XIII
Towards the Climax
M. de La Tour d’Azyr was seen no more in the Manège—or indeed in Paris at all—throughout all the months that the National Assembly remained in session to complete its work of providing France with a Constitution. After all, though the wound to his body had been comparatively slight, the wound to such a pride as his had been all but mortal.
The rumour ran that he had emigrated. But that was only half the truth. The whole of it was that he had joined that group of noble travellers who came and went between the Tuileries and the headquarters of the émigrés at Coblentz. He became, in short, a member of the royalist secret service that in the end was to bring down the monarchy in ruins.
That time, however, was not yet. For the present the royalists continued to find the innovators more or less droll; they continued to laugh at them, and, laughing, edited their merry sheet, The Acts of the Apostles, in the Palais Royal.
One visit M. de La Tour d’Azyr had paid to Meudon. He was well received by M. de Kercadiou, who, after all, had no quarrel with him. But Mademoiselle kept her chamber, firm in her expressed resolve never again to receive him. It nowise modified her resolve that André-Louis should not have been harmed in the encounter. At a certain price, implied, she had offered herself to M. le Marquis, and he had refused to buy. The abiding humiliation of that thought alone precluded the possibility of her ever consenting to see M. le Marquis again.
That unalterable resolve of hers was delicately conveyed to him by M. de Kercadiou. Understanding the enormity of his offence from her point of view, he took his leave in hopelessness, and returned no more.
As for André-Louis, without reason to hope that M. de Kercadiou would depart from his written word, he submitted without attempting to combat a decision which he assumed to be irrevocable. His godfather’s house saw him no more. But twice in the course of that winter he saw M. de Kercadiou and Aline; once in the Galéri de Bois in the Palais Royal, when bows were distantly exchanged between them, and on another occasion in a box at the Théâtre Français, when they did not see him at all. Aline he saw on yet a third occasion, and again in a box at the theatre—this time with Madame de Plougastel. That was early in the following Spring, and again Aline did not see him.
Meanwhile he went about his duties in the Assembly with what zest he could, and also attended to the direction of his fencing academy, which continued to prosper exceedingly, having received an enormous impetus from his performances in the Bois during that memorable September week. Subsisting now almost entirely on the eighteen francs a day of his salary as a deputy, his already considerable savings began to mount up. These he was prudently investing in Germany. He sold such shares as he had acquired in the Compagnie des Eaux and his bonds of the Caisse d’Escompte, and disposed of the proceeds through a German banker in the Rue Dauphine. He purchased during those two years some considerable property in the neighbourhood of Dresden. He would have preferred his native country. But the tenure of land in France appeared to him, and rightly, to be insecure. Today one group of Frenchmen had dispossessed another; tomorrow another group might dispossess those who had come forward to purchase the last dispossessions.
And now we come to what is perhaps the bulkiest portion of the Confessions and in some ways the most interesting—being that portion which takes rank among the mémoires pour servir of this epoch. He describes the busy, active life of Paris as he saw it and the principal events in the Assembly. He tells us of the completely peaceful and orderly condition now restored, of the impetus received by industry, the abundance of work for all hands, and the reign of economic prosperity that appeared definitely to have set in throughout France. The revolution was accomplished, he says, quoting the words as used by Dupont in the Assembly. And so it was provided that the Crown would accept in good faith the work which had been done, content to govern constitutionally, its own power defined, circumscribed and subordinated to the will of the nation and the general weal.
But would the Crown so accept all this? That was the question agitating all minds, begetting a certain measure of suspense. Men look backwards at each step taken since that first gathering of the States General in the Hall of the Menus Plaisirs at Versailles two years ago, and, seeing how often faith had been broken, doubted with reason that it would now be kept. It was because of these doubts and mistrusts—which centred particularly upon the Queen and those immediately about her—that suspense persisted. There was a sense—an intuition almost—that much still remained to be done before France could rest secure in the enjoyment of this legal equality she had so laboriously created for her children. How many obstacles were yet to be overcome, what horrors were yet to be traversed, no man in that Spring of 1791—not even the extremists of the Cordeliers and similar societies—could even remotely conceive.
Meanwhile this epoch of prosperity and false peace endured until the King’s flight to Varennes in the following June—the fruition of all that secret coming and going between Paris and Coblentz. That flight, dispelling by the bad faith it evinced the last illusion, put an end to peaceful conditions and introduced a reign of turbulence. The manner of His Majesty’s ignominious return under guard, like a runaway schoolboy brought home to be birched, and the subsequent events of that year down to the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, are all described elsewhere, and are so little concerned with the story that is our principal consideration, that I spare you their repetition from the point of view of André-Louis.
The dissolution of the Assembly followed in September. Its work was accomplished. The King came to the Manège to receive and pronounce his acceptance of the Constitution. The revolution was indeed accomplished.
There followed the election of the Legislative Assembly, in which André-Louis once more represented Ancenis. Because in the Constituent he had been no more than a deputy-suppléant, he was not under the decree passed on the motion of Robespierre that no member of the Constituent should be a member of the Legislative. Had he observed the spirit as well as the letter of the law he would have refrained from reelection. But so warmly was he desired by Ancenis and urged by Le Chapelier, who himself was going into enforced retirement, that he submitted. It was a matter that offended no one. His exploits as the Paladin of the Third Estate had rendered him popular with all parties, even the members of the old Côté Droit, and in the Jacobins, where he had spoken once or twice, he had been well received and was well regarded. It was expected of him in those days that he would do great things. Almost, I think, he expected it of himself, for he confesses frankly that he shared at the time the fairly widespread error that the revolution was a thing accomplished. France had now but to govern herself upon the lines laid down by the Constitution which had been given to her.
