To the scaffold (46 page)

But his words were drowned out by the continual shoutii^.

"Down with the veto! Ratify the decrees! Long live the nation!"

In exasperation Louis picked up a little bell and rang it in an effort to get attention. Several nobles, standing near him, waved their ivory sticks in the air and—"very politely" one observer thought—pleaded with the invaders to respect the law.

It was a curious scene, with hatchet-waving fishwives and craftsmen from the faubourgs arguing with their monarch. They accused him of lying to them, of deceiving them. "You have cheated us!" they screamed when he tried to protest. "Knots of rebels hustled the King," Madame de Tourzel remembered after-

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wards. "One wretch, armed with a pike, and with his eyes full of rage, advanced, making a sinister movement." Yet he did not strike the King, something held him back. A potentially murderous confrontation became a shouting match. The King accepted a bottle of wine from a butcher and drank the nation's health. He accepted a red cap from someone and put it on—with difficulty, because it was too small—and continued to wear it as the day went on. He listened, or appeared to listen, to the personal advice offered him by individual Parisians.

"Sire," one of them told the King, "your enemies are not in Paris, they are at Coblentz and it is time you realized that however much you would like to go and join them. The people, on the other hand, only want to see you happily going along with the constitution, and if you did this in good faith they would love you even more because, I repeat, they want to love you."

Louis listened to the man "open-mouthed, gaping at him wide-eyed," then told him that he would always remain faithful to the constitution.

"You are still deceiving us. Sire," the man replied, "but you had better watch out."^

All this time Antoinette had been restrained by her servants in her son's rooms, not knowing whether her husband was alive or dead. She held the little boy in her arms, weeping, "almost suffocated with her sobs." Then a message came from Elisabeth, telling Antoinette that Louis had not been killed, "that he was displaying the greatest courage," and that she would only do harm if she were with them. Meanwhile more Parisians broke into the outer room of the dauphin's suite and Antoinette hurried into the King's bedroom.

A delegation from the Assembly arrived at the palace to assess the situation, and tried to address the crowd, which ignored them. The deputies ranged themselves around Louis, and listened while one young man harangued him for nearly an hour, making what Madame de Tourzel called "absurd requests."

"This is neither the moment to make nor to grant such requests," the King told his subject. "Address yourself to the magistrates, the mouthpieces of the law; they will answer you."

After three hours of this Petion finally arrived, but instead of bringing an armed force with him to put down the lawlessness he announced that all was well, the King had not been harmed and

J/O CAROLLY ERICKSON

that his person had been respected. Then he went away again, leaving the King and Queen to the mercy of their tormentors.

One of the dauphin's footmen rushed breathlessly in to warn Antoinette that the outer hall was full of rioters who were smashing in all the doors and were just behind him. She hurried into the royal council chamber, where she faced the crowd, holding both her children close to her, pretending to ignore the torrent of catcalls and jeers and threats that erupted.

Protected by a ring of faithful grenadiers from the Filles Saint Thomas battalion, "who constantly opposed an impenetrable wall to the bellowing crowd," she sat down behind a table with her children on her right and left, and several Assembly deputies behind her. Santerre, the brewer from the Faubourg St.-Antoine who was one of the "Bastille men" and who had helped to organize the current demonstration, told the grenadiers to stand aside so that he might speak to the Queen.

"You are led astray, you are mistaken, madam," he told her. "The people love you and the King better than you think. Fear nothing."

"I am neither led astray nor mistaken," Antoinette replied with dignity. "And I know that I have nothing to fear in the midst of the National Guard." As she spoke she pointed to the soldiers.

