MIRABEAU'S SUCCESSOR.
The royal carriage sadly travelled the Paris Road, watched by the two moody men who had forced it to alter its direction. Between Epernay and Dormans, Charny, from his stature and his high seat, could distinguish a four-in-hand coach approaching from the way of Paris.
He guessed that it brought grave news of some important character.
Indeed, it was hailed with cheers for the National Assembly, and contained three officials. One was Hatour Maubourg, Lafayette's right hand man, Petion and Barnave, members of the House.
Of the three the oldest stepped up to the royal carriage, leaving his own, and roughly opening the door, he said:
"I am Petion, and these Barnave and Latour, members of the Assembly, sent by it to serve you as escort and see that the wrath of the populace does not anticipate justice with its own hand. Close up there to make room for me."
The Queen darted on all three one of those disdainful glances which the haughty daughter of Maria Theresa deigned to let fall from her pride. Latour was a gentleman of the old school, like Lafayette, and he could not support the glance. He declined to enter the carriage on the ground that the occupants were too closely packed.
"I will get into the following one," he said.
"Get in where you like," said Petion; "my place is with the King and the Queen, and in I go."
He stepped in at the same time. He looked one after another at the King, the Queen and Lady Elizabeth, who occupied the back seat.
"Excuse me, madam," he said to the last, "but the place of honor belongs to me as representative of the Assembly. Be obliging enough to rise and take the front seat."
"Whoever heard of such a thing?" muttered the Queen.
"Sir!" began the King.
"That is the way of it; so, rise, madam, and give your place to me."
Lady Elizabeth obeyed, with a sign of resignation to her brother and sister.
Latour had gone to the cab to ask the ladies to let him travel with them. Member Barnave stood without, wavering about entering the conveyance where seven persons were.
"Are you not coming, Barnave?" asked Petion.
"Where am I to put myself?" inquired the somewhat embarrassed man.
"Would you like my place?" demanded the Queen tartly.
"I thank you, madam," rejoined Barnave, stung; "a seat in the front will do for me."
It was made by Lady Elizabeth drawing the Princess Royal to her side while the Queen took the Dauphin on her knee. Barnave was thus placed opposite the Queen.
"All ready," cried Petion, without asking the King, "on you go!"
The vehicle resumed the journey, to cheers for the National Assembly.
It was the people who stepped into the royal carriage with their representatives.
There was silence during which each studied the others except Petion who seemed in his roughness to be indifferent to everything.
Jerome Petion, alias Villeneuve, was about thirty-two; his features were sharply defined; his merit lay in the exaltation, clearness and straightforwardness of his political opinions. Born at Chartres, he was a lawyer when sent to Paris in 1789, as member of the Assembly. He was fated to be Mayor of Paris, enjoy popularity effacing that of Bailly and Lafayette and die on the Bordeaux salt meadow wastes, devoured by wolves. His friends called him the Virtuous Petion. He and Camille Desmoulins were republicans when nobody else in France knew the word.
Pierre Joseph Marie Barnave was born at Grenoble; he was hardly thirty; in the Assembly he had acquired both his reputation and great popularity, by struggling with Mirabeau as the latter waned. All the great orator's enemies were necessarily friends of Barnave and had sustained him. He appeared but five-and-twenty, with bright blue eyes, a largish mouth, turned-up nose and sharp voice. But his form was elegant; a duelist and aggressive, he looked like a young military captain in citizen's dress. He was worth more than he seemed.
He belonged to the Constitutional Royalist party.
"Gentlemen," said the King as he took his seat, "I declare to you that it never was my intention to quit the kingdom."
"That being so, the words will save France," replied Barnave, looking at him ere he sat down.
Thereupon something strange transpired between this scion of the country middle class and the woman descended from the greatest throne of Europe. Each tried to read the other's heart, not like two political foes, hiding state secrets, but like a man and a woman seeking mysteries of love.
Barnave aimed in all things to be the heir and successor of Mirabeau. In everybody's eyes Mirabeau passed for having enjoyed the King's confidence and the Queen's affection. We know what the truth was. It was not only the fashion then to spread libels but to believe in them.
Barnave's desire to be Mirabeau in all respects is what led him to be appointed one of the three Commissioners to bring back the Royal Family.
He came with the assurance of the man who knows that he has the power to make himself hated if he cannot make himself loved.
The Queen divined this with her woman's eye if she did not perceive it.
She also observed Barnave's moodiness.
Half a dozen times in a quarter of an hour, Barnave turned to look at the three Lifeguards on the box, examining them with scrupulous attention, and dropping his glance to the Queen more hard and hostile than before.
Barnave knew that one of the trio was Charny, but which he was ignorant of: and public rumor accredited Charny as the Queen's paramour. He was jealous, though it is hard to explain such a feeling in him; but the Queen guessed that, too.
From that moment she was stronger; she knew the flaw in the adversary's breastplate and she could strike true.
