DISBURDENING! The last word has been said. Now it is easier to await the end tranquilly. Marie Antoinette has bidden farewell to the world. She no longer hopes, and no longer makes any attempt to escape. She can no longer count upon aid from the court of Vienna, no longer does she expect a victory of the French troops. Jarjayes has left the capital, and the faithful Toulan has been removed from his post as guardian, so there is no one at hand to help her. Madame Tison, the spy of the Commune, has told her employers that some of the guardians are untrustworthy. If hitherto an attempt at escape has been dangerous, now it would be foolish and suicidal.
Yet there are persons to whom danger is a lure, who love to stake the limit, whose energies are doubled and trebled when they attempt the impossible, and to whom a foolhardy adventure can alone give lust to life. Such people find it hard to breathe in the piping times of peace; tranquillity bores them to distraction; they need vent for their temperamental foolhardiness; and their ruling passion is to attempt the crazy, the absurd, the impossible. The Baron de Batz, who had stayed on in Paris, was a man of this type. Of noble blood, and wealthy, so long as the monarchy was resplendent and revered, it had been his pride to lurk in the background. Why should he make obeisance to obtain a position, to win a sinecure? Nothing but peril could set him in motion. Not until the other royalists had given up the King for lost, did the Don Quixote of loyalty make heroic efforts to save poor Louis. To this daredevil it seemed a matter of course that he should remain in the firing line throughout the Revolution. Under dozens of aliases he stayed in hiding while carrying on his active campaign against the Reds. He devoted vast sums of money to numerous enterprises, of which the maddest, so far, had been that when the King was being driven to execution under guard of eight thousand armed men, he had drawn his sword with the cry: “Join me, friends who wish to save their King!” But no one joined him. In all France there was no other rash person ready in broad daylight to attempt the rescue of a condemned man from a hostile city, to snatch Louis from a whole army. Finding himself unsupported, Baron de Batz vanished in the crowd before the guards had recovered from their surprise. However, this failure had not dispirited him in the least, and his only thought was to outdo so bold a venture, as soon as Louis had been executed, by staging a preposterously venturesome plan for the rescue of the Queen.
Baron de Batz had been quick to recognise the weak point of the Revolution, the poison gnawing at its vitals, the deadly evil which Robespierre was trying to excise with the guillotine—corruption. By seizing political power, the revolutionists had got control of the offices of state, and posts under government, major and minor, were paid for in money, which corrodes souls as rust corrodes steel. Nor was it only the salaries that were in question. Cash passed through the hands of officials, and stuck to their fingers. Proletarians, petty bourgeois, persons who had never before been concerned in great enterprises, handicraftsmen, clerks, agitators who had had no serious employment, could now dispose of great sums that were needed for the purchase of munitions of war, or that were received for the sale of the estates of the émigrés. There was no adequate check upon the moneys thus disbursed, and few of those concerned had the incorruptibility of a Cato or a Robespierre, few could withstand the overwhelming temptation. Obscure ties were formed between sentiment and business, and many of the revolutionary ultras, who had been eager to serve the Republic, now became no less eager to feather their own nests. Into this turbid pool of corruption Baron de Batz threw his well-baited hooks, whispering a magic word which then as today exercised a marvellous lure, a ‘million’. There was a million at the disposal of those who would help to get the Queen away from the Temple. With such a sum the walls of the strongest dungeon can be broken down. Baron de Batz did not, like Jarjayes, deal with understrappers, with lamp-lighters and with private soldiers, but resolutely devoted himself to bribing the chiefs. Above all he made advances to important members of the town council, such as the sometime lemonade-seller Michonis, inspector of prisons, and therefore in charge of the Temple as well as of the other jails. The second string to his bow was Cortey, the military commander of the section. Thus our royalist, against whom a warrant was out and for whom the police were searching day and night, had both the civil and the military guardians of the Temple under his thumb, and at the very time when in the Convention and in the Committee of Public Safety the members were thundering invectives against “the infamous Batz”, the Baron, in safe hiding, and with powerful protectors, could get on with his scheme.
