A multitude of carriages ploughed across the muddy spaces in which the sans-culottes plodded on foot, and one saw the beautiful Madame de Buffon[383] sitting alone in a phaeton belonging to the Duc d'Orléans, waiting at the door of some club.
All that was elegant and in good taste in aristocratic society met at the Hôtel de La Rochefoucauld[384], at the soirées of Mesdames de Poix, d'Hénin, de Simiane, de Vaudreuil, in the few salons that remained open of the upper magisterial circle. At M. Necker's, at M. le Comte de Montmorin's, at the houses of the different ministers gathered (in addition to Madame de Staël, the Duchesse d'Aiguillon, Mesdames de Beaumont[385] and de Sérilly[386]) all the new lights of France and all the liberties of the new manners. The shoemaker knelt to take the measure of your foot in the uniform of an officer of the National Guard; the monk who on Friday trailed his white or black gown along the ground appeared on Sunday in a round hat and a lay coat; the shorn Capuchin read the paper in the public-house, and in the midst of a circle of frivolous women, a nun appeared gravely seated: it was an aunt or a sister turned out of her monastery. The crowd visited these convents thrown open to the world like the travellers who, at Grenada, wander through the deserted halls of the Alhambra, or, at Tivoli, linger beneath the columns of the Sibyl's temple.
For the rest, many duels and love-affairs, prison attachments and political friendships, mysterious meetings among ruins, under a tranquil sky, amid nature's peace and poetry; silent, remote, solitary walks, mingled with undying oaths and indefinable affections, to the dull tumult of a fleeing world, to the distant noise of a crumbling society, which threatened in its fall to crush the happiness set at the foot of events. Those who had lost sight of each other for twenty-four hours were not sure of ever meeting again. Some went the revolutionary way; others contemplated civil war; others set out for Ohio, sending ahead plans for country-houses to be built among the savages; others went to join the Princes: all this cheerfully, often without a sou in their pockets, the Royalists declaring that the thing would come to an end one of these mornings by a decree of Parliament, the patriots, quite as airy in their hopes, foretelling the reign of peace and happiness together with that of liberty. People sang:
La sainte chandelle d'Arras,
Le flambeau de la Provence,
S'ils ne nous éclairent pas,
Mettent le feu dans la France;
On ne peut pas les toucher,
Mais on espère les moucher[387].
And that was how people spoke of Robespierre and Mirabeau!
"It is as little within the power of any earthly faculty," wrote L'Éstoile[388], "to keep the French people from talking as to hide the sun in the ground or bury it in a hole."
The Palace of the Tuileries, a great gaol filled with sentenced prisoners, rose erect amid these festivals of destruction. The condemned themselves made merry while waiting for the "cart," the "shears," and the "red shirt" which had been put out to dry; and through the windows one saw the dazzling illuminations of the Queen's circle.
The newspapers.
Pamphlets and newspapers swarmed in thousands; the satires and poems, the songs of the Actes des Apôtres[389] replied to the Ami du peuple, or to the Modérateur[390] of the Club Monarchien, edited by Fontanes; Mallet Du Pan[391], on the political side of the Mercure, was in opposition to La Harpe and Chamfort on the literary side of the same journal. Champcenetz[392], the Marquis de Bonnay, Rivarol[393], Mirabeau the Younger (the Holbein of the sword, who levied on the Rhine the legion of the Hussars of Death), Honoré Mirabeau the Elder amused themselves by drawing caricatures at dinner and composing the Petit almanach des grands hommes: Honoré would subsequently go off to move martial law or the seizure of the property of the clergy. He spent the night at Madame Le Jay's[394], after declaring that he would not leave the National Assembly unless driven out at the point of the bayonet. Égalité consulted the devil in the Montrouge stone-quarries, and returned to the Jardin de Monceau to preside over the orgies prepared by Laclos[395]. The future regicide proved himself worthy of his race: he was twice prostituted; debauchery handed him over exhausted to ambition. Lauzun[396], already worn out, supped in his pleasure-house at the Barrière du Maine with dancers from the Opera, caressed indifferently by Messrs. de Noailles, de Dillon[397], de Choiseul, de Talleyrand[398] and other elegants of the time, of whom two or three mummies still survive.
The majority of the courtiers celebrated for their immorality at the end of the reign of Louis XV., and during the reign of Louis XVI., were enlisted under the tricolour banner: almost all of them had been through the American war and had besmirched their ribbons with the Republican colours. The Revolution employed them so long as it remained at a middling height; they even became the first generals of its armies. The Duc de Lauzun, the romantic lover of the Princess Czartoriska, the woman-hunter of the high-road, the Lovelace who "had" this one and then "had" that one, in the chaste and noble cant of the Court; the Duc de Lauzun, becoming Duc de Biron, and commanding the forces of the Convention in the Vendée: the pity of it! The Baron de Besenval[399], the lying and cynical revealer of the corruption of the upper classes, the fly on the wheel of the puerilities of the expiring old monarchy; that ponderous baron, compromised in the affair of the Bastille, and saved by M. Necker and Mirabeau only because he was a Swiss: the disgrace of it! What had such men to do with such events? When the Revolution had attained its full height, it scornfully abandoned these frivolous apostates from the throne: it had needed their vices, it now needed their heads; it disdained no blood, not even that of the Du Barry[400].