Chapter XI: Book V: 218 (2)

Every peasant, sailor, and husbandman owns a little white cottage with a garden; among the vegetables, the currant-bushes, the roses, the irises, the marigolds of this garden, you find a shoot of Cayenne tea, a stalk of Virginian tobacco, a Chinese flower, some kind of souvenir of other shores and another sun: they compose the chart and the itinerary of the owner. The occupiers of these coast holdings belong to a fine Norman race; the women are tall, slender, active, and wear grey-woolen bodices, petticoats of calamanco and striped silk, white stockings with colored clocks. Their foreheads are shaded by an ample dimity or cambric head-dress, the flaps of which stand up in the shape of a cap or float like a veil. A number of silver chains hang in a bunch at their left side. Every morning, in the spring, these daughters of the North, stepping from their boats, as though they were coming once again to invade the land, carry to market baskets of fruit and shells filled with curds: when, with one hand, they hold on their heads black jars full of milk or flowers, when the lappets of their white caps set off their blue eyes, their pink faces, their fair hair pearled with dew, the Valkyrs of the _Edda_, of whom the youngest is the Future, or the Basket-bearers of Athens, were less graceful. Does the picture still resemble the original? Those women, doubtless, no longer exist; nought remains but my recollection of them.

*

I left my mother and went to see my two elder sisters, who lived near Fougères. I stayed a month with Madame de Chateaubourg. Her two country-houses, Lascardais[299] and Le Plessis[300], near Saint-Aubin-du-Cormier, famous for its tower and its battle[301], stood in a country of rocks, moors, and woods. My sister's steward was M. Livoret[302], formerly a Jesuit, who had met with a strange adventure.

When he was made steward at Lascardais, the Comte de Chateaubourg, the elder, had just died: M. Livoret, who had not known him, was installed as care-taker of the castle. The first night that he slept there alone, he saw a pale old man come into his room, in a dressing-gown and night-cap, and carrying a little light. The apparition went to the hearth, placed the candlestick on the mantel, lit the fire and sat down in a chair. M. Livoret trembled all over his body. After two hours spent in silence, the old man rose, took his light again, and left the room, closing the door behind him.

The next day the steward told his adventure to the farm-people, who, on hearing the description of the spectre, declared that it was their old master. The matter did not end there: if M. Livoret looked behind him in a wood, he saw the ghost; if he had to climb over a stile in a field, the shade set itself astride the stile. One day, the unhappy haunted man venturing to say, "Monsieur de Chateaubourg, leave me," the ghost replied, "No." M. Livoret, a cold and practical man, possessed of very little imagination, repeated his story as often as he was asked, always in the same way and with the same conviction.

[Sidenote: A visit to Normandy.]

A little later I accompanied to Normandy a brave officer attacked with brain-fever. We were lodged in a farm-house: an old tapestry, lent by the lord of the manor, separated my bed from the invalid's. Behind this hanging the patient was bled: to relieve him of his sufferings, they plunged him into ice-baths; he shivered under this torture, with his nails turned blue, his violet face haggard, and his teeth clenched. His head was shaven, and a long beard which came down from his pointed chin served to clothe his bare, wet, lean chest.

When the invalid had a fit of crying, he opened an umbrella, thinking that he was sheltering himself from his tears: if this were a sure protection against weeping, a statue should be raised to the inventor.

My only happy moments were those at which I went to wander in the grave-yard of the village church, built upon a mound. My companions were the dead, a few birds, and the setting sun. I dreamed of Paris society, of my early years, of my phantom, of the Combourg woods, to which I was so near in point of space, though so far removed in point of time. I returned to my poor sick man: it was the blind leading the blind.

Alas, let a blow, a fall, a moral suffering deprive Homer, Newton, Bossuet of their genius, and those divine men, instead of exciting profound pity, bitter and eternal regret, would be the object of a smile! Many people whom I have known and loved have seen their reason troubled while about me, as though I bore with me the germ of the contagion. I can explain Cervantes' masterpiece and its cruel gaiety only by a sad reflection: when one considers existence as a whole, and weighs its good and evil, one feels tempted to long for any accident that brings forgetfulness with it, as a means of escaping from one's self; a joyful drunkard is a happy being. Putting religion aside, happiness lies in not knowing one's self and in reaching death without having felt life.

I brought my friend back completely cured.

*

Madame Lucile and Madame de Farcy, who had returned with me to Brittany, wished to go back to Paris; but I was detained by the unsettled condition of the province. The States had been summoned for the end of December 1788. The commune of Rennes and, following in its wake, the other communes of Brittany had passed a resolution forbidding their deputies to take part in any business before the question of hearth-money had been settled.

The Comte de Boisgelin[303], who was to preside over the order of the nobles, hurried to Rennes. The gentry were convoked by private letters; among them were those who, like myself, were still too young to have votes in the deliberations. We might be attacked, strong arms needed counting as well as votes: we went to our posts.

A number of meetings were held at M. de Boisgelin's before the opening of the States. All the scenes of confusion at which I had assisted were renewed. The Chevalier de Guer, the Marquis de Trémargat, my uncle the Comte de Bedée, nicknamed Bedée the Artichoke, because of his stoutness, as opposed to another Bedée, long and slim, who was called Bedée the Asparagus, broke a number of chairs in climbing on them to deliver their harangues. The Marquis de Trémargat, a wooden-legged naval officer, made many enemies for his order. One day they were talking of establishing a military school for the education of the sons of poor nobles; a member of the Third Estate cried:

"And what are our sons to have?"

