Chapter XXVIII: The Royal Family Imprisoned

Tumult and Dismay in the Assembly.--Storming the Tuileries.--Aspect
of the Royal Family.--The Decree of Suspension.--Night in the
Cloister.--The Second Day in the Assembly.--The Royal Family
Prisoners.--Third Day in the Assembly.--The Temple.--The Royal Family
Transferred to the Temple.

But few of the excited thousands who crowded all the approaches to the Tuileries were conscious that the royal family had escaped from the palace. The clamor rapidly increased to a scene of terrific uproar. First a few gun-shots were heard, then volleys of musketry, then the deep booming of artillery, while shouts of onset, cries of fury, and the shrieks of the wounded and the dying filled the air. The hall of the Assembly was already crowded to suffocation, and the deputies stood powerless and appalled. A tumultuous mass pressed the door. Blows, pistol-shots, and groans of death were heard beneath the windows, and it was every moment apprehended that the assassins would break into the hall, and that the royal family and all their defenders would be cut down. Several bullets shattered the windows, and one or two cannon-balls passed through the roof of the building. Every one was exposed to fearful peril.

There was no longer any retreat for the king. By the side of the president's chair there was a space inclosed by an iron railing, appropriated to the reporters. Several of the members aided the king in tearing down a portion of this railing, and all the royal family sought refuge there. At this moment the door of the hall was attacked, and tremendous blows seemed to shake the whole building. "We are stormed!" shouted one of the deputies. There was, however, no escape for any one in any direction, and for some moments there was witnessed a scene of confusion and terror which no language can describe.

At the same time there was a frightful conflict raging in and around the palace. Immediately upon the departure of the king, all the Swiss troops, who were hated as foreign mercenaries hired to shoot down the French, were drawn into the palace from the court-yard, and were mingled in confusion through its apartments with the loyalist gentlemen, the officers, and the domestics. Notwithstanding the vast dimensions of the palace, it was so crowded that there was scarcely space to move.

The throng in the Carrousel attacked one of the gates, broke it down, and rushed into the royal court, which was nearly vacated by the retirement of the Swiss. The companies of the National Guard in the Carrousel, instead of opposing, looked approvingly on, and were evidently quite disposed to lend the assailants a helping hand. A large piece of timber was placed at the foot of the staircase of the palace in the form of a barrier, and behind this were intrenched in disorder, crowding the steps, the Swiss and some of the National Guard who adhered to the king.[355]

Just then the whole Faubourg St. Antoine came marching along in solid column. They marched through the Carrousel, entered the court, and placed six pieces of cannon in battery to open a fire upon the palace. It was to avoid, if possible, a conflict, that the guards had been withdrawn from the court into the palace. The shouts of a countless multitude applauded this military movement of the mob. The Swiss had received command from the king not to fire. The crowd cautiously pressed nearer and nearer to the door, and at length, emboldened by the forbearance of the defenders of the palace, seized, with long poles to which hooks were attached, one after another of the sentinels, and, with shouts, captured and disarmed them. Thus five of the Swiss troops were taken prisoners.

At last a single shot was fired, no one can tell on which side. It was the signal for blood. The Swiss, crowded upon the magnificent marble stairs, rising one above another, occupied a very formidable position. They instantly opened a deadly fire. Volley succeeded volley, and every bullet told upon the dense mass crowding the court. At the same moment, from every window of the palace, a storm of shot was showered down upon the foe. In a moment the pavement was red with blood, and covered with the dying and the dead. The artillerymen abandoned their pieces, and the whole multitude rushed pell-mell, trampling the dead and wounded beneath them in frantic endeavors to escape from the court into the Carrousel. In a few moments the whole court was evacuated, and remained strewed with pikes, muskets, grenadiers' caps, and gory bodies.

The besiegers, however, soon rallied. Following the disciplined troops from Marseilles, who were led by able officers, the multitude returned with indescribable fury to the charge. Cannon-balls, bullets, and grapeshot dashed in the doors and the windows. Most of the loyalist gentlemen escaped by a secret passage through the long gallery of the Louvre, as the victorious rabble, with pike, bayonet, and sabre, poured resistlessly into the palace and rushed through all its apartments. The Swiss threw down their arms and begged for quarter. But the pitiless mob, exasperated by the slaughter of their friends, knew no mercy. Indiscriminate massacre ensued, accompanied with every conceivable act of brutality. For four hours the butchery continued, as attics, closets, cellars, chimneys, and vaults were searched, and the terrified victims were dragged out to die. Some leaped from the windows and endeavored to escape through the Garden. They were pursued and mercilessly cut down. Some climbed the marble monuments. The assassins, unwilling to injure the statuary, pricked them down with their bayonets and then slaughtered them at their feet. Seven hundred and fifty Swiss were massacred in that day of blood.

