348

LA FAYETTE'S INTERFERENCE.

of a prince of the blood, who flies to the succor of his king and places himself at the foot of the throne, between the threatened sovereign and the people, neither was it that of an audacious usurper who tempts revolt by occasion, and at least presents to the people a completed crime.

The conduct of this prince was but that of one who looks to a contingent reversion: either that he would not receive the crown except by a fatality of events, and without thrusting forth his hand to fortune, or that he had more indifference than ambition for supreme power, or that he would not place his royalty as a check upon the way of liberty; that he sincerely desired a republic, and that the title of first citizen of a free nation appeared to him greater than that of king.

VII.

However, a short time after the days of the 5th and 6th October, La Fayette desired to break off the intimacy between the Duc d'Orleans and Mirabeau. He resolved at all risks to compel the prince to remove from the scene, and by an exercise of moral restraint or the fear of a state prosecution, to absent himself and go to London. He made the king and queen enter into his plans, by alarming them as to the prince's intrigues, and designating him as a competitor for the throne. La Fayette said one day to the queen, that this prince was the only man upon whom the suspicion of so lofty an ambition could fall. Sir," replied the queen, with a look of incredulity, "is it necessary then to be a prince in order to pretend to the throne ?" "At least, madame," replied the general, "I only know the Duc d'Orleans who aspires to it. La Fayette presumed too much on the prince's

ambition.

VIII.

Mirabeau, discouraged at the hesitations and scruples of poraneously with this work, the author acquits the Duc d'Orleans of any participation in the riots and bloodshed at Versailles, on the 4th and 5th of October; but says, page 280, "Depositions prove that he was seen everywhere between Paris and Versailles, but that he did nothing. Between eight and nine o'clock in the morning of the 6th, so soon after the massacre that the court of the castle was still stained with blood, he went and showed himself to the people, with an enormous cockade in his hat, laughing and flourishing a switch in his hand."-Standard Library.-H. T. R.

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the Duc d'Orleans, and finding him above or below crime, cast him off like a despised accomplice of ambition, and tried to ally himself with La Fayette, who, possessed of the armed force, and who saw in Mirabeau the whole of the moral force, smiled at the idea of a duumvirate, which could assume to themselves empire. There were secret interviews at Paris and at Passy between these two rivals. La Fayette rejecting every idea of a usurpation profitable to the prince, declared to Mirabeau that he must renounce every conceived plot against the queen if he would come to an understanding with him. "Well, general," replied Mirabeau," since you will have it so, let her live! A humbled queen may be fit for something, but a queen with her throat cut is only good as the subject of a bad tragedy!" This atrocious remark, which treated the bloodshed of a woman as a jest, was subsequently known by the queen, who however forgave Mirabeau, and did not allow it to interfere with her liaisons with the great orator. But the cold-blooded infamy must have found its way to her heart as an ominous warning of what she might fear hereafter.

La Fayette, sure of the consent of the king and queen, supported by the feelings of the national guard, who were growing weary of factions and the factious, ventured to assume quietly towards the prince the tone of a dictator, and to pronounce against him an arbitrary exile under the appearance of a mission freely accepted. He sent to request of the Duc d'Orleans a meeting at the Marquise de Coigny's, a noble intelligent lady attached to La Fayette, and in whose salon the Duc d'Orleans occasionally met him. After a conversation heard by the walls alone, but the result of which showed its tenor, and which Mirabeau, to whom it was communicated, termed very imperious on the one side, and very resigned on the other, it was agreed that the Duc d'Orleans should forthwith set out for London. The friends of the prince induced him to change his resolution that same night, and he sent La Fayette a note to this effect. La Fayette requested another interview, in which he called upon him to keep his word, enjoined him to depart in twenty-four hours, and then conducted him to the king. There the prince accepted the feigned mission, and promised to leave nothing neglected to expose in England the plots of the conspirators of the kingdom. "You are more interested than any one," said La Fayette, in the king's presence, "for no one is more compromised than yourself." Mirabeau, cognizant of this

350

PLANS OF THE GIRONDISTS.

oppression of La Fayette and the court over the mind of the Duc d'Orleans, offered his services to the duke, and tempted him with the last offers of supreme power. The subject of his address to the Assembly was already prepared: he intended to denounce, as a conspiracy of despotism, this coup d'état against one citizen, in which the liberty of all citizens was attempted. "This violation of the inviolability of the representatives of the nation in the palpable exile of a prince of the blood; he was to point out La Fayette, making use of the royal hand to strike the rivals of his popularity, and to cover his own insolent dictatorship under the venerated sanction of the chief of the nation and the head of the family." Mirabeau had no doubt of the resentment of the Assembly against so odious an attempt, and promised the friends of the Duc d'Orleans one of those returns of opinion which raise a man to a higher elevation than that from which he has fallen. This language, backed by the entreaties of Laclos, Sillery, Lauzun, a second time shook the prince's resolution. He saw now disgrace in this voluntary exile, where at first he had only seen magnanimity. At the break of day he wrote that he declined the mission. La Fayette then sent for him to the minister for foreign affairs. There the prince, again overcome, wrote to the Assembly a letter, which destroyed beforehand all the denunciation of Mirabeau. 66 My enemies pretend," said the duke to La Fayette, that you boast of having against me proofs of my share in the attempts of the 5th of October." They are rather my enemies who say so," replied La Fayette: "if I had proofs against you I should already have arrested you. I have none, but I am seeking for them." The Duc d'Orleans went. Nine months had passed away since his return. The Constituent Assembly had left, without any other defence than anarchy, the constitution it had so lately voted. Disorder prevailed throughout the kingdom: the first acts of the Legislative Assembly announced the hesitation of a people which halts on a declivity, but is doomed to descend to the very bottom.

