PART THREE

THE STORMING OF THE TUILERIES

Upon Sunday, the twenty-ninth of July, 1792, in the late morning of that day, the broad road that flanks the River Seine above Paris was covered by a marching column of men. They were in number about five hundred. A few showed uniforms grotesque with dust and grease. The most part were in the clothes of their civil estate, a few workmen, many of the professions, not a few from the land. For the most part they went gaily enough, though without parade; but some were very weary, and a few halting pitiably, though all trudged on.

This column was that of “the men of Marseilles,” and their tatters and their fatigue were the usury of five hundred miles of blazing road. They had been one month so marching, and behind them they still dragged two cannon--dragged them by leather lanyards, taking turns.

This last day of their famous raid was hot and cloudless. The sight of the river alone was cool, beyond the stubble of the baked harvested fields; and the great road stretched on dusty hour after hour and league after league.

They had halted for the mid-day meal; the afternoon was already mellowing when they saw at last, far off in the north and west, the twin towers of the cathedral, the lifted dome of the university church upon the height to the left, the windmills upon Montmartre to the right, and between those low and distant hills the haze of Paris.

They formed somewhat before they reached the suburbs; they took some kind of rank, that their approach might be the more significant, and that they might hold their companies in the press of the poor from the eastern quarters who had come out in crowds to meet them under the sunset. They raised their famous song; they came in through the first houses to the noise of “La Marseillaise.”

Before them other contingents, less famous, had reached the city for the Revolutionary feast. These had found the whole town alive with preparation for the struggle; for the war had now run four months, or nearly four, and it was certain that the crown was betraying the people.

[Illustration: ENROLLING VOLUNTEERS IN PARIS ON THE PONT NEUF, BEFORE THE STATUE OF HENRY IV

_To face p. 93_ ]

Upon the morrow this battalion from Marseilles came into the town through St. Anthony’s Gate, through the main way dense with people, past the last foundation ruins of the Bastille. Their drums beat. They carried their colours before them. Their cannon, now cleaned and burnished, followed in their train.

* * * * *

In the centre of Paris there stands, the most famous, perhaps, among the royal emblems of Europe, a great palace the construction of which is of every age, though its outward aspect is singularly united. It is the Louvre. This great place, more than a third of a mile in length, is in plan two courtyards. The larger of these, as large as a little town, and called the Carrousel, at the time of the Revolution was completed only upon one of its branches, and was closed toward the west by the mass of the Tuileries. Its one completed side was the southern one, that toward the river, called “the Long Gallery.” From the end of this the Tuileries turned away from the river at right angles. For more than forty years the charred walls of that building, burned in the Commune, have disappeared, and their place is taken now by an open garden. Only the two high, flanking pavilions which closed the north and the south of its long line still stand, each now forming one end of the completed great courtyard of the Louvre.

In 1792 the Tuileries had upon the Carrousel side, toward the palace of the Louvre, three smaller yards, walled and preserving its entrances from the public of the city. Beyond these again, and filling all the main Carrousel court of the Louvre, was a crowd of houses pierced by tortuous lanes, and in the midst of them a little chapel to St. Thomas of Canterbury. This mass of houses within the arms of the palace was, as it were, a little overflow of the town into the midst of the Louvre and its connected Tuileries. Through this built and crowded space traffic passed and repassed between the Rue St. Honoré, to the north of the Louvre, and the river, running along its southern side. For under the Long Gallery of the Louvre, the only completed side of the great Carrousel court, arches were pierced, giving access to the quays.

Behind the Tuileries to the west the gardens, which are now open to the town and form a part of it, were then private to the king. Overlooking

[Illustration: THE STORMING OF THE TUILERIES

_To face p. 94_ ]

them from the north, the great oval of the royal riding-school looked with its tall, mournful windows, and therein, upon benches roughly provided for the passing circumstance, sat the congress of the Revolution. Therein were heard the declamations that hurried on the storm, and in these hot days, when the western casements of the palace stood open at morning, the court within could hear the distant noise of the debates.

That court, with the heavy, lethargic king in the midst of it, still governed in this end of July, 1792. He was still the executive; from him and from those rooms there still proceeded all orders to the armies, all communications with the powers of Europe. A great pomp still surrounded these last hours of the French monarchy. Its ceremonial was still exactly preserved amid the gold, the heavy hangings, and all the splendour of the Bourbons. So long as that centre stood and governed, so long as it betrayed (for it was certainly betraying) the nation in arms, that nation and the great experiment upon which it had embarked were in peril or doomed. For from the Tuileries could go out not only open orders that presumed the defence of the frontiers and resistance to the coming invasion, but secret letters also, very contradictory of these; and one such had gone out in those very days to the peril of the French people. The queen’s letter was an appeal for a proclamation to be issued by the invaders, a manifesto threatening with military execution whatever men or cities might either arrest the foreign armies or insult the shaken and tottering throne of her husband.

