The Swiss gladly obeyed D'Hervilly's summons. Forming in close order, and as steady as on parade, they marched through the garden, one battalion moving toward the end opposite to the palace, where there was a draw-bridge which it was essential to secure; the other following D'Hervilly to the Assembly hall. Nothing could resist their advance: they forced their way up the stairs; and in a few moments a young officer, M. de Salis, at the head of a small detachment, sword in hand, entered the chamber. Some of the deputies shrieked and fled, while others, more calm, reminded him that armed men were forbidden to enter the hall, and ordered him to retire. He refused, and sent his subaltern to the king for orders. But Louis still held to his strange policy of non-resistance. Even the terrible scenes of the morning, and the deliberate attack of an armed mob upon his palace, had failed to eradicate his unwillingness to authorize his own Guards to fight in his behalf, or to convince him that when his throne (perhaps even his life and the lives of all his family) was at stake, it was nobler to struggle for victory, and, if defeated, to die with arms in his hands, than tamely to sit still and be stripped of his kingly dignity by brigands and traitors. Could he but have summoned energy to put himself at the head of his faithful Guards, as we may be sure that his brave wife urged him to do; could he have even sent them one encouraging order, one cheering word, there still might have been hope; for they had already proved that no number of Santerre's ruffians could stand before them.[5] But Louis could not even now bring himself to act; he could only suffer. His command to the officer, the last he ever issued, was for the whole battalion to lay down their arms, to evacuate the palace, and to retire to their barracks. He would not, he said, that such brave men should die. They knew that in fact he was consigning them to death without honor; but they were loyal to the last. They obeyed, though their obedience to the first part of the order rendered the last part impracticable. They laid down their arms, and were at once made prisoners; and the fate of prisoners in such hands as those of their captors was certain. A small handful, consisting, it is said, of fourteen men, escaped through the courage of one or two friends, who presently brought them plain clothes to exchange for their uniforms, but before night all the rest were massacred.
Not more fortunate were their comrades of the other battalion, except in falling by a more soldier-like death. Though no longer supported by the detachment under D'Hervilly, they succeeded in forcing their way to the draw-bridge. It was held by a strong detachment of the National Guard, who ought to have received them as comrades, but who had now caught the contagion of successful treason, and fired on them as they advanced. But the gallant Swiss, in spite of their diminished numbers still invincible, charged through them, forced their way across the bridge into the Place Louis XV., and there formed themselves into square, resolved to sell their lives dearly. It was all that was left to them to do. The mounted gendarmery, too, came up and turned against them. Hemmed in on all sides, they fell one after another; Louis, who had refused to let them die for him, having only given their death the additional pang that it had been of no service to him.
The retreat of the king had left the Tuileries at the mercy of the rioters. Furious to find that he had escaped them, they wreaked their rage on the lifeless furniture, breaking, hewing, and destroying in every way that wantonness or malice could devise. Different articles which had belonged to the queen were the especial objects of their wrath. Crowds of the vilest women arrayed themselves in her dresses, or defiled her bed. Her looking-glasses were broken, with imprecations, because they had reflected her features. Her footmen were pursued and slaughtered because they had been wont to obey her. Nor were the monsters who slew them contented with murder. They tore the dead bodies into pieces; devoured the still bleeding fragments, or deliberately lighted fire and cooked them; or, hoisting the severed limbs on pikes, carried them in fiendish triumph through the streets.
And while these horrors were going on in the palace, the tumult in the Assembly was scarcely less furious. The majority of the members—all, indeed, except the Girondins and Jacobins, who were secure in their alliance with the ringleaders—were panic-stricken. Many fled, but the rest sat still, and in terrified helplessness voted whatever resolutions the fiercest of the king's enemies chose to propose. It was an ominous preliminary to their deliberations that they admitted a deputation from the commissioners of the sections into the hall, where Guadet, to whom Vergniaud had surrendered the president's chair, thanked them for their zeal, and assured them that the Assembly regarded them as virtuous citizens only anxious for the restoration of peace and order. They were even formally recognized as the Municipal Council; and then, on the motion of Vergniaud, the Assembly passed a series of resolutions, ordering the suspension of Louis from all authority; his confinement in the Luxembourg Palace; the dismissal and impeachment of his ministers; the re-appointment of Roland and those of his colleagues whom he had dismissed, and the immediate election of a National Convention. A large pecuniary reward was even voted for the Marseillese, and for similar gangs from one or two other departments which had been brought up to Paris to take a part in the insurrection.
