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A.D. 1790.]

NECKER RETIRES INTO SWITZERLAND.

Laws," showing the material influence of soul and body on each other. On the commencement of the revolution, he began a paper called L'Ami du Peuple, in which he vented his inextinguishable fury against all classes in the state except the veriest scum of the population, who read and admired his ferocious writings. In his person, Marat was as ugly and deformed as his soul was. His very aspect terrified children; and such was his cowardice that, whilst launching daily his denunciations against others, and when he became president of the convention, as he did, bringing their heads to the guillotin, he slept in a cave in the profoundest secresy. All this, however, did not save him from the avenging dagger of Charlotte Corday.

Robespierre, another chief monster of this revolution, was the son of a barrister at Arras. He was educated at the college of Louis le Grande, in Paris, and, like his father, adopted the profession of law. He was sent from Artois to the national assembly as their deputy. For some time, his insignificant person, his weak voice, and defective vision, rendered him of little influence in the assembly; but by perseverance, and by assuming a character of mildness and humanity, and by defending the poor and denouncing corruption, he gradually won popularity, and was called "The Incorruptible." He was closely associated, however, with the jacobin club, and the bloodhounds, Danton and Marat; and, no sooner did he obtain the opportunity, than he showed himself to be one of the most sanguinary wretches that ever disgraced the name of man.

The assembly, pressed by exhaustion of the public revenue, again put a large quantity of the church property into the market, and issued eight hundred millions of assignats upon the strength of it. Talleyraud made an elaborate speech showing the certain consequence of so immoderate an issue of paper-money; its depreciation; the consequent hoarding of gold, and the direct rise of price in all articles of life. Mirabeau, on the contrary, supported the issue. Necker opposed the measure in vain, for Necker was now become a mere cypher with all parties. He never had the diplomatic genius which he believed himself to possess. He had won the favour of the people by being the means of calling together the states-general; but the king and his fellow-ministers had no confidence in him, and the jacobins and Cordeliers had long ago ruined his fame with the once idolising people. Danton and Marat had not hesitated to accuse him of corruption and public pillage. The mob, who once hailed him as the saviour of the country, now howled at nights under his windows, and menaced him with the lanterne. Necker seized this opportunity of being overridden by the assembly, in the matter of the second issue of the assignats, to tender his resignation, and to get away in safety to his native mountains. His resignation was accepted with pleasure; and Necker addressed a characteristic letter to the assembly to announce his departure. He assumed the same air of patriotic vanity which he had always worn. "I leave," he said, " as the guarantee of my administration, my house in Paris, my country house, and my funds in the royal treasury, which, for a long time, have amounted to two million four hundred thousand livres, and ask only to withdraw the four hundred thousand livres which the state of my affairs renders necessary."

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The fact was well known that at that moment he could not have sold his property, and that there was no money in the treasury to pay him. It was well for him to be able to escape scatheless; and, obtaining a passport from Bailly, and another from the king, he set out towards Switzerland along the road which, so short a time previous, he had traversed amid the frantic plaudits of the people, and with the elating idea that he was destined to retrieve the finances and save the country. Now not a voice was raised to lament his departure, and he was not allowed to quit the country without a serious alarm. He had arrived at Arcis-sur-Aube, accompanied by his wife and four friends, when the national guard of the place arrested the whole party, and would not allow them to proceed until they had obtained the permission of the national assembly. Though Necker had passports from the municipality of Paris and from the king, he had not one from the assembly, and, without that, the zealous officials thought the others worthless. The assembly, notwithstanding some of its members proposed that he should be brought back and examined as to the state of his accounts, sent him permission to proceed, and he got safely to Copet, on the lake of Geneva, where he survived till 1804, contemplating the course of the revolution, which swept away so many now playing a prominent part in it.

The ministry of France was now reduced to the utmost insignificance, and St. Priest and Latour du Pin soon after resigned, being in danger of being impeached by the assembly for keeping up a mischievous correspondence with the emigrants and the military chiefs. Count Montmorin alone remained in his dangerous post, and was one of the first victims of jacobin vengeance in the massacres of September of the following year. For the present, Montmorin, Molleville, Malouet, and a few others formed a sort of privy council, and concerted plans in the vain hope of strengthening the monarchy. Duport du Tertre was made keeper of the seals, and Duportrail, at the recommendation of La Fayette, was made head of the war department in place of Latour du Pin. Duportrail soon showed himself more inclined towards the popular party than his predecessor, and one of his first acts was to deprive Bouillé of the independent liberty, which the king had conferred on him, of disposing the troops as he thought best-a power which Bouillé was anxious to employ in favour of the king's escape.

