And meanwhile the Queen heard debated before her the alternatives of a flight to the frontier and of a domestic rising nearer Paris in defence of the Crown. She was by all her bent—and was increasingly to be—in favour of foreign support; but Mirabeau’s counsel was something to her. At the end of February it prevailed, and La Marck came to Bouillé at Metz with the news that Mirabeau’s plan should be considered. Bouillé agreed. There was to be no suggestion of flight: the Court’s choice of the frontier was to be abandoned. Compiègne should be the goal of a short and determined march. The soldier rejoiced, as did Mirabeau, that a final decision had been made, that no near presence of foreign aid was expected, and that the idea of a flight to the frontier was given up. March, perhaps the close of it, was to see the thing done, and so with the spring was to be issued the challenge to civil war: then and then only, if necessary, might there follow a retirement upon a fortress.
The thing was dangerous and more dangerous. Mesdames, the King’s aunts, had left their country house at great pains for Italy: the populace had all but detained them. La Fayette, a month later, had disarmed certain gentlemen of the palace and had insisted that his Militia alone mount guard. It was certain, as March crept on, that the decision must soon be taken, and that the double power of Mirabeau over Court and Parliament could alone force the exit from Paris to a well-chosen town, and so decide the issue of a Restoration of the Monarchy now so grievously imperilled. Mirabeau still grew in power, still spoke in his loudest tones, still watched, and drove all his team of political dupes and Royal clients, still remained strongly double. Swearing to one that he had all ready for the end of Monarchy if the King should fly; writing continually (and more sincerely) to another his plans in aid of such a flight; asking for yet more money (on the 2nd of March); urging a further double-dealing with the Assembly in a secret and verbal message to the King (on the 13th); betraying the Jacobins, his Jacobins, in a private letter (on the 21st). Doing all this with his intrigue fully formed, and the royal family already sheltered under the wing of that intrigue, Fate entered.
It was on the 24th of March that Mirabeau wrote his last letter to La Marck. His friend had mining rights in the kingdom: the new mining laws were down for debate that week. He promised to speak, and on the morning of the 27th he called on La Marck upon his way to the manège; he was faint and compelled to rest awhile upon a couch there, but he rallied and went on to the Parliament. It was Sunday. The streets were full of people: he was recognised, followed, and cheered.
Upon that 27th of March he spoke more than once: his ill-ease was not apparent. On the 28th he was struck. But even so lying in his bed, for the next three days, in spite of an increasing agony, he made of his moments of respite occasions for set words, usually well chosen, pagan, proud, memorable, and a trifle affected. A crowd in the street without kept guard and silence. A crowd was about his bed continually. Talleyrand, reconciled, came; La Marck, who loved him, came repeatedly—and a hundred others. He spoke, and they spoke, of Death, as a matter for converse, often for jest. La Marck quizzed him: “Oh, you connoisseur of great death-beds!” Talleyrand told him that he came, “like the populace, to hear.” A man who loved him said well, “that he acted death as a great actor upon a national stage.” Astounding courage, and more astounding silence upon the thing he had never cared for or believed: all the greatness and all the void of the eighteenth century was here. He admitted God, however, and rallied his good doctor, a materialist—as then were all, and still are most, experts in viscera: the days were sun-lit, and the sun reminded him of God. So for four days; upon the fifth day, the 2nd of April, at half-past eight in the morning, those watching his last and silent agony saw that he was dead.
Many modern historians have said that the death of Mirabeau affected but little the plans that had been made for flight.
It is an error. The death of Mirabeau changed all, and it was one more of those hammer-blows of Fate exactly coincident with the sequence of the Queen’s weird.
It is true that the flight was already long arranged. It is true that its very details were planned for the most part long before Mirabeau died. Nevertheless had Mirabeau lived the whole thing would have had a different issue; and for this reason, that Mirabeau dominated all that world—not only the world of the Court but also the world of Parliament, and, in some indirect way, the world of Opinion as well—by Will. Any action that the Court had taken with Mirabeau alive and active would have been bent to Mirabeau’s plan, and even if the flight had been, not (as he counselled) to Compiègne, but to Montmédy and the frontier, Mirabeau would have forced at once its success and a consequent civil war. He would have permitted no departure without being privy to it; he would have sworn, shouted, cajoled and persuaded doubly upon either side—for Mirabeau was a soldierly man; he had a plan and could use men by ordering. He could use them for the achievement of a fixed end, which was now the salvation of the Monarchy; for he believed the Monarchy to be the skeleton and framework of France—this creative light of the Revolution around him seemed to him a mere mist and dazzle. Great as he was, I repeat it, the Revolution seemed to him to be drifting towards an Anarchy. He was like a landsman who may be brave and domineering but who shudders when he first comes across the temper of the sea.
But what might have happened is but hypothesis. For Mirabeau died; and Mirabeau once dead it was necessarily certain that the Court, left to itself, should attempt to preserve not Monarchy but merely the Court. Mirabeau living, that determination of theirs to save their bodies would have done no harm, and the eagerness of the Queen to get away to the neighbourhood of friends would have been used as human intelligence uses the instinct of animals. Mirabeau dead, that force ran ever along its own blind line, attempting merely to save the persons of the King and Queen and their children. Attempting so small a thing it happened to fail: but on the failure or success of that attempt the largest things depended.
It was, as we have seen, upon Saturday the 2nd of April that Mirabeau died, and had said in dying that there went with him the last shreds of the Monarchy.