He left—as did those who shared that view—two factors out of his calculations: the fact that the Court could not bring itself to accept the altered state of things, and the fact that the new Assembly had not the experience necessary to master the intrigues and factions of the Court. The Legislative was an Assembly of young men, few of them being much above the age limit of twenty-five. Lawyers predominated, and among these that group of lawyers from the Gironde inspired by so lofty republicanism; but they were young lawyers without experience of affairs, and during critical early days they were to flounder helplessly, and by their floundering and displays of weakness encourage the Court party to deliver battle once again.
At first it was a battle but of words, a battle of newspapers, conducted between such organs as L’Ami du Roy and L’Ami du Peuple—a sheet that had lately made its appearance furiously edited by the Philanthropist Marat.
Public irritation began to manifest itself once more, public nerves at perpetual strain by revolution and counterrevolution were beginning to threaten crises. And now half Europe was aiming to hurl herself upon France, and her quarrel with France was the quarrel of the French King. That was the horror at the root of all the horrors that were to come. That was what gave their opportunity to the Marats, the Dantons, the Héberts, and all the rest of the extremists who stirred up the populace.
And whilst the Court prosecuted its intrigues, whilst the Jacobins, led by Robespierre, waged war against the Girondins who, under the great leadership of Vergniaud and Brissot, were gradually finding themselves, whilst the Feuillants waged war equally against both, and whilst the torch of foreign war was alight on the frontier and that of civil war was being secretly kindled at home, André-Louis was removed from the hub itself.
Of the counterrevolutionary troubles that were everywhere being stirred up by the clergy, none were more acute than those of Brittany, and in view of his antecedents and the influence which he was—quite exaggeratedly—deemed to wield in his native province, it was natural that the Commission of Twelve should propose to him in the early days of the Girondin ministry, and on the suggestion of Roland, that he should go down to Brittany to combat, by peaceful means, if possible, the evil influences at work.
It was a matter in which the municipalities had clear and well-timed powers. But many of the municipalities were themselves growing suspect for their singular inertia before the steadily spreading reactionary sentiments. Hence the need to send down an elected representative with fullest powers to arouse the municipalities to a sense of their danger. He was desired to proceed peacefully; but that he was empowered to have recourse to other measures is clear from the nature of the orders he carried—orders enjoining upon all Frenchmen, in the name of the nation, to render him all possible assistance, and warning those who hindered him that they would do so at their peril.
He accepted the task, and so he was one of five similar plenipotentiaries dispatched on the same errand in that Spring of 1792—which saw for the first time the philanthropic Dr. Guillotin’s engine of painful death erected in the Carrousel—into the provincial departments, forerunners in a sense of the representatives en mission so common later on under the National Convention.
Considering what afterwards happened in Brittany, it cannot be pretended that his mission achieved the success that was expected. That, however, is no pan of our present concern. It kept him absent from Paris for some four months, and might have engaged him longer, and perhaps to better purpose, but that at the beginning of August he was recalled. More imminent than any trouble in Brittany was the trouble brewing at home in Paris itself, where the political sky was blacker than it had been since ’89.
Of this trouble André-Louis saw signs and heard rumours ever increasing as his berline bore him eastwards towards the capital. Into that powder magazine that Paris was become, the torch had been recklessly cast by the manifesto of their Majesties of Prussia and Austria, a manifesto declaring responsible for all events and to be dealt with in summary military fashion all members of the Assembly, of departments, of districts, of municipalities, the very justices of the peace, and the soldiers of the National Guard.
It was a declaration of war of an unprecedented kind—a declaration of war, not against France, but against one section of France. And the amazing thing is that this manifesto, published in Coblentz on the 26th of July, was known already in Paris on the 28th, justifying those who denounced its real source as being not Coblentz at all, but the Tuileries. Madame de Campan’s memoirs also afford this a certain measure of confirmation when they betray the fact that the Queen, her mistress, was in possession of the itinerary prepared by the Prussians who stood in arms at the gates of France. Even in those days the methodical Prussians planned, it would appear, by the calendar. Her Majesty was able to give Madame de Campan full details of that itinerary. On such a day the Prussians would be at Verdun; on such a day at Chalons; and on such a day before the walls of Paris, of which Bouillé had sworn that not one stone should remain upon another.
And Paris, receiving this manifesto, receiving the news of it prematurely, understood that it was the gage of battle flung down not by Prussia, but by the old detested and detestable regime which the Constitution was believed to have swept away forever. France saw—or justifiably thought she saw—revealed in full at last the bad faith in which that Constitution had been accepted. She perceived that her last resource lay in insurrection, so that she might anticipate as far as possible her coercion by foreign armies. In Paris itself there were still at the time all the provincial federates who had come up for the national festival of the fourteenth of July, including the bands of the Marseillais who had marched from the South to the rhythm of that new hymn of theirs that was presently to resound so terribly. It was Danton who had detained them in the capital, forewarned of what was brewing.
And now, in full view of each other, each side proceeded to arm. The Swiss were fetched up from Courbevoie to the Tuileries, the Chevaliers du Poignard—a band of gentlemen numbering some hundreds sworn to the defence of the Throne, and including in its ranks M. de La Tour d’Azyr, lately returned from the camp of the émigrés beyond the frontier—assembled in the royal palace when their place as Frenchmen was with the Army of the North. In the sections the forging of pikes was renewed, muskets were unearthed, cartridges procured and distributed, and hostilities were declared in petitions to the Assembly itself. Paris realised that the hour was rapidly approaching which would see the climax of this long struggle between Equality and Privilege. And it was towards a city so disposed that André-Louis came speeding from the West to find there also the climax of his own disturbed career.