The Tuileries, then, thus standing in the midst of Paris, and of Paris armed in militia bodies, swollen with these Revolutionary volunteers from the provinces, was morally a sort of fortress, isolated and held, standing for the enemy in the very heart of the national capital. It must hold out till the invader came, or, if it fell, carry with it the crown.

The Tuileries was not only morally a fortress; it was in some measure an effective fortress as well. A regular force, the royal guard of Swiss mercenaries, was available for its defence; it had cannon, and save against cannon the great building was strong; it expected and received drafts of volunteers of its own that would support the king and could be armed; it possessed good reserves of ammunition. A minority, but a considerable minority, of the wealthier militia in the city, promised a reinforcement to the king. He would have a garrison of some six thousand men if an assault should come.

The very position of the palace strongly aided its defence. The garden behind was well protected; no street flanked it, as the Rue de Rivoli does to-day, but all along the north were houses, the narrow passages through which could easily be held. Upon the south it reposed upon the river, with only the quays between.

If the place was to be taken at all, it could be taken only from the east, the Louvre side; and not from there, it would seem, against any sustained musket-fire from the windows, still less against cannon stationed in the three walled inclosures that stood out before it toward the great courtyard of the Carrousel.

* * * * *

The sultry days with which that August opened were days of a curious hesitation. The invaders, massed under the Duke of Brunswick, beyond the German frontiers, were in column, marching up the Moselle Valley. They had not yet crossed those borders. The secret messages to the enemy, the negotiations between them and the treasonable crown, were still proceeding. The armed militia of Paris, or that majority of it which was ready to act for the Revolution and against the king, drilled, but did not yet move. There was a silence, as it were, or at the most a murmur, throughout the million populace and over all the plain that holds Paris. Quarrels arose, indeed, violent enough, and blows were exchanged, especially where the volunteer contingents from the provinces were feasted. Already by that end of July the news of what the invaders intended was abroad. Their proclamation, which the queen had inspired, was on all men’s lips. Copies of it, printed, had come in from the frontiers. It still suited the crown to pretend that it had not heard of that insult which it had itself drafted.

By the third of August the pretence could be kept up no longer, and on that day the king communicated to the congress in the riding-school, to the National Assembly, the amazing terms of the challenge. If the French would not undo all their Revolutionary work, if they met the invasion of the country by resistance, if they menaced the person of the court, and in particular the king and

[Illustration: THE ASSAULT ON THE TUILERIES

_To face p. 98_ ]

his family, all so acting were punishable by death, in particular all public officers and magistrates that should so attempt to defend the cause of the nation. As for Paris, if it moved, Paris was to be destroyed.

There is a temper in the French by which everything is restrained in them until they act. It is a temper of rapid accumulation before the moment of decision. During the week that followed, this temper was discoverable throughout the city, very significant to certain captains of the people and in particular to Danton; very much misunderstood by foreigners who have left us their records, and by not a few of the court and of the wealthier quarters of the town.

As though each party to this coming and decisive grappling was instinctively aware of some known trysting-day, the week proceeded under its increasing heat with orders upon each side, with the serving out of ball-cartridge, with the rations of powder for the same, with the sending of directions where men should gather, and where defence should be posted. Neither side yet moved; neither side was strong enough to prevent the preparations of the other. There was violent thunder, but the air was not cleared. The oppression of the sky still grew heavier as the moment of crisis drew near.

I have said that it was upon the third of August that the king had admitted to the assembly the manifesto of Brunswick which heralded the invasion. That day was a Friday. Exactly seven days separated it from the crash. Upon Sunday, the fifth, when the last royal mass was said publicly in the chapel of the Tuileries, whispers and open words among the public in the galleries were the last expressions of civil and unarmed resistance that the court was to hear. By Tuesday, the seventh, every man who was to support the crown had received his orders. Upon Wednesday the Swiss Guards, in their barracks to the west of the town, had the command to march upon the morrow, and on Thursday, the ninth, at evening they came marching in, no man opposing them, while during that same evening all those of the wealthier militia, or of private gentry, or of old servitors, that would garrison the palace and defend the crown, passed in through its doors.