The Assembly during these hours were powerless, and they awaited in intense anxiety the issue of the combat. Nothing can more impressively show the weak and frivolous mind of the king than that, in such an hour, seeing the painter David in the hall, he inquired of him,

"How soon shall you probably have my portrait completed?"

David brutally replied, "I will never, for the future, paint the portrait of a tyrant until his head lies before me on the scaffold."[356]

The queen sat in haughty silence. Her compressed lip, burning eye, and hectic cheek indicated the emotions of humiliation and of indignation with which she was consumed. The young princess wept, and her fevered face was stained with the dried current of her tears. The dauphin, too young to appreciate the terrible significance of the scene, looked around in bewildered curiosity.

At eleven o'clock reiterated shouts of victory, which rose from the Garden, the palace, the Carrousel, and all the adjoining streets and places, proclaimed that the triumph of the people was complete. The Assembly, now overawed, unanimously passed a decree suspending the king, dismissing the Royalist ministers, recalling the Girondist ministry, and convoking a National Assembly for the trial of the king. As Vergniaud read, in accents of grief, this decree to which the Assembly had been forced, the king listened intently, and then said satirically to M. Coustard, who was standing by his side,

"This is not a very _constitutional_ act."

"True," M. Coustard replied; "but it is the only means of saving your majesty's life."

The Assembly immediately enacted the decrees, which the king had vetoed, banishing the refractory priests and establishing a camp near Paris. Danton,[357] whose tremendous energies had guided the insurrection, was appointed Minister of Justice. Monge, the illustrious mathematician, by the nomination of his equally illustrious friend Condorcet, was placed at the head of the Marine. Lebrun, a man of probity and untiring energy, was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs.

Thus was the whole government effectually revolutionized and reorganized. During all the long hours of this day the royal family sat in the crowded Assembly almost suffocated with heat, and enduring anguish which no tongue can tell. The streets were filled with uproar, and the waves of popular tumult dashed against the old monastery of the Feuillans, even threatening to break in the doors. The regal victims listened to the decrees which tore the crown from the brow of the king, and which placed his sceptre in the hands of his most envenomed foes. In the conflict with the defenders of the palace, between three and four thousand of the populace had perished, in revenge for which nearly eight hundred of the inmates of the Tuileries had been massacred. The relatives of the slain citizens, exasperated beyond measure, were clamorous for the blood of the king as the cause of the death of their friends. There was no possible covert for the royal family but in the Assembly. Fifty armed soldiers, with bayonets fixed, surrounded them in their box, and yet it was every moment feared that the populace would break in and satiate their rage with the blood of the monarch and his family.

The king was ever famed for his ravenous appetite. Even in the midst of these terrific scenes he was hungry and called for food. Bread, wine, and cold viands were brought to him. He ate and drank voraciously to the extreme mortification of the queen, who could not but perceive how little respect the conduct of the king inspired. Neither she, Madame Elizabeth, nor the children could taste of any food. They merely occasionally moistened their fevered lips with iced water.

It was now ten o'clock in the evening. The night was calm and beautiful. The tumult of the day was over, but the terrific excitement of the scene had brought the whole population of Paris out into the promenades. Fires were still blazing beneath the trees of the Tuileries, consuming the furniture which had been thrown from the windows of the chateau. Lurid flames flashed from the barracks of the Swiss in the court-yard, which had been set on fire, streaming over the roof of the palace, and illuminated both banks of the Seine.

The whole number slain during the day, Royalists and Revolutionists, amounted to over four thousand. Many of the dead had been removed by relatives, but the ground was still covered with the bodies of the slain, who were entirely naked, having been stripped of their clothing by those wretches who ever swarm in the streets of a great city, and who find their carnival in deeds of violence and blood. By order of the insurrectional committee at the Hotel de Ville, who had deposed the municipal government and usurped its authority, these dead bodies were collected and piled in vast heaps in the court-yards, in the Garden, in the Place Louis XV., and in the Elysian Fields. Immense quantities of wood were thrown upon them, and the whole city was illuminated by the glare of these funeral fires. The Swiss and the Marsellais, the Royalists and the Jacobins, were consumed together, and the ashes were swept clean from the pavement into the Seine.

As these scenes at midnight were transpiring in the streets, the Assembly sent a summary of its decrees to be read by torch-light to the groups of the people. It was hoped that these decrees would satisfy them, and put a stop to any farther acts of violence on the morrow. It was two o'clock in the morning before the Assembly suspended its sitting. For seventeen hours the royal family had sat in the reporters' box, enduring all of humiliation and agony which human hearts can feel.

