He suffered no conversion in opinion, he did not forget his early political principle, he simply became indifferent to it and a servant of something that lived and suffered and exercised also upon some few—and he was one—a charm, perhaps of voice, perhaps of carriage, but, at any rate, of sex.
He worked henceforward absolutely for Marie Antoinette. He achieved so little that his name will hardly appear again in this record of her fall, but his name should be retained as a proof of what she still was to men.
He has long been accused of treason. He would have told you that he betrayed a formula, a phrase, to be the more loyal to a soul and body which he had come, as by a revelation, to understand. But Barnave was wrong: not to bodies or things, but to ideas, are men rightly subject: religion resides in dogma: loyalty must express itself in a creed, and the Word is God. These reasonings against reason, these preferences of the thing to the idea, are dangerous to honour.
BARNAVE
Henceforward Barnave was near her always: advised her secretly, wrote to dictation from her lips, ran risk and peril, and at last died by the same hands which had killed her also upon the scaffold.
This bishop’s palace at Meaux, the hall that Bossuet had known, was their last resting-place. The sun was well up, it was already warm when they left the town for the slow stretch of thirteen hours to Paris.
The weather would not change. The same intense and blinding heat pursued and tortured them; but it was now less tolerable than ever, both from the length to which the strain had been spun out, and from the increasing crowds which lined the old paved road in a wider and wider margin as they neared the capital. The flat hedgeless fields seemed covered with men—as the prisoners saw it through their low windows—to the horizon. The murmur beyond had swelled into a sort of permanent roar, which mixed with the songs and cries of the few hundred that still kept pace with the carriages, and, now that they had left the valley of the Marne and entered the dry plain that bounds Paris to the north, the drought and the dust were past bearing. The approach of evening afforded them no relief. At the gate of the city, where at least they might expect the contrast of the familiar streets and the approach to repose, they were disappointed. The driver had orders to skirt the barrier round to the western side. So for some two hours more this calvary dragged on: the ragged marchers themselves were exhausted, many clung to the sides of the coach. Some few had climbed upon its roof and jeered and threatened those three Guards, who sat silent in their yellow liveries not replying, awaiting their chance of escape at the end of this endless journey.
When the last slope into the town was climbed, the travellers, as they crossed the flat summit where is now the Triumphal Arch of Napoleon, could see at last before them, beyond lines of trees and about the innumerable heads, the windows of their palace sending back the evening light in a blaze, and to the left that huge oblong roof of the riding-school where sat the Parliament.
Meanwhile, as the berline passed the barrier, the bellowing and the songs, the tramping and the press of moving poverty, white with dust and parched to drunkenness, ceased suddenly. It was like a stream of anarchy breaking against that curious homogeneity of attitude and clear purpose which marked the capital upon every principal day of the Revolution and cut it off sharply from the provinces and even the suburbs around.