Before night the court heard the hammering and the sawing of the carpenters in the Long Gallery of the Louvre. They were making a gap

[Illustration: A SOLDIER OF THE NATIONAL GUARD]

[Illustration: GRENADIER OF THE INFANTRY Of LIGNÉ

At the Time of the French Revolution

_To face p. 100_ ]

there in the flooring, lest the Tuileries should be turned from that end. With the fall of darkness they could also hear the rumbling wheels of cannon going to their posts and of waggons still distributing the arms and the munitions for the fight.

The night fell very dark and moonless, but open, in the stifling weather, to murky stars. From the higher windows of the Tuileries one could see in nearly all the houses around lights maintained at the windows of the citizens; for, that night, few slept. Amid so much terror and surmise, there was a grotesque suggestion of a city illuminated as for a gala-day.

Garrisoned within the palace there stood to arms squads of the volunteers along the first row of its eastern windows; the Swiss Guards were stationed with piled muskets in the three courts before it, and in the central hall up which the great marble stairway turned. The hours of the night went by. Midnight was passed, but nothing stirred.

It was a little before one o’clock in the morning of Friday, August 10th, when this general silence was shattered by one loud cannon-shot close at hand. For a moment it was thought that the popular forces were moving. It was not so. That cannon-shot was only a signal for the bells.

The bells began to ring in steeple after steeple, dome after dome, catching the call one from another athwart the dark town. First on the hill of the university; then by St. Anthony’s Gate, where was the thickest of the Revolutionary gatherings; then, nearer, by the town hall; then from St. Martin’s to the north; from the millennial rough tower of St. Germain to the south. For an hour or more the clamour of the bells filled Paris. But still there was no marching or any sound of arms, and from those high windows of the roof in the Tuileries, those attic windows where the watchers were, the streets lay empty below, under the dim oil-lamps that swung from cords across them and from the brighter light of the unsleeping houses.

From one of those same windows the queen, with certain of her women, watched through those hours of darkness. The stars began to pale, and along the uncertain east a band of dark cloud stood motionless in the sombre sky, like a distant coast revealed by the dawn. Behind it at last the vivid colour of a thunderous sunrise showed. The

[Illustration: MARIE-ANTOINETTE AND HER CHILDREN

From a photograph by Braun, Clément & Co., New York, of a painting by Mme. Vigée Lebrun, in Museum of Versailles

_To face p. 103_ ]

violent red overspread all the arch above them, and so touched the roofs of Paris that it seemed as though a great fire had come at last with the wars and had caught all the city. Marie Antoinette called her sister-in-law, the Princess Elizabeth, to her side, and the two women watched this thing together. It was a little past four o’clock. The day broadened, and at last the sun rose blinding, and still the silence endured. The bells had long ceased, and the more careless of those within the Tuileries jested one with another, saying, “The tocsin did not yield this night; it has run dry.”

Before the sun had strength, and while yet the Tuileries cast a broad shadow westward over the garden terrace and toward the garden trees, while the streets were still quite empty, the queen unwisely bethought her that something might be done at this last moment to lend strength and dignity to the resistance of the palace. She would summon the king and bring the garrison out before him, so moving their loyalty and his too slow determination.

She went to find her husband. He had sunk into a torpor with the last hours of the night, and when she woke him from the place where he lay he started up dishevelled and confused. His clothes suffered through the wearing of so many hours; his very wig was disturbed and askew. His face was suffused. But he came down at her asking, and stood before the main western garden door, while what could be gathered of the six thousand were hurriedly summoned there into line to meet him and to be passed in review. Not all of them came,--not all of them by very many,--and the thing was so haphazard that unarmed pages slipped into the line and played the fool, with chance tongs and shovels to take the place of muskets when they saluted. The king, a figure not exciting loyalty on that breakfastless morning after that sleepless night, heavy in shoulder as in stomach, purple-coated, freckled and pale, walked up and down the motley line. It was an unhappy business, unworthy, undignified, the true product of an energetic woman’s misunderstanding of men. Just before the king turned to leave them, an old and devoted courtier went down on one rheumatic knee to offer his sword. There was a single laugh from somewhere. Louis turned and re-entered the palace.

By this time the Friday sun had risen high. It was between six and seven o’clock, and still the city did not move.