A master conspirator, so splendid was his courage that, although the Committee of Public Safety had become aware that he was busily at work upon endeavours to overthrow the Republic, he calmly had himself enrolled as a private, under the name of Forguet, among the guards of the Temple, since he was determined to keep the affair under personal observation. Musket in hand, dressed in the dirty and ragged uniform of a National Guard, this millionaire aristocrat took his turn with his fellow-soldiers in doing sentry-go in front of the Queen’s door. We do not know whether he had any interviews with Marie Antoinette, but there was no need for them, since Michonis, who was to earn a big share of the million, was in touch with the Queen. At the same time, thanks to Cortey’s position as military commander, an ever larger number of men in the Baron’s pay were introduced among the sentries. Thus there ensued one of the most amazing and improbable situations in history. A day came in the year 1793, when, in the centre of revolutionary Paris, the stronghold of the Temple (which no one could enter without a permit from the Commune and where Marie Antoinette, the detested ex-Queen of France, was supposed to be watched exclusively by devotees of the Republic) was actually under guard of a battalion of disguised royalists, whose leader was Baron de Batz proscribed in a hundred warrants issued by the Convention and the Committee of Public Safety. No writer of historical romances has ever conceived a more preposterous story.
At length it seemed to Batz that the time was ripe for his coup. The night had come when, if that coup were successful, one of the most memorable and fateful transformation scenes of history would take place, for the new King of France, Louis XVII, would be torn from the hands of the Revolution. Baron de Batz was playing at dice with fate, was playing a game of hazard which, should he win, might well result in the destruction of the Republic. When darkness fell, everything was ready to the last detail. Cortey marched into the yard at the head of his detachment, accompanied by the arch-conspirator, Baron de Batz. The military commander distributed his men in such a fashion that the exits were in the hands of the royalists recruited by the Baron. Simultaneously Michonis, the other republican official who had been so liberally bribed, was on duty upstairs in the Queen’s room, and had already provided Marie Antoinette, Madame Elisabeth and the Queen’s daughter with uniform cloaks. At midnight these three, wearing military caps and shouldering muskets, were to march out of the Temple with others of the bribed National Guards, the Dauphin in their midst. Since Cortey, as chief officer of the guard, could have the great gates opened whenever he pleased, it seemed practically certain that the little force under his leadership would be able to make its way into the street without arousing the least suspicion. As to what was to happen afterwards, Batz had arranged everything. Under a false name he owned a country house not far from Paris, a place which had never been raided by the police. There the royal family was to remain in hiding for a few weeks, until a favourable opportunity arose to get them across the frontier. Furthermore, there were a couple of vigorous and determined royalists, each armed with a pair of pistols, stationed in the street, to check pursuit if the escape should be detected.
It was nearly eleven o’clock. Marie Antoinette and the others were ready to follow their liberators at any moment. Below in the courtyard they could hear the tramp of the patrol, but this was not alarming since they knew that friendly hearts were beating beneath the uniforms of the ostensible sansculottes. Michonis was only waiting for a sign from Baron de Batz. At this juncture, however, came an alarm. Someone knocked loudly at the prison gate. Lest suspicion should be aroused, the late-comer was promptly admitted. It was Simon, the shoemaker, a steadfast and incorruptible revolutionist, a member of the Commune, who had come in haste to make sure that the Queen had not already been carried off. A few hours earlier, a gendarme had brought him a missive betraying Michonis’s plans for the night, and Simon had instantly acquainted his fellow-members of the town council with the news. They, however, were by no means ready to give credence to so romantic a tale, for their tables were laden day after day with hundreds of such denunciations. Besides, the story seemed too wildly improbable. Was not the Temple guarded by 280 men, and under the supervision of the most trustworthy commissaries? Still, no harm would be done by entrusting Simon, instead of Michonis, with the charge of the interior of the Temple for this one night. The instant Cortey saw the newcomer, he realised that the game was up. Simon, however, never guessed for a moment that Cortey was one of the conspirators. “Since you are here,” said the shoemaker, “I am easy in my mind.” Then he went upstairs to Michonis.
Baron de Batz, who realised that his plan was about to be shipwrecked, deliberated for a moment. Should he dog Simon up the stairs, and blow out the man’s brains? No, that would be fruitless! The sound of the shot would instantly bring the rest of the guard upon the scene. They were not all of them in the plot. One of the revolutionary stalwarts must have got wind of it and betrayed it. The Queen’s escape had become impossible, and an act of violence would needlessly endanger her life. The only thing that remained was to get safely out of the Temple those who had entered it in disguise. Cortey, who was sweating with alarm, quickly gathered the conspirators together into a patrol. With Baron de Batz among them, they quietly marched out into the street. The conspirators were saved, but the Queen had been sacrificed.
