Madam Roland had wished to reign alone. She saw an influential rival in Dumouriez, and at once conceived for him an instinctive repugnance and suspicion. She met him first on March 23, 1792, at the time when, as Minister of Foreign Affairs, he came to salute Roland, just named Minister of the Interior, as his colleague. As soon as he departed: "There," said she to her husband, "is a man with a crafty mind and a false glance, against whom it is probably more necessary to be on one's guard than any other person; he expressed great satisfaction at the patriotic choice he was deputed to announce; but I should not be at all surprised if he were to have you dismissed some day." She thought she recognized in Dumouriez at first sight, "a witty roué, an insolent chevalier who makes sport of everything except his own interests and glory."
Later on she drew the following portrait of him: "Among all his colleagues, he had most of what is called wit, and less than any of morality. Diligent and brave, a good general, a skilful courtier, writing well and expressing himself with ease, capable ofgreat enterprises, all he lacked was character enough to balance his mind, or a cooler brain to carry out the plans he had conceived. Agreeable to his friends, and ready to betray them, gallant to women, but not at all suited to succeed with those among them who are susceptible to affectionate relations, he was made for the ministerial intrigues of a corrupt court."
The nomination of Dumouriez as Minister of Foreign Affairs is one of the most curious and unforeseen events of this strange epoch. Few men have had a career so adventurous and agitated as his. A complex and mobile nature, where the intriguer and the great man were blended into one, he never commanded esteem, but at certain moments he secured admiration. Napoleon I. seems to have been too severe when he said of him that he was "only a miserable intriguer." The man who opened the series of great French victories, and who saved his country from invasion by his admirable defence of the defiles of Argonne, merited more than this disdainful mention. It is none the less certain, however, that one scents, as it were, an air of Beaumarchais in the Memoirs of Dumouriez, and that there is more than one link of character and existence between the author of theMariage de Figaroand the victor of Jemmapes. Both were men without principles, but full of resource, wit, and fascination. Both were lovable in spite of their great defects, because of their humanity and kindness. Both belonged at the same time to theold régime and the Revolution. Before arriving at celebrity, each had a stormy youth, tormented by the love of pleasure, the need of money, and a sort of perpetual restlessness: they flattered every power of the time, sought fortune by the most circuitous ways, were diplomatic couriers, and secret agents; before coming out into open daylight, they made trial of their marvellous address in obscurity, and signalized themselves among those men of action and initiative whom governments, which make use of them in occult ways, first launch, then compromise, disavow, and sometimes imprison.
Born at Cambrai, January 25, 1739, Dumouriez belonged to a family of the upper middle class. Entering the army early, he distinguished himself by his high spirits and courage. As a cornet of the Penthièvre cavalry, he served in the German campaigns from 1758 to 1761, and was invalided in 1763. He spent twenty-four years at the wars and brought back nothing but twenty-two wounds, the rank of captain, a decoration, and some debts. Seeking then a new career, he entered, thanks to his connection with Favier, the secret diplomacy of Louis XV., and was sent to Corsica, Italy, and Portugal. He returned to the army in 1768, and made a brilliant record in the Corsican campaign, obtaining successively the grades of adjutant-major general, adjutant-quartermaster, and colonel of cavalry. It was he who seized the castle of Corte, Paoli's last asylum. In 1771, he again became a secret agent. LouisXV. wished to befriend Poland in its death-struggle, but without betraying his hand. Dumouriez was sent to the Polish confederates. He was reputed to be merely acting on his own impulses. He organized troops and fought successfully against Souvaroff, the future adversary of the French Republic, but could not save Poland—that Asiatic nation of Europe, as he called it. He came back to Paris in 1772, and the government, complying with the demands of Russia, shut him up for a year in the Bastille, where he had leisure to meditate on the ingratitude of courts. This captivity strengthened his taste for study, and, far from allaying his ambition, gave it renewed force.
Louis XVI. put him in command at Cherbourg, and it was he who conceived the plan of making that town a station for the French marine. He was fifty years old when the Revolution of 1789 broke out. At once he saw in it an opportunity for success and glory. Full of confidence in his own superiority, he merely awaited the hour when events should second his ambition. He said to himself that the emigration, by making a void in the upper ranks of the army, was going to leave him free scope, and that he would be commander-in-chief of the French troops under the new régime. To attain this end he decided to serve the King, the Assembly, and the factions; to assume all parts and all masks, and to be in turn, and simultaneously if need were, the courtier of Louis XVI. and the favorite of the Jacobins.
