Читать книгу The Countess of Charny; or, The Execution of King Louis XVI - Александр Дюма, Dumas Alexandre - Страница 3

The Narbonne Ministry lasted three months. A speech of Vergniaud blasted it. On the news that the Empress of Russia had made a treaty with Turkey, and Austria and Prussia had signed an alliance, offensive and defensive, he sprung into the rostrum and cried:

"I see the palace from here where this counter-revolution is scheming those plots which aim to deliver us to Austria. The day has come when you must put an end to so much audacity, and confound the plotters. Out of that palace have issued panic and terror in olden times, in the name of despotism – let them now rush into it in the name of the law!"

Dread and terror did indeed enter the Tuileries, whence De Narbonne, wafted thither by a breath of love, was expelled by a gust of storm. This downfall occurred at the beginning of March, 1792.

Scarce three months after the interview of Gilbert and the queen, a small, active, nervy little man, with flaming eyes blazing in a bright face, was ushered into King Louis' presence. He was aged fifty-six, but appeared ten years younger, though his cheek was brown with camp-fire smoke; he wore the uniform of a camp-marshal.

The king cast a dull and heavy glance on the little man, whom he had never met; but it was not without observation. The other fixed on him a scrutinizing eye full of fire and distrust.

"You are General Dumouriez? Count de Narbonne, I believe, called you to Paris?"

"To announce that he gave me a division in the army in Alsace."

"But you did not join, it appears?"

"Sire, I accepted; but I felt that I ought to point out that as war impended" – Louis started visibly – "and threatened to become general," went on the soldier, without appearing to remark the emotion, "I deemed it good to occupy the south, where an attack might come unawares; consequently, it seemed urgent to me that a plan for movements there should be drawn up, and a general and army sent thither."

"Yes; and you gave this plan to Count de Narbonne, after showing it to members of the Gironde?"

"They are friends of mine, as I believe they are of your majesty."

"Then I am dealing with a Girondist?" queried the monarch, smiling.

"With a patriot, and faithful subject of his king."

Louis bit his thick lips.

"Was it to serve the king and the country the more efficaciously that you refused to be foreign minister for a time?"

"Sire, I replied that I preferred, to being any kind of minister, the command promised me. I am a soldier, not a statesman."

"I have been assured, on the contrary, that you are both," observed the sovereign.

"I am praised too highly, sire."

"It was on that assurance that I insisted."

"Yes, sire; but in spite of my great regret, I was obliged to persist in refusing."

"Why refuse?"

"Because it is a crisis. It has upset De Narbonne and compromises Lessart. Any man has the right to keep out of employment or be employed, according to what he thinks he is fitted for. Now, my liege, I am good for something or for nothing. If the latter, leave me in my obscurity. Who knows for what fate you draw me forth? If I am good for something, do not give me power for an instant, the premier of a day, but place some solid footing under me that I may be your support at another day. Our affairs – your majesty will pardon me already regarding his business as mine – our affairs are in too great disfavor abroad for courts to deal with an ad interim ministry; this interregnum – you will excuse the frankness of an old soldier" – no one was less frank than Dumouriez, but he wanted to appear so at times – "this interval will be a blunder against which the House will revolt, and it will make me disliked there; more, I must say that it will injure the king, who will seem still to cling to his former Cabinet, and only be waiting for a chance to bring it back."

"Were that my intention, do you not believe it possible, sir?"

"I believe, sire, that it is full time to drop the past."

"And make myself a Jacobin, as you have said to my valet, Laporte?"

"Forsooth, did your majesty this, it would perplex all the parties, and the Jacobins most of all."

"Why not straightway advise me to don the red cap?"

"I wish I saw you in it," said Dumouriez.

For an instant the king eyed with distrust the man who had thus replied to him; and then he resumed:

"So you want a permanent office?"

"I am wishing nothing at all, only ready to receive the king's orders; still, I should prefer them to send me to the frontier to retaining me in town."

"But if I give you the order to stay, and the foreign office portfolio in permanency, what will you say?"

"That your majesty has dispelled your prejudices against me," returned the general, with a smile.

