Part 8

André Chénier was at this time writing weekly letters for the _Journal de Paris_, in which he eloquently supported the principles of order and liberty. As M. de Lamartine has said, he was the Tyrtæus of good sense and moderation. He was indignant at {114} the threatened scandal, and, in concert with his collaborator on the _Journal de Paris_, Roucher, the poet of _Les Mois_, he criticised in most energetic terms the revolutionary manifestation then organizing. At the Jacobin Club, on April 4, Collot d'Herbois freed his mind against him. "This is not Chénier-Gracchus," said the comedian; "it is another person, quite another." He spoke of André as a "sterile prose writer," and pointed him out to popular vengeance. The two brothers were in opposing camps. While André Chénier stigmatized the fête of anarchy, his brother Joseph was diligently manufacturing scraps of poetry, inscriptions, and devices which were to figure in the programme. "What!" cried André, "must we invent extravagances capable of destroying any form of government, recompense rebellion against the laws, and crown foreign satellites for having shot French citizens in a riot? People say that the statues will be veiled in every place through which this procession is to pass. Oh! if this odious orgy takes place, it will be well to veil the whole city; but it is not the images of despots that should be wrapt in funeral crape, but the faces of honest men. How is it that you do not blush when a turbulent handful, who seem numerous because they are united and make a noise, oblige you to do their will, telling you that it is your own, and amusing your childish curiosity meanwhile with unworthy spectacles? In a city which respected itself such a fête would meet nothing but solitude and silence." The controversy {115} waxed furious. The walls were covered with posters for and against the fête. Roucher thus flagellated Collot d'Herbois: "This character out of a comic novel, who skipped from Polichinello's booth to the platform of the Jacobins, has sprung at me as if he were going to strike me with the oar the Swiss brought back from the galleys!"

Pétion, then mayor of Paris, far from opposing the fête, approved and encouraged it. "I think it my duty," he wrote, April 6, 1792, "to explain myself briefly concerning the fête which is being arranged to celebrate the arrival of the soldiers of Chateauvieux. Minds are heated, passions are in ferment, and citizens hold different opinions; everything seems to betoken disorder. It is sought to change a day of rejoicing into a day of mourning.... What is it all about? Some soldiers, leaders with the French guards, who have broken our chains and afterwards been overloaded with them, are about to enter within our walls; some citizens propose to meet and offer them a fraternal welcome; these citizens are obeying a natural impulse and using a right which belongs to all. The magistrates see nothing but what is simple and innocent in all this; they see certain citizens abandoning themselves to joy and mirth; every one is at liberty to participate or not to participate in the fête. Public spirit rises and assumes a new degree of energy amidst civic amusements." The municipality ordered this letter of Pétion's to be printed, posted on the walls, and {116} sent to the forty-eight sectional committees and the sixty battalions of the National Guard.

Not all the members of the National Assembly shared the optimism of the mayor of Paris. The preparations for the fête, which was announced for April 15, occasioned, on the 9th, a session as affecting as it was stormy. The whole debate should be read in the _Moniteur_. The question was put whether the Swiss of Chateauvieux, then waiting outside the doors, should be introduced and admitted to the honors of the session. M. de Gouvion, who had been major-general of the National Guard under Lafayette, gravely ascended the tribune. "Gentlemen," said he, "I had a brother, a good patriot, who, through the favorable opinion of your fellow-citizens, had been successively a commander of the National Guard and a member from the Department. Always ready to sacrifice himself for the Revolution and the law, it was in the name of the Revolution and the law that he was required to march to Nancy with the brave National Guards. There he fell, pierced by fifty bayonets in the hands of those who.... I ask if I am condemned to look on tranquilly while the assassins of my brother enter here?" A voice rising from the midst of the Assembly cried: "Very well, sir, go out!" The galleries applauded. Gouvion attempted to continue. The murmurs redoubled. Several persons in the galleries cried: "Down! down!"

The Assembly, revolutionary though it was, felt {117} indignant at the scandal, and called the galleries to order. The president reiterated the injunction to keep silence. Gouvion began anew: "I treat with all the contempt he merits, and with ... I would say the word if I did not respect the Assembly--the coward who has been base enough to outrage a brother's grief." The question was then put whether the Swiss of Chateauvieux should be admitted to the honors of the session. Out of 546 votes, 288 were in the affirmative, and 265 in the negative. Consequently, the president announced that the soldiers of Chateauvieux, who had asked to present themselves to the Assembly, should be admitted to the honors of the session. Gouvion went out by one door, indignant, and swearing that he would never re-enter an Assembly which received his brother's assassins as conquerors. By another door, Collot d'Herbois made his entry with his protêgês, the ex-galley slaves.

