It was the Commune which had caused the attack on the palace, which the king must have seen, for he took refuge in the House, and not in the City Hall. The Commune wanted to smother the wolf—the she-wolf and the whelps—between two blankets in their den.
This shelter to the royals converted the Assembly into Royalists. It was asserted that the Luxembourg Palace, assigned to the king as a residence, had a secret communication with those catacombs which burrow under Paris, so that he might get away at any hour.
The Assembly did not want to quarrel with the Commune over such a trifle, 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 royal captives were taken hither to the part called "the palace," from Count Artois making it his city residence.[Pg 132] They were happy to hold in bondage the king no more, but the friend of the foreign foe, the great enemy of the Revolution, and the ally of the nobles and the clergy.
The royal servants looked at the lodgings with stupefaction. In their tearful eyes were still the splendors of the kingly dwellings, while this was not even a prison into which was flung their master, but a kennel! Misfortune was not to have any majesty.
But, through strength of mind or dullness, the king remained unaffected, and slept on the poverty-stricken bed as tranquilly as in his palace, perhaps more so.
At this time, the king would have been the happiest man in the world had he been given a country cottage with ten acres, a forge, a chapel and a chaplain, and a library of travel-books, with his wife and children. But it was altogether different with the queen.
The proud lioness did not rage at the sight of her cage, but that was because so sharp a sorrow ached in her heart that she was blind and insensible to all around her.
The men who had done the fighting in the capture of the Royalist stronghold were willing that the prisoners, Swiss and gentlemen, should be tried by court-martial. But Marat shrieked for massacre, as making shorter work than even a drum-head court.
Danton yielded to him. Before the snake the lion was cowed, and slunk away, trying to act the fox.
The city wards pressed the Assembly to create an extraordinary tribunal. It was established on the twentieth, and condemned a Royalist to death. The execution took place by torch-light, with such horrible effect, that the executioner, in the act of holding up the lopped-off head to the mob, yelled and fell dead off upon the pavement.
The Revolution of 1789, with Necker, Bailly, and Sieyes, ended in 1790; that of Barnave, Lafayette, and Mirabeau[Pg 133] in 1792, while the Red Revolution, the bloody one of Danton, Marat, and Robespierre, was commencing.
Lafayette, repulsed instinctively by the army, which he had called upon in an address to march on Paris and restore the king, had fled abroad.
Meanwhile, the Austrians, whom the queen had prayed to see in the moonlight from her palace windows, had captured Longwy. The other extremity of France, La Vendee, had risen on the eve of this surrender.
To meet this condition of affairs, the Assembly assigned Dumouriez to the command of the Army of the East; ordered the arrest of Lafayette; decreed the razing of Longwy when it should be retaken; banished all priests who would not take the oath of allegiance; authorized house-to-house visits for aristocrats and weapons, and sold all the property of fugitives.
The Commune, with Marat as its prophet, set up the guillotine on Carrousel Square, with an apology that it could only send one victim a day, owing to the trouble of obtaining convictions.
On the 28th of August, the Assembly passed the law on domiciliary visits. The rumor spread that the Austrian and Prussian armies had effected 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 six stages, if nothing stopped him.
What would happen then to this boiling crater from which the shocks had made the Old World quake the last three years?
The insolent jest of Bouille would be realized, that not one stone would be left upon another.
It was considered a sure thing that a general, terrible, and inexorable doom was to fall on the Parisians after their city was destroyed. A letter found in the Tuileries had said:
[Pg 134]
"In the rear of the army will travel the courts, informed on the journey by the fugitives of the misdeeds and their authors, so that no time 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 worthies and cropping their ears. If they acted thus on the threshold, what would they do when within the gates?
It was no longer a secret.
A great throne would be erected before the heap of ruins which was Paris. All the population would be dragged and beaten into passing before it; the good and the bad would be sifted apart as on the last judgment day. The good—in other words, the religious and the Royalists—would pass to the right, and France would be turned over to them for them to work their pleasure; the bad, the rebels, would be sent to the left, where would be waiting the guillotine, invented by the 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, would they stand up for her now? No.
The king conspired with the enemy, and from the temple, where he was confined, continued to correspond with the Prussians and Austrians: the nobility marched against France, and were formed in battle array by her princes; her priests made the peasants revolt. From their prison cells, the Royalist prisoners cheered over the defeats of the French by the Prussians, and the Prussians at Longwy were hailed by the captives in the 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," he said.
[Pg 135]
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 search was one not foreseen; the mob had entered rich houses, and the sight of luxuries had redoubled their hatred, though not inciting them to pillage. There was so little robbery that Beaumarchais, then in jail, said that the crowd nearly drowned a woman who plucked a rose in his gardens.
On this general search day, the Commune summoned before its bar a Girondist editor, Girey-Dupre, who took refuge at the War Ministry, from not having time to get to the House. Insulted by one of its members, 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 main force, while a fresh election for a Commune was decreed.
The present one determined to hold office, and thus was civil war set going. No longer the mob against the king, citizens against aristocrats, 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. But Robespierre, the prudent, wary, vague, and double-meaning denunciator, came out boldly for all to fly to arms, not merely to defend, but to attack. 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 this period must have felt the circulation run up at every beat.
The Assembly feared the working-men, who had broken in the Tuileries gates and might dash in the Assembly[Pg 136] doors. It feared, too, that if it took up arms against the Commune, it would not only be abandoned by the Revolutionists, but be bolstered up by the moderate Royalists. In that case it would be utterly lost.
It was felt that any event, however slight, might lead this disturbance to 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.