)) LUTION ■■Hi r> TTlliC i MS88B 8 BHiHH8 B^m ■■ / 1 » , ' ■ -iffisp DC 146- CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY DATE DUE m$&r H3S0 Ifrj ^ (^^ J'BJBT*" .. y Mn* GAYLORD PRINTED IN U S A. Cornell University Library DC 145.G44 Men and women of the French revolution 3 1924 024 296 349 -,»»> ¥7i *Z Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924024296349 MEN AND WOMEN OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION HONORE GABRIEL RIQUETT MIRABEAU MEN AND WOMEN OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION BY PHILIP GIBBS AUTHOR OF "FOUNDERS OF THE EMPIRE' "THE ROMANCE OF EMPIRE' ETC. ILLUSTRATED WITH TWENTY-EIGHT PLATES REPRODUCED FROM CONTEMPORARY PRINTS PHILADELPHIA J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY. LONDON KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO. LTD. 1906 X PREFACE There are some people, perhaps, who may be annoyed at the appearance of one more book dealing with the French Revolution. If so I am sorry, and they need not read this one. I confess I did not write it to please anybody but my- self, and certainly to myself the writing of it has been a real pleasure. During my reading of contemporary memoirs and biographies, from which the facts in this book have been mostly gleaned, I have lived, as it were, in the very tumult of the Revolution, and my imagination has been thrilled by its tremendous drama. It has seemed to me, at times when the pages of my manuscript were blank before me, as if I were describing people and scenes observed by my own eyes ; as if I had listened with my own ears to the wit and wisdom of the philosophers who heralded the Revolution, had laughed at the salted epigrams of Madame du Deffand, and carried away fragrant memories from the salon of Madame Geoff rin. Contemporary memoirs have this value over other histories, that they tell one the small details of character and fact ; and by a hundred little touches, taken from this memoir or that, one's imagination is able to build up a living image. So I have lived also for a time in the old v a MEN AND WOMEN OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION Court at Versailles and heard the girlish laughter of Marie Antoinette, before she had learnt not to laugh, and after- wards I have seen the proud sorrow of her face. With Gouverneur Morris I have visited the boudoirs of many charming ladies, with the Prince de Ligne I have had the entrde of many noble salons. With Madame Roland I have listened to the pedantry of, her elderly husband, to the fine phrases of Brissot and Vergniaud, to the fiery speech of Barbaroux, to the cold classicism of Condorcet, to all the Girondins who came to the Home Secretary's house for the society of his strong-minded wife. I have heard the call to arms of Camille Desmoulins, and he has taken me to the little room which held all his happiness with Lucile and the baby. Marat has invited me into his cellar and read out the latest number of his ' People's Friend.' The thunderous eloquence of Mirabeau has sounded in my ears, and I have leaned on the arm of Danton as he went with a fiery speech in his heart to the Club of the Cordeliers. I have been fascinated, and sometimes bored, by the long harangues of Robespierre, and sat opposite to him in his room above the carpenter's shop where he dreamed of universal liberty through the mists of terror. I have haunted low taverns and heard fierce speeches of feverish women and frenzied men. I have followed the tumbrils to the Place de Greve and seen men and women die a horrid death calmly to the noise of obscene cries. Through all the long drama of the Revolution I have wandered with excited mind, as all have wandered whose imagination has been seized by the most astonishing period of modern history. I believe it is a period of inexhaustible interest, and VI PREFACE because I have written about it with a large amount of personal pleasure for the mere sake of living more closely with the time, I fancy there are many people who may also find a little pleasure in reading what I have written. This is not a history. It is rather, perhaps, a psycho- logical study of some of the actors in the great drama, so arranged, however, that the thread of narrative is not con- fused or lost. For each phase of the Revolution is repre- sented by a set of characters, many of whom are divided from those preceding and following them, by natural death, or the quick knife of the guillotine. My arrangement, there- fore, into biographical classes is both convenient and historical. So much for the text of this book. However worthy or worthless, I confess gladly that it does not compare in interest with the illustrations. They are the excuse and the value of the volume. These contemporary French prints, mostly reproduced for the first time in this country, are surpassingly interesting, and to Mr. Joseph Grego, who, for the purpose of this book, so kindly lent the originals from his wonderful collection, of which those now published form but a small part, my warmest thanks are here recorded. | Philip Gibbs. April, 1 906. vn CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGB I. The Court at Versailles i II. The Philosophers 42 III. Men and Women of the Salons 77 IV. Mirabeau and the States-General 105 V. Lafayette and the National Guard 140 VI. The People's Friend 158 VII. Desmoulins and Danton. . . 198 VIII. The Royal Family at the Tuileries and the Temple . 243 IX. The Girondins 291 X. Robespierre and the Terror 346 Index 389 IX LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Honors Gabriel Mirabeau Marie Antoinette, Queen of France .... Dinner of the Body- Guards in the Opera Hall at Versailles, October i, 1789 Necker Joseph Emmanuel Sieyes Opening of the States-General at Versailles, May 5, 1789 Oath in the Tennis Court at Versailles, June 20, 1789 Gilbert Mottier Lafayette The Market Women on their way to find the King at Versailles, October 5, 1789 Jean Paul Marat J. S. Bailly Appeal made at the Palais Royal by Camille Des- moulins, July 12, 1789 Arrest of M. de Launay, Governor of the Bastille, July 14, 1789 Danton Brissot Camille Desmoulins Execution of Foulon, on the Place de Greve, July 23, 1789 Arrest of Louis XVI. at Varennes, June 22, 1791 Dagger Scene in the Palace of the Tuileries, February 28, 1791 xi Frontispiece To face p. 16 34 82 92 122 124 140 148 158 180 198 202 222 232 240 250 266 272 MEN AND WOMEN OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION Death of Louis Capet on the Place de la Revolution, January 21, 1793 To face p. 284 Condemnation of Marie Antoinette before the Revolutionary Tribunal „ 288 Marie- Jeanne Phelippon, Wife of Roland ... „ 292 Jean Marie Roland de la Platiere „ 304 Jer6me Petion „ 316 Dumouriez „ 324 Condorcet committing Suiqjide in Prison, March 28, • 1794 344 Maximilien Robespierre „ 360 The Ninth Thermidor, Year II. (July 27, 1794). Arrest of Robespierre „ 386 XU MEN AND WOMEN OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION CHAPTER I THE COURT AT VERSAILLES It is a dull place now, the palace of Versailles, where once the splendour of a great Court and the pomp and pageantry of royal etiquette filled the courtyards and the corridors, the gilded salons and the painted bedchambers, with all those great and little people who seemed to rule the destinies of France. American and English tourists, and the bourgeoisie of provincial France, now troop in gangs through apartments once sacred to the royal presence, gossip loudly in little rooms where State secrets were once whispered, and pass in the sober black garb of modernity down the panelled passages which were once thronged with the silks and satins, the gold-laced coats, and Pompadour gowns of a world long dead. To most of us who have visited Versailles the rambling old building of sham