II
Quos Deus Vult Perdere
Once again, precisely as he had done when he joined the Binet troupe, did André-Louis now settle down wholeheartedly to the new profession into which necessity had driven him, and in which he found effective concealment from those who might seek him to his hurt. This profession might—although in fact it did not—have brought him to consider himself at last as a man of action. He had not, however, on that account ceased to be a man of thought, and the events of the spring and summer months of that year 1789 in Paris provided him with abundant matter for reflection. He read there in the raw what is perhaps the most amazing page in the history of human development, and in the end he was forced to the conclusion that all his early preconceptions had been at fault, and that it was such exalted, passionate enthusiasts as Vilmorin who had been right.
I suspect him of actually taking pride in the fact that he had been mistaken, complacently attributing his error to the circumstance that he had been, himself, of too sane and logical a mind to gauge the depths of human insanity now revealed.
He watched the growth of hunger, the increasing poverty and distress of Paris during that spring, and assigned it to its proper cause, together with the patience with which the people bore it. The world of France was in a state of hushed, of paralyzed expectancy, waiting for the States General to assemble and for centuries of tyranny to end. And because of this expectancy, industry had come to a standstill, the stream of trade had dwindled to a trickle. Men would not buy or sell until they clearly saw the means by which the genius of the Swiss banker, M. Necker, was to deliver them from this morass. And because of this paralysis of affairs the men of the people were thrown out of work and left to starve with their wives and children.
Looking on, André-Louis smiled grimly. So far he was right. The sufferers were ever the proletariat. The men who sought to make this revolution, the electors—here in Paris as elsewhere—were men of substance, notable bourgeois, wealthy traders. And whilst these, despising the canaille, and envying the privileged, talked largely of equality—by which they meant an ascending equality that should confuse themselves with the gentry—the proletariat perished of want in its kennels.
At last with the month of May the deputies arrived, André-Louis’ friend Le Chapelier prominent amongst them, and the States General were inaugurated at Versailles. It was then that affairs began to become interesting, then that André-Louis began seriously to doubt the soundness of the views he had held hitherto.
When the royal proclamation had gone forth decreeing that the deputies of the Third Estate should number twice as many as those of the other two orders together, André-Louis had believed that the preponderance of votes thus assured to the Third Estate rendered inevitable the reforms to which they had pledged themselves.
But he had reckoned without the power of the privileged orders over the proud Austrian queen, and her power over the obese, phlegmatic, irresolute monarch. That the privileged orders should deliver battle in defence of their privileges, André-Louis could understand. Man being what he is, and labouring under his curse of acquisitiveness, will never willingly surrender possessions, whether they be justly or unjustly held. But what surprised André-Louis was the unutterable crassness of the methods by which the Privileged ranged themselves for battle. They opposed brute force to reason and philosophy, and battalions of foreign mercenaries to ideas. As if ideas were to be impaled on bayonets!
The war between the Privileged and the Court on one side, and the Assembly and the People on the other had begun.
The Third Estate contained itself, and waited; waited with the patience of nature; waited a month whilst, with the paralysis of business now complete, the skeleton hand of famine took a firmer grip of Paris; waited a month whilst Privilege gradually assembled an army in Versailles to intimidate it—an army of fifteen regiments, nine of which were Swiss and German—and mounted a park of artillery before the building in which the deputies sat. But the deputies refused to be intimidated; they refused to see the guns and foreign uniforms; they refused to see anything but the purpose for which they had been brought together by royal proclamation.
Thus until the 10th of June, when that great thinker and metaphysician, the Abbé Siéyès, gave the signal: “It is time,” said he, “to cut the cable.”
On his motion, the preliminary action was taken of formally summoning the two absent orders to sit in common assembly with the Third Estate.
But Privilege—not seeing in its stupid tenacity of greed whither it was going, believing in force as the supreme law, and trusting to guns and foreign regiments—still refused to accede to the just and reasonable demands of a common assembly.
“It is said,” Siéyès had written, “that the Third Estate alone cannot form States General. So much the better, it will compose a National Assembly.”
This he now demanded should be done, and the Third, as representing ninety-six per centum of the nation, proceeded to do it. As a beginning the nobility and clergy were pronounced to be no more than two corporations no wise representative:
They willed it so, and they had it so.
