Marie Antoinette and the Downfall of Royalty

by Imbert de Saint-Amand

A discussion ensued on the subject of Brissac's impeachment. The struggle between the two opposing parties was of unheard-of vivacity. One of the most courageous members of the right, M. Calvet, gave free vent to his indignation. "The informer," said he, "is a scoundrel who makes a thrust with a poniard and hides himself; he was unknown at Rome until the times of Sejanus and Tiberius; times, gentlemen, of which you remind me often." "To the Abbey! to the Abbey!" retorted the left, with fury. Said Guadet: "I demand that M. Calvet should be sent to the Abbey for three days, for having dared to say that the representatives of the French people remind him of the Roman Tiberius and Sejanus." The motion was adopted, and the Assembly decided that M. Calvet should pass three days in prison. M. de Jaucourt threatened to cudgel Chabot, and the ex-friar, ascending the tribune, said: "I think it was very cowardly on the part of a colonel to offer to cane a Capuchin." The Assembly, having passed an order of the day concerning this incident, decreed that "there was reason for an accusation against M. Cossé, styled Brissac, and that his papers should be sealed up at once."

The King and Queen, awakened in the middle of the night by these tidings, besought Brissac to make his escape, and provided him with the means. The Duke refused, and instead of trying to assure his safety, sat down to write a long letter to Madame du Barry. At first Louis XVI. wished to veto this decree, as was his duty, but his ministers dissuaded him. They reminded him of the October Days, and the weak monarch, alarmed on account of his family, if not on his own, sacrificed his Constitutional Guard and also the brave servitor who commanded it. Speaking to M. d'Aubier, one of the ordinary gentlemen of the King's bedchamber, the Queen said: "I tremble lest the King's guard should think the honor of the corps compromised by their disarmament."—"Doubtless, Madame, that corps would have preferred to die at the feet of Your Majesties."—"Yes," replied the Queen, "but the few partisans who still adhere to the King in the Assembly counsel him to sanction the decree disbanding them, and to disregard their advice is to run the risk of losing them." While the Queen was yet speaking, a man approached under pretence of asking alms. "You see," said she to M. d'Aubier, "there is no place and no time when I am free from spies."

The Constitutional Guard were sent as prisoners to the École Militaire between a double file of National Guards, and forced to surrender their weapons. By a sort of fatality Louis XVI. was led to disarm himself, to spike his cannons, tear down his flags, and dismantle his fortresses. By dint of approaching too near the fatal declivity of concessions, he ended by losing even his dignity as man and King. He was paralyzed, annihilated by the Assembly, which treated him like a hostage, a conquered man, and which struck down, one after another, the last defenders of the monarchy and of public order. The fate of the Constitutional Guard might well discourage honest men who only sought to devote themselves. How was it possible to remain faithful to a chief who was false to himself, who was more like a victim than a king? Finding themselves unsupported by the Tuileries, the royalists began to look across the frontier, and many men who would have flocked around an energetic monarch, fled from a feeble king and sorrowfully went to swell the ranks of the emigration.

In spite of the advice of Dumouriez, Louis XVI. would not make use of his right to form another guard. He preferred to put himself in the hands of the National Guard, who were his jailors rather than his servants. As to the Duke de Brissac, even the formality of an interrogatory was dispensed with, and he was sent before the Superior Court of Orleans. When he bade adieu to Louis XVI., the King said to him: "You are going to prison; I should be much more afflicted if you were not leaving me there myself." What was to be the fate of the loyal and devoted servant, thus sacrificed to his master's inexcusable weakness? He left the dungeons of Orleans only to be transferred to Versailles by the Marseillais, and there, on September 9, 1792, was assaulted by a furious throng surrounding the carriages containing the prisoners. The brave old man struggled long against the assassins, but, after losing two fingers and receiving several other wounds, he was killed by a sabre-thrust which broke his jaw, and his head was set on one of the spikes of the palace gate.

[[1]] The magnificent mansion built for Madame du Barry by Louis XV., and restored to her after her banishment to Meaux by Marie Antoinette.

XIV.

THE SUFFERINGS OF LOUIS XVI.

Dissatisfied with men and things, dissatisfied with others and himself, the mind and heart of Louis XVI. were the prey of moral tortures which left him no repose. He began to be ashamed of his concessions, and to repent of having accepted pusillanimous advice. Why had he not succeeded in being a king? Why had he garrisoned Paris insufficiently ever since the outbreak of the Revolution? Why had he suffered the Bastille to be taken, encouraged the emigration, and disbanded his bodyguards? Why had he not opposed the first persecutions aimed at the Church? Why had he pretended to approve acts and ideas which horrified him? Why, by resorting to deplorable equivocations which cast a shadow over his policy and his character, had he reduced his most devoted followers to doubt and despair? Such thoughts as these assailed him like so many stings of conscience. The sentiments of monarchy and of military honor awoke in him once more, and he sounded with bitterness the whole depth of the abyss into which his irresolution had plunged him. In seeing what he was, he recalled sorrowfully what he had been, and comprehended by cruel experience what feebleness could make of a Most Christian King and eldest son of the Church, an heir of Louis XIV. He thought of the many brave men, victims of his political errors, who on his account had suffered exile and ruin; of the faithful royalists menaced, because of him, with prison and death. He thought of the incessantly repeated crimes, the massacres of the Glacière, the impunity of the brigands of "headsman" Jourdan, of Brissac's incarceration. This is what it is, he said within himself, to have suffered religion to be persecuted and to have believed that, were the altar once overthrown, the throne might rest secure. He reproached himself bitterly for having sanctioned the civil organization of the clergy at the close of 1790, and thus drawn upon himself the censure of the Sovereign Pontiff. He wanted to be done with concessions, but he understood perfectly that it was too late now to resist, and that he was irrevocably lost in consequence of events undesired and unforeseen.