"The almshouse," replied Trémargat.

The phrase fell among the crowd and soon bore fruit.

At these meetings I became aware of a disposition of character in myself which I have since found again in the field of politics and arms: the more my colleagues or companions grew inflamed, the calmer I became. I saw the tribune or the gun fired with indifference: I have never bowed before either words or cannon-balls.

The result of our deliberations was that the nobles were to treat general matters first, and not busy themselves with hearth-money until the other questions had been disposed of; a resolution directly opposed to that of the commons. The nobles had no great confidence in the clergy, who often abandoned them, especially when presided over by the Bishop of Rennes[304], a wheedling, circumspect person, who spoke with a slight and not ungraceful lisp, and nursed his prospects at Court. The hatred was fomented by a newspaper, the _Sentinelle du Peuple_, edited at Rennes by a scribbler newly arrived from Paris.

The States were held in the Jacobin Convent on the Place du Palais. We entered the sessions-hall, in the temper which I have described; we had hardly taken our seats before we were besieged by the mob. The 25th, 26th, 27th, and 28th of January 1789 were unlucky days. The Comte de Thiard had few troops under his command; he lacked both vigor and decision, and moved without acting. The School of Law at Rennes, which had Moreau at its head, had sent for the young men of Nantes; they came to the number of four hundred, and in spite of his entreaties, the Commandant was unable to prevent them from invading the town. Meetings held by various factions in the cafés and on the Champ-Montmorin resulted in collisions attended with bloodshed.

[Sidenote: Riots at Rennes.]

Tired of being blockaded in our hall, we resolved to sally forth sword in hand; it was a pretty sight enough. At a signal given by our president, we all drew our swords together, to the cry of "Brittany for ever!" and, like a forlorn garrison, executed a furious sortie in order to fight our way through. The mob received us with yells, with showers of stones, blows of iron-shod sticks, and pistol-shots. We forced a passage through the surging crowd, which closed in upon us. Several gentlemen were wounded, dragged along the ground, lacerated, covered with bruises and contusions. We succeeded with great difficulty in extricating ourselves and reaching our respective lodgings.

Duels followed between the nobles and the law-students and their friends from Nantes. One of these duels took place in public on the Place Royale; the honors remained with old Keralieu[305], a naval officer, who was attacked, and who fought with incredible vigor amid the applause of his youthful adversaries.

Another mob had formed. The Comte de Montboucher[306] caught sight in the crowd of a student called Ulliac, and said to him:

"Monsieur, this concerns you and me!"

A ring was formed around them; Montboucher disarmed Ulliac and handed him back his sword: they embraced, and the crowd dispersed.

At least our Breton nobility did not succumb without honour. It refused to send deputies to the States-General, because it had not been convoked in accordance with the fundamental laws of the constitution of the province; it joined the army of the Princes in vast numbers, and was decimated in Condé's Army, or with Charette in the wars of the Vendée. Would it have made any difference in the majority in the National Assembly if it had joined that assembly? That is scarcely likely: in great social transformations, cases of individual resistance, however creditable to personal character, are powerless against facts. Nevertheless it is difficult to say what might not have been effected by a man of Mirabeau's genius, but of opposite principles, if one had been found in the order of the Breton nobility.

Young Boishue and my schoolfellow Saint-Riveul had been killed in these encounters, on their way to the chamber of the nobles: the former was in vain defended by his father, who served as his second[307].

Reader, pause: see flow the first drops of blood which the Revolution was to shed. Heaven decreed that they should issue from the veins of a companion of my childhood. Suppose that I had fallen instead of Saint-Riveul; it would have been said of me, merely changing the name, as was said of the victim with whom commenced the great immolation:

"A gentleman called Chateaubriand was killed on his way to the assembly-room of the States."

Those few words would have taken the place of my long history. Would Saint-Riveul have played my part on the earth? Was he destined for fame or for silence?

And now, reader, pass on; cross the river of blood which for all time separates the old world, whence you are issuing, from the new, at the entrance to which you shall die.

*

The year 1789, so famous in our history and in the history of the human race, found me on the moors of my Brittany; I was not even able to leave the country until rather late, and did not reach Paris until after the sack of the Maison Reveillon[308], the opening of the States-General[309], the constitution of the Third Estate into a National Assembly, the oath of the Tennis Court[310], the Royal Speech of the 23rd of June, and the joining of the clergy and the nobles to the commons[311].

There was a great stir along my road: in the villages the peasants stopped the carriages, asked to be shown passports, interrogated the travelers. The nearer we approached to the capital, the more the excitement increased. Passing through Versailles, I saw troops quartered in the orangery, trains of artillery parked in the court-yards, the provisional hall of the National Assembly erected on the Place du Palais, and deputies moving to and fro amid sight-seers, people of the palace, and soldiers.

[Sidenote: Disturbances in Paris.]

In Paris the streets were blocked by crowds standing before the bakers' shops; the passers-by stood discussing at the street corners, the tradesmen came out of their shops and gave and received the news before their doors; the agitators gathered together at the Palais-Royal: Camille Desmoulins began to distinguish himself in the throng[312].

I had scarcely alighted[313], together with Madame de Farcy and Madame Lucile, at a lodging-house in the Rue de Richelieu, when a riot broke out: the mob proceeded to the Abbaye to deliver some French Guards, who had been imprisoned by order of their officers. The non-commissioned officers of an artillery regiment quartered at the Invalides joined the people. The defection of the army was commencing.

