History of the Constituent By A. de Lamartine. & Co.

From The Athenæum.

pher debate, to the peasant bread, to the Assembly (1789). citizen equality, to the young agitation, to the Vol. I. Vizetelly aged peace-so is it even now, as a story and a monument, everything to everybody. No two writers can agree as to how it came, THERE are some subjects of which the in- what it meant, how far it was a curse, how far terest never fails. Treat them how you will a blessing. To an Echerolles, it was a series -poetically, dramatically, critically; as a of personal calamities, not very pleasant to group of facts, as a series of fancies-they any one and particularly unpleasant to the rouse attention, hold the heart in thraldom, Echerolles people. To a Thiers it was chiefly and wake emotions, bright, vivid, personal, a great military spectacle. Louis Blanc sces enduring as those which wait on individual in it only the first protest in favor of Comexperience. Such subjects are, the Pelopon- munistic ideas. To a Larochejacquelin it nesian War- the last days of the Roman Re- was a war against priests and altars. Marat public the story of Mohammed—the discov-sees in it nothing but a great act of phleboto eries of Columbus - the life of Mary, Queen my. Buonarotti knows little of the Revolu of Scots-the Civil War in England - the tion, except so far as it was an instrument to French Revolution, and others. The last coerce butchers and bakers into low prices. here named is perhaps the most brilliant of Thus, each writer paints for us, according to all themes for the historic pen. It has the his skill and knowledge, not the Revolution, charm of mystery. Its theatre was a world. but his Revolution. It touched all interests, quickened all pulses, enlarged all systems, vivified all ideas. It was a part of human life—it was a powerful and dramatic contribution to the history of the human mind.

At the opening of the august and striking spectacle, the Revolution was everything to everybody. It existed in all hearts as a principle and a hope before it took external form. The king on the throne wooed it to approach. The minister called to it from his cabinet with smiles. The noble welcomed it in the interests of his pride. The philosopher desired it as an auxiliary of reform. Court ladies prayed for it as a novelty. The people asked for its advent as a means. All minds, all hearts, all consciences, conspired to aid the dramatic action, to bring about the terrible catastrophe. Each party, each person, saw in it himself the hope of promoting his own interests, the means of developing his own ideas, of impressing his own thought on the future institutions of France.

The aspects of the Revolution are no doubt infinitely various. To a people like the French this is embarrassing, for the French intellect is before all things fond of a definition. It likes to condense a drama into a phrase, to describe a revolution in an epigram. Each author tries therefore, to select his mot - his word for circulation to write, as it were, his joke, his text, his summary of the Revolution, on the frontispiece of his volume. says the Revolution meant Finance - Thiers says Glory-Louis Blanc says Socialism Lacretelle says intrigue-Buonarotti says Starvation. M. de Lamartine, of course, has also his mot.

Necker

With him the Revolution meant the Press. It was the press, as he affirms in an eloquent passage," which condenses, on a page of paper that may be concealed in the hands of a child, thoughts sufficient to explode a world

which circulates like the airwhich illuminates like light-which speaks amidst silence—and which participates, as it were, in the immateriality and invisibility of thought itself" - that created the Revolution. This explanation, though plausible beyond the plausibility of most other theories- inasmuch as other causes may be freely traced to the action of thought as brought to bear on minds through the ministry of printer's inktenable as a whole. But we will not flatter ourselves that we, any more than M. de Lamartine, can reduce the French Revolution to the compass of a bon mot.

is not

Hence arose universal disappointment with the Revolution. It answered no expectation. It owned no guidance, obeyed no hand; it swept on like the march of Destiny, crushing friend and foe, deaf to all cries, indifferent to all emotions, trampling down kings and shoeblacks, royalists and jacobins, fools and philosophers, with the same merciless unconcern as would an earthquake or a falling mountain. Hence is it still a mystery, strange as the human heart itself. This new contribution to the library of the That men who look upon the riddle after-Revolution opens well. M. de Lamartine has wards, who try to read and make intelligible his peculiar views, his personal style. His to the common eye the hieroglyphic story, history, so far as we can judge it by a first should read it variously is only natural. As volume, is unlike other histories. He deals the Revolution at its opening meant every-more than his rivals with personal matters, thing to everybody—to the king a pastime, with adventures, with pictorial details-so to the minister income, to the clergy ceremo- that his work has all the charms of romance. nial, to the noble popularity, to the philoso- Sometimes, too, his sentiment, his poetic sen

was "profusion"-Maurepas, who governed France for years in jokes - Malesherbes and other ministers, are finely painted. On Marie Antoinette the poet has bestowed all his skill, and he paints her outlines and records the story of her life with infinite grace, eloquence, and delicacy :

sibility, his eclectic interest in everything| Calonne, his rival in finance, whose maxim noble and great, lead him into rhapsody and political paradox, and seduce him into the free use of colors, rosy and bright in themselves, rather than belonging absolutely to his subject. In this however, there is something graceful and generous. Historians are so apt to read events by one light only-to confine nature and providence to one side of the arena that it is rather a pleasant novelty pleasant even when wrong- to find a writer who can see good in those who reject his own shibboleth.

