And many of the recent events had convinced him that there was no time to lose. The vote of November, debarring him, in common with all other members of the Assembly, from office, was a severe blow to the most important of his projects, so far as his own interests were concerned. Within a month it had been followed by another, proposed by the Abbe Sieyes, a busy priest who boasted that he had made himself master of the whole science of politics, but who was in fact a mere slave of abstract theories, the safety or even the practicability of which he was utterly unable to estimate. On his motion, the Assembly, in a single evening, abolished all the ancient territorial divisions of the kingdom, and the very names of the provinces; dividing the country anew into eighty-three departments, and coupling with this new arrangement a number of details which were evidently calculated to wrest the whole executive authority of the kingdom from the crown and to vest it in the populace. At another sitting, the whole property of the Church was confiscated. On another night, the Parliaments were abolished; and on a fourth, the party which had carried these measures made a still more direct and audacious attack on the royal prerogative, by passing a resolution which deprived the crown of all power of revising the sentences of the judicial tribunals, and of pardoning or mitigating the punishment of those who might have been condemned. And, if to bring home to the tender-hearted monarch the full effect of this last inroad upon his legitimate power, they at the same time created a new crime to which they gave the name of treason against the nation,[12] without either defining it, or specifying the kind of evidence which should he required to prove it; and they proceeded at once to put it in force to procure the condemnation of a nobleman of decayed fortune, but of the highest character, the Marquis de Favras, in a manner which showed that their real object was to strike terror into the whole Royalist party. The charges on which he was brought to trial were not merely unfounded, but ridiculous. He was charged with designing to raise an army of thirty thousand men, with the object of carrying off the king from Paris, of dissolving the Assembly by force, and putting La Fayette and Bailly to death. The evidence with which it was pretended to support these charges broke down on every point, and its failure of itself established the prisoner's innocence, even without the aid of his own defense, which was lucid and eloquent. But the marquis was known to be a Royalist in feeling, and, though very poor, to stand high in the confidence of the princes. The demagogues collected mobs round the courthouse to intimidate the judges, and the judges proved as base as the accusers themselves. They professed, indeed, to fear not so much for their own lives as for the public tranquillity, but they pronounced him guilty. One of them had even the effrontery to acknowledge his innocence to Favras himself, and to affirm that his life was a necessary sacrifice to the public peace.
No event since the attack on Versailles had caused Marie Antoinette equal anguish. It showed that attachment to the king and herself was in itself regarded as an inexpiable crime, and her distress was greatly augmented when, on the Sunday following the execution of the marquis, some of his friends brought to the table where, as usual, she was dining in public with the king, the widowed marchioness and her orphaned son in deep mourning, and presented them to their majesties. Their introducers evidently expected that the king, or at least the queen, by the distinguished reception which she would accord to them, would mark their sense of the merits of their late husband and father, and of the indignity of the sentence under which he had suffered.
Marie Antoinette was sadly embarrassed and distressed: she was taken wholly by surprise; and it happened by a cruel perverseness of fortune that Santerre, the brewer, whose ruffianly and ferocious enmity to the whole royal family, and especially to herself, had been conspicuous throughout the worst outrages of the past summer and autumn, was on the same day on duty at the palace as commander of one of the battalions of the Parisian Guard, and was standing behind her chair when the marchioness and her son were introduced. Her embarrassment and all her feelings on the occasion were described by herself in the course of the afternoon to Madame Campan.
After the dinner was over, she went up to her attendant's room, saying that it was a relief to find herself where she could weep at her ease; for weep she must at the folly of the ultra-Royalists. "We can not but be destroyed," she continued, "when we are attacked by people who unite every kind of talent to every kind of wickedness; and when we are defended by folks who are indeed very estimable, but who have no just notion of our position. They have now compromised me with both parties, in their presenting to me the widow and son of Favras. If I had been free to do as I would, I should have taken the child of a man who had just been sacrificed for us, and have placed him at table between the king and myself; but surrounded as I was by the very murderers who had caused his father's death, I could not venture even to bestow a glance upon him. Yet the Royalists will blame me for not having seemed to be interested in the poor child; while the Revolutionists will be furious, thinking that those who presented him to me knew that it would please me." And all that she could venture to do she did. She knew that the marchioness was very poor, and she sent her by a trusty agent a few hundred louis, and with it a kind message, assuring the unhappy widow that she would always watch over her and her son's interests.
CHAPTER XXVII. The King accepts the Constitution so far as it has been settled.-The Queen makes a Speech to the Deputies.-She is well received at the Theatre.-Negotiations with Mirabeau.-The Queen's Views of the Position of Affairs.-The Jacobin Club denounces Mirabeau.-Deputation of Anacharsis Clootz.-Demolition of the Statue of Louis XIV.-Abolition of Titles of Honor.-The Queen admits Mirabeau to an Audience.-His Admiration of her Courage and Talents.-Anniversary of the Capture of the Bastile.-Fete of the Champ de Mars.-Presence of Mind of the Queen.
What was probably as painful to Marie Antoinette as these occurrences themselves was the apathy with which the king regarded them. The English traveler to whose journal we have more than once referred, and who, in the first week of the year, saw the royal pair waiting in the gardens of the Tuileries, remarked that though the queen did not appear in good health, but showed melancholy and anxiety in her face, the king, on the other hand, "was as plump as ease could render him.[1]" And in the course of February, in spite of all her remonstrances, Necker succeeded in persuading him to go down to the Assembly, and to address the members in a long speech, in which, though some of his expressions were clearly intended as a reproof of the Assembly itself for the precipitation and violence of some of its measures, he nevertheless declared his cordial assent to the new Constitution, so far as they had yet settled it, and promised to co-operate in a spirit of affection and confidence in the labors which still remained to be achieved.