The Countess De Charny - Volume II (16 page)

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when motherly instinct prompted her to follow her child lirst of all, she almost involuntarily moved on beside the king into the hall of Assembly.

There a great relief awaited her, for she beheld her boy sitting, safe and sound, upon the president’s desk.

Seeing her son safe, a terrible pang reminded her of Charny, and the mortal danger that threatened him.

“Gentlemen,” she cried, “one of my bravest officers and most devoted friends has been left outside your door, in danger of death. I ask succour for him.”

On hearing her words, five or six deputies hastened out, and the royal family and their attendants were ushered to the seats reserved for the cabinet ministers.

The Assembly had received them standing, not on account of the deference due to crowned heads, but with the respect due misfortune.

Before seating himself, the king made a sign to indicate that he wished to speak; and there was a breathless silence as he said: “I have come here to prevent a great crime, and I feel that I can be nowhere safer than in your midst, gentlemen.”

“Sire,” responded Vergniaud, who was presiding, “you can rely upon the firmness of the National Assembly. Its members have sworn to die, if need be, in defence of the rights of the people and of the legally constituted authorities.”

The king seated himself. At that moment a frightful fusilade resounded almost at the very doors of the Hiding School. The National Guards had united with the insurgents on the Feuillant Terrace, and were now firing at the Swiss who had acted as an escort for the royiil family.

An officer of the National Guard, who seemed to have lost his head completely, rushed into the Assembly Chamber, shouting: —

“The Swiss! the Swiss! We are driven back!”

For one instant the Assembly inclined to the belief that

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the Swiss Guards had repulsed the insurgents, and were now coming to reclaim their king; for at that time Louis XVI., it must be admitted, was rather the king of the Swiss than of the French. All the deputies sprang to their feet as if with one accord, and members, spectators, secretaries, all raised their hands and cried, “Come what may, we swear to live and die freemen ! “

The king and his family took no part in this demonstration; but this cr}^, uttered by three thousand mouths, swept over their heads like a hurricane.

This mistake in relation to the Swiss was of short duration, however; for fifteen minutes later a cry of, “The palace is taken!” was heard; “the insurgents are marching upon the Assembly with the intention of slaying the king!”

Then the same men who, in their hatred of despotism, had just sworn to live and die freemen, raised their hands with the same enthusiasm, and solemnly swore to defend the king to the death.

At that very moment Captain Durler was being ordered in the name of the Assembly to lay down his arms.

“I serve the king, and not the Assembly,” he said coolly. “Where is the king’s order?”

The messenger sent by the Assembly had brought no written order.

“I received my commission from the king,” added Dur-ler, “and I obey only the king’s orders.”

So they dragged him almost by main force into the Assembly. His face was blackened with powder and stained with blood.

“Sire, they tell me to lay down my arms,” he said. “Is this the king’s order?”

“Yes,” answered Louis; “surrender your arms to the National Guards. I do not want another one of you brave fellows to perish ! “

Durler sighed, bowed his head, and went out; but at the door he paused and declared he would not obey any save a

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written order: so the king took a sheet of paper and •wrote: —

” The King orders the Swiss Guard to lay down their arms and retire to their quarters.”

And this was the order that was subsequently repeated in all the rooms, corridors, and halls of the palace.

This order having restored some slight semblance of tranquillity, the president proposed that the Assembly resume business; but a member rose and said that the Constitution forbade the Assembly to transact any business in the king’s presence.

“That is true,” remarked Louis XVI. “But where will you put us?”

” We can offer you, Sire, the box reserved for the Logographe. It is empty now, that journal having ceased to appear.”

“Very well,” replied the king, “we are ready to go there at any time.”

“Ushers!” cried Vergniaud, “conduct the king to the box reserved for the Logographe.”

The ushers hastened to obey. The king and queen and royal family left the hall by the same door by which they had entered it, and again found themselves in the corridor.