Italian architecture, drab without and tarnished within, magnificent, perhaps, but not impressive, it is difficult to summon up the spirit of the place, and to realise with any vividness all the strange secrets and the pitiful B MEN AND WOMEN OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION tales these walls might tell if their history were inscribed on them. One wanders through, curious and interested, but not moved to any deep emotion. There are paintings to be admired, furniture of exquisite design, tapestry faded though still beautiful. But all this leaves one cold. It is a museum of antiquities, a burial-place of dead things, and the imagi- nation is not quickened with any sense of tragedy, nor with that nervous thrill of paiifful sympathy with the dead past which sometimes makes one feel the near presence of ghosts. It is only afterwards, as one leaves Versailles, getting away from the tourist crowd, and forgetting the cockney criticisms, the nasal Americanisms, and the light chatter of Parisian and provincial French, that suddenly there comes to one a host of dim memories, and before one's eyes there rises a panorama of historic scenes and figures. Ghosts ! Vaguely their faces loom up through the mists of memory. The voices of the dead sound faintly in one's ears, with words that have been written in history. Pictures blurred and indistinct, crowded with portraits still with a little life in them, come to one's mental vision j and scenes of pretty gaiety, of stupid vice, of horrid tragedy are re-enacted in the theatre of the brain. Louis XV. is there, handsome and stately, with a fine •dignity of mien inherited from men who, with all his vice perhaps, must have had something of virtue in them, which he had not. Yes, it is Louis the Well-beloved who moves past us in imagination, and from those ill-arranged, ill- assorted memories which are all that most of us can summon up from studies in history, some of his sayings, curiously witty for a king, and with the salt of a cynical philosophy, echo in our ears down the far-off years. ' What have I done that my people love me so much ? ' He was amused at the adulation of the people who praised 2 THE COURT AT VERSAILLES God for his recovery from sickness. They called him ' Le Bien-Aime,' and he could not for the life of him tell why ! But he could read the signs of the times. ' He, more clearly perhaps than the philosophers who prophesied the future, knew that those who followed him would have to pay the price of their predecessor's villainies. ' After me,' he said, in a moment of candour, ' after me — the Deluge ! ' It is not a pleasant ghost, that of Louis the Well-beloved. The gorge rises at this kingly satyr who preyed upon fair and frail women, who spent millions on his mistresses while people starved, clothing his corruption in glittering splendour. We see him with his infamous pander, the Comte du Barry, the tradesman in women's souls, who served his master with Satan's fidelity to sin, and when he tired of one weak woman brought him another, fresh and beautiful, perhaps, in girlish innocence, trembling and terror-stricken in those gilded chambers to which she had been enticed, ignorant, yet fearful of the fate in store for her. Louis the Well-beloved ! Festering and malodorous mass of vice, once crowned king of men, the ghosts of all those women whose virtue he robbed, or bought with money stolen from starving creatures, rise up with horrible accusing faces, and stretch out their arms to pluck at his dead heart. The condemnation of history is more severe for Louis XV. than the condemnation of an enraged people which brought his grandson to the block. Always will his memory be surrounded with the evil women who were as much his tyrants as his slaves. For them we may have pity and even a little admiration. He was a king, marked out among men to be a leader, yet it was the women who led and ruled, not he who had bought the thing he thought was love. In such a woman as Madame de Pompadour, vile though she was, there was a certain greatness of character. She was -a B 2 MEN AND WOMEN OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION the real mistress of the King, dictating her will to him and being obeyed. She was the mistress also of her own fate, and such an admiration as one may give to the genius of vice, to a criminal purpose boldly conceived and boldly carried out, is due to her. For she was the illegitimate daughter of a bourgeoise woman, called Madame Poisson, a vulgar woman with a vulgar name, and in those days the King's mistresses were not usually selected from such a class. Yet as a girl she had determined to be the mistress of the King, and had the audacity to believe in her own power to secure her purpose. Her mother was well supplied with money by the man who had injured her husband. Lenormant de Tourichon is the name he disgraced, and, with some of his wealth, the daughter he could not legally claim was taught all the elegant accomplishments which money could procure. She had talent and industry, She had a natural taste for the fine arts, and a physical beauty and health which made her a notable figure on horseback. She rode like Diana, straight and fearlessly, and Louis XV., riding himself in the forest of Fontainebleau, did not fail to notice the girl who courted his attention with undisguised desire. In time she was married to a nephew of her ' foster-father.' The young man, Lenormant d'Etioles, seems to have loved her honestly, and for a time believed that he had her heart in his keeping. Perhaps he did — for a time. Perhaps this woman, who kept secret her criminal ambition, but never swerved from it, had a kind of love for her husband which only that ambition would crush out. She said so, in one of those candid utterances which sometimes come from women to their closest friends. To one of these, startled by her strange words and unable to forget them, she said : ' Only the King would shake my fidelity to my husband.' At the time these words may have seemed but the silly 4 THE COURT AT VERSAILLES jest of an idle moment. But the time came when they revealed a woman's vicious scheming. It is not quite clear how Jeanne d'Etioles established her position at Versailles. It is probable that as a kind of citizen queen — for her husband was wealthy, and her accomplishments received the homage of her class — she had been reported to the King, by his spies and go-betweens, as a woman worthy of his notice. There is a story of a dropped handkerchief — a threadbare trick, however fine the lace — at a ball in honour of the Dauphin's nuptials, which the King picked up as a sign of his com- placency. We may believe in the handkerchief or not, but it is certain that after this date the crowd of courtiers at Versailles knew they had a new favourite to fear and flatter. At Versailles Jeanne d'Etioles took up her residence with unabashed delight, becoming — de par le roi — la Marquise de Pompadour. The husband wrote to her a passionate and pathetic letter, pleading his love, and imploring her return to honour and to the child she had borne to him. But ambi- tion was the dominant passion of the Pompadour's heart, and husband or child was of no account when standing in her way. She showed the letter to the King. She might at least get the credit of a good man's love. Louis read the letter and perhaps for a moment the shadow of his own infamy darkened his spirit. ' Madam,' he said, gravely, ' your husband is a very honest man.' If Madame de Pompadour was a very wicked woman, and the point needs no argument, it must also be acknow- ledged that she played the part of King's mistress with real greatness of intellect and grandeur of manner. She was the mistress, not only of the King, but of France. The Ministers, the Abbe de Bernis and the Due de Choiseul, were