"Well, yes, entirely, general; you are my premier."

"Sire, I am devoted to your service; but – "

"Restrictions?"

"Explanations, sire. The first minister's place is not what it was. Without ceasing to be your majesty's faithful servant on entering the post, I become the man of the nation. From this day, do not expect the language my predecessors used; I must speak according to the Constitution and liberty. Confined to my duties, I shall not play the courtier; I shall not have the time, and I drop all etiquette so as to better serve the king. I shall only work with you in private or at the council – and I warn you that it will be hard work."

"Hard work – why?"

"Why, it is plain; almost all your diplomatic corps are anti-revolutionists. I must urge you to change them, cross your tastes on the new choice, propose officials of whom your majesty never so much as heard the names, and others who will displease."

"In which case?" quickly interrupted Louis.

"Then I shall obey when your majesty's repugnance is too strong and well-founded, as you are the master; but if your choice is suggested by your surroundings, and is clearly made to get me into trouble, I shall entreat your majesty to find a successor for me. Sire, think of the dreadful dangers besieging your throne, and that one must have the public confidence in support; sire, this depends on you."

"Let me stay you a moment; I have long pondered over these dangers." He stretched out his hand to the portrait of Charles I. of England, by Vandyke, and continued, while wiping his forehead with his handkerchief: "This would remind me, if I were to forget them. It is the same situation, with similar dangers; perhaps the scaffold of Whitehall is erecting on City Hall Place."

"You are looking too far ahead, my lord."

"Only to the horizon. In this event, I shall march to the scaffold as Charles I. did, not perhaps as knightly, but at least as like a Christian. Proceed, general."

Dumouriez was checked by this firmness, which he had not expected.

"Sire, allow me to change the subject."

"As you like; I only wish to show that I am not daunted by the prospect they try to frighten me with, but that I am prepared for even this emergency."

"If I am still regarded as your Minister of Foreign Affairs, I will bring four dispatches to the first consul. I notify your majesty that they will not resemble those of previous issue in style or principles; they will suit the circumstances. If this first piece of work suits your majesty, I will continue; if not, my carriage will be waiting to carry me to serve king and country on the border; and, whatever may be said about my diplomatic ability," added Dumouriez, "war is my true element, and the object of my labors these thirty-six years."

"Wait," said the other, as he bowed before going out; "we agree on one point, but there are six more to settle."

"My colleagues?"

"Yes; I do not want you to say that you are hampered by such a one. Choose your Cabinet, sir."

"Sire, you are fixing grave responsibility on me."

"I believe I am meeting your wishes by putting it on you."

"Sire, I know nobody at Paris save one, Lacoste, whom I propose for the navy office."

"Lacoste? A clerk in the naval stores, I believe?" questioned the king.

"Who resigned rather than connive at some foul play."

"That's a good recommendation. What about the others?'"

"I must consult Petion, Brissot, Condorcet – "

"The Girondists, in short?"

"Yes, sire."

"Let the Gironde pass; we shall see if they will get us out of the ditch better than the other parties."

"We have still to learn if the four dispatches will suit."

"We might learn that this evening; we can hold an extraordinary council, composed of yourself, Grave, and Gerville – Duport has resigned. But do not go yet; I want to commit you."

He had hardly spoken before the queen and Princess Elizabeth stood in the room, holding prayer-books.

"Ladies," said the king, "this is General Dumouriez, who promises to serve us well, and will arrange a new Cabinet with us this evening."

Dumouriez bowed, while the queen looked hard at the little man who was to exercise so much influence over the affairs of France.

"Do you know Doctor Gilbert?" she asked. "If not, make his acquaintance as an excellent prophet. Three months ago he foretold that you would be Count de Narbonne's successor."

The main doors opened, for the king was going to mass. Behind him Dumouriez went out; but the courtiers shunned him as though he had the leprosy.

"I told you I should get you committed," whispered the monarch.

"Committed to you, but not to the aristocracy," returned the warrior; "it is a fresh favor the king grants me." Whereupon he retired.