The party of the left and the spectators in the galleries burst into transports of joy, and gave three rounds of applause. The soldiers entered the hall to the beating of drums and cries of "Long live the nation!" They were followed by a large procession of men and women carrying pikes and banners. Collot d'Herbois, the showman of the Swiss, pronounced an emphatic address in praise of the pretended martyrs of liberty, which the Assembly ordered to be printed. One Goachon, speaking for the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, and holding a pike ornamented with a {118} red liberty cap, exclaimed: "The citizens of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, the victors of the Bastille, the men of July 14, have charged me to warn you that they are going to make ten thousand more pikes after the model which you see."

The fête took place on Sunday, April 15. It was the triumph of anarchy, the glorification of indiscipline and revolt. On that day the galley slaves were treated like heroes. The emblems adopted were a colossal galley, ornamented with flowers, and the convicts' head gear, that hideous red bonnet in which Dumouriez had already played the buffoon, and which was presently to be set on the august head of Louis XVI. The soldier galley slaves, whose chains were kissed with transports by a swarm of harlots, came forward wearing civic crowns. What a difference between the Constituent Assembly and the Legislative Assembly! Under the one, a grand expiatory ceremony on the Champ-de-Mars had honored the soldiers slain at Nancy, and the National Guards had worn mourning for these martyrs of duty. Under the other, it was not the victims who were lauded, but their assassins. A goddess of Liberty in a Phrygian cap was borne in a state chariot. The procession halted at the Bastille, the Hôtel de Ville, and the Champ-de-Mars. The mayor and municipality of Paris were present in their official capacity. The _Ça ira_ was sung in a frenzy of enthusiasm. Soldiers and public women embraced each other. It was David who had {119} designed the costumes, planned the chariot, and organized the whole performance,--David, the revolutionary artist who was destined by a change of fortune to paint the portrait of a Pope and the coronation of an Emperor.

In 1791, André Chénier and David, then friends, and saluting together the dawn of the Revolution, had celebrated with lyre and pencil the "_Serment du Jeu de Paumé_"[1] Consecrating an ode to the painter's magnificent tableau, the poet exclaimed:--

Resume thy golden robe, bind on thy chaplet rich, Divine and youthful Poesy! To David's lips, King of the skilful brush, Bear the ambrosial cup.

How he repented his enthusiasm now! What ill-will he bore the artist who placed his art, that sacred gift, at the service of anarchical passions! With what irony the same pen passed from dithyramb to satire!

Arts worthy of our eyes, pomp and magnificence Worthy of our liberty, Worthy of the vile tyrants who are devouring France, Worthy of the atrocious dementia Of that stupid David whom in other days I sang!

On the very day of the fête the young poet had the courage to publish in the _Journal de Paris_ an avenging satire, which branded the shoulders of the ex-galley slaves as with a new hot iron. The sweet {120} and pathetic elegiast, the Catullus, the Tibullus of France, added a bronze chord to his lyre:--

Hail, divine triumph! Enter within our walls! Bring us these warriors so famed For Desilles' blood, and for the obsequies Of many Frenchmen massacred... One day alone could win so much renown, And this fair day will shine upon us soon! When thou shalt lead Jourdan to our army, And Lafayette to the scaffold!

Jourdan was the slaughterer, the headsman, the torturer of the Glacier of Avignon, who, coming under the provisions of the amnesty, had arrived to take part in the triumph of the Swiss of Chateauvieux. The acclamations were lugubrious. The lanterns and torches shed a funereal glare. Nothing is more doleful than enthusiasm for ignominy. The applause accorded to disgrace and crime sounds like sinister derision. Outraged public conscience extinguishes the fires of apotheoses such as these. Madame Elisabeth, in a letter of April 18, speaks with a sort of pity of this odious but ridiculous fête: "The people have been to see Dame Liberty waggling about on her triumphal car, but they shrugged their shoulders. Three or four hundred _sans-culottes_ followed, crying 'Long live the nation! Long live liberty! Long live the _sans-culottes_! to the devil with Lafayette!' All this was noisy but sad. The National Guards took no part in it; on the contrary, they were indignant, and Pétion, they say, is ashamed of his conduct. {121} The next day a pike surmounted by a red bonnet was carried noiselessly through the garden, and did not remain there long." The Princess de Lamballe, who was living at the Tuileries in the Pavilion of Flora, could see the pike thus carried by a passer. It may, perhaps, have been that belonging to one of the Septembrists,--that on which her own head was to be placed.