her tools. She took the helm of state, while the King looked 5 MEN AND WOMEN OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION on with absolute indifference, and for twenty years she steered as passion or pride dictated. If a man wanted a pension or place he must please the Pompadour or go begging. Every office was filled by one of her creatures, and the proudest noble must plead to the Pompadour if his treasury should be filled by public money. The Court poets sung her praises and her ' virtues ' — with poetic license ; the Court painters strove to depict the beauties of her triple chin. The Court and the Church vied with each other in offering flattery and incense to the woman who held the reins of power which the fainefant King had dropped into her plump hands. Outside the Court and the Church there were poets and wits who dared to denounce the Pompadour in scurrilous verses, and in poissardes which stung her like salt in an open wound. If these were witty they were hardly wise, according to the wisdom of the world. Many a man who had been pleased with his wit thought little of his wisdom when he lay rotting in a dungeon of the Bastille, by order of a lettre de cachet from the Pompadour's boudoir. But, if she could be vindictive to her enemies, she could also be a generous patron and a lavish friend. France, unsuccessful in war, losing India and Canada during the ministry of the Due de Choiseul and the reign of Madame, was triumphant in the arts of peace. To Madame de Pompadour the material splendour of the reign of Louis Quinze was largely due. She had a real love for beautiful furniture, painting, pottery, printing, binding and building. She had not only a real love for these things, but she had a fine judgment and taste. She could execute a good en- graving with her own hand. Many of the designs for the porcelain of the famous Sevres factory were drawn by her pencil ; she was a sumptuous patroness of the master book- binders of the golden age of binding. Towards the end — 6 THE COURT AT VERSAILLES indeed throughout her reign — she was in danger of losing her ascendency over the King. Naturally the first passion she had inspired in him quickly flickered out in a heart so rotten that it could not be faithful in infidelity. But her ambition was satisfied if she could but keep the reins of power. She did not want his passion, so she provided him with other favourites, too insignificant in character to chal- lenge her supremacy of intellect, and in return for this amicable assistance in the only desires which animated him he was willing to give her the mastery of France. ' My life has been a battle,' said the Pompadour on her death-bed, and she died fighting, and victorious to the last, against those Court factions which would have had her dragged at the cart's tail had she not been more subtle in intrigue, more powerful in crushing a half-developed plot, than these enemies were in concocting it. So La Pompadour passed, and with her the last shreds of dignity that still clothed the King. For though she was his mistress she had at least a certain sense of decency, even a certain nobility and magnificence of manner that claimed the outward respect of the Court world. But with the favourite who followed her, decency itself was outraged, and to the stately dignity of the Pompadour succeeded the gutter vulgarity of Du Barry. Jeanne d'Etioles had come from the bourgeoisie, not then considered of the same clay as kings, but soon to be of more account. Yet not even the high nobility could deny her accomplishments and intellectual culture. . Jeanne Lange, as she was at one time called, came not from the bourgeoisie but from the streets. Nothing worse can be said of her than that, after an unsavoury career as a Parisian milliner, she became the mistress of the Comte du Barry, who traded in women of her class. By him she was introduced to the 7 MEN AND WOMEN OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION King, then sixty years of age. Louis XV.'s knowledge of evil women was by that time unrivalled, even for a king, but so far he had not consorted with women of the gutter. It is probable that his faded palate was piqued by the coarseness and grossness of a creature who spoke the argot of Paris and had the manners of a fishwife. He found her irresistible and gave to France a mistress who plunged her stout arms into the national coffers, elbow-deep. Even the Well-beloved was bound to pay some small attention to the peculiar code of propriety existing at his Court, and to salve the outraged feelings of the nobles, who did not by any means object to the King's keeping a mistress, but did strongly object to a street woman in that high position, he made Mademoiselle Lange almost ' respectable ' by marrying her to a con- venient husband. This was Guillaume du Barry, the brother of that other scoundrel with whom his new wife had pre- viously lived. As an officer of marines with a beggarly salary, but princely desires of self-indulgence, he did not at all dislike the plan of taking a wife with whom he would not five, so that manners or morals need not be considered, for which service he would be richly recompensed by royal favours. The bargain was struck, a nameless woman became Comtesse du Barry and the mistress of the French Court and kingdom, a poor man became rich without the need of wit or work. Surely it was admirable ! So at Versailles Madame la Comtesse sat with a smile on her fat face — more hideous in the eyes of her contem- poraries because unpainted and unpowdered — slapping the cheeks of her black page, putting lollipops into the beak of her pet parrot, saying rude things about the Due de Choiseul, who hated her, and thereby got deposed, telling stories with the savour of Montmartre, and pointed with the pats and giggles of a loose woman to an elderly debauchee, and holding 8 THE COURT AT VERSAILLES up to ridicule the King's plain maiden daughters who had almost the monopoly of virtue in the Court of France. A strange and quaint quartette, those daughters of the King — Mesdames de France ! In an age when princesses were less safe from, and perhaps less careful of, amorous intrigues than ladies of lesser degree, love does not seem to have come near one of these four royal spinsters. They were quite, quite respectable ! The vilest vou4 of the Court, who would kill a woman's reputation with as much careless- ness as he would kill a flea on his dog's nose, could find nothing to hint or smirk over in the case of those four ladies. He would have been laughed at for his pains. For indeed Mesdames Adelaide, Victoire, Sophie and Louise led as secluded and virtuous a life within the palace of Versailles, where virtue was not the commonest commodity, as if they were already cloistered in a community of nuns. The pages of Madame Campan (then Mademoiselle Genet), their young reading-woman, and afterwards the first waiting-woman of Marie Antoinette, remind one, when describing her duties with the four princesses, of the life of Fanny Burney at the Court of King George. The deadly monotony, the virtuous dullness, the stiff and formal etiquette of Queen Charlotte's household were similar in character to the daily life of Versailles in the apartments of Mesdames, though very much less stately and severe. The chief and almost the only amusement enjoyed by these ladies was the daily reading of the classic literature of France, delivered by the much-tried voice of Mademoiselle Genet. To them the works of Racine and Corneille (so portentously dull now, if one may be frank !) revealed a world of romance in which their imagination revelled for long hours every day. Poor ladies ! Heroically virtuous in an age of vice, they were touched to the heart by the artificial sentiment of impossible 9 MEN AND WOMEN OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION heroines, and shed tears over the sufferings of imaginary characters. Of the real world they knew but little, and nothing of the miseries and sufferings of the people who were already mutinous at their misery, and had grown tired of tears shed by their own women at dramas more tragic than those of the classical poets. Yet, perhaps, after all we are wrong in thinking that none of them had ever been touched by the real emotiofis of life. One of them at least, the Princess Victoire, may have had her secret romance, hugging her secret as a sweet sad thing years after its happen- ing. For she was the least plain among her sisters. By some the Princess Victoire has been described as beautiful and gracious, with eyes that must have melted some man's heart, unless the courtiers at Versailles were colder than we credit them. She was the worldly one of that quartette. Madame Louise was always nun-like, hating the world even as she knew it in the backwater of life beyond which the great stream of gaiety and vice flowed on at Versailles. It was not surprising that she fled at last, with a secrecy from her own sisters which seemed hardly necessary, to the greater seclusion of a convent. Madame Sophie was too undeniably ugly and of too sullen a temperament to tempt, or to be tempted by, the gaieties and levities of life. ' Never did I behold a person of so revolting an appearance,' says the candid Madame Campan ; ' she walked with the greatest rapidity, and in order to recognise people without looking at them she had acquired the habit of leering on one side, like a hare. This princess was so exceedingly diffident that a person might be with her daily, for years together, without hearing her utter a single word.' Madame Adelaide does not seem to have had any claims to beauty, but had instead a temper which was apt to break out of bounds when touched by trifles. Perhaps even she had had her 10 THE COURT AT VERSAILLES disappointments and disillusions, so that all sweetness of youth was soured in the middle-aged spinster. But Madame Victoire was amiable and affable. She had no desire for a nunnery, though her religion was strong enough to cause her serious scruples with regard to the eating of water-fowl in Lent. Fortunately she obtained an agreeable bishop who gave the sanction of the Church to this little privilege, so that her piety and her palate were both satisfied. One must sympathise with the poor princess, and not blame her because the pleasures of the table were the best pleasures of her life. It was a dull, depressing life, more than a little tragic, one may fancy, if there is tragedy in unloved woman- hood. So in paying homage to her goodness of heart we may pass by her gourmandise. When Mademoiselle Genet asked her, with a little fear, whether she would become a nun like Madame Louise, she pointed to the sofa and said : ' Make yourself easy, my dear ; I shall never have Louise's courage. I love the conveniences of life too well ; this couch is my destruction.' She did not guess that one day, in her old age, she would be glad to leave that couch, not to fly from the temptations of the world, but from the savage, murderous hands of a frenzied people. Almost the only interruption to the private life of ' Mesdames de France,' and the one daily excitement, that in time must have been but little exciting, was the visit to the King at his ddbotter, or time of unbooting. This was always the occasion of solemn etiquette. ' The princesses,' says Madame Campan, ' put on an enormous hoop, which set out a petticoat ornamented with gold or embroidery ; they fastened a long train round their waists and concealed the " undress " of the rest of their clothing by a long cloak of black taffety which enveloped them to the chin. The gentle- men ushers, the ladies in waiting, the pages, the esquires, ii MEN AND WOMEN OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION and the ushers bearing large flambeaux, accompanied them to the King. In a moment the whole palace, generally so still, was in motion ; the King kissed each princess on the forehead, and the visit was so short that the reading which it interrupted was frequently resumed at the end of a quarter of an hour ; the princesses returned to their apartments, untied the strings of their petticoats and trains, took up their tapestry again, and I went back to my book.' It was very rarely that Louis XV. came to the private apartments of his daughters. He had no great love for them, and in his later years, under the influence of the gutter Queen, he so far forgot his dignity as to call them by the cruel nicknames which he had learnt from his coarse women, in the presence of the poor princesses' own waiting- women. They were ugly names certainly, and scarcely witty. Being the fattest of his daughters, as he explained to Madame Campan, he called Madame Victoire ' Coche,' the old sow ; Madame Adelaide was ' Loque,' a scrap ; Madame Sophie, ' Graille,' a rag ; and Madame Louise was ' Chiffe,' or shoddy silk. The whole Court knew these nicknames, and Madame du Barry made merry with them, in her peculiar style of pleasantry. France had fallen low indeed when such a woman was allowed to be present in Councils of State, where she stayed during the discussion of national problems, ' ridi- culously perched up on the arm of his chair, playing off all sorts of childish monkey tricks, calculated to please an old Sultan.' According to the princesses' reading-woman, this ugly siren once dared to snatch a packet of sealed letters from the King's hand. ' Among them she had observed one from Comte de Broglie ; she told the King that she knew the vile Broglie spoke ill of her to him, and that for once, at least, she would make sure he should read nothing respecting 12 THE COURT AT VERSAILLES her. The King wanted to get the packet again ; she resisted, and made him run two or three times round the Council Chamber, and at length, passing the fireplace, she threw the letters into the grate, where they were consumed. The King became furious ; he seized his audacious mistress by the arm, and put her out of the door without speaking to her. Madame du Barry thought herself utterly disgraced ; she returned, however, and remained two hours alone, abandoned to the utmost distress. The King went to her ; the Countess, in tears, threw herself at his feet, and he pardoned her.' There were other less important people than the Due de Choiseul and the Comte de Broglie who hated the woman. One of them was a pretty, impudent young lady named Madame de Rosen, who was bold enough to scoff at Madame du Barry to her face. The King's mistress complained to her old debauchee, but he laughed at the insults she so bitterly resented. In his heart he knew that she deserved them. ' She is only a schoolgirl,' he said at length to pacify the indignant creature, ' and she should be treated as a schoolgirl.' The words gave to Madame du Barry her idea of revenge, and she carried it out in a characteristic spirit of low vulgarity. Madame de Rosen was invited in a friendly manner to her rooms, and thinking, perhaps, that she had gone a little too far with a woman who would make a bad enemy, she accepted. But a few minutes after her arrival she was suddenly seized by a number of lusty serving wenches, who, stripping the struggling girl, according to the fashion then prevalent with refractory schoolgirls, gave her a severe beating. When the story came to the King's ears he con- sidered it a good joke, but to the ladies of the Court it made one more count in the indictment of hatred against the low- bred woman who controlled the weak and vice-ridden King. Well, let them pass, King Louis and his harem. A more 13 MEN AND WOMEN OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION graceful ghost, the