The Countess De Charny - Volume II (36 page)

So vehement was the demand for a great victory that the real facts of the case could hardly be revealed to Paris and France; but Dumouriez reported them to Danton through Westermann. The Prussians had suffered so little, and were still so far from being beaten, that twelve days after the battle of Yalmy they were still in possession of the same camp.

Dumouriez wrote to ask if he should treat with the Kinsr of Prussia in case any such overtures were made. There were two replies: one from the ministry, — the tone of which was arrogant, even supercilious; the other, emanat-ing from Danton personally, was calm, and eminently judicious, even polite in tone.

The ministerial communication was a lordly document, declaring : —

” Tlie Repuhlic icill not treat with its enemies while they remain within its borders.^’

Danton’s letter said : —

”If the Prussians will consent to evacuate our territory, you are at liberty to make any terms you can with them.”

But no negotiations were likely to prove successful in the Prussian monarch’s present frame of mind; for about the same time that the news of the victory at Valmy reached Paris, the news that the monarchy had been abolished and a Republic established in its stead reached Valmy, and the King of Prussia was furiously angry.

The invasioii of France had been undertaken with a view to rescuing the king; but the sole results thus far had been the king’s im])risonment, the massacre of the Royalists, and the abolishment of the monarchy. All this had excited Frederick William’s wrath to a pitch of positive

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fury, ami he was resolved to figlat, come what might. Accordiugly, he gave orders for a bloody battle on the 29th of September.

So it will be seen that he had no intention of evacuating French territory.

But on the 29th there was a conference instead of a battle.

Dumouriez was prepared at all points. Brunswick, though bold in speech, was exceedingly prudent in deed, being much more of an Englishman than a German. He had married the sister of the Queen of England, so he was much more inclined to heed the advice of England than Germany. If England wanted to fight he was ready to fight with both hands, with one hand for England, and with the other for Prussia ; but if England, his real mistress, did not intend to unsheathe her sword, he was more than willing to sheathe his.

On the 29th of September Brunswick received letters from England and Holland, refusing to join the coalition. Moreover, Custine was marching along the Ehine, threatening Coblentz, and if Coblentz was taken, the door for Frederick William’s return to Prussia would be closed.

Then there was another still more potent factor in the case. The Prussian king had a lady love, — the Countess von Lichtenau. She had followed the army after the fashion of the day, and, like Goethe, who was scribbling the first scenes of his ” Faust ” in one of the Prussian monarch’s army waggons, she had thought this would be a delightful pleasure-trip; besides, she wanted to see Paris.

But the countess stopped at Spa ; and while there she heard of the defeat at Valmy, and of the peril that threatened her royal lover. There were two things that this beautiful countess was terribly afraid of, — the bullets of Frenchmen, and the smiles of Frenchwomen. So she wrote letter after letter, and the postscripts of these letters, that is to say, the substance of all she had written, was : ” Come back ! come back ! “

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The Prussian king lingered merely because he was ashamed to abandon Louis XVI. ; so Danton lost no time in sending him, through Westermann, certain orders of the Commune which would seem to indicate that the royal prisoners were very well treated. As this satisfied the King of Prussia, it is evident that he was not hard to please. His friends declare, however, that before he decided to return to his native land, he made both Danton and Dumouriez promise, upon their word of honour, that they would save the French monarch’s life; but there is nothing to verify this assertion.

On the 29th of September the Prussian army began its retreat and marched one league. The next day it marched another league.

The French army acted as a sort of escort for it, as if doing the honours of the country to their foreign guests. Whenever the French soldiers wanted to make an attack, or to cut off the enemy’s retreat, Dauton’s men prevented it.

If the Prussians would only leave France, that was all Danton asked. On October 22ud this desire Avas fulfilled.

On November 6th the cannon of Jemmapes announced the verdict of Heaven upon the French Eevolution. It was no longer a failure.

The next day, November 7th, the trial of the king was virtually begun by the introduction and passage of a motion for his prosecution.