” What is this on the floor? ” asked the queen. ” It looks like blood.”

The ushers made no reply. If these stains were really blood, it is quite probable that the ushers had no idea how they came there. To spare the queen the ominous sight the king quickened his pace, and, opening the door of the box himself, bade the queen enter.

But as Marie Antoinette set foot on the threshold, she uttered a cry of horror, covered her face with her hands, and drew back. The presence of those blood stains was explained. A dead body had been placed in the box, and

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it was this body, which the queen had nearly stepped upon in her haste, that had made her recoil in horror.

“Ah!” said the king — in the same tone in which he had exclaimed, ” That is poor Mandat’s head ” — ” Ah ! this is the body of our poor Comte de Charny ! “

It was indeed the count’s body, which a few deputies had succeeded in rescuing from the clutches of his murderers, and placed in this box, not foreseeing that the royal family would also be installed there a few minutes afterwards.

The body was immediately removed, and the royal family entered the box. Some one suggested that an attempt be made to clean the floor, for it was covered with blood; but the queen shook her head, and was the first to take her seat. No one noticed that she loosened the strings of her shoes and placed her trembling feet in the still warm blood.

” Oh, Charny, Charny ! ” she murmured, ” why is not my blood flowing too, so it might mingle eternally with thine?”

Just then the clock struck three.

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CHAPTER XVII.

FROM THREE TO SIX IN THE AFTERNOON.

We left the palace just as the Swiss Guards were being driven back step by step to the very door of the royal apartments, and just as a voice was proclaiming through the corridors an order for these same heroic defenders to lay down their arms.

So the palace was taken at last! What grim genius presided over this victory of the people? “Popular Wrath,” the reader may reply. But who directed this wrath?

A man we have scarcely mentioned, a Prussian officer, mounted on a small black horse, and riding beside the gigantic Santerre on his colossal Flemish steed, — in short, Westermann, the Alsatian.

Who was this man that thus appeared first like the lightning in the midst of the tempest? He was one of those men whom God brings forth from his arsenal only when a terrible blow of retribution is to be struck.

Such was Westermann, the Man of the Setting Sun, as he was called; and, in fact, he did appear only when royalty was sinking below the horizon, never to rise again !

Who discovered him? Who divined that to the brewer Santerre — a giant hewn out of a block of flesh — would be given the soul for this struggle in which the Titans of earth were to overthrow the gods of royalty? And who complemented Geryon with Prometheus, or Santerre with Westermann? Danton!

And wliere did this influential revolutionist find tliis conqueror? In a cesspool of crime, — at Saint Lazare.

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Westermann was accused — accused, understand, not convicted — of manufacturing counterfeit_money. For the work of the 10th of August, Danton needed just such a man, — one who would not draw back, because in retreating he would only be mounting the pillory.

The mysterious prisoner had attracted Dantou’s attention, and when the day and hour came that Danton needed him, his powerful hand broke the captive’s chains, and he •was bidden to come forth.

The Revolution, as we have previously remarked, effected the abasement of the mighty of earth and the exaltation of the lowly. It set captives free, and cast into prison those who had been, up to that time, the powerful of the earth.

On that memorable 10th of August, Santerre was scarcely seen. It was Westermann who was everywhere and did everything.

It was Westermann who ordered the union of the Saint Marceau and Saint Antoine sections. It was Westermann, on his little black horse, who led the revolutionist army into the Carrousel, and rapped on the door of the Tuileries with the hilt of his sword, as if ordering the door opened for a regiment which had completed its march and was about to make the palace its headquarters.

We saw this door open; but we also saw how heroically the Swiss did their duty, — how they were destroyed rather than conquered, — and followed them, step by step, up the staircase and through the palace, which was thickly strewn with their dead.

When they learned that the king was about to leave the palace, two or three hundred gentlemen, who had hastened there to die with the king, held a meeting in the queen’s guardroom to decide whether it was their duty to die without the king, since he was no longer ready to die with them, as he had solemnly promised; and they finally decided that as the king had gone to the National Assembly, they would rejoin him there.

