If any one desires to see, in a very modern and tawdry mirror, what evil had possessed the mind of this well-born lady, let him watch (from some distance) a certain financial world in London and that cosmopolitan gang in Paris to which that world is allied by blood and in whose support—whenever it is endangered—they are to be found, for in Paris and London they are one. With far more refinement and with infinitely greater variety, she (like those modern money-dealers) sought in a rush of fantastic and novel experience to assuage a thirst. They have no plea save the coarseness of their lineage. She had for excuse the gnawing of a position which none about her comprehended, and which she herself, though her body resented it, saw but dimly with her young mind, and which disturbed her as a confused, intolerable thing.
From within, therefore, she is amply to be excused; but consider the effect of her fever upon those who saw her. Consider the effect of this new manner of hers upon the public function of the French monarchy.
The French have, with their own hands, destroyed the conception of “a king”: in Europe to-day we look around and find nothing of monarchy remaining. A few impoverished symbols, a few indebted, a few insufficiently salaried men, of whose true character the public knows nothing, afford or do not afford unifying titles for a bureaucracy there, an oligarchy here: in Italy a national name, in Spain a moribund tradition. But that monarchy which the Gaulish energy had drawn out of the stuff of old Rome was another matter; it was a sacramental alliance between an idea and a thing.
The Idea was that of the Gallic formula “without Authority there is no life”—for Authority is Authorship: this Gallic formula also sustains the Faith.
The Thing was one lineage of actual and living men: devoted, from father to son—sacrificed almost as in a public sacrifice—condemned to the perpetual burden of being mixed into this Idea and of supporting the burden of its intensity and power.
There had descended from the Merovingian and the Carolingian families to the Capetian, bearing a power that increased with every century, the conception of a creative executive made flesh; an executive that should reside in the living matter of a family of men who should be seen, known, touched, loved, or hated; who should rapidly pronounce new and necessary laws, actively preserve the yet more necessary body of ancient and fundamental custom, observe in public the religion of the community, and, above all, lead in battle. That was the rôle; that was the mould. The bond of heredity forced many an incongruity into that mould (a child sometimes and sometimes a madman), yet—so short is one human life in the general story of a nation—the gap thus formed was rapidly filled by a successor, and the permanent impression remained of a soldier incarnating a community of soldiers.
This institution had now endured for much more than a thousand years. This Gallic institution had impressed itself (here, as in Germany, by imitation; there, as in Britain, by direct importation) upon all the civilisation of the West. It had grown old, as must all human institutions that have no direct sustenance from forces outside time; but even so it maintained a mysterious vitality. Its kings were anointed. It held a sort of compact with the Divine, and in this its old age was still alive with a salutary if a grotesque publicity.
The King and Queen of France were the least protected of any in the realm from insult, satire, and gibe; even where their own law protected them, a general conspiracy, as it were, the instinct of all society, defended the pamphleteer.
The King and Queen were publicly owned: all they had was public money; all they did they did before a crowd. Every week they dined at a table in a vast hall. Their nobles stood by but did not eat—before them a thousand or (according to the weather) ten thousand of the populace defiled curiously and unceasingly. They prayed in public. They were expected to receive in public the applause or the condemnation of all. They were public for the destruction of secret things, conspiracies, masonries, Templars, trusts, rings. They were publicly approached by any at random and publicly claimed as the public redressers of wrong—always in theory and often in actual fact. Nay, their physical acts were public. They dressed and undressed before an audience—or rather were dressed and undressed by these. The birth of every royal child was witnessed by a mob crowding the Queen’s chamber.