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CHAPTER III.—Two Queens

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CHAPTER III.

TWO QUEENS.

The announcement of Louis XV.'s mortal illness found an echo even in the secluded life of the humble engraver's family. Writing to her friend at Amiens on the 9th May 1774, Manon remarks: "Although the obscurity of my birth, name and position seem to preclude me from taking any interest in the Government, yet I feel that the common weal touches me in spite of it. My country is something to me, and the love I bear it is most unquestionable. How could it be otherwise, since nothing in the world is indifferent to me. I am something of a cosmopolitan, and a love of humanity unites me to everything that breathes. A Caribbean interests me; the fate of a Kaffir goes to my heart. Alexander wished for more worlds to conquer; I could wish for others to love." Magnificent humanitarian cry to have burst from the lips of this lovely recluse of twenty!

And while a young girl on the Quai de l'Horloge felt the deep stirrings of a woman's heart for a people whose suffering condition she had not apprehended as yet, another girl—also in her first bewitching bloom—ascended the throne of France, and was hailed by ​Burke as "just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in, glittering like the morning star, full of life and splendour and joy."

It is curious to remember that these two women, born in such opposite ranks—the one on a throne, the other in a workshop—destined one day to play such opposite parts in the approaching political tragedy, both destined to perish amid the clash of warring social forces—were for a short time at this, the spring-time of their lives, lodged in the same palace, where Marie Antoinette reigned in the lustre of royalty, while Marie Jeanne looked on critically from the back-stairs. It gives one some food for reflection to compare these two natures, and to observe that the daughter of a long line of sovereigns was a mere giddy, frivolous, thoughtless school-girl, while the daughter of the enameller had matured her mind by long hours of study and meditation, and, even at this early age, showed an irrepressible interest in public affairs, whenever they came within her ken. If faculty demand function, surely one of these two girls was by nature anointed Queen of France—and that one was not Marie Antoinette. But from the round men stuck into three-cornered holes, and three-cornered men jammed into round holes, springs half the mischief of the world. Marie Jeanne might have made an incomparable ruler; Marie Antoinette's cravings for pleasure might have remained the harmless vagaries of a beautiful woman. But these vagaries, in the position to which circumstances had condemned her, assumed the proportions of a crime. So far from any yearning of compassion for Kaffirs or Caribbeans, what cared Marie Antoinette for the French people, who, ground ​down by a system of infamous taxation, toiled and moiled in semi-starvation, that Court and nobles might enjoy the greater luxury? What cared she for the peasants who, sooner than cultivate the fruitful champaigns, chose to uproot their vines because of this exorbitant dues which made hard work as useless as idleness? She could care nothing for these things, since she knew nothing whatever of the condition of the people whose Queen she was.

Her peep at this royal show must have been not a little suggestive to Marie Phlipon, when taken by her mother to pass a week at Versailles, in the autumn of 1774. Accompanied by the Abbé Bimont and his housekeeper they were lodged in the attics, one of the female servants of the palace being a friend of theirs. The sumptuous repasts, receptions, plays, balls, card-parties, and what not, passing in succession before the eyes of Plutarch's disciple, shocked her sense of justice and hurt her pride. While she stood there among the crowd, she must often from a distance have seen the radiant young queen, brightly blazing amid her favourite-attendants, and recognised Louis XVI.'s bluff, ungainly bearing amid the obsequious swarm of elegant courtiers. And as the dazzling pictures of court-life were passing before her, did she foresee that presently, as in a play, the scene would be shifted, and that this same brilliant court would quake to the tramp of an infuriated mob of women—menacing, haggard, dishevelled, half-starved—till, under the very walls of the Palace of Versailles, with its daintily-fed inmates, rang out the terrible cry for bread? And that, again, presently King and Queen, courtiers and all, would be swept in the revolutionary tornado from the very face of the earth? No, these things were as yet only darkly brewing in the future; ​but Manon, disgusted with the Court, and impatiently awaiting the moment of departure, took more pleasure in looking at the statues in the gardens than at the personages in the palace. To her mother's inquiry if she were pleased with her visit, she answered, "Provided it is soon over; otherwise I shall detest these people so heartily that I shall not know what to do with my hatred." And to the question of what harm they had done, she replied, "To make me feel injustice and see absurdity." "A benevolent monarch," she wrote afterwards to Sophie, "appears to me almost adorable; but if, before my birth, I had been given the choice of a Government, I would have declared in favour of a Republic."

