Paris, November 1821
WOKEN by the fall of the Bastille as by a noise foreboding the fall of the crown, Versailles had gone from vauntery to despondency. The King rushes to the National Assembly, gives a speech from the President’s own chair, announces that the troops have been ordered to withdraw, and returns to his palace with everybody’s blessings. What useless pageantry! No party ever believes in converting their opponent: neither liberty capitulating nor power abasing itself ever obtains mercy from its enemies.
Eighty deputies came from Versailles to declare peace in the capital. Illuminations followed. M. de Lafayette was named commander of the National Guard and M. Bailly the Mayor of Paris: I never knew this poor but respectable scholar except through his misfortunes. Revolutions find men for all their phases: some follow these revolutions to the end, while others start them but do not see them to the finish.
Everyone was scattering. Courtiers left for Bâle, Lausanne, Luxembourg, and Brussels. Madame de Polignac in flight met M. Necker returning. The Comte d’Artois, his sons, and the three Condés emigrated, dragging behind them the high clergy and a portion of the nobility. Officers, threatened by their insurgent soldiers, yielded to a torrent that would soon set them adrift. Louis XVI alone stayed to face the nation with his two children and a few women: the Queen, the King’s aunts Mesdames Adélaide and Victoire, and Madame Élisabeth. Monsieur, who remained until the flight to Varennes, was of no great help to his brother.[6] Though he had helped decide the Revolution’s fate by supporting, in the Assembly of Notables, the right to individual votes, the Revolution would nonetheless defy him. Monsieur had little liking for the King, did not understand the Queen, and was disliked by them in turn.
Louis XVI came to the Hôtel de Ville on the seventeenth. A hundred thousand men armed like the monks of the League received him. He was harangued by Messrs. Bailly, Moreau de Saint-Méry, and Lally-Tolendal, who wept: the latter is still prone to tears. The King was moved in his turn. He put an enormous tricolor ribbon in his hat and declared, there and then, that he was “an honest man, Father of the French, and King of a free people,” even as these people prepared, by virtue of their freedom, to cut off the head of this honest man, their Father and their King.
A few days after this reconciliation, I was at the window of my hotel with my sisters and a few other Bretons. We heard shouting: “Bolt the doors! Bolt the doors!”
A group of ragged men appeared at one end of the street; from their midst rose two flagpoles, which we couldn’t see very well at that distance. Only when they came closer could we make out the two disheveled and disfigured heads that Marat’s predecessors carried on the points of their pikes. These were the heads of Messrs. Foulon and Bertier.[7] Everyone else drew back from the windows: I alone remained. The murderers stopped below me and thrust their pikes up toward me, singing, rollicking, and leaping to shove the pale effigies in my face. An eye in one of those heads, gouged from its socket, hung over the dead man’s darkened countenance; the pike came through the open mouth so that the teeth chomped down on metal.
“Brigands!” I shouted. “Is this what you take liberty to be?”
If I had had a gun, I would have shot at those derelicts as at a pack of wolves. They howled and pounded harder against the front door, hoping to force it and add my head to those of their victims. My sisters fainted, and the cowards in the hotel heaped reproaches on me. But the murderers were being pursued; they had no time to invade the building and so moved on. These heads, and others that I would encounter soon after, changed my political leanings. I was horrified by these cannibal feasts, and the idea of leaving France for some distant country began to take root in my mind.