The portraits in this volume are admirable. Here, for example, is Necker, done to the

life:

-:

This princess, who was herself but fifteen years old, and whom nature had endowed with grace, beauty, and intelligence, calculated to decorate all worldly thrones, and to fascinate all human kind, was, for a long time, in the eyes of her husband and troublesome gift of destiny. Love had not the Dauphin, nothing more than a premature yet begun to blossom in that cold, heavy, and tardy nature. A slight malformation which his His countenance displayed the man. Pride, modesty had prevented him from revealing and solemnity, stateliness, devoid of character, a correcting by the aid of art, inspired him with lofty forehead, a confident eye, a close and not more repugnance than attraction towards beauty. ungracious mouth, foreign features, in which Ger- His marriage festival had been transformed into a man gravity struggled with French shallowness; public calamity by a conflagration which consum self-satisfaction, disdain for others, affected good ed the scaffolding of the Parisian feu-de-joie in the nature, feigned modesty, the attitude of a ser- Champs-Elysées, and which, driving the panicvant who protects his master, a look that can-stricken crowd into the neighboring streets and vassed for esteem, a lachrymose and wordy sen- the fosses of the Tuileries, caused the death of sibility, out of place in public affairs; an equivo- hundreds of old men, women, and children, sufcal philosopher, who accepted the caresses of focated under the crushing weight of the multiatheism while kneeling to the state religion; a tude. The national prejudice, already averse to visible intoxication of sectarian popularity; a real the introduction of an Austrian princess to the honesty, but one which displayed itself with the royal bed of France, was overcast as by a sinis parade of charlatanism, and which dwelt with ter omen at a disaster of which that princess had ostentation on its slightest acts, public or pri- been the innocent cause. The splendor, the atvate; an advertisement of virtue, a part of per- traction, the invincible seduction of the young petual indecision between the loyal subject, the Dauphiness triumphed, however, over this preinfatuated parvenu, and the popular man of fac-sage in the eyes of the court and of the people. tion such was the exterior, and such was the She became the idol of the nation." man; original type of the politicians of that doctorial, self-sufficient, and supercilious school which agitated and governed for two reigns, the progeny of Necker, the schoolmen of the Revolution. He undertook subjects for the French Academy, in which politics and administration were connected with literature. His heavy and emphatic eloquence affected the sensibility of Jean Jacques Rousseau, without possessing its fascination. The words virtue, religion, humanity, philosophy, love for the people, public felicity, sanctified his books in the eyes of the financiers, while his knowledge of commercial and administrative economy imposed upon men of letters. The caresses bestowed by his wife upon the arbiters of literary taste prepared the way for his success. The respectful worship which Madame Necker professed for the genius of her husband was communicable to all her society; it was believed on her assertion. M. Necker had thus become in the eyes of public opinion a mystery of genius, of virtue, and of practical capacity, which no one had ascertained, but all attested. His respectability formed a sect in Paris. It was the epoch when a craving for prodigies agitated the imaginations of those who were weary of the actual present; when Mesmer, Saint-Martin, and Cagliostro exercised their fascinations; and when a certain dose of charlatanism was essential even to merit and to virtue.

of accession to the throne. The reader will Here we have the royal pair at the moment like to compare this picture with the wellknown passage in which Carlyle has described the death of Louis the Fifteenth.

