CHAPTER XXVIII. Great Tumults in the Provinces.-Mutiny in the Marquis de Bouille's Army. -Disorder of the Assembly.-Difficulty of managing Mirabeau.-Mercy is removed to The Hague.-Marie Antoinette sees constant Changes in the Aspect of Affairs.-Marat denounces Her.-Attempts are made to assassinate Her.-Resignation of Mirabeau.-Misconduct of the Emigrant Princes.
But men less blinded by the feverish excitement of revolutionary enthusiasm would have seen but little in the state of France at this time to regard as matter for exultation. Many of the recent measures of the Assembly, and especially the extinction of the old provinces, had created great discontent in the rural districts. Formidable riots had broken out in many quarters, especially in the great southern cities, in some of which the mob had rivaled the worst excesses of its Parisian brethren; massacring the magistrates, tearing their bodies into pieces, and terrifying the peaceable inhabitants by processions, in which the mangled remains of their victims formed the most conspicuous feature. At Brest and at Toulon the sailors showed that they fully shared the general dissatisfaction; while in the army a formidable mutiny broke out among the troops which were under the command of the Marquis de Bouille, in Lorraine. That, indeed, had a different object, since it had been excited by Jacobin emissaries, who were aware that the marquis, the soldier who, of the whole French army at that time, enjoyed the highest reputation, was firmly attached to the king; though he was not one of the nobles who had opposed all reform, nor had he hesitated to follow his royal master's example and to declare his acceptance of the new Constitution. Fortunately he had subalterns worthy of him, and faithful to their oaths; and as he was a man of great promptitude and decision, he, with their aid, quelled the mutiny, though not without a sanguinary conflict, in which he himself lost above four hundred men, while the loss which he inflicted on the mutineers was far heavier. But he had set a noble example, and had given an undeniable proof of the possibility of quelling the most formidable tumults; and it may be said that his quarters were the only spot in all France which was not wholly given up to anarchy and disorder.
For even the Assembly itself was a prey to tumult and violence. From the time of its assuming that title admission had been given to every one who could force his way into the chamber, whether he was a member or not; nor was any order preserved among those who thus obtained admission; but they were allowed to express their opinion of every speaker and of every speech by friendly or unfriendly clamor: a practice which, as may well be supposed, materially influenced many votes. And presently attendance for that purpose became a trade; some of the most violent deputies hiring a regularly appointed troop to take their station in the galleries, and paying them daily wages to applaud or hiss in accordance with the signs which they themselves made from the body of the hall.[1] And if the populace was thus the master of the Assembly while at Versailles, this was far more the case after its removal to Paris, where the number of the idle portion of the population furnished the Jacobins with far greater means of intimidating their adversaries.
It was remarkable that La Marck himself, as has been already intimated, did not fully share the hopes which the king and queen founded on the adhesion of Mirabeau. It was not only that on one point he had sounder views than Mirabeau himself-doubting, as he did, whether the mischief which his vehement friend had formerly done could now be undone by the same person, merely because he had changed his mind-but he also felt doubts of Mirabeau's steadiness in his new path, and feared lest eagerness for popularity, or an innate levity of disposition, might still lead him astray. As he described him in a letter to Mercy, "he was sometimes very great and sometimes very little; he could be very useful, and he could be very mischievous: in a word, he was often above, and sometimes greatly below, any other man." At another time he speaks of him as "by turns imprudent through excess of confidence, and lukewarm from distrust;" and this estimate of the great demagogue, which was not very incorrect, shows, too, how high an opinion La Marck had formed of the queen's ability and force of character, for he looks to her "to put a curb on his inconstancy,[2]" trusting for that result not so much to her power of fascination as to her clearness of view and resolution.
And she herself was never so misled by her high estimate of Mirabeau's abilities and influence as to think his judgment unerring. On the contrary, her comment to Mercy on one of the earliest letters which he addressed to the king was that it was "full of madness from one end to the other," and she asked "how he, or any one else, could expect that at such a moment the king and she could be induced to provoke a civil war?" alluding, apparently, to his urgent advice that the royal family should leave Paris, a step of the necessity for which she was not yet convinced. Her hope evidently was that he would bring forward some motions in the Assembly which might at least arrest the progress of mischief, and perhaps even pave the way for the repair of some of the evil already done.
