Marie Antoinette and the Downfall of Royalty Part 3

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VII.

MARIE ANTOINETTE AND MADAME ROLAND.

Two women find themselves confronted across the chessboard and about to move the pieces in a terrible game in which each stakes her head, and each is foredoomed to lose. One is the woman who represents the old regime--the daughter of the German Caesars, the Queen of France and Navarre; the other stands for the new regime, the Parisian middle cla.s.ses--the daughter of the engraver of the Quai des Orfevres. They are nearly the same age. Madame Roland was born March 18, 1754; and Marie Antoinette, November 2, 1755. Both are beautiful, and both are conscious of their charm. Each exercises a sort of domination over all who approach her.

In 1792, when Roland enters the ministry, Marie Antoinette is no longer thinking of coquetry, luxury, or dress. The heroine of the Gallery of the Mirrors, the crowned shepherdess of the Trianon, the queen of elegance, pleasure, and fas.h.i.+on is not recognizable in her. The time for splendors is over, like the time for pastorals. No more festivals, no more distractions, no more theatres. Incessant anxieties and unremitting labor; writing throughout the day and reading, {74} meditating, and praying throughout the night, are now the unfortunate sovereign's whole existence. She hardly sleeps. Her eyes are reddened by tears. A single night, that of the arrest on the journey to Varennes, had sufficed to whiten her hair. She wears mourning for her brother, the Emperor Leopold, and for her ally, the King of Sweden, Gustavus III., and one might say that she is also wearing it for the French monarchy. All trace of frivolity has disappeared. The severe and majestic countenance of the woman who suffers so cruelly as queen, spouse, and mother, is sanctified by the double poetry of religion and sorrow.

Madame Roland, on the other hand, is more coquettish than she has ever been. The actress who has at last found her theatre and is very proud to play her part, wishes to allure, desires to reign. She delights in presiding at these political dinners where all the guests are men, and of which her grace and eloquence const.i.tute the charm. She has just completed her thirty-eighth year. Her husband is nearly fifty-eight; Buzot is only thirty-two. Possibly she is still more preoccupied with love than with ambition. To use one of her own expressions, "her heart swells with the desire to please," to please Buzot above all; she takes pains to celebrate her own beauty, which, in spite of showing symptoms of decline, has the brilliance of sunset. In her Memoirs she describes her "large and superbly modelled bust, her light, quick step, her frank and open glance, at once keen and {75} soft, which sometimes amazes, but which caresses still more, and always quickens." She writes: "My mouth is rather large; there are a thousand prettier, but none that has a softer and more seductive smile." In prison, when she is nearly forty, she states that if she has lost some of her attractions, yet she needs no help from art to make her look five or six years younger.

"Even those who see me every day," she adds, "require to be told my age, in order to believe me more than thirty-two or thirty-three."

Madame Roland had at first written thirty-three or thirty-four. But after reflection, finding herself too modest, she made an erasure and retrenched another year. She adds that she made very little use of her charms; avowing at the same time, and with the most absolute frankness, that if she could reconcile her duty with her inclination to utilize them more fully, she would not be sorry.

Both Marie Antoinette and Madame Roland were political women. But the one became so in her own despite, in the hope of saving the life of her husband and the heritage of her son; the other, through ambition and the desire to play a part for which her origin had not destined her.

In the one, everything is at once n.o.ble and simple, natural and majestic; in the other there is always something affected and theatrical; one scents the _parvenue_ who will never be a _grande dame_, even in the Ministry of the Interior or at the house of Calonne.

All is unstudied in Marie Antoinette; Madame Roland, on the contrary, is an artist in coquetry.

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Bizarre caprice of fate which makes political rivals and adversaries treating with each other on equal terms of these two women, of whom one was so much above the other by rank and birth. The Tuileries and the house of the Minister of the Interior are like two hostile citadels at a stone's throw from each other. On both sides there is watchfulness and fear. An impa.s.sable abyss, hollowed out by the vanity of the commoner still more than by the pride of the Queen, forever separates these two courageous women who, had they united instead of antagonizing each other, might have saved both their country and themselves.