Meanwhile Simon had been furiously taking Michonis to task, insisting that the latter must instantly come to the Commune and give an account of his doings. Michonis, who had got rid of his disguise before Simon came into the room, remained imperturbable. Making no objection, he followed the dangerous Simon to the sitting of the dangerous tribunal. Strangely enough, the Commune gave Simon rather a chill reception. He was indeed extolled for his patriotism, his zeal and his watchfulness, but at the same time he was given to understand that he must have been seeing spooks. As far as appearances went, the Commune did not take the conspiracy seriously.
In actual fact, however—and this gives us a shrewd glimpse into the devious paths of politics—the town councillors took the attempt at flight very seriously indeed, but were chiefly concerned to avoid having any fuss made about the matter. This is proved by a very remarkable document in which the Committee of Public Safety directs the public prosecutor in Marie Antoinette’s trial to suppress all references to the details of the great plot for the Queen’s escape hatched by the Baron de Batz and his confederates, and frustrated at the last moment by Simon. The fact that there had been an attempt at escape might be mentioned, but nothing more. The Commune was afraid to let the world know how far the poison of corruption had spread among its own members and the most trusted of its employees—the consequence of this hush-it-up policy being that for many, many years one of the most dramatic episodes in history was shrouded by a veil of silence.
Nevertheless—while the Commune of Paris, the revolutionary municipal council, alarmed by the venality brought to light in the Batz affair, considered it would be better to refrain from any public trial of those who had been concerned in the plans for escape—it decided to deal more harshly than ever with the prisoner, with the bold woman who, instead of quietly accepting her fate, was fired by an invincible spirit of revolt. Measures must be taken to render such attempts impossible for the future. The suspect commissaries, beginning with Toulan and Lepitre, were dismissed from their posts, and from this time onwards Marie Antoinette was watched like a criminal. One night at eleven, Hébert, the most ruthless of the town councillors, paid a visit to Marie Antoinette and Madame Elisabeth, who had long since gone to bed. Acting under instructions from the Commune, he made the fullest possible use of his authorisation to effect a thorough search. It lasted five hours, every room, every article of wearing apparel, every piece of furniture, every drawer, being rigorously scrutinized.
The results of the search were, however, minimal. Nothing more was discovered than a red-leather portfolio in which were papers containing a few addresses of no consequence; a pencil-holder without a pencil; a stick of sealing wax; two miniatures and other mementoes; an old hat that had belonged to Louis XVI. Further surprise visits, additional searches, gave no better result. Throughout the revolutionary period, Marie Antoinette had been careful to burn every scrap of writing that might incriminate her friends and helpers, so that no excuse for a prosecution could be discovered. Greatly annoyed at the lack of evidence against their redoubtable adversary, and convinced nonetheless that she must still be engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, the members of the Commune of Paris decided to assail her where she would be most sensitive—in her maternal affection. This time they hit the bull’s-eye. On 1st July 1793, a few days after the conspiracy had been discovered, the Committee of Public Safety, acting upon a resolution passed by the Commune, decided that the ex-Dauphin, Louis Capet, should be separated from his mother, and confined in a part of the fortress where he would have no chance of communicating with her. Since, in these circumstances, his mother could not carry on his education, the lad, now eight years old, was to have a tutor.
Who was this tutor to be? The choice was left to the Commune, which, grateful to Simon the shoemaker for having prevented Marie Antoinette’s escape, and knowing him to be a sansculotte whose principles were proof against temptation either by money or by an appeal to his sensibilities, decided that he was the very man for the job. Now Simon, though a rough fellow and a typical proletarian, was by no means the drinker and the sadist of monarchical legend. Still, it was a lamentable choice. He could read and write, after a fashion, but he had certainly read little, and the only letter of his that has come down to us shows that his knowledge of spelling was elementary—but he was a Red, and in 1793 to be a Red was sufficient qualification for any office. There had been an immense decline in the spiritual level of the Revolution since, six months before, in the National Assembly, the proposal had been mooted to appoint Condorcet (philosopher and mathematician, secretary of the Academy of the Sciences, and author of the Progrès de l’esprit humain) tutor to the heir to the French throne. Between this man of genius and Simon the shoemaker there was a great gulf fixed. Of late, however, though the motto of the republic was “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity”, there remained scant thought of either liberty or fraternity, which had declined in value as much as the assignats. “Equality”, or rather a forcible levelling-down, dominated the last, the most radical phase of the Revolution. The deliberate aim of the Commune was that little Louis should be brought up, not to become a man of culture, but one of the uninstructed who constituted the lowest class of the population. He was to forget his high birth, for this would make it easier to ignore him.
