CHAPTER XX
THE NEW TYRANNY
Before telling you how the Chevalier de Vaudrey got out of Caen and how he fared forth to his love, it is meet that the reader should understand the rapidly changing conditions that converted the New France into a veritable Hell on earth.
After the Fall of the Bastille, and even after the mob’s sortie on Versailles which enforced the royal family’s return to Paris where they lived in the Tuileries, it was the hope of the moderate patriots that constitutional monarchy might prevail.
These hopes were dashed, first, by royalty’s intrigues and double-dealing, and, secondly, through the pressure of the revolting emigres and the threat of foreign invasion that welded all the defenders of France, willy-nilly, into a traitor-crushing and invader-defying Republic.
Of all the personages of that unhappy time, the locksmithing King Louis XVI least understood what was going on about him.
A true Bourbon with an ancestry of nearly a thousand years’ possession of the French throne, he never learned anything and never forgot anything. He played at being a limited monarch but his sympathies were naturally with the riffled aristocrats––the nobility whose privileges had been taken away, their estates commandeered, their chateaux fired or sacked, and themselves obliged to flee for their lives to the protection of the foreigner.
Not comprehending the nature of the Storm that wiped out old tyranny, Louis dangerously rode the Storm, he could not guide it. His lack of understanding is sadly shown in the closing scene at Versailles when they brought him news of the people’s coming.
“Mais, c’est une revolte. Why, that is a revolt!” exclaimed the bewildered monarch.