The Court, alternately yielding and resisting, a mixture of obstinacy and weakness, of hectoring and fear, allowed itself to be bullied by Mirabeau[314], who demanded that the troops should be removed to a distance, and yet did not consent to remove them: it accepted the affront and did not remove the cause of it. In Paris a rumor spread that an army was arriving through the Montmartre sewer, that the dragoons were about to force the barriers. It was suggested to take up the street pavements, to carry the paving-stones to the top floors of the houses, in order to hurl them upon the tyrant's satellites: every one set to work. In the midst of this turmoil M. Necker was ordered to resign. The new ministry consisted of M. de Breteuil[315], La Galaizière, the Maréchal de Broglie[316], La Vauguyon, La Porte[317] and Foullon[318]. These replaced Messieurs de Montmorin[319], de La Luzerne[320], de Saint-Priest[321] and de Nivernais[322].

A Breton poet, newly landed, had asked me to take him to Versailles. There are people who will go to see gardens and fountains amid the downfall of empires: scribblers especially possess this faculty of isolating themselves in their hobby during the course of the greatest events; with them, their phrase or their strophe fills the place of everything.

I took my Pindar to the gallery at Versailles at mass-time. The Œil-de-Boeuf was radiant: M. Necker's dismissal had raised the spirits of all; they felt sure of victory: possibly Sanson[323] and Simon[324] were among the crowd, witnessing the delight of the Royal Family.

[Sidenote: Marie Antoinette.]

The Queen passed by with her two children; their fair hair appeared to be waiting for crowns: Madame la Duchesse d'Angoulême[325], aged eleven, drew all eyes through a virginal pride; beautiful through nobility of birth and maidenly innocence, she seemed to say, like Corneille's orange-blossom in the _Guirlande de Julie_:

J'ai la pompe de ma naissance[326].

The little Dauphin[327] walked under his sister's protection, and M. Du Touchet followed his pupil; he noticed me, and obligingly called the Queen's attention to me. Casting a smiling look in my direction, she gave me that gracious bow which she had already made me on the day of my presentation. I shall never forget that look, so soon to be extinguished. Marie Antoinette, when she smiled, outlined so clearly the shape of her mouth, that the recollection of that smile (O horror!) enabled me to recognize the jaw-bone of the daughter of kings when the head of the unhappy woman was discovered in the exhumations of 1815.

The counter-stroke to the blow struck at Versailles resounded in Paris. On my return I came upon a crowd hastening along and carrying the busts of M. Necker and of M. le Duc d'Orléans[328], covered with crape. They cried, "Long live Necker! Long live the Duc d'Orléans!" and among those cries was heard one bolder and more unforeseen:

"Long live Louis XVII.!"

Long live the child whose very name would have been forgotten in the funeral inscription of his family, if I had not recalled it to the memory of the House of Peers[329]! Had Louis XVI. abdicated, Louis XVII. been placed upon the throne, M. le Duc d'Orléans declared Regent, what would have happened?

On the Place Louis XV., the Prince de Lambesc[330], at the head of the "Royal German" regiment, drove back the crowd into the gardens of the Tuileries and wounded an old man: suddenly the tocsin sounded. The cutlers' shops were broken into, and thirty thousand muskets taken from the Invalides. The people armed themselves with pikes, cudgels, pitchforks, sabres, pistols; they sacked Saint-Lazare, burnt down the barriers. The electors of Paris took in hand the government of the Capital, and in a night sixty thousand citizens were organized, armed, equipped into National Guards.

On the 14th of July came the fall of the Bastille. I was present, as a spectator, at this assault against a few pensioners and a timid governor: if the gates had been kept closed, the mob could never have entered the fortress. I saw two or three guns fired, not by the pensioners, but by French Guards who had climbed to the towers.

De Launey[331] was torn from his hiding-place, and after undergoing a thousand outrages, was struck down on the steps of the Hôtel de Ville; Flesselles[332], the provost of the merchants, had his brains blown out by a pistol-shot: this was the spectacle which heartless enthusiasts thought so fine. In the midst of these murders, the people gave themselves up to orgies, as in the troubles in Rome under Otho and Vitellius. "The victors of the Bastille," happy drunkards, declared conquerors by pot-house votes, were driven about in hackney-coaches; prostitutes and sans-culottes commenced to reign and escorted them. The passers-by uncovered, with the respect born of fear, before those heroes, some of whom died of fatigue amidst their triumph. The keys of the Bastille multiplied; they were sent to all the important simpletons in the four quarters of the world. How often have I missed my fortune! If I, a spectator, had inscribed my name on the list of the victors, I should be in receipt of a pension today.

The experts hurried to assist at the _post-mortem_ examination of the Bastille. Temporary cafés were established under tents; people hastened thither as to the fair at Saint-Germain or to Longchamp; numbers of carriages drove slowly past, or stopped at the foot of the towers, whence the stones were being hurled down amid whirlwinds of dust. Elegantly-dressed women and fashionable young men stood upon different points of the Gothic rubbish, and mingled with the half-naked workmen engaged in demolishing the walls amid the acclamations of the crowd. At this meeting-place were to be seen the most famous orators, the best-known men of letters, the most celebrated painters, the most renowned actors and actresses, the most popular dancers, the most illustrious foreigners, the nobles of the Court and the ambassadors of Europe: old France had come there to end, new France to commence, its existence.

