To these prisoners, shut away from men, the movement of that world was unknown. They only knew that something was surging all round the thick, obliterating, impenetrable walls of their Tower.[[32]] On the day when the populace conquered the Girondins, all they knew was that they were not allowed even upon the roof, from which, upon most days for some hour or so, they might take the air and look down upon the slates of revolutionary Paris far below; and during June when the new power of the Committee and of martial law, of the Terror, of the determination of the Revolution, of the city, was fixing itself firmly in the saddle, they knew nothing of what was passing, save perhaps from a growing insolence in their guards.
[32]. The walls, to be accurate, were nine feet thick, and the windows were like tunnels.
In that same month yet another plot for their escape failed. It depended upon two men; the one a certain Batz, on whom our information is most confused and our evidence most doubtful, as indeed his own character and his own memories were doubtful and confused (he was a sort of enthusiast who had already attempted many impossible things); the other, a character quite clearly comprehended, one Michonis. Batz was a kind of baron; Michonis was, like Toulan and Lepitre, of the Municipality and had regular authority. He will be seen again in the last plot to save the Queen. Of whatever nature was this uncertain attempt, it also failed. Shortly after the woman Tison diversified their lives by going mad with great suddenness and suffering a fit. She was removed; and the incident is only of note because certain pamphleteers have called it a judgment of God. Yet her wage was small.
Upon the day after that unusual accident, the growing suspicion of the popular party against what was left of Moderate administration in Government broke out in a furious denunciation of actual and supposed conspiracies. It was feared that the great mass of suspects now gathered into the prisons possessed some engine for revolt. An extreme policy in diplomacy and in arms, as in internal government, finally prevailed, and with the 1st of July this ardent severity took the form of a decree, passed in the now enfeebled and captured Parliament, that the Dauphin—the greatest asset of all—should be separated from his mother and put, though in the same building, under a different guard.
It is not to be imagined that so large a transformation of policy between the execution of the King and the decree for the separation of the Dauphin had, in any part of it, a mainspring other than the war. I have said that the steps of the spring, the destruction of the Gironde by the Mountain, the capture by Paris of the Parliament were but the effects of the collapse of the Volunteer rush at Neerwinden, the treason of Dumouriez and the new—and necessary—martial law that henceforward bound the Republic. All the last rigours of the imprisonment depended upon the same catastrophe.
The enemy that had been checked at Valmy, and had been attacked in the winter but half-prepared, the enemy that had suffered the French gallop to overwhelm the Netherlands and to occupy Mayence—was returning. The Republicans were out of Belgium, the armies of the Kings were flooding back upon the Rhine. The Rhine and Alsace depended upon two things—Mayence, and, behind it, shielding Alsace, the lines of Weissembourg that stretched from the river to the mountains. Mayence was to fall, the lines of Weissembourg were to be pierced. As for the Belgic frontier, there a line of fortresses could check for a moment the advance of the Allies—for the French fortify: they are in this the heirs of Rome; and whenever they suffer defeat the theory of fortification is belittled; in the resurrections of their military power the spade goes forward, borne upon the shoulders of Gaul.
In this July of 1793 the Belgic frontier only perilously held. The sieges were at hand and the fall of the frontier strongholds was at hand. These once conquered, it was proposed by Austria, Prussia, and England to dismember the territory of the Republic. To all this I will return.
It was upon the 1st of July, with the enemy advancing, that it was proposed to take the Dauphin from the Queen.