It is necessary to go back a few years in order to comprehend the motive of Madame Roland's hatred for Marie Antoinette. It was inspired in the vain commoner by envy, the worst and vilest of all counsellors.

Madame Roland's special characteristic was the pa.s.sion for making an effect. Now the effect produced by Marie Antoinette under the old regime was immense; that produced by the future Egeria of the Girondin group was almost null. A simple mortal, regarding Olympus from below, she said to herself with vexation, that in spite of her talents and her charms there was no place for her among the G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses.

Versailles was like a superior world from which it maddened her to be excluded. She was twenty years old when, in 1774, she visited it with her mother, her uncle, the Abbe Bimont, and an aged gentlewoman, Mademoiselle d'Hannaches. They all lodged at the palace. One of Marie Antoinette's {77} women, who was acquainted with the Abbe, and who was not then on duty, lent them her apartment. The only object of the excursion was to give the young girl a near view of the court.

In recalling this souvenir in her Memoirs, Madame Roland displays her aversion for the old society. She is annoyed even with the companion of her visit, because she was, according to the expression then in use, a person of quality. "Mademoiselle d'Hannaches," she says, "went boldly wherever she chose, ready to fling her name in the face of any one who tried to stop her, thinking they ought to be able to read on her grotesque visage her six hundred years of established n.o.bility.

The fine figure of a pedantic little cleric like the Abbe Bimont, and the imbecile pride of the ugly d'Hannaches were not out of keeping in those scenes; but the unpainted face of my worthy mamma, and the modesty of my dress, announced that we were commoners; if my eyes or my youth provoked remark, it was almost patronizing, and caused me nearly as much displeasure as Madame de Boismorel's compliments." It was this Madame de Boismorel who, although she found the little Philipon very pleasing, had said to the grandmother of the future Madame Roland: "Take care that she does not become a learned woman; it would be a great pity."

The splendors of Versailles did not dazzle the daughter of the engraver of the Quai des Orfevres. The apartment she occupied was at the top of the {78} palace, in the same corridor as that of the Archbishop of Paris, and so near it that it was necessary for the prelate to take precautions lest she should overhear him talk. "Two poorly furnished rooms," she says, "in the upper end of one of which s.p.a.ce had been contrived for a valet's bed, was the habitation which a duke and peer of France esteemed himself honored in possessing, in order to be closer at hand to cringe every morning at the levee of Their Majesties: and yet he was the rigorist Beaumont.... The ordinary and the ceremonial table-service of the entire family, eating separately or all together, the ma.s.ses, the promenades, the gaming, the presentations, had us for spectators during a week." What impression was made on her by this excursion to the royal palace? She herself will tell us nineteen years later, in her prison. "I was not insensible," she says, "to the effect of so much pomp and ceremony, but I was indignant that its object should be to exalt certain individuals already too powerful and of very slight personal importance: I liked much better to look at the statues in the gardens than at the persons in the palace; and when my mother asked if I was satisfied with my visit, 'Yes,' I replied, 'provided it will soon be over; if I stay here many days longer, I shall detest the people so much that I shall be unable to hide my hatred.' 'What harm are they doing you, then?' 'Making me feel injustice, and constantly behold absurdity.'"

How this impression is emphasized in the really {79} prophetic letter written by the future heroine of the Revolution to her friend, Mademoiselle Sophie Cannet, October 4, 1774: "To return to Versailles.

I cannot tell you how greatly all I have examined has made me value my own situation, and thank Heaven that I was born in an obscure condition. You think, perhaps, that this sentiment is based on the slight esteem I attach to the worth of opinion, and my sense of the reality of the penalties attached to greatness. Not at all. It is based on the knowledge I have of my own character, which would be very detrimental both to me and to the State if I were placed at a little distance from the throne; because I would be keenly shocked by the extreme inequality which sets so many thousands of men below a single individual of the same species!" What a prediction! The most unforeseen events were one day to bring this young plebeian near that royalty formerly so far above her. The engraver's daughter will be the wife of a minister of State. And then what will happen? According to her own expression, her role will be very detrimental to herself and to the State.