In the upper part of the old monastery, above the committee-rooms of the Assembly, there was a spacious corridor, from which opened several cells formerly used by the monks. These cells, with walls of stone and floors of brick, and entirely destitute of furniture, were as gloomy as the dungeons of a prison. Here only could the king and his family find safety for the night. Some articles of furniture were hastily collected from different parts of the building, and four of these rooms were prepared for the royal party. Five nobles, who had heroically adhered to the king in these hours of peril, occupied one, where, wrapped in their cloaks and stretched out upon the floor, they could still watch through the night over the monarch. The king took the next. It was furnished with a table, and a plain wooden bedstead. He bound a napkin around his head for a night-cap, and threw himself, but partially undressed, upon his uncurtained bed. The queen, with her two children, took the next cell. Madame Elizabeth, with the governess of the children, Madame de Tourzel, and the Princess Lamballe, who had joined the royal family in the evening, took the fourth. Thus, after thirty-six hours of sleeplessness and terror, the royal family were left to such repose as their agitated minds could attain.

The sun had long arisen when the queen awoke from her fevered slumber. She looked around her for a moment with an expression of anguish, and then, covering her eyes with her hands, exclaimed,

"Oh, I hoped that it had all been a dream!"

The whole party soon met in the apartment of the king. As Madame Tourzel led in the two royal children, Marie Antoinette looked at them sadly, and said,

"Poor children! how heart-rending it is, instead of handing down to them so fine an inheritance, to say, it ends with us!"

"I still see, in imagination," writes Madame Campan, "and shall always see, that narrow cell of the Feuillans, hung with green paper; that wretched couch where the dethroned queen stretched out her arms to us, saying that our misfortunes, of which she was the cause, aggravated her own. There, for the last time, I saw the tears, I heard the sobs of her whom her high birth, the endowments of nature, and, above all, the goodness of her heart, had seemed to destine for the ornament of a throne and for the happiness of her people."

The tumult of the streets still penetrated their cells, and warned them that they had entered upon another day of peril. The excited populace were still hunting out the aristocrats, and killing them pitilessly wherever they could be found. At ten o'clock the royal family were conducted again to the Assembly, probably as the safest place they could occupy, and there they remained all day. Several of the Swiss had been taken prisoners on the previous day, and by humane people had been taken to the Assembly that their lives might be saved. The mob now clamored loudly at the door of the hall, and endeavored to break in, demanding the lives of the Swiss and of the escort of the king, calling them murderers of the people. Vergniaud, the president, was so shocked by their ferocity that he exclaimed, "Great God, what cannibals!"

At one time the doors were so nearly forced that the royal family were hurried into one of the passages, to conceal them from the mob. The king, fully convinced that the hour of his death had now come, entreated his friends to provide for their safety by flight. Heroically, every one persisted in sharing the fate of the king. Danton hastened to the Assembly, and exerted all his rough and rude energy to appease the mob. They were at length pacified by the assurance that the Swiss, and all others who had abetted in the slaughter of the people on the preceding day, should be tried by a court-martial and punished. With great difficulty the Assembly succeeded in removing the Swiss and the escort of the king to the prison of the Abbaye.

At the close of this day the king and his family were again conducted to their cells, but they were placed under a strict guard, and their personal friends were no longer permitted to accompany them. This last deprivation was a severe blow to them all, and the king said bitterly,

"I am, then, a prisoner, gentlemen. Charles I. was more fortunate than myself. His friends were permitted to accompany him to the scaffold."

Another morning dawned upon this unhappy family, and again they were led to the hall of the Assembly, where they passed the weary hours of another day in the endurance of all the pangs of martyrdom.

It was at length decided that the royal family, for safe keeping, should be imprisoned in the tower of the Temple. This massive, sombre building, in whose gloomy architecture were united the palace, the cloister, the fortress, and the prison, was erected and inhabited by the Knights Templar of the Middle Ages. Having been long abandoned it was now crumbling to decay. It was an enormous pile which centuries had reared near the site of the Bastille, and with its palace, donjon, towers, and garden, which was choked with weeds and the debris of crumbling walls, covered a space of many acres.

The main tower was one hundred and fifty feet high, nine feet thick at the base, surrounded by a wide, deep ditch, and inclosed by an immensely high wall. This tower was ascended by a very narrow flight of circular stairs, and was divided into four stories, each containing a bare, dismal room about thirty feet square. The iron doors to these rooms were so low and narrow that it was necessary to stoop almost double to enter them. The windows, which were but slits in the thick wall, were darkened by slanting screens placed over them, and were also secured by stout iron bars.

Such were the apartments which were now assigned to the former occupants of the Tuileries, Versailles, and Fontainebleau. It was a weary ride for the royal captives through the Place Vendome and along the Boulevards to the Temple. An immense crowd lined the road. All the royal family, with Petion, the mayor, occupied one carriage, and the procession moved so slowly that for two hours the victims were exposed to the gaze of the populace before the carriages rolled under the arches of the Temple. It was late in the afternoon when they left the Assembly, and the shades of night darkened the streets ere they reached the Temple.