No event, however wretched or hateful in itself, should be treated lightly when its circumstances are serious, or when it marks an epoch: what should have been seen in the capture of the Bastille (and what was not then seen) was, not the violent act of the emancipation of a people, but the emancipation itself which resulted from that act.

[Sidenote: The fall of the Bastille.]

Men admired what they ought to condemn, the accident, and did not seek to discover in the future the accomplishment of a peopled destiny, the changes in morals, ideas, political power, a renovation of the human race, of which the capture of the Bastille, like a blood-stained jubilee, inaugurated the era. Brutal anger wrought ruins, and beneath that anger was concealed the intelligence which laid among those ruins the foundations of the new edifice.

But the nation, deceived as to the grandeur of the material fact, was not deceived as to the grandeur of the moral fact: in the eyes of the nation, the Bastille was the trophy of its servitude, and seemed to be erected at the entrance to Paris, opposite the sixteen pillars of Montfaucon[333], as the gibbet of its liberties[334]. In demolishing a State fortress, the people considered that it was breaking the military yoke, and made a tacit engagement to take the place of the army which it was disbanding: we know what prodigies were wrought by the people turned soldier.

*

Awakened by the sound of the fall of the Bastille, as though by the premonitory sound of the fall of the throne, Versailles had lapsed from the heights of self-confidence to the depths of despondency. The King hurried to the National Assembly, and delivered a speech from the president's chair; he declared that an order had been given for the withdrawal of the troops, and returned to his palace amid a shower of benedictions. A vain parade! Parties do not believe in the conversion of the opposing parties: the liberty which capitulates, or the power which degrades itself, receives no mercy from its foes.

Eighty deputies set out from Versailles to announce the making of peace to the Capital; illuminations followed. M. de La Fayette[335] was made Commandant of the National Guard, M. Bailly[336], Mayor of Paris: I never knew the poor but respectable scholar, save through his misfortunes. Revolutions possess men for each of their several periods; some follow these revolutions to their finish, others commence but do not complete them.

A general dispersal ensued; the courtiers left for Bâle, Lausanne, Luxemburg, and Brussels. Madame de Polignac[337] in her flight met M. Necker returning. The Comte d'Artois, his sons[338], the three Condés[339] emigrated, drawing after them the higher clergy and a portion of the nobility. The officers of the army, threatened by their mutinous soldiers, yielded to the torrent which drifted them down its stream. Louis XVI. alone remained behind to face the nation with his two children and a few women: the Queen, "Mesdames[340]," and Madame Élisabeth[341]. "Monsieur[342]," who stayed until the flight to Varennes, was of no great assistance to his brother: although, by declaring himself in the Assembly of Notables in favour of the vote by heads, he had decided the fate of the Revolution, the Revolution distrusted him; he, Monsieur, disliked the King, did not understand the Queen, and was not loved by them.

Louis XVI. went to the Hôtel de Ville on the 17th: a hundred thousand men, armed like the monks of the League, received him. He was harangued by Messrs. Bailly, Moreau de Saint-Méry[343], and Lally-Tolendal[344], all of whom wept: the last has remained subject to tears. The King broke down in his turn; he fixed an enormous tricolour cockade on his hat; he was then and there declared to be "an honest man, Father of the French, King of a free people," while the said people was preparing, by virtue of its liberty, to lay low the head of that honest man, its father and its King.

[Sidenote: First revolutionary horrors.]

A few days after this reconciliation, I was at the windows of my lodgings with my sisters and some Bretons; we heard cries of "Shut the doors, shut the doors!" A troop of tatterdemalions approached from one end of the street; from the midst of this troop rose two standards which we could not see clearly at that distance. As they came nearer, we distinguished two dishevelled and disfigured heads, which the forerunners of Marat[345] were carrying, each at the end of a pike: they were the heads of Messrs. Foullon and Bertier[346]. The others all drew back from the windows; I remained. The assassins stopped in front of me, stretched the pikes towards me, singing, capering, jumping up in order to bring the pale effigies nearer to my face. One eye in one of these heads had started from its socket, and fell upon the dead man's lurid face; the pike projected through the open mouth, the teeth of which bit upon the iron.

"Brigands!" I cried, filled with indignation which I was unable to contain. "Is that how you understand liberty?"

Had I had a gun, I should have fired at those wretches as at a pack of wolves. They shouted and yelled; they beat long at the doors of the gate-way, in the hope of breaking them down and adding my head to those of their victims. My sisters fainted; the poltroons of the lodging-house overwhelmed me with reproaches. The murderers, who were being pursued, had not time to break into the house, and passed on. Those heads, and others which I saw soon afterwards, changed my political tendencies; I held the banquets of cannibals in abhorrence, and the idea of leaving France for some distant country began to take root in my mind.

*

Recalled to office on the 25th of July, installed and received with festivities, M. Necker, the third successor, after Calonne and Taboureau[347], of Turgot[348], was soon left behind by events, and lapsed into unpopularity. It is one of the singular facts of the time that so serious a person should have been raised to the post of minister through the tact of a man noted for such mediocrity and levity as the Marquis de Pezay[349]. The _Compte rendu_[350], which replaced in France the system of taxation by that of loans, stirred people's ideas: women talked of receipts and expenditure; for the first time one saw, or thought one saw, something in the mechanism of figures. These calculations, painted in colours laid on _à la Thomas_[351], had first established the reputation of the director-general of finance. The banker was a clever accountant, but a resourceless economist; a noble but turgid writer; an honest man, but devoid of the loftier virtues. He was like the character which speaks the prologue in a classical play, and which disappears at the rise of the curtain, after explaining the piece to the audience. M. Necker was the father of Madame de Staël[352]: his vanity hardly permitted him to believe that his true title to the recollection of posterity lay in the fame achieved by his daughter.