In the same letter she had written: "A beneficent king seems to me an almost adorable being; but if, before coming into the world, the choice of a government had been given me, my character would have made me decide for a republic." She will end by hating the beneficent King, and probably no one will contribute more than she towards establis.h.i.+ng the republican regime in France.

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Supposing that, instead of being merely an insignificant commoner, Madame Roland had been born in the ranks of aristocracy, had enjoyed the right of sitting down in the presence of Their Majesties at Versailles, and had shone at the familiar entertainments of the Trianon, she would doubtless have shared the sentiments and ideas of the women of the old regime, and, like the Princess de Lamballe or the d.u.c.h.ess de Polignac, have shed tears of compa.s.sion over the Queen's misfortunes. Fate, in placing her in a subordinate position, made her an enemy and a rebel. She anathematized the society in which her rank bore no relation to her lofty intelligence and her need of domination.

When, from the upper window of her father's house on the Quai des Orfevres, beside the Pont-Neuf, she saw the brilliant retinue of Marie Antoinette pa.s.s by on their way to Notre Dame to return thanks to G.o.d for some happy event, she grew angry at all this pomp and glitter, so much in contrast with her own obscure condition. What crimes have been engendered by the sentiment of envy! The furies of the guillotine were above all things envious. They were delighted to see in the fatal cart the woman whom they had formerly beheld in gala carriages resplendent with gold. Madame Roland certainly ought not to have carried her hatred to such a pitch; but had she not demanded in 1789, when speaking of Louis XVI. and the Queen, that "two ill.u.s.trious heads" should be brought to trial? Who knows? If, in 1784, she had obtained the {81} patent of n.o.bility for her husband which at that period she solicited so ardently, she might have become sincerely royalist! But having remained, despite herself, in the citizen cla.s.s, she retained and personified, to her latest hour, its rancor, pettiness, and wrath.

What figure could she have made at Versailles, or even at the Tuileries? In the midst of great lords and n.o.ble ladies the haughty commoner would have been out of place; she would have stifled. It was chiefly on that account that she attached herself to the new ideas.

She told herself that so long as royalty lasted, she would always be of small importance; while, if the republic were established, she might aspire to anything. Though her husband was one of the King's ministers, she became daily more adverse to the monarchy, and Roland, following her counsels, was like a pilot whose whole intent is to make the vessel founder, even though he were to perish with its crew.

It is a sad thing to say, but even their community in suffering did not disarm Madame Roland's hate for Marie Antoinette. It was in prison, on the eve of ascending the scaffold herself, that she wrote concerning Louis XVI. and the Queen: "He was led away by a giddy creature who united the presumption of youth and grandeur to Austrian insolence, the intoxication of the senses, and the heedlessness of levity, and was herself seduced by all the vices of an Asiatic court, for which she had been too well prepared by the example of her mother." Ah! why {82} were not these cruel lines effaced by the tears Madame Roland shed in floods over the pages she was writing, and of which the traces still remain on the ma.n.u.script of her Memoirs? Why did she not sympathize in the grief of Marie Antoinette, separated from her children, when in speaking of her daughter Eudora, she wrote: "Good G.o.d! I am a prisoner, and she is living far from me! I dare not even send for her to receive my embraces; hatred pursues even the children of those whom tyranny persecutes, and mine, with her eleven years, her virginal figure, and her beautiful fair hair, could hardly appear in the streets without creatures suborned or deluded by falsehood pointing her out as the offspring of a conspirator. Cruel wretches! how well they know how to tear a mother's heart!"

Why were these two women political adversaries? Both sensitive, both artistic, with inexhaustible sources of poetry and tenderness at heart, they were born for gentle emotions and not for horrible catastrophes.

Who, at their dawning, could have predicted for them such an appalling night? Like Marie Antoinette, Madame Roland loved nature and the arts.

She felt the profound and penetrating charm of the fields. She drew, she played on the harp, guitar, and violin, and she sang. "No one knows," she wrote a few moments before her death, "what an alleviation music is in solitude and anguish, nor from how many temptations it can save one in prosperity." She had sung the same romances {83} as the Queen. The same poets had inspired and affected each.