The Oeil de Boeuf was intensely amused. This Third was so droll in its fantastic contortions. The rejoinder was of the simplest. It consisted in closing the Hall of the Menus Plaisirs where the Assembly was held. How the gods must have laughed at those so reckless laughers! André-Louis certainly laughs as he writes of it.
“Again brute force against ideas. Again the manner of La Tour d’Azyr. The Assembly no doubt had too dangerous a gift of eloquence. But how to conceive that the closing of a hall is to cripple the deliberations of an assembly! Are there no other halls, or failing halls, the broad canopy of heaven itself?”
The Third evidently thought so, for, finding the hall closed to them and guarded by soldiers who refused them admission, they repaired through the rain to the tennis-court, utterly destitute of furniture, and there announced (by way of revealing to the Court the futility of its measures against them) that wherever they were there the National Assembly was. Upon that they made their formidable oath not to separate until they had fulfilled the purpose for which they had been convoked, until they had given France a constitution—an oath very properly concluded amid shouts of “Vive le Roi!”
Thus a protest of loyalty to their King was mingled with a declaration to resist the vicious and corrupt system of which he was the unfortunate centre.
Le Chapelier best expressed that day precisely what was in the mind both of the Assembly and of the nation at large, harmonising their loyalty to the throne with their duty as citizens, when he moved “that His Majesty be informed that the enemies of the country obsess the Throne, and that their counsels tend to place the monarchy at the head of a party.”
Yet Privilege, as barren of invention as of foresight, contented itself with repeating its former tactics. M. le Comte d’Artois, having announced that on the morrow he would play tennis, the members of the Third found themselves on that Monday, the twenty-second of June, excluded from the tennis-court as on the Sunday they had been excluded from the Menus Plaisirs. This time, that errant, long-suffering Assembly which is to begin by giving bread to starving France must postpone its measures so that M. d’Artois may have his game of tennis. Yet M. le Comte does not, suffering from the general myopy, perceive the sinister aspect of his action. Quos Deus vult perdere … The Assembly moved patiently on, as it had done before, and found an asylum this time in the Church of Saint Louis.
And now those self-doomed humorists of the Oeil de Boeuf, driven by their petty insolence, prepare to push things to the length of bloodshed. If this National Assembly cannot understand a hint, it shall be given something plainer, something that it cannot possibly fail to understand. In vain does Necker try to build a bridge across the gulf; the King—unfortunate captive of Privilege—will have none of it. He insists—as no doubt was insisted with him that he should—that the three orders shall remain distinct. If they desire a reunion, he will permit it, but for this occasion only, and to treat only of general affairs, which general affairs do not comprise any matters concerning the respective rights of the three orders, the constitution of future States General, feudal and seigneurial property, or privileges pecuniary or honourable; in short, nothing that can alter the existing regime, nothing of all that purpose by which the Third is inspired.
The royal convocation of these States is revealed at last as an impudent mockery, a thing devised solely to mystify and to delude.
The Third, notified, repairs to the Menus Plaisirs to meet the other orders and hear the royal declaration. M. Necker is absent; the rumour runs that he is on the point of departure. Since Privilege will not use the bridge of his providing, he will certainly not remain to have it supposed from his presence that he approves the declaration to be made. How could he approve it, since it changes nothing? It declares that the King will sanction equality of taxation if the nobility and the clergy will renounce their pecuniary privileges; that property shall be respected, particularly tithes and feudal rights and dues; that on the question of individual liberty the States are invited to seek and to propose means that will reconcile the abolition of letters-de-cachet with the precautions necessary to spare the honour of families and to repress the beginnings of sedition; that in the matter of throwing State employment open equally to all, the King must refuse, particularly in so far as the army is concerned, in the institution of which it is not his wish to make the slightest modification—by which it is meant that the military career must remain a privilege of the noblesse, as hitherto, and that no man who is not nobly born may aspire to any rank above that of an under-officer.
And lest any doubts should linger in the minds of the already sufficiently disillusioned representatives of ninety-six per centum of the nation, comes from that sluggish, phlegmatic prince the challenge:
“If you abandon me in so beautiful an enterprise, I shall, alone, dispose for the welfare of my people; I shall consider myself, alone, their true representative.”
And upon that he dismisses them:
“I order you messieurs, to separate at once. Tomorrow morning you will repair to the chambers assigned to your respective orders, there to resume your sittings.”