The monarchy was demolished, in imitation of the Bastille, at the evening sitting of the National Assembly on the 4th of August. They who, from hatred of the past, decry the nobility to this day, forget that it was a member of that body, the Vicomte de Noailles[353], supported by the Duc d'Aiguillon[354] and Matthieu de Montmorency[355], who upset the edifice which was the object of the revolutionary onslaughts. Upon the motion of the feudal delegate were abolished all feudal rights: rights of hunting and preserving feathered and ground game, tithes and champerty, the privileges of the orders, of the towns and provinces, personal servitude, manorial jurisdiction, purchase of offices. The severest blows struck against the ancient constitution of the State were delivered by noblemen. The patricians began the Revolution, the plebeians completed it: just as old France owed her glory to the French nobility, even so does young France owe to it her liberty, if liberty there be for France.

[Sidenote: "Ô Richard! Ô mon Roi!"]

The troops encamped around Paris had been sent away, and by one of those contradictory counsels which vexed the will of the King, the Flanders Regiment was summoned to Versailles. The Bodyguards invited the officers of that regiment to dinner[356]; heads grew excited; the Queen appeared in the middle of the banquet, with the Dauphin; toasts were drunk to the health of the Royal Family; the King came in his turn; the military band played the touching and favourite air, "_Ô Richard! ô mon roi[357]!_" No sooner was this news spread through Paris, than it was seized upon by the opposite opinion; people cried that Louis was refusing his sanction to the Declaration of Rights with the intention of escaping to Metz with the Comte d'Estaing[358]. Marat propagated this rumour: he was already writing the _Ami du peuple_[359].

The 5th of October arrived. I did not witness the events of that day. The accounts of what had occurred reached the Capital early on the 6th. We were told at the same time to expect a visit from the King. I was as bold in public places as I was timid in drawing-rooms: I felt myself made for solitude or the forum. I hastened to the Champs-Élysées: first appeared guns, upon which harpies, thieves' doxies, women of the town rode astride, uttering the most obscene speeches, making the most filthy gestures. Next, surrounded by a horde of people of every age and sex, marched on foot the Bodyguards, who had exchanged hats, swords, and bandoliers with the National Guards: each of their horses carried two or three fish-fags, dirty bacchantes, drunk and indecently clad. After them came the deputation from the National Assembly; the royal carriages followed, rolling in the dusty darkness of a forest of pikes and bayonets. Tattered rag-men, butchers with their blood-stained aprons hanging from their thighs, their bare knives from their belts, their shirtsleeves turned up, walked beside the carriage-doors; other sinister guards had climbed upon the roof; others hung on to the foot-board, lolled upon the box. They fired muskets and pistols; they cried:

"Here are the baker, the baker's wife, and the baker's boy!"

By way of oriflamme, they carried before the descendant of St. Louis, in mid-air, upraised on Swiss halberts, the heads of two Bodyguards, powdered and curled by a Sèvres hair-dresser.

[Sidenote: The King brought to Paris.]

Bailly the astronomer told Louis XVI. at the Hôtel de Ville that the "humane, respectful and faithful" people had "conquered" its King, and the King on his side, "greatly touched and greatly pleased," declared that he had come to Paris "of his free will:" unworthy insincerities pertaining to the violence and fear which at that time dishonoured all men and all parties. Louis XVI. was not insincere: he was weak; weakness is not an insincerity, but it takes its place and fulfills its functions: the respect with which the virtues and misfortunes of the sainted and martyred King must needs inspire us render any expression of human judgment almost sacrilegious.

*

The deputies left Versailles and held their first sitting on the 19th of October in one of the halls of the archbishop's palace. On the 9th of November they moved into the Riding-hall, near the Tuileries. The remainder of the year 1789 witnessed the decrees which despoiled the clergy, destroyed the old magistracy, and created the _assignats_[360]; the resolution of the Commune of Paris in favour of the first committee of research; and the order of the judges for the prosecution of the Marquis de Favras[361].

The Constituent Assembly, in spite of all with which it can be reproached, remains nevertheless the most illustrious popular assemblage that has ever appeared among the nations of the world, both because of the magnitude of its transactions' and the immensity of their results. There is no political question, however lofty, which it did not discuss and suitably solve. What would it not have been, had it kept to the _cahiers_[362] of the States-General and not endeavoured to go beyond them! All that human experience and intelligence had conceived, discovered and elaborated during three centuries is to be found in these instructions. The various abuses of the old monarchy are there pointed out and remedies proposed; every kind of liberty is claimed, even the liberty of the press; every form of improvement demanded for industries, manufactures, commerce, public roads, the army, taxation, finance, the schools, public education, and the rest. We have passed across abysses of crime and accumulations of glory to no profit; the Republic and the Empire have served no purpose: the Empire merely regulated the brute force of the arms which the Republic had set in motion; it has left us centralization, a vigorous form of administration which I consider an evil, but which alone, perhaps, was able to replace the local systems of administration at a time when these were destroyed, and when anarchy combined with ignorance filled all men's heads. With that exception, we have not moved a step forward since the Constituent Assembly: its labours are like those of the great physician of antiquity, which at the same time extended and settled the boundaries of science. Let us speak of some of the members of this Assembly, and in particular of Mirabeau, in whom they are all summed up, by whom they are all governed.