A similar thing had occurred six weeks before, when the Republic was proclaimed the very day after Dumouriez had gained the battle of Valmy; so each victory had its celebration, so to speak, and helped France one step farther along on the revolutionary pathway.

This time it was a terrible step. The end towards which the people had been marching blindly for three years was near now, and the distinctly-defined outlines of objects which had heretofore been seen only in masses, were now becoming visil)le. And what did one perceive in the liori-zon? — a scaffold, and at the foot of the scaffold a king.

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A time, too, liail come when the base instincts of hatred, revenge, and destruction could no longer be held in check by the noble sentiments of superior minds. Even a man like Danton, who had assumed the responsibility of the bloody days of September, w^as now accused of being the chief of the Indulgents, and even the members of the Convention, or, at least, only a few of them, could understand that it was royalty, or rather royal ism, not the king, that they ought to attack.

Royalty w^as a gloomy abstraction, a threatening and dangerous mystery, with which the people wanted nothing whatever to do, — an idol, gilded without, but, like the whited sepulchres of which Christ speaks, full of dead men’s bones, and uncleanness within.

But the king himself was something entirely different. Louis XVI. had not been a particularly interesting personage in the days of his prosperity ; but now his nature had been purified by misfortune, and broadened by captivity. The ennobling influences of adversity had been so marked in his case that even the queen revered and almost adored this man whose plebeian tastes and appetites had so often brought the blood to her face in days gone by. It cannot be said that she really loved him, however, for her poor broken heart had lost all the love it ever contained, like a leaking vase which had lost the liquid it once held, drop by drop.

One day the king found the queen engaged in sweeping a room in which the dauphin was lying ill. He paused on the threshold, and letting his head droop upon his breast, said, with a sigh: —

“What an occupation for a queen of France! Who would have believed I should bring such misery upon you by linking your destiny with mine ! “

“And do you count as nothing the honour of being the wife of the best and most persecuted of men?” answered the queen.

Marie Antoinette said this without noting the presence of any witness, — not knowing that a poor valet would

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gatlier up these words like so many black pearls to form a diadem, not for the brow of a king, but of a condemned prisoner.

Another day the king saw Madame Elizabeth biting off — for want of a pair of scissors — the thread with which she was mending the queen’s gown.

“My poor sister!” he exclaimed. “What a contrast between your present surroundings and the pretty mansion at Montreuil, where you wanted for nothing ! “

“Ah! my brother, can I regret anj^thing when I am permitted to share your misfortunes?” answered that saintly woman.

Royalty was smitten unto death, but the imprisoned king had become endowed with a dignity that inspired reverence in the brains of not a few men, though this idea was so unpopular they dared not give utterance to it even in the most guarded manner.

” The people need salvation, but they do not need vengeance,” Danton said at the Cordeliers Club.

” I wish the indictment could bo drawn up, not against Louis XVI.,” said Thomas Paine, ”but against the entire race of monarehs. We have one of them in our power. He will be of service to us chiefly in putting us on the track of danger elsewhere. Louis XVI. is chiefly useful in demonstrating the necessity of revolutions.”

Lofty minds like Paine’s and Dauton’s and Gregoire’s were thoroughly agreed on this point. Not one king, but all kings should be indicted, and Louis XVI. should be held as a witness.

Republican France, that is to say, a nation that had attained its majority, should proceed; not only in her own name, but in the name of the nations still under the sway of royalty ; that is, under age. Suppose a public prosecution had been begun against Catherine II., — the murderess of her husband, the plunderer of Poland! Imagine that Pasiphre of tlie ISTorth chained to the pillory of public opinion, and what the result would have been !

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CHAPTEK XXXVII.

THE INDICTMENT.

The papers in the iron safe opened by Gamain, upon whom the Convention conferred a pension of twelve hundred francs a year for his services, and who died, tortured by rheumatism, after regretting a thousand times that he could not perish on the guillotine, to which he had helped to send his royal pupil, — these papers, to the great disappointment of the Kolands, contained no evidence against either Danton or Dumouriez.