ghost of a gay young girl, giddy but not dissolute, beautiful but not of the professional beauty that might be bought by the highest bidder, still flits through the painted chambers of Versailles. There is a sweet frag- rance still about the memory of the young Dauphine who came from the Austrian Court, where she had been brought up in innocence, and even in simplicity, to the Court of France, where innocence was an impossible virtue and simplicity a sin. The memory of Marie Antoinette is clouded by the shadows of her later years, and there are some who can even find it in their heart to hate her because she still held to the pride of royal prerogatives When the King himself was willing to yield to the people's will ; because she tried vainly to give him some of her own strength of mind, and only made him obstinate, but not strong, by fits and starts, adding the danger of obstinacy to weakness ; and because she intrigued to save the Crown, against the enemies of revolution, and tried, sometimes foolishly and sometimes bitterly, to safe- guard the privileges of an order so rotten and wretched in cowardice that it deserved to perish. But one cannot feel anything but sympathy, and some tenderness even, for the young Princess and the young Queen. She was a nymph among satyrs, or at least a gracious and wholesome girl among a crowd of men and women who were mostly vile. Not all of them. She attracted around her some few women of fidelity and virtue and womanly sweetness, who stand in pleasant contrast to the scarlet women of the Court, and even a few men of chivalry with a code of honour good for the age they lived in. But it was a dangerous environment. Innocence itself cannot stand in the midst of corruption without losing something of its freshness, and its sweetness soon becomes soured. An angel could hardly have lived at Versailles without giving occasion for scandal and becoming 14 THE COURT AT VERSAILLES splashed with the mud of calumny. And Marie Antoinette was no angel. She was a young woman who had a very hearty desire for earthly happiness. She liked laughter, and had a fund of merriment which was sometimes rather naughty and terribly dangerous. She was witty, and had a sense of the ridiculous, both traps ready for the snarer in a Court where wit was relished but revenged, and where the most ridiculous things were the most sacred. She was high-spirited for a time until all her spirits were crushed by constant enmity and outrage, and before she had learnt to be always looking for pitfalls and precipices she was careless and audacious in the desire to be pleased and to enjoy the gaieties of life with liberty. It was only after the fearful episode of the diamond necklace, the first milestone along her highway of sorrow, that Marie Antoinette learnt caution, and then too late. It was from that time that she became the Queen rather than the woman, showing secrecy and reserve, and putting on the armour of suspicion instead of wearing her heart on her sleeve and revealing the mood of the moment on a smiling face. She must have been beautiful in those early days, though even this has been denied. Certainly it is a charming and winsome portrait that is drawn, item by item, in the secret memoirs of Bachaumont, like Olivia's merry inventory to the boylike Viola : ' Here is the exact portrait of Madame la Dauphine,' he writes. ' This princess is of a height proportioned to her age, thin without being emaciated, and such as a young girl is when not fully formed. She is very well made, well proportioned in all her limbs. Her hair is a beautiful blonde ; I judge it will some day be a golden chestnut ; it is well planted on her head. Her forehead is fine ; the shape of her face a handsome oval, but a little long ; the eyebrows are as well 15 MEN AND WOMEN OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION marked as a blonde can have them. Her eyes are blue, but not insipid ; they sparkle with a vivacity full of intelligence. Her nose is aquiline, a little sharp at the tip. Her mouth is small, the lips full, especially the lower one, which every- one knows to be the Austrian lip. The whiteness of her skin is dazzling, and she has a natural colour which dispenses her from putting on rouge. Her carriage and bearing were those of an archduchess ;. but her dignity is tempered by gentleness, and it is difficult on seeing this princess to refuse her a respect mingled with tenderness.' Marie Antoinette, though she was inclined to be happy and to make the best and brightest of France and the French Court, did not find it easy, even in her early days, as Dauphine and Queen. Curiously, as Dauphine, one of her few good friends was the old roud King, who, by some psychological miracle, had enough decency left in him to be touched by the innocence of his grandson's wife. Her enemies, and she had many from the outset, were of her own household, for the people of France were prepared to pet her then. Her arch- enemy, so she thought herself , though unjustly, was a formid- able lady who played the part of Mother Grundy and found her hands full, as may be expected, at Versailles. This was Madame la Comtesse de Noailles, naughtily nicknamed ' Madame Etiquette ' by the Dauphine, to the delight of all Court ladies of youthful years who trembled at the strict- ness of this mistress of ceremonies, and to the deep annoy- ance of the lady herself and the lady's important family, to whose ears the new title was quickly told, and a hundred times repeated by whispering tongues. Certainly Marie Antoinette must have been a sore trial to this noble dame, for from the first she resisted, and with a pretty temper by all accounts, those thousand rules of etiquette which were supposed to safeguard the honour, the dignity, and the 16 tltlllHfHuml!tIHIIilmHltttltttlt//tt, MAR IF. ANTOINETT REINE DE FRANCE. j^gggBgummmm -nTTrrrriiiiiit in iiui,ii 1 1 urmntrniv fflmiTOm«v SKH THE COURT AT VERSAILLES virtue of royal princesses. There was much excuse for this rebellion. It is not pleasant, hardly dignified even, for a Princess Royal to shiver in a state of nature while her chemise is travelling from hand to hand of ladies in an ascend- ing scale of rank, the most supreme of whom might claim the privilege of covering her mistress in this most intimate garment. Nor was the publicity of the royal family ? s meals, when any gaping rascal of Paris had free admittance to see them eat — the most popular sight of the day — more decent or more dignified. Judged by the more simple code of modern royalty, Marie Antoinette was right in abolish- ing these things and claiming more privacy with a deal less ceremony. Yet, after all, it is dangerous to disregard the traditions of a nation. It must always give offence and sometimes opens the door to scandalmongers. To say the least, Marie Antoinette was indiscreet in defying the con- ventional ceremonies of the French Court with such open scoffing. It would have been better if she had not made an enemy of ' Madame Etiquette.' She did so with an easy gaiety that was amusing but unwise. Falling off a donkey one day when surrounded by her ladies, she lay still and in a merry voice bade them fetch Madame Etiquette, that she might say how the Queen of France should get up again. The laughter that greeted this good jest had echoed un- pleasantly in the ears of the De Noailles faction. When Louis the Well-beloved had died of the smallpox and had been buried with little lamentation, when the odious Du Barry had been banished from the Court and Mesdames de France had been given the chateau of Bellevue as their own residence, after years of restricted seclusion at Ver- sailles, and at length when Madame de Noailles herself resigned her position in disgust, the young Queen departed more than ever from the ceremonial usages of her position, 