As has been very well said by M. Frédéric Massonin an excellent book, as novel as it is interesting,Le Département des affaires étrangères sous la Revolution, Dumouriez had been accustomed to make his way everywhere, to eat at all tables, and listen at all doors. One of the agents of Count d'Artois brought him into relations with Mirabeau. He was protected by the minister Montmorin. He drew up plans of campaign for Narbonne. He used the intimate "thou" to Laporte, the King's confidant and intendant of the civil list. He made use of women also. Separated from his lawful wife, he lived in marital relations with a sister of Rivarol, the Baroness de Beauvert, a charming person who had much intercourse with aristocratic society, who speculated in arms, and who was pensioned by the Duke of Orleans, as appears from a letter of Latouche de Tréville, the prince's chancellor, dated April 17, 1789. Dumouriez, who had expensive tastes, sought at the same time for gold and honors. Either by means of the court or the Revolution, he desired to gain a great fortune and much glory, to become a statesman, a minister, commander-in-chief, and realize his great military plan, the conquest of the natural frontiers of France. He said to himself: He who wills the end wills the means, and managed as adroitly with parties as with soldiers. At Niort, where he was in command at the beginning of the Revolution, he made himself remarkable by his enthusiasm for the new ideas, and became president of the club and honorary citizen of the town. He contracted an intimacy with Gensonné,whom the Assembly had sent into the departments of the west to observe their spirit. In January, 1792, the emigration of general officers had become so considerable that he rose by seniority to the rank of lieutenant-general. Thereafter, he believed his hour had come, and threw himself boldly into the political arena. The Gironde and the Jacobins were the two powers then in vogue; he flattered both the Jacobins and the Gironde. Brissot was the corypheus of the diplomatic committee and the chief of the war party. He became the familiar of Brissot. Already, in 1791, he had prepared a memoir on the subject of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs which he dedicated and read to the Jacobins. In it he announced (singular prediction for the future minister of a king!) that before fifty years had passed, Europe would be republican. He demanded an immediate and radical change in the diplomatic personnel. "It is of small importance," said he in the same memoir, "that our representatives would lack experience. In the first place, our interests are greatly simplified; moreover, our former representatives were young men belonging to the court who had had no political education. In a word, it is the majesty of the nation which gives our negotiations weight. The minister," he added, "should be a man of approved patriotism, above all suspicion, like the wife of Cæsar. Absolute integrity, great knowledge of men, great firmness, a broad and upright mind, should complete his character." Dumouriez perhaps imagined that all these qualitiesof an ideal minister were reunited in his person. However that may be, he accepted, without any mistrust of his own abilities, the portfolio of Foreign Affairs, confided to him March 15, 1792, on account of his relations with the Gironde and his popularity with the Jacobins. He had a high opinion of himself, and, even after his cruel disappointments, he was to write in his Memoirs, in 1794: "Dumouriez sometimes laughs sardonically in his retreat over the judgments passed upon him. When he arrived at the ministry, the courtiers said and published that he was only a soldier of fortune, incapable of conducting political affairs, in which he would make nothing but blunders. When he commanded an army, they told the Prussians and the German Emperor's troops that he was a mere writer, who had never made war and understood nothing about it. Since he retired with reputation from public employments, they have published that up to the date of the Revolution he had been an intriguing adventurer, a ministerial spy, an office-sweeper. Would to God, they had employed the adventures of their youth in similar espionages! They would not have begun the Revolution like factionists, they would have conducted it with wisdom, they would have preserved the esteem of the nation, they would not have been the prime authors of the King's death, either by betraying or abandoning him."
The new Minister of Foreign Affairs began to play his rôle of leader of French diplomacy in asingular fashion. Repairing to the Jacobin Club, he described himself as their liegeman, assumed the red bonnet in their presence, and, with it on his head, announced that as soon as war should be declared, he would throw away his pen in order to resume his sword. Let us add that he was simultaneously trying to conciliate the good graces of Louis XVI. and to persuade him that if he leaned upon the Jacobins, it was solely in the hope of serving the King and consolidating the throne. At the same time he appointed as director of foreign affairs that Bonne-Carrère whose portrait has been traced in this wise by Brissot: "Falling with all his vices and perverse habits into the midst of a revolution whereby the people had recovered sovereignty, he merely changed his idol without changing his idolatry. He caressed the people instead of caressing the great, made the hall of the Jacobins his OEil-de-Boeuf, played valet to the successful parties one after another, the Lameths and the Mirabeaus, and succeeded in raising himself from the secretaryship of the Jacobins to the embassy of Liège, by the aid of that very Montmorin who detested the Jacobins, and could but advance a man who betrayed them."
