To the scaffold (38 page)

The Assembly followed the royal family to Paris in October, meeting temporarily at the Archbishop's palace and after a few weeks settling into permanent quarters in the riding school in the Tuileries gardens. Some deputies chose to return to their provinces, but the majority stayed to continue the exhilarating, enervating struggle to hammer out a government. They met three afternoons a week in noisy, often rancorous and unruly debate. Deputies polished their speeches at the salons and dinner parties of fashionable hostesses before delivering them on the Assembly floor, but frequently the fine phrases were drowned out by the "hallooing and bawling" of opponents of the speaker's position. The strongest orators, rather than the most sagacious ones, tended to carry the day. "Sometimes an orator gets up in the middle of another deliberation," one observer remarked, "makes a fine discourse and closes with a snug resolution which is carried with a huzza." 11

Monarchists and not a few cultured republicans thought the deputies were incompetent, by and large, and worried that without a more effective governing body the country would before long fall prey to anarchy, civil war, or a seizure of power by a popular demagogue. Certainly the issues the deputies faced were very grave. They needed to find a means to control the wayward, power-crazed Parisians, and to keep the capital supplied with adequate food and ftiel stores over the coming winter. They were threatened with challenges to their authority from Brittany and the Cambresis, where the revolution was unpopular and the Assembly detested. They had to undertake the long-term tasks of forging a legal and institutional framework for the liberty they claimed. And, if this were not enough, they had to find immediate solutions to the urgent crisis in finance.

One member of the Committee of Finances estimated that the public debt had risen to nearly five billion francs in the last months of 1789, and Necker was hard pressed to find means to cover the interest payments. The Assembly reduced the royal pensions, saving millions of francs, but this was only a modest

beginning at reform. Necker, while negotiating to buy grain from America and from England's Canadian provinces, was trying to persuade the Dutch financiers who had come to France's aid in the past to make huge loans once again, to be secured this time by the debt America owed to France. It was a grandiose strategy, perhaps too grandiose. The Finance Minister was floundering, critics murmured that despite his enormous reputation as a financial wizard, he was in truth as incompetent as the quarrelsome deputies. ^^ As vain of his abilities as he was of his portly person, flattered by his social-climbing wife and by his witty, ugly daughter Madame de Stael, who was one of the most prominent hostesses in Paris, Necker was losing patience with the mercurial French. At one dinner party where the political discussion became vehement, a guest heard Necker mutter in disgust that the French were a "ridiculous nation," forgetting for the moment that he might be overheard by the servants. ^^

As the deputies debated, plots and counter-plots swirled around them, making their task more complex and putting their very existence in jeopardy. Rumor had it that unnamed persons were planning to massacre the King and Queen and all the nobles who had not yet emigrated. Disaffection in some provinces led many observers to envision a dismemberment of the kingdom, and eventual civil war. Monarchists and opportunists—including Provence—spun intrigues to abduct the King and then march on Paris with loyalist troops or foreign armies. Others wanted to force the ineffectual Louis to abdicate in favor of Orleans—who, though he had been sent to England to keep him from exploiting his popularity to make mischief in Paris, was still a potential threat to be reckoned with. Orleans was widely believed to have been responsible for the "October Days," when the King and Queen were forcibly brought to the Tuileries. Antoinette's brother in Vienna was convinced that the Duke was "himself the author of these upheavals in France." It was no longer clear that, as many of the deputies had once assumed, the ultimate political outcome of the revolution would be a constitutional monarchy. France seemed poised on the cliff-edge of disaster, and well-informed Parisians spent hours debating "whether the abuses of former times were more grievous than the excesses which are to come."^"^

At the center of all the turbulence was the Assembly's most

mesmerizing orator, Gabriel-Honor^ de Riqueti, Comte de Mira-beau. Able to dominate the stormy debating sessions with his dark charisma, Mirabeau committed all his considerable energies to combatting everything that was worst about absolute monarchy— its extravagance and waste, its support of parasitic courtiers, its ineptitude and apparent contempt for the condition of the people. "I am a mad dog from whose bites despotism and privilege will die," the Count declared proudly, and like a mad dog he seemed to hold everyone around him at bay. Mirabeau was grotesquely ugly, with an ugliness so extreme that it was fascinating. His huge head and deeply pitted skin, his deformed body and somber, even demonic presence put him far outside the human norm, as did his prodigious sexual gluttony and his equally outsize greed. "He is an object of dread and contempt to all parties," wrote an Englishman who knew Mirabeau well, adding candidly that his distinguished friend was "ready to sell himself to any party who thought him worth buying." Venal the Count surely was, and coarse in his language, avid to violate every social convention. But he was also immensely learned, a productive writer and translator of the classics, with as intense a passion for books as for the pleasures of the flesh. It was largely Mirabeau's firnmess, poise and strength of will that kept the Assembly from collapsing or becoming hopelessly fragmented, and that guided the revolution along its relentlessly democratic path.^^

Mirabeau led the dominant party in the Assembly, the Patriots, dedicated to refashioning France and to pulling down the old order, with the Assembly ascendent over the King. ("They unhinge everything," Gouvemeur Morris wrote of this group, which he referred to as "Madmen.") Other factions were the Blacks, or counter-revolutionaries, who wanted to restore the old order in its entirety, and the Monarchists, who envisioned a division of power between the King and a popularly elected body or bodies. (This group, rapidly dwindling in numbers and influence, Morris favored, though he saw that they had a serious weakness in that they had learned all they knew about politics from books, not from experience, and hence were crude or naive in their approach to gaining power.)*^

Mirabeau was a Patriot, but an ambivalent one; while hating royal excesses he did not hate the King, and was convinced that France's best government would be an alliance between the King

and the people, with himself at the head of the popular wing. The Assembly, which he referred to as "the wild ass," could never be entirely dominant, in Mirabeau's view; it had to be led, bullied if necessary, galvanized into action by a compelling personality. The King was necessary, provided he was stripped of his absolute powers and tamed by a constitution. Mirabeau told his friend Comte de la Marck, a former ambassador of Maria Theresa and a trusted intimate of the King and Queen, to inform the royals that he was "more for them than against them" and to warn them that they were in great danger. "Convince them," he said, "that they and France are lost if the royal family do not leave Paris." He drew up plans for an escape route, and envisioned Normandy as a possible haven for the monarchy.