But there came to the queen--for it was she who was the soul of that defence--news full of omen. The regular government of the city, elective, popular, and resistant to the crown though it was, had not seemed strong enough for battle: it had fallen in the night, and in the town hall there were now in power men of some insurrectionary committee, the leaders of the revolt. The man chiefly responsible for the militia of the city, one who might have divided or checked its forces, by his authority, had left the palace in the night to meet the authorities of the city. When he reached the town hall he had found there not the authorities of the city, but this new insurrectionary body, and as he left the place the mob without had murdered him. It was certain now that the attack could not be restrained.

Before the eastern front of the palace, cutting the great courtyard of the Louvre and shutting off the houses in it from the Tuileries, ran a high wooden paling, stretching from one lodge gate to another. Between that paling and the Tuileries itself detachments of the guard were waiting with muskets loaded, and sections of cannon with matches lit, prepared to discharge at the first menace of attack.

It was about eight o’clock when the head of a street boy who had hoisted himself up precariously from the farther side appeared above that paling’s rim and disappeared again. Then one face, then another, as grotesquely, as impotently showed. Some stayed so long that it seemed as though their owners were standing upon the shoulders of companions. One or two of these larrikins threw stones. A guard levelled his musket, and all those faces popped down again. What a beginning for the catastrophe of a thousand years!

At an upper window of the palace Louis, the king, watched, looking eastward in his turn, and he and those about him heard a murmur coming from along the river quay--a murmur not loud, but wide-spread and deep and dull because there stood between it and the hearers the Long Gallery of the Louvre. It was the advance of the people, of their unformed vanguard, coming before the militia and the volunteers. In a moment that murmur turned to vivid, immediate, and neighbouring sound, like the roar of water which had

[Illustration:

Copyright by Manzi-Joyant Co.

LOUIS XVI

The Forge in the Palace at Versailles

_To face p. 106_ ]

been heard approaching in a flume upon a mountain side and breaks suddenly outward from its issue over the washers: so the many thousands of the insurrectionary crowd burst through the arches under the Long Gallery, coming from the river quays into the Carrousel of the Louvre.

Every musket and every window was ready; all the fourteen guns of the palace were ready in rank before it. The great oaken gates of the palisade were burst asunder; the armed mob broke through swelling in; and at that moment the first order was given in the palace to fire.

Instantly the signal rolled along the line, and all the windows blazed with flame. Range in those days was very short, windage very great, and few fell; but the assault was checked, and as it halted, two guns of the Swiss roared out together, and the grape-shot swept down perhaps thirty men, opened a lane in the dark and shouting mass, and sent it pressing backward through the gates and the now opened rents in the palisade.

The Swiss, both those already before the palace and those coming out from within, formed by companies and charged. There were the shrieks and the trampling of a herd overcome by discipline,--the Swiss were perhaps a thousand all told,--and the whole place was cleared: the narrow and tortuous streets between the houses of the great Carrousel of the Louvre; and even, some say, the arches under the Long Gallery and the quays for some yards beyond.

It was not yet nine o’clock, and the palace seemed to be already saved.

There is no other town in Europe, and only two other peoples, the Irish and the Poles, of whom one could not say what many said in that moment of the town of Paris and of the French people, that their fate had been decided by this action of regulars against a mob. But Paris being Paris, and Gaul Gaul, and the French people having beyond any other the gift for rapid organization from below and for corporate discipline, no victory was yet won by the regulars.

Even as the noise of the broken mob retreating died away, another new noise, more formidable, more rhythmical, approached, and the watchers in the Tuileries heard it. It was not an army upon the march, but it was men determined and in some way ordered. It was the militia, it was the contingents from the provinces, and chief among them the volunteers from Marseilles, the five hundred with their guns.

The Swiss were back, ranged before the palace and in reserve in the central hall and by the great staircase. All the muskets were loaded again, though the affair was thought to be finished after that first brief and successful skirmish, when the sound of regular marching and the rumble of cannon-wheels were heard.

At his window, overlooking the still empty enclosures beneath him, stood Louis, heavy with insufficient sleep; by his side stood an official of the county, Roederer. The column of the popular attack came swinging through the arches which led from the river quay under the Long Gallery; their cannon were ready, and their muskets charged. This time it was war.