Louis XV. died at Versailles on the 10th May, 1774, while the Dauphin, the Dauphiness, the royal family, the court, and the gentlemen of the household were silently awaiting his last sigh in the ante-chambers of the royal apartment. In their uncertainty of the moment when the old monarch might cease to exist, when etiquette required that the new King should quit the palace of the defunct one, it had been concerted with the chiefs of the royal stables-whose duty it was to bring forward the carriages — that a wax taper, which was burning in a window of the royal bedchamber, should be extinguished at the moment when the dying monarch had breathed his last, and that this should be the silent signal for the entrance of the equipages into the courts of the palace. At the moment the taper was extinguished, the Dauphin, who had retired with the Dauphiness into their apartment, heard a sound like a rumbling peal of thunder in the interior of the palace. He arose, disturbed at the approach of so unusual a noise. It was occa

sioned by the hurried footsteps of hundreds of courtiers and officers of the crown, who were rushing from the ante-chambers of the late king to precipitate themselves into those of the future monarch. At such a sound - which tumultuously announced from the very first moment a reign of noise and agitation-the youthful King and Queen instinctively fell upon their knees, and elevating their hands together, exclaimed as with one voice," May God protect us! we are too young to reign!" The King was scarcely twenty, the Queen not nineteen; and the kingdom worn out with the vices of the last reign, would have required, to raise and consolidate it, the eagle-eye of genius, the heart of heroism, and the maturity of a sage."

surrounded on the one side by persons for whom she felt antipathy, and on the other by characters who exposed her to great dangers, she felt all the wearisomeness of youth, the ennui of gravity, and the eagerness for amusements, the headstrong levity of a child to whom toys are shown and then taken away. With melancholy feelings she compared the morose and disgraceful coldness of her husband with the handsome, agreeable, elegant, and complaisant Count d'Artois, who was then the delight of the court. She formed a connection innocently, but futilely, with this prince and the females who were the equivocal companions of his amusements. The extravagant freaks of this young party, which were concealed from the eyes of the Dauphin, or tolerated by him with apathetic indifference, became the Marie Antoinette had not escaped the breath amusement of the courtiers, the talk of Verof calumny even before her entrance into sailles, and the scandal of Paris. Youth, inexFrance. When she arrived in Paris, it was to perience, the absence of all serious advice, the take her place in the most dissolute court in thirst of amusements interdicted to her rank, the Europe-then governed by a courtesan, Ma-plicity of the women in her service, threw Marie seductions of opportunities, and the facile comdame du Barry - as the wife of a youth who Antoinette into imprudences which sometimes was half idiot, half ascetic. If circumstances assumed the appearance of irregularities. She, ever can explain or palliate the fall of woman, unknown to her husband, planned a nocturthe levities of Marie Antoinette would have nal trip to Paris, under the escort of the Count that explanation, be it good or worthless. M. d'Artois, then young as she was. She, with de Lamartine continues: one or two of her women, threw herself into a private carriage, which whirled her rapidly Her precocious beauty eclipsed that of Ma- to Paris, and there, disguised in dresses of dame du Barry, the favorite of Louis XV., and character, and as a shepherdess, which concealthe modern Phryne. But the beauty of Madame ed her majesty without hiding her name, she du Barry was that of a courtezan; the beauty passed the night under a mask at the public of Marie-Antoinette was that of a princess. Na-festivities, or in a ball at the opera; she was ture had adorned her with all the gifts that made pleased to be there recognized by the pliancy of her, as a woman, an object of admiration, and, her form, or by the beauty of her hands; she as a Queen, an object for adoration; in shape there listened without anger to the homage offertall, her movements were swan-like in carriage ed to her beauty, as it flattered her pride without and deportment; in elegance such as to lose no- having the right to offend her rank. Sometimes, thing of her majesty; her hair was blonde and accompanied by a single servant-woman, she got silken, and its warm tints reminded the beholder into the common coaches, then stationed on the of the wavy tresses of Titian; a lofty oval fore-public roads, and a vehicle, without a name, head, like to those of the fair daughters of the Danube; eyes of liquid azure, in which the calm and the tempest of the soul made the look by turns sleep or undulate; the nose slightly aquiline; the mouth Austrian, of her family, that is, a mingling of pride and of a smile; the chin turned up; her color heightened by the chill climate of the north; an irresistible grace shed like a youthful vapor over all her features, and which did not allow her to be viewed but through an atmosphere of fire or of inebriation.

transported in the night time the future Queen of France to the portal of a theatre: while her husband who was the butt of raillery of the cour tiers, was fast asleep at Versailles. These levities, applauded by those who participated in them, betrayed at Versailles, talked of in Paris, magnified and incriminated by public malignity, became the conversation of France, and the scandal of Europe. Motives were attributed to them which perverted the whole. The favorite beauties were named; the favored lovers were pointed out; the Dauphin was pitied; the Count d'Artois was blamed; the almost general licentiousness of morals then prevailing revenged itself by incriminating, with the most rigid severity, the thoughtlessness of youth at court. Pub lic opinion, which had at first idolized Marie-Antoinette, then conceived impressions against her which were never effaced.

