No such complete representation of a great nation has been attempted since that day; no such experiment could be attempted save with political energy at white heat and under the urgent necessity of a secular charge. The confused noise which filled the rising spring of ’89 was, for once, the voice of all: thousands upon thousands of little primary assemblies, of advisory letters, of plaints, of legal suggestions, of strict orders and mandates to the elected (without which no political freedom can exist), of corporate actions by guilds, by townships, by chapters, by every form of political personality, filled and augmented the life of France. So vast was the thing that to this day, amid the libraries of monographs that seem to exhaust the Revolution, all have shrunk from the delineation of this rising ocean of men. There is no final work upon the elections of ’89. No one has dared.
April passed. The deputies began to stream into Paris. Paris, in the last days of that month and the first of the next, began to overflow into the royal town at its gates. Sunday, the 3rd of May, saw one long procession of every kind and fortune pouring, in spite of the drenching weather, from the capital up into the hills of Versailles. Upon the morrow the opening religious ceremony of the Session was to be held.
At about six o’clock of the morning of Monday, the 4th of May, it was still raining—not violently, but still raining; the dawn struggled in wet clouds over the woods and the plain of Paris beyond, and the pavements of Versailles were shining flat under the new day, with large puddles in their worn places. As the light broadened the rain ceased. The uniform and dull low sky began to break and gather: the innumerable crowd moved. Some thousands were sodden after a night spent out of doors; many thousands more, moving from their packed rooms, where a bed was a guinea and the mere shelter of a roof a well-let thing, began to crowd the pavements, the roofs, the cornices; as for the windows, every window had its bouquet of heads at high price, well-dressed heads and eager. The morning rose and grew warm.
The palace of Versailles looks east and north down towards the woods that hide Paris; it looks down three broad, divergent avenues, spreading like the fingers of a hand, and starting (as from the palm of such a hand) from a wide space called the “Place d’Armes,” which forms a huger outer court, as it were, to the huge Court of the Kings. To the right and to the left of this main square and its avenues, as you look from the palace, lie the two halves of the town: the northern, to the left, has for its principal church Notre Dame; the southern, to the right, has for its principal church St. Louis, which is now the Cathedral; each building is by situation and plan the centre of its quarter. The way from Notre Dame to St. Louis is up the Rue Dauphine, across the great Place d’Armes, and then down the Rue Saborg—all in a straight line not half a mile long, with the great Place taking up more than the middle third. From the one church to the other was the processional way of Versailles; it was chosen for that day. From seven onwards the Parliament had been gathering in Notre Dame; not till ten did the royal carriages arrive, all plumed and gilded, swung low and ridiculous: the King and his household, the Queen and hers; the Princes of the Blood—but as for Orleans he was already with the lords in the church, disdaining his rank and making a show of humility. They all set out in procession for St. Louis, the clergy of Versailles in a small surpliced body leading, the dark Commons next, the embroidered and feathered Nobility, the Priests, the Household, the music, the Bishop; then the Blessed Sacrament in the Archbishop of Paris’ hands, with Monsieur and his brother and two more of the Blood at the corners of the canopy; last of all the Queen and her ladies—all in the order I have named; two thousand and more four-front, the length of a brigade—and every one of them (save the Archbishop who held the Monstrance) with a blessed candle in his or her hand. By the time the head of the line was at St. Louis, the tail had hardly left Notre Dame[[9]] and as each detachment took the line, young Dreux Brézé, Master of Ceremonies, on foot since seven, ordered them.
[9]. Carlyle, of course, puts one church for the other and makes the procession walk wrong way about. The Cambridge history, however, is accurate in this detail.
The myriads of people saw them go by. The sun was shining at last: all could be seen, yet the cheers were pointed and full of meaning; the silence also was full of meaning. They cheered the Commons as those six hundred went by, in black without swords—all in black save for a Breton amongst them. Some curiously picked out Mirabeau; they were silent at the lords’ blaze of colour, half cheering only Orleans, his face such a picture! the sacred candle flickering in his hands; they did not (as would a modern crowd) all uncover to the Blessed Sacrament; they cheered the King. Then, as the Queen passed, there passed with her a belt of silence. As she went slowly with her ladies along that way silence went with her; cheering went before and after. At one place only was that silence broken, where a group of rough women suddenly shouted out as she passed insulting vivats for Orleans: it may be that she stumbled when she heard them.
From the advanced colonnade of the great stables (where the sappers are lodged to-day) upon the roof of the colonnade, there was a truckle-bed and many cushions laid, and on it was lying the broken body of her son, the Dauphin, who would not inherit all these things: he was very visibly dying. His miserable little frame, all bent and careless, lay there at its poor ease. His listless and veiled eyes watched the procession go by. It is said that his mother, in that half-mile of ordeal, glanced up to where he lay, and smiled.
The sun still shone upon the double row of soldiers—the blue of the Gardes Françaises upon this side, the red of the Swiss upon that; the crowd was in gaiety—the wet were now dry; the last of the line were now gone and the doors of St. Louis had closed on them. It had been a great show, and all the place and its pleasures were open to the people. Next day the Session was opened in that same hall which had been raised two years before for the Notables.
A member of the Commons, sitting in the back row of his order, would have seen before him, rank upon rank, the dense mass of black uniform menace which his six hundred presented, half-filling the floor of the great oblong hall; to left of him, against a row of columns, the clergy of every rank; to the right, against the opposite row of columns, the blaze of the Nobles—among them Orleans, his face insolently set towards the Throne. Far above and beyond them all, at the end of the hall, like an altar raised upon its steps, was the last splendour of the Throne. The golden threads of the lilies shone upon the vast canopy of purple velvet that overshadowed it. Seated upon it, alone above his kingdom, the last of the kings possessed a great majesty, in which the known hesitation of his gait, the known lethargic character of his person, were swallowed up in awe: an enormous diamond gleamed in the feather of his hat. Below and around him were grouped the Princes of the Blood and the great officers of State, and in front of the group in a long line sat the Ministry. Necker among these—the only one dressed as the Commons were dressed—appealed to the Commons; while at the foot of the throne, in purple and silver white, a little diamond circlet and a heron’s feather in her hair, stood the Queen.