And so His Majesty departs followed by Privilege—nobility and clergy. He returns to the Château to receive the acclamations of the Oeil de Boeuf. And the Queen, radiant, triumphant, announces that she confides the fate of her son, the Dauphin, to the nobles. But the King does not share the enthusiasm that pervades the palace; he is morose and silent. The gelid silence of the people as he drove through their ranks—a silence to which he is not accustomed—has impressed him unfavourably. He will require a deal of stiffening from his evil counsellors before he will consent to be thrust onwards along the path of doom to which this day he has set his foot.
The gauntlet which he threw down in the Assembly has been taken up by the Third. When the master of ceremonies comes to remind Bailly, its president, that the King has ordered the Third to depart, “It seems to me,” he is answered, “that the Assembled Nation cannot receive orders.”
And then that great man Mirabeau—massive of body as of genius—dismisses the master of ceremonies in a voice of thunder: “We have heard the intentions that have been suggested to the King, and it is not for you, sir, who have here no place, or voice, or right to speak, to remind us of his words. Go back and tell those who sent you that we are here by the will of the people, and that we shall not leave save by force of bayonets.”
That was to pick up the glove indeed. And the story runs that M. de Brézé, the young master of ceremonies in question, was so stricken by that dismissal, by the majesty of the man, the majesty of the twelve hundred deputies silently facing him, that he went out backwards as if in the presence of royalty.
The crowd outside, learning of the turn of events, goes off furiously to the Château. Six thousand men flood the courtyards, storm the gardens and the terraces. The Queen’s gaiety is checked by sudden fear. It is the first time such a thing has happened to her. But it shall not be the last; for she misses the warning it conveys. She shall know it again and again before the end, and ever in increasing quantity; but wisdom never. Yet now in her panic she begs the King quickly to undo that which she and her friends have done, and to recall the magician Necker, who alone can save the situation.
Fortunately the Swiss banker has not yet taken his departure. He is at hand. He comes down to the courtyard. He pacifies the people.
“Yes, yes, my children. Reassure yourselves. I will remain! I will remain!”
They kiss his hands as he moves through them, in tears, deeply moved by this display of faith in him. Thus covering with his reputation for honesty the brutal stupidity of the cabal, he gains them a respite.
That was on the twenty-third of June. The news of it came quickly to Paris. Did it mean, wondered André-Louis, that the National Assembly had conquered, that the door would be opened to the reforms the need for which grew every day more desperate? He hoped it might be so, for Paris was becoming restive and ever hungrier. The queues outside the bread shops were daily increasing as bread grew daily more scarce, and accusations of gambling in corn flew recklessly and dangerously, likely at any moment to precipitate grave trouble.
For two days nothing happened. The reconciliation was not confirmed; the royal declaration was not revoked. It began to look as if the Court would not keep faith. And then the electors of Paris took a hand. This body had concerted to continue to assemble after the elections, so as to complete the instructions of their elected deputies. They now proposed the formation of a civic guard, the organisation of an elective annual commune, and an address to the King petitioning the withdrawal of the troops assembled at Versailles, and the revocation of the royal declaration of the twenty-third. On that same day the soldiers of the French Guards broke out of barracks, and came to fraternise with the people in the Palais Royal, swearing to refuse to obey any order against the National Assembly. For this, eleven of them were placed under arrest by their Colonel, M. du Châtelet.
Meanwhile the petition of the electors was before the King. In addition to this, a minority of the nobles, with the self-seeking effete Duke of Orléans at their head, had of their own impulse joined the National Assembly, to the great delight of Paris.
The King, urged to prudence by M. Necker, decided upon the reunion of the orders, which the National Assembly demanded. There was great joy at Versailles, and thus, apparently, the peace was made between Privilege and People. Had it been real all might have been well. But Privilege had not yet learnt its lesson; indeed, would never learn it until all was lost. The reunion was but a pretence, a mockery, made by the temporising nobles, who now—as was becoming obvious—but watched for an opportunity, awaited a pretext to resort to the force in which alone they believed.