The king had studied carefully and anxiously the history of the English revolution and the fate of Charles I. As he saw that Charles's taking arms to maintain his authority against the parliament had led to his execution, after a civil war, Louis-who had nothing of the spirit of Charles Stuart

had acquired a deep dread of anything which might lead to civil war. He regarded the attempt to escape, if unsuccessful, as fatal to himself and family; if successful, as the immediate cause of a civil war, the issue of which no man could foresee. He, therefore, more and more recoiled from all schemes of escape. But the queen took very different views. She regarded it as certain that to remain in France was to ultimately perish. The refugees she had no faith in, and was averse to receive reaction at their hands, certain that, should they succeed, they would become masters in their turn. Yet every day it was becoming more and

more evident that the clubs, and through the clubs the mob, with it all his power for any purpose. He, in consequence, were gaining in power and audacity. The leaders of the depended much more on the escape of the king to some place clubs, Robespierre, Danton, Marat, and Desmoulins, taught out of the reach of the assembly than on any efforts within the utmost contempt and execration for all ranks and classes that body. He therefore proposed that means should be above the mere rabble. She felt that it could not be long devised for the king and royal family to escape to the army ere the assembly itself would be overwhelmed by the under Bouillé, but that Louis should not place himself fanaticism of the republicans, and that there must be a entirely in the power of Bouillé, but should take up his deluge of bloodshed, in which the royal family would dis- residence at Lyons, whilst Bouillé should encamp at Montappear first. During the sojourn of the court at St. Cloud, medly. From Lyons he proposed that the king should, by a in the autumn of this year, she, therefore, entertained many proclamation, express to the nation his real views and feel. plans of escape. The king would listen to none. Driven ings regarding the new constitution, which he never could

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almost to despair, Marie Antoinette, catching at the faintest hope of rescue, now resolved on what she had hitherto recoiled from, an interview with Mirabeau.

This extraordinary man had for the greater part of the year been receiving a prodigal pension from the court, for his services in maintaining the royal cause in the assembly, and in devising and assisting in a plan of escape for the king. It was not only as a lover of monarchy, but as a greater lover of the assembly and the people, that Mirabeau could, under the circumstances of the country, hope to effect anything. A little too much enthusiasm on behalf of the monarch, and he would have lost all his popularity, and

do but at the risk of his head, so long as he was in the power of the assembly and of the mob. Mirabeau had artfully drawn from most of the deputies their private views, in writing, of the constitution, and in comparing them, be found that each one condemned some particular article, and thus, taken altogether, the body of deputies in reality con demned every article in it. He proposed that these private confessions should be appended to the king's proclamation, as the most telling reason why he did not approve more or less of the constitution, which was thus altogether condemned by the whole of the assembly which had passed This plan had been communicated to Bouillé by a foreign

A.D. 1790.]

EXTRAVAGANCE AND DEBAUCHERY OF MIRABEAU.

prince on behalf of the court, and Bouillé had been so much struck with it, that he recommended that every means should be used to secure the zealous exertions of Mirabeau in carrying out the plan, and he engaged himself to support it by all his power with the army.

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indulged in all the licentious pleasures possible; he lived on the freest terms with madame Jay, the wife of his publisher; and, besides, kept a number of opera-girls, with whom he passed his leisure hours. All this time he knew the royal coffers, from which his extravagance was supplied, were The great difficulty lay in the repugnance of the queen to next to empty, and that the court itself was often at its wits'

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sank under them. He was, in fact, now fast exhausting his constitution by his excesses, and he knew it, and he knew too that he never could do anything for the court in return for the large sums that he received. At times, these reflections would burst in upon him, as they will on such passionate, sensual natures, without the power of warning them to reform. "He felt," says his friend Dumont, "so well that, if he had enjoyed personal consideration, all France would have been at his feet, that, in certain moments, he would have consented to pass through fire and flames to purify the name of Mirabeau. I have seen him weeping, and half suffocated with grief, as he said, with bitterness, 'I cruelly expiate the errors of my youth.' But they were not the errors of his youth only, they were the vices of his whole life, that tyrannised over him.

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thing." "And, if they should not keep their word?" "Then," retorted Mirabeau, indignantly, "I will soon turn them into a republic! "

This was wild talk, when we consider what was the state of France at this moment-the close or 1790. The national assembly was engaged in a fierce contest with the clergy, whom it proposed to make elective by the people, bishops and all, and to impose on them an oath binding them to approve of this institution, as well as of all other parts of the constitution. This was on a par with the government of king William in England, compelling the English clergy to swear to his supremacy in ecclesiastical matters, and his title to the throne, which produced the schism of the nonjurors. In this case the French clergy became to a great extent non-jurors. The dispute was not terminated till the

