He was taken away. Upon the next day, the 30th, as once before during their imprisonment, the Queen refused to eat and sat silent. To that silence there succeeded a fit of violent anger in which she screamed at the guards. It was when Cléry came to get some books for his master.
It is reported that Simon, one of the Municipals who was later to be the gaoler of her child, said as he saw the distress of the women, that it nearly moved him to tears, and that turning to the Queen he told her that she had had no tears when the palace fought the people upon the 10th of August. It is said that the Queen answered: “You do not understand.” And when he added: “You should be glad at least that the traitors are caught,”—by which phrase he meant the popular vengeance and the massacres in the prisons, the repulsion of the invasion and the rest of it—the Queen would not answer a word.
Upon the 1st of November, the day before her thirty-seventh birthday, she saw again a visitor to her prison, a dark face which it appalled her to see: it was a face stamped with all the association of Varennes. It was the face of Drouet.
He spoke to her as a deputy from the Municipality (to which he now belonged), to ask whether she had anything to complain of. She resolutely maintained her sullen silence; she turned her face away and treated him as though he were not there, and he on his part threw his arms up in a gesture of resignation, then bowed to her and went out.
The royal people had colds in November and waited through a shivering month what could not but be the approach of some very evil thing. Upon the 6th, one of those scraps of news—positive news and ill—which reached them like patches of clear light in the midst of murky fears and rumours, was granted to the prisoners. The Committee of Parliament had reported upon Louis’ case: an indictment was framed; he would certainly be tried.
To such an advance of misfortune the Queen could only oppose the fixed hope that in some way or other the regular armies of the Old World must break through. They had been checked at Valmy, nay, they had retreated. But surely they could not but return, and brush aside at last the raw and formless rags of the French volunteers. They could not but. The old regulated armies, the peace of mind, the brilliant uniforms, the vast prestige of German arms, the leadership of gentlemen—sanity, cleanliness, and the approval of educated men—these must at last destroy those mere composite mobs, half regulars, half forced levies; sodden, mutinous, ill-fed, ill-clothed, officered as best might be, untutored and untutorable, which her gaolers had flung together in a sort of delirium, hotch-potch, to make a confused covering against the governing classes of Europe who were advancing in defence of all the decencies of this world.
As the Royal Family so hoped against hope, that ill-conditioned crowd—old soldiers relaxed in discipline, young enthusiasts who drank, sickly and grumbling volunteers, veterans hoping for revenge against the harsh experience of years (a dangerous type), company-officers of a week’s standing (put side by side with others of twenty years), captains in boyhood and lieutenants at forty—this welter was jumbled all together under the anxious eye of Dumouriez, along a valley of the frontier, on the muddy banks of the river called Hate—La Haine.
I know the place: low banks that rise in the distance into hills are overlooked far up stream and down by the fantastic belfry of Mons and its huge church dominating the plain. Dumouriez, deeply doubting his rabble but knowing the temper of his own people, poured the young men and the old across the line of the river, leading them with the Marseillaise. Among the villages of the assaulted line Jemappes has given its name to the charge. By the evening of that same day, the 6th of November, the Austrian force was destroyed, a third of its men lay upon the field or had deserted, the rest were beating off in a pressed retreat, eastward and away. The rabble should have failed and had succeeded.
I have said that for Valmy no explanation has as yet been given. For Jemappes there are many explanations: that the Austrians had attempted to hold too long a strategic line and were outnumbered at the chief tactical point of the battle: that their excellent cavalry (the French in this arm were deplorable) had not been allowed to hold their left long enough: that one passage of the river was accidental and could not have been foreseen (a bad commentary on any action!). But the true cause of that temporary yet decisive achievement was to be found in two forms of energy: rapidity in marching and in the handling of guns—but such criticisms do not concern this book.[[30]]
[30]. These two military qualities are present to-day capitally among the French, and may at any moment reappear in the discussions of modern Europe.