The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, Charles Duke Yonge [e book reader android txt] 📗

which, if he be well managed, one may some day turn to his good. Till he is entirely at his ease with any one, he can restrain himself, and even stifle his impatience and his inclination to anger, in order to appear gentle and amiable. He is admirably faithful when once he has promised any thing, but he is very indiscreet; he is thoughtless in repeating any thing that he has heard; and often, without in the least intending to tell stories, he adds circumstances which his own imagination has put into his head. This is his greatest fault, and it is one for which he must be corrected. However, taken altogether, I say again, he is a good child; and by treating him with allowance, and at the same time with firmness, which must be kept clear of severity, we shall always be able to do all that we can wish with him. But severity would revolt him, for he has a great deal of resolution for his age. To give you an instance: from his very earliest childhood the word _pardon_ has always offended him. He will say and do all that you can wish when he is wrong, but as for the word _pardon_, he never pronounces it without tears and infinite difficulty.

"I have always accustomed my children to have great confidence in me, and, when they have done wrong, to tell me themselves; and then, when I scold them, this enables me to appear pained and afflicted at what they have done rather than angry. I have accustomed them all to regard 'yes' or 'no,' once uttered by me, as irrevocable; but I always give them reasons for my decision, suitable to their ages, to prevent their thinking that my decision comes from ill-humor. My son can not read, and he is very slow at learning; but he is too giddy to apply. He has no pride in his heart, and I am very anxious that he should continue to feel so. Our children always learn soon enough what they are. He is very fond of his sister, and has a good heart. Whenever any thing gives him pleasure, whether it be the going anywhere, or that any one gives him any thing, his first movement always is to ask that his sister may have the same. He is light-hearted by nature. It is necessary for his health that he should be a great deal in the open air; and I think it is better to let him play and work in the garden on the terrace, than to take him longer walks. The exercise which children take in running about and playing in the open air is much more healthy than forcing them to walk, which often makes their backs ache.[10]"

Some of these last recommendations may seem to show that the governess was, to some extent, regarded as a nurse as well as a teacher; and when we find Marie Antoinette complaining of want of discretion in a child of four years old, it may perhaps be thought that she is expecting rather more of such tender years than is often found in them; that she is inclined to be overexacting rather than overindulgent; an error the more venial, since it is probable that the educators of princes are more likely to go astray in the opposite direction. But it is impossible to avoid being struck with the candor with which she judges her boy's character, and with the judiciousness of her system of education; and equally impossible to resist the conviction that a boy of good disposition, trained by such a mother, had every chance of becoming a blessing to his subjects, if fate had only allowed him to succeed to the throne which she had still a right to look forward to for him as his assured inheritance.


CHAPTER XXV.

Necker resumes Office.--Outrages in the Provinces.--Pusillanimity of the Body of the Nation.--Parties in the Assembly.--Views of the Constitutionalists or "Plain."--Barnave makes Overtures to the Court.--The Queen rejects them.--The Assembly abolishes all Privileges, August 4th.-- Debates on the Veto.--An Attack on Versailles is threatened.--Great Scarcity in Paris.--The King sends his Plate to be melted down.--The Regiment of Flanders is brought up to Versailles.--A Military Banquet is held in the Opera-house.--October 5th, a Mob from Paris marches on Versailles.--Blunders of La Fayette--Ferocity of the Mob on the 5th.-- Attack on the Palace on the 6th.--Danger and Heroism of the Queen.--The Royal Family remove to Paris.--Their Reception at the Barrier and at the Hotel de Ville.--Shabbiness of the Tuileries.--The King fixes his Residence there.

Necker had obeyed the king's summons the moment that he received it, and before the end of the month he returned to Versailles and resumed his office. But, even before the king's dispatch reached him, Paris had witnessed terrible proofs that the tranquillity which the king's visit to the capital was supposed to have re-established was but temporary. The populace had broken out into fresh tumults, murdering some of Breteuil's colleagues with circumstances of frightful barbarity; while intelligence of similar disturbances in the provinces was constantly arriving. In Normandy, in Alsace, and in Provence, in the towns, and in the rural districts, the towns-people and the peasants rose against their wealthier neighbors or their landlords, burning their houses, and commonly murdering the owners with the most revolting barbarity. Some were torn into pieces; some were roasted alive; some had actually portions of their flesh cut off and eaten by their murderers in their own sight, before the blow was given which terminated their agonies. Their sex did not save ladies from being victims of the same cruelties, nor did it prevent women from being actors in them.