And the opportunity came soon, at the very beginning of July. M. du Chatelet, a harsh, haughty disciplinarian, proposed to transfer the eleven French Guards placed under arrest from the military gaol of the Abbaye to the filthy prison of Bicêtre reserved for thieves and felons of the lowest order. Word of that intention going forth, the people at last met violence with violence. A mob four thousand strong broke into the Abbaye, and delivered thence not only the eleven guardsmen, but all the other prisoners, with the exception of one whom they discovered to be a thief, and whom they put back again.
That was open revolt at last, and with revolt Privilege knew how to deal. It would strangle this mutinous Paris in the iron grip of the foreign regiments. Measures were quickly concerted. Old Maréchal de Broglie, a veteran of the Seven Years’ War, imbued with a soldier’s contempt for civilians, conceiving that the sight of a uniform would be enough to restore peace and order, took control with Besenval as his second-in-command. The foreign regiments were stationed in the environs of Paris, regiments whose very names were an irritation to the Parisians, regiments of Reisbach, of Diesbach, of Nassau, Esterhazy, and Roehmer. Reinforcements of Swiss were sent to the Bastille between whose crenels already since the 30th of June were to be seen the menacing mouths of loaded cannon.
On the 10th of July the electors once more addressed the King to request the withdrawal of the troops. They were answered next day that the troops served the purpose of defending the liberties of the Assembly! And on the next day to that, which was a Sunday, the philanthropist Dr. Guillotin—whose philanthropic engine of painless death was before very long to find a deal of work—came from the Assembly, of which he was a member, to assure the electors of Paris that all was well, appearances notwithstanding, since Necker was more firmly in the saddle than ever. He did not know that at the very moment in which he was speaking so confidently, the oft-dismissed and oft-recalled M. Necker had just been dismissed yet again by the hostile cabal about the Queen. Privilege wanted conclusive measures, and conclusive measures it would have—conclusive to itself.
And at the same time yet another philanthropist, also a doctor, one Jean-Paul Mara, of Italian extraction—better known as Marat, the gallicized form of name he adopted—a man of letters, too, who had spent some years in England, and there published several works on sociology, was writing:
“Have a care! Consider what would be the fatal effect of a seditious movement. If you should have the misfortune to give way to that, you will be treated as people in revolt, and blood will flow.”
André-Louis was in the gardens of the Palais Royal, that place of shops and puppet-shows, of circus and cafés, of gaming houses and brothels, that universal rendezvous, on that Sunday morning when the news of Necker’s dismissal spread, carrying with it dismay and fury. Into Necker’s dismissal the people read the triumph of the party hostile to themselves. It sounded the knell of all hope of redress of their wrongs.
He beheld a slight young man with a pockmarked face, redeemed from utter ugliness by a pair of magnificent eyes, leap to a table outside the Café de Foy, a drawn sword in his hand, crying, “To arms!” And then upon the silence of astonishment that cry imposed, this young man poured a flood of inflammatory eloquence, delivered in a voice marred at moments by a stutter. He told the people that the Germans on the Champ de Mars would enter Paris that night to butcher the inhabitants. “Let us mount a cockade!” he cried, and tore a leaf from a tree to serve his purpose—the green cockade of hope.
Enthusiasm swept the crowd, a motley crowd made up of men and women of every class, from vagabond to nobleman, from harlot to lady of fashion. Trees were despoiled of their leaves, and the green cockade was flaunted from almost every head.
“You are caught between two fires,” the incendiary’s stuttering voice raved on. “Between the Germans on the Champ de Mars and the Swiss in the Bastille. To arms, then! To arms!”
Excitement boiled up and over. From a neighbouring waxworks show came the bust of Necker, and presently a bust of that comedian the Duke of Orléans, who had a party and who was as ready as any other of the budding opportunists of those days to take advantage of the moment for his own aggrandizement. The bust of Necker was draped with crepe.
André-Louis looked on, and grew afraid. Marat’s pamphlet had impressed him. It had expressed what himself he had expressed more than half a year ago to the mob at Rennes. This crowd, he felt must be restrained. That hotheaded, irresponsible stutterer would have the town in a blaze by night unless something were done. The young man, a causeless advocate of the Palais named Camille Desmoulins, later to become famous, leapt down from his table still waving his sword, still shouting, “To arms! Follow me!” André-Louis advanced to occupy the improvised rostrum, which the stutterer had just vacated, to make an effort at counteracting that inflammatory performance. He thrust through the crowd, and came suddenly face to face with a tall man beautifully dressed, whose handsome countenance was sternly set, whose great sombre eyes mouldered as if with suppressed anger.
