"This alone was wanting to calumniate me! You seem to suppose that I am capable of causing you to be assassinated!" and she burst into tears. Dumouriez was as agitated as she was. "God forbid," he replied, "that I should do you such an injustice!" And he added some flattering expressions of attachment, such as he thought calculated to soothe a mind so proud, yet so crushed. And presently she calmed herself, and came up to him, putting her hand on his arm; and he resumed: "Believe me, madame, I have no object in deceiving you; I abhor anarchy and crime as much as you do. Believe me, I have experience; I am better placed than your majesty for judging of events. This is not a short-lived popular movement, as you seem to think. It is the almost unanimous insurrection of a great nation against inveterate abuses. There are great factions which fan this flame. In all factions there are many scoundrels and many madmen. In the Revolution I see nothing but the king and the entire nation. Every thing which tends to separate them tends to their mutual ruin: I am laboring as much as I can to reunite them. It is for you to help me. If I am an obstacle to your designs, and if you persist in thinking so, tell me so. and I will at once send in my resignation to the king, and will retire into a corner to grieve over the fate of my country and of you." And he concludes his narrative by expressing his belief that he had regained the queen's confidence by his frank explanation of his views, while he himself in his turn was evidently fascinated by the affability with which, after a brief further conversation, she dismissed him.[9] Though, if we may trust Madame de Campan, Marie Antoinette was not as satisfied as she had seemed to be, but declared that it was not possible for her to place confidence in his protestations when she recollected his former language and acts, and the party with which he was even now acting.
Madame de Campan probably gives a more correct report of the queen's feelings than the general himself, whom the consciousness of his own integrity of purpose very probably misled into believing that he had convinced her of it. But, though, if Marie Antoinette did listen to his professions and advice with some degree of mistrust, she undoubtedly did him less than justice: she can hardly be blamed for indulging such a feeling, when it is remembered in what an atmosphere of treachery she had lived for the last three years. Undoubtedly Dumouriez, though not a thorough-going Royalist like M. Bertrand, was not only in intention an honest and friendly counselor, but was by far the ablest adviser who had had access to her since the death of Mirabeau, and in one respect was a more judicious and trustworthy adviser than even that brilliant and fertile statesman; since he did not fall into the error of miscalculating what was practical, or of overrating his own influence with the Assembly or the nation.
Yet, had the king and queen adopted his views ever so unreservedly, it may well be doubted whether they would have averted or even deferred the fate which awaited them. The leaders of the two parties, before whose union they fell, had as little attachment to the new Constitution as the queen. The moment that they obtained the undisputed ascendency, they trampled it underfoot in every one of its provisions. Constitution or no Constitution, they were determined to overthrow the throne and to destroy those to whom it belonged; and to men animated with such a resolution it signified little what pretext might be afforded them by any actions of their destined victims. The wolf never yet wanted a plea for devouring the lamb.
One of the first fruits of the union between the Jacobins and the Girondins was the preparation of an insurrection. The Assembly did not move fast enough for them. It might be still useful as an auxiliary, but the lead in the movement the clubs assumed to themselves. Their first care was to deprive the king of all means of resistance, and with this view to get rid of the Constitutional Guard, the commander of which was still the gallant Duke de Brissac, a noble-minded and faithful adherent of Louis amidst all his distresses. But it was not easy to find any ground for disbanding a force which was too small to be formidable to any but traitors; and the pretext which was put forward was so preposterous that it could excite no feeling but that of amusement, if the object aimed at were not too serious and shocking for laughter. At Easter the dauphin had presented the mess of the regiment with a cake, one of the ornaments of which was a small white flag taken from among his own toys. Petion now issued orders to search the officers' quarters for this child's flag, and, when it was found, one of the Jacobin members was not ashamed to produce it to the Assembly as a proof that the court was meditating a counter- revolution and a massacre of the patriots, and to propose the instant dissolution of the Guard. The motion was carried, though some of the Constitutionalist party had the honesty to oppose it, as one which could have only regicide for its object; and Louis did not dare refuse it his assent.