Yet so deeply seated were hope and confidence in the queen's heart, so sanguine was her trust that out of the mutual enmity of the populace and the Assembly safety would still be wrought for the king and the monarchy, that even while the din of battle was raging outside the hall, and inside deputy after deputy was rising to heap insults on the king and on herself, or to second Vergniaud's resolutions for his formal degradation, she could still believe that the tide was about to turn in her favor. While the uproar was at its height she turned to D'Hervilly, who still kept his post, faithful and fearless, at his master's side. "Well, M. d'Hervilly," said she, with an air, as M. Bertrand, who tells the story, describes it, of the most perfect security, "did we not do well not to leave Paris?" "I pray God," said the brave noble, "that your majesty may be able to ask me the same question in six months' time.[6]" His foreboding was truer than her hopes. In less than six months she was a desolate, imprisoned widow, helplessly awaiting her own fate from her husband's murderers.
All these resolutions of Vergniaud, all the ribald abuse with which different members supported them, the unhappy sovereigns were condemned to hear in the narrow box to which they had been removed. They bore the insults, the queen with her habitual dignity, the king with his inveterate apathy; Louis even speaking occasionally with apparent cheerfulness to some of the deputies. The constant interruptions protracted the discussions through the entire day. It was half-past three in the morning before the Assembly adjourned, when the king and his family were removed to the adjacent Convent of the Feuillants, where four wretched cells had been hastily furnished with camp-beds, and a few other necessaries of the coarsest description. So little was any attempt made to disguise the fact that they were prisoners, that their own domestic servants were not allowed the next day to attend them till they had received a formal ticket of admittance from the president. Yet even in this extremity of distress Marie Antoinette thought of others rather than of herself; and when at last her faithful attendant, Madame de Campan, obtained access to her, her first words expressed how greatly her own sorrows were aggravated by the thought that she had involved in them those loyal friends whose attachment merited a very different recompense.[7]
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
Indignities to which the Royal Family are subjected.—They are removed to the Temple.—Divisions in the Assembly.—Flight of La Fayette.—Advance of the Prussians.—Lady Sutherland supplies the Dauphin with Clothes.—Mode of Life in the Temple.—The Massacres of September.—The Death of the Princess de Lamballe.—Insults are heaped on the King and Queen.—The Trial of the King.—His Last Interview with his Family.—His Death.
From the 11th of August the life of Marie Antoinette is almost a blank to us. We may be even thankful that it is so, and that we are spared the details, in all their accumulated miseries, of a series of events which are a disgrace to human nature. For month after month the gentle, benevolent king, whom no sovereign ever exceeded in love for his people, or in the exercise of every private virtue; the equally pure-minded, charitable, and patriotic queen, who, to the somewhat passive excellences of her husband added fascinating graces and lofty energies of which he was unhappily destitute, were subjected to the most disgusting indignities, to the tyranny of the vilest monsters who ever usurped authority over a nation, and to the daily insults of the meanest of their former subjects, who thought to make a merit with their new masters of their brutality to those whose birthright had been the submission and reverence of all around them.
Vergniaud's motion had only extended to the suspension of the king from his functions till the meeting of the Convention; but no one could doubt that that suspension would never be taken off, and that Louis was in fact dethroned. Marie Antoinette never deceived herself on the point, and, retaining the opinion as to the fate of deposed monarchs which she had expressed three years before, pronounced that all was over with them. "My poor children," said she, apostrophizing the little dauphin and his sister, "it is cruel to give up the hope of transmitting to you so noble an inheritance, and to have to say that all is at an end with ourselves;" and, lest any one else should have any doubt on the subject, the Assembly no longer headed its decrees with any royal title, but published them in the name of the nation. In one point the resolutions of the 10th were slightly departed from. The municipal authorities reported that the Luxembourg had so many outlets and subterranean passages, that it would be difficult to prevent the escape of a prisoner from that palace; and accordingly the destination of the royal family was changed to the Temple. Thither, after having been compelled to spend two more days in the Assembly, listening to the denunciations and threats of their enemies, whom even the knowledge that they were wholly in their power failed to pacify, they were conveyed on the 13th; and they never quit it till they were dragged forth to die.