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under the smart of impatience while she saw him sinking in his lethargy into the grave which his enemies were hollowing under him, that was not the feeling uppermost in her mind. As King, to her he was invested with something of the divine right, and so far he was a part of her religion; he was the father of her children, and no mother's love was ever deeper than hers; he was her husband and her protector. When first calumny opened its vials and poured out poisonous exhalations, making of her fair beauty a leprosy to the nation; when the pertinacity of a half-insane jeweler (Boehmer) bent upon selling his diamond necklace, in association with the devices of a depraved woman, (Madame Lamotte,) imposed upon the passion of the Cardinal de Rohan for the Queen-when the Cardinal, in his vanity and delirious credulity, accepted the clumsy forgeries of Madame Lamotte as truth, and fixed a stain upon the Queen's good name; then, when she wept, the King stood by her side holding her hand in his, and speaking comfort. Among the schemes contrived for his flight by his friends, there were some which might have succeeded if he would have consented to escape alone, but he would not. He would not insure his personal safety by leaving her behind, for, said he, "I know how it would be; my escape would bring vengeance upon her, and she would be torn to pieces by the populace; therefore I will not go from her." Neither would the Queen consent to disguise herself and fly to the frontiers without him, though her present position was so frightful, and the hope held out so alluring, though leaving him she would leave a nation of assassins, (of whose hatred she was the especial object,) to find love, security, and honor in her own country. These two could neither part from each other nor from their children; the mighty malignity of a persecution which could strip them of all besides, had no power to lessen their affection. The difficulties of their unhappy attempt at escape which was intercepted at Varennes, were in great measure due to the perplexities of preparation necessary for moving so large a family secretly away all together. That he was discovered was the King's misfortune, but that he was detained was his fault. I believe that with any fire in his soul he might have met and conquered his fate, for at the moment when the Royal family

was first arrested at the bridge at Varennes, there were only six men to oppose their progress. It was night; the town still slept; and if the King had at once given the order to charge, his escape must have been effected; for though he had few defenders at his side, those few were loyal, armed, and mounted; they might easily have cut down the halfdozen antagonists who opposed them, and have urged on the King's postilions, and the other side of the bridge once gained, there were troops in readiness who would have insured the safety of their road onward. But the Count Damas looked in vain to the King for the order: the Queen spoke, but the King would not, and the moment was lost. The old irresolution sat upon Louis and bore him down-bore down to unfathomable depths all that his heart held dear, and all the honor and all the hope of his afflicted country. M. de Damas' after - life was embittered by a continual regret. He thought he should have charged for the Queen without the King's command, and the horror of her fate fell upon him like a great remorse.

The King was undecided when indecision was ruin. The tocsin was rung; the sleepers were awakened; the town poured out its citizens, the national guard was summoned, and the royal carriage was dragged back from the bridge to the shop of a grocer named Sausse, a man in authority holding some small official situation. The poor King in his extremity took this man by the hands and implored him to let him go, assuring him that it would be for the good of his country— and that not he, but those who coerced him, were guilty of tyranny. The pathos of the King's appeal, and the nobility of the Queen's beauty, her courage, and the sight of the children clinging to her, moved this man; but the woman his wife was of a harder nature, and whispered other words in his ear. He listened to her, and turned away from the King. The Princess Elizabeth, the Royal children, and Marie Antoinette, were led into that sordid shop. What thoughts, what high passions were working in the Queen's heart when she entered there where she was to pass the night with her defeated hope. The long-looked-for light of deliv erance had been open to her for a day, and now it was so suddenly closed. Was it quite gone-might she not rise and kin

dle it again, or was the universe become a vast darkness? Was the whole of life to be an unutterable affliction? She could see nothing before her but calamity; the present was nothing else, the future could have nothing else in store. She looked on her boy while she sat in that hot, dusty, atmosphere among the bales of goods piled in the grocer's warehouse, looked till a new impulse prompted her, and she went to the disloyal woman who was the grocer's wife, and cast herself down before her and implored her mercy-she, the pride and beauty of the world, at whose feet a whole nation had knelt in passionate adoration.

"Feel for me," she said, "oh! feel for a woman-a wife and a mother-whose husband and children are in the last extremity of danger, and let us go."

"Well, well, well but, you see, I also," replied Madame Sausse," am a wife, and I must think for my husband. If I were to let you go, it is my opinion that M. Sausse would find himself in difficulty." After this reply Marie Antoinette sank into silence, and passed the night gazing mutely, with fixed eyes, upon her son; but the light of morning disclosed a sign upon her brow which was like a speech of wo. The silken hair whose delicate auburn was powdered only slightly in compliance with the fashion of the time, had turned completely white. Every little pore then of the outward skin had been in sympathy with the secret passion of the soul. Nature's most hidden subtle agents had refused to work in that great despair, and the glory of the discrowned head was withered with the heart.