Dumouriez then, following the example of Mirabeau, was about to play a double game; to be revolutionary with the Revolution and a courtier with the court. As to Madame Roland, he never placed himself at her feet. The despotism of this female minister, the pretentious of this demagogic bluestocking,her affectation of puritan rigor, her mania for directing everything, shocked the good sense of a man who believed that woman is made to please, not to reign. It was repugnant to this soldier to take his orders from the Egeria of the Girondins. On the other hand, Dumouriez was displeasing to Madame Roland. She found him too dissolute and not sentimental enough. She could not pardon his having Madame de Beauvert for mistress and Bonne-Carrère for confidant. She admitted neither his free-and-easy tone, his Gallic humor, nor his natural gaiety, so unlike the declamatory tone and pretentious jargon of the disciples of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Moreover, she found him too much of a royalist, too accustomed to the old régime. The ministry, apparently so homogeneous, was soon to be divided against itself.
Louis XVI. had been persuaded that the only means of regaining public confidence would be to name a ministry chosen by the Gironde and accepted by the Jacobins. The six ministers—Dumouriez of Foreign Affairs, Roland of the Interior, De Grave of War, Claviére of Finances, Duranton of Justice, Lacoste of Marine—formed what was called the Girondin ministry; the reactionists named it thesans-culottesministry. The revolutionists rejoiced in its advent, while the royalists sought to cover it with ridicule.
On the day when the Council met for the first time at the Tuileries (in the great royal cabinet on the first floor, afterwards called the Salon of Louis XIV.), Roland created a scandal by his plebeian dress. The simplicity of his costume, his round hat, his shoes fastened with ribbons instead of buckles, caused, as his wife disdainfully remarks, "astonishment to all the valets, those creatures who, existing only for the sake of etiquette, thought the safety of the empire depended on its preservation." The master of ceremonies, approaching Dumouriez with anuneasy frown, glanced at Roland, and said in an undertone, "Eh! sir, no buckles on his shoes!" "Ah! sir, all is lost!" replied Dumouriez so coolly that it raised a laugh.
Louis XVI., who wished, as one might say, to enlarge the borders of gentleness and resignation, displayed more than good-will towards the ministers; he showed them deference. This was the more meritorious because to him this ministry was like a reunion of the seditious, like the Revolution in arms against his crown; his pretended advisers seemed much more like enemies than auxiliaries. He tried, however, to attach them to him by kindness, and made a sincere trial of his rights and duties as a constitutional sovereign. Madame Roland herself, bitter and violent as she is, renders him a certain justice. "Louis XVI.," says she, "showed the greatest good nature towards his new ministers; this man was not precisely such as he has been painted by those who seek to degrade him." As to Dumouriez, he says in his Memoirs: "Dumouriez had been greatly deceived concerning the character of Louis XVI., who had been represented to him as a violent and wrathful man, who swore a great deal and maltreated his ministers. He must, on the contrary, do him the justice to say that during three' months when he observed him closely and in very delicate circumstances, he always found him polite, gentle, affable, and even very patient. This prince had a great timidity arising from his education and his distrustof himself, some difficulty in speaking, a just and dispassionate mind, upright sentiments, great knowledge of history, geography, and the arts, and an astonishing memory." Madame Roland also owns that he had an excellent memory and much activity; that he was never idle; that he read often, and had a distinct knowledge of all the different treaties concluded by France with neighboring powers; that he knew history well, and was the best geographer in the kingdom. "His knowledge of the names and faces of those belonging to his court," she adds, "and the anecdotes peculiar to each, extended to all persons who had come into prominence during the Revolution; no subject could be mentioned to him on which he had not some opinion founded on certain facts."
At first, the sessions of the ministry went off very tranquilly. The King, with an accent of candor, protested his attachment to the Constitution and his desire to see it solidly established. Often he left his ministers to chat among themselves without taking any part in their conversation. During such times he read his French and English journals, or wrote letters. If a decree was presented for his sanction, he deferred his decision until the next meeting, to which he came with a settled opinion, concealing it carefully, none the less, and appearing to decide only in accordance with the will of the majority. He frequently evaded irritating questions by turning the conversation to other subjects. If war were thetopic, he spoke of travels; apropos of diplomacy, he described the manners of the country in question; to Roland he spoke of his works, to Dumouriez of his adventures. The Minister of Foreign Affairs, who was a first-class story-teller, and whose freedom of speech was welcomed by the King, to use Madame Roland's expression, amused both his colleagues and his sovereign by his jests and anecdotes.
