“Gentlemen,” said she, “I am much pleased at having presented you with your colors. The nation and the army ought to love the king as we love the nation and the army. I was delighted with the events of yesterday.”
Upon these words, which she emphasized in her firmest tone of voice; a murmur arose from the crowd, and loud applause re-echoed from the military ranks:
“We are supported,” said the latter.
“We are betrayed,” said the former.
Thus, poor queen, that fatal evening of the 1st of October was not an accidental matter; thus, unfortunate woman, you do not regret the occurrences of yesterday; you do not repent. And so far from repenting, you are delighted with them.
De Charny, who was in the centre of a group, heard with a sigh of extreme pain this justification,—nay, more: than that, this glorification of the orgies of the king’s guards.
The queen, on turning away her eyes from the crowd, met those of the count; and she fixed her looks on the countenance of her lover in order to ascertain the impression her words had produced upon him.
“Am I not courageous?” was the import of this look.
“Alas, Madame, you are far more mad than courageous,” replied the gloomy countenance of the count.
Chapter XIX
The Wowen begin to stir
AT Versailles the court was talking heroically against the people.
At Paris, they were becoming knights-errant against the court; only the knights-errant were running about the streets.
These knights of the people were wandering about in rags, their hands upon the hilt of a sabre or the butt-end of a pistol, questioning their empty pockets or their hollow stomachs.
While at Versailles they drank too much, at Paris, alas! they did not eat enough.
There was too much wine on the table-cloths of Versailles.
Not sufficient flour in the bakers’ shops at Paris.
Strange circumstances! a melancholy blindness, which now that we are accustomed, to the fall of thrones, will excite a smile of pity from politicians.
To make a counter-revolution, and provoke to a combat people who are starving!
Alas! will say History, compelled to become a materialist philosopher, no people ever fight go desperately as those who have not dined.
It would however have been very easy to have given bread to the people, and then most assuredly, the bread of Versailles would have appeared less bitter.
But the flour of Corbeil ceased to arrive. Corbeil is so far from Versailles; who, then, living with the king and queen, could have thought of Corbeil?
Unhappily, from this forgetfulness of the court, Famine, that spectre which sleeps with so much difficulty, but which so easily awakens,—Famine had descended, pale and agitated, into the streets of Paris. She listens at all the corners of the streets; she recruits her train of vagabonds and malefactors; she glues her livid face against the windows of the rich and of the public functionaries.
The men remember those commotions which had cost so much blood; they recall to mind the Bastille; they recollect Foulon, Berthier, and Flesselles; they fear to have the opprobrious name of assassins again attached to them, and they wait.
But the women, who have as yet done nothing but suffer! Where women suffer, the suffering is triple,—for the child, who cries and who is unjust, because it has not a consciousness of the cause; for the child who says to its mother, “Why do you not give me bread?” for the husband, who, gloomy and taciturn, leaves the house in the morning to return to it in the evening still more gloomy and taciturn; and finally, for herself, the painful echo of conjugal and maternal sufferings. The women burn to do something in their turn; they wish to serve their country in their own way.
Besides, was it not a woman who brought about the 1st of October at Versailles?
It was therefore for the women, in their turn, to bring about the 5th of October at Paris.
Gilbert and Billot were sitting in the Café de Foy,1in the Palais Royal. It was at the Café de Foy that
motions were proposed. Suddenly the door of the coffeehouse is thrown open; and a woman enters it much agitated. She denounces the black and white cockades which from Versailles have invaded Paris; she proclaims the public danger.