The Assembly, revolutionary though it was, felt indignant at the scandal, and called the galleries to order. The president reiterated the injunction to keep silence. Gouvion began anew: "I treat with all the contempt he merits, and with ... I would say the word if I did not respect the Assembly—the coward who has been base enough to outrage a brother's grief." The question was then put whether the Swiss of Chateauvieux should be admitted to the honors of the session. Out of 546 votes, 288 were in the affirmative, and 265 in the negative. Consequently, the president announced that the soldiers of Chateauvieux, who had asked to present themselves to the Assembly, should be admitted to the honors of the session. Gouvion went out by one door, indignant, and swearing that he would never re-enter an Assembly which received his brother's assassins as conquerors. By another door, Collot d'Herbois made his entry with his protêgês, the ex-galley slaves.
The party of the left and the spectators in the galleries burst into transports of joy, and gave three rounds of applause. The soldiers entered the hall to the beating of drums and cries of "Long live the nation!" They were followed by a large procession of men and women carrying pikes and banners. Collot d'Herbois, the showman of the Swiss, pronounced an emphatic address in praise of the pretended martyrs of liberty, which the Assembly ordered to be printed. One Goachon, speaking for the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, and holding a pike ornamented with a red liberty cap, exclaimed: "The citizens of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, the victors of the Bastille, the men of July 14, have charged me to warn you that they are going to make ten thousand more pikes after the model which you see."
The fête took place on Sunday, April 15. It was the triumph of anarchy, the glorification of indiscipline and revolt. On that day the galley slaves were treated like heroes. The emblems adopted were a colossal galley, ornamented with flowers, and the convicts' head gear, that hideous red bonnet in which Dumouriez had already played the buffoon, and which was presently to be set on the august head of Louis XVI. The soldier galley slaves, whose chains were kissed with transports by a swarm of harlots, came forward wearing civic crowns. What a difference between the Constituent Assembly and the Legislative Assembly! Under the one, a grand expiatory ceremony on the Champ-de-Mars had honored the soldiers slain at Nancy, and the National Guards had worn mourning for these martyrs of duty. Under the other, it was not the victims who were lauded, but their assassins. A goddess of Liberty in a Phrygian cap was borne in a state chariot. The procession halted at the Bastille, the Hôtel de Ville, and the Champ-de-Mars. The mayor and municipality of Paris were present in their official capacity. The Ça ira was sung in a frenzy of enthusiasm. Soldiers and public women embraced each other. It was David who had designed the costumes, planned the chariot, and organized the whole performance,—David, the revolutionary artist who was destined by a change of fortune to paint the portrait of a Pope and the coronation of an Emperor.
In 1791, André Chénier and David, then friends, and saluting together the dawn of the Revolution, had celebrated with lyre and pencil the "Serment du Jeu de Paumé"[[1]] Consecrating an ode to the painter's magnificent tableau, the poet exclaimed:—
Resume thy golden robe, bind on thy chaplet rich,
Divine and youthful Poesy!
To David's lips, King of the skilful brush,
Bear the ambrosial cup.
How he repented his enthusiasm now! What ill-will he bore the artist who placed his art, that sacred gift, at the service of anarchical passions! With what irony the same pen passed from dithyramb to satire!
Arts worthy of our eyes, pomp and magnificence
Worthy of our liberty,
Worthy of the vile tyrants who are devouring France,
Worthy of the atrocious dementia
Of that stupid David whom in other days I sang!
On the very day of the fête the young poet had the courage to publish in the Journal de Paris an avenging satire, which branded the shoulders of the ex-galley slaves as with a new hot iron. The sweet and pathetic elegiast, the Catullus, the Tibullus of France, added a bronze chord to his lyre:—
Hail, divine triumph! Enter within our walls!
Bring us these warriors so famed
For Desilles' blood, and for the obsequies
Of many Frenchmen massacred...
One day alone could win so much renown,
And this fair day will shine upon us soon!
When thou shalt lead Jourdan to our army,
And Lafayette to the scaffold!
Jourdan was the slaughterer, the headsman, the torturer of the Glacier of Avignon, who, coming under the provisions of the amnesty, had arrived to take part in the triumph of the Swiss of Chateauvieux. The acclamations were lugubrious. The lanterns and torches shed a funereal glare. Nothing is more doleful than enthusiasm for ignominy. The applause accorded to disgrace and crime sounds like sinister derision. Outraged public conscience extinguishes the fires of apotheoses such as these. Madame Elisabeth, in a letter of April 18, speaks with a sort of pity of this odious but ridiculous fête: "The people have been to see Dame Liberty waggling about on her triumphal car, but they shrugged their shoulders. Three or four hundred sans-culottes followed, crying 'Long live the nation! Long live liberty! Long live the sans-culottes! to the devil with Lafayette!' All this was noisy but sad. The National Guards took no part in it; on the contrary, they were indignant, and Pétion, they say, is ashamed of his conduct. The next day a pike surmounted by a red bonnet was carried noiselessly through the garden, and did not remain there long." The Princess de Lamballe, who was living at the Tuileries in the Pavilion of Flora, could see the pike thus carried by a passer. It may, perhaps, have been that belonging to one of the Septembrists,—that on which her own head was to be placed.