Does not this most feminine pa.s.sage in Madame Roland's Memoirs recall the character of the mistress of the Little Trianon? "I always remember the singular effect produced on me by a bunch of violets at Christmas; when I received them I was in that condition of soul often induced by a season favorable to serious thought. My imagination slumbered, I reflected coldly, and I hardly felt at all; suddenly the color of these violets and their delicate perfume struck my senses; it was an awakening to life.... A rosy tinge suffused the horizon of the day." Would not this cry of Madame Roland in her captivity suit Marie Antoinette as well? "Ah! when shall I breathe pure air and those soft exhalations so agreeable to my heart?" And might not the daughter of the great Maria Theresa have cried, like the daughter of Philipon the engraver? "Adieu! my child, my husband, my friends. Adieu! sun whose brilliant rays brought serenity to my soul, as if they were recalling it to the skies. Adieu! ye solitary fields which have so often moved me."

What must not these two keenly sensitive women have had to suffer at the epoch when France became a h.e.l.l? They have each believed in the amelioration of the human species and the return of the golden age to earth, and what will their awakening be, after such alluring dreams?

Men will be as unjust, as wicked, as cruel to the republican as to the queen. {84} She, too, will be drenched with calumnies and outrages.

They will insult her also in the most cowardly and ferocious manner.

Under the very windows of her dungeon she will hear the hawkers crying: "Great visit of Pere d.u.c.h.esne to Citizeness Roland, in the Abbey prison, for the purpose of pumping her." The ign.o.ble journalist will call her "old sack of the counter-revolution." He will say to her with his habitual oaths: "Weep for your crimes, old fright, before you expiate them on the scaffold!" The wife of Louis XVI. and the wife of Roland will die within twenty-three days of each other: one on October 16, the other on November 8, 1793. They will start from the same prison of the Conciergerie, to be led to the same Place Louis XV., to have their heads cut off by the blade of the same guillotine. The commoner who had been so jealous of the Queen, can no longer complain.

If the lives of the two women have been different, they will at least have the same death; and the doer of the n.o.ble deeds of the regime of equality, the headsman, will make no distinction between the two victims, between the veritable sovereign, the Queen of France and Navarre, and the sovereign of a day, whom Pere d.u.c.h.esne, as insolent to one as to the other, will no longer speak of except under the sobriquet of Queen Coco.

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VIII.

MADAME ROLAND AT THE MINISTRY OF THE INTERIOR.

Roland took the portfolio of the Interior, March 24, 1792, and installed himself and his wife in the ministerial residence, then occupying the site afterwards built on by the _Theatre Italien_. This very beautiful and luxurious mansion had formerly been the controller's office, and both Calonne and Necker had lived in it. Madame Roland found no small pleasure in queening it under the gilded canopies of the old regime. It was not at all disagreeable to her to give dinners in the sumptuous banqueting hall erected by the elegant Calonne, nor did the austere admirer of the ancients set the black broth of Sparta before her guests.

Once arrived at power, was this great enemy of n.o.bility and prescription simple, and easy of approach? Not in the least. There is often more arrogance displayed by parvenus of both s.e.xes than by those who are aristocrats by birth. Madame Roland was extremely proud of her new dignity, and at once resolved, as she tells us in her Memoirs, neither to make nor receive visits. Her att.i.tude and {86} manners while at the ministry were those of an Asiatic sovereign. She secluded herself, permitting only a small number of privileged courtiers to enter her presence. Under the old regime, the wives of ministers and amba.s.sadors, dukes and peers, had never felicitated themselves on "cultivating their private tastes" to the detriment of the proprieties and obligations of good breeding. But the Revolution had changed all that. French politeness was now mere old-fas.h.i.+oned rubbish. At the Ministry of the Interior, the etiquette whose "severity" is vaunted by Madame Roland was more rigorous than that of the court of Versailles, and it was easier to see the wife of the King than the wife of the minister. With what hauteur the latter expresses herself concerning "the self-seeking crowds who throng about those who hold great places"!

a.s.suredly, the Queen had never spoken of her subjects in this tone of disdainful patronage.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MADAME ROLAND]

Madame Roland, who "was tired of fools," incommoded herself for n.o.body.

