Part 2

On her return to the Tuileries after the disastrous journey to Varennes, the Queen wrote to {16} Fersen, June 27, 1791: "Be at ease about us; we are living," and Fersen replied: "I am well, and live only to serve you." June 29, she wrote him another letter in which she said: "Do not write to me; it would endanger us; and, above all, do not return here under any pretext; all would be lost if you should make your appearance. They never lose sight of us by night or day; which is a matter of indifference to me. Be tranquil; nothing will happen to me. The Assembly desires to treat us with gentleness. Adieu. I shall not be able to write to you again."

Marie Antoinette was in error when she supposed she would not write again. She was in error, likewise, when she imagined that Fersen, in spite of all dangers and difficulties, would not find means to see her again. Their correspondence was not interrupted. After the acceptance of the Constitution, Marie Antoinette wrote to him: "Can you understand my position and the part I am continually obliged to play? Sometimes I do not understand myself, and am obliged to consider whether it is really I who am speaking; but what is to be done? It is all necessary, and be sure our position would be still worse than it is if I had not at once assumed this attitude; we at least gain time by it, and that is all that is required. I keep up better than could be expected, seeing that I go out so little and endure constantly such immense fatigue of mind. What with the persons whom I must see, my {17} writing, and the time I spend with my children, I have not a moment to myself. The last occupation, which is not the least, gives me my sole happiness. When I am very sad, I take my little boy in my arms, embrace him with my whole heart, and for a moment am consoled."

Fersen, touched and pitying, was constantly thinking of that fatal palace of the Tuileries where the Queen was so much to be compassionated. An invincible attraction drew him thither. There, he thought, was the post of devotion and of honor. November 26, he wrote: "Tell me whether there is any possibility of going to see you entirely alone, without a servant, in case I receive the order to do so from the King (Gustavus III.); he has already spoken to me of his desire to bring this about." Of all the sovereigns who interested themselves in the fate of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette, Gustavus was the most active, brave, and resolute; he was also the only one in whom Marie Antoinette placed absolute confidence. She expected less from her own brother, the Emperor Leopold, and it was to Stockholm above all that she turned her eyes. Gustavus ordered Fersen to go secretly to Paris, and on December 22, 1791, he sent him a memoir and certain letters, commissioning him to deliver them to Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette. He recommended, as forcibly as he could, a new attempt at flight, but with precautions suggested by the lesson of Varennes. He thought the members of the royal {18} family should depart separately and in disguise, and that, once outside of his kingdom, Louis XVI. should call for the intervention of a congress. The following passage occurs in the letter of the Swedish King to Marie Antoinette: "I beg Your Majesty to consider seriously that violent disorders can only be cured by violent remedies, and that if moderation is a virtue in the course of ordinary life, it often becomes a vice when there is question of public matters. The King of France can re-establish his dominion only by resuming his former rights; every other remedy is illusory; anything except this would merely open the way to endless discussions which would augment the confusion instead of ending it. The King's rights were torn from him by the sword; it is by the sword that they must be reconquered. But I refrain; I should remember that I am addressing a princess who, in the most terrible moments of her life, has shown the most intrepid courage."

Fersen obtained permission from Louis XVI. to accomplish the mission confided to him by Gustavus III. He left Stockholm under an assumed name and with the passport of a Swedish courier, and reached Paris without accident, February 13, 1792. He was so adroit and prudent that no one suspected his presence. On the very evening of his arrival he wrote in his journal: "Went to the Queen by my usual road; very few National Guards; did not see the King." Fersen, therefore, only reappeared at the Tuileries in the darkness, like a fugitive or {19} an outlaw. He found the Queen pale with grief and with hair whitened by sorrow and emotion. It was a solemn moment. The storm was raging within France and beyond it. Terrible omens, snares, and dangers lay on every side. One might have said that the Tuileries were about to be swallowed up in a gulf of fire and blood.

The next day Fersen saw the King. He wrote in his journal: "Tuesday, 14. Saw the King at six in the evening. He will not go and can not, on account of the extreme vigilance. In fact, he scruples at it, having so often promised to remain, for he is an honest man.... He sees that force is the only resource; but, being weak, he thinks it impossible to resume all his authority.... Unless he were constantly encouraged, I am not sure he would not be tempted to negotiate with the rebels. He said to me afterwards: 'That's all very well! We are by ourselves and we can talk; but nobody ever found himself in my position. I know I missed the right moment; it was the 14th of July; we ought to have gone then, and I wanted to, but how could I when Monsieur himself begged me to stay, and Marshal de Broglie, who was in command, said to me: "Yes, we can go to Metz. But what shall we do when we get there?" I lost the opportunity and never found it again. I have been abandoned by everybody.'" Louis XVI. desired Fersen to warn the Powers that they must not be surprised at anything he might be forced to do; that he was {20} obliged, that it was the effect of constraint. "They must put me out of the question," he added, "and let me do what I can."

Fersen had a long talk with Marie Antoinette the same day. She entered into full details about the present and especially about the past. She explained why the flight to Varennes, in which Fersen had taken such a prominent part, and which had succeeded so well so long as he directed it, had ended in failure. The Queen described the anguish of the arrest and the return. To the project of a new effort to escape, she replied by pointing out the implacable surveillance of which she was the object, and the effervescence of popular passions, which this time would overleap all restraint if the fugitives were taken. It would be better for the royal family to suffer together than to expose themselves to die separately. It would be better to die like princes, who abdicate majesty only with life, than as vagabonds, under a vulgar disguise. "The Queen," adds Fersen, "told me that she saw Alexander Lameth and Duport; that they always tell her that there is no remedy but foreign troops; failing that, all is lost, that this cannot last, that they have gone farther than they wished to. In spite of all this, she thinks them malicious, does not trust them, but uses them as best she can. All the ministers are traitors who betray the King." Fersen had a final interview with Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette on February 21, 1792. By February 24, {21} he had returned to Brussels. He was profoundly moved on quitting the Tuileries, but, dismal and lugubrious as his forebodings may have been, how much more sombre was the reality to prove!

What a terrible fate was reserved for the chief actors in this drama! Yet a few days, and the chivalrous Gustavus was to be assassinated. The hour of execution was approaching for Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette. Fersen, likewise, was to have a most tragic end. From the moment when he bade his last adieu to the unhappy Queen, his life was but one long torment. His disposition, already inclined to melancholy, became incurably sad. His loyal and devoted soul could not accustom itself to the thought of the calamities weighing so cruelly upon that good and beautiful sovereign of whom he said in 1778: "The Queen is the prettiest and most amiable princess that I know." On October 14, 1793, he will still be endeavoring, with the aid of Baron de Breteuil, to bring to completion a thousandth plot to extricate the august captive from her fate. He will learn the fatal tidings on the 20th. "I can think of nothing but my loss," he will write in his journal. "It is frightful to have no positive details. It is horrible that she should have been alone in her last moments, with no one to speak to, or to receive her last wishes. No; without vengeance, my heart will never be content." Covered with honors under the reign of Gustavus IV., senator, chancellor of the Academy of {22} Upsal, member of the Seraphim Order, grand marshal of the kingdom of Sweden, there will remain in the depths of his heart a wound which nothing can heal. An inveterate fatality will pursue him as it had done the unfortunate sovereign of whom he had been the chevalier. He will perish in a riot at Stockholm, June 20, 1810, at the time of the obsequies of the Prince Royal. Struck down by fists and walking-sticks, his hair pulled out, his clothes torn to rags, he will be dragged about half-naked, rolled underfoot, assassinated by a maddened populace. Before rendering his last sigh, he will succeed in rising to his knees, and, joining his hands, he will utter these words from the stoning of Saint Stephen: "O my God, who callest me to Thee, I implore Thee for my tormentors, whom I pardon." If not the same words, they are at least the same thoughts as those of Marie Antoinette on the platform of the scaffold.

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III.

THE DEATH OF THE EMPEROR LEOPOLD.

One after another, Marie Antoinette lost her last chances of safety; blows as unforeseen as terrible beat down the combinations on which she had built her hopes. Within a fortnight she was to see the two sovereigns disappear from whom she had expected succor: her brother, the Emperor Leopold, and Gustavus III., the King of Sweden. Leopold had not been equal to all the illusions which his sister had cherished with regard to him, but, nevertheless, he showed great interest in French affairs, and a lively desire to be useful to Louis XVI. Pacific by disposition, he had temporized at first, and adopted a conciliatory policy. He desired a reconciliation with the new principles, and, moreover, he was not blind to the inexperience and levity of the _émigrés_. But the obligation, to which he was bound by treaties, to defend the rights of princes holding property in Alsace, his fear of the propaganda of sedition, the aggressive language of the National Assembly and the Parisian press, had ended by determining him to take a more resolute attitude, and it was at the moment when he was {24} seriously intending to come to his sister's aid that he was carried off by sudden death. Though she did not desire a war between Austria and France, the Queen had persisted in wishing for an armed congress, which would have been a compromise between peace and war, but which the National Assembly would have regarded as an intolerable humiliation. It must not be denied, the situation was a false one. Between the true sentiments of Louis XVI. and his new rôle as a constitutional sovereign, there was a real incompatibility. As to the Queen, she was on good terms neither with the _émigrés_ nor with the Assembly.

