French Revolution Volume 1 the Bastille — 1.4.IV.The Procession. part1
Chapter 1.
4. IV.
The Procession.
On the first Saturday of May, it is gala at Versailles; and Monday, fourth of the month, is to be a still greater day.
The Deputies have mostly got thither, and sought out lodgings; and are now successively, in long well-ushered files, kissing the hand of Majesty in the Château.
Supreme Usher de Brézé does not give the highest satisfaction: we cannot but observe that in ushering Noblesse or Clergy into the anointed Presence, he liberally opens _both_ his folding-doors; and on the other hand, for members of the Third Estate opens only one!
However, there is room to enter; Majesty has smiles for all.
The good Louis welcomes his Honourable Members, with smiles of hope.
He has prepared for them the Hall of _Menus_, the largest near him; and often surveyed the workmen as they went on.
A
spacious Hall: with raised platform for Throne, Court and Blood-royal; space for six hundred Commons Deputies in front; for half as many Clergy on this hand, and half as many Noblesse on that.
It has lofty galleries; wherefrom dames of honour, splendent in _gaze d’or;_ foreign Diplomacies, and other gilt-edged white-frilled individuals to the number of two thousand,—may sit and look.
Broad passages flow through it; and, outside the inner wall, all round it.
There are committee-rooms, guard-rooms, robing-rooms: really a noble Hall; where upholstery, aided by the subject fine-arts, has done its best; and crimson tasseled cloths, and emblematic _fleurs-de-lys_ are not wanting.
The Hall is ready: the very costume, as we said, has been settled; and the Commons are not to wear that hated slouch-hat (_chapeau clabaud_), but one not quite so slouched (_chapeau rabattu_).
As for their manner of _working_, when all dressed: for their “voting by head or by order” and the rest,—this, which it were perhaps still time to settle, and in few hours will be no longer time, remains unsettled; hangs dubious in the breast of Twelve Hundred men.
But now finally the Sun, on Monday the 4th of May, has risen;—unconcerned, as if it were no special day.
And yet, as his first rays could strike music from the Memnon’s Statue on the Nile, what tones were these, so thrilling, tremulous of preparation and foreboding, which he awoke in every bosom at Versailles!
Huge Paris, in all conceivable and inconceivable vehicles, is pouring itself forth; from each Town and Village come subsidiary rills; Versailles is a very sea of men.
But above all, from the Church of St. Louis to the Church of Notre-Dame: one vast suspended-billow of Life,—with _spray_ scattered even to the chimney-pots!
For on chimney-tops too, as over the roofs, and up thitherwards on every lamp-iron, sign-post, breakneck coign of vantage, sits patriotic Courage; and every window bursts with patriotic Beauty: for the Deputies are gathering at St. Louis Church; to march in procession to Notre-Dame, and hear sermon.
Yes, friends, ye may sit and look: boldly or in thought, all France, and all Europe, may sit and look; for it is a day like few others.
Oh, one might weep like Xerxes:—So many serried rows sit perched there; like winged creatures, alighted out of Heaven: all these, and so many more that follow them, shall have wholly fled aloft again, vanishing into the blue Deep; and the memory of this day still be fresh.
It is the baptism-day of Democracy; sick Time has given it birth, the numbered months being run.
The extreme-unction day of Feudalism!
A superannuated System of Society, decrepit with toils (for has it not done much; produced you, and what ye have and know!
)—and with thefts and brawls, named glorious-victories; and with profligacies, sensualities, and on the whole with dotage and senility,—is now to die: and so, with death-throes and birth-throes, a new one is to be born.
What a work, O Earth and Heavens, what a work!
Battles and bloodshed, September Massacres, Bridges of Lodi, retreats of Moscow, Waterloos, Peterloos, Tenpound Franchises, Tarbarrels and Guillotines;—and from this present date, if one might prophesy, some two centuries of it still to fight!
Two centuries; hardly less; before Democracy go through its due, most baleful, stages of _Quack_ocracy; and a pestilential World be burnt up, and have begun to grow green and young again.
Rejoice nevertheless, ye Versailles multitudes; to you, from whom all this is hid, and glorious end of it is visible.
This day, sentence of death is pronounced on Shams; judgment of resuscitation, were it but far off, is pronounced on Realities.
This day it is declared aloud, as with a Doom-trumpet, that a _Lie is unbelievable_.
Believe that, stand by that, if more there be not; and let what thing or things soever will follow it follow.