The agreeable side of power was all she wanted. Suppressing the receptions which annoyed her, she gave none but men's dinners, where she perorated and paraded, and where, being the only woman present, she had no rivals to fear. Self-sufficiency and insufficiency are, for the most part, what fall to the share of parvenus. What would have been said in the old days of a n.o.ble dame who did the honors of a ministry so strangely, who never invited another woman to {87} dinner, and admitted no one to her presence but a little clique of flatterers?

Everybody would have accused such a lady as lacking in good breeding.

But to Madame Roland all that she did was right in her own eyes. How could a woman so superior be expected to submit to the tyranny of polite usages? Was not the first of all despotisms the very one to be shaken off? and ought not a person so proud of the originality of her genius feel bound before all things, as she said herself, "to preserve her own mode of being"? Madame Roland did at the ministry just what she did from her cradle to her grave: she posed.

"To listen to Madame Roland," said Count Beugnot in his witty and curious Memoirs, "you would have thought she had imbibed the pa.s.sion for liberty from reading the great writers of antiquity.... Cato the Elder was her hero, and it was probably out of respect for this hero that she showed a lack of courtesy towards her husband. She was unwilling to see that there was as much difference between Roland's wife and the Roman minister as there was between the Brutus of the Revolutionary Tribunal and him of the Capitol. Self-love was the means by which this woman had been elevated to the point where we have seen her; she was incessantly actuated by it, and does not dissimulate the fact." It was she, and not her husband, who was Minister of the Interior. If the aristocrats treated Roland as a minister _sans-culottes_, it might have been added that the {88} breeches which he lacked were worn by his spouse. Out of all the rooms composing a vast apartment, she had chosen for her own daily use the smallest that could be converted into a study, and kept her books and writing-table in it. It was from this boudoir, half literary, half political, that she conducted the ministry according to her own whims. "It often happened," says she, "that friends or colleagues desiring to speak confidentially with the minister, instead of going to his own room, where he was surrounded by his clerks and the public, came to mine and begged me to have him called thither. Thus I found myself in the stream of affairs without either intrigue or idle curiosity. Roland took pleasure in talking these subjects over with me afterwards with that confidence which has always reigned between us, and which has brought our knowledge and our opinions into community."

On this head, M. Dauban makes the very just remark: "A community in which there is no equilibrium of forces, becomes a sort of omnipotence for the strongest." The omnipotence in this case was not on the side of the beard, but of Madame Roland. The wife wrote, thought, and acted for her husband. It was she who drew up his circulars and reports to the National a.s.sembly. "My husband," she tells us, "had nothing to lose in pa.s.sing through my hands. Roland, without me, would have been none the less a good administrator; with me, he has made more sensation, because I imparted to my writings {89} that mixture of force and sweetness, that authority of reason and charm of sentiment, which perhaps belongs only to a sensitive woman, endowed with sound understanding." And the "virtuous" Roland took pride in the magnificent phrases which he navely believed to be the expression of his own genius, when his wife had saved him not merely the trouble of writing, but even of thinking. "He often ended," she says, "by persuading himself that he had really been in a good vein when he had written such or such a pa.s.sage which proceeded from my pen."

Madame Roland had at her orders a man of letters, salaried by the Ministry of the Interior, who was the official defender of the minister and his policy. "It had been felt," she tells us, "that it was needful to counteract the influence of the court, the aristocracy, the civil list and their journals, by popular instructions to which great publicity should be given. A journal posted up in public places seemed to be the proper thing, and a wise and enlightened man had to be found for its editor." This wise and enlightened man was Louvet, the author of the _Amours de Faublas_. He was the writer whom Madame Roland esteemed most capable of instructing and of moralizing the ma.s.ses.

"Men of letters and persons of taste," she says, "know his charming romances, in which the graces of imagination are allied to lightness of style, a philosophical tone, and the salt of criticism. He has proved that his skilful hand could alternately shake the bells of folly, hold the burin of history, and {90} launch the thunderbolts of eloquence.

Courageous as a lion, simple as a child, a sensible man, a good citizen, a vigorous writer, he could make Catiline tremble from the tribune, dine with the Graces, and sup with Bachaumont."