In order to get a just idea of the sentiments shown by the _émigrés_, it is necessary to read a letter written from Trèves, October 16, 1791, by Madame de Raigecourt, the friend of Madame Elisabeth, to another friend of the Princess, the Marquise de Bombelles: "I see with pain that Paris and Coblentz are not on good terms. The Emperor treats the Princes like children.... The Princes cannot avoid suspecting that it is the influence of the Queen and her agents which thwarts their plans and causes the Emperor to behave so strangely.... Some trickery on the part of the Tuileries is still suspected in this country. They ought to explain themselves to each other once for all. Is the Queen afraid lest the Count d'Artois should arrogate an authority in the realm which would diminish her own? Let her be at ease on that score; she will {25} always be the King's wife and always dominant. What is she afraid of, then? She complains that she is not sufficiently respected. But you know the good heart and the uprightness of our Prince; he is incapable of the remarks attributed to him, and which have certainly been reported to the Queen with the intention of estranging them entirely." Madame de Raigecourt ends her letter with this complaint against Louis XVI.: "Our wretched King lowers himself more and more every day; for he is doing too much, even if he still intends to escape.... The emigration, meanwhile, increases daily, and presently there will be more Frenchmen than Germans in this region." At this very time, the Queen was having recourse to her brother Leopold as to a saviour. She wrote to him, October 4, 1791: "My only consolation is in writing to you, my dear brother; I am surrounded by so many atrocities that I need all your friendship to tranquillize my mind.... A point of primary importance is to regulate the conduct of the _émigrés_. If they re-enter France in arms, all is lost, and it will be impossible to make it believed that we are not in connivance with them. Even the existence of an army of _émigrés_ on the frontier would be enough to keep up the irritation and afford ground for accusations against us; it appears to me that a congress would make the task of restraining them less difficult.... This idea of a congress pleases me greatly; it would second the efforts we are {26} making to maintain confidence. In the first place, I repeat, it would put a check on the _émigrés_, and, moreover, it would make an impression here from which I hope much. I submit that to your better judgment.... Adieu, my dear brother; we love you, and my daughter has particularly charged me to embrace her good uncle."

While Marie Antoinette was thus turning towards Austria for assistance, the National Assembly at Paris repelled with energy all thought of any intervention whatsoever on the part of foreign powers. January 1, 1792, it issued a decree of impeachment against the King's brothers, the Prince de Conde, and Calonne. The confiscation of the property of the _émigrés_ and the taxation of their revenues for the benefit of the State had been prescribed by another decree to which Louis XVI. had offered no opposition. January 14, Guadet said in the tribune, while speaking of the congress: "If it is true that by delays and discouragement they wish to bring us to accept this shameful mediation, ought the National Assembly to close its eyes to such a danger? Let us all swear to die here rather than--" He was not allowed to finish. The whole assembly rose to their feet, crying: "Yes, yes; we swear it!" And in a burst of enthusiasm, every Frenchman who would take part in a congress having for its object the modification of the Constitution, was declared an infamous traitor. January 17, it was decreed that the King should require the {27} Emperor Leopold to explain himself definitely before March 1.

By a curious coincidence, this date of March 1 was precisely that on which the Emperor Leopold was to die of a dreadful malady. He was in perfect health on February 27, when he gave audience to the Turkish envoy; he was in his agony, February 28, and on March 1, he died. His usual physician asserted that he had been poisoned. The idea that a crime had been committed spread among the people. Vague rumors got about concerning a woman who had caused remark at the last masked ball at court. This unknown person, under shelter of her disguise, might have presented the sovereign with poisoned bonbons. The Jacobins, who might have desired to get rid of the armed chief of the empire, and the _émigrés_, who might have reproached him as too luke-warm in his opposition to the principles of the French Revolution, were alternately suspected. The last hypothesis was hardly probable, nor does anything prove that the Jacobins had any hand in the possibly natural death of the Emperor Leopold. But minds were so overexcited at the time that the parties mutually accused each other, on all occasions, of the most execrable crimes. For that matter, there were Jacobins who, out of mere bravado, would willingly have gloried in crimes of which they were not guilty, provided that these crimes had been committed against kings.