That Louis awoke at last to a sense of the incomparable beauty of his wife is well known. That he then doated on her, trusted her, indulged her whims and crotchets with a fondness and a folly only equalled by his former

apathy, is also known. It was the same to become real ministers of vanities; the small

her. Nothing serious, either in pleasure, business, or passion, ever entered into that volatile and flighty head. Her love of female favorites, though seemingly harmless, in its results was as mischievous as are generally the private preferences of royalty in the other Our author tells us that

sex.

number admitted, the great number refused; the mystery, the demi-confidences, the interpretations, those calumnies of ignorance, changed this retreat into a Capreæ, and those mysteries into disdain all those murmurs of opinion. A thuncrimes. Her very innocence made the Queen derbolt awoke her from those enchantments.

This "thunderbolt" was the famous case of A charming and virtuous princess, Madame de the pearl necklace. M. de Lamartine exLamballe, was her idol before she became the culpâtes the Queen from any guilty share in victim of her destiny. At the first word she this mysterious matter-in which a Queen raised her to the functions of superintendentess and a common girl, a cardinal and an intri of her household, breaking by violence, in order to bring her nearer to herself, all the rights, and hesitated how to describe) Cagliostro, and a gante, a friar, an Italian (whom history has disregarding the murmurs, of persons more anciently belonging to the court. This attachment, thief, were all mixed up together, and placed pure and disinterested on the part of the Princess at the bar of public opinion as accomplices. de Lamballe, constituted for some months the This strange story is here related at considerhappiness of Marie-Antoinette. One year after-able length:-but we have not space to dwell wards she saw at a court fête a young lady of on its dubious and exciting details. eighteen years, the handsomest and most attrac- Not a little space is given in this opening tive woman of that time; it was the Countess Jules volume, as was most needful, to an account of de Polignac. Marie-Antoinette instantly sought Mirabeau. Nowhere have we seen this tribune to obtain at any price the friendship of this beauty. of the people, this conspirator of the court, so She inquired the reasons that had kept that young magnificently painted as in these pages. M. de lady away from the court up to that time, and was informed that the contracted fortune of the ancient Lamartine has enjoyed the advantage of pehouse of the Polignacs had kept her in obscurity rusing the unpublished papers of the Mirabeau in the country. She filled up with titles, with family; out of which he has gleaned particu court situations, and with fortune, the distance lars-family feelings and failings as well as which separated her from the unknown lady; she knowledge of facts-such as throw new light brought her into contact with the court; she gave on his early career, and on what may be called her the first rank in her household; she asked his private life. Here are some notes by the her for her affection, and she lavished on her all elder Mirabeau on his hopeful son at various her own, and made this friend reign over all her wishes. She created, by the side of the official ages, brought together; the expressions occourt, an intimate and personal court, of which cur in letters to his brother, the tribune's unMadame de 'Polignac was the sovereign centre, and she appeared herself therein less as a Queen than as a friend. * * But soon this veil did "I have nothing to tell you about my enormous not seem sufficiently dense. The Queen, tired of son," wrote the father, a few months after his the pomp and of the clear day of her palaces, birth, "except that he beats his nurse." "He is asked the King for a rustic house, and one re-as ugly as the son of Satan," he added a year tired, in the midst of a modern garden and on after. "It is a sand in which nothing remains," the confines of a grove. The King with pleasure he said when the child was five years old. "I gave her the Petit-Trianon. She there hid her have put him into the hands of Poisson, who is life with Madame de Polignac and a small num-attached to me like a spaniel. Thank him very ber of friends. There she enjoyed herself in much for the education he is giving the monkey. solitude and rural felicity; the smallness of the Let him make a firm citizen of him, that is all dwelling, the rusticity of the gardens, the naked- that's necessary. With these qualities he will ness of the apartments, the suppression of all make the race of pigmies tremble who play the ceremony, the affected simplicity of dress, made part of grandees of the court!" "There is a the Queen be forgotten in the mistress of the cot-part in a comedy to be performed this evening, tage. The King himself did not come there in by a young monster whom they call my son, but royal state, but as a private individual. The who, if he were the son of our greatest actor, delights of the gardens, the cultivation of flowers, could not more naturally be a buffoon, a mimic, the rural occupations of the dairy, the repasts under the shade of the trees, the music concealed in the woods, the illuminations reflected from the waters, the walks by the light of the moon, the theatrical representations, in which the Queen herself caused her charms and her voice to be applauded in various parts-such as that of Rosina in Beaