There were other glaring contrasts between his public and his private view: there was Mirabeau’s high playing of the demagogue rôle. He must roar with the Jacobins: that organisation, the “radical thousand” of Paris, and a hundred and fifty societies at its back throughout France, already directed the storm from the October of ’90. He mixed with it, flattered it, became its powerful spokesman in the Assembly, was its President by the end of November; and while he so marked and emphasised with his voice and will almost every one of the succeeding steps that led towards a pure democracy, he marvelled that the Court would not accept his secret counsel and believe his support of the Crown to be his true motive of action all the while. It was indeed his main motive; but men of his stature also require applause, and the double part he filled was acted too brilliantly upon its public side for his private statesmanship—to which all his intellect and much of his heart was really devoted—to obtain full weight at the palace. He was permanently mistrusted, and he met that mistrust by chance phrases of contempt or insult which he may or may not have intended to be repeated to the woman and the office which he desired both to guide and to save.
In one thing, however, his influence still weighed: in that one thing it would have sufficed, had he lived, to save the Queen. I mean in the plan, still debated and still postponed, for the abandonment of Paris by the Crown.
I have said that the main misunderstanding between the Queen and Mirabeau lay in this, that for him a national, for her a domestic, end was now in view. For months he had urged a public withdrawal from the capital, a public appeal to the armed forces, a withdrawal to some near and loyal town, a town with a palace and tradesmen dependent on it—to Compiègne, for instance, a long day’s ride[[18]] away; thereafter an appeal to the provinces and, if the extremists and Paris would fight, then a civil war and a reconquest of power. He had talked of the Queen on horseback with her son; he resurrected Maria Theresa and imagined bold things. The Queen desired for her husband, herself, and her children merely safety: but she would not leave the King.
[18]. To be accurate, a little less than fifty miles.
Once that summer the Queen and her children had driven out from St. Cloud towards the western woods that overhang the Seine; the King and his gentlemen had ridden westward also in the wooded plain below. Many in either retinue had thought the moment come, but each party returned at evening.
Returned to Paris in the autumn, the rising flood of public feeling made a public appeal and a public withdrawal more difficult with every succeeding month, and month after month it was postponed.
The foreigner, of whom the French had hardly thought during the first months of their enthusiasm, now re-arose before them; many were already anxious for the frontier, and already the irritant of German menace, which was to lead at last from Valmy to Wattignies and from Wattignies to Jena, had begun to chafe the military appetites of Paris. Were war to break out with the spring of the next year—nay, were it only in the air—the escape of the King from Paris would be more difficult than ever.
It was at the close of October,[[19]] before the Court had left St. Cloud for Paris, that the plan for leaving Paris first took definite shape and that Louis sent Parniers with a message to Bouillé at Metz.
[19]. Oct. 20, not the 23rd, a date accepted since the publication of Bouillé’s Memoirs in 1833, but corrected by collation with the original two years ago.
Mirabeau had pointed to Bouillé as the only general to defend that march; not because Bouillé was on the frontier, but because Bouillé had got his army in hand again, was very capable, did not intrigue. But Bouillé, in Mirabeau’s design, was to come westward and to receive the King at Compiègne. The General himself accepted such a plan and urged it. The King still preferred a flight to the very frontier, Besançon for choice, and it is impossible—when his reluctance to leave at all is considered, his whole character, his wife’s counsel, and her previous attitude in the letters and appeals of that summer—to doubt that the Queen had moulded that decision. It was not a firm choice. Bouillé’s son, coming at Christmas to Paris to sound people and things, found La Fayette of very dubious loyalty, and he doubted the aid of the Militia. He saw Fersen (the young fellow took for granted that Fersen was the Queen’s lover); he saw him in Fersen’s own house in the Faubourg St. Honoré. They discussed the rottenness of the army, the unlikeliness of immediate foreign aid. It was decided to postpone the thing for three months.