louis XVI. to an Austrian princess. Therefore, though fondly attached to the queen, the king became very distrustful whenever she spoke of having recourse to the protection of her brother Leopold. The queen had no other chance: she was extremely afraid of the emigrants, whom she knew to be debating the question of deposing Louis XVI. and appointing a regent; she saw with the Count d'Artois her most cruel enemy, M. de Calonne, who had commented and corrected, with his own hand, Madame de Lamotte's pamphlet against her in the shameful necklace affair. She had more to dread from that quarter than HE AT LENGTH APPLIES TO THEM. 585 from the Revolution. The Revolution, considering her only as a queen, would have simply taken her life; but Calonne would have been able to bring her to trial as a woman and a wife, to dishonour her perhaps juridically, and imprison her. She adhered, without any deviation, to the plans of the agents of Austria, Mercey and Breteuil. She trifled with Mirabeau, and afterward with Lameth and Barnave, only to gain time; for it was necessary that Austria should first get rid of troublesome business in Brabant, Turkey, and Hungary; and it was also necessary that Louis XVI., cleverly tutored by the clergy, should first allow his kingly scruples to give way to his scruples as a Christian and a devotee; for the idea of a superior duty could alone make him fail in what he believed to be a duty. The king, had he been willing, could very easily have departed alone on horseback, without any attendants. This was Clermont-Tonnerre's advice; but it was by no means that of the queen, who feared nothing in the world so much as being separated for a moment from the king; for he might, perhaps, have yielded to the insinuations of his brothers against her. She took advantage of his emotion, on the 6th of October, when he believed she had been so near perishing. Bursting into tears, she made him swear that he would never depart alone; that if they went, they would go together, and escape or perish together. She would not even consent to their departing at the same moment by different roads. In the spring of 1790, Louis XVI. had refused the offers that were made of carrying him away; nor did he take advantage of escape during his abode at Saint-Cloud, in the same year, though he had every opportunity of doing so, riding out every day on horseback, or in his carriage, to a distance of several leagues. He was unwilling to leave anybody behind, neither the queen, the dauphin, his sister Elizabeth, nor the princesses. Neither could the queen resolve to leave certain of her confidants, women who possessed her secrets. They would depart only in a body, in one troop, like a battalion. In the summer of 1790, the affair of the oath required of the priests having much troubled the conscience of the king, they urged him to the measure of writing to the different powers, and of making his protestation. On the 6th of October, 1790, he sent his first protest to the court of a relation, his cousin, the king of Spain, the one whom he distrusted the least among all the foreign potentates. Next, he wrote to the Emperor (of Austria), to Russia, and to Sweden: and, lastly, on the 3rd of December, he applied to the power that he suspected the most, as having wished from the very first to interfere in the affairs of France -I mean Prussia. He demanded of all "a European congress, supported by a strong army," without explaining whether he wished this force to be made to act against the Revolution (Hardenberg, I. 103). Generally speaking, the kings made no haste. The North was in commotion. The revolution of Poland was imminent; it broke out in the spring (May 3rd), and prepared a new partition. The other states, Turkey and Sweden, destined to be absorbed sooner or later, were postponed. But Liege and Brabant had just been devoured, and the turn of France would come when she should be ripe enough." "Kings," said 586 PLAN FOR THE KING'S ESCAPE. Camille Desmoulins, "having tasted the blood of nations, will not easily cease. We know that the horses of Diomedes, after having once eaten human flesh, would eat nothing else." Only, it was necessary that France should become ripe and ready before they seized her as their prey: that she should grow weak and torpid by civil war, towards which she was strongly encouraged. The great Catherine wrote to the queen, in order to excite her to resist, the following words, intended to be sublime :-" Kings must pursue their course, without caring for the outcries of the people, as the moon follows its course without being impeded by the baying of dogs a burlesque imitation of Lefranc de Pompignan, the more ridiculous in this case, as, to follow up the comparison, the moon was really impeded. To extricate the moon from this eclipse, the excellent Catherine was agitating all Europe, and acting energetically with her pen and her tongue. If she was able, indeed, by the king's deliverance, to let loose civil war, and afterwards set all the kings fighting for prostrate France, how easy would it be for her, sitting in her charnel-house of the north, to drink the blood of Poland, and gnaw her to the bone? When the escape was attempted, it was the minister of Russia who undertook to get a passport for a Russian lady, to be given to the queen. Catherine sent no succour ; but she was well contented that Gustavus III., the petty King of Sweden (just beaten by her, and now her friend), a prince of a restless, romantic, and chivalrous mind, should go in quest of adventures at Aix, at the very gate of France. There, under pretence of taking the waters, he was to wait for the beautiful queen absconding with her husband, to offer her his invincible sword, and, disinterestedly, teach the good-natured Louis XVI. how thrones may be restored. Austria, which had been, ever since the days of Choiseul, and the marriage of Louis XVI., in possession of the French alliance, was far more directly interested in the king's escape. Only, in order that jealous Prussia and jealous England should allow her to interfere, it was necessary not only that Louis XVI. should positively give himself up to Austria, but that, a great party declaring for him, and a powerful concourse of royalists being formed on the eastern frontier, Austria should be as though, in spite of herself, obliged and summoned to act by France. Civil war begun was the express condition that our faithful ally made for her intervention. As early as October, 1790, the two Austrian partisans, Mercy and Breteuil, the queen's advisers, insisted on flight. Breteuil sent from Switzerland a bishop with his plan, like that which Leopold sent at a later period; but neither the queen nor the bishop considered it prudent to be the first to speak to the king of the Austrian plan. The queen caused it to be presented to him by one of her firm friends, who had been intimately acquainted with her in her happier days, M. de Fersen, a Swedish officer, who had remained devotedly attached to her. In order not to alarm the king, they merely spoke to him of taking refuge with M. de Bouillé, among the faithful regiments which had just shown so much energy at Nancy, close to the Austrian frontier, and within reach of succour from Leopold, his brother-in-law. The king listened, but remained silent. |