*

Connected, thanks to the disorders and the chances of his life, with the greatest events and with the lives of malefactors, ravishers, and adventurers, Mirabeau, the tribune of the aristocracy, the deputy of the democracy, had in his composition something of Gracchus and Don Juan, of Catiline and Guzman de Alfarache, of the Cardinal de Richelieu and the Cardinal de Retz, of the _roué_ of the Regency and the savage of the Revolution: moreover he had something of the Mirabeaus, the exiled Florentine family, which retained a trace of those armed palaces and of those great factionists celebrated by Dante; the naturalized French family, in which the republican spirit of the Italian middle-ages and the feudal spirit of our own middle-ages were united in a succession of uncommon men.

Mirabeau's ugliness, laid on over the substratum of beauty special to his race, produced a sort of powerful figure from the "Last Judgment" of Michael Angelo, the fellow-countryman of the Arrighettis[363]. The scars dug into the orator's face by the small-pox had rather the semblance of gaps left by the fire. Nature seemed to have moulded his head for empire or the gallows, and to have hewn his arms to clasp a nation or carry off a woman. When he shook his mane as he looked at the mob, he stopped it; when he raised his paw and showed his claws, the plebs ran furiously. I have seen him in the tribune, amid the awful disorder of a sitting, sombre, ugly and motionless: he reminded one of Milton's Chaos, shapeless and impassive in the centre of his own confusion.

[Sidenote: The Comte de Mirabeau.]

Mirabeau took after his father[364] and his uncle[365], both of whom, like Saint-Simon[366], wrote, off-hand, pages that became immortal. Speeches were written for him to deliver from the tribune: he took from them what his mind was able to amalgamate with its own substance. If he adopted them in their entirety, he delivered them badly; his hearers perceived that they were not his own, through words which he inserted at random and which betrayed him. He derived his energy from his vices; those vices did not spring from a chilly temperament, but were supported by deep, burning, tempestuous passions. Cynicism of manners, by annihilating the moral sense, brings back into society a sort of barbarians; these barbarians of civilisation, while equipped for destruction, like the Goths, have not their power of creating: the latter were the enormous children of a virgin nature, the former are the monstrous abortions of a nature that is depraved.

I twice met Mirabeau at a banquet, once at the house of Voltaire's niece, the Marquise de Villette[367], and on another occasion at the Palais-Royal, with some members of the Opposition to whom Chapelier[368] had introduced me: Chapelier went to the scaffold in the same tumbril with my brother and M. de Malesherbes.

Mirabeau talked much, and, above all, much of himself. This lion's whelp, himself a lion with a chimera's head, this man so positive where facts were concerned, was all romance, all poetry, all enthusiasm in imagination and language: one recognized the lover of Sophie[369], exalted in sentiment, capable of sacrifice.

"I discovered her," he said, "that adorable woman.... I knew what her soul was, that soul shaped by nature's hands in a moment of magnificence."

Mirabeau delighted me with stories of love, with desires for retirement, among which he interspersed barren discussions. He interested me, moreover, in another direction: like myself, he had been treated sternly by his father, who, like mine, had kept up the inflexible tradition of absolute paternal authority.

My great table-companion enlarged upon foreign politics, and hardly spoke of politics at home, although it was the latter which occupied him; but he let fall a few words of sovereign contempt for those men who proclaim themselves superior by reason of the indifference which they affect for misfortunes and crimes. Mirabeau was by nature generous, sensible to friendship, ready to forgive injuries. Notwithstanding his immorality, he had not been able to warp his conscience; he was only corrupt for himself: his firm and upright mind did not treat murder as a sublime effort of the intelligence; he had no sort of admiration for the sewer or the slaughter-house.

Nevertheless, Mirabeau was not wanting in arrogance; he was an outrageous boaster; although he had become a cloth-merchant in order to be elected by the Third Estate (the order of the nobility having committed the honourable folly of rejecting him), he was in love with his birth: "a refractory hawk," says his father, "whose nest was laid among four towers." He did not forget that he had figured at Court, ridden in the coaches, and hunted with the King. He insisted upon being addressed by his title of count; he adhered to his colours, and put his servants into livery when every one else ceased to do so. In and out of season, he referred to "his kinsman," Admiral de Coligny. The _Moniteur_ having spoken of him as Riquet[370]:

"Are you aware," he said angrily to the journalist, "that with your 'Riquet' you have set Europe at cross-purposes for three days?"

He repeated that impudent and well-known jest:

"In any other family, my brother the viscount would be the wit and the worthless fellow; in my family, he is the fool and the good man."

Some biographers ascribe the phrase to the viscount, comparing himself humbly with the other members of the family.

The ground-work of Mirabeau's opinions was monarchical; he once uttered these fine words:

"I have tried to cure the French of the superstition of monarchy and to substitute its cult."

In a letter intended to be laid before Louis XVI. he wrote:

"I should not like to have worked only for a vast destruction." This, nevertheless, is what happened to him: Heaven, to punish us for making a bad use of our talents, gives us occasion to repent of our successes.

[Sidenote: Mirabeau's power.]

Mirabeau moved public opinion with two levers: on the one side, he placed his fulcrum in the masses, of whom he had constituted himself the defender, while despising them; on the other, although he was a traitor to his order, he retained its sympathy through caste affinity and common interest. This would not happen to a plebeian who should become the champion of the privileged classes: he would be abandoned by his own party, without winning over the aristocracy, which is naturally ungrateful and not to be won by those not born within its ranks. The aristocracy, moreover, is not able to make a noble without notice, since nobility is the daughter of time.