At the appointed hour he returned with the four dispatches promised – for Spain, Prussia, England, and Austria. He read them to the king and Messieurs Grave and Gerville, but he guessed that he had another auditor behind the tapestry by its shaking.

The new ruler spoke in the king's name, but in the sense of the Constitution, without threats, but also without weakness. He discussed the true interests of each power relatively to the French Revolution. As each had complained of the Jacobin pamphlets, he ascribed the despicable insults to the freedom of the press, a sun which made weeds to grow as well as good grain to flourish. Lastly, he demanded peace in the name of a free nation, of which the king was the hereditary representative.

The listening king lent fresh interest to each paper.

"I never heard the like, general," he said, when the reading was over.

"That is how ministers should speak and write in the name of rulers," observed Gerville.

"Well, give me the papers; they shall go off to-morrow," the king said.

"Sire, the messengers are waiting in the palace yard," said Dumouriez.

"I wanted to have a duplicate made to show the queen," objected the king, with marked hesitation.

"I foresaw the wish, and have copies here," replied Dumouriez.

"Send off the dispatches," rejoined the king.

The general took them to the door, behind which an aid was waiting. Immediately the gallop of several horses was heard leaving the Tuileries together.

"Be it so," said the king, replying to his mind, as the meaning sounds died away. "Now, about your Cabinet?"

"Monsieur Gerville pleads that his health will not allow him to remain, and Monsieur Grave, stung by a criticism of Madame Roland, wishes to hold office until his successor is found. I therefore pray your majesty to receive Colonel Servan, an honest man in the full acceptation of the words, of a solid material, pure manners, philosophical austerity, and a heart like a woman's, withal an enlightened patriot, a courageous soldier, and a vigilant statesman."

"Colonel Servan is taken. So we have three ministers: Dumouriez for the Foreign Office, Servan for War, and Lacoste for the Navy. Who shall be in the Treasury?"

"Clavieres, if you will. He is a man with great financial friends and supreme skill in handling money."

"Be it so. As for the Law lord?"

"A lawyer of Bordeaux has been recommended to me – Duranthon."

"Belonging to the Gironde party, of course?"

"Yes, sire, but enlightened, upright, a very good citizen, though slow and feeble; we will infuse fire into him and be strong enough for all of us."

"The Home Department remains."

"The general opinion is that this will be fitted to Roland."

"You mean Madame Roland?"

"To the Roland couple. I do not know them, but I am assured that the one resembles a character of Plutarch and the other a woman from Livy."

"Do you know that your Cabinet is already called the Breechless Ministry?"

"I accept the nickname, with the hope that it will be found without breaches."

"We will hold the council with them the day after to-morrow."

General Dumouriez was going away with his colleagues, when a valet called him aside and said that the king had something more to say to him.

"The king or the queen?" he questioned.

"It is the queen, sir; but she thought there was no need for those gentlemen to know that."

And Weber – for this was the Austrian foster-brother of Marie Antoinette – conducted the general to the queen's apartments, where he introduced him as the person sent for.

Dumouriez entered, with his heart beating more violently than when he led a charge or mounted the deadly breach. He fully understood that he had never stood in worse danger. The road he traveled was strewn with corpses, and he might stumble over the dead reputations of premiers, from Calonne to Lafayette.

The queen was walking up and down, with a very red face. She advanced with a majestic and irritated air as he stopped on the sill where the door had been closed behind him.

"Sir, you are all-powerful at this juncture," she said, breaking the ice with her customary vivacity. "But it is by favor of the populace, who soon shatter their idols. You are said to have much talent. Have the wit, to begin with, to understand that the king and I will not suffer novelties. Your constitution is a pneumatic machine; royalty stifles in it for want of air. So I have sent for you to learn, before you go further, whether you side with us or with the Jacobins."

"Madame," responded Dumouriez, "I am pained by this confidence, although I expected it, from the impression that your majesty was behind the tapestry."

"Which means that you have your reply ready?"

"It is that I stand between king and country, but before all I belong to the country."

"The country?" sneered the queen. "Is the king no longer anything, that everybody belongs to the country and none to him?"

"Excuse me, lady; the king is always the king, but he has taken oath to the Constitution, and from that day he should be one of the first slaves of the Constitution."