But all this was far from agreeable to the spiteful companion of the Minister of the Interior. Indignant at the accord which seemed to exist between Louis XVI. and his counsellors, she dreamed of nothing but discussions and conflicts. All that wore the appearance of reconciliation was repugnant to her. She made her obedient spouse recount to her the smallest details of the sessions of the Council, meddling with and criticising all. During the first three weeks, Roland and Clavière, enchanted with the King's dispositions, flattered themselves that the Revolution was at an end. Madame Roland scoffed at their confidence. "Bon Dieu," she said to them, "every time I see you start for the Council with this charming confidence, it seems to me you are ready to commit some folly."—"I assure you," replied Clavière, "that the King is perfectly aware that his interests are bound up with the observance of the laws just established; he reasons too pertinently not to be convinced of this truth."—"Well," added Roland, "if he is not an honest man, he is the greatest rascal in the kingdom; nobody can dissimulatelike that." Madame Roland rejoined that she could not believe in love for the Constitution on the part of a man nourished in the prejudices and accustomed to the use of despotic power. She, who doubtless thought herself the only person capable of presiding well at the council of ministers, treated it as a "café where they amused themselves with idle gossip." "There was no record of their deliberations," says she, "nor a secretary to take them down; after sitting three or four hours, they went away without having accomplished anything but a few signatures; it was like this three times a week."—"This is pitiable!" she would exclaim impatiently when, on his return, she asked her husband what had passed. "You are all in very good humor because there have been no disputes or vexations, and you have even been treated with civility; each of you seems to be doing pretty much as he pleases in his own department. I am afraid you are being made game of."—"Nevertheless, business is getting on."—"Yes, and time is wasted, for in the torrent that is carrying you away, I should be much better pleased to have you employ three hours in solid meditation on great combinations than to see you spend them in useless chatter."
It must needs be said that no person contributed more to the downfall of royalty than Madame Roland. At the moment when the good temper and gentleness of Louis XVI. began to gain upon his ministers, when Dumouriez was softened by theroyal kindness, when minds experienced a relaxation, and honest people, worn out by so many political shocks, were sincerely desirous of repose, it was she who nourished discord, made the Gironde irreconcilable, inspired the subversive pamphlets of Louvet, embittered her husband's heart, and invented the provocations against which the conscience of the unfortunate monarch rebelled. This part, which would have been a sorry one for a man to play, seems still worse in a woman. Count Beugnot has said very justly: "I have seen that a woman can preserve only the faults of her sex in the midst of such a frightful catastrophe, not its virtues. The gentle, amiable, sensitive qualities grow and develop in the shelter of peaceful domestic joys; they are lost and obliterated in the heat of debates, the bitterness of parties, and the shock of passions. The soft and tender foot of woman cannot tread unharmed in paths bristling with steel and red with blood. To do so with safety she must become a man; but to me, a man-woman seems a monster. Ah! let them leave to us, whom nature has granted the pitiful advantage of strength, the field of contention and the fate of war; we are adequate to this cruel destiny; but let them keep to the easier and sweeter part of pouring balm into wounds and staunching tears."
Roland's character was tranquil; it was his wife who made him ambitious, haughty, and inflexible. She should have pacified her husband, but instead of that she excited him. Never was he malevolent andspiteful enough to suit her. She would not pardon him a single movement of compassion or respect towards the august unfortunates. Led by her, Roland no longer dared entertain a generous thought. He returned shamefaced to the Ministry of the Interior if he had felt a humane sentiment while at the Tuileries. It is sad to find tenderness and pity in the heart of a man, Dumouriez, and in the heart of a woman, Madame Roland, nothing but malevolence and hatred. Dumouriez wanted to put out the fire; Madame Roland, to stir it up. Dumouriez sincerely desired the King's safety; Madame Roland swore that he should perish. If a germ of pity woke to life in the hearts of the ministers, Madame Roland hastened to stifle it. Her hostility towards the royal family was more than deliberate; there was something like ferocity in it. Her Memoirs and those of Dumouriez display two very different minds. Sadness dominates in his; anger in hers. Even on the steps of the scaffold, Madame Roland will not feel her hatred lessen. Dumouriez, on the contrary, will cast a glance of melancholy respect upon the unfortunate sovereign whose sorrows and whose resignation, whose gentleness and uprightness, had touched him so profoundly.
Dumouriez, at the beginning of his ministry, was still the slave of the Jacobins, his allies and protectors. His elevation to the ministry was in great part due to them, and even while despising them, he felt unable to shake off their yoke. Little by little, they inspired him with horror, and before many weeks were over, his only idea was to free himself from their control. But at first he treated them like a power with which he was obliged to reckon. What proves this is his passive attitude at the time of the celebrated fête of the Swiss of Chateauvieux. The prologue of the bloody tragedies that were in course of preparation, this fête shows what headway the revolutionary ideas had made. The sinister days of the Convention were approaching, the Terror existed in germ, and already many representatives who, on a secret ballot, would have voted in accordance with right and honor, were cowardly enough to do so against their conscience when they had to answer to their names.
Things had travelled fast since the close of the Constituent Assembly. In 1790, that Assembly, asthe faithful guardian of discipline, had congratulated the Marquis de Bouillé on the energy with which he repressed the military rebellion that broke out at Nancy, August 31. The soldiers garrisoned at this town were guilty of the greatest crimes. They pillaged the military chests, arrested the officers, and fired on the troops who remained faithful. M. Desilles, an officer of the King's regiment, conducted himself at the time in a heroic manner. When the insurgents were about to discharge the cannon opposite the Stainville gate, he sprang towards it, and covering it with his body, cried: "It is your friends, your brothers, who are coming! The National Assembly sends them. Do you mean to fire on them? Will you disgrace your flags?" It was useless to try to hold Desilles back. He broke away from his friends and threw himself again in front of the rebels, falling under four wounds at the moment when the fight began.
The Constituent Assembly passed a decree by which it thanked the Marquis de Bouillé and his troops "for having gloriously fulfilled their duty" in repressing the military insurrection of Nancy. Its president wrote an official letter to Desilles, soon to die in consequence of his wounds: "The National Assembly has learned with just admiration, mingled with profound sorrow, the danger to which your heroic devotion has exposed you; in trying to describe it, I should weaken the emotion by which the Assembly was penetrated. So sublime an example of courageand civic virtue is above all praise. It has secured you a sweeter recompense and one more worthy of you; you will find it in your own heart, and the eternal memory of the French people."
The Swiss regiment of Chateauvieux had taken part in the rebellion at Nancy. Switzerland had reserved, by treaty, its federal jurisdiction over such of its troops as had taken service under the King of France. By virtue of this special jurisdiction the soldiers of the regiment of Chateauvieux, taken arms in hand, were tried before a council of war composed of Swiss officers. Twenty-two were condemned to death and shot. Fifty were condemned to the galleys and sent to the convict prison at Brest. It was in vain that Louis XVI. attempted to negotiate their pardon with the Swiss Confederacy. It remained inflexible, and the guilty were still undergoing their penalty when the Jacobins resolved to release them from prison in defiance of the treaties uniting Switzerland and France. "To deliver these condemned prisoners," says Dumouriez in his Memoirs, "was to insult the Cantons, attack their treaty rights, and judge their criminals. We had enemies enough already without seeking new ones among an allied people who were behaving wisely towards us, especially a free and republican people." But revolutionary passions do not reason. Collot d'Herbois, a wretched actor who had passed from the theatrical stage to that of politics, and who, not content with having bored people, wished to terrorize them also,made himself the champion of the galley-slaves of the regiment of Chateauvieux. He was the principal impresario of the lugubrious fête which disgraced Paris on April 15, 1792.
The programme was not arranged without some opposition. Public opinion was not yet ripe for saturnalia. There were still a few honest and courageous publicists who, like André Chénier, boldly lifted their voices to stigmatize certain infamies. In the tribune of the Assembly some orators were to be found who expressed their minds freely and held their own against the tempests of demagogy. There were generals and soldiers in the army for whom discipline was not an idle word; and if the fête of the Swiss of Chateauvieux made the future Septembrists and furies of the guillotine utter shouts of joy, it drew from honest men a long cry of grief and indignation.
Intimidated by the menaces of the Jacobins, the Assembly voted the release of the Swiss incarcerated in the prison of Brest. But merely to deliver them was not enough: the Jacobins wanted to give them an ovation. Their march from Brest to Paris was a triumph, and Collot d'Herbois organized a gigantic fête in their honor.
André Chénier was at this time writing weekly letters for theJournal de Paris, in which he eloquently supported the principles of order and liberty. As M. de Lamartine has said, he was the Tyrtæus of good sense and moderation. He was indignant atthe threatened scandal, and, in concert with his collaborator on theJournal de Paris, Roucher, the poet ofLes Mois, he criticised in most energetic terms the revolutionary manifestation then organizing. At the Jacobin Club, on April 4, Collot d'Herbois freed his mind against him. "This is not Chénier-Gracchus," said the comedian; "it is another person, quite another." He spoke of André as a "sterile prose writer," and pointed him out to popular vengeance. The two brothers were in opposing camps. While André Chénier stigmatized the fête of anarchy, his brother Joseph was diligently manufacturing scraps of poetry, inscriptions, and devices which were to figure in the programme. "What!" cried André, "must we invent extravagances capable of destroying any form of government, recompense rebellion against the laws, and crown foreign satellites for having shot French citizens in a riot? People say that the statues will be veiled in every place through which this procession is to pass. Oh! if this odious orgy takes place, it will be well to veil the whole city; but it is not the images of despots that should be wrapt in funeral crape, but the faces of honest men. How is it that you do not blush when a turbulent handful, who seem numerous because they are united and make a noise, oblige you to do their will, telling you that it is your own, and amusing your childish curiosity meanwhile with unworthy spectacles? In a city which respected itself such a fête would meet nothing but solitude and silence." The controversywaxed furious. The walls were covered with posters for and against the fête. Roucher thus flagellated Collot d'Herbois: "This character out of a comic novel, who skipped from Polichinello's booth to the platform of the Jacobins, has sprung at me as if he were going to strike me with the oar the Swiss brought back from the galleys!"
Pétion, then mayor of Paris, far from opposing the fête, approved and encouraged it. "I think it my duty," he wrote, April 6, 1792, "to explain myself briefly concerning the fête which is being arranged to celebrate the arrival of the soldiers of Chateauvieux. Minds are heated, passions are in ferment, and citizens hold different opinions; everything seems to betoken disorder. It is sought to change a day of rejoicing into a day of mourning.... What is it all about? Some soldiers, leaders with the French guards, who have broken our chains and afterwards been overloaded with them, are about to enter within our walls; some citizens propose to meet and offer them a fraternal welcome; these citizens are obeying a natural impulse and using a right which belongs to all. The magistrates see nothing but what is simple and innocent in all this; they see certain citizens abandoning themselves to joy and mirth; every one is at liberty to participate or not to participate in the fête. Public spirit rises and assumes a new degree of energy amidst civic amusements." The municipality ordered this letter of Pétion's to be printed, posted on the walls, andsent to the forty-eight sectional committees and the sixty battalions of the National Guard.
Not all the members of the National Assembly shared the optimism of the mayor of Paris. The preparations for the fête, which was announced for April 15, occasioned, on the 9th, a session as affecting as it was stormy. The whole debate should be read in theMoniteur. The question was put whether the Swiss of Chateauvieux, then waiting outside the doors, should be introduced and admitted to the honors of the session. M. de Gouvion, who had been major-general of the National Guard under Lafayette, gravely ascended the tribune. "Gentlemen," said he, "I had a brother, a good patriot, who, through the favorable opinion of your fellow-citizens, had been successively a commander of the National Guard and a member from the Department. Always ready to sacrifice himself for the Revolution and the law, it was in the name of the Revolution and the law that he was required to march to Nancy with the brave National Guards. There he fell, pierced by fifty bayonets in the hands of those who.... I ask if I am condemned to look on tranquilly while the assassins of my brother enter here?" A voice rising from the midst of the Assembly cried: "Very well, sir, go out!" The galleries applauded. Gouvion attempted to continue. The murmurs redoubled. Several persons in the galleries cried: "Down! down!"
The Assembly, revolutionary though it was, feltindignant at the scandal, and called the galleries to order. The president reiterated the injunction to keep silence. Gouvion began anew: "I treat with all the contempt he merits, and with ... I would say the word if I did not respect the Assembly—the coward who has been base enough to outrage a brother's grief." The question was then put whether the Swiss of Chateauvieux should be admitted to the honors of the session. Out of 546 votes, 288 were in the affirmative, and 265 in the negative. Consequently, the president announced that the soldiers of Chateauvieux, who had asked to present themselves to the Assembly, should be admitted to the honors of the session. Gouvion went out by one door, indignant, and swearing that he would never re-enter an Assembly which received his brother's assassins as conquerors. By another door, Collot d'Herbois made his entry with his protêgês, the ex-galley slaves.