They were very compromising to the king and the priest-hood, however, showing, as they did, an exceedingly mean and ungrateful spirit on the part of Louis XVI., who seemed to specially dislike those who tried to save him; namely: Necker, Lafayette, and Mirabeau. Against the Girondists he seemed to have nothing whatever to say.

The discussion began on the 13th of Xovember. Who opened this discussion? Who had constituted himself the sword-bearer of the Mountaineers, as the Extremists were now called?

A young man only twenty-four years old; sent to the Convention before he attained the required age, but whom we have met several times already in the course of this story.

He was from the department of the Aisne, and had recently made his first appearance in public at the Jacobin Club, under the auspices of Robespierre. He was the son of an old soldier who had received the cross of the Order of St. Louis, and the accompanying title of Chevalier for thirty years of faithful service.

Portrait of Camille Desmoulins. Photo-Etching. — From Painting by Duplessis Berteaux.

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Sent to Rheims to study law, his progress was not very creditable ; but he wrote a good many poor verses, as well as a more ambitious poem, modelled after ” La Pucelle ” and “Orlando Furioso,” which had proved a complete failure in 1789, but which was republished with greater success in 1792.

He left his native province and came to Paris to interest Camille Desmoulins in his behalf, — that brilliant journalist who held the future of so many unknown poets in the hol-low of his hand.

Camille, a thorough Bohemian, full of genius, wit, and verve, received a visit one day from an arrogant and con-ceited youth, whose slow and measured words fell, one by one, like drops of ice-water percolating through a rock. His blue eyes were cold and stern, and overshadowed by black eyebrows. His complexion was as chalky in its whiteness as when we met him on the occasion of his initiation into the Order of the Enlightened Ones.

His sojourn at Rheims had perhaps given him that scrof-ulous malady which kings once pretended to be able to cure by a touch on the day of their coronation. His chin was almost concealed from sight by the enormous cravat he wore round about his throat, although it was then the fashion to wear one’s cravat loose and flowing, as if to afford the headsman every facility for reaching the throat. His body was as rigid as that of an automaton, and his forehead so low that his hair seemed to grow down almost to his eyebrows, while his curt, concise language was the language of precept and command.

In short, a person better calculated to arouse Camille Desmoulins’s antipathy could hardly be imagined.

The young man read his verses to the famous journalist, and among other things, curtly remarked that the world had been empty since the time of the Romans.

Desmoulins thought the verses very poor. The sentiment seemed to him mawkish, the pliilosopliy absurd, and he openly sneered at the versification ; so the poet-pliiloso])licr returned to the solitudes of lUerancourt, ” where, like Tar-

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quin,” as Michelet says, “he took to decapitating poppies with a switch, imagining one a Danton, and another a Desmoulins.”

His opportunity came at last; for an opportunity never fails to come to some men.

His native village or town of Blerancourt was in danger of losing a certain business upon which its means of liveli-hood largely depended; and though the young man had no acquaintance with Robespierre, he wrote to him, imploring him to support this local measure, and offering to give up his little estate, — all he possessed in the world, — to be sold for the benefit of the nation.

The very traits that had excited Desmoulins’s mirth and derision set Eobespierre to thinking. The result was, he sent for the youthful fanatic, studied him carefully, and finally concluded that he was of the stuff of which successful revolutionists are made ; and through his influence with the Jacobins he secured the youth’s election to the Convention, though he had not attained the required age. The chairman of the Electoral Committee, Jean de Bry, protested, sending, with his protest, the baptismal certificate of the member-elect, who was only twenty-four years and three months old; but at Robespierre’s instigation this protest was ignored.

It was in this young man’s lodgings that Robespierre had taken refuge on the night of September 2nd. It was this young man who had slept soundly, though Robespierre could not close his eyes. In short, this young man was Saint-Just.