Such was the man whom Marie Antoinette, notwith-spring of 1791, to which date we shall refer the account of standing her deep repugnance, consented to meet and to flatter, in the last vain hope of arousing him to do what he ought to do for the escape of the royal family. The revolt of the troops at Nancy had shown that no time was to be lost, for the contagion might spread to the whole army. Accordingly, Mirabeau was admitted to the park at St. Cloud with the utmost secrecy, and the queen met him in what is called les Hauteurs, or the Heights. She observed to him, "that, with an ordinary enemy, with a man who had sworn the ruin of the monarchy, without being capable of appreciating its usefulness for a great people, the step she was taking would be altogether improper and out of place; but with a Mirabeau," &c. Mirabeau was easily attacked on the side of his vanity, and the charm of a woman like Marie Antoinette made that flattery tenfold as impressive. He showed that she had saved the monarchy, as he took leave of her; and, whatever hopes he might have excited in the queen, he certainly entertained the idea that he had only to secure the escape of the royal family to become the prime minister and dictator of France. He was persuaded that the king once out of their hands, the assembly would go to pieces, and that Paris would be compelled, by famine, to submit to Bouillé. The nobles were all to be united by the restoration of their privileges; the clergy would exert their influence over the people by regaining theirs! Five of the southern provinces, he said, would be loyal to a man.

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it. But this dispute affrighted the timid conscience of the king, and from that moment he began to think in earnest of flying. Whilst the king and the clergy were thus both in renewed resistance to the constitution-the king secretly, the clergy openly-the emigrants were plotting with particular activity, but were divided into a number of parties amongst themselves. The emigrant court at Turin was a scene of perfect anarchy. The princes and higher nobility, incapable of change, at once haughty and imbecile, looked down on the gentry, who, in return, despised them. The princes and nobles were for employing only foreign forces; the gentry were for employing all the royalists of the south. The gentry who raised troops in the south would call them royal militia; the princes and bishops objected to that, and insisted on calling them bourgeois corps, or citizen militia. In this wrangling, an attempt was yet made to raise an insurrection at Lyons, which it was proposed to make the capital instead of Paris, which had become odious to the princes and nobles by its democracy. The insurrection failed at the end of 1790, and the princes then remove! from Turin to Coblentz, on the Rhine, to be nearer the Austrians, whom they hoped to engage in their cause. They settled in the territory of the elector of Treves, whose authority they almost wholly usurped. Some few subordinate agents were left at Turin; but even these were variance. On the Rhine, too, the prince of Condé separated from the princes at large, and formed a military caz, and corps, preferring the idea of fighting rather than of intriguing with foreign courts. The indignation at the fing put upon the clergy at this period augmented the tide o emigration. Numbers flocked to take up arms under

Dumont pointed out to him the folly of the whole scheme. The power of the clergy was gone, because the people were become atheistical, and had got the estates of the church; the nobles, were, as they ever had been, imbecile and impracticable; and, worst of all, the king was destitute of the vigour of character to carry him through such a crisis. "But," inter-Condé; women, as indignant as the men, deemed it thi rupted Mirabeau, "you forget the queen! she has a force of duty to quit the soil of France. It became a fashion to mind that is prodigous; she is a man in courage!" Dumont emigrate; and Chateaubriand, in his Memoirs of the Dek reminded him of La Fayette and the national guards; but of Berri, draws a curious picture of these emigrants on the Mirabeau replied, that if La Fayette thought, under such Rhine:-"Many of the emigrants had joined the army in a circumstances, to play Washington, he would be swept to state of complete destitution; others were spending m destruction. Last of all, Dumont bade him reflect that the providently the last relics of their fortunes. Several moment he had succeeded in liberating the court from corps, composed wholly of officers, served as private soldiers. danger, he himself would be the first object of its vengeance; The naval officers were mounted; country gentlem that the aristocracy would immediately claim their old formed themselves into companies, distinguished by th privilege of ruling everything, and that they would never names of their native provinces. All were in good spirits forgive him either his genius or his past castigations. for the camp life was free and joyous. Some becam "But," said Mirabeau, "the court has promised me every-drawers of water, some hewers of wood; others provad

A.D. 1790.]

MIRABEAU DENOUNCED BY MARAT.

and dressed the provisions; and everywhere the inspiring note of the trumpet resounded; the camp, in fact, was a perfect kingdom. There were princes dwelling in wagons, magistrates on horseback, missionaries preaching the Bible and administering justice. The poor nobles conformed with careless philosophy to this state of things, cheerfully enduring present privations in the sanguine expectation of speedily regaining all they had lost. They confidently believed that the end of autumn would find them restored to their splendid houses, to their groves, their forests, and to their old dovecotes!

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family, and that seventeen of them had been served on himself. This brought down the applauses of the assembly; but it did not at all awe the journalists, or deceive the people, as to what was the real fact, that the count was retained by the court.

