And he returned to his coach, where he found Pitou and Billot sleeping upon the front seat, the coachman sleeping on his box, and the horses sleeping upon their exhausted limbs.
Chapter XXII
The King Louis XVI
THE interview between Gilbert, Madame de Staël, and Monsieur de Necker had lasted about an hour and a half. Gilbert re-entered Paris at a quarter-past nine o’clock, drove straight to the post-house, ordered horses and a post-chaise; and while Billot and Pitou were gone to rest themselves, after their fatigue, in a small hotel in the Rue Thiroux, where Billot generally put up when he came to Paris, Gilbert set off at a gallop on the road to Versailles.
It was late, but that mattered little to Gilbert. To men of his nature, activity is a necessity. Perhaps his journey might be a fruitless one. But he even preferred a useless journey to remaining motionless. For nervous temperaments, uncertainty is a greater torment than the most frightful reality.
He arrived at Versailles at half-past ten; in ordinary times, every one would have been in bed and wrapped in the profoundest slumber; but that night no eye was closed at Versailles. They had felt the counter-shock of the terrible concussion with which Paris was still trembling.
The French Guards, the body-guards, the Swiss, drawn up in platoons and grouped near the openings of all the principal streets, were conversing among themselves, or with those of the citizens whose fidelity to the monarchy inspired them with confidence.
For Versailles has, at all times, been a royalist city. Religious respect for the monarchy, if not for the monarch, is engrafted in the hearts of its inhabitants, as if it were a quality of its soil. Having always lived near kings, and fostered by their bounty, beneath the shade of their wonders,—having always inhaled the intoxicating perfume of the fleurs-de-lys, and seen the brilliant gold of their garments, and the smiles upon their august lips, the inhabitants of Versailles, for whom kings have built a city of marble and porphyry, feel almost kings themselves; and even at the present day, even now, when moss is growing round the marble, and grass is springing up between the slabs of the pavement, now that gold has almost disappeared from the wainscoting, and that the shady walks of the parks are more solitary than a graveyard, Versailles must either belie its origin, or must consider itself as a fragment of the fallen monarchy, and no longer feeling the pride of power and wealth, must at least retain the poetical associations of regret, and the sovereign charms of melancholy. Thus, as we have already stated, all Versailles, in the night between the 14th and 15th July, 1789, was confusedly agitated, anxious to ascertain how the King of France would reply to the insult offered to the throne, and the deadly wound inflicted on his power.
By his answer to Monsieur de Dreux Brézé, Mirabeau had struck royalty in the face.
By the taking of the Bastille, the people had struck royalty to the heart.
Still, to narrow-minded and short-sighted persons the question seemed easy of solution. In the eyes of military men in particular, who were accustomed to see nothing more than the triumph or defeat of brute-force in the result of events, it was merely necessary to march upon Paris. Thirty thousand men and twenty pieces of cannon would soon reduce to a nonentity the conceit and the victorious fury of the Parisians.
Never had monarchy so great a number of advisers, for everybody uttered his opinions loudly and publicly.
The most moderate said:—
“It is a very simple matter.”
This form of language, it will be observed, is nearly always applied, with us, to the most difficult circumstances.
“It is a very simple matter,” said they. “Let them begin by obtaining from the National Assembly a sanction which it will not refuse. Its attitude has, for some time, been reassuring to every one; it will not countenance violence committed by the lower classes, any more than abuses perpetrated by the upper.
“The Assembly will plainly declare that insurrection is a crime; that citizens who have representatives to explain their griefs to the king, and a king to do them justice, are wrong in having recourse to arms and in shedding blood.