What is certain is, that Marie Antoinette believed {28} in poison. "The death of the Emperor Leopold," says Madame Campan, "occurred on March 1, 1792. The Queen was out when the news arrived at the Tuileries. On her return, I gave her the letter announcing it. She cried out that the Emperor had been poisoned; that she had remarked and preserved a gazette in which, in an article on the session of the Jacobin Club at the time when Leopold had declared for the Coalition, it was said, in speaking of him, that a bit of piecrust could settle that affair. From that moment the Queen had regarded this phrase as an inadvertence of the propagandists."

On the very day when Marie Antoinette's brother died, Louis XVI.'s Minister of Foreign Affairs, De Lessart, had enraged the National Assembly by reading them extracts from his diplomatic correspondence, which they found not sufficiently firm. They were indignant at a despatch in which Prince de Kaunitz said: "The latest events give us hopes; it appears that the majority of the French nation, impressed with the evils they have prepared, are returning to more moderate principles, and incline to render to the throne the dignity and authority which are the essence of monarchical government." When De Lessart came down from the tribune, the whispering changed into cries of rage and threats against the minister and the court, which, it was said, was planning a counter-revolution at the Tuileries, and dictating to the cabinet of Vienna the language by which it hoped to intimidate France. {29} At the evening session of the same day, Rouyer, a deputy, proposed to impeach the Minister of Foreign Affairs. "Is it possible," cried he, "that a perfidious minister should come here to make a parade of his work and lay the responsibility of it on a foreign power? Will the time never arrive when ministers shall cease to betray us? Were my head to be the price of the denunciation I am making, I would none the less go on with it." At the session of March 6, Guadet said: "It is time to know whether the ministers wish to make Louis XVI. King of the French, or the King of Coblentz."

On the 10th the storm broke. The day before, Narbonne had received his dismission. Brissot accused De Lessart of having compromised the safety of France, withheld from the Assembly the documents establishing the alliance between the Emperor and the King of Prussia, discredited the assignats, depreciated the credit, lowered the rate of exchange, and encouraged interior disorder. Vergniaud followed him, exclaiming: "From the tribune where I am speaking may be seen the palace where perverse counsellors lead astray and deceive the King given to you by the Constitution; where they forge chains for the nation, and arrange the manoeuvres which are to deliver us up to Austria, after having caused us to pass through the horrors of civil war. Terror and dismay have often issued from that famous palace. Let them re-enter it to-day in the name of the law, let them penetrate all hearts, and {30} teach all who dwell there, that our Constitution accords inviolability to the King alone. Let them know that the law will overtake all the guilty without exception, and that there will not be a single head convicted of crime which can escape its sword." The decree of impeachment against the ministers was voted by a very large majority. De Lessart was advised to take flight, but he refused. "I owe it to my country," said he, "I owe it to my King and to myself to make my innocence and the regularity of my conduct plain before the tribunal of the high court, and I have decided to give myself up at Orleans." He was conducted by gendarmes to that city, where he was imprisoned. Louis XVI. dared not do anything to save his favorite minister. On March 11, Pétion, the mayor of Paris, came to the bar of the Assembly, and read, in the name of the Commune, an address in which it was said: "When the atmosphere surrounding us is heavy with noisome vapors, Nature can relieve herself only by a thunder-storm. So, too, society can purge itself from the abuses which disturb it only by a formidable explosion.... It is true, then, that responsibility is not an idle word; that all men, whatever may be their stations, are equal before the law; that the sword of justice is poised over all heads without distinction." Was not this language like a prognostic of the 21st of January and the 16th of October? Encompassed by a thousand snares, hated by each of the extreme parties, by the {31} _émigrés_ as well as by the Jacobins, Marie Antoinette no longer beheld anything but aspects of sorrow. Abroad, as in France, her gaze fell on dismal spectacles only. Her imagination was affected. She hardly dared taste the dishes served at her table. All had conspired to betray her. She had experienced so many deceptions and so much anguish; fate had pursued her with so much bitterness, that her heart, exhausted with emotions, and overwhelmed with sadness, was weary of all things, even of hope.

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IV.

THE DEATH OF GUSTAVUS III.

The drama of the Revolution is not French alone; it is European. It has its afterclap in every empire, in every kingdom, even to the most distant lands. It excites minds in Stockholm almost as much as in Paris. Among the Swedes there are people whose greatest desire would be to parody the October Days, and to carry about on pikes the bleeding heads of their adversaries. The new ideas take fire and spread like a train of gunpowder. It is the fashion to go to extremes; a nameless frenzy and fatality seem let loose upon this epoch of agitations and catastrophes. All those who, at one time or another, have been guests at the palace of Versailles, are condemned, as by a mysterious sentence, either to exile or to death.