Mirabeau created a school. Men imagined that by shaking off the moral shackles they were turning themselves into statesmen. These imitations produced only petty miscreants: this one who flatters himself that he is corrupt and a robber is only debauched and a cheat; that other who thinks himself vicious is only vile; a third who boasts of being a criminal is merely infamous.

Too early for himself, too late for the Court, Mirabeau sold himself to the Court, and the Court bought him. He staked his reputation for a pension and an embassy: Cromwell was on the verge of bartering his future for a title and the Order of the Garter. Notwithstanding his haughtiness, Mirabeau did not rate himself high enough. Nowadays, when the abundance of cash and places has raised the price of consciences, there is not a street-boy but costs hundreds of thousands of francs and the leading honours of the State to buy. The grave released Mirabeau from his promises, and shielded him from the perils which he would probably not have been able to conquer: his life would have shown his weakness in good; his death left him in possession of his strength in evil.

At the end of dinner, the discussion turned upon Mirabeau's enemies; I found myself by his side and had not spoken a word. He looked me in the face with his eyes of pride, vice and genius, and laying his hand upon my shoulder, said:

"They will never forgive me my superiority!"

I still feel the pressure of that hand, as though Satan had touched me with his fiery claw. When Mirabeau fixed his look upon a young mute, had he a presentiment of my future condition? Did he think that he would one day figure in my recollections? I was destined to become the historian of great personages: they have defiled before me without my hanging to their mantles to make them drag me with them to posterity.

Mirabeau has already undergone the metamorphosis which is wrought in those whose memory is destined to survive: carried from the Pantheon to the sewer, and back from the sewer to the Pantheon, he has raised himself to the full height of that time which today forms his pedestal. We no longer behold the real Mirabeau, but the idealized Mirabeau, the Mirabeau as the painters depict him, in order to make him the symbol or the myth of the period which he represents: he thus becomes both more false and more true. From among so many reputations, so many actors, so many events, so many ruins, there will remain but three men, attached to each of the three great revolutionary epochs: Mirabeau for the aristocracy, Robespierre for the democracy, Bonaparte for the despotism; the monarchy has none: France has paid dear for three reputations which virtue is unable to acknowledge!

*

The sittings of the National Assembly offered a spectacle of an interest which our "Chambers" are far from approaching. One rose early to find room in the crowded galleries. The deputies arrived eating, talking, gesticulating; they formed groups in the various parts of the house, according to their opinions. The orders of the day were read; after that, the subject agreed upon was set forth, or else an extraordinary motion. There was no question of any insipid point of law; rarely did some scheme of destruction fail to form part of the proceedings. The members spoke for or against; each spoke extempore as best he could. The debates grew stormy; the galleries joined in the discussion, applauded and cheered, hissed and hooted the speakers. The president rang his bell, the deputies apostrophized each other from bench to bench. Mirabeau the Younger[371] took his competitor by the collar; Mirabeau the Elder cried:

"Silence, the 'thirty votes'!"

One day I was seated behind the royalist opposition; before me was a Dauphiné nobleman, swarthy of visage, short of stature, who jumped upon his seat with rage and said to his friends:

"Let us fall upon those ragamuffins, sword in hand!"

He pointed in the direction of the majority. The ladies of the markets, who sat knitting in the galleries, heard him, rose from their seats, and all cried at once, their stockings in their hands, and foaming at the mouth:

"To the lantern with them!"

The Vicomte de Mirabeau, Lautrec[372], and some younger nobles proposed to take the galleries by assault.

Soon this tumult was drowned by another: petitioners, armed with pikes, appeared at the bar:

"The people are starving," they said: "it is time to take measures against the aristocrats and to rise 'to the level of the situation.'"

The president assured these citizens of his respect:

"We have our eye upon the traitors," he replied, "and the Assembly will see justice done."

[Sidenote: The National Assembly.]

Thereupon a fresh din; the deputies of the Right cried that they were making for anarchy; the deputies of the Left replied that the people was free to express its will, that it had the right to complain of the abettors of despotism, seated in the very midst of the national representatives: they spoke thus of their colleagues to that sovereign people which was waiting for them under the street lamps.

The evening sittings surpassed the morning sittings in scandalousness: people speak better and more boldly by candlelight. At such times the Riding-hall became a veritable playhouse, in which was enacted one of the greatest tragedies in the world. The leading characters still belonged to the old order of things: their terrible substitutes, hidden behind them, spoke little or not at all. At the end of a violent discussion, I saw a common-looking deputy ascend the tribune, a man with a grey and impassive face, his hair neatly dressed, decently clad like the steward in a good house, or like a village attorney careful of his appearance. He read a long and tedious report; he was not listened to; I asked his name: it was Robespierre[373]. The men in leathern shoes were ready to leave the drawing-rooms, and already the wooden shoes were kicking at the door.

*

When, before the Revolution, I read the history of public disturbances among various nations, I could not conceive how it was possible to live in those times; I was surprised that Montaigne was able to write with such spirit in a castle which he could not go round without running the risk of being taken prisoner by bands of Leaguers or Protestants[374].

