“Doubtless he finds that hard. I certainly should if I were in his situation.”
Talleyrand’s blue eyes twinkled. “It is inconceivable that you would ever have allowed yourself to get into it. He is, I honestly believe, the stupidest man alive. You would hardly credit it, but by such influence as is left to him he secured the election of that arch-rogue Pétion as Mayor of Paris last November, rather than allow the election of Lafayette, who was the other candidate. And I am convinced that he was not actuated by malice.”
“Was it in the capacity of Mayor that Lafayette could have swayed matters in favour of the Monarchy?”
“He might have, but it was not to that I was referring. Having been defeated he took himself off to command the army, but in the spring he returned to Paris and offered to use it to re-establish the King’s authority. No man could have offered more or been in a stronger position to rescue the Royal Family, yet that blockhead of a King snubbed the General and sent him packing.”
“Do you think Mirabeau might have saved the situation, had he lived?”
“No. He had already lost all credit with the Sovereigns before he died, owing to the forthright manner in which he supported the measures against the Church.”
It was Talleyrand himself who had proposed the confiscation of the property of the Church and the sale of its lands for the benefit of the Exchequer. He had also instigated most of the other measures which had led to its severance from Rome and recreation as a national institution. As the most prominent of the only four bishops who had not refused to take the new oath to the Constitution he had celebrated mass at the altar of the Nation in the Champs de Mars before the grievously distressed Royal Family, the Assembly, and a great concourse of people. Again, as almost the only active prelate who accepted the New Order, he had officiated at the induction of a number of new Bishops, men of dubious piety but prepared to take their orders from the Assembly instead of from Rome.
Curious to learn his true attitude, Roger remarked, “I gather that with regard to Church matters your Grace has not been altogether inactive?”
“And rightly so!” replied the Bishop swiftly. “France has been the milch-cow of Rome for too long, and her priests had become lazy parasites. Your King Henry VIII set me a good example, and I have followed it to the best of my ability. You know well that I have never sought to disguise my own unsuitability for priesthood, and that I was forced into taking Orders when too young to resist. But as a statesman I believe that my measures have laid the foundation in France of a Church that will prove healthier, more honest and less grasping than that which she had before. However, we digress. I was about to tell you that the King, despite his own folly, found himself at the beginning of this year with a Ministry that was mainly Feuillant in character. Louis de Narbonne was at the War Office, and Lafayette in command of the army. The Girondins were by then the most powerful party; they were clamouring for a war against the émigrés, because they believed that such a war would both assist the spread of their fanatical doctrines abroad and lead to the destruction of the Monarchy. We believed that by such a war we could save it, so we let ourselves appear to be persuaded by their urgency and hurried forward preparations for hostilities. There you have the true genesis of the present conflict.”
“As it happens, it appears that they have come nearer to achieving their object than have you and your friends,” Roger remarked with a diffidence that took the sting out of the implied criticism.
“Alas, that is so,” confessed the Bishop; “the King’s stupidity wrecked all our efforts on his behalf. We had planned to carry him off from Paris in Madame de Staël’s carriage to Lafayette’s camp, where he could have been made to appear as the champion of the people against their enemas, while de Narbonne, as War Minister, could have suppressed any risings in Paris. But the King refused to allow himself to be rescued and dismissed de Narbonne from office, which led to the fall of the Feuillant ministry. Then, crowning folly of all, the King was persuaded to nominate a new Cabinet composed of Girondins. He could hardly have done worse had he entrusted himself to Danton, Robespierre and Marat.”
“Here in England we have been led to believe that the deputies of the Gironde are now the moderates.”
“Then you have been misled by the pose they adopt of virtuous idealists who desire only a government of the purest democratic principles. In fact they are vain, self-seeking and treacherous. Like Brutus and Cassius, they are ever mouthing the purity of their intentions while secretly planning to murder Caesar, so that they may usurp his power. They were as radical in their views as the other Jacobins and split from them only early this year because Robespierre and his friends opposed the war.”
“Who do you consider to be the most influential among them?”
“Brissot himself is a frothy mediocrity. The King’s principal ministers, Roland, Servan and Clavière, are all men of straw. Vergniaud is their best orator, and perhaps the finest the Revolution has produced. Gensonné, Condorcet, Gaudet and Isnard all carry considerable weight in the Assembly, but not one of them is capable of becoming a great leader. ’Tis Madame Roland, with the help of her toady, the despicable Abbé Sieyès, who now governs France from her salon. Both of them are clever, unscrupulous and boundlessly ambitious. As a middle-class woman Madame Roland was no more than one of the crowd on her few appearances at Versailles, so she was hardly noticed by the Sovereigns. She considers that she was slighted and has ever since harboured an unappeasable hatred of the Queen. Before the split, and she thought she could do without them, she was hand in glove with the most violent of the enragés, and she would stop at nothing to vent her jealous spite on Marie Antoinette.”
“You make no mention of Dumouriez.”
“As I remarked earlier, he is not a Girondin, although he holds the portfolio for Foreign Affairs in their ministry, and is the strongest man in it.”
