CHAPTER XXXVII
G. A. SALA ON MARIE ANTOINETTE
The Royal Family—The Queen—Her “trial,” condemnation and death—The Sansons—Sala’s impressions.
GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA
From a photograph.
There are some stories so dreadful in the immensity of human misery which they reveal—there are some tragedies of which the catastrophe is one of such unmitigated horror, that the reader who has general impressions of what will be the end of the dismal tale, but who is unfamiliar with its particular circumstances, is unable to follow, without some kind of impatience, the opening scenes of the drama. He has continually in his mind’s eye the awful falling of the curtain on anguish and despair and death. Half unconsciously he hastens on in his perusal, and slurs over minor episodes and seemingly trifling facts, forgetting that these are subsidiary and auxiliary to the terrible consummation which he so anxiously awaits. “Toutes choses meuvent vers leur fin,” Rabelais has said; but the little things—the slender fibres of a story—are gathered up as it proceeds, into bundles; and, acquiring importance from consolidation, are ultimately merged in the final and tremendous whole.
Thus there have been many records of human life and action, now real, now artificial, in reading which we have to encounter an almost uncontrollable impulse to turn to the end, and ascertain whether that of which we have had, at the beginning, a vague forecast, will really come to pass. Who, if he will only have the candour to acknowledge it, has not had to struggle with such an impulse in reading, say, the Electra of Sophocles, the Faust of Goethe, and the Bride of Lammermoor of Scott?—three of the most perfectly tragic dramas, I take it, ever fashioned by the hand of mortal genius. And so it is with numerous tragedies of superhuman structure and ordinance. In both cases we pant for the last scene of all, which is to end the strange eventful history. What will be the fate of Aegisthus, and the doom of Clytemnestra? Who, if anyone, will rescue Gretchen from a shameful death? How will Edgar Ravenswood bear his immeasurable sorrow?
These are the problems which agitate us in the study of fiction, and irresistibly impel us to hasten from the prologue to the epilogue—from the exordium to the peroration. And to speed as quickly is usually our desire when we are confronted with the tragedies of history, or with the vouched-for chronicles of human passion and crime. Throw down on the floor Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion, it has been said, and the volume will open, automatically, at the page where the execution of Charles I is described. Try to concentrate your thoughts on the history of Marie Stuart; and, coldly, clearly, sternly distinct in the midst of a whirligig of scenes and events—the Louvre, Holyrood, the Kirk of Field, Lochleven and what not—there stands out the image of the Hall at Fotheringay, the black scaffold, the block, the masked headsman; the Dean of Peterborough drearily homilising, and the Puritan Earl of Kent ranting; while the weeping tire-women disrobe the royal victim, her little pet dog snuggling by her, not without difficulty when the axe has fallen to be dislodged from the corse of the kind mistress he loved so well, and who has been stricken down by cruel men, he knows not why. See this, as I see it.