The party of the left and the spectators in the galleries burst into transports of joy, and gave three rounds of applause. The soldiers entered the hall to the beating of drums and cries of "Long live the nation!" They were followed by a large procession of men and women carrying pikes and banners. Collot d'Herbois, the showman of the Swiss, pronounced an emphatic address in praise of the pretended martyrs of liberty, which the Assembly ordered to be printed. One Goachon, speaking for the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, and holding a pike ornamented with ared liberty cap, exclaimed: "The citizens of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, the victors of the Bastille, the men of July 14, have charged me to warn you that they are going to make ten thousand more pikes after the model which you see."
The fête took place on Sunday, April 15. It was the triumph of anarchy, the glorification of indiscipline and revolt. On that day the galley slaves were treated like heroes. The emblems adopted were a colossal galley, ornamented with flowers, and the convicts' head gear, that hideous red bonnet in which Dumouriez had already played the buffoon, and which was presently to be set on the august head of Louis XVI. The soldier galley slaves, whose chains were kissed with transports by a swarm of harlots, came forward wearing civic crowns. What a difference between the Constituent Assembly and the Legislative Assembly! Under the one, a grand expiatory ceremony on the Champ-de-Mars had honored the soldiers slain at Nancy, and the National Guards had worn mourning for these martyrs of duty. Under the other, it was not the victims who were lauded, but their assassins. A goddess of Liberty in a Phrygian cap was borne in a state chariot. The procession halted at the Bastille, the Hôtel de Ville, and the Champ-de-Mars. The mayor and municipality of Paris were present in their official capacity. TheÇa irawas sung in a frenzy of enthusiasm. Soldiers and public women embraced each other. It was David who haddesigned the costumes, planned the chariot, and organized the whole performance,—David, the revolutionary artist who was destined by a change of fortune to paint the portrait of a Pope and the coronation of an Emperor.
In 1791, André Chénier and David, then friends, and saluting together the dawn of the Revolution, had celebrated with lyre and pencil the "Serment du Jeu de Paumé"[1] Consecrating an ode to the painter's magnificent tableau, the poet exclaimed:—
Resume thy golden robe, bind on thy chaplet rich,Divine and youthful Poesy!To David's lips, King of the skilful brush,Bear the ambrosial cup.
How he repented his enthusiasm now! What ill-will he bore the artist who placed his art, that sacred gift, at the service of anarchical passions! With what irony the same pen passed from dithyramb to satire!
Arts worthy of our eyes, pomp and magnificenceWorthy of our liberty,Worthy of the vile tyrants who are devouring France,Worthy of the atrocious dementiaOf that stupid David whom in other days I sang!
On the very day of the fête the young poet had the courage to publish in theJournal de Parisan avenging satire, which branded the shoulders of the ex-galley slaves as with a new hot iron. The sweetand pathetic elegiast, the Catullus, the Tibullus of France, added a bronze chord to his lyre:—
Hail, divine triumph! Enter within our walls!Bring us these warriors so famedFor Desilles' blood, and for the obsequiesOf many Frenchmen massacred...One day alone could win so much renown,And this fair day will shine upon us soon!When thou shalt lead Jourdan to our army,And Lafayette to the scaffold!
Jourdan was the slaughterer, the headsman, the torturer of the Glacier of Avignon, who, coming under the provisions of the amnesty, had arrived to take part in the triumph of the Swiss of Chateauvieux. The acclamations were lugubrious. The lanterns and torches shed a funereal glare. Nothing is more doleful than enthusiasm for ignominy. The applause accorded to disgrace and crime sounds like sinister derision. Outraged public conscience extinguishes the fires of apotheoses such as these. Madame Elisabeth, in a letter of April 18, speaks with a sort of pity of this odious but ridiculous fête: "The people have been to see Dame Liberty waggling about on her triumphal car, but they shrugged their shoulders. Three or four hundredsans-culottesfollowed, crying 'Long live the nation! Long live liberty! Long live thesans-culottes! to the devil with Lafayette!' All this was noisy but sad. The National Guards took no part in it; on the contrary, they were indignant, and Pétion, they say, is ashamed of his conduct.The next day a pike surmounted by a red bonnet was carried noiselessly through the garden, and did not remain there long." The Princess de Lamballe, who was living at the Tuileries in the Pavilion of Flora, could see the pike thus carried by a passer. It may, perhaps, have been that belonging to one of the Septembrists,—that on which her own head was to be placed.
