A general dispersal ensued; the courtiers left for Bâle, Lausanne, Luxemburg, and Brussels. Madame de Polignac[337] in her flight met M. Necker returning. The Comte d'Artois, his sons[338], the three Condés[339] emigrated, drawing after them the higher clergy and a portion of the nobility. The officers of the army, threatened by their mutinous soldiers, yielded to the torrent which drifted them down its stream. Louis XVI. alone remained behind to face the nation with his two children and a few women: the Queen, "Mesdames[340]," and Madame Élisabeth[341]. "Monsieur[342]," who stayed until the flight to Varennes, was of no great assistance to his brother: although, by declaring himself in the Assembly of Notables in favour of the vote by heads, he had decided the fate of the Revolution, the Revolution distrusted him; he, Monsieur, disliked the King, did not understand the Queen, and was not loved by them.
Louis XVI. went to the Hôtel de Ville on the 17th: a hundred thousand men, armed like the monks of the League, received him. He was harangued by Messrs. Bailly, Moreau de Saint-Méry[343], and Lally-Tolendal[344], all of whom wept: the last has remained subject to tears. The King broke down in his turn; he fixed an enormous tricolour cockade on his hat; he was then and there declared to be "an honest man, Father of the French, King of a free people," while the said people was preparing, by virtue of its liberty, to lay low the head of that honest man, its father and its King.
First revolutionary horrors.
A few days after this reconciliation, I was at the windows of my lodgings with my sisters and some Bretons; we heard cries of "Shut the doors, shut the doors!" A troop of tatterdemalions approached from one end of the street; from the midst of this troop rose two standards which we could not see clearly at that distance. As they came nearer, we distinguished two dishevelled and disfigured heads, which the forerunners of Marat[345] were carrying, each at the end of a pike: they were the heads of Messrs. Foullon and Bertier[346]. The others all drew back from the windows; I remained. The assassins stopped in front of me, stretched the pikes towards me, singing, capering, jumping up in order to bring the pale effigies nearer to my face. One eye in one of these heads had started from its socket, and fell upon the dead man's lurid face; the pike projected through the open mouth, the teeth of which bit upon the iron.
"Brigands!" I cried, filled with indignation which I was unable to contain. "Is that how you understand liberty?"
Had I had a gun, I should have fired at those wretches as at a pack of wolves. They shouted and yelled; they beat long at the doors of the gate-way, in the hope of breaking them down and adding my head to those of their victims. My sisters fainted; the poltroons of the lodging-house overwhelmed me with reproaches. The murderers, who were being pursued, had not time to break into the house, and passed on. Those heads, and others which I saw soon afterwards, changed my political tendencies; I held the banquets of cannibals in abhorrence, and the idea of leaving France for some distant country began to take root in my mind.
*
Recalled to office on the 25th of July, installed and received with festivities, M. Necker, the third successor, after Calonne and Taboureau[347], of Turgot[348], was soon left behind by events, and lapsed into unpopularity. It is one of the singular facts of the time that so serious a person should have been raised to the post of minister through the tact of a man noted for such mediocrity and levity as the Marquis de Pezay[349]. The Compte rendu[350], which replaced in France the system of taxation by that of loans, stirred people's ideas: women talked of receipts and expenditure; for the first time one saw, or thought one saw, something in the mechanism of figures. These calculations, painted in colours laid on à la Thomas[351], had first established the reputation of the director-general of finance. The banker was a clever accountant, but a resourceless economist; a noble but turgid writer; an honest man, but devoid of the loftier virtues. He was like the character which speaks the prologue in a classical play, and which disappears at the rise of the curtain, after explaining the piece to the audience. M. Necker was the father of Madame de Staël[352]: his vanity hardly permitted him to believe that his true title to the recollection of posterity lay in the fame achieved by his daughter.
The monarchy was demolished, in imitation of the Bastille, at the evening sitting of the National Assembly on the 4th of August. They who, from hatred of the past, decry the nobility to this day, forget that it was a member of that body, the Vicomte de Noailles[353], supported by the Duc d'Aiguillon[354] and Matthieu de Montmorency[355], who upset the edifice which was the object of the revolutionary onslaughts. Upon the motion of the feudal delegate were abolished all feudal rights: rights of hunting and preserving feathered and ground game, tithes and champerty, the privileges of the orders, of the towns and provinces, personal servitude, manorial jurisdiction, purchase of offices. The severest blows struck against the ancient constitution of the State were delivered by noblemen. The patricians began the Revolution, the plebeians completed it: just as old France owed her glory to the French nobility, even so does young France owe to it her liberty, if liberty there be for France.
"Ô Richard! Ô mon Roi!"