While each armed body facing the other held its fire, awaiting the advantage gained by such reserve,--for in those days of short range, to let a trained troop opposing one fire first was to have a heavy advantage in the returning fire at close quarters,--Westermann, an Alsatian, Danton’s friend, mounted upon a horse, rode out from the popular ranks to parley in their own tongue with these Swiss mercenaries, German in speech, like himself. One of these fired, I think,--at least, so the best story goes,--and immediately a rapidly increasing, alternative rattle of individual shots broke out from the line of the windows, above from the militia and the volunteers below; and unexpectedly, the ranks opening to let them through, the two cannon from Marseilles gave tongue against the cannon of the guards. This time there was no breaking, and the more trained firing of the militia and the provincial volunteers permitted of no further charge from the guards. But the reciprocal attack began to fill the space before the palace with fallen men, neither side yet proclaiming an advantage. The Swiss Guards still held the main door of the Tuileries; the fire from its long tiers of windows was still well nourished; the muskets in the hands of the half-trained populace were still regularly recharged, and held their own.

It was in this moment of doubt that Roederer, the politician who stood by the king at his eastern window, said to Louis that it was the duty of a monarch not to risk the state. “Look, Sire! A whole people are advancing! If the palace must fall, let it fall; but let the crown be saved.” Louis

[Illustration: THE TUILERIES AND ITS GARDEN IN 1757

_To face p. 111_ ]

looked dully out of that window, and thence he could see the Paris of the kings.

This place stretched back beyond the origins of religion into the roots of Rome; thirteen full hundred years of monarchy had sat therein. The huge pile of the Louvre, stretching out into the morning, was the story of Henry IV, of the Medicean woman before him, and of the Valois. The turrets upon the more distant island were the roofs of St. Louis. Eudes, the son of Robert, the founder of all the royal line, had beaten the barbarian off just where the slate pinnacles of the Châtelet pierced the sky half a mile away. Behind all these visible things were the ghosts of Clovis and of Charlemagne.

He turned to go. He went back through the palace to the western gardens, where the sound of the firing upon the eastern front was deadened by the mass of the palace between. His wife and his children were with him, and a few men of the guard. He crossed between the regular trees--his little boy, his heir, kicking the fallen leaves before him with his foot--and entering the riding-school, Louis took refuge with the parliament.

There stood that day upon the quays outside the southern end of the Tuileries a young man, a young man of twenty-three, a lieutenant of guns, Napoleon Bonaparte, on leave in Paris. He was alone. He had watched all that business curiously, a spectator. He had already some knowledge of what the soul is in men fighting. He has left his judgment upon record that had Louis not turned back that day “to save the monarchy,” the monarchy would have been saved. He believed, and his judgment of arms is not negligible, that if the king had shown himself even then in the open spaces before the palace and in danger, preferably upon a horse, that would have happened to the defence which would have saved it.

It was in the Long Gallery of the Louvre, where that arm of building joins the Tuileries, that the weak point of the defence had been discovered. The young men of the populace, eager and curious, had flowed up the stairways of the Long Gallery and had found the flooring cut and a gap between them and the entry to the Tuileries. That gap they had fought for, conquered, leaped, and bridged with planks; and just as the defence of the palace against the frontal attack was holding its last desperate own before the great main portal, just as the Swiss themselves were wondering how long the pressure they suffered could be resisted, the upper floor of the Tuileries was enfiladed: the first contingents from the Long Gallery were beginning to shoot down and through those open suites of rooms; the garrison was caught in flank and wavered.

Hervilly, an officer commanding the Swiss Guards, in that desperate moment received half a sheet of paper folded in four. The curious may peer at it to-day under glass in the Carnavalet in Paris. It was an order from the king to bid the guards cease fire and march out of the palace back to their barracks to the west of the town. That order had been sent from the place where Louis was in refuge, from the parliament in the riding-school. Hervilly read it. He put it in his pocket again. He still maintained the fire of the guards.

But it was too late. The Tuileries were pierced from the south: those that had found the entry by the Long Gallery called to others behind them; room after room was swept; hundred after hundred of the armed populace pressed through the gap, killing and cleaning out the garrison.

As the fire from the palace windows was thus quenched, the attack from the open against the outer front began to triumph; the main door was forced; the Swiss Guards were broken in the hall and upon the great marble staircase; their remnants were driven out backward through the western doors upon the Tuileries Gardens beyond.

There was no battle any more. The last shots died away as one hunted refugee after another, discharging his last desperate cartridge, was run down with the bayonet; and at last all that sound of men in arms ceased and gave place to the muffled tumult rolling in the rooms of the palace, a looting and a scuffling, a rumbling sound upon the many stairs.

There chimed, heard through this new lull, the strokes of ten o’clock from the dial upon the garden front and from the church of St. Roch, hard by. In those two hours since eight all had been accomplished.

[Illustration: THE STRUGGLE IN THE HALLS OF THE TUILERIES, AUGUST 10, 1792

_To face p. 114_ ]