Thus face to face, each looking into the eyes of the other, they stood for a long moment, the jostling crowd streaming past them, unheeded. Then André-Louis laughed.
“That fellow, too, has a very dangerous gift of eloquence, M. le Marquis,” he said. “In fact there are a number of such in France today. They grow from the soil, which you and yours have irrigated with the blood of the martyrs of liberty. Soon it may be your blood instead. The soil is parched, and thirsty for it.”
“Gallows-bird!” he was answered. “The police will do your affair for you. I shall tell the Lieutenant-General that you are to be found in Paris.”
“My God, man!” cried André-Louis, “will you never get sense? Will you talk like that of Lieutenant-Generals when Paris itself is likely to tumble about your ears or take fire under your feet? Raise your voice, M. le Marquis. Denounce me here, to these. You will make a hero of me in such an hour as this. Or shall I denounce you? I think I will. I think it is high time you received your wages. Hi! You others, listen to me! Let me present you to …”
A rush of men hurtled against him, swept him along with them, do what he would, separating him from M. de La Tour d’Azyr, so oddly met. He sought to breast that human torrent; the Marquis, caught in an eddy of it, remained where he had been, and André-Louis’ last glimpse of him was of a man smiling with tight lips, an ugly smile.
Meanwhile the gardens were emptying in the wake of that stuttering firebrand who had mounted the green cockade. The human torrent poured out into the Rue de Richelieu, and André-Louis perforce must suffer himself to be borne along by it, at least as far as the Rue du Hasard. There he sidled out of it, and having no wish to be crushed to death or to take further part in the madness that was afoot, he slipped down the street, and so got home to the deserted academy. For there were no pupils today, and even M. des Amis, like André-Louis, had gone out to seek for news of what was happening at Versailles.
This was no normal state of things at the Academy of Bertrand des Amis. Whatever else in Paris might have been at a standstill lately, the fencing academy had flourished as never hitherto. Usually both the master and his assistant were busy from morning until dusk, and already André-Louis was being paid now by the lessons that he gave, the master allowing him one half of the fee in each case for himself, an arrangement which the assistant found profitable. On Sundays the academy made half-holiday; but on this Sunday such had been the state of suspense and ferment in the city that no one having appeared by eleven o’clock both des Amis and André-Louis had gone out. Little they thought as they lightly took leave of each other—they were very good friends by now—that they were never to meet again in this world.
Bloodshed there was that day in Paris. On the Place Vendome a detachment of dragoons awaited the crowd out of which André-Louis had slipped. The horsemen swept down upon the mob, dispersed it, smashed the waxen effigy of M. Necker, and killed one man on the spot—an unfortunate French Guard who stood his ground. That was a beginning. As a consequence Besenval brought up his Swiss from the Champ de Mars and marshalled them in battle order on the Champs Élysées with four pieces of artillery. His dragoons he stationed in the Place Louis XV. That evening an enormous crowd, streaming along the Champs Élysées and the Tuileries Gardens, considered with eyes of alarm that warlike preparation. Some insults were cast upon those foreign mercenaries and some stones were flung. Besenval, losing his head, or acting under orders, sent for his dragoons and ordered them to disperse the crowd. But that crowd was too dense to be dispersed in this fashion; so dense that it was impossible for the horsemen to move without crushing someone. There were several crushed, and as a consequence when the dragoons, led by the Prince de Lambesc, advanced into the Tuileries Gardens, the outraged crowd met them with a fusillade of stones and bottles. Lambesc gave the order to fire. There was a stampede. Pouring forth from the Tuileries through the city went those indignant people with their story of German cavalry trampling upon women and children, and uttering now in grimmest earnest the call to arms, raised at noon by Desmoulins in the Palais Royal.
The victims were taken up and borne thence, and amongst them was Bertrand des Amis, himself—like all who lived by the sword—an ardent upholder of the noblesse, trampled to death under hooves of foreign horsemen launched by the noblesse and led by a nobleman.
To André-Louis, waiting that evening on the second floor of No. 13 Rue du Hasard for the return of his friend and master, four men of the people brought that broken body of one of the earliest victims of the Revolution that was now launched in earnest.