Madame Roland admired the author of _Faublas_, now become the editor-in-chief of the _Sentinelle_; but among her intimates there was a man whom she admired much more. This was Buzot. With what complacency she draws in her Memoirs the portrait of this man "of an elevated character, a haughty spirit, and a vehement courage, sensitive, ardent, melancholy; an impa.s.sioned lover of nature, nouris.h.i.+ng his imagination with all the charms she has to offer, and his soul with the principles of the most touching philosophy; he seems formed to enjoy and to procure domestic happiness; he could forget the universe in the sweetness of private virtues practised with a heart worthy of his own." Needless to say that in Madame Roland's thought, this heart worthy of the heart of Buzot was her own. "He is susceptible," says she, "of the tenderest affections" (always for Madame Roland), "capable of sublime flights and the most generous resolutions." Into what ecstasies she falls over the n.o.ble face and elegant figure of this handsome man, in whose costume "reigns that care, cleanliness, and decency which manifest the spirit of order, taste, the sentiment of decorum, and the respect of an honest man for the public and himself"! How she contrasts with {91} men who think patriotism consists in "swearing, drinking, and dressing like porters, in order to fraternize with their equals," this attractive, this irresistible Buzot, who "professes the morality of Socrates and the politeness of Scipio"!

Clearly, the veritable idol of the Egeria of the Girondins is not the republic, but Buzot. He is so elegant, so distinguished! His mind and his person have so many charms! Poor Roland! You think that your better half is solely occupied with your ministry. Alas! this learned woman has other thoughts in her head. Your position as a minister has not augmented your prestige in the region of sentiment. Though you lord it in the Hotel Calonne, yet, in spite of the throng of pet.i.tioners and flatterers who surround you, you will never be a Lovelace, and your romantic spouse will not allow herself to be affected by your appearance, like that of a Quaker in Sunday clothes.

You thought you were doing wonders in presenting yourself at the council of ministers with lanky, unpowdered locks, a round hat, and shoes minus buckles. This peasant costume, which so greatly scandalized the master of ceremonies, doubtless made the best impression at the Jacobin Club, but your wife prefers the careful dress of her too dear Buzot.

Madame Roland, who had just completed her thirty-eighth year, was still very charming. Lemontey thus paints her portrait as she appeared at this epoch: "Her eyes and hair were remarkably {92} beautiful; her delicate complexion had a freshness and color which made her look singularly young. At the beginning of her husband's ministry she had lost nothing of her air of youth and simplicity; her husband resembled a Quaker whose daughter she might have been, and her child hovered round her with hair floating to her waist; one might have thought them natives of Pennsylvania transported to the drawing-room of M. de Calonne."

Count Beugnot, who was the companion of her captivity in the Conciergerie, is severe on the female politician, but he admires the pretty woman. "Her figure was graceful," he says, "and her hands perfectly modelled. Her glance was expressive, and even in repose her face had something n.o.ble and subtly attractive in it. One surmised her wit without needing to hear her speak, but no woman whom I have ever listened to, spoke with more purity and elegance. She must have owed her faculty of giving to French a rhythm and cadence veritably new, to her familiar knowledge of Italian. The harmony of her voice was still further heightened by graceful and appropriate gestures and the expression of her eyes, which grew animated in conversation. I daily experienced new charm in listening to her, less on account of what she said than because of the magic of her delivery."

If Madame Roland, a prisoner, crushed by misfortune, on the very threshold of the scaffold, after so many sleepless nights and so many tears, had {93} preserved such attractions, what a charm must she not have exercised at the Ministry of the Interior, when hope and pride illumined her beautiful face, and when, after appearing to her electrified adorers as the Muse of the new regime, the magician, the Circe of the Revolution, she touched so profoundly their minds and hearts! She who knew so well how to love and how to hate, who felt so keenly, who had so much energy, so much vigor, what fascination must she not have exerted with her glance of fire, her long black tresses, her more than ornate eloquence, her inspired, lyric, enthusiastic bearing, and that consummate art which, according to the remark of Fontanes, made one believe that in her everything was the work of nature!