Marie Antoinette forwarded a tress of this bleached hair in a locket to the Princess de Lamballe, with this inscription: “Blanchi par le malheur."

Things then seemed at their worst; but in the downward course of sorrow or of error there is generally some instant of pause when it seems possible for the lost wayfarer to break into a better path; and such a moment was now coming for this great sufferer. In the journey from Varennes back to Paris-in the slow procession, every step of which was like a new screw turned on from the rack-in the midst of that hot throng of men pressing insult upon a woman whom it should have been their part to honor and defend - in that hour, when seated opposite to Péthion, afterward Mayor of Paris, she

saw him treat her King and her King's sister with gross offense- - in that hour when one of her body-guard was killed and mangled (for those Jocobins mangled when they killed) before her eyes, and the life of a courageous priest, who dared to bow down before the King, was savagely threatened-an unlooked-for hope showed through the gloom. The famous demagogue Barnave, one of the most influential members of the Assembly, who was placed by the side of Péthion to guard the royal prisoners, prevented this impending murder with passionate interference. The Queen turned toward him, and looked her thanks. To that look his eyes replied, moist with an emotion which could not be approved by patriots, for it was not malignant and inhuman, but tender and respectful. His hatred was extinguished. He had detested a queen whom he had not seen; he had seasoned his oratory with common scandal, defaming a character he had not known, and imputing vices to her which it was not in her nature to conceive. He saw her now as she was; he admired the majestic front which she opposed to her humiliation; he revered the maternal love, conquering pride, which quivered in her accents when she appealed to the ruffians who pressed upon her through the open carriage-window. She pleaded to them that the day was very hot, and that her children were almost suffocated by want of air; but she was answered by a savage taunt: "Nous t'étoufferons bien autrement toi." Tears, drowning the queenly disdain which looked so beautiful upon her lips, dropped from her eyes upon her boy's bright curls. Péthion, with his coarse insolence, had pulled those curls too rudely, and the child had cried; and now his mother held him close against her heart, and shielded him with her delicate arms.

Barnave's heart was not proof against what he saw; it was subdued to a sacred sympathy which he dared not then express, because Péthion was by his side, but which the Queen perceived and appreciated. Reverence and love had been once so familiar to her, that she could not fail to know them again wherever they appeared, and in whatever disguise. Only the day before she had parted from one whose attachment to her has made his name the very symbol of true devotion, who is renowned throughout the world for one act of chivalry. The noble Swede,

Count Fersen, had only yesterday made his last salutation to her, and looked his last hope for her deliverance. How well she had judged him, singling him out from the crowd who worshiped when she shone in her full glory at Versailles singling him out in her thoughts as something brave and true, and capable of a great deed. Now, in the hour of danger, he had come, with her salvation for his trust, and had played the great stake, and had almost won it. His part in the drama was over before Varennes was reached, and he had thought her safe when he left her. How cleverly he had laid his schemes, how well he had acted his character of coachman, how gallantly he had driven her through the winding ways of the infernal city! But his work was ruined, and she retraced in pain and grief the road of hope. When she reached the Tuileries and left her carriage, the populace were gathered round in a huge mass, black, gloomy, threatening, like a thunder cloud. The flash of weapons would have been less formidable than the low mutterings and scowling looks which foretold some unknown horror. An order went forth that no hat should be lifted, and this command of marked contempt of the royal presence was accompanied by menaces against any who should dare disobey it. But one man found courage to brave the edict. He lifted his hat from his head as the Queen passed, and then flung it far away with a vigorous throw, so as to avoid the chance of having it forced upon his head. He ran a great risk. The mob might have fallen upon him, and have torn him to pieces; for though La Fayette was there with his National Guard, he had sufficiently shown on the sixth of October that he was either unable or unwilling to repress popular outrage, and his presence, therefore, could never be viewed as a protection. But this populace of Paris, bloodthirsty and pitiless, rarely subdued by the sense of humanity, was on several occasions overawed by some single example of true courage, and so it was in this case. The man was looked at with astonishment, and left unmolested.

As Marie Antoinette entered the palace, she whispered to her sister-in-law, the Princess Elizabeth, "In that deputy Barnave I think we have a friend."