“It seems, then, that he and Madame Roland are the two people at present best situated to influence future events in France,” Roger commented.
Talleyrand helped himself to a hothouse peach, began to peel it with a gold knife, and smiled. “At present, yes; but none other than a fool would hazard how long they will remain so. It would not surprise me if by the time you reach Paris some new turn of events had raised up other rogues to displace them.”
In the main the cynical Bishop proved right, as within an hour of Roger’s arrival in Le Havre he learned that the King had dismissed Roland and his associates on the 12th of June, and that three days later Dumouriez had resigned to take over command of the Army of the North. No details concerning the reason for the crisis were yet available and the names of the new ministers were so little known that they conveyed no definite impression—except that they were more reactionary than their predecessors, which was already causing the patriots in the port to mutter that the King had betrayed them and that “virtuous Citizen Roland” had fallen a victim to the “Austrian woman’s” intrigues.
That afternoon, the 18th, Roger and Dan took the diligence to Paris, and on their journey they had a further opportunity of observing how greatly the state of things in France had deteriorated. Instead of the ostlers at every five-mile post-stage being ready with the relays, so enabling the coach to travel swiftly through the night to its destination, no preparations to speed it onward had been made at any of the halts, and the length of them depended on a number of quite unpredictable factors.
Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Contrat Social had become the bible of the Revolution. Among the idealistic vapourisings in it, influenced no doubt by the thought of small Swiss cantons in valleys remote from any great centre of population, he had laid it down that democracy thrived best under local government. The French reformers had accepted his principles with the disastrous result that the central government had lost all but a vestige of its former power. Not only each provincial town, but every village, now had its elected representatives who considered themselves to be the supreme authority within their own distri
ct.
At every stop the coach had to await the pleasure of some local official, who checked the number of its occupants and the amount of baggage it carried, then demanded a small sum—which varied with each place and appeared to be arrived at quite arbitrarily—in payment for a permit for it to pass through his commune. Often these officials had to be fetched from their homes, some distance away; and even when permission was given to proceed, further delays frequently occurred because the guard had gone off to drink with an acquaintance, or the coachman had decided to have an hour’s sleep.
The state of the roads was also against rapid progress. In the old days they had been kept in good condition by the corvée, a system by which each peasant had to give a number of days’ work every year upon them under the supervision of trained road engineers; but that had been abolished in ’89. Labour, paid out of the tolls exacted by each commune, was supposed to take its place, but these funds had a way of disappearing into the pockets of the mayors and their cronies. Accordingly no repairs were done, and the highways had deteriorated to such a degree that in many places they were little better than pot-holed cart-tracks.
In consequence, instead of arriving in Paris soon after dawn as he had expected, it was not until four in the afternoon that Roger, tired, dusty and disgruntled, was set down in the Place Vendôme. About those lost twelve hours he need not have worried; he was destined to more than make up for them in the next twenty-four.
CHAPTER II
THE LADY IN THE BATH
Roger went straight to La Belle Étoile, a big hostelry near the Louvre which he had always made his headquarters when in Paris, and found, to his great pleasure, that his old friends Monsieur and Madame Blanchard were still the proprietors.
The honest Norman couple were greatly surprised, but delighted to see him. They had known him since the days when as a youth he had occupied an attic room in the great Hôtel de Rochambeau near-by. In those days he had been only an undersecretary in the Marquis de Rochambeau’s employ, with a modest salary, and no influential friends; but they had seen him blossom into a young exquisite who wore silks and satins; then, after a long absence, he had returned as a rich English milor who moved in the very highest society, went frequently to Versailles and was even rumoured to be a member of the Queen’s intimate circle.
How that transformation had been achieved they were too discreet ever to have enquired, and now they made no attempt to learn what had brought him back to a dreary and depressing Paris, which all but a handful of English residents had already abandoned. Instead, with much happy fussing, they installed him in a comfortable room that had a smaller one adjacent to it for Dan, took down from the attic a trunkful of clothes that he had left there two years before, and promised him the best supper Paris could provide. Having insisted that they should share it with him in their private parlour, he left Dan to unpack and went out to get a first impression of the city.
Its narrow streets, in which here and there big mansions stood well back behind walled courtyards, were as familiar to him as was the West End of London, and the people in them appeared little changed compared with the poverty-stricken look that had so shocked him about the population of Le Havre. Yet here, in the richest quarter of Paris, there were few provision shops and the hours for queueing were long since over, so he realised that matters might be very different in the Faubourgs. When he had left Paris private equipages with two or more servants clad in bright liveries had already become rare; now, the few that he saw had only coachmen in plain grey, and the coats of arms on their doors had been painted over, as also had the shields that once displayed the arms of the nobility on the gateways of their mansions. But there were still plenty of well-dressed people driving in hired conveyances or walking in the public gardens. However, he soon noticed that everyone without exception was wearing the national colours either in their hat or lapel, so he went into the first mercer’s he saw and bought himself a tricolore cockade.