They collected together all the Swiss they met, as well

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as a score of National Guardsmen, and descended about five hundred strong into the garden.

Their passage was barred by a grating called the Queen’s Grille. They tried to force the bolt, but the bolt would not yield; but they finally succeeded in prying the gate part way open with a crowbar, though they had to push through one by one. It was only about thirty yards from here to the Pont Eoyal, at the entrance to which a company of insurgents was stationed. Two Swiss guards were the first to undertake to cross this narrow space, and they were killed before they had taken four steps. The others passed over their dead bodies. The bullets fell around them like hail; but the brilliant uniforms of the Swiss made such capital targets that sixty or seventy Swiss were killed, while only two noblemen were killed and one — Monsieur de Viomesnil — wounded.

On their way to the Assembly they also had to pass a guard-house erected under the trees between the terrace and the bank of the river, and eight or ten more Swiss were slain there.

The party, which had lost about eighty men in advancing as many yards, continued their course towards the steps leading to the Feuillant Terrace. Monsieur de Choiseul saw them coming, and, sword in hand, he ran to meet them under the fire of the guns both on the Royal and the Swing-ing Bridge, and endeavoured to encourage the fugitives by shouting to them to come on to the Assembly.

Supposing himself followed by about four hundred men, he rushed into the hall, and up the stairway leading to the Assembly Chamber.

On the topmost step he met Deputy Merlin, who called out to him, “What are you doing herewith your sword drawn, you rascal ! “

Monsieur de Choiseul glanced behind him. He was alone.

“Put up your sword,” continued Merlin, “and go and join the king. I alone saw you; that is to say, no one.”

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What bad become of the little band that Choiseul believed was following him? The thick shower of grape and canister had scattered them like dry autumn leaves. Monsieur de Vioinesnil and eight or ten other gentlemen, together with five Swiss, took refuge in the Venetian Embassy on the Rue Saint Florentin, the door of which chanced to be standing hospitably open. They were saved.

The others tried to reach the Champs Elysees ; but two volleys of grape from guns planted at the base of the statue of Louis XV. broke the line of fugitives into three fragments.

One fled up the boulevard, and there met some mounted gendarmes, who were approaching in company with a battalion of insurgents. The fugitives believed themselves saved. Monsieur de Villiers, himself a former major of gendarmes, ran to one of the horsemen, shouting, “Help, my friend, help ! ” But the horseman drew a pistol and blew the old nobleman’s brains out.

Seeing this, thirty Swiss, and a gentleman who had once been one of the king’s pages, ran into a building connected with the Kaval Department. The thirty Swiss were disposed to surrender; and seeing eight or ten ragamuffins advancing towards them, they laid down their arms and shouted, ” Hurrah for the Nation ! “

“Ah, you traitors!” cried the rioters, “you surrender because you see that you can’t help yourselves. Do you think you ‘11 save yourselves by shouting for the nation? No!”

Two Swiss dropped simultaneously, one felled by a blow from a pike, the other by a bullet. In another instant their heads were severed from their bodies and placed upon pikes.

The other Swiss, enraged at the death of their comrades, picked up their muskets again and began firing. Seven out of the eight ragamuflBns fell dead or wounded.

The Swiss then made a rush for the main gateway, only

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to find themselves face to face witli a cannon. They retreated; the cannon advanced. The fugitives huddled in a corner of the courtyard. The cannon was turned upon its pivot, and then the flame and smoke belched forth. Twenty-three of the twenty-eight Swiss were killed. Fortunately, almost at the same instant, while the smoke still blinded the gunners, a door opened behind the five remaining Swiss, and they and the former page darted in, hastily closing it behind them; and the rioters, believing none of the Royalists had escaped them, hastened off with yells of triumph, dragging their cannon after them.