She was right. While Madame Roland and her associates met together, exulting

over the capture of M. and Mme. Veto, (the familiar names then in vogue for the King and Queen,) one of their own side, one of the most distinguished and oratorical of patriots, was secretly adoring the fallen idol, and scheming for her deliverance; he who had suspected and denounced the apostasy of Mirabeau was following in the perilous track which Mirabeau had opened, and which every advancing step found narrower and steeper. In combination with the Lameths, Barnave strove to frame such a constitution of limited monarchy as should in its conditions prove tolerable at once to a nation in rebellion, and to a monarch who was their nominal sovereign, but their actual prisoner. Barnave was a brave man attempting an impossibility; he failed, as others had failed before him. And it could not be otherwise. With a nation determined on the destruction of the King, and the King not determined on his own salvation, it was evident how things must proceed. A ruler with a strong arm might possibly have upheld the monarchy in its modified condition, even at this juncture, but a strongarmed ruler could not possibly have come to such a pass, and the King's descent was precipitated by an irremediable act of folly on the part of those whose desire was to serve him. The resolution, suggested either by timidity or a mistaken notion of magnanimity, that the members of the present Constituent Assembly should not be reëligible for the next, is too well known, with its fatal consequences, to need much comment here. It opened the way to all disorder; whatever good had been done was thus blotted out at one stroke; and the election of the new members, known as the Girondins, so named from the department they chiefly came from, was the signal for the work of devastation to begin again. They were obscure men up to that time; for the most part mean, pedantic attorneys, and, as a body, theirs was the most contemptible that ever directed the government of a great country. They had no experience of public life, no training to fit them for the statesman's office. They endeavored to replace their ignorance of life by a laborious study of the history of Rome; and according to their narrow views a Roman republic was the only form of government in which prosperity and virtue were possible. To achieve a Roman republic out of such materials as were still left coherent in the per

The faith with which the new C nstitution was ushered in was a delusion, and amidst the admiring acclamations of the people who had insulted and wronged them, the sovereigns heard still the undertones of menace, and knew that the cannons then rolling out their thunders in applause might speak to them with a different meaning at another hour. They walked on thin ice; there was only a frail partition between them and the deep waters; and when the King left the Assembly, after receiving his congratulations on his position as monarch of this new constitution from the president, who kept his seat while he addressed him-when escorted to his palace with the loud shouts of the populace, the roar of artillery, and the joyous sound of military music, he joined his Queen, who had been a spectator of the scene, and who was sitting silent and thoughtful in her own apartment-his face was so pale that she started at the sight of it. He sank into a chair and wept.

ishing constitution of the French Govern- ! the ax for which he had no epigram prement, was a work of difficulty so great pared-when he saw tears fall which he that it seemed better to begin by total de- had no sarcasm to arrest-when he saw struction, and trust to their wits to build the people whom he had instructed in the a new edifice on the classical model. They ingenious use of derision as an instrument of vied with each other in the progress of an- torture, jeering at the last pangs of the one nihilation, for they were vain men, and creature he loved on earth-when his wife, each was ambitious to be most distinguish- Lucille, tender and beautiful, perished by ed in the work; there were suspicions and the guillotine before his eyes. He followjealousies between them; they were afraided her; for the first time failing to smile of each other, and their worst acts of cruel- at the sight of the executioner. ty were the results of a rank cowardice. One part of their object they compassedthey were successful in destroying; but they did more than they intended when they destroyed themselves. In their at tack upon the throne, they cast away justice, honor, religion, and righteousness, as clumsy encumbrances, like the sand which the aëronaut throws out from his balloon when he soars striving after unknown hights; and when at last they fell to earth, or to a region below it, they stared aghast in the great shock, and bewailed the loss of those things which their own hands had flung to the winds. They ranted about Brutus, (the assassin,) and played antique Romans like a bad provincial company. Among them all there were only two men who had the true gift of eloquence-a fatal gift in such hands. The one was Vergniaud, distinguished as an orator; the other, Camille Desmoulins, whose strength was in his pen. Vergniaud was sonorous and persuasive; Desmoulins was brilliant and satirical. He had in him an irony like that of Mephistopheles; he was a cruelhearted man, who stung when he killed; he relished murder when it was seasoned with a jest; he had an epigram for every head that rolled from the scaffold; he understood how to place his victims in a ludicrous position; and he could make even their dead bodies play out a comic scene. The influence of the press at this time in Paris was enormous, and the paper under his direction, the Révolution de France, was one of the most powerful instruments of wrong. His lampoons, his libels, his profane ribaldry directed against the Queen, used greatly to entertain Madame Roland, and he was one of her esteemed friends. But she thought differently of his powers when, at a later day, his wit played upon and polluted her own reputation. He was one who could "mock mothers from their sons, mock castles down;" but the day came when his mocking was silenced forever-when one head was severed by

