CHAPTER XVIII.
THE ASSEMBLY AND THE COMMUNE.
It was the Commune which had caused the attack on the palace, which theking must have seen, for he took refuge in the House, and not in theCity Hall. The Commune wanted to smother the wolf--the she-wolf and thewhelps--between two blankets in their den.
This shelter to the royals converted the Assembly into Royalists. Itwas asserted that the Luxembourg Palace, assigned to the king as aresidence, had a secret communication with those catacombs which burrowunder Paris, so that he might get away at any hour.
The Assembly did not want to quarrel with the Commune over such atrifle, and allowed it to choose the royal house of detention.
The city pitched on the temple. It was not a palace, but a prison,under the town's hand; an old, lonely tower, strong, heavy, lugubrious.In it Philip the Fair broke up the Middle Ages revolting against him,and was royalty to be broken down in it now?
All the houses in the neighborhood were illuminated as the royalcaptives were taken hither to the part called "the palace," from CountArtois making it his city residence. They were happy to hold inbondage the king no more, but the friend of the foreign foe, the greatenemy of the Revolution, and the ally of the nobles and the clergy.
The royal servants looked at the lodgings with stupefaction. In theirtearful eyes were still the splendors of the kingly dwellings, whilethis was not even a prison into which was flung their master, but akennel! Misfortune was not to have any majesty.
But, through strength of mind or dullness, the king remainedunaffected, and slept on the poverty-stricken bed as tranquilly as inhis palace, perhaps more so.
At this time, the king would have been the happiest man in the worldhad he been given a country cottage with ten acres, a forge, a chapeland a chaplain, and a library of travel-books, with his wife andchildren. But it was altogether different with the queen.
The proud lioness did not rage at the sight of her cage, but that wasbecause so sharp a sorrow ached in her heart that she was blind andinsensible to all around her.
The men who had done the fighting in the capture of the Royaliststronghold were willing that the prisoners, Swiss and gentlemen, shouldbe tried by court-martial. But Marat shrieked for massacre, as makingshorter work than even a drum-head court.
Danton yielded to him. Before the snake the lion was cowed, and slunkaway, trying to act the fox.
The city wards pressed the Assembly to create an extraordinarytribunal. It was established on the twentieth, and condemned a Royalistto death. The execution took place by torch-light, with such horribleeffect, that the executioner, in the act of holding up the lopped-offhead to the mob, yelled and fell dead off upon the pavement.
The Revolution of 1789, with Necker, Bailly, and Sieyes, ended in1790; that of Barnave, Lafayette, and Mirabeau in 1792, while theRed Revolution, the bloody one of Danton, Marat, and Robespierre, wascommencing.
Lafayette, repulsed instinctively by the army, which he had called uponin an address to march on Paris and restore the king, had fled abroad.
Meanwhile, the Austrians, whom the queen had prayed to see in themoonlight from her palace windows, had captured Longwy. The otherextremity of France, La Vendee, had risen on the eve of this surrender.
To meet this condition of affairs, the Assembly assigned Dumouriez tothe command of the Army of the East; ordered the arrest of Lafayette;decreed the razing of Longwy when it should be retaken; banishedall priests who would not take the oath of allegiance; authorizedhouse-to-house visits for aristocrats and weapons, and sold all theproperty of fugitives.
The Commune, with Marat as its prophet, set up the guillotine onCarrousel Square, with an apology that it could only send one victim aday, owing to the trouble of obtaining convictions.
On the 28th of August, the Assembly passed the law on domiciliaryvisits. The rumor spread that the Austrian and Prussian armies hadeffected their junction, and that Longwy had fallen.
It followed that the enemy, so long prayed for by the king, the nobles,and the priests, was marching upon Paris, and might be here in sixstages, if nothing stopped him.
What would happen then to this boiling crater from which the shocks hadmade the Old World quake the last three years?
The insolent jest of Bouille would be realized, that not one stonewould be left upon another.
It was considered a sure thing that a general, terrible, and inexorabledoom was to fall on the Parisians after their city was destroyed. Aletter found in the Tuileries had said:
"In the rear of the army will travel the courts, informed on thejourney by the fugitives of the misdeeds and their authors, so that notime will be lost in trying the Jacobins in the Prussian king's camp,and getting their halters ready."
The stories also came of the Uhlans seizing Republican local worthiesand cropping their ears. If they acted thus on the threshold, whatwould they do when within the gates?
It was no longer a secret.
A great throne would be erected before the heap of ruins which wasParis. All the population would be dragged and beaten into passingbefore it; the good and the bad would be sifted apart as on thelast judgment day. The good--in other words, the religious and theRoyalists--would pass to the right, and France would be turned over tothem for them to work their pleasure; the bad, the rebels, would besent to the left, where would be waiting the guillotine, invented bythe Revolution, which would perish by it.
But to face the foreign invader, had this poor people any self-support?Those whom they had worshiped, enriched, and paid to defend her, wouldthey stand up for her now? No.
The king conspired with the enemy, and from the temple, where he wasconfined, continued to correspond with the Prussians and Austrians: thenobility marched against France, and were formed in battle array by herprinces; her priests made the peasants revolt. From their prison cells,the Royalist prisoners cheered over the defeats of the French by thePrussians, and the Prussians at Longwy were hailed by the captives inthe abbey and the temple.
In consequence, Danton, the man for extremes, rushed into the rostrum.
"When the country is in danger, everything belongs to the country," hesaid.
All the dwellings were searched, and three thousand persons arrested;two thousand guns were taken.
Terror was needed; they obtained it. The worst mischief from the searchwas one not foreseen; the mob had entered rich houses, and the sightof luxuries had redoubled their hatred, though not inciting them topillage. There was so little robbery that Beaumarchais, then in jail,said that the crowd nearly drowned a woman who plucked a rose in hisgardens.
On this general search day, the Commune summoned before its bar aGirondist editor, Girey-Dupre, who took refuge at the War Ministry,from not having time to get to the House. Insulted by one of itsmembers, the Girondists summoned the Commune's president, Huguenin,before its bar for having allowed the Ministry to take Girey by force.
Huguenin would not come, and he was ordered to be arrested by mainforce, while a fresh election for a Commune was decreed.
The present one determined to hold office, and thus was civil warset going. No longer the mob against the king, citizens againstaristocrats, the cottage against the castle; but hovels against houses,ward against ward, pike to pike, and mob to mob.
Marat called for the massacre of the Assembly; that was nothing,as people were used to his shrieks for wholesale slaughter. ButRobespierre, the prudent, wary, vague, and double-meaning denunciator,came out boldly for all to fly to arms, not merely to defend, but toattack. He must have judged the Commune was very strong to do this.
The physician who might have his fingers on the pulse of France at thisperiod must have felt the circulation run up at every beat.
The Assembly feared the working-men, who had broken in the Tuileriesgates and might dash in the Assembly doors. It feared, too, that if ittook up arms against the Commune, it would not only be abandoned by theRevolutionists, but be bolstered up by the moderate Royalists. In thatcase it woul
d be utterly lost.
It was felt that any event, however slight, might lead this disturbanceto colossal proportions. The event, related by one of our characters,who has dropped from sight for some time, and who took a share in it,occurred in the Chatelet Prison.