The fall of the Bastille was followed throughout France by the enlistment of National Guards, ostensibly, in most instances, as a protection against mythical brigands, whose coming in great numbers was continually heralded in every town and village, but who never came. The experience of Pitou, in Haramont, is typical of the great movement which was in progress everywhere.
“It is a terrible but certain fact,” says Michelet, “that in Paris, that city of eight hundred thousand souls, there was no public authority for the space of three months, from July to October.”
Meanwhile the National Assembly was going haltingly on with its work of constitution-making. The session of the 4th of August shines out with peculiar prominence, as it was the occasion of all the privileged classes vying with one another in renouncing their privileges. Such good effect as this tardy renunciation might have had, however, was destroyed by the king’s refusal to sanction it, except in so far as he was personally affected.
Towards the end of August the knotty question of the veto was duly reached: whether the king should have any veto upon the acts of the Assembly, and if so, whether it should be absolute or suspensive.
Throughout Lafayette assumed a position of great prominence in other directions than as commander-in-chief of the National Guard. The suspensive” veto was finally decided upon, and there was a vague prospect of a return of quieter times, except for the continued scarcity and dearness of grain. “Our rights of man are voted,” says Carlyle; “feudalism and all tyranny abolished; yet behold we stand in queue [at the bakers’ doors]! Is it aristocrat forestallers—a court still bent on intrigue? Something is rotten somewhere.”
With hope, terror, suspicion, excitement, succeeding one another with bewildering rapidity, comes the certainty that the “Œil-de-Bœuf is rallying,” that the Flanders regiment has been summoned to Versailles, and that some scheme of flight or repression is in the wind. Then comes the news of the banquet of the 1st of October,—of the appearance of the king and queen, the trampling under foot of cockades, and the announcement of Marie Antoinette the next day, that she was “enchanted with the events of the supper.” Of all fatuous performances of mortals foredoomed to destroy themselves, surely that was the most fatuous. It is significant, by the way, of the extreme caution with which the statements of Madame Campan must be accepted, that in describing this scene, at which she was present, she does not mention the word “cockade,” nor does she imply that it was aught but a quiet, orderly function, at which, perhaps, some one or two may have imbibed a thought too freely.
With regard to the events of the night of October 5-6 at Versailles, nothing need be said, save that the body-guard who heroically defended the door to the queen’s apartments, where Georges de Charny is said to have been slain, was one Miomandre de Sainte-Marie; and that although “fractured, slashed, lacerated, left for dead, he has crawled to the Œil-de-Bœuf, and shall live honored of loyal France.”
In the “Comtesse de Charny” we shall find the king and queen on the road to Paris, on the 6th of October. We shall there meet many old acquaintances and make some new ones, and shall follow the setting sun of the time-honored monarchy of France till it sinks at last below the horizon.
Ange Pitou
Chapter I
In which the Reader is made acquainted with the Hero of this History, as well as with the Country in which he first saw the Light
ON the borders of Picardy and the province of Soissons, and on that part of the national territory which, under the name of the Isle of France, formed a portion of the ancient patrimony of our kings, and in the centre of an immense crescent formed by a forest of fifty thousand acres which stretches its horns to the north and south, rises, almost buried amid the shades of a vast park planted by Francis I. and Henry II., the small city of Villers-Cotterets. This place is celebrated from having given birth to Charles Albert Demoustier, who, at the period when our present history commences, was there writing his “Letters to Emilie on Mythology,” to the unbounded satisfaction of the pretty women of those days, who eagerly snatched his publications from each other as soon as printed.