The Revolution made me understand the possibility of existence under such conditions. Moments of crisis produce a reduplication of life in men. In a society which is dissolving and Recomposing itself, the struggle of two geniuses, the clash of the past and the future, the mixture of old manners and new manners form a transient combination which does not leave a moment for weariness. Passions and characters, when at liberty, display themselves with an energy which they do not possess in the well-regulated State. The breaches of the laws, the emancipation from duties, social usages, and seemly manners, the very dangers, all add to the interest of this disorder. The human race making holiday perambulates the streets, having got rid of its schoolmasters and returned for a moment to a state of nature, and does not begin again to feel the need of social restraint until it bears the yoke of the new tyrants engendered by license.

[Sidenote: The theatres.]

I cannot better depict society in 1789 and 1790 than by comparing it with the architecture of the time of Louis XII. and François I., when the Greek orders began to be grafted upon the Gothic style, or rather by likening it to the collection of ruins and tombs of all ages heaped pell-mell, after the Terror, in the cloisters of the Petits-Augustins: only, the ruins of which I speak were alive and constantly changing. In every corner of Paris were literary sets, political societies, and spectacles; future celebrities wandered unrecognized in the crowd, like the souls on the shore of Lethe, before enjoying the light. I saw Marshal Gouvion-Saint-Cyr[375], play a part in Beaumarchais' _Mère Coupable_[376] at the Théâtre du Marais. One went from the Club des Feuillants to the Club des Jacobins, from the public ball-rooms and gaming-houses to the meetings in the Palais-Royal, from the gallery of the National Assembly to the gallery in the open air. The streets were filled with popular deputations, cavalry pickets, infantry patrols passing to and fro. Behind a man in a French coat, with powdered hair, a sword, a hat carried under his arm, pumps and silk stockings, walked a man wearing his hair short and without powder, an English frock and an American neck-cloth. At the theatres the actors gave out the news; the pit shouted patriotic ditties. Topical pieces drew crowds: an Abbé appeared upon the stage; the audience cried, "Jack-priest! Jack-priest!" and the Abbé answered:

"Gentlemen, long live the nation!"

People trooped to hear Mandini and his wife, Viganoni and Rovedino[377], sing at the _Opera Buffa_ after hearing _Ça ira_ roared in the streets; they went to admire Madame Dugazon[378], Madame Saint-Aubin[379], Carline[380], little Olivier[381], Mademoiselle Contat, Molé, Fleury, Talma at the commencement of his career, after seeing Favras hanged.

The walks on the Boulevard du Temple and the Boulevard des Italiens, or de Coblentz, the paths of the Tuileries Gardens were inundated with smartly dressed women: three young daughters of Grétry's[382] shone there, white and pink as their costumes; they soon died, all three.

"She fell asleep for ever," said Grétry, speaking of his eldest daughter, "seated on my knees, as beautiful as in life."

A multitude of carriages ploughed across the muddy spaces in which the sans-culottes plodded on foot, and one saw the beautiful Madame de Buffon[383] sitting alone in a phaeton belonging to the Duc d'Orléans, waiting at the door of some club.

All that was elegant and in good taste in aristocratic society met at the Hôtel de La Rochefoucauld[384], at the _soirées_ of Mesdames de Poix, d'Hénin, de Simiane, de Vaudreuil, in the few _salons_ that remained open of the upper magisterial circle. At M. Necker's, at M. le Comte de Montmorin's, at the houses of the different ministers gathered (in addition to Madame de Staël, the Duchesse d'Aiguillon, Mesdames de Beaumont[385] and de Sérilly[386]) all the new lights of France and all the liberties of the new manners. The shoemaker knelt to take the measure of your foot in the uniform of an officer of the National Guard; the monk who on Friday trailed his white or black gown along the ground appeared on Sunday in a round hat and a lay coat; the shorn Capuchin read the paper in the public-house, and in the midst of a circle of frivolous women, a nun appeared gravely seated: it was an aunt or a sister turned out of her monastery. The crowd visited these convents thrown open to the world like the travellers who, at Grenada, wander through the deserted halls of the Alhambra, or, at Tivoli, linger beneath the columns of the Sibyl's temple.

For the rest, many duels and love-affairs, prison attachments and political friendships, mysterious meetings among ruins, under a tranquil sky, amid nature's peace and poetry; silent, remote, solitary walks, mingled with undying oaths and indefinable affections, to the dull tumult of a fleeing world, to the distant noise of a crumbling society, which threatened in its fall to crush the happiness set at the foot of events. Those who had lost sight of each other for twenty-four hours were not sure of ever meeting again. Some went the revolutionary way; others contemplated civil war; others set out for Ohio, sending ahead plans for country-houses to be built among the savages; others went to join the Princes: all this cheerfully, often without a sou in their pockets, the Royalists declaring that the thing would come to an end one of these mornings by a decree of Parliament, the patriots, quite as airy in their hopes, foretelling the reign of peace and happiness together with that of liberty. People sang:

La sainte chandelle d'Arras,
Le flambeau de la Provence,
S'ils ne nous éclairent pas,
Mettent le feu dans la France;
On ne peut pas les toucher,
Mais on espère les moucher[387].

And that was how people spoke of Robespierre and Mirabeau!

"It is as little within the power of any earthly faculty," wrote L'Éstoile[388], "to keep the French people from talking as to hide the sun in the ground or bury it in a hole."

The Palace of the Tuileries, a great gaol filled with sentenced prisoners, rose erect amid these festivals of destruction. The condemned themselves made merry while waiting for the "cart," the "shears," and the "red shirt" which had been put out to dry; and through the windows one saw the dazzling illuminations of the Queen's circle.

[Sidenote: The newspapers.]