The Assembly had surrendered the safe-keeping of the king to the Commune of Paris, and appropriated one hundred thousand dollars to meet the expenses of the royal family until the king should be brought to trial. Conscious that an army of nearly two hundred thousand men was within a few days' march of Paris, hastening to rescue the king, and that there were thousands of Royalists in the city, and tens of thousands in France, who were ready at any moment to lay down their lives to secure the escape of the monarch, and conscious that the escape of the king would not only re-enslave France, but consign every friend of the Revolution to the dungeon or the scaffold, they found it necessary to adopt the most effectual measures to hold the king securely. They, therefore, would no longer allow the friends of the king to hold free communication with him.

The Temple itself, by outworks, had been promptly converted into a fortress, and was strongly garrisoned by the National Guard. Twelve commissioners were without interruption to keep watch of the king's person. No one was allowed to enter the tower of the Temple without permission of the municipality. Four hundred dollars were placed in the hands of the royal family for their petty expenses. They were not intrusted with more, lest it might aid them to escape. A single attendant, the king's faithful valet Clery,[358] was permitted to accompany the captives. It does not appear that the authorities wished to add unnecessary rigor to the imprisonment. Thirteen cooks were provided for the kitchen, that their table might be abundantly supplied. One of these only was allowed to enter the prison and aid Clery in serving at the table, the expenses of which for two months amounted to nearly six thousand dollars.[359]

It was an hour after midnight when the royal family were led from the apartments of the Temple to which they had first been conducted to their prison in the tower. The night was intensely dark. Dragoons with drawn sabres marched by the side of the king, while municipal officers with lanterns guided their steps. Through gloomy and dilapidated halls, beneath massive turrets, and along the abandoned paths of the garden, encumbered with weeds and stones, they groped their way until they arrived at the portals of the tower, whose summit was lost in the obscurity of night. As in perfect silence the sad procession was passing through the garden, a valet-de-chambre of the king inquired in a low tone of voice whither the king was to be conducted.

"Thy master," was the reply, "has been used to gilded roofs. Now he will see how the assassins of the people are lodged."

The three lower rooms of the tower were assigned to the captives. They had been accompanied by several of their friends who adhered to them in these hours of adversity. All were oppressed with gloom, and many shed bitter tears. Still they were not in _despair_. Powerful armies were marching for their rescue, and they thought it not possible that the French people, all unprepared for war, could resist such formidable assailants. A week thus passed away, when on the 19th the municipal officers entered and ordered the immediate expulsion of all not of the royal family. This harsh measure was deemed necessary in consequence of the conspiracies which were formed by the Royalists for the rescue of the king. Unfeeling jailers were now placed over them, and, totally uninformed of all that was passing in the world without, they sank into the extreme of woe.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 355: "Napoleon se trouvait au 10ieme Aout a Paris; il avait ete present a l'action. Il m'ecrevit une lettre tres detaillee, que je lus a mes collegues du directoire du departement; voici les deux traits principaux. 'Si Louis XVI. se fut montre a cheval la victoire lui fut restee; c'est ce qui m'a paru, a l'esprit qui animait les groupes le matin.

"'Apres la victoire des Marseillais, j'en vis un sur le point de tuer un garde du corps; je lui dis,

"'Homme du midi, sauvons ce malheureux!

"'Es tu du midi?

"'Oui!

"'Eh, bien! sauvons le!'"--_Memoires du Roi Joseph_, t. i., p. 47.]

[Footnote 356: History of the Girondists, by Lamartine, vol. ii., p. 77.]

[Footnote 357: Danton was one of the fiercest of the Jacobins. Madame Roland, a political opponent, thus describes him: "I never saw any countenance that so strongly expressed the violence of brutal passions, and the most astonishing audacity, half disguised by a jovial air, an affectation of frankness, and a sort of simplicity, as Danton's. In 1778 he was a needy lawyer, more burdened with debts than causes. He went to Belgium to augment his resources, and, after the 10th of August, had the hardihood to avow a fortune of L158,333 ($791,665), and to wallow in luxury while preaching sans culottism and sleeping on heaps of slaughtered men." "Danton," says Mignet, "was a gigantic revolutionist. He deemed no means censurable so they were useful. He has been termed the Mirabeau of the populace. Mirabeau's vices were those of a patrician. Danton's those of a democrat. He was an absolute exterminator without being personally ferocious; inexorable toward masses, humane, generous even, toward individuals."--_Mignet_, p. 158.]

[Footnote 358: "Clery we have seen and known, and the form and manners of that model of pristine faith and loyalty ran never be forgotten. Gentlemanlike and complaisant in his manners, his deep gravity and melancholy features announced that the sad scenes in which he had acted a part so honorable were never for a moment out of his memory."--_Scott's Life of Napoleon._]

[Footnote 359: Thiers's Hist. French Revolution, vol. ii., p. 26.]