Both the king and the queen knew that Prussia had already combined with Austria, and was secretly marching an army of eighty thousand men under the Duke of Brunswick to unite with the emigrants at Coblentz. The queen thought that the allies would be in Paris in six weeks. She was minutely informed of their contemplated movements; when they would be at Verdun, when at Lille; and she, in confidence, informed her ladies that she expected to be rescued in a month.[333]
The peril of France was now truly great, and the patriots were deeply agitated. Foreign armies were approaching. The king not only was taking no effectual measures for the defense of the kingdom, but had vetoed the decrees of the Assembly raising an army for the protection of the capital, and was also believed to be in sympathy and in traitorous correspondence with the foe. France was threatened with invasion, and the court of France was virtually guiding the march of the invading armies, weakening every point of defense, and striving to betray the patriot forces into the hands of the enemy. The only excuse which history can offer for the king is, that he was the tool of others, and so weak and characterless that he was unconscious of the enormity of his crime. But this excuse, which ought to have commended him to pity, could not be an argument for maintaining him upon his throne.
Though it was well known to all intelligent men that the Prussian armies were marching to unite with the Austrian for the invasion of France, yet the king, in grossest violation of duty, had made no communication of the fact to the Legislative Assembly. All the great roads were crowded with priests, nobles, and their partisans, hastening to join the emigrants at Coblentz. Couriers were every where traversing Europe, from St. Petersburg to Rome, from Stockholm to Madrid, from Berlin to Naples, openly announcing the coalition of all Europe to crush the revolution in France, and declaring that the armies would move in such force that the French would not be able to resist them for a single month. The allies were not unwilling to have their plans known and even exaggerated, for some of them hoped that the terror of the threat might be sufficient to drive the French patriots to submission.[334]
It was consequently proclaimed, not officially, but with great soundings of trumpets, that Spain was to indemnify herself for the war by taking possession of the four beautiful southern provinces of France which lean against the Pyrenees—Navarre, Roussillon, Languedoc, and Guienne. The King of Sardinia was to receive the provinces adjacent to his kingdom, whose romantic valleys penetrated the lower Alps—Dauphiny, Provence, Lyonnois, and Bretagne. The Stadtholder of Holland was to extend his sway over the Provinces of Flanders and Picardy. Austria was to grasp the provinces adjoining the Rhine—Alsace, Lorraine, Champagne. The Swiss were offered Franche Comte if they would join the coalition. And, finally, England was to regain her old possession of Normandy, and was to seize all the colonial possessions of France in the two Indies.[335]
Though the British government was at this time strongly in sympathy with the coalition, it did not venture openly to join the alliance, for the masses of the British people were cordially with the French patriots and rejoiced in the establishment of constitutional liberty in France. These extravagant threats filled Europe. It was every where assumed that only a small minority of the French people were opposed to the Old Régime, and that the mass of the nation would at once arise and welcome the invading armies.
With this terrific storm from without menacing the liberties of France, a large number of priests who had refused to accept the Constitution were plying all the energies of the most potent superstition earth has ever known to rouse the ignorant peasantry against civil and religious liberty. They were told that eternal damnation was their inevitable doom if they were not willing to lay down their lives in defense of the king and the Pope; and that eternal blessedness was the sure inheritance of all who should labor and pray for holy mother Church. The queen, it was well known, was in constant conference with the enemy, counseling, encouraging, and aiding with all the pecuniary means she could obtain from the revenues of France. The king was a weak-minded, fickle man, with no decision of his own, and entirely at the disposal of those who surrounded him. Being quite in subjection to the imperial mind of the queen, he delayed adopting any vigorous measure to repel the approaching foe, thwarted the decrees of the Assembly, and allowed his own enormous salary of six millions of dollars to be appropriated by the queen and her counselors to hasten the march of foreign invaders upon Paris.
In the very palace of the Tuileries a secret committee of old Royalists were in session every day, planning for the enemy, informing them of all the movements in Paris, advising them as to the best points of attack, and organizing, in different parts of the empire, their partisans to rise in civil war the moment the first thunderings of hostile artillery should be heard upon the plains of France. Here surely was a combination of wrong and outrage sufficient to drive any people mad.[336]
During the whole month of July the interior of the palace was the abode of terror. The inmates, apprehensive every hour of attack, had no repose by day or night. Almost daily there was an alarm that the mob was gathering. "During the whole month," writes Madame Campan, "I was never once in bed. I always dreaded some night attack. One morning, about one o'clock, footsteps were heard in the anteroom of the queen's chamber, and then a violent struggle and loud outcries, as the groom of the chambers grasped a man who was stealthily approaching with a dagger, apparently to assassinate the queen."
"I begin to fear," said the queen one day, "that they will bring the king to a trial. Me they will assassinate. But what will become of our poor children? If they assassinate me, so much the better; they will rid me of an existence that is painful."
"One morning, at about four o'clock, near the close of July," writes Madame Campan, "a person came to give me information that the Faubourg St. Antoine was preparing to march against the palace. We knew that at least an hour must elapse before the populace, assembled upon the site of the Bastille, could reach the Tuileries. It seemed to me sufficient for the queen's safety that all about her should be awakened. I went softly into her room. She was asleep. I did not awaken her.