For yet another week no incident disturbed the common run of their quiet; the physical impressions which build up most of life were neighbouring and small; the daily noise of hammering in the great tower next door where their permanent apartments were preparing; the daily reading, the daily games of backgammon, and, daily, the sumptuous meals; the modest dresses, changed (as is the custom of the gentry) for the evening; the daily intercourse with such two Commissioners from the City Council as happened to be on guard. From their windows they could see the rapid demolition of the small huddled buildings round the Tower, and Palloy’s great encircling wall rising between them and liberty on every side.
But beyond these exterior things their minds dwelt continually upon the matter which had held all their thoughts for a year. They remembered, in their isolation, the frontier, the Argonne (which is a wall), and beyond it the bare plains of the East: moving densely over these the convoys, the guns, and the packed columns of the invasion. They had failed to hold their Parisian fortress till the advent of that slow machine, but they could still hope serenely: they had known regulars since their childhood: they saw in the advance of Brunswick something inevitable; they were certain of his success, and they waited.
A ROUGH MINIATURE OF THE PRINCESS DE LAMBALLE
PRESERVED AT THE CARNAVALET
How truly the history of the Revolution is the history of war can never sufficiently be stamped upon the mind of the student. The Terror when it came was, as I shall call it, nothing but martial law established during a reign: the steps by which the fury of the time advanced towards it corresponded exactly to the fortune of the French armies.
Upon the 2nd of September, as the prisoners walked in the garden, they heard a roar throughout the city. The populace beyond the railings threw stones: they were hurried back into their prison. For a moment before dusk they saw the wild and fanatical face of Mathieu, once a monk, who shouted at them: “The Émigrés have taken Verdun, but if we perish you shall perish with us.” In the increasing hubbub all around, the little Dauphin cried and was disturbed; and all night the Queen could not sleep. She could not sleep as the noise rose and roared throughout Paris.... It had almost come. The armies were almost here, and once again the dice were being shaken for the murder of the prisoners, or for their deliverance.
It was on that day, and pricked by the spur of such news, that Marat’s frenzied committee gathered a band, and began the massacre of those caught in the public prisons—all those suspect of complicity with the invasion and of the desire to help the foreigner in destroying the new liberties of the nation. Among these hundreds, roped in suddenly upon suspicion from among the rich or the reactionary of the older world, was the foolish, tender and loyal woman who had determined to share the fortunes of the Queen—the Princesse de Lamballe. When they had taken her a fortnight before from the side of her friend she had but been thrust into another prison to await these days.
The 3rd of September broke upon the captives, a dull uneasy morning in which the clamour of distant disturbance still occasionally reached them from the centre of the city southward, then came nearer.
They were told that on that day there would be no walk in the garden. They sat therefore all the morning in their rooms. They dined as was their custom; their dinner was over, it was not quite three o’clock, and the King and the guard for the day stood together at one of the great tunnel-like windows of the first floor, for the windows were not yet blinded as they later were. The guard by his side was one Danjou, a young man of thirty-two, very eager upon the new world which he believed to be then arising; full of a vision of freedom, a good sculptor—for that was his business—intense in action, he was, above all, brave. Energy bubbled out of him, and he had, what goes with energy, a clear head and rapid decision. The King and this man stood together exchanging that kind of easy conversation which Louis had by this time learnt to hold with men of every rank. They were watching the workmen pull down the houses near by, and the rising of the wall which was built to enclose the gardens of the Temple. Now and then, as a great beam fell with its great clouds of dust, the honest and slow King would laugh and say: “There goes another!” Their conversation was on this level when they heard an increasing noise outside the gates. To the Royal Family it meant but one more mob rolling by. Danjou, who was a free man fresh from outside and knew better, was silent and anxious: he was aware that the massacres had begun.