“Ye can no other; God be your help!
” So spake a greater than any of you; opening _his_ Chapter of World-History.
Behold, however!
The doors of St. Louis Church flung wide; and the Procession of Processions advancing towards Notre-Dame!
Shouts rend the air; one shout, at which Grecian birds might drop dead.
It is indeed a stately, solemn sight.
The Elected of France, and then the Court of France; they are marshalled and march there, all in prescribed place and costume.
Our Commons “in plain black mantle and white cravat;” Noblesse, in gold-worked, bright-dyed cloaks of velvet, resplendent, rustling with laces, waving with plumes; the Clergy in rochet, alb, or other best _pontificalibus:_ lastly comes the King himself, and King’s Household, also in their brightest blaze of pomp,—their brightest and final one.
Some Fourteen Hundred Men blown together from all winds, on the deepest errand.
Yes, in that silent marching mass there lies Futurity enough.
No symbolic Ark, like the old Hebrews, do these men bear: yet with them too is a Covenant; they too preside at a new Era in the History of Men.
The whole Future is there, and Destiny dim-brooding over it; in the hearts and unshaped thoughts of these men, it lies illegible, inevitable.
Singular to think: _they_ have it in them; yet not they, not mortal, only the Eye above can read it,—as it shall unfold itself, in fire and thunder, of siege, and field-artillery; in the rustling of battle-banners, the tramp of hosts, in the glow of burning cities, the shriek of strangled nations!
Such things lie hidden, safe-wrapt in this Fourth day of May;—say rather, had lain in some other unknown day, of which this latter is the public fruit and outcome.
As indeed what wonders lie in every Day,—had we the sight, as happily we have not, to decipher it: for is not every meanest Day “the conflux of two Eternities!
” Meanwhile, suppose we too, good Reader, should, as now without miracle Muse Clio enables us—take _our_ station also on some coign of vantage; and glance momentarily over this Procession, and this Life-sea; with far other eyes than the rest do, namely with prophetic?
We can mount, and stand there, without fear of falling.
As for the Life-sea, or onlooking unnumbered Multitude, it is unfortunately all-too dim.
Yet as we gaze fixedly, do not nameless Figures not a few, which shall not always be nameless, disclose themselves; visible or presumable there!
Young Baroness de Staël—she evidently looks from a window; among older honourable women.
[130] Her father is Minister, and one of the gala personages; to his own eyes the chief one.
Young spiritual Amazon, thy rest is not there; nor thy loved Father’s: “as Malebranche saw all things in God, so M. Necker sees all things in Necker,”—a theorem that will not hold.
But where is the brown-locked, light-behaved, fire-hearted Demoiselle Théroigne?
Brown eloquent Beauty; who, with thy winged words and glances, shalt thrill rough bosoms, whole steel battalions, and persuade an Austrian Kaiser,—pike and helm lie provided for thee in due season; and, alas, also strait-waistcoat and long lodging in the Salpêtrière!
Better hadst thou staid in native Luxemburg, and been the mother of some brave man’s children: but it was not thy task, it was not thy lot.
Of the rougher sex how, without tongue, or hundred tongues, of iron, enumerate the notabilities!
Has not Marquis Valadi hastily quitted his quaker broadbrim; his Pythagorean Greek in Wapping, and the city of Glasgow?
[131] De Morande from his _Courrier de l’Europe;_ Linguet from his _Annales_, they looked eager through the London fog, and became Ex-Editors,—that they might feed the guillotine, and have their due.
Does Louvet (of _Faublas_) stand a-tiptoe?
And Brissot, hight De Warville, friend of the Blacks?
He, with Marquis Condorcet, and Clavière the Genevese “have created the _Moniteur_ Newspaper,” or are about creating it.
Able Editors must give account of such a day.
Or seest thou with any distinctness, low down probably, not in places of honour, a Stanislas Maillard, riding-tipstaff (_huissier à cheval_) of the Châtelet; one of the shiftiest of men?
A Captain Hulin of Geneva, Captain Elie of the Queen’s Regiment; both with an air of half-pay?
Jourdan, with tile-coloured whiskers, not yet with tile-beard; an unjust dealer in mules?
He shall be, in a few months, Jourdan the Headsman, and have other work.
Surely also, in some place not of honour, stands or sprawls up querulous, that he too, though short, may see,—one squalidest bleared mortal, redolent of soot and horse-drugs: Jean Paul Marat of Neuchâtel!
