The Last Days of the French Monarchy

Upon the crest of the steep and thickly wooded hills that rise from the left bank of the Seine below Paris, you may find a village, the old stones of which, and something spacious in its whole arrangement, are consonant with its name. It is called “Marly of the King.”
There the great trees, the balustrade, and gates still standing recall the palace to which the French monarchy retired when leisure or fatigue or mourning withdrew it from Versailles; for it was a place more domestic and far less burdened with state.
To the gates of that great country house there came near ten o’clock, just after the hour when full darkness falls on a midsummer evening, a great coach, driving from Versailles. It was the coach of the Archbishop of Paris, coming urgently to see the king, and the day was Friday, the nineteenth of June, 1789. They were in the full crisis that opened the Revolution. The tall windows of the palace were fully lit as the coach came up the drive. The night air was cold, for those June days were rainy and full of hurrying cloud. The Archbishop of Paris and his colleague of Rouen, who was with him, were summoned by their titles into the room where Louis XVI sat discussing what should be done for the throne.
Two days before, upon the Wednesday, the commons of the great Parliament—the Commons House in that great Parliament which had met again after a hundred years, and which now felt behind it the nation—had taken the first revolutionary step and had usurped authority. The quarrel which had hampered all reform since this Parliament of the States General had met six weeks before; the refusal of the two privileged orders and particularly of the nobles to vote with the commons and to form with them one National Assembly; the claim of the privileged orders and particularly of the nobles to bar whatever the popular representatives might decide—all that had been destroyed in spirit by a new act of sovereignty.
Using the title that was on all men’s lips and calling themselves the “National Assembly,” the commons had declared that the whole assembly was an indivisible body, and alone the organ of the nation. They had used with conscious purpose the solemn formula “Desires and decrees,” which hitherto throughout all these centuries had never appeared above any seal or signature save that of a king. They clothed this spiritual thing with body by the enormous decision that no tax should be paid in the kingdom that had not their approval.
This was the blow that had summoned the council round the king at Marly upon this Friday night. For now two anxious days doubtful issues and conflicting policies had pulled Louis this way and that, whether to yield, whether to compromise, or whether to strike back.
It was a fortnight since the sickly child who was heir to the throne had died, and this retirement of the royal family to Marly, consequent upon such mourning, was confused by the numbness of that shock also. The king perhaps more than the queen had suffered in his powers and judgment; for Marie Antoinette, the most vigorous and lucid of those gathered in council at Marly, the least national, and the least wide in judgment, was active at this moment for the full claims of the crown.
With her at the king’s side in the taking of this crucial decision stood other advisers. The king’s two brothers, the elder and the younger, who, as Louis XVIII and Charles X, were to rule after the restoration, and who were now known under the titles of Provence, and Artois were in the palace together. Provence, the elder, very dull and heartless, was the more solid; Artois, the younger, empty, poor in judgment, was the least unattractive. They counted for their rank, and even Provence for little else.
Barentin was there, the keeper of the seals. He was a man of very clear decision, of straightforward speech and manner; a man with something sword-like about him. He thought and said that the king had only to move troops and settle matters at once.
There also, lit by the candles of that night, was the vacuous, puffed face of Necker, the millionaire. This man, famous through his wealth, which was ill acquired and enormous, an alien in religion as in blood, had become, by one of those ironies in which the gods delight, the idol of the national movement. He was pitifully inferior to such an opportunity, empty of courage, empty of decision, and almost empty of comprehension. No idea informed him unless it was that of some vague financial “liberalism” (rather, say, moral anarchy) suitable to the crooked ways by which he himself had arrived. Those protruding eyes, that loose mouth, and that lethargic, self-satisfied expression were the idol that stood in the general mind for the giant things that were coming. Behind such cold dross was reddening the creative fire of the nation! Such a doorkeeper did Fate choose to open the gates for the armies of Marceau and Napoleon! All his advice was for something “constitutional.” In days better suited for such men as he Necker would have been a politician, and a parliamentary politician at that.
To these, then, thus assembled entered the archbishops with their news. The news was this: that before sunset, just before they had left Versailles, the clergy had rallied to the commons. The bishops, indeed, all save four, had stood out for the privileged orders; but the doubt in which all minds had been since the revolutionary step of forty-eight hours before was resolved. The clergy had broken rank with the nobles; for that matter, many of the wealthier nobles were breaking rank, too. Decision was most urgent; the moment was critical in the extreme, lest in a few hours the National Assembly, already proclaimed, already half formed, should arise united and in full strength over against the crown.
In not two hours after the arrival of the prelates the decision, nearly reached before they came, was finally taken by the king. He would follow Necker, and Necker was for a long, windy, complicated compromise. Necker was for a constitution, large, “liberal,” strangling the action of the popular life, dissolving the yes and no of creative creeds, leaving to the crown as much as would preserve its power to dismiss the States General and to summon a new body less national—and, above all, less violent. There is an English word for this temper, the word “Whig.” But that word is associated in the English language with the triumph of wealth. Necker’s muddy vision did not triumph.
That decision was taken upon this Friday night, the nineteenth of June, 1789—taken, I think, a little before midnight. Artois was off to bed, and Provence, too. The council was broken up. It was full midnight now when wheels were again heard upon the granite sets before the great doors, and the hot arrival of horses. The name announced was that of Talleyrand, the Bishop of Autun, and the king, perhaps angrily, refused to see him.
This man, with eyes like a ferret and an intelligence as keen as it was witty and narrow, a bradawl of a mind, as invincible at intrigue as in vice, given up wholly to the search for personal advantage, had about him all that the plain piety of Louis XVI detested, and all that Louis XVI’s slow mind most feared. The king had made him Bishop of Autun against his every judgment, and only at the call of Talleyrand’s fellow-clergymen, who loved their comrade’s amusing sallies against religion and his reputation of the brain. It was a reputation that had led Rome to consider the making of him a cardinal, and only Louis himself had prevented it. For Louis profoundly believed. It was Louis who had said in those days just before the Revolution, “I will give no man the see of Paris who denies his God.”
Such was Talleyrand, thirty-five years of age, destined to compass the ruin of the French church, to ordain to the schismatic body which attempted to replace it, to be picked out by Danton for his very vices as a good emissary to Pitt, to be one of the levers of Napoleon, to be the man that handed the crown to Louis XVIII at the restoration. Such was the man, full of policy and of evil, whom on that midnight Louis XVI refused to see.
The king refused to see him with the more determination that Talleyrand had asked for a secret audience. Talleyrand sent a servant to the king’s younger brother, Artois, who knew him well, and Artois, who was in bed, asked him to come to the bedroom to speak to him, which he did; and there in that incongruous place, to the empty-headed man lying abed listening to him, Talleyrand, till well after midnight, set forth what should be done. He also came, he said, hot-foot from Versailles, a witness. He had twenty times the grip of any of these others (he said) to seize what had happened.