17 c MEN AND WOMEN OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION and indulged in the delights of liberty. By so doing she gave offence to all the noble old ladies of the Court, who could not forget the discipline and decorum of their own youth and of youthful Queens ; and many younger ladies, with such little virtue that they could not easily believe in virtue that was not hedged round with barriers, professed to be shocked at the behaviour of Marie Antoinette. The Queen knew all this and laughed "at it. She was a little too ready with her laughter, and was easily disconcerted at any touch of drollery. When all the ladies of the Court came to pay their morning respects to the new King and Queen upon the death of the Well-beloved, one of the young ladies of the Queen's household, the Marquise de Clermont-Tonnerre, became very fatigued with the ceremony of standing behind lier mistress, and with merry impudence squatted on the floor behind the shelter of friendly hoops. The Queen's •quick eye saw the incident, and she could not prevent herself from laughing behind her fan. The contrast of this naughti- ness to the gravity of the occasion and the appearance of her visitors was too much for her. ' Little black bonnets with great wings, old shaking heads, low curtsies, keeping time with the motions of the head, made, it must be admitted,' says Madame Campan, who tells this story, ' a few venerable ■dowagers appear ridiculous.' The impudent young mar- chioness and the terrific old ladies stirred the Queen's quick sense of the ridiculous so much that she could not control her face. A queen's face is always watched, and the fan did not hide this laughter. From that day Marie Antoinette was called a ' moqueuse ' by her enemies, and the epithet is not one that makes for love. These things may seem trivial. They were thought trivial at first by Marie Antoinette, but not when she found that they surrounded her with spite and malice. When 18 THE COURT AT VERSAILLES still new to her queenly rank she felt herself nearly alone. At first the King himself was but a husband in name, and less than a friend. Louis XVI., the grandson of the last king, was a strange and somewhat pathetic creature in his early manhood. He had few, if any, of the vices of his ancestors, unless his huge and famous appetite may be called a vice. Yet he had few of their finer qualities either, save a passive courage which towards the end made him an almost noble figure. As a young man he was shy to boorishness, taciturn to sulkiness, with no touch of dignity, with no elegance of manner, with no spark of wit. He loved best, as all the world knows, to potter about with locksmith's tools and clockmaker's instru- ments. He would have made a respectable artisan in the workshops of Charenton, and as such he would have been, no doubt, a happier man. He could not understand the wit of the Court triflers, who made him a butt to his face, and he disliked their gallantries. He was shy and suspicious at first even of his own pretty and winsome wife, thinking, like all stupid men, that gaiety and wittiness which they do not understand may be directed against themselves. It was a secret but very real grief to the young Queen, and it needed all her natural charm to tame the young bear, to draw out a little sociability in him, and to win a husband's love. When she did succeed in becoming a wife in more than name, and winning what is to all good women the precious gift of motherhood, she was not ill-rewarded for her patience. Boorish he still remained, but he loved her with that faithful, trustful love which is more common in the boor than in the gallant. But when his shyness had been conquered his first signs of sociability were more amiable than admirable. His sense of humour was in the style of sheer buffoonery, and at 19 C2 MEN AND WOMEN OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION his ' couchers,' when the great nobles of the Court, the Due de Coigny, the Due de Laval, the Marquis de Conflans and others assembled in his chamber, he amused himself by throwing his cordon bleu at their heads, trying to hook those who wore earrings. The Prince de Ligne, in his memoirs, describes how the King almost strangled him once with this rough gaiety. ' I was angry and said, " The King has touched me ; may God heal me ! " ' The Queen in time cured the King of this love of horseplay, and he learnt to show consideration for those who deserved it. But always his familiar conversation ran chiefly upon hunting stories which no one cared to hear. The Queen found him very dull at times. Yet there were compensations. He was good, he loved her, and he was not jealous — three admirable qualities in a husband, most admirable in a king. So little jealous was he that with a very good grace he gave the Queen for her own use the lodge and garden at Versailles, called Le Petit Trianon, and agreed amiably to her half-jesting condition that he should not enter this part of the palace buildings without an invitation. Like a child with her doll's house, the Little Trianon was to be her ' very own.' It was an innocent form of pleasure, yet the Queen would have done better if she had burnt the little house to the ground, and swept its ' English garden ' into the rubbish- heap, rather than have spent her merry hours there with her private friends. For the Little Trianon had a bad name, and was soon to have a worse one. Louis XV. had played the rou4 there with his various mistresses. Dressed as shepherds and shepherdesses, d la Watteau, in that spirit of artificial simplicity and rural sentimentality which Rousseau — though perfectly sincere himself — had made a fashionable craze, the Well-beloved and his courtiers and courtesans had plucked the flower of love-in-idleness. On the other 20 THE COURT AT VERSAILLES side of the wall, not very far away, were the people of Paris, rather hungry, and fond of the strange philosophy that was being talked in wine-shops, making men's eyes blaze with a wild sort of drunkenness not caused by drink. Foul and vile stories of what went on in the Petit Trianon at Versailles were current coin in these haunts of the semi- starved, were passed indeed now and again into higher circles of the bourgeoisie, who were not too eager to test whether this coinage rang true or false. So it was a place of evil odours, in spite of its English garden and fragrant flowers. It was a place which smelt most evilly in the nostrils of the Parisian people when it was rumoured that the Queen had given it another name, calling it ' Little Vienna.' Rumour lies in this case as in most others, but it was from this time that the Queen herself received another name in Paris wine- shops. They called her ' the Austrian woman,' and the French hated Austria. Poor Queen ! She still loved her own liberty and wanted friends to love her and to love as well — more than ever when she began to learn how little friendship there was in France. There was one lady at the Court with whom Marie Antoinette had fallen in love at first sight. It is pleasant to use this phrase for women's friendship. The Princesse de Lamballe was one of those women whose sympathy is never soured by sorrow, and whose beauty has no offence in it even to those who cannot boast of any. She has not only been acknowledged beautiful by all who knew her in the flesh — and her portraits do not disappoint us now — but also to be virtuous, and lovely in character. She had had a tragic story, and the sadness of it touched hearts that were not easily softened by the misfortunes of marriage. The fourth daughter of a Prince of Savoy, she was betrothed at eighteen to the young Prince de Lamballe. It was a 21 MEN AND WOMEN OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION brilliant match. The young man was the son of the Due de