O Marat, Renovator of Human Science, Lecturer on Optics; O thou remarkablest Horseleech, once in D’Artois’ Stables,—as thy bleared soul looks forth, through thy bleared, dull-acrid, wo-stricken face, what sees it in all this?
Any faintest light of hope; like dayspring after Nova-Zembla night?
Or is it but _blue_ sulphur-light, and spectres; woe, suspicion, revenge without end?
Of Draper Lecointre, how he shut his cloth-shop hard by, and stepped forth, one need hardly speak.
Nor of Santerre, the sonorous Brewer from the Faubourg St. Antoine.
Two other Figures, and only two, we signalise there.
The huge, brawny, Figure;
through whose black brows, and rude flattened face (_figure ecrasée_), there looks a waste energy as of Hercules not yet furibund,—he is an esurient, unprovided Advocate; Danton by name: him mark.
Then that other, his slight-built comrade and craft-brother; he with the long curling locks; with the face of dingy blackguardism, wondrously irradiated with genius, as if a naphtha-lamp burnt within it: that Figure is Camille Desmoulins.
A fellow of infinite shrewdness, wit, nay humour; one of the sprightliest clearest souls in all these millions.
Thou poor Camille, say of thee what they may, it were but falsehood to pretend one did not almost love thee, thou headlong lightly-sparkling man!
But the brawny, not yet furibund Figure, we say, is Jacques Danton; a name that shall be “tolerably known in the Revolution.
” He is President of the electoral Cordeliers District at Paris, or about to be it; and shall open his lungs of brass.
We dwell no longer on the mixed shouting Multitude: for now, behold, the Commons Deputies are at hand!
Which of these Six Hundred individuals, in plain white cravat, that have come up to regenerate France, might one guess would become their _king?
_ For a king or leader they, as all bodies of men, must have: be their work what it may, there is one man there who, by character, faculty, position, is fittest of all to do it;
that man, as future not yet elected king, walks there among the rest.
He with the thick black locks, will it be?
With the _hure_, as himself calls it, or black _boar’s-head_, fit to be “shaken” as a senatorial portent?
Through whose shaggy beetle-brows, and rough-hewn, seamed, carbuncled face, there look natural ugliness, small-pox, incontinence, bankruptcy,—and burning fire of genius;
like comet-fire glaring fuliginous through murkiest confusions?
It is _Gabriel Honoré Riquetti de Mirabeau_, the world-compeller;
man-ruling Deputy of Aix!
According to the Baroness de Staël, he steps proudly along, though looked at askance here, and shakes his black _chevelure_, or lion’s-mane; as if prophetic of great deeds.
Yes, Reader, that is the Type-Frenchman of this epoch; as Voltaire was of the last.
He is French in his aspirations, acquisitions, in his virtues, in his vices; perhaps more French than any other man;—and intrinsically such a mass of manhood too.
Mark him well.
The National Assembly were all different without that one; nay, he might say with the old Despot: ‘The National Assembly?
I am that.
’ Of a southern climate, of wild southern blood: for the Riquettis, or Arighettis, had to fly from Florence and the Guelfs, long centuries ago, and settled in Provence; where from generation to generation they have ever approved themselves a peculiar kindred: irascible, indomitable, sharp-cutting, true, like the steel they wore; of an intensity and activity that sometimes verged towards madness, yet did not reach it.
One ancient Riquetti, in mad fulfilment of a mad vow, chains two Mountains together; and the chain, with its “iron star of five rays,” is still to be seen.
May not a modern Riquetti unchain so much, and set it drifting,—which also shall be seen?
Destiny has work for that swart burly-headed Mirabeau; Destiny has watched over him, prepared him from afar.
Did not his Grandfather, stout _Col-d’Argent_ (Silver-Stock, so they named him), shattered and slashed by seven-and-twenty wounds in one fell day lie sunk together on the Bridge at Casano; while Prince Eugene’s cavalry galloped and regalloped over him,—only the flying sergeant had thrown a camp-kettle over that loved head;
and Vendôme, dropping his spyglass, moaned out, “Mirabeau is _dead_, then!
” Nevertheless he was not dead: he awoke to breathe, and miraculous surgery;—for Gabriel was yet to be.
With his silver _stock_ he kept his scarred head erect, through long years; and wedded; and produced tough Marquis Victor, the _Friend of Men_.