TheMoniteur, however, grew ecstatic over the fête. "There are plenty of others," it said, "who will describe the march of the triumphal cortège, the groups composing it, the car of Liberty, conducted by Fame, drawn by twenty superb horses, preceded by ravishing music which was sometimes listened to in religious silence and sometimes interrupted by wild, irregular dances whose very disorder was rendered more piquant by the fraternal union reigning in all hearts.... The people were there in all their might, and did not abuse it. There was not a weapon to repress excesses, and not an excess to be repressed." It concluded thus: "We say to the administration: Give such festivals as these often. Repeat this one every year on April 15; let the feast of Liberty be our spring festival; and let other civic solemnities signalize the return of the other seasons. In former days the people had none but those of their masters, and all that was accomplished by them was their depravity and abasement. Give them some that shall be their own, and that will elevate their souls, develop their sensibilities, and fortify their courage. Theywill create, or, better, they have already created, a new people. Popular festivals are the best education for the people."
Optimists, how will your illusions terminate? You who see nothing but an idyl in all this, can not you perceive that such ceremonies are the prelude to massacres, and that an odor of blood mingles with their perfumes? All who took part on either side of the heated controversy which preceded the ovation to the Swiss of Chateauvieux, will be pursued by fate. Gouvion, who had sworn never again to set foot within the precincts of the Assembly where the murderers of his brother triumphed, kept his word. On the very day of that shameful session he asked to be sent to the Army of the North, and three months later was to be carried off by a cannon-ball. Still more melancholy was to be the fate of Pétion, who showed such complaisance toward the Swiss on this occasion. He, once so popular that in 1791 he was asked to allow the ninth child, which a citizeness had just presented to her country, "to be baptized in his name, revered almost as much as that of the Divinity"; he of whom some one said at that time, "For the same reason which would have made Jesus a suitable mayor of Jerusalem, Pétion is a suitable mayor of Paris; there is too striking a resemblance between them to be overlooked," was sadly to exclaim some months later: "I am one of the most notable examples of popular inconsistency.... For a long time I have said to myself and to myfriends: The people will hate me still more than they have loved me. I can no longer either enter or depart from the place where we hold our sessions without being exposed to the grossest insults and the most seditious threats. How often have I not heard them say as I was passing: 'Scoundrel! we will have your head!'"
Proscribed with the Girondins, May 31, 1793, he fled at first to Normandy, and afterwards into the Gironde, wandering from town to town, from field to field, and hiding for several months thirty feet under ground, in a sort of well; the poor people who showed him hospitality paid for it with their heads. Ah! how disenchanted he must have been with that revolutionary policy of which he had been the enthusiastic promoter! How sad was the farewell to life signed by him and Buzot: "Now that it has been demonstrated that liberty is hopelessly lost; that the principles of morality and justice are trodden under foot; that there is nothing to choose between two despotisms,—that of the brigands who are tearing the vitals of France and that of foreign powers; that the nation has lost all its energy; that it lies at the feet of the tyrants by whom it is oppressed; that we can render no further service to our country; that, far from being able to give happiness to the beings we hold most dear, we shall bring down hatred, vengeance, and misfortune upon them, so long as we live,—we have resolved to quit life and be no longer witnesses of the slavery which is about to desolate our unhappy country."
After ending with this cry of grief and indignation: "We devote the vile scoundrels who have destroyed liberty and plunged France into an abyss of evils to the scorn and indignation of all time," the two proscripts were found dead in a wheat-field about a league from Saint-Emilion. Their bodies were half devoured by wolves.
And how will André Chénier end? On the day of the Swiss fête, the city where such a scandal took place seemed to him insupportable. For several days he sought refuge in the country where he could breathe a purer air beneath the blossoming trees. But contemplation of nature did not soothe him. Running to meet danger, he returned and threw himself into the furnace, more ardent and indignant than before. With manly enthusiasm he exclaimed: "It is above all when the sacrifices which must be made to truth, liberty, and country are dangerous and difficult, that they are accompanied by inexpressible delights. It is in the midst of spying accusations, outrages, and proscriptions, it is in dungeons and on scaffolds, that virtue, probity, and constancy taste the pleasures of a proud and pure conscience." André had a presentiment of his fate.
He was to die on the same day and the same scaffold as his friend Roucher, a few hours earlier than the moment when Robespierre's condemnation would have saved them. It is thus that he was to pay with his life for his opposition to the fête of the Swiss of Chateauvieux, and Collot d'Herbois was avenged.But after the turn of the victims came that of the headsmen. The unlucky comedian who, pursuing even his comrades with his hatred, asked that "the head of theComédie Françaiseshould be guillotined and the rest transported," the impresario of the fête of the Swiss galley slaves, the organizer of the Lyons massacres, Collot d'Herbois, cursed by friends and enemies, was transported to Guiana and died there in 1796, just as he had lived, in an access of burning fever.