The _Moniteur_, however, grew ecstatic over the fête. "There are plenty of others," it said, "who will describe the march of the triumphal cortège, the groups composing it, the car of Liberty, conducted by Fame, drawn by twenty superb horses, preceded by ravishing music which was sometimes listened to in religious silence and sometimes interrupted by wild, irregular dances whose very disorder was rendered more piquant by the fraternal union reigning in all hearts.... The people were there in all their might, and did not abuse it. There was not a weapon to repress excesses, and not an excess to be repressed." It concluded thus: "We say to the administration: Give such festivals as these often. Repeat this one every year on April 15; let the feast of Liberty be our spring festival; and let other civic solemnities signalize the return of the other seasons. In former days the people had none but those of their masters, and all that was accomplished by them was their depravity and abasement. Give them some that shall be their own, and that will elevate their souls, develop their sensibilities, and fortify their courage. They {122} will create, or, better, they have already created, a new people. Popular festivals are the best education for the people."

Optimists, how will your illusions terminate? You who see nothing but an idyl in all this, can not you perceive that such ceremonies are the prelude to massacres, and that an odor of blood mingles with their perfumes? All who took part on either side of the heated controversy which preceded the ovation to the Swiss of Chateauvieux, will be pursued by fate. Gouvion, who had sworn never again to set foot within the precincts of the Assembly where the murderers of his brother triumphed, kept his word. On the very day of that shameful session he asked to be sent to the Army of the North, and three months later was to be carried off by a cannon-ball. Still more melancholy was to be the fate of Pétion, who showed such complaisance toward the Swiss on this occasion. He, once so popular that in 1791 he was asked to allow the ninth child, which a citizeness had just presented to her country, "to be baptized in his name, revered almost as much as that of the Divinity"; he of whom some one said at that time, "For the same reason which would have made Jesus a suitable mayor of Jerusalem, Pétion is a suitable mayor of Paris; there is too striking a resemblance between them to be overlooked," was sadly to exclaim some months later: "I am one of the most notable examples of popular inconsistency.... For a long time I have said to myself and to my {123} friends: The people will hate me still more than they have loved me. I can no longer either enter or depart from the place where we hold our sessions without being exposed to the grossest insults and the most seditious threats. How often have I not heard them say as I was passing: 'Scoundrel! we will have your head!'"

Proscribed with the Girondins, May 31, 1793, he fled at first to Normandy, and afterwards into the Gironde, wandering from town to town, from field to field, and hiding for several months thirty feet under ground, in a sort of well; the poor people who showed him hospitality paid for it with their heads. Ah! how disenchanted he must have been with that revolutionary policy of which he had been the enthusiastic promoter! How sad was the farewell to life signed by him and Buzot: "Now that it has been demonstrated that liberty is hopelessly lost; that the principles of morality and justice are trodden under foot; that there is nothing to choose between two despotisms,--that of the brigands who are tearing the vitals of France and that of foreign powers; that the nation has lost all its energy; that it lies at the feet of the tyrants by whom it is oppressed; that we can render no further service to our country; that, far from being able to give happiness to the beings we hold most dear, we shall bring down hatred, vengeance, and misfortune upon them, so long as we live,--we have resolved to quit life and be no longer witnesses of the slavery which is about to desolate our unhappy country."

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After ending with this cry of grief and indignation: "We devote the vile scoundrels who have destroyed liberty and plunged France into an abyss of evils to the scorn and indignation of all time," the two proscripts were found dead in a wheat-field about a league from Saint-Emilion. Their bodies were half devoured by wolves.

And how will André Chénier end? On the day of the Swiss fête, the city where such a scandal took place seemed to him insupportable. For several days he sought refuge in the country where he could breathe a purer air beneath the blossoming trees. But contemplation of nature did not soothe him. Running to meet danger, he returned and threw himself into the furnace, more ardent and indignant than before. With manly enthusiasm he exclaimed: "It is above all when the sacrifices which must be made to truth, liberty, and country are dangerous and difficult, that they are accompanied by inexpressible delights. It is in the midst of spying accusations, outrages, and proscriptions, it is in dungeons and on scaffolds, that virtue, probity, and constancy taste the pleasures of a proud and pure conscience." André had a presentiment of his fate.

He was to die on the same day and the same scaffold as his friend Roucher, a few hours earlier than the moment when Robespierre's condemnation would have saved them. It is thus that he was to pay with his life for his opposition to the fête of the Swiss of Chateauvieux, and Collot d'Herbois was avenged. {125} But after the turn of the victims came that of the headsmen. The unlucky comedian who, pursuing even his comrades with his hatred, asked that "the head of the _Comédie Française_ should be guillotined and the rest transported," the impresario of the fête of the Swiss galley slaves, the organizer of the Lyons massacres, Collot d'Herbois, cursed by friends and enemies, was transported to Guiana and died there in 1796, just as he had lived, in an access of burning fever.