Penthievre. This in itself seemed a guarantee of happi- ness and certainty of wealth. The Due de Penthievre was not only one of the most distinguished nobles of France (descended from Louis XIV. and Madame de Montespan, whose natural son was legitimised as Comte de Toulouse) but he was the noblest example of the ancienne noblesse, a good, gallant, and generous man, land to the poor, chivalrous to women, faithful to his King and Queen, an admirable husband and a devoted father. This seems rather impossibly virtuous, yet his contemporaries agree. His only son was a little wild, yet during his first married days to the Princesse de Carignan he seemed to have reformed. His reformation, perhaps, was rather too enthusiastic. He no longer wished to have a pack of hounds, so he wrote to his father, , which he had so ardently desired before his marriage. The pack of hounds would have been less dangerous than a certain Mademoiselle La Chassaigne of the Comedie Francaise, whom he ardently desired within five months of his wedding-day. So strong was the infatuation that he left the H6tel de Toulouse, his father's Parisian palace, where his young wife wept for him, and went to the spider's web of La Chassaigne. The Due de Penthievre was stricken to the heart by this shame, and implored his son to return. The young wife, agonised and weak with weeping, was seized with nervous attacks, from which she was never wholly free until she became cured by a strange cheerfulness in a prison cell with death outside the window. The son did at length return, and then to die. The Princesse de Lamballe became a widow almost before she had experienced her wifehood, and the poor old duke, her loyal friend and protector from now until the end, was a broken man. But he persevered in goodness. ' He is certainly the most perfect man on earth,' wrote Madame 22 THE COURT AT VERSAILLES d'Oberkirch, a celebrated lady of the time. ' He lives at Sceaux, a charming retreat, far from the Court, far from intrigues. He is never consoled, and never will be consoled, for the death of his only son, the Prince de Lamballe. His grief is as beyond description as it is beyond comfort. His only remaining child is the Duchesse de Chartres, who has inherited her father's goodness and virtues, as well as his immense fortune.' For some time the Due de Penthievre lived with his daughter-in-law in retirement at Rambouillet (afterwards pur- chased, by the generous consent of its owner, by Louis XVI.), but a little brightness and joy interrupted his usual quietude when his daughter, as mentioned in the letter above, married the Due de Chartres, a distant cousin to the King, and after- wards famous, or infamous, to all the world as 'Philippe Egalite ' Orleans. The Princesse de Lamballe returned to Court after a long period of mourning, and narrowly escaped the dishonour of becoming the last wife of Louis XV. The De Noailles family, with whom she was connected, endeavoured to achieve this infamy, but the Due de Choiseul, chief minister of France, was the opposing influence. The situation was solved and the Princess was saved by the advent of Made- moiselle Lange, alias Madame la Comtesse du Barry. It was then that Marie Antoinette became attracted by the beautiful young woman who was to be her lifelong and heroically faithful friend. The Princesse de Lamballe was one of those very few who stood by the Queen in her last dark days, and she laid down her life because she would not do dishonour to the name of friendship. The Queen's enthusiasm for her was almost without bounds. She went so far that she wished to revive for her the old office of Superintendent of the Household which 23 MEN AND WOMEN OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION had not been maintained for many years. It carried with it an enormous salary, and the ministers, knowing the need of economy, were as much against its revival as the would-be reformers of the nation, who considered it an outrage. The ladies of the Court were equally incensed at the idea. They were jealous of ' the Queen's favourite,' as the Princesse de Lamballe was already called — an unpleasant name both in and out of Court — and they, were hot against the prospect of submitting to a lady who would have the right of ordering them in their duties about the Queen's person, and of super- intending the social side of her establishment. But the Queen persisted, and Louis, who by this time could refuse her nothing, wrote the order of appointment. The Queen was very glad. ' Judge of my happiness,' she wrote eagerly to her ' favourite ' ; ' I shall make my friend happy, and shall rejoice in it even more than she.' So the Princesse de Lam- balle was officially installed at Versailles in a position of great dignity and responsibility, superior to many ladies of older years and longer connection with the Court. It was the cause of much envy and heartburning. Ladies devoted to the Queen, like the Princesse de Chimay and the Comtesse de Maill6, refused to accept office under the ' Superintendent ' as dame d'honneur and dame du Palais. It was at this time that the Comtesse de Noailles, ' Madame Etiquette,' packed up her traps and departed in dudgeon. The balls given by the Princesse de Lamballe, in virtue of her office, were but poorly attended. Only the Queen's closest and staunchest friends put in an appearance. These friends deserve some notice, for they were men and women who played important parts, mostly, however, base and cowardly parts, in the Revolution which was as yet undreamt of. Chief among them were the two brothers of the King, the Comte de Provence and the Comte d'Artois, the 24 THE COURT AT VERSAILLES Duchesse de Chartres (afterwards Duchesse d' Orleans), the Baron de Besenval, the Baron de Breteuil, the Marquis de Vaudreuil, the Due de Coigny, the Due de Guines, Count Esterhazy, the Comte and Comtesse Jules de Polignac, the Prince de Ligne, and Count Axel Fersen. Of the King and his two brothers a wit known to the Prince de Ligne uttered the following audacity : ' Do you want to know what those three brothers are ? A fat lock- smith, the wit of a provincial cafe, a boulevard strutter.' De Ligne, a Royalist and a very faithful friend, asserts that these words were caricatures. Perhaps they were, but caricatures are sometimes excellent portraits. The Comte de Provence, ' Monsieur de France,' as he was always called, had a good memory for somewhat doubtful stories, and could make a cheap witticism pass off by capping it with a classical quotation ; but he had no depth of intellect, no sincerity, and no heart. His utter weakness of character was more apparent in later days. The Comte d'Artois's chief qualities were a good leg and an elegant waist, of which he was inordi- nately vain. ' He played the pretty French prince sometimes,' admits the Prince de Ligne, ' but he had as much grace as he had kindness.' He was a more attractive character than his brother certainly, for in his early days his gaiety of spirits was not without charm. But they had their danger. This young man might develop into another Louis the Well- beloved, from which God save France ! That was in the thoughts of some men when they studied this ' boulevard strutter.' The Prince de Ligne was a particular friend of the Comte d'Artois, but more so of the Queen, and he tells a good tale which gives a bright and vivid little impression of life as it sometimes went at Versailles : 'I had the pleasure of being obstinate occasionally with sovereigns who were often despots in merrymaking. M. le 25 MEN AND WOMEN OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION Comte d'Artois wanted me to hunt the wild boar with him. " To-morrow, at seven o'clock." " No, monseigneur ; in the first place it is too early, and then the Queen wishes me to ride on horseback with