On one point she partly agreed with him, but not wholly. He insisted on the necessity of dismissing the ministers; but she, though thinking them, both as a body and individually, unequal to the crisis, saw great difficulty in replacing them, since the vote of the preceding winter forbade the king to select their successors from the members of the Assembly;[3] and she feared also lest, if he should dismiss them, the Assembly would carry out a plan which, as it seemed to her, it already showed great inclination to adopt, of managing every thing by means of committees, and preventing the appointment of any new administration. Her view of the situation, and of the king's and her position, varied from time to time, as indeed their circumstances and the views of the Assembly appeared to alter. In August she is in great distress, caused by a decision of the emperor to remove Mercy to the Hague. "I am," she writes to the embassador, "in despair at your departure, especially at a moment when affairs are becoming every day more embarrassing and more painful, and when I have therefore the greater need of an attachment as sincere and enlightened as yours. But I feel that all the powers, under different pretexts, will withdraw their ministers one after another. It is impossible to leave them incessantly exposed to this disorder and license; but such is my destiny, and I am forced to endure the horror of it to the very end.[4]" But a fortnight later she tells Madame de Polignac that "for some days things have been wearing a better complexion. She can not feel very sanguine, the mischievous folks having such an interest in perverting every thing, and in hindering every thing which, is reasonable, and such means of doing so; but at the moment the number of ill-intentioned people is diminished, or at least the right-thinking of all classes and of all ranks are more united ... You may depend upon it," she adds, "that misfortunes have not diminished my resolution or my courage: I shall not lose any of that; they will only give me more prudence.[5]" Indeed, her own strength of mind, fortitude, and benevolence were the only things in France which were not constantly changing at this time; and she derived one lesson from the continued vicissitudes to which she was exposed, which, if partly grievous, was also in part full of comfort and encouragement to so warm a heart. "It is in moments such as these that one learns to know men, and to see who are truly attached to one, and who are not. I gain every day fresh experiences in this point; sometimes cruel, sometimes pleasant; for I am continually finding that some people are truly and sincerely attached to us, to whom I never gave a thought."
Another of her old vexations was revived in the renewed jealousy of Austrian influence with which the Jacobin leaders at this time inspired the mob, and which was so great that, when in the autumn Leopold sent the young Prince de Lichtenstein as his envoy to notify his accession, Marie Antoinette could only venture to give him a single audience; and, greatly as she enjoyed the opportunity of gathering from him news of Vienna and of the old friends of the childhood of whom she still cherished an affectionate recollection, she was yet forced to dismiss him after a few minutes' conversation, and to beg him to accelerate his departure from Paris, lest even that short interview should be made a pretext for fresh calumnies. "The kindest thing that any Austrian of mark could do for her," she told her brother, "was to keep away from Paris at present.[6]" She would gladly have seen the Assembly interest itself a little in the politics of the empire, where Leopold's own situation was full of difficulties; but the French had not yet come to consider themselves as justified in interfering in the internal government of other countries. As she describes their feelings to the emperor, "They feel their own individual troubles, but those of their neighbors do not yet affect them; and the names of Liberty and Despotism are so deeply engraved in their heads, even though they do not clearly define them, that they are everlastingly passing from the love of the former to the dread of the latter;" and then she adds a sketch of her own ideas and expectations, and of the objects which she conceives it her duty to keep in view, in which it is affecting to see that her utter despair of any future happiness for the king and herself in no degree weakens her desire to promote the happiness of the very people who have caused her suffering. "Our task is to watch skillfully for the moment when men's heads have returned to proper ideas sufficiently to make them enjoy a reasonable and honest freedom, such as the king has himself always desired for the happiness of his people; but far from that license and anarchy which have precipitated the fairest of kingdoms into all possible miseries. Our health continues good, but it would be better if we could only perceive the least gleam of happiness around us; as for ourselves, that is at an end forever, happen what will. I know that it is the duty of a king to suffer for others; and it is one which we are discharging thoroughly."