Within three weeks of the execution of Louis all Europe was banded against the Republic, and one may say, morally, all the Christian world, for even the distant and ill-informed Colonials of Philadelphia and Virginia had recoiled nervously at the news of a King’s execution. The pressure of that general war against the Republic was to give, by what fools call the logic of events, a most powerful aid to the practical and savage determination of the Mountain: it was to squeeze to death the idealism of the Girondins.
While yet these last were in power there were plots for the escape of the prisoners, plots which failed; and their treatment, even in minor details (as the allowing them to take their own form of exercise and the leaving of them as much as possible alone) was easy. Little objects left by the King were conveyed to the Queen from the upper room, and Jarjayes, a friend, saw that they reached the King’s brothers. Had the impossible attempt of the Girondins performed the miracle which they who had called on this miraculous war demanded, had the patchy volunteer forces of the French found it possible to conquer in those early months of ’93, the treatment of the prisoners would have gone from better to better; their release by negotiation would soon have arrived, if not by negotiation then from mere mercy. This same Jarjayes, who had been Marshal of the camp and was husband to one of the Queen’s women, found things so easy that he could weave a definite plot for the escape of the Royal Prisoners. Why it failed we do not know, though of course the Royalist evidence we have ascribes it to a special virtue in the Queen, who refused to be separated from her children. In the first week of March the first plan failed, on account of a violent reaction towards severity on the part of the authorities following the first military reverses in the Netherlands. The second plan is better attested, and there is here a sufficient concurrence of witnesses to make us believe that some hesitation of the Queen’s did cause its final failure. She would have had to flee alone, and it is on the whole just to decide that she refused; for we have it on the authority of a fairly honest man that the Princess Royal had some memory of this incident of her childhood and had spoken to him on it, while Chauveau-Lagarde (who was later the Queen’s counsel during her trial) has left a copy of a note of hers saying that she would not fly alone without her children. Of other supposed communications between her and Jarjayes we have only his copy of her writing.[[31]] At any rate, with the last days of March all this early phase of the Queen’s widowed captivity comes to an end. Dumouriez and the French armies lost the great and decisive action of Neerwinden upon the 18th of the month, and in the last week of it, though the Committee of Public Safety was not yet formed to establish martial law throughout the Republic and to save the State, yet new rigours began.
[31]. I can pay but little attention to evidence of that kind. In the case of Fersen there are reasons for his destroying the originals: he was the recipient of her passionate affection. Moreover, we know his nature well: he had all the Northern simplicity, and with that intense passion of his, he would have thought it sacrilege to ascribe a single word to her that she had not written or to make fiction out of her beloved soul. Moreover, he cared little whether posterity knew or did not know the things he chose to bequeath to his heirs. In the case of inferior men with an obvious axe to grind, and proud, whatever their loyalty, to be intermediaries between the Hostage and her rescuers, the evidence of mere copies which they alone can certify is of very little value.
The woman Tison and her husband—half the gaolers, half the spies of the family, as I have said—were not permitted to leave the Tower of the Temple. Pencils were forbidden. Upon the 25th of March a chimney fire was a pretext for the appearance of Chaumette coming from the Commune of Paris. He returned the next day with the Mayor Pache, and with Santerre, the man of the fall of the Bastille, the rich leader of the popular militia; in those same hours Dumouriez at the head of the defeated French Army was receiving the general of the Austrian forces and negotiating treason. He was about to join hands with the enemy and to propose a march on Paris. The first demand for the Queen’s trial was made—by Robespierre: a week and Dumouriez’ treason was accomplished: the chief general of the Republic had despaired of France and had gone over to the Austrian camp with the design of marching on Paris and at least restoring order; his army had refused to follow him, but the shock was enormous. Paris won; the Girondins lost. The Committee of Public Safety was established.
The Terror was born; and the Revolution, acting under martial law, went forward to loose everything at once or to survive by despotism and by arms.
Thence onward Marie Antoinette’s imprisonment becomes another matter. On the 20th of April there came into her prison men whose tone and manner would never have been allowed before: the chief of the “Madmen,” as the populace called them, the intense Republicans who would believe anything of a Bourbon, Hébert, came into the prison. He came at night. By coincidence or by design her terrors for the future were to be terrors of the night. It was near eleven when his dandy, meagre figure and thin, pointed face appeared to terrify her, and for five hours the whole place was searched and ransacked. Her little son, already ailing, she had to lift from his bed while they felt the mattress and the very walls to see what might be hidden. They took from Madame Elizabeth her stick of sealing-wax, her pencil—which had no lead to it—and they took with them a little scapular of the Sacred Heart and a prayer for France—but the France for which the Princesses had this written prayer was not the nation.
On the 23rd they came again and found nothing but an old hat of the King’s, which his sister kept as a sort of relic and had put under her bed. It was taken for granted (and justly) that communication had been established between the prisoners and the Kings outside. A denunciation of Lepitre, Toulan and the rest, failed, but Toulan and Lepitre were struck off the list of guards.
With the end of May the populace, supported and permitted by the new Committee of Public Safety, conquered the lingering Moderate majority, and the Committee of Public Safety was left without rivals; it began from that moment to direct the war with the leonine courage and ferocity, the new and transcendent intelligence, the ruthless French lucidity which ultimately at Wattignies saved the State.
Upon the victory of Paris and the Mountain, the destruction of the Moderates, the establishment of martial law, the despotism of the Committee of Public Safety, came the last phase of the Queen’s imprisonment—and with it, by a most evil coincidence or portent, the growing illness of the little heir, her son. Sharp pains in his side, convulsions, the doctor sent for in the early part of May, and again towards its end, and again in June, things going from bad to worse with him.