That was what was unanimously declared. It was the most barbarous action known since the beginning of the Monarchy.[162] Outraged in his pride and in his will because the bourgeois had dared to offer him resistance, the splendid hero of the Faubourg Saint Antoine, at the fatal moment, fell to the level of Septembrist; and as Monsieur must have known all about it, and as he did nothing to prevent it, he was Condé's accomplice.
As de Beaufort was on excellent terms with the mob, the princes sent him to the Hôtel de Ville; he set out upon his mission and Mademoiselle, who had followed close upon his heels, loitered and listened to the comments of the people. When she returned and told her father what she had heard Gaston was terrified; he ordered her to go back to the Hôtel de Ville and reconnoitre.
It was long past midnight, and the streets were deserted. The Hôtel de Ville was a ruin; the doors and windows were gone, and the flames were still licking the charred beams; the interior had been pillaged. "I picked my way," said Mademoiselle, "among the planks; they were still flaming. I had never seen such a desolate place; we looked everywhere, but we could see no one." They were about to leave the ruins when the provost of the merchants emerged from his hiding-place (probably in the cellar) with the men who had been with him.
Mademoiselle found them a safe lodging and went back to her palace. Day had dawned; people were gathering in the Place de Grève; some were trying to identify the dead. Among the dead were priests, members of Parliament, and between thirty and forty bourgeois. Many had been wounded.
The people blessed Mademoiselle, but she turned sorrowfully away. She thought that nothing could atone for such a murder. She said of the event:
People spoke of that affair in different ways; but however they spoke, they all agreed in blaming his Royal Highness and M. le Prince. I never mentioned it to either of them, and I am very glad not to know anything about it, because if they did wrong I should be sorry to know it; and that action displeased me so that I could not bear to think that any one so closely connected with me could not only tolerate the thought of such a thing, but do it. That blow was the blow with the club; it felled the party.
Immediately after the fire, when the city was panic-stricken, M. le Prince's future promised success; he had every reason to hope. Many of the political leaders had left Paris, and taking advantage of that fact, and of the general fear, Condé marshalled the débris of the Parliament, and they nominated a cabinet. Gaston was the nominal head; Condé was generalissimo. The Hôtel de Ville had been repaired, the cabinet was installed there, and Broussel was provost of merchants, but the knock-down "blow with the club" had made his power illusory. Generally the public conscience was callous enough where murders were concerned, but it rebelled against the murder of 4th July. The common saying in Paris was that the affair was a cowardly trap, deliberately set. Public opinion was firm, and the Condé party fell. Before the massacre the country had been tired of civil war. After the massacre it abhorred it. The people saw the Fronde in its true light. With the exception of a few members of Parliament,—patriots and would-be humanitarians,—who had thought of France? The two junior branches, or the nobility? They had called the Spaniards to an alliance against Frenchmen, and, to further their selfish interests, they had led their own brothers into a pitfall.
Who had cared for the sufferings of the people? The Fronde had been a deception practised upon the country; a systematic scheme fostered by men and women for personal benefit. To the labourer hunted from his home to die in the woods, to the bourgeois whose business had been tied up four years, what mattered it that the wife of La Rochefoucauld was seated before the Queen? Was it pleasure to the people dying of famine to know that M. de Longueville was drawing a salary as Governor of Pont de l'Arche? A fine consolation, truly! it clothed and fed the children, it brought back the dead, to maintain a camp of tinselled merry-makers, "among whom nothing could be seen but collations of gallantry to women."