"A compulsory oath, and in no way binding, sir!"

Dumouriez held his tongue for a space, and, being a consummate actor, he regarded the speaker with deep pity.

"Madame," he said, at length, "allow me to say that your safety, the king's, your children's, all, are attached to this Constitution which you deride, and which will save you, if you consent to be saved by it. I should serve you badly, as well as the king, if I spoke otherwise to you."

The queen interrupted him with an imperious gesture.

"Oh, sir, sir, I assure you that you are on the wrong path!" she said; adding, with an indescribable accent of threat: "Take heed for yourself!"

"Madame," replied Dumouriez, in a perfectly calm tone, "I am over fifty years of age; my life has been traversed with perils, and on taking the ministry I said to myself that ministerial responsibility was not the slightest danger I ever ran."

"Fy, sir!" returned the queen, slapping her hands together; "you have nothing more to do than to slander me?"

"Slander you, madame?"

"Yes; do you want me to explain the meaning of the words I used? It is that I am capable of having you assassinated. For shame, sir!"

Tears escaped from her eyes. Dumouriez had gone as far as she wanted; he knew that some sensitive fiber remained in that indurated heart.

"Lord forbid I should so insult my queen!" he cried. "The nature of your majesty is too grand and noble for the worst of her enemies to be inspired with such an idea, she has given heroic proofs which I have admired, and which attached me to her."

"Then excuse me, and lend me your arm. I am so weak that I often fear I shall fall in a swoon."

Turning pale, she indeed drooped her head backward. Was it reality, or only one of the wiles in which this fearful Medea was so skilled? Keen though the general was, he was deceived; or else, more cunning than the enchantress, he feigned to be caught.

"Believe me, madame," he said, "that I have no interest in cheating you. I abhor anarchy and crime as much as yourself. Believe, too, that I have experience, and am better placed than your majesty to see events. What is transpiring is not an intrigue of the Duke of Orleans, as you are led to think; not the effect of Pitt's hatred, as you have supposed; not even the outcome of popular impulse, but the almost unanimous insurrection of a great nation against inveterate abuses. I grant that there is in all this great hates which fan the flames. Leave the lunatics and the villains on one side; let us see nothing in this revolution in progress but the king and the nation, all tending to separate them brings about their mutual ruin. I come, my lady, to work my utmost to reunite them; aid me, instead of thwarting me. You mistrust me? Am I an obstacle to your anti-revolutionary projects? Tell me so, madame, I will forthwith hand my resignation to the king, and go and wail the fate of my country and its ruler in some nook."

"No, no," said the queen; "remain, and excuse me."

"Do you ask me to excuse you? Oh, madame, I entreat you not to humble yourself thus."

"Why should I not be humble? Am I still a queen? am I yet treated like a woman?"

Going to the window, she opened it in spite of the evening coolness; the moon silvered the leafless trees of the palace gardens.

"Are not the air and the sunshine free to all? Well, these are refused to me; I dare not put my head out of window, either on the street or the gardens. Yesterday I did look out on the yard, when a Guards gunner hailed me with an insulting nickname, and said: 'How I should like to carry your head on a bayonet-point.' This morning, I opened the garden window. A man standing on a chair was reading infamous stuff against me; a priest was dragged to a fountain to be ducked; and meanwhile, as though such scenes were matters of course, children were sailing their balloons and couples were strolling tranquilly. What times we are living in – what a place to live in – what a people! And would you have me still believe myself a queen, and even feel like a woman?"

She threw herself on a sofa, and hid her face in her hands.

Dumouriez dropped on one knee, and taking up the hem of her dress respectfully, he kissed it.

"Lady," he said, "from the time when I undertake this struggle, you will become the mighty queen and the happy woman once more, or I shall leave my life on the battle-field."

Rising, he saluted the lady and hurried out. She watched him go with a hopeless look, repeating:

"The mighty queen? Perhaps, thanks to your sword – for it is possible; but the happy woman – never, never, never!"

She let her head fall between the sofa cushions, muttering the name dearer every day and more painful:

"Charny!"