66

66

IX.

The Girondists, at the first step, going ahead of the Barnaves and Lameths, showed a disposition to push France, all unprepared, into a republic. The Duc d'Orleans, whose long residence in England had allowed him to reflect at a distance

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from the attractions of events and factions, felt his Bourbon blood rise within him. He did not cease to be a patriot, but he understood that the safety of the country on the brink of a war was not in the destruction of the executive power. Unquestionably pity for the king and queen awakened in a heart in which hatred had not stifled every generous feeling. He felt himself too much avenged by the days of the 5th and 6th October, by the humiliation of the king before the Assembly, by the daily insults of the populace under the windows of Marie Antoinette, and by the fearful nights of this family, whose palace was but a prison; and perhaps also he feared for himself the ingratitude of revolutions.

He had gone to England on compulsion, and had remained there under the idea, which was perfectly just, that his name might be used as a pretext for agitation in Paris. Laclos had gone to him in London from time to time to try again to tempt the exile's ambition, and make him ashamed of a deference for La Fayette, which France took to be cowardice. The prince's pride was roused at this, and he threatened to return; but the representations of M. de la Luzerne, minister of France in England, those of M. de Boinville, one of La Fayette's aides-de-camp, and his own reflections, had prevailed over the incitements of Laclos. Proof of this is found in a note of M. de la Luzerne's, found in an iron chest amongst the king's secret papers. I attest," says M. de la Luzerne, "that I have presented to M. the Duc d'Orleans, M. de Boinville, aide-de-camp of M. de La Fayettte, that M. de Boinville declared to the Duc d'Orleans that they were very uneasy as to the troubles which might at this moment be excited in Paris by malcontents, who would not scruple to make use of his name to disturb the capital, and perhaps the kingdom; and he was urged on these grounds to protract the time of his departure. The Duc d'Orleans, unwilling in any way to afford plea or pretext for any disturbance of public tranquillity, consented to delay his return."

X.

He at last left England, and on his return made several fruitless attempts to be again employed in the navy. Whilst his mind was thus wavering, he received the intelligence, through M. Bertrand de Molleville, that the king had nominated him to the rank of admiral. The Duc d'Orleans went to thank that minister, and added that, "He was rejoiced at

the honor the king conferred on him, as it would give him an opportunity of communicating to the king his real sentiments, which had been odiously calumniated. I am very unfortunate," continued he; "my name has been involved in all the crimes imputed to me, and I have been deemed guilty, because I disdained to justify myself; but time will show whether my conduct belies my words."

The air of frankness and good faith, and the significant tone with which the Duc d'Orleans uttered these words, struck the minister, who until then had been greatly prejudiced against his innocence. He inquired if his royal highness would consent to repeat these expressions to the king, as they would rejoice his majesty, and he feared that they might lose some of their force if repeated by himself. The duke eagerly embraced the idea of seeing the king, if the king would receive him, and expressed his intention of presenting himself at the château the next day. The king, informed of this by his minister, awaited the prince, and had a long and private conference with him.

A confidential document, written with the prince's own hand, and drawn up in order to justify his memory in the eyes of his children and his friends, informs us of what passed at this interview. "The ultra-democrats," said the Duc d'Orleans, "deemed that I wished to make France a republic; the ambitious, that I wished, by my popularity, to force the king to resign the administration of the kingdom into my hands; lastly, the virtuous and patriotic had the illusion of their own virtue concerning me, for they deemed that I sacrificed myself entirely to the public good. The one party deemed me worse than I was; the others, better. I have merely followed my nature, and that impelled me, above all, to liberty. I fancied I saw her image in the parliaments, which at least possessed her tone and forms, and I embraced this phantom of representative freedom. Thrice did I sacrifice myself for those parliaments; twice from a conviction on my part; the third, not to belie what I had previously done." I had been in England; I had there seen true liberty, and I doubted not that the States-General, and France also, wished to obtain freedom. Scarcely had I foreseen that France would possess citizens, than I wished to be one of these citizens myself, and I made unhesitatingly the sacrifice of all the rank and privileges that separated me from the nation: they cost me nothing; I aspired to be a deputy-I was one. I sided with the tiers état, not from