La Fayette, Bailly, and all the chief municipal authorities, were denounced as traitors. "Those who are your enemies," said Marat, in his Ami du People, "are not the nobles and the clergy so much as those who make the laws. Those who head the band are the king's atrocious ministers; are the deputies of the people, seduced by promises, or corrupted

But, all this time, the aspect of things in Paris was grow-by presents. They are the Mirabeaus, the Montmorencys, ing more formidable to such dreamers. The mob, under the inspirations of the fierce democrat journalists, Marat, Freron, Prudhomme, and others, was every day becoming more ripe for the execution of the most terrible deeds, and for overriding all forms of order-even king, ministers, assembly, and magistracy. The clubs and the democratic journals overawed the assembly and the magistracy, and the mob were, through them, the masters of the country. In eighteen months the revolution had risen to the very point of making all France one great blood-bath. The court of justice at the Chatelet was denounced by the clubs and the journalists as sold to the respectabilities, and as the sink of corruption; and the assembly, in the spirit of compliance, proposed to abolish it, and to erect a new court, to be called The High National Court, to try all treasons against the nation, and five judges were to be taken from the Court of Cassation, that is, the court of appeal, having power to casser, or break, the decision of all inferior courts. These five judges were to preside in the new court, and to decide by a jury. Thus the assembly was actually playing into the hands of the democrats-of such men as Marat and Robespierre, and sharpening the axe with which they were to take off the heads of all that they chose to proscribe. Barnave was made president of the assembly in October; but even Barnave did not escape the suspicions and denunciations of Marat. Mirabeau was also denounced by Marat and his confrères, who, by their mouchards, or spies, whom they had everywhere, had detected his interview with the queen; and the fury of this blear-eyed monster was doubly whetted against the orator through his own foolish ostentation. He had been made one of the administrators of the department of the capital, and also head of the battalion of the national guard to which he belonged; and he gave a grand dinner to the officers of the battalion, followed by a ball and a fête, with illuminations and fireworks, said altogether to cost ten thousand livres. Marat asked the people, in his journal, where all this money came from with a man who, till lately, only existed by writing for the booksellers? Whether they did not know that it all came from the court, and from the Austrian woman, by whom he was paid to betray them? Mirabeau ascended the tribunal, and made a fiery protest against these attacks. He demanded whether such infamous accusations were to be tolerated by the assembly against its most patriotic members? He enumerated his sufferings in the cause of the people, recalling the fact of the numerous dungeons of France he had been in under arrest by lettres-de-cachet, declaring that he had seen fifty-four lettres-de-cachet in his

the Clermont-Tonnerres, the Lanjuinais, the Chopeliers, the Sièyes, the Thourists, the Torgets, the Liancourts, the Desmouniers, the Duponts, those vile and cowardly deserters of their country; it is they who have rallied, with the courtiers, the municipal administrators, and the staff of the Paris national guard, round the king, to make the executive power triumph, and to sacrifice the nation to one who is only its servant."

Thus was this sanguinary wretch already pointing out to the mob its victims. La Fayette was obliged, by his office of commandant of the national guard, to take care that the court did not escape. He was responsible, and he was also obliged to see the king and queen frequently; and the queen, though she put little confidence in La Fayette, as too much himself in the power of the people, and bound by his principles to a thorough reform, yet sometimes conversed with him on the state of affairs, and on the measures necessary for the safety of the royal family. This was enough, in the eyes of the blood-hounds of the republican press, to stamp him as a traitor. The revolution, on the crest of which he and Bailly first rode, had now assumed that furious current which would soon carry them on to the rocks of perdition, if they were not fortunate enough to escape from the hands of the once-applauded mob. Το conciliate the all-powerful faction, La Fayette and the Feuillans returned to the jacobin club; but it was too late. Marat howled in malignant triumph over this humiliation, for it was nothing less. "Now they have ruined the country," he wrote, "these vile deserters have returned to the jacobin club; and some imprudent journalists have celebrated their return as a reinforcement brought to the patriotic party. But will not these rogues, without virtue, without honour, without shame, continue to sell the interests of the country, as they have always done? They want now to take refuge in public opinion. Having passed their lives in shame, they would fain die on the field of honour."

The duke of Orleans also appeared at the jacobin club, and introduced his son, the duke of Chartres (afterwards Louis Philippe, king of the French), who made a patriotic speech, which was received with rapturous applause, and printed. This caused the furious journalists to flame with indignation. They thought the jacobins themselves had learned little of the real principle of equality, to make this adulatory reception of a ci-devant prince, instead of giving hin some proper lessons on the occasion. Yet, so much equality existed at the jacobin's, that the duke of Chartres immediately after took his turn, like any other member, as one of the door-keepers of the club. About this time

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