The Dumouriez Cabinet might be called one of war.

On the first of March, the Emperor Leopold died in the midst of his Italian harem, slain by self-compounded aphrodisiacs. The queen, who had read in some lampoon that a penny pie would settle the monarchy, and who had called Dr. Gilbert in to get an antidote, cried aloud that her brother was poisoned. With him passed all the halting policy of Austria.

Francis II., who mounted the throne, was of mixed Italian and German blood. An Austrian born at Florence, he was weak, violent, and tricky. The priests reckoned him an honest man; his hard and bigoted soul hid its duplicity under a rosy face of dreadful sameness. He walked like a stage ghost; he gave his daughter to a conqueror rather than part with his estate, and then stabbed him in the back at his first retreating step in the snows. Francis II. remains in history the tyrant of the Leads of Venice and the Spitzberg dungeons, and the torturer of Andryane and Silvio Pellico.

This was the protector of the French fugitives, the ally of Prussia and the enemy of France. He held Embassador Noailles as a prisoner at Vienna.

The French embassador to Berlin, Segur, was preceded by a rumor that he expected to gain the secrets of the King of Prussia by making love to his mistresses – this King of Prussia was a lady-killer! Segur presented himself at the same time as the envoy from the self-exiled princes at Coblentz.

The king turned his back on the French representative, and asked pointedly after the health of the Prince of Artois.

These were the two ostensible foes; the hidden ones were Spain, Russia, and England. The chief of the coalition was to be the King of Sweden, that dwarf in giant's armor whom Catherine II. held up in her hand.

With the ascension of Francis, the diplomatic note came: Austria was to rule in France, Avignon was to be restored to the pope, and things in France were to go back to where they stood in June, 1789.

This note evidently agreed with the secret wishes of the king and the queen. Dumouriez laughed at it. But he took it to the king.

As much as Marie Antoinette, the woman for extreme measures, desired a war which she believed one of deliverance for her, the king feared it, as the man for the medium, slowness, wavering, and crooked policy. Indeed, suppose a victory in the war, he would be at the mercy of the victorious general; suppose a defeat, and the people would hold him responsible, cry treason, and rush on the palace!

In short, should the enemy penetrate to Paris, what would it bring? The king's brother, Count Provence, who aimed to be regent of the realm. The result of the return of the runaway princes would be the king deposed, Marie Antoinette pronounced an adulteress, and the royal children proclaimed, perhaps, illegitimate.

The king trusted foreigners, but not the princes of his own blood and kingdom.

On reading the note, he comprehended that the hour to draw the sword for France had come, and that there was no receding.

Who was to bear the flag of the revolution? Lafayette, who had lost his fame by massacring the populace on the Paris parade-ground; Luckner, who was known only by the mischief he wrought in the Seven Years' War, and old Rochambeau, the French naval hero in the American Revolution, who was for defensive war, and was vexed to see Dumouriez promote young blood over his head without benefiting by his experience.

It was expected that Lafayette would be victorious in the north; when he would be commander-in-chief, Dumouriez would be the Minister of War; they would cast down the red cap and crush Jacobins and Girondists with the two hands.

The counter-revolution was ready.

But what were Robespierre and the Invisibles doing – that great secret society which held the agitators in its grasp as Jove holds the writhing thunder-bolts? Robespierre was in the shade, and many asserted that he was bribed by the royal family.

At the outset all went well for the Royalists; Lafayette's lieutenants, two Royalists, Dillon and Biron, headed a rout before Lille; the scouts, dragoons, still the most aristocratic arm of the service, turned tail and started a panic. The runaways accused the captains of treachery, and murdered Dillon and other officers. The Gironde accused the queen and Court party of organizing the flight.

The popular clamor compelled Marie Antoinette to let the Constitutional Guard be abolished – another name for a royal life-guard – and it was superseded by the Paris National Guards.

Oh! Charny, Charny, where were you? – you who, at Varennes, nearly rescued the queen with but three hundred horsemen – what would you not have done at Paris with six thousand desperadoes?

Charny was happy, forgetting everything in the arms of his countess.