No sooner had the news of their first ephemeral [298] successes at Longwy and Verdun arrived at Paris, and at the same time the rising in La Vende become known, than there was a rush to arms, to the frontier, to drive back the invaders from the soil of France. The revolutionists seized their opportunity to declare that the royalists left in France would help the invaders by conspiring at home. It was enough. The thirst for blood and slaughter, never equalled or approached by any other civilised nation, which characterised the French Revolution, burst forth with unheard of atrocity. The September massacres were the result, and of the order for this horrible crime Tallien and Danton were chiefly accused.
A young musician, waiting at the Conciergerie for the gendarmes to take him to the tribunal which was his death sentence, remembering that a friend wanted a certain air, went back to his room, copied it, and took it to his friend, saying
FORE:There is such a thing as being too angelic, and gentle, and unsuspicious. If those who have to live in the world go about acting as if other people were angels instead of men and women, believing all they are told, trusting every one, and knowing as little as they can of what is going on around them, no good ever comes of it.Not that M. de Montagu shared the opinions of his brothers-in-law, he saw to what they had led. But he thought as many others did and still do, that emigration was a mistake, at any rate for the present, [218] that precipitation in the matter would irritate moderate men and many who were still undecided, and drive them into the ranks of the Revolutionists, especially if they saw the emigrs preparing to return with a foreign army to fight against their countrymen. What he hoped for was a rapprochement between the royalists and the moderate constitutional party, who, if united, might still save both the monarchy and the reforms. M. de Beaune laughed at the idea, and events prove him to be right; finally, as he could not convince his son, he set off alone.
The King had been married to her when he was fifteen and she two-and-twenty; and after the first few years had lived in an open immorality which was very general at his court, and for a long time did not much affect his popularity with the nation, though every now and then caricatures and epigrams more witty than prudent appeared; as, for instance, the following, written upon the base of the pedestal of an equestrian statue of him, around which were grouped the figures of Strength, Prudence, Justice, and Peace:[13]The young Marquis, her cousin, was starting for St. Domingo, and the day before his departure a fte de famille took place, exceedingly characteristic of the France of the eighteenth century.Emigrate? I never thought of such a thing. We were going to Spain to see my father, who is there.At last they went away, but in a few moments two of them whose appearance was different from the rest returned and saidOne of the odious, inevitable republican ftes was, of course, given to celebrate the events of Thermidor. Mme. Tallien opened a salon, where, as in the others then existing, the strange, uncouth figures of the sans-culottes mingled with others whose appearance and manners showed that they were renegades and traitors to their own order and blood.
