The demand from the Tuileries was an urgent demand for immediate invasion, and fore-running it, a drastic proclamation from the armed force at Coblenz: the wall which inspired that demand was the will of Marie Antoinette.
A man in flight could cover the distance from Paris to Brussels in two days; an urgent runner in three. Normally the courier with his post-bag arrived on the morning of the fourth day. From Brussels to Frankfort worse roads, varying frontiers, and the German lethargy between them compelled news to a delay of close upon a week.
The ferment in Paris was rising; the Federals of the South were on their second day’s march northward when, in the middle of the first week of July, the Queen, whose policy, or rather passion, could bear no more delay, wrote to Mercy and to Fersen separately two letters of great weight. These letters have never yet been given their due. The student should note them closely if he is to understand all that followed.
The originals have, perhaps, not come down to us, but either man, Fersen and Mercy, noted their intents, and thus we know them.
These letters Lasserez brought into Brussels, riding, on the morning of Sunday, the 8th of July, and on the next day Mercy and Fersen, meeting, consulted on their purport. The Queen, with whom the project of such an engine was familiar, now definitely demanded a separate and nominal threat against the town of Paris, and a menace that the whole city should be held hostage by the invading German armies against the safety of her husband, herself and her child. This clause her judgment of the French character assured her to be efficacious; this clause she insisted should be added to the Manifesto which was even now preparing.
It was upon July the 9th, I say, that the two men met and consulted upon the Queen’s orders: that day they sent off command or counsel to the Rhine.
On the 14th, while, in that same Paris, Louis was once more swearing to the Constitution upon the Champ de Mars, while hour for hour, far off on the Rhone, a priest receiving the Marseillaise Battalion was adding his famous verse “of the children”[[25]] to their famous hymn, in Frankfort the last of the Emperors was receiving with incredible magnificence the Crown of the Empire. The note inspired by Marie Antoinette was at the gates of his town.
[25]. “Nous entrerons dans la Carrière, &c.,” the best verse and the only poetry of the lot.
It entered: Mallet saw it. “Paris is to be destroyed by fire and the sword if the Royal Family are harmed”: it was approved. From Frankfort it went back as a new clause to Coblenz; there it was incorporated in the Manifesto and signed. Immediately, the ink barely dry, it was published (upon the 25th of July) to the world, above the signature of the Duke of Brunswick and in the name of that perfect and mechanical army which Prussia in especial could move with the precision of a physical law upon the capital that phrase had doomed.
This was the origin of that famous Clause VIII. which ordered, if the Tuileries were forced, nay, if submission to the Royal Family was not at once made, that Prussia and Austria would take “an unforgettable vengeance,” that Paris should be given up “to military execution and subversion, and the guilty rebels to the death they deserve.”