[1] The oath taken by the deputies of the third estate in the tennis-court of Versailles, in 1789.

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XII.

THE DECLARATION OF WAR.

The wave of anarchy constantly rose higher, but the optimists, sheltering themselves, like Pétion, in a beatific calm, obstinately closed their eyes and would not see it. Abroad and at home there was such a series of shocks and agitations, of struggles and emotions, perils and troubles; things hurried on so fast, and the scenes of the drama were so varied and so violent, that what happened to-day was forgotten by the morrow. The noise of the fête of the Swiss of Chateauvieux had hardly ceased when the shouts of the multitude were heard saluting Louis XVI., who had just declared war on Austria.

In reality, the King did not desire war, but the bellicose current had become irresistible. The court of Vienna had shown itself intractable. It forbade the princes who owned possessions in Lorraine and Alsace to receive the indemnities offered by France in exchange for their feudal rights, and threatened to have the Diet of Ratisbonne annul any private treaties they might conclude concerning them. The electors of Trèves, Cologne, and Mayence undisguisedly favored the levying of troops by the emigrant {127} princes, and even paid subsidies toward their support. They refused to recognize the official ambassadors of Louis XVI., while recognizing the plenipotentiaries of these princes. There was talk of holding a Congress at Aix-la-Chapelle for the purpose of intimidating the National Assembly. The successor of the Emperor Leopold, Francis II., who, before his election to the Empire, had assumed the title of King of Hungary and Bohemia, displayed extremely martial sentiments. Austria, which had sent forty thousand men to the Low Countries and twenty thousand to the Rhine, had just signed a treaty of alliance with Prussia, "to put an end to the troubles in France." Dumouriez urgently demanded the court of Vienna to explain itself. It finally sent the French Ambassador, Marquis de Noailles, a dry, curt, and formal note, naming the only conditions on which peace could be preserved. These were: the re-establishment of the French monarchy on the bases of the royal declaration of June 23, 1789, and, consequently, the restoration of the nobility and clergy as orders; the restitution of Church property; the return of Alsace to the German princes, with all their sovereign and feudal rights; and, finally, the surrender of Avignon and the county of Venaisson to the Holy See.

"In truth," says Dumouriez in his Memoirs, "if the Viennese minister had slept through the entire thirty-three months that had elapsed since the royal séance, and had dictated this note on awaking {128} without knowledge of what had happened, he could not have proposed conditions more incongruous with the progress of the Revolution.... The new social compact was founded on the abolition of the orders and the equality of all citizens. The financial system, which alone could prevent bankruptcy, was founded on the creation of assignats. The assignats were hypothecated on the property of the clergy, now become the property of the nation, and the greater part of which had been already sold. The nation, therefore, could not accept these conditions except by violating its Constitution, destroying property, ruining its purchasers, annulling its assignats, and declaring bankruptcy. Could so humiliating an obedience be expected from a great nation, proud of having conquered its liberty? and that for the sake of placing itself once more under the yoke of nobles who, having abandoned their King himself, now threatened to re-enter their country with sword and flame and every scourge of vengeance?"

The entire National Assembly reasoned in the same way as Dumouriez. A cry for war arose on all sides. The Girondins saw in it the indispensable consecration of the Revolution. The Feuillants hoped that besides proving creditable to the government, it would accomplish the additional end of drawing away from Paris and other great cities a multitude of turbulent men who, for lack of anything else to do, were disturbing public order. Certain reactionists, stifling the sentiment of patriotism in their hearts, {129} were equally anxious for war, in the secret hope that it would prove disastrous for the French army, and result in the re-establishment of the old régime. On the other hand, there were good citizens, inclined to optimism and judging others by themselves, who thought that when confronted with an enemy, all intestine dissensions would vanish as by enchantment, and that the new Constitution, hallowed by victory and glory, would ensure the country a most brilliant destiny. Ministers were unanimous, and enthusiasm universal. Even if he had so desired, Louis XVI. could no longer resist it. On April 20, 1792, he went to the Assembly. The hall was filled with a crowd which comprehended the importance and solemnity of the act about to be accomplished.

According to Dumouriez, the King was very majestic: "I come," he said, "in accordance with the terms of the Constitution, formally to propose war against the King of Hungary and Bohemia." He afterwards paid the greatest attention to the report of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, and seemed, by the motions of his head and hands, to approve it in every respect. He returned to the Tuileries amidst general acclamations. War was unanimously decided on, and Dumouriez went to the diplomatic committee in order to draw up the declaration. At ten in the evening the decree was brought in and carried to the King, who sanctioned it at once.