Marie Antoinette had not had the slightest warning of this decision to remove her child from her care when, at half-past nine one evening, six deputies from the Commune knocked at the gate of the Temple. The method of cruel surprise was part of Hébert’s system. His domiciliary visits, his searches, his inspections, were always unannounced, and usually took place late at night. The boy had long since been put to bed, but the Queen and Madame Elisabeth were still up. The officials of the Commune entered their sitting room, and the Queen rose with an uneasy mind, for every such nocturnal visit had brought her humiliation or evil tidings. On this occasion even the revolutionary intruders seemed more than a little embarrassed. Themselves, for the most part, fathers of families, they found it hard to tell a mother that the Committee of Public Safety had, without any apparent reason, decided to deprive her of the custody of her son.
As regards the scene which took place that night between the despairing mother and the officials of the Commune, the only information available is testimony which cannot be relied upon, for it is that of the Dauphin’s sister, who at the time was only thirteen years of age. Is it true, as the Duchess of Angoulême declares, that Marie Antoinette, with tears streaming down her face, implored these officials, who were merely fulfilling their instructions, to leave her son under her care? That she exclaimed they would do better to kill her than to take little Louis away from her? That the messengers from the Commune threatened (the statement is highly improbable, since they were not thus commissioned) to kill the boy and the girl if their mother continued to oppose their wishes, and that, in the end, after a tussle which had lasted for hours, they carried off the screaming and sobbing lad by brute force?
The official report of what happened contains no mention of such details, but tells us simply: “The separation was effected with all the kindliness proper to the circumstances, the officers of the people having exhibited the utmost consideration compatible with the strictness of their duties.” Each report contradicts the other; both are unquestionably biased, and where the partisan spirit is at work we seldom hear the truth. Of this, at least, there can be no doubt, that the enforced and needlessly cruel severance from her son must have been one of the most painful moments in Marie Antoinette’s life. The mother was deeply attached to this high-spirited, precocious, fair-haired little boy, the boy she had wanted to bring up to be a king. It was his merry chatter, it was his unstinted curiosity, which had made the hours in the lonely fortress endurable. Beyond dispute, she was fonder of him than of her daughter, who, being of a sulky temperament, mentally inert and in all respects insignificant, must have made much less appeal to the liveliness and tenderness of Marie Antoinette than the good-looking, gentle and quick-witted youngster, who was now snatched from her thus brutally. It was harsh almost beyond belief that, although the Dauphin was to stay on in the Temple in a room only a few yards from the tower occupied by his mother, she was never to be allowed to exchange a word with him, and that she was forbidden to pay him a visit even when he was ailing. He was quarantined from her as if she had been suffering from the plague. She was actually forbidden to converse with Simon the shoemaker, the boy’s tutor, from whom she might have gleaned a little information about her son. His seclusion from her was to be unconditional and absolute.
After a while, however, Marie Antoinette discovered, as a trifling and most inadequate consolation, that from one of the window slits in the spiral staircase she could, from the third storey, get a glimpse into the courtyard where the Dauphin often played. There she would stand hour after hour, waiting till fortune vouchsafed her a fleeting glance of him upon whom her affections were now centred. In this matter, at least, her guardians were kindly, and did not interfere. The child, who, in childish fashion, had quickly adapted himself to the changed circumstances, never guessed, as he played merrily enough, that his mother was spying eagerly upon him through this grated loophole whose bars she may have often wetted with her tears. He had forgotten whose child he was, from what race he sprang and what name he bore. Loudly and energetically he would sing the Carmagnole and the Ça ira, which Simon and the other revolutionists had taught him—though, it need hardly be said, he had not the vaguest notion of their significance. It seemed to him amusing to wear the red cap of the sansculottes. He played games with the soldiers who were set to keep watch over his mother. Not only by stone walls, but by a whole world, was the boy now separated from her. What would become of him, thought the poor woman who could no longer embrace him but could only look at him from a distance. Had not Hébert, to whose tender mercies the Convention had pitilessly entrusted her, written in his scurrilous rag the Père Duchesne the threatening words: “Unhappy nation! … This brat will bring disaster on you soon or late; for the more amusing he is, the more is he to be dreaded. The best thing would be to maroon the young serpent and his sister upon a desert island, for we must get rid of them at any cost. Besides what does a child more or less matter when the safety of the Republic is at stake?”
