Brûle de perdre les Français.”
—Le Vrai Reveil du Peuple (1795)
When M. de la Guerinière, in the year 1743, took over the royal riding school of the Tuileries, and, making additions thereto, turned it into a private academy of horsemanship, he could have had small idea of what should, nearly fifty years later, replace his equestrian arrangements. Where the young Louis XV. had pranced and caracoled the National Assembly now deliberated the affairs of a France becoming daily more unlike that of the Bien-Aimé. It is only just to say that the tenants of the building had not found their new quarters altogether convenient. A parallelogram of great length, bordered by six rows of seats rising one above the other, seats from which some of the occupants could neither catch the eye of the president nor be seen by him, the Manège oppressed its inmates by its defective ventilation and its demands on the voice. The presidential tribune, a simple table covered with a green cloth, stood half way up the hall on a daïs, immediately facing that of the speakers, an arrangement which cut the space into two geographical divisions, and perhaps contributed, as one of its orators remarked, to the moral divisions of the Legislative Assembly also. These latter divisions were at any rate clear enough—the Right, the constitutional Royalists; the Left, the Gironde and their present allies, the Jacobins, further reinforced by the extreme Left; and the Centre, which generally voted with the Right.
At nine o’clock on the morning of July 3rd the Manège was already full. The galleries for the people, which adorned all four walls, and of which some, supported by pillars, projected over the very heads of the orators, were crowded with spectators. Down in the central space between the seats, round the two china stoves in the semblance of the Bastille, deputies in negligent attire, booted and spurred, strolled about, talking, laughing, spitting, calling to each other. It was in vain that the President rang his bell several times for silence, and that the four black-clad ushers with their gilded swords attempted to enforce his appeals. At last a more effective check supervened, in the approach of a deputation. It was the customary hour for such attendances and the persons in the central space hastily clambered to their seats to get a better view of it.
Conducted by an usher, a man and a woman threaded their way from the west entrance past the noisy groups towards the green daïs. From their dusty and travel-stained appearance they had evidently journeyed far by road, and by the long garment which he wore—it could hardly be called a cassock—the man was a priest, but a “constitutional.” To his loose mouth and swarthy skin he added a bearing of decided truculence. Beside him there walked two children of about four and six years, and the woman who followed him bore in her arms a wailing infant of a few months old. In spite of her rags and evident misery, the face of the girl, for she was little more, would have won her attention anywhere. It had once been beautiful, but now, across the beauty which still remained, there was written disillusionment absolute and complete. The short hair which curled freely on her forehead had once been covered with the white veil of the novice.
The group came to a stand-still opposite the daïs, and the constitutional began to address the President in loud, confident tones.
“My name is François Lethon,” he said, “and I am the curé of Tregourez, in Finistère. This,” pointing to the motionless figure of the woman, “is my wife.”
Applause from the nearest deputies greeted this remark, some seeing fit to signify their approval of a married clergy by spitting on the ground. The curé bowed, cleared his throat as if for a harangue, and began again.
“I am the servant of the nation, she is the servant of the nation, and this infant is our gift to the nation.” With a deprecatory wave of the hand he turned towards the two children, who immediately tried to escape from his eye and to hide behind the woman’s skirt. “They were my protests some time since against an unnatural law, which it has now seemed good to you gentlemen, the fathers of liberty, to remove. Their mother is dead.”
Fresh applause followed these words, several of the deputies pressing round to shake hands with the constitutional, and to gaze curiously at the girl, who throughout kept her eyes fixed upon the child in her arms, and, but for the rising color in her pale cheeks, seemed unconscious of the babble of voices round her, and of the sentiments, not always too delicately expressed, which must have reached her ears.