Once at home, Manon turned with renewed zest to her books. She became so interested in the study of geometry, that, being too poor to buy a certain treatise which had been lent her, she actually copied the whole of it. Presently a fresh disturbance from without was not without exercising a permanent influence on her mind. One day she was startled from her studies by the tramping of an excited crowd hurrying to the Place de la Grève (the place of execution), where two young parricides were condemned to suffer death by the wheel and the stake. People had crowded to the very roofs of houses to witness this appalling punishment. However much the girl shrank from the abominable sight, she could not shut out the shrieks of the wretches nor the smell of the burning faggots! Their cries were heard from her mother's bed, for one of the criminals lived for twelve hours on the wheel. All night this hideous occurrence racked her. However shocked at the crime, she was even more so at people who could find pleasure in such a sight. "In truth," she writes, "human ​nature is not at all estimable considered en masse. I cannot conceive what can thus excite the curiosity of thousands to see two of their fellow-creatures die. The popularity of the gladiatorial fights in Rome no longer surprises me. A kind of ferocity, a certain taste for blood, must be latent in the human heart. But no; that I cannot believe. I imagine that we all of us love strong impressions, because they give us a lively sense of existence, and the same taste which takes the educated people to the theatres carries the populace to the Place de la Grève. Yes, the pitiless mob applauded the tortures of the criminal as if at a play. Of course his crime was horrible; but at such instants one forgets the criminal and his crime, only to feel the agony of a fellow-being, and suffering nature makes herself one with pain. I confess that I feel contempt for men, as well as love; they are so bad or so mad that it is impossible not to despise them. On the other hand, they are so wretched that it is just as impossible to help pitying and loving them. Ah!" she sighs, "I was not prepared for these strange and violent impressions which have come to trouble my ideas, and to modify my whole being in quite a new manner."

Here, then, we have the first heart-throb of pity and yearning over the suffering multitudes, which was never to cease till her own heart ceased to beat. Descending from the serene heights of placid philosophical meditations, she looked at the world she lived in, and what she saw filled her soul with a shuddering awe. Louis Blanc is surely mistaken when he avers, in one passage of his History of the French Revolution, that Madame Roland, unlike Rousseau, had no feeling for the common people. On the ​contrary, she felt the strongest love and commiseration for them. The reasons on which he bases this assertion are, her speaking rather contemptuously of shop-keepers and her aversion to taking a husband from that class in marriage. The reasons which she herself gives for her dislike show that it arose from a strong democratic feeling, as will be seen in a subsequent chapter. Certain it is that henceforth she begins to be more and more preoccupied with the social condition of men, for, in one of her letters to Sophie, she says that, in her eyes, the first and most beautiful of all the virtues is the care for the common weal, the love of the unfortunate, and the desire to help them.

And already there were many signs and portents of the coming events. Like that little cloud which, no bigger than a man's hand, in a seemingly windless sky, is seen weirdly flying across the heavens, and known by mariners to forebode the gathering of the hurricane, there were sudden outbreaks and bread-riots, from which those who can read signs augured the brewing tempest.

In 1775 Marie alludes to a popular agitation which breaks out, now in one spot and now in another, owing to the scarcity of provisions. In the May of that year, she wrote that, in spite of certain edicts of the Ministry with regard to importation of grain from abroad, high prices have ruled in the markets, and that the people, spurred on by want, have raised loud outcries, in some instances forcing the shop-keepers to sell their provisions at a lower price, or else plundering their premises. Crowd after crowd assembled before the bakers' shops, and the wisest closed their shutters and threw the loaves out of window. She draws a most moving ​picture of these famished wretches, cadaverous with hunger, beating a devil's tattoo on the shutters, jostling and pressing each other in their need, and with greedy eyes watching the loaves, as they stumble over each other in their hot haste to catch them! This disturbance was at last allayed by a reduction of the price of bread to a loaf of two sous, and Manon dilates on the singular appearance of the crowd, now appeased, if only for the present. "Some of the people," she writes, "caper about with loaves hugged in their arms, carrying them in triumph, and manifesting the pleasure of satisfied hunger by the most energetic gestures. In many quarters," she continues, "the disturbance would hardly have been perceived had it not been for the pusillanimity of the shop-keepers, who all closed their shutters." She herself was a witness of one of these panics. On entering a church to hear mass, three or four children came running in to seek shelter from a mob that was making for a neighbouring baker. Great alarm on the part of the beadles and the female chair-hirers, who, violently shutting the doors, would naturally have led the otherwise unsuspecting congregation to think that enraged ravishers were coming to violate the most sacred of shrines. "The poor people only wanted bread, and thought not of altars," she says, adding significantly, "the sight of these things gives one quite a new kind of feeling and awakens a host of thoughts."