Yet the horror of these scenes was scarcely stranger than the pusillanimity of those who endured them unresistingly; for there were not wanting instances of magistrates honest enough to detest, and courageous enough to chastise, such outrages; and wherever the effort was made it succeeded so completely as to fix no slight criminality on those who submitted to them. In Dauphiny, the States of the province raised a small guard, which quelled the first attempts to cause riots there, and hanged the ringleaders. In Macon, a similar force, though not three hundred strong, encountered a band of brigands, six thousand in number, and brought back two hundred prisoners, the chiefs of whom were instantly executed, and by their prompt punishment tranquillity was restored. Similar firmness would have saved other districts, which now allowed themselves to be the victims of ravage and murder; as afterward it would have preserved the whole country, even when the madness and wickedness of subsequent years were at their height; for in no part of the kingdom did those who perpetrated or sympathized with the crimes which have made the Revolution a by-word, approach the number of those who loathed them, but who had not the courage or foresight to withstand them. It seemed as if a long course of misgovernment, and the example of the profligacy and impiety set by the higher classes for many generations, had demoralized the entire people, some in their excesses discarding the ordinary instincts of human beings; while the bulk of the nation had lost even that courage which had once been among its most shining qualities, and had no longer the manliness to resist outrages which they abhorred, even when their own safety was staked upon their repression.

And similar weakness was exhibited in the Assembly itself; for, unquestionably, the party which at last prevailed was not that which was originally the strongest. Like most assemblies of the kind, it was divided into three parties--the extreme Royalists, or "the Right;" the extreme Reformers (who were subdivided into several sections), or "the Left;" and between them the moderate Constitutionalists, or "the Plain," as they were called, from occupying seats in the middle of the hall, between the raised benches on either side. And to the last party belonged all the men most distinguished either for statesman-like perceptions or for eloquence, Mirabeau himself agreeing with them in all their leading principles, though he never formally enrolled himself in the ranks of any party.

The majority of the Constitutionalists were as loyal to the king's person and dignity as the extreme Royalists; their most eloquent speaker, a young lawyer named Barnave, at the first opening of the States had even sought to open a direct communication with the court, begging Madame de Lamballe[1] to assure the queen of the wish of himself and all his friends to maintain the king in the full enjoyment and exercise of what he called a Constitutional authority, borrowing the idea and expression from the English Government. But though Marie Antoinette had no objection to the king of his own accord renouncing portions of the power which had been claimed and exerted by his predecessors, she would not hear of the States taking upon themselves to impose such sacrifices on him, or to curtail his authority by any exercise of their own; and she rejected with something like disdain the support of those whose alliance was only to be purchased on such conditions. Barnave, like Mirabeau, felt insulted; determined to revenge himself, and for a while united himself to the fiercest of the Republicans; while the Right, with incredible folly, often played into his hand, joining the Left, of which many members avowedly aimed at the abolition of royalty, and with none of whom they had one opinion or sentiment in common to defeat the Constitutionalists, with whom they practically had but very slight differences. And thus, as with a base pusillanimity, many, both of the Right and of the Plain, fled from the country after the tumults of October, the mastery of the Assembly gradually fell into the hands of that party which contained by far fewer men of ability or honesty than either of the others, but which surpassed them both in distinctness of object, and in unscrupulous resolution to carry out its views.

But the events of July, the mutiny of the troops, the successful insurrection of the mob, the destruction of the Bastile, and the visit of Louis to Paris, had been a series of damaging blows to the Government; and as each successive exploit gave encouragement to the movement party, events proceeded with extreme rapidity. Necker, who returned to Versailles on the 27th of July, showed more clearly than ever his unfitness for the chief post in the administration at such a crisis, by devoting himself solely to financial arrangements, and omitting to take, on the part of the crown, the initiative in any one of the reforms which the king had promised. Those he permitted to be intrusted to a committee of the Assembly; and the committee had scarcely met when the Assembly took the matter into its own hands; and in a strange panic, and at a single sitting, swept away the privileges of both Nobles and clergy, those who seemed personally most concerned in their maintenance being the foremost in urging their suppression. A member of the oldest nobility proposed the abolition of the privileges of the Nobles. A bishop moved the extinction of tithes; Bretons, Burgundians, Provencals, renounced for their fellow- citizens the old distinctions and immunities to which each province had hitherto clung with an unyielding if somewhat unreasoning attachment; and the whole was crowned by the Archbishop of Paris proposing a celebration of the _Te Deum_, as an expression of gratitude to God for having inspired a series of actions calculated to confer so much happiness on the nation.

Though he could not avoid seeing the mischievous character of many of the resolutions thus tumultuously passed, and though his royal assent to them was asked in language unceremonious and almost peremptory in its curtness, Louis could not bring himself, or perhaps did not venture, to refuse his sanction