[11]“Nor is Postmaster Drouet unobservant all this while, but steps out and steps in, with his long flowing nightgown, in the level sunlight, prying into several things.... That lady in slouched gypsy-hat, though sitting back in the carriage, does she not resemble someone we have seen sometime—at the Feast of Pikes or elsewhere? And this Grosse-Tête in round hat and peruke, which, looking rearward, pokes itself out from time to time, methinks there are features in it—? Quick, Sieur Guillaume, Clerk of the Directoire, bring me a new assignat! Drouet scans the new assignat, compares the paper-money picture with the Gross Head in round hat there, by day and night; you might say the one was an attempted engraving of the other. And this march of troops, this sauntering and whispering—I see it.”—Carlyle’s “French Revolution.”
[12]Antoine Pierre Barnave, one of the French revolutionists, was deputy to the Third Estate in 1789, and President of the National Assembly in 1790. He was arrested for alleged treason in 1791, and was guillotined in 1793.
[13]Pétion, mentioned in this connection, another of the revolutionists, was President of the Constituent Assembly in 1790, and Mayor of Paris in 1791-92. He was proscribed in June, 1793, but escaped, and at last committed suicide near Bordeaux in 1794.
[14]The Temple was a fortified structure of the Knights Templars, built in 1128. After the order was abolished in 1312, it was used for various purposes. The chapel remained until 1650, and the square tower, where the royal family were imprisoned, was destroyed in 1810.
[15]The Princess de Lamballe was the daughter of the Prince de Carignan of the house of Savoy-Carignan, and an intimate friend of Marie Antoinette, and shared the latter’s imprisonment in the Temple. She married the Prince de Lamballe, a great-grandson of Louis XIV and Madame de Montespan. She was put to death in 1792, because she refused to take the oath against the monarchy. Carlyle, in his “French Revolution,” says of her murder: “The brave are not spared, nor the beautiful, nor the weak. Princess de Lamballe has lain down on bed. ‘Madame, you are to be removed to the Abbaye’ (the military prison at St. Germain-des-Prés). ‘I do not wish to remove; I am well enough here.’ There is a need-be for removing. She will arrange her dress a little, then. Rude voices answer: ‘You have not far to go!’” The sad story of her fate is told in the last outcry from the mob. Although innocent of any offence, unless sympathy with the royal family or friendship with Marie Antoinette were an offence, she was executed. She went calmly to the guillotine and bravely gave up her life.
[16]History relates that the King mounted the scaffold without hesitation and without fear, but when the executioners approached to bind him he resisted them, deeming it an affront to his dignity and a reflection upon his courage. The Abbé who had accompanied him, as a spiritual consoler, reminded him that the Saviour had submitted to be bound, whereupon Louis, who was of a very pious nature, at once consented, though still protesting against the indignity of the act. Before the fatal moment, he advanced to the edge of the scaffold and said to the people: “Frenchmen, I die innocent; it is from the scaffold and near appearing before God that I tell you so. I pardon my enemies. I desire that France—” The sentence was left unfinished, for at that instant the signal was given the executioner. The Abbé leaning towards the King said: “Son of Saint Louis, ascend to Heaven.” Undoubtedly the reason for the interruption of the King’s last words was the fear of popular sympathy, for notwithstanding the revolutionary frenzy he was personally liked by many.
[17] The Carmagnole was originally a Provençal dance tune, which was frequently adapted to songs of various import. During the Revolution, so-called patriotic words were set to it, and it was sung, like the “Marseillaise,” to inspire popular wrath against royalty.
[18]Jean Paul Marat, the French revolutionist, was born in Switzerland in 1744. He was both physician and scientist in his earlier years, but at the outbreak of the Revolution took a prominent part in the agitation for a republic, and incited the people to violence. In 1792 he was elected to the National Convention, and in 1793 was tried before the Revolutionary Tribunal as an ultra-revolutionist, but was acquitted. July 13, 1793, he was assassinated by Charlotte Corday, who was guillotined for the murder four days later.
[19]Saumur is a town in the department of Maine-et-Loire, on the Loire River. It was here that the Vendeans, who were partisans of the royal rising against the Revolution and the Republic, won a victory over the Republican Army June 9, 1793, and took the town.
[20]Marie Antoinette died upon the scaffold as bravely as the King had done. Her trial was a mock one, for her execution had been decided upon before she was tried. She was never liked by the French people, and all sorts of charges had been made against her, many of them untrue. She had inherited her ideas of royalty and absolution from her mother, Maria Theresa of Austria, and never showed any interest in the lower classes. Her biographer in the Encyclopædia Britannica says: “In the Marie Antoinette who suffered on the guillotine we pity, not the pleasure-loving Queen; not the widow who had kept her husband against his will in the wrong course; not the woman who throughout her married life did not scruple to show her contempt for her slow and heavy but good-natured and loving King, but the little princess, sacrificed to state policy and cast uneducated and without a helper into the frivolous court of France, not to be loved but to be suspected by all around her and eventually to be hated by the whole people of France.”