VOL. LVII.-NO. 2

It was by her friends thought desirable that Marie Antoinette should now show herself frequently to her subjects, and she was persuaded on one occasion to accompany her family to the Comédie Italienne. Mrs. Elliot, whose Memoirs I have alluded to in a former number, was present on this evening, and gives an acccount of the scene which then took place:

"I was there (says Mrs. Elliot) in my own box, nearly opposite the Queen's, and as she was so much more interesting than the play, I never took my eyes off her and her family. The opera given was Les Evénemens imprévue, Her Majesty from her first entering the house and Madame Dugazon played the soubrette. seemed distressed. She was overcome even by the applause, and I saw her several times wipe the tears from her eyes. The little Dauphin, who sat on her knee the whole night, seemed anxious to know the cause of his unfortunate mother's tears. She seemed to soothe him, and the audience appeared well disposed, and to feel In one of the acts a duet is sung by the soufor the cruel situation of their beautiful Queen. brette and the valet, where Made. Dugazon says,

15

'Ah! comme j'aime ma maîtresse.'

As she looked particularly at the Queen at the moment she said this, some Jacobins leapt upon the stage, and if the actors had not hid Made. Dugazon, they would have murdered her. They hurried the poor Queen and family out of the house, and it was all the guards could do to get them safe into their carriages"

This was the last time that the Queen ever appeared in public. The show of hope was dissolving; the monarchy and its representatives were rapidly sinking, Marie Antoinette's imagination turned fondly to the frontiers. She thought of her friends among the emigrants, of the Count d'Artois who was dear to her as a brother, and of her own kindred. She thought that they must soon bring help. She relied on them, but they were the origin of her worst perils, and the source of her most grievous calamities.

Barnave saw where her trust was placed, and knew that it never could be fulfilled. He saw his own counsels for the formation of the Royal household and the King's guard disregarded. He would have filled these places with men of the popular side, like himself, still attached to the throne, but this suggestion was not accepted. The Queen's position, between the King's shiftings of purpose, the sullen bigotry of the côté droit, and the aggressive movements of the Girondin party, was most unhappy. She personally esteemed Barnave, but his power was not equal to his wish to serve her, and other voices influenced the Assembly. He had done his utmost, and he came to take his leave. Their last interview was trying to her. He expressed to her the ardor he had felt in her service, and the regret with which he left her in so perilous a position. He told her that if her hopes were with the emigrant princes and their allies, she was nursing a delusion, and urged upon her again his views for the safety of the interior. He told her that his task was over, and 'that he left her neither in fear nor in anger. He only went away because he saw that he could no longer be of use. He had served no personal interest in serving her. He was proud to think that he had run a great risk for her sake. He came to bid her adieu, perhaps forever, and he asked only one reward-this was, the permission to kiss her hand.

The Queen's resolution struggled vainly against her emotion while she heard these

words; and when she gave him her hand, her tears fell fast, fell over his hand and her own while they were for a moment linked together, and so they parted. She cherished the recollection of his sacrifice and of his remorse, not of his injustice. Made. Campan found her weeping bitterly after his departure, and his name was often dwelt on in the dark hours of distress by Marie Antoinette and the Princess Elizabeth with grateful affection. They were spared the knowledge of his fate. It was on the twenty-ninth October, 1793, after the date of the Queen's execution, that he paid the penalty of his virtue with his head. He was thirty-two years of age when the guillotine ended his eventful life. He had faced the probability of such a termination to his career; he knew what his peril was when he entered on his new path, and his death was worthy of his repentance.

The Queen strained her eyes to discern deliverance advancing from Coblentz; but it was ruin, not succor, that was marching onward. The loud-sounding threats of the emigrants and their allies furnished the revolutionists with their only plea for violence. The Girondins found in the menaces from foreign shores a pretext for aggressions. It was their policy continually to propose measures which must compel the King to use his veto, and then to force him to withdraw it. The King, conscious of the difficulties that surrounded him, and without strength to face them, fell into a deep despondency: for ten days he sat speechless, never addressing a word either to his sister, his children, or his wife. The Queen saw in this helpless dejection a worse calamity than all that had preceded, and fell upon her knees before him, passionately entreating him to speak to her. She appealed to him with caresses and with exhortations: her eloquence came from her heart. The King put his arms round her neck, and spoke; and this, for her, was a moment of rejoicing wrung from anguish.

Increasing perplexity and fears too well founded, threw the King into the arms of a patriot ministry, of which Dumouriez and Roland were the most conspicuous members; very different men, widely separated as to their genius and their actual opinions, but thrown together for the present by the force of circumstances. Dumouriez, bred as a courtier, had gone through many phases before he became a

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