What does a child more or less matter? Not much to Hébert, as Marie Antoinette knew well enough. That was why she shuddered on the days when she did not see her darling at play in the courtyard. That was why she trembled in helpless rage whenever this enemy came into her room, this wretch by whose counsel her child had been reft from her and who had thereby been guilty of one of the most contemptible crimes ever known—a needless act of cruelty perpetrated upon an adversary already overthrown. It is, indeed, a black page in the story of the Revolution that it should have handed the Queen over to Hébert’s charge; for even the loftiest of ideals becomes degraded and petty when, in its name, power is given to unworthy creatures capable of the basest acts of inhumanity.
Tedious were the hours and darker seemed the barred windows of the tower, now that her boy’s laughter no longer brought solace to the mother’s heart. No news came from without, her last helpers had vanished, there was no further means of communicating with her friends across the frontier. Marie Antoinette, her daughter and Madame Elisabeth were a lonely company day after day; they had nothing to say to one another; the ex-Queen and her sister-in-law had ceased to hope and perhaps even ceased to fear. Though spring had passed and summer had come, they rarely went downstairs and out into the little garden, for an intense fatigue had made their limbs heavy. During these weeks of uttermost distress, the light in the Queen’s countenance was extinguished. When we examine the last oil painting made of Marie Antoinette, we find it hard to recognise the sometime queen of pastoral plays, the goddess of the Rococo, and hard even to recognise the proud, combative and majestic creature Marie Antoinette had still been in the Tuileries. The woman of this clumsy likeness, wearing a widow’s cap over her white hair, is already old, though her years number only eight-and-thirty. The sparkle has vanished from her weary eyes, and we feel that we are looking at one who is ready to answer any summons without an attempt at resistance. What had been the charm of her countenance has been effaced by a hopelessly mournful expression, and liveliness has given place to supreme indifference. Looking at it from afar, we fancy this picture of Marie Antoinette to be that of a prioress or an abbess, of a woman who no longer had any interest in the world, whose wishes were dead, and who was already living another life than ours. We see in it neither beauty nor courage nor energy; nothing but passivity. The Queen has abdicated, the woman has renounced her womanhood. The face looking forth from the canvas is that of a matron long outworn, whom no further happenings can either astonish or alarm.
In actual fact, Marie Antoinette was not affrighted when, at two o’clock one morning, there came a knocking at her door. What more harm could the world do her, now that it had taken from her her husband, her son, her lover, her crown, her honour and her liberty? Rising from bed, she dressed, and opened her door to the commissaries. They read aloud to her the Convention’s decree to the effect that the Widow Capet, since she was to be prosecuted, must be transferred from the Temple to the Conciergerie. Having listened quietly, she made no answer. She knew well enough that an accusation before the Revolutionary Tribunal was equivalent to a death sentence, and that imprisonment in the Conciergerie was the last stage on the way to the guillotine. She made no plaint, offered no protest, did not ask for a postponement. She had not a word to say to these men who appeared with such a dread message in the night. Indifferently she submitted to having her clothes searched, to having her personal belongings taken away from her. She was allowed to keep nothing but a pocket handkerchief and a small phial containing drops of a cordial. Then she had to make the last of many farewells, parting this time from her sister-in-law and her daughter. She had grown accustomed to such partings!
With a firm gait she walked to the door of the room and quickly down the stairs, rejecting offers of assistance. It had been needless to leave her the cordial; her heart would not fail her, since her strength came to her from within. She had long since endured the worst that fate could bring; no coming ordeal could be more grievous than had been the life of the last few months. Death, now close at hand, would be easier. She was ready, perhaps eager, to meet it. Swiftly, therefore, she sped forth from this tower of haunting memories, so swiftly that (perhaps her eyes were blinded with tears) she forgot to stoop as she passed through the low portal of exit, and knocked her forehead against the hard stone archway. Her conductors, honestly distressed, asked her whether she had hurt herself. “No,” she answered, unmoved, “nothing can hurt me now.”