She proceeds to tell him that all is settled. The king had adopted the line which she had marked out for him in her former letter. The Constitution had been presented to him on the 3d of September. He had taken a few days to consider it, not with the idea of proposing the slightest alteration, but in order to avoid the appearance of acting under compulsion; and, on the same day on which she wrote to Mercy, he was drawing up a letter to the Assembly, to announce his intention of visiting the Assembly to give it his royal assent in due form. But, though she would not have had him act otherwise, she can not announce this apparent termination of the contest without some natural expressions of grief and indignation.
"At last the die is cast. All that we have now to do is to regulate the future progress and conduct of affairs as circumstances may permit. I only wish that others would regulate their conduct by mine. But even in our own inner circle we have great difficulties and great conflicts. Pity me: I assure you that it requires more courage to support the condition in which I am placed than to encounter a pitched battle. And the more so that I do not deceive myself, and that I see nothing but misery in the want of energy shown by some, and the evil designs of others. My God! is it possible that, endowed as I am with force of character, and feeling as I do so thoroughly the blood which runs in my veins, I should yet be destined to pass my days in such an age and with such men! But, for all this, never believe that my courage is deserting me. Not for my own sake, but for the sake of my child, I will support myself, and I will fulfill to the end my long and painful career, I can no longer see what I am writing. Farewell.[15]"
Tears, we may suppose, were blinding her eyes, in spite of all her fortitude. There was no exaggeration in her declaration to the Empress Catherine of Russia, with whom at this time she was in frequent communication, that the "distrust which was shown by all around them was a moral and continual death, a thousand times worse than that physical death which was a release from all miseries.[16]" And in the same letter she explains that to remove this distrust was one principal object which the king and she had in view in all their measures. Yet, in spite of all his concessions, the week was not to pass without fresh insults being offered to the king, which shocked even his phlegmatic apathy. The letter which he sent to the Assembly to announce his compliance with its wishes was indeed received with acclamations which, if not sincere, were at least loud, and apparently unanimous; and, as if in reply to it, La Fayette proposed and carried a motion that the Assembly should pass an act of amnesty for all political offenses; and a magnificent festival was appointed to be held in the Champ de Mars on the following Sunday, in celebration of the joyful event. But, after the first brief excitement had passed away, the Jacobin faction recovered its ascendency, and contrived to make that very festival, which was designed to express the gratitude of the nation, an occasion of further humiliation to the unhappy Louis. Every arrangement for the day was discussed in a spirit of the bitterest disloyalty. When the question was raised, which in any other Assembly that ever met in the world would have been thought needless, what attitude the members were to preserve while the king was taking the prescribed oath to observe the Constitution, a hundred voices shouted out that they should all keep their seats, and that the king should swear, standing and bare-headed; and when one deputy of high reputation, M. Malouet, remonstrated against such a vote, arguing that so to treat the chief of the State would be a greater insult to the nation than even to himself, a deputy from Brittany cried out that M. Malouet and those who thought with him might receive Louis on their knees, if they liked, but that the rest of the Assembly should be seated.
And, in accordance with the feeling thus shown, every mark of respect was studiously withheld from the unhappy monarch, and every care was taken to show him that every deputy considered himself his equal. Two chairs exactly similar were provided for him and for the president; and when, after taking the oath and affixing his signature to the act, the king resumed his seat, the president, who, having to reply to him in a short address, had at first risen for that purpose, on seeing that Louis retained his seat, sat down beside him, and finished his speech in that position. Louis felt the affront. He contained himself while in the hall, and while the members were conducting him back to the palace, which they presently did amidst the music of military bands and the salutes of artillery. But when his escort had left him, and he reached his own apartments, his pride gave way. The queen with the dauphin had been present in a box hastily fitted up for her, and had followed him back. He felt for her more than for himself. Bursting into tears, he said, "It is all over. You have seen my humiliation. Why did I ever bring you into France for such degradation?" And the queen, while endeavoring to console him, turned to Madame de Campan, who has recorded the scene, and dismissed her from her attendance.[17] "Leave us," she said, "leave us to ourselves." She could not bear that even that faithful servant should remain to be a witness to the despair and prostration of her sovereign.