Antoinette wanted nothing to do with the grotesque and amoral Mirabeau, who though he came from an aristocratic family seemed to have lost his identity and adopted the behavior and political attitudes of the lowest-class Parisians. She did not trust him, despite La Marck^s message, she felt certain Mirabeau was concerned about no one but himself. Besides, Mirabeau's message was only one among many. She had a personal letter from Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, urging her to ignore the goings-on in Paris and in the Assembly and stay above it all in regal isolation.

"Kings ought to proceed in their career undisturbed by the cries of the people," the Empress wrote, "as the moon pursues her course unimpeded by the howling of dogs."^^

There were many letters, secret messages, expressions of sympathy and dire admonitions. Madame Campan was there as always to read them to her, having taken up residence at the Tuileries at Antoinette's urging. And there was Madame Thibaut, the principal chamberwoman—"a person of great merit, and attached beyond measure to her majesty," according to Madame de Tourzel—and xMadame Tourzel herself, the capable governess to the royal children. All these, and dozens of others, gave Antoinette constant signs of their support and encouragement in her troubles. Her secretary Augeard urged her to get away from Paris at once, and offered to abduct her himself some evening in a humble post-wagon drawn by two horses. She should dress as a governess, Augeard advised, and have the dauphin dressed as a little girl. The first night they could stop at St.-Thierry, the country

estate of the Bishop of Rheims, and the following night at Augeard's own house at Buzancy. From there it was only a single post to the border. She was strongly tempted to follow the secretary's advice, but then thought better of it. Her would-be abductor was betrayed to the Assembly, arrested and imprisoned.

Meanwhile there were her children to look after, and her "bad leg," which had begun to cause her pain and inconvenience. Over the Christmas holidays she sprained it, not for the first time, and had to stay in her room, a semi-invalid, for nearly two weeks. *^ The presence of her son distracted her. "The little chou d'amour is charming," she wrote to the Duchesse de Polignac, "and I love him to distraction. He loves me very much too, in his fashion, when it suits him. I love to call him chou d'amoury to remind him of you and yours. Sometimes I ask him if he remembers you, if he loves you; he says *Oui,' and then I hug him even more. He is well, he grows strong, and doesn't have tantrums any more. He goes walking every day, which does him a lot of good."^^

Antoinette's nursery of children and foster-children became temporarily smaller when she sent the little Senegalese boy Jean Amilcar to a children's home at St.-Cloud. But Theresa's companion Ernestine was still a member of the family, spending virtually all her waking hours with the Princess, and the two girls were being prepared to take their first communion together early in the new year. They had grown so close, in fact, that the Queen was thinking of finding a child similar to Ernestine to be a companion for her son.

The winter months dragged by, the royal imprisonment went on. Each afternoon the King and Queen took their exercise in the Tuileries garden—Louis was not permitted to go hunting—the King escorted by six grenadiers of the National Guard, several household officers and a page, the Queen accompanied by one of her ladies and surrounded by guardsmen who stood so close to her that they could hear every word she said. Nearby, in a little railed-off garden of his own, the dauphin dug with a hoe and rake, while several grenadiers looked on.

Arthur Young saw them there one warm, drizzly January afternoon, and was struck by how ill Antoinette looked. "Her majesty does not appear to be in health," he told his correspondent afterwards, "she seems to be much affected and shows it in her face." A crowd of ticket-bearing spectators followed her, talking

very loudly, scrutinizing her, hardly allowing her room to breathe—though some. Young noticed, took off their hats as she passed.^^ She felt her imprisonment keenly. "My soul is more agitated and troubled than ever," she confided to Mercy. She had begun to think of writing her memoirs, aware that she was living through significant events and determined to record her view of them. She saved letters, and began noting down "minute reports made in the spirit and upon the event of the moment," Campan says. 21

She was determined to do all she could to survive the ordeal, and not only survive it, but triumph over it if she could. Her courage was more than equal to the challenge, and so was her character. But she was far from brilliant.

"The Queen," La Marck wrote, "has certainly sufficient intelligence and resolution for great actions, but I must confess that in matters of business, or even in conversation, she does not show that degree of attention and that logical sequence that is necessary to know in order to prevent errors and assure success."^^

She was doing her best, but her best might not be good enough. And her strength, both emotional and physical, had begun to ebb. "They shall not destroy my courage," she vowed in a letter, "but I am suffering very much."

i^24^^

N the spring of 1790 Paris was still in ferment. Drumbeats sounded throughout the day and far into the night, and every morning the militia bands heralded the dawn with their shrill piping. No one could get any rest, for the continual marching and exercising of the soldiers, their interminable evening parades and their "ostentatious bustle" in the streets at all hours destroyed the peace of even the most sedate neighborhoods. Living in the revolutionary city was "like living in a city besieged," a visitor wrote. The noise, the martial atmosphere, the crowds, the shrieks, clamor and explosions from duels—which, everyone agreed, were on the increase—kept tensions at fever pitch. The pungent scent of the lilacs blooming in the Tuileries gardens was lost amid the reek of gunpowder, smoke obscured the blossoming chestnut trees and cries of alarm floated in the chill spring air.