"Did you hear what that man who was conducting the carriage said about the Count of Charny?" she asked of Louis XVI.
Barnave gave a start which did not escape the Queen, whose knees was touching his.
"He declared, did he not, that he was responsible for the count's life?" rejoined the sovereign.
"Exactly, and that he answered for his life to his wife."
Barnave half closed his eyes but he did not lose a syllable.
"Now the countess is my old friend Andrea Taverney. Do you think, on our return to Paris, that it will be handsome to give him leave to go and cheer his wife. He has run great risks, and his brother has been killed on our behalf. I think that to claim his continued service beside us would be to act cruelly to the happy couple."
Barnave breathed again and opened his eyes fully.
"You are right, though I doubt that the count will accept it," returned the King.
"In that case we shall both have done our duty—we in proposing it and the count in refusing."
By magnetic sympathy she felt that Barnave's irritation was softening. At the same time that his generous heart understood that he had been unfair to her his shame sprang up.
He had borne himself with a high head like a judge, and now she suddenly spoke the very words which determined her innocence of the charge which she could not have foreseen, or her repentance. Why not innocence?
"We would stand in the better position," continued the Queen, "from our not having taken Count Charny with us, and from my thinking, on my part, that he was in Paris when he suddenly appeared by the side of our carriage."
"It is so," proceeded the monarch; "but it only proves that the count has no need of stimulant when his duty is in question."
There was no longer any doubt that she was guiltless.
How was Barnave to obtain the Queen's forgiveness for having wronged her as a woman? He did not dare address her, and was he to wait till she spoke the first? She said nothing at all as she was satisfied with the effect she had produced.
He had become gentle, almost humble; he implored her with a look, but she did not appear to pay him any heed.
He was in one of those moods when to rouse a woman from inattention he would have undertaken the twelve labors of Hercules, at the risk of the first being too much for him.
He was beseeching "the Supreme Being," which was the fashionable God in 1789, when they had ceased to believe in heaven, for some chance to bring attention upon him, when all at once, as though the Ruler, under whatever title addressed, had heard the prayer, a poor priest who waited for the King to go by, approached from the roadside to see the august prisoner the nearer, and said as he raised his supplicating hands and tear-wet eyes:
"God bless your Majesty!"
It was a long time since the crowd had a chance of flying into anger. Nothing had presented itself since the hapless Knight of St. Louis, whose head was still following on the pike-point. This occasion was eagerly embraced.
The mob replied to the reverence with a roar: they threw themselves on the priest in a twinkling, and he was flung down and would have been flayed alive before Barnave broke from his abstraction had not the frightened Queen appealed to him.
"Oh, sir, do you not see what is going on?"
He raised his head, plunged a rapid look into the ocean which submerged the priest, and rolled in growling and tumultuous waves up to the carriage; he burst the door with such violence that he would have fallen out if the Princess Elizabeth had not caught him by the coat.
"You villains!" he shouted. "Tigers, who cannot be French men! or France, the home of the brave, has become a den of assassins!"
This apostrophe may appear bombastic to us but it was in the style of the period. Besides, the denunciator belonged to the National Assembly and supreme power spoke by his voice. The crowd recoiled and the old man was saved.
He rose and said:
"You did well to save an old man, young sir—he will ever pray for you."
He made the sign of the cross, and went his way, the throng opening to him, dominated by the voice and attitude of Barnave, who seemed the statue of Command. When the victim was gone from sight, the young deputy simply and naturally retook his seat, as if he were not aware he had saved a human life.
"I thank you, sir," said the Queen.
These few words set him quivering over all his frame. In all the long period during which we have accompanied Marie Antoinette, though she had been more lovely, never had she been more touching.
He was contemplating so much motherly grace when the prince uttered a cry of pain at the moment when Barnave was inclined to fall at the knees of dying Majesty. The boy had played some roguish trick on the virtuous Petion, who had deemed it proper to pull his ears. The King reddened with anger, the Queen turned pale with shame. She held out her arms and pulled the boy from between Petion's knees, so that Barnave received him between his. She still wished to draw him to her but he resisted, saying:
"I am comfortable here."
Through motherly playfulness or womanly seductiveness, she allowed the boy to stay. It is impossible to tell what passed in Barnave's heart: he was both proud and happy. The prince set to playing with the buttons of the member's coat, which bore the motto: "Live Free or Die."
"What does that mean?" he wanted to know.
As Barnave was silent, Petion interpreted.
"My little man, that means that the French have sworn never to know masters more, if you can understand that? Explain it otherwise, Barnave, if you can."
The other was hushed: the motto, which he had thought sublime, seemed almost cruel at present. But he took the boy's hand and respectfully kissed it. The Queen wiped away a tear, risen from her heart.
The carriage, moving theatre of this little episode, continued to roll forward through the hooting of the mob, bearing to death six of the eight passengers.