The very rejoicings were turned by the agents of the Jacobins into occasions for further outrages. The whole city was illuminated, and the sovereigns yielded to the entreaties of the popular leaders, to drive through the streets and the Champs Élysées to see the illumination. The populace, who believed the Revolution at an end and their freedom secured, cheered them heartily as they passed; but at every cry of "Vive le roi," a stentorian voice, close to the royal carriage, shouted out, "Not so: Vive la nation!" and the queen, though it was plain that the ruffian had been hired thus to outrage them, almost fainted with terror at his ferocity. A few days afterward, the insults were renewed even more pointedly. The royal family went in state to the opera, where, before their arrival, the Jacobins had packed the pit with a gang of their own hirelings, whose unpowdered hair made them conspicuous objects.[18] The opera was one of Grétry's, "Les Événements Imprévus," in which one of the duets contains the line "Ah, comme j'aime ma maïtresse." Madame Dugazon, a popular singer of the day, as she uttered the words, bowed toward the royal box, and instantly the whole pit was in a fury. "No mistress for us! no master! Liberty!" The whole house was in an uproar. The king's partisans and adherents replied with loyal cheers, "Vive le roi! Vive la reine!" The pit roared out, "No master! no queen!" and the Jacobins even proceeded to acts of violence toward all who refused to join in their cry. Blows were struck, and it became necessary to send for a company of the Guard to restore order.
Yet when, on the last day of the month, the king visited the Assembly[19] to declare its dissolution, the president addressed him in terms of the most loyal gratitude, affirming that by his acceptance of the Constitution, he had earned the blessings of all future generations; and when he quitted the hall, the populace escorted the royal carriage back to the palace with vociferous cheers. Though, in the eyes of impartial observers, this display of returning good-will was more than counterbalanced when, as the members of the Assembly came out, some of the Royalists and Constitutionalists were hooted, and some of the fiercest Jacobins were greeted with still more enthusiastic acclamations.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
Composition of the New Assembly.—Rise of the Girondins,—Their Corruption
and Eventual Fate.—Vergniaud's Motions against the King.—Favorable
Reception of the King at the Assembly, and at the Opera.—Changes in the
Ministry.—The King's and Queen's Language to M. Bertrand de Moleville.—
The Count de Narbonne.—Pétion is elected Mayor of Paris.—Scarcity of
Money, and Great Hardships of the Royal Family.—Presents arrive from
Tippoo Sahib.—The Dauphin.—The Assembly passes Decrees against the
Priests and the Emigrants.—Misconduct of the Emigrants.—Louis refuses
his Assent to the Decrees.—He issues a Circular condemning Emigration.
The new Assembly met on the 1st of October, and its composition afforded the Royalists, or even the Constitutionalists, the party that desired to stand by the Constitution which had just been ratified, very little prospect of a re-establishment of tranquillity. The mischievous effect of the vote which excluded members of the last Assembly from election was seen in the very lists of those who had been returned. In the whole number there were scarcely a dozen members of noble or gentle birth; the number of ecclesiastics was equally small; while property was as little represented as the nobility or the Church. It was reckoned that of the whole body scarcely fifty possessed two thousand francs a year. The general youth of the members was as conspicuous as their poverty; half of them had hardly attained middle age; a great many were little more than boys. The Jacobins themselves, who, before the elections, had reckoned on swaying their decisions by terror, could hardly have anticipated a result which would place the entire body so wholly at their mercy.
But what was still move ominous of evil was the rise of a new party, known as that of the Girondins, from the circumstance of some of its most influential members coming from the Gironde, one of the departments which the late Assembly had carved out of the old province of Gascony. It was not absolutely a new party, since the foundations of it had been laid, during the last two months of the old Assembly, by Pétion and a low-born pamphleteer named Brissot, who, as editor of a newspaper to which he gave the name of Le Patriote Français, rivaled the most blood-thirsty of the Jacobins in exciting the worst passions of the populace. But Pétion and Brissot had only sown the seeds. The opening of the new Assembly at once gave it growth and vigor, when the deputies from the Gironde plunged into the arena of debate, and showed an undeniable superiority in eloquence to every other party. The chiefs, Vergniaud, Gensonné, and Gaudet, were lawyers who had never obtained any practice. Isnard, the first man to make an open profession of atheism in the Assembly, was the son of a perfumer in Provence. They were adventurers as utterly without principle as without resources. And their first thought appears to have been to make money of the king's difficulties, and to sell themselves to him. They applied to the Minister of the Interior, M. de Lessart, proposing to place the whole of their influence at the service of the Government, on condition of his securing each of them a pension of six thousand francs a month.[1] M. de Lessart would not have objected to buy them, but he thought the price which they set upon themselves too high; and as they adhered to their demand, the negotiation went off, and they resolved to revenge themselves on his royal master with all the malice of disappointed rapacity.