her as far as the Cross of Toulouse." " I don't wish it." " It will be done for all that." " You will come with me." ' No, monseigneur." " I give you my word that you shall." " And I mine that I shall not." ' The next morning, at six o'clock, great racket at my door ; the young prince attacked, and I defended. He called our common friends and I barricaded myself in. He burst the door, dragged me out of bed, shouting victory, put on my clothes himself, and forced me along, almost lifting me on the horse he had in waiting for me. Just as he was mounting his, after putting my foot in the stirrup, I escaped. He flung himself off and pursued me. I hid, and he passed me. I did^not know where I was going, but I rushed through the King's kitchens ; twenty scullions and as many saucepans gave chase, taking me perhaps for a poisoner of his Majesty. I ran through a crowd of porters, who took me for an assassin and were after me with their long chair-poles. ' The young prince was off the scent and I had time to look about me. I went up to the theatre and hid behind a lot of scenes that were piled on the ground. I was betrayed by some workmen who went down, and up came the prince and discovered my feet and tried to pull me out by them. I got them free and sprang the other way, but in trying to clear the scenes I met with a devil of a nail, which tore my whole right cheek and covered me with blood. The prince was in great distress, and consoled me and kissed me, and went off to his hunt and his wild boars alone. I put plenty of salt in my wound, bathed it with brandy and took my handkerchief ; the Queen was waiting for me and I mounted my horse and rode off with her. This was how, though 26 THE COURT AT VERSAILLES I suffered much, for the cold was severe, I kept my word of honour to the prince.' The Prince de Ligne, who so prided himself on these niceties of 'honour,' deserves a little portrait to himself. He was one of those foreigners whom the Queen made her favourites, thereby arousing the envy and hatred of her French courtiers. This love of foreigners was to do her much harm, but she had her excuse, and a pretty good one. ' At least,' she said, ' they are not like Frenchmen ; they ask nothing from me.' Friendship with people like the Polignacs had to be paid for with pensions and places, but the Prince de Ligne and other foreigners who came to Ver- sailles asked nothing but friendship itself, and were well content. This prince was a Belgian by birth, though in many ways he was more French than the French. He was one of those men whom even democrats may admire as a romantic and amiable figure among aristocrats who were mostly rotten at heart. He was a gallant soldier and an honest gentleman. Handsome, witty, full of grace and charm of manner, he had the instincts of an age of chivalry as out of date as Don Quixote. There is no doubt that he loved the Queen, but there was no shame in such love for either of them. His memoirs are delightful reading, modest, though he had something to boast of, and full of kindly sentiment for the French nobles and people, although he lived long enough to see the worst side of both classes. He gives a lively description of his youth, a youth which lasted far beyond the middle age of most men, being, as he said he would fain be, one ' who is never more than twenty.' His father had a curious hatred for his son, and seems to have been a tyran- nical and selfish kind of scoundrel. ' My father never liked me,' he writes, ' I do not know why, for we never knew each 27 MEN AND WOMEN OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION other. But it was not the fashion at that time to be a good father or a good husband. My mother was very much afraid of him ; she was brought to bed of me attired in a great farthingale.' One of the proudest days of the young man's life was when he became colonel of the regiment that bore the family name and of which his father was proprietary colonel. In his memoirs he is amused by tne letters which passed between the prince and himself on this occasion. ' Monseigneur,' he wrote, ' I have the honour to inform your Highness that I have just been appointed colonel of your regiment. I am, with profound respect, &c.' The prince wrote the following amiability : ' Monsieur, after the misfortune of having you for a son, nothing could more keenly affect me than the misfortune of having you for colonel.' Young de Ligne was no carpet knight. He loved the fever of action and the thrill of peril. He was ' as happy as a king ' when he heard the first balls whistle. But for his rank and wealth he would have been called a soldier of fortune. He served with the Austrians in the campaigns of the war for the Bavarian succession. He became the friend and trusted diplomat of Frederick the Great, and represented Austrian interests in the Courts of Europe. It was in this capacity that he came to Paris, and, although faithful to Austria, became a Frenchman in manners and spirit. 'A good fellow, but a trifle wild' was the verdict of Madame du Deffand and of others who studied his gay and effervescent character. He set up for a wit in the style of the Chevalier de Boufflers, who was his cher ami, but France, somewhat critical in this regard, did not allow his claim, though his charm was acknowledged. Although ' a trifle wild,' he was not in any sense a debauchee, and his relations with the Frenchwomen who attracted him 28 THE COURT AT VERSAILLES were honourable. To the Queen he was a faithful friend, and at the Court of Versailles he spent many merry months, enjoying youth and life with a pleasant enthusiasm. To those days he looked back in after days with infinite regret and tenderness. He lived to see France, which he had well loved, in the agonies of revolution, and the Queen whom he adored executed by her people. These memories were tragic when old age did at last come upon the man who had so long kept his youthfulness. ' Memories ! ' he cries in a moment of depression. ' They call them sweet and tender, but in whatever form they come to me I declare them hard and bitter. War, love, success of other days, when we have had all that, you poison our present ! What a difference ! . . . Then I thought well of men. Women, the Court, the town, the men of business had not then deceived me. My soldiers (a society of honest men, purer, more delicate than men of the world) adored me, my peasants blessed me, my trees grew, that which I loved was still in the world, it existed for me. O memory, memory ! ' Like the Due de Penthievre, in his old age he never ceased to mourn the death of a son in the first war of the Revolution, whom he loved devotedly, and in whom all his hopes had centred. The Revolution broke many hearts, alas ! It is better to think of the Prince de Ligne in his earlier days, when he was the welcome guest at the Petit Trianon with the Polignacs, the King's brothers, and the other friends of Marie Antoinette. The Polignacs : they too must have remembrance. The Comtesse Jules de Polignac was the best hated woman at the Court by those who disliked royal favourites, and her friendship with the Queen was a misfortune to the Queen herself. She was a beautiful woman, in a different style more beautiful, perhaps, than the Princesse de Lamballe. She had held aloof from the Court for awhile on account of 29 MEN AND WOMEN OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION poverty which she avowed to the Queen with a candour that may not have been quite without a little cunning. Marie Antoinette made this excuse for absence null and void by heaping offices and places upon the whole Polignac family, husband, brothers, and the Comtesse herself, who became governess of the royal children. Even the Princesse de Lamballe was for a time neglected by the Queen in favour of her new friend. Almost