He was now wholly disarmed. To render his defeat in the impending struggle more certain, one of the ministers, Servan, himself proposed a levy of twenty thousand fresh soldiers, to be stationed permanently at Paris, and this motion also was passed. Again Louis could not venture to withhold his sanction from the bill, though he comforted himself by dismissing the mover, with two of his colleagues, Roland and Claviere. Roland's dismissal had indeed become indispensable, since, on the preceding day, he had had the audacity to write him an insolent letter, composed by his ferocious wife, which in express terms threatened him with death "if he did not give satisfaction to the Revolution.[10]" Nor was Madame Roland inclined to be satisfied with the murder of the king and queen. As has been already mentioned, she at the same time urged upon her submissive husband the assassination of Dumouriez, who, having intelligence of her enmity, began in self-defense to connect himself with the Jacobins. On the dismissal of Roland and the others, he had exchanged the foreign port-folio for that of war, and was practically the prime minister, being in fact the only one whom Louis admitted to any degree of confidence; but this arrangement lasted less than a single week. Louis had yielded to and adopted his advice on every point but one. He had sanctioned the dismissal of the Constitutional Guard, and the formation of the new body of troops, which, no one doubted, was intended to be used against himself; but he was as firmly convinced as ever that his religious duty bound him to refuse his assent to the decree against the priests, and he refused to do a violence to his conscience, and to commit what he regarded as a sin. But this very decree was the one which Dumouriez regarded as the most dangerous one for him to reject, as being that which the Assembly was most firmly resolved to make law; and, as his most vigorous remonstrances failed to shake the king's resolution on this point, he resigned his post as a minister, and repaired to the Flemish frontier to take the command of the army, which greatly needed an able leader.
CHAPTER XXXV. The Insurrection of June 20th.
Both Jacobins and Girondins felt that the departure of Dumouriez from Paris had removed a formidable obstacle from their path, and they at once began to hurry forward the preparations for their meditated insurrection. The general gave in his resignation on the 15th of June, and the 20th was fixed for an attack on the palace, by which its contrivers designed to effect the overthrow of the throne, if not the destruction of the entire royal family. It was organized with unusual deliberation. The meetings of conspirators were attended not only by the Girondin leaders, to whom Madame Roland had recently added a new recruit, a young barrister from the South, named Barbaroux, remarkable for his personal beauty, and, as was soon seen, for a pitiless hardness of heart, and energetic delight in deeds of cruelty that, even in that blood-thirsty company, was equaled by few; with them met all those as yet most notorious for ferocity-Danton and Legendre, the founders of the Cordeliers; Marat, daily, in his obscene and blasphemous newspaper, clamoring for wholesale bloodshed; Santerre, odious as the sanguinary leader of the very first outbreaks of the Revolution; Rotondo, already, as we have seen, detected in attempting to assassinate the queen; and Petion, who thus repaid her preference of him to La Fayette, which had placed him in the mayoralty, whose duties he was now betraying. Some, too, bore a part in the foul conspiracy as partisans of the Duc d'Orleans, who wore generally understood to have instructions to be lavish of their master's gold, the vile prince hoping that the result of the outbreak would be the assassination of his cousin, and his own elevation to the vacant throne. In their speeches they gave Louis the name of Monsieur Veto, in allusion to the still legal exercise of his prerogative, by which he had sought to protect the priests; while the queen was called Madame Veto, though in fact she had finally joined Dumouriez in urging her husband to give his royal assent to the decree against them, not, as thinking it on any pretense justifiable, but as believing, with the general, in the impossibility of maintaining its rejection. Yet nothing could more completely prove the absolute innocence and unimpeachable good faith of both king and queen than the act of his enemies in giving them this nickname; so clear an evidence was it that they could allege nothing more odious against them than the possession by Louis, in a most modified degree, of a prerogative which, without any modification at all, has in every country been at all times regarded as indispensable to, and inseparable from, royalty; and the exercise of it for the defense of a body of men of whom none could deny the entire harmlessness.