For two hours the Queen was on display, with the brewer hustling demonstrators in and out of the room in shifts. Each group had the opportunity to see Antoinette and shout at her. A boy walked in carrying a bleeding calf's head on a pike. "Heart of the aristocrats" was written on an accompanying banner. Armed women shook their weapons at the Queen, she was called every obscene name in the Parisian vocabulary. She sat still, holding her children tightly, her face calm and her poise intact. Her evident fragility surprised some in the crowd, but even Madame de Tour-zel did not hear any stray shouts of "Long live the Queen" amid the abuse. Santerre continued to usher people in and out of the council chamber, until at last the crowd dispersed and straggled slowly out of the palace, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake. A number of Assembly deputies lingered until the early hours of the morning, and Antoinette, letting out her anger at last, insisted on taking them through her son's rooms and showing them the hacked and splintered doors, the broken locks and shattered panels. There was evidence of the havoc everywhere, in the salons

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and on the staircases, even on the roof, and the Queen insisted that a full report of the damage be made."^

In the days following the assault on the palace the royal family braced for another onslaught by the Parisians. They knew now that they were undefended, there was no one, no force, they could look to to protect them. Somewhat to their surprise, the allied troops on France's northern border were slow to press their advantage. But they would invade eventually, and when they did Louis and Antoinette would face their greatest danger to date. The Assembly kept the scattered, demoralized revolutionary army in the field by printing three hundred millions more in assignats and raising fresh battalions of volunteers. And at the palace, where all was confusion and where Louis had retreated into morose silence, ministries changed every few weeks—sometimes every few days—and there was no stability.

"Our position is becoming ever more critical," Antoinette wrote to Mercy in Brussels early in July. "On one side there is nothing but violence and fury, on the other, weakness and inertia. We cannot count on either the National Guard or the army, we do not know whether we ought to stay in Paris or go elsewhere." As ever, the Queen was the one forced to make the crucial decision. Mercy advised her to take her family to Compi^gne, then on to Amiens or Abbeville where stalwart monarchists stood ready to defend the sovereign.^ The Landgravine of Hesse-Darmstadt offered to smuggle Antoinette out of Paris, but she refused to leave Louis and the children.

Every day ministers, diplomats, well-wishers begged the King and Queen to put themselves out of danger, and offered to make the arrangements, to ensure that loyal troops would be waiting to escort them to safety. Louis's own plan, to let himself be taken out of the capital through the forest by a band of smugglers, was still possible. Lafayette conspired to take over the government by force and warned the King that he must remove himself from harm's way at once. But Louis, though at times he vacillated and at least once made up his mind to attempt another escape, always returned to the same opinion in the end: he would stay in Paris, he had given his word, he would wait to be rescued by the Austrians and Prussians when at last they came.^

Antoinette was convinced that the radicals were planning to assassinate Louis. They were only waiting for the right moment.

J/-2 CAROLLY ERICKSON

The Cordeliers Club boasted that among its members was a secret society of tyramiicides who had sworn to kill everyone who attacked French liberty—and the King was the worst offender. ^ "The band of assassins is growing incessantly," the Queen told Fersen, "I still live, but it is a miracle that I do. They no longer want me—they want to kill my husband."^ One frightened courtier brought Madame de Tourzel three stiff tunics made of twelve folds of taffeta, "impenetrable by bullet or dagger," which he had made for the King and Queen and the dauphin. The governess took the three cuirasses to Antoinette, who immediately tried hers on.

"Strike me," she ordered Madame de Tourzel, who had taken up a knife to test the garments, "and see if it penetrates." The idea horrified the governess, who said that she would do no such thing. Antoinette then took off the tunic and Madame de Tourzel put it on and struck it with the knife. It appeared to be impenetrable. Antoinette went to Louis and they agreed to wear the cuirasses "at the slightest symptom of danger."^

"Believe that our courage never deserts us," she wrote in cipher to Fersen. In fact it was not their courage but their endurance, their power to go on day after day in ever increasing danger, that was being tested. Antoinette worried once again about poison in their food, about the murderous bands that roved the outskirts of the Tuileries, shouting "Death to the King! Kill the Queen!" She shivered with fear when the orchestra in the royal chapel played "^a ira" instead of religious anthems and when the very guardsmen outside her apartments shouted "Down with the veto!" when the King passed by.