From the earliest days of the Revolution the gardens of the Palais Royal had always been the meeting place of the malcontents, as the Duc d’Orléans had set himself up as the patron of the mob and had paid agitators to incite the people to rebellion beneath the windows of his palace; so Roger made his way there as the most likely place to gauge current feeling.
As a result of the King having dismissed his Girondin ministers a week earlier, it was now common knowledge that France was in the throes of a new political crisis, so Roger expected to find the garden packed with excitable people. To his surprise it was three-quarters empty, and although half a dozen orators were declaiming from soap-boxes beneath the chestnut trees, the little groups about them seemed indifferent and apathetic.
Sitting down at one of the tables outside the Café de la Foix, he got into conversation with a respectable-looking man, and, commenting on the lack of enthusiasm shown by the crowd, was told two reasons that accounted for it. Firstly, his new acquaintance gave it as his opinion that after three years of commotions the people of Paris no longer cared a fig for which set of men the King selected as his ministers; all they really wanted was a stable Government that would bring down the high cost of living and reanimate the commerce of the nation. Secondly, on this particular evening, for some unaccountable reason, not one of the mob’s favourite orators was there to rouse its temper.
For a while Roger moved round among the crowd and, although he was not yet sufficiently up to date with events to appreciate the full gist of the speakers’ tirades, he gathered that they were engaged mainly in inveighing against the King’s use of the suspensive veto although it had been accorded him as a right under the new Constitution.
At seven o’clock he returned to La Belle Étoile and over an excellent supper of good Normandy dishes learnt from his hosts the reason which had caused the King to dismiss Monsieur Roland and his friends.
On the outbreak of war the Legislative Assembly—which had replaced the original National Assembly when that body had completed the drafting of the new Constitution the preceding September—had called on the whole country to furnish volunteers for the army. In the past two months many thousands of these fédérés, as they were called, had collected in the provincial capitals and were soon about to march through Paris on their way to the Front. However, as the war had opened badly for France, the Girondin ministers had proposed that a great camp of 20,000 of them should be formed outside Paris for the city’s defence. Secondly, they had proposed that with these patriots to defend him the King would no longer require the bodyguard that he had been granted under the Constitution. Lastly, they had demanded that he should sanction further measures against the priests who had refused to take the oath to the Constitution, and deprive them of their livings.
Still trusting in his old belief, that the people were only misled and would never willingly harm him, the King had agreed to give up his bodyguard; but in the establishment of a camp of 20,000 mostly lawless ruffians outside Paris he had seen great danger to the tranquillity of the capital; and as he was a deeply religious man the idea of debarring nine-tenths of the priesthood of France from practising their office had utterly appalled him. In consequence he had placed his veto on the last two proposals, and dismissed the ministers responsible for them.
The Blanchards, like the great majority of honest Parisians, had greeted the first reforms of the Revolution with enthusiasm, but were strongly in favour of a continuance of the Monarchy in its new constitutional form. They maintained that in the present issue the King had been not only within his rights, but also wise and just in his decision. Like the man with whom Roger had talked at the Café de la Foix, they deplored the constantly changing array of law-makers who, for three years, had disturbed every aspect of life by causing the Assembly to decree a seemingly endless succession of new and often impractical measures; for in those years their lack of experience of governing, their woolly idealism and fanatical desire to change everything simply for the sake of change, had resulted in turning the whole nation
topsy-turvy, brought business almost to a standstill, and reduced every respectable family in France to ruin, or very near it. The innkeeper went on to declare that, for all the faults of the ancien régime, under it a man at least knew where he stood; but now he could never tell from week to week if he might not find his church closed on Sunday, be out of work on Monday, and on Tuesday wake up in prison as the result of breaking some new regulation of which he had not yet heard.
He added that of all the follies committed by the radicals their attempt to reduce the upper classes to their own level had proved the most disastrous for the country. By it they had killed the goose that laid the golden eggs, for while everyone knew that the nobles who had been driven abroad could not have taken one hundred-thousandth part of their wealth with them, it had not remained in France to be shared out among the people as they had been led to expect. The wholesale abolition of tolls, tithes, rents, dues and other feudal perquisites, the bankruptcy of innumerable commercial undertakings, and the fall of the value of all securities, had caused it to evaporate into thin air. Still worse, this slaughter of the golden goose had had the most appalling repercussions on a great section of the people themselves.
Too late, it was now realised that the nobles had hoarded nothing but a minute portion of their wealth. With few exceptions, what they had taken with one hand they had paid out with the other, and the more extravagant they were, the better for everyone connected with them. At Versailles alone they had supported 40,000 servants, in Paris 100,000, and an even greater number on their estates and at their mansions in provincial cities. Untrained for anything other than private service, by far the greater part of this huge multitude was now jobless and starving. The damage was far from ending there, as it was the wealthy alone who had enabled the luxury trades of France to develop into her foremost industry. The emigration had brought ruin to countless jewellers, furriers, hairdressers, wine merchants, horse-dealers, confectioners, haberdashers, dress-, coach-, cabinet-, hat-, cane-, lace-, harness-, boot- and sword-makers. With the closing down of all these businesses the people they employed had been thrown out of work.
The Man who Killed the King Page 5