In Paris the acquittal of the Cardinal (which meant to the mob simply the condemnation of the Queen) caused an immediate popular outburst of cheering and congratulation. They surrounded his palace. They demanded and obtained its illumination. He was compelled to show himself and to be acclaimed. Then, as must ever be the case with such false heroes, he was completely dropped. Those who had done most to secure the verdict were most in a position to know the perils of further ovation. When the King had stripped him of every possible function and emolument and had exiled him to the Velay, the Rohans themselves were the most assiduous to impose silence upon him and to force him back into obscurity. He lived, unnoticed and unremembered, remote in Strasburg; was advised, on election to the States-General two years later, not to sit; sat, refused the civil oath, emigrated, survived the Queen by some ten years, and died, doing after that no more evil.
No public insult could more deeply have wounded the Queen than this verdict and that demonstration. Her health was touched, but much more her very self was overshadowed as she feared—and she was right—for ever. She had not even, as have we, the resource of history. She did not know how thoroughly history can deal with these Popish plots and Royal Necklaces and Dreyfus Innocencies and the rest, nor how contemptuously time and learning together expose at last every evil intrigue. She only knew—and she was right—that in her time the calumny would never be set right. And indeed this one of the great historical enthusiasms for falsehood was not set right till our own time. Napoleon, musing years after upon the verdict, called it, with his broad judgment and his opportunities for comparison and knowledge, the beginning of the Revolution, the gate of her tomb. Marie Antoinette was of no great judgment—she was contemporary to it all; no experience or research, but only instinct, could guide her—but some such dreadful presentiment of the capital importance of the affair stood fast in her mind: in part it greatly ripened her view of this bad world; much more it oppressed or broke the springs of her spirit; and while there is henceforward in all she did new tenacity and much calculation of effort, there is, much more, an inner certitude of doom.
The King went off to Cherbourg, where Calonne, still seeking to re-establish the finances by an extended public employment of labour and by display, had achieved the first stage of that magnificent artificial harbour, the model of all of its kind that were to follow in Europe and on the Mediterranean. Everywhere Louis met with easy but fervid acclamation. He had never seen the provinces before. He came back radiant. The new warmth and zeal, which, under another aspect and reacting against other stimuli, were so soon to produce the great change, had already touched the people, and he had bathed, as it were, in a public energy which, till then, cabined in Versailles or wearied by the cliques of Paris, he had never known. All that enthusiasm, his and his people’s, he communicated in many letters to the Queen; but she had suffered her blow, and nothing now could undeceive her but that fate was coming. Her relation the Archduke, the last of so many royal visitors at Versailles, had gone. In July her fourth child was born—a girl; and that same summer every stranger that passed through Paris noted the beginnings of the storm. The pamphlets were awake; the press had risen to a continuous pressure of suggestion, anecdote, and attack, and the necessity for facing and solving the insistent fiscal problem was no longer a theory to be discussed politically but a thing to be done.
The Court was brilliant in a last leaping flame. Fontainebleau that autumn was glorious with colours and men; the balls at Versailles that winter of ’86 shone with a peculiar and a memorable splendour—but it was the end. There were to be no more glories: the last ball had been given, the last progress made.
Calonne, whose French audacity might a little earlier have saved the State, dared an experiment which failed—but which, from its nature and the things it could but breed, led on to the Revolution. He determined (and he persuaded the King) to summon, for consultation upon the finances and the betterment of the realm, a council of all those who led in the nobility, the Church, the Parlements, the Services, the great municipalities. This convention was to be named, upon the parallel of the last similar summons—now some two centuries old—an assembly of “the Notables.” The Ministry were given the King’s decision suddenly, upon the 29th of December. The Notables were to meet upon that day month. More than one critic—especially among the aged—foresaw, the dyke once opened, what a flood would follow; all, wise or unwise, felt that the meeting would be the end of most that they had known and the beginning of quite new perils and perhaps new energies or a new world.
Whether or no the Queen was hurt at a sudden determination in which she had taken no part nor even had a voice, she very rapidly in the next six months rose to hold the Government in her hands: thenceforward to the meeting of the States-General and the opening of the Revolution, her decision and her vigour take part in all those acts—a dozen at the most—which proved ultimately the authors of her destruction.
The Notables met—or rather did not meet—upon the day named, the 29th of January ’87. They came to Paris on the appointed day, they met in the streets of Paris, in drawing-rooms and elsewhere; but those provincial mayors, great judges, and members of the high nobility had to wait and chafe for many days before they were legally convened. Criticism and violence of tongue had time to grow; there was a sense of weakness, of anarchy even, in the petty details of governmental action following on such delay. When they did meet, before their debates had time to develop, one event after another was transforming everything around the Queen.
The Polignacs had quarrelled with her; Madame de Polignac, her life-long friend, had threatened to retire from her post with the Children of France. Many—most—had followed them; all whom the Polignacs had benefited, through the Queen, for so many years. A last and new faction, more intimate, more wounding, more in possession of her secrets, and more dangerous than any other was thus formed.
Vergennes was just dead; the King, should Calonne fail in the great business of Reform which the Assembly of Notables had opened, would be left without a Chief Minister, and the Queen’s place was plainly ready for her in his council-room.
More than these, the La Motte had escaped from prison, and had fled (of course) to London.