On July 11, the Assembly, fearing imminent invasion and no longer willing to entrust the national defense to the King and his ministers, declared that a special state of danger to the country existed, and that any and all measures could be taken to save it. Two tense weeks later, the Duke of Brunswick, commander of the allied forces of Austria and Prussia, somewhat reluctantly lent his name to a threatening manifesto declaring the war aims of the allied army. Their purpose, the manifesto said, was to end the anarchy in France, to defend the monarchy and the Church, and to restore Louis to liberty and to the fiill exercise of his rightful authority. "If the Palace of the Tuileries is assaulted or invaded," the manifesto went on, "if the least violence, the least insult is

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directed at their Majesties the King and Queen ... an exemplary and memorable vengeance will follow and the city of Paris will undergo a military execution."

The Austrians were on the march at last, and were sweeping through the country south of Lille. The Assembly had sent all the regular troops away from Paris—though the Swiss Guard moved in to camp in the courtyard of the Tuileries—and was attempting to raise fifty thousand more volunteers. Rumors flew that England was about to join the invasion. Red caps now crowned every head, every Parisian wore the tricolor cockade. A new group of sansculottes from Marseilles, some six hundred strong, swept into Paris and began provoking drunken riots during which several national guardsmen were killed. The men from Marseilles drowned out the "C^ Jra" with a song of their own, a song full of ^lan and gore and with a thrilling chorus:

"To arms, citizens!

Form your battalions!

March on, march on

Let our fields be soaked in their impure blood!"

Soon everyone was singing the new "Marseillaise" and carrying weapons. Paris itself was becoming a battlefield, armed against the enemies both within and outside the gates. The forty-eight sections, or political wards, of the city were on the alert, ready to direct the assault. In the faubourgs, the cannon were loaded, the patriots in arms. On August 3, the sections voted to dethrone the King; if the Assembly had not deposed him within a week, they declared, the people would rise and carry out the task themselves, before the Austrians arrived to destroy the city and slaughter its inhabitants.

"Hurry, if you can, to bring us the help you promised us for our deliverance," Antoinette wrote in desperation to Fersen. She could not sleep, both she and Louis were up all night, "expecting to be murdered." Her distress and anguish were indescribable. "Everyone is awaiting the catastrophe soon to come," she told Fersen. Everyone knew that Paris, at its deadliest and most revengeful, was about to explode.

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HE bells tolled solemnly, mournfully, ceaselessly. All the sections of the capital were on the march, the faubourgs under the brewer Santerre, the Left Bank, joined by the men of Marseilles and another contingent of guards from Brest. People ran frantically through the streets, a mixture of elation and fear on their faces. "Fly to arms! Fly to arms!" was the universal cry. It was a hot night, the night of August 9, and doors and windows were flung wide to the night air. The word had spread that all the houses were to be illuminated, and in street after street yellow light glowed from lanterns and torches and spilled out onto the dusty pavingstones.

Earlier that day the Legislative Assembly had once again rejected a petition from the provincial National Guard—the Federates—calling for the deposition of the King and election of a national convention. The Jacobins, together with other activists in the Paris sections, had long been planning to act on their own authority. Now representatives of the sections met at the Hotel de Ville to take the government of France into their own hands. While the bells rang and the hastily assembled forces mustered, Paris reformed itself into an insurrectionary commune, and ordered the old municipal council dissolved. The Commander-in-Chief of the National Guard, the Marquis de Mandat, who had been entrusted by Mayor Petion with protecting the Tuileries, was deposed and murdered, and replaced by Santerre. Petion himself was replaced and put in detention.

Before dawn on the morning of August 10, the feast of Saint

Lawrence the Martyr, the men and women of the faubourgs began their march on the palace, thousands strong.

Inside the palace, no one could sleep. Informants had told the royal family that another popular assault was planned for the day of the tenth, and a plan of defense was in place. But apart from the Swiss Guard in the courtyard, a splendid body of nine hundred or so troops who were drawn up to form a cordon, and the eccentric noblemen who had enrolled as "Knights of the Dagger," there were no reliable defenders, and the courtiers knew it.