Whereby at last in the appointed year 1749, this long-expected rough-hewn Gabriel Honoré did likewise see the light: roughest lion’s-whelp ever littered of that rough breed.
How the old lion (for our old Marquis too was lion-like, most unconquerable, kingly-genial, most perverse) gazed wonderingly on his offspring; and determined to train him as no lion had yet been!
It is in vain, O Marquis!
This cub, though thou slay him and flay him, will not learn to draw in dogcart of Political Economy, and be a _Friend of Men;_ he will not be Thou, must and will be Himself, another than Thou.
Divorce lawsuits, “whole family save one in prison, and three-score _Lettres-de-Cachet_” for thy own sole use, do but astonish the world.
Our Luckless Gabriel, sinned against and sinning, has been in the Isle of Rhe, and heard the Atlantic from his tower; in the Castle of If, and heard the Mediterranean at Marseilles.
He has been in the Fortress of Joux; and forty-two months, with hardly clothing to his back, in the Dungeon of Vincennes;—all by _Lettre-de-Cachet_, from his lion father.
He has been in Pontarlier Jails (self-constituted prisoner); was noticed fording estuaries of the sea (at low water), in flight from the face of men.
He has pleaded before Aix Parlements (to get back his wife);
the public gathering on roofs, to see since they could not hear: ‘the clatter-teeth (_claque-dents_)!
’ snarles singular old Mirabeau; discerning in such admired forensic eloquence nothing but two clattering jaw-bones, and a head vacant, sonorous, of the drum species.
But as for Gabriel Honoré, in these strange wayfarings, what has he not seen and tried!
From drill-sergeants, to prime-ministers, to foreign and domestic booksellers, all manner of men he has seen.
All manner of men he has gained; for at bottom it is a social, loving heart, that wild unconquerable one:—more especially all manner of women.
From the Archer’s Daughter at Saintes to that fair young Sophie Madame Monnier, whom he could not but “steal,” and be beheaded for—in effigy!
For indeed hardly since the Arabian Prophet lay dead to Ali’s admiration, was there seen such a Love-hero, with the strength of thirty men.
In War, again, he has helped to conquer Corsica; fought duels, irregular brawls; horsewhipped calumnious barons.
In Literature, he has written on _Despotism_, on _Lettres-de-Cachet;_ Erotics Sapphic-Werterean, Obscenities, Profanities; Books on the _Prussian Monarchy_, on _Cagliostro_, on _Calonne_, on _the Water Companies of Paris:_—each book comparable, we will say, to a bituminous alarum-fire; huge, smoky, sudden!
The firepan, the kindling, the bitumen were his own; but the lumber, of rags, old wood and nameless combustible rubbish (for all is fuel to him), was gathered from huckster, and ass-panniers, of every description under heaven.
Whereby, indeed, hucksters enough have been heard to exclaim: Out upon it, the fire is _mine!
_ Nay, consider it more generally, seldom had man such a talent for borrowing.
The idea, the faculty of another man he can make his;
the man himself he can make his.
‘All reflex and echo (_tout de reflet et de réverbère_)!
’ snarls old Mirabeau, who can see, but will not.
Crabbed old Friend of Men!
it is his sociality, his aggregative nature; and will now be the quality of all for him.
In that forty-years “struggle against despotism,” he has gained the glorious faculty of _self-help_, and yet not lost the glorious natural gift of _fellowship_, of being helped.
Rare union!
This man can live self-sufficing—yet lives also in the life of other men; can make men love him, work with him: a born king of men!
But consider further how, as the old Marquis still snarls, he has ‘made away with (_humé_, swallowed) all _Formulas;_’—a fact which, if we meditate it, will in these days mean much.
This is no man of system, then; he is only a man of instincts and insights.
A man nevertheless who will glare fiercely on any object; and see through it, and conquer it: for he has intellect, he has will, force beyond other men.
A man not with _logic-spectacles;_ but with an _eye!
_ Unhappily without Decalogue, moral Code or Theorem of any fixed sort; yet not without a strong living Soul in him, and Sincerity there: a Reality, not an Artificiality, not a Sham!
And so he, having struggled “forty years against despotism,” and “made away with all formulas,” shall now become the spokesman of a Nation bent to do the same.
For is it not precisely the struggle of France also to cast off despotism; to make away with _her_ old formulas,—having found them naught, worn out, far from the reality?
She will make away with _such_ formulas;—and even go _bare_, if need be, till she have found new ones.
