In June 1788 the Clergy—summoned to meet and grant an aid, as a last desperate resource for means—replied by an assertion in turn of their immutable custom and peculiar right. In July “The New Order” broke down. The demand for the States-General was acceded to by the Crown and by the Queen. On the 8th of August 1788 they were definitely summoned for the May Day of the following year.
CHAPTER XI
THE BASTILLE
August 8, 1788, to September 30, 1789
THE decision was taken. France was alive with the advent of the States-General. The autumn of 1788 had come. Fersen was with the Queen.
It was more than fourteen years since, a boy of eighteen, Northern, dignified, and grave, his large and steady brown eyes had met hers from far off among the hundreds in the Masked Ball at the Opera. He was then a child. She also was a child, pure, exiled, of an active timidity, and not yet even Queen. I have written what happened then: the rare occasions on which he had come and gone. Now he was here with her at Versailles.
The something permanent which every human life has known had entered in that moment of her girlhood and settled finally within her heart. The accidents of living did little to disturb so silent and so secure a thing. He had been but a chance visitor to Paris—a Swedish lad on his Grand Tour—when they had thus met for ever; during the critical first three years of her reign he had been away in his own country. He had returned, as I have said, in the summer of 1778. The worst of her torments was settled then: she was to be a mother; she might expect an heir to the throne; the adventure, the successful adventure, of America had begun. A position of womanhood and of rule, such dignities and such repose, might have paled or rendered ridiculous the chance passion of extreme youth: they did neither. Whether he came or went, his quiet image—the one fixed thing she had known in a world she could not know—remained. He had been received at once right into the tiny inner circle of the Polignacs before he left for the American War. He had been with the Queen continually, reserved and of that breeding which she longed for, the unpassionate poise of the North. Her child, her husband’s child, was born; ’79 and its war news came, and Fersen had resolved at last to go. He also by that time, as has been read, knew what had entered his life.
The Queen, as he inhabited the halls of Versailles during his farewells, had followed him with her eyes, and very often they had filled with tears. All the world saw the thing. He had gone off at last to America, to wonder at the swamps and the bare landscape, the odd shuffling fighting and the drag of an informal war. His English gave him work enough interpreting between his own French Generals and Washington; he wrote home from time to time to his father, he busied himself in learning his military trade—but of Versailles or to Versailles there was not a word. During all the three years, ’80-’83, that he suffered the new countries, the Queen and he heard nothing the one of the other.
He had returned to Europe; but it was only the journey of his sovereign Gustavus that kept him some months in France, though a colonelcy, more or less honorary, and a pension of some hundreds had been given the young man there. A wealthy marriage, long arranged in England for him, he let slip without concern. The proposal (a year before the affair of the necklace) that he should marry Necker’s ugly daughter he resigned at once in favour of his friend, young Staël, his sovereign’s ambassador. With a commission in Sweden as well as in France, it was his own country he preferred. His moments at Versailles were rare, his visits very brief—such as that in which he saw the Notables dissolved (of which scene he records his judgment); in none did he more than appear, silent, for a very few hours or days at Versailles. The girl who had met him, a boy, in ’74, was now a woman of thirty and more; chance glimpses alone had lit up the very long space of those years: she had suffered all the business of the necklace, all the rising hatred of Paris, without any too close a word from him; she was entering the Revolution and the way to death when he reappeared: henceforward he did not leave her.
That bond, which time had neither increased nor diminished and which permanent absence and silence had left unfalsified, now became a living communion between them. He was never what is called her “lover”; the whole sequence is that of a devotion as in a tale or a song, and yet burning in living beings: a thing to the French incomprehensible, to men of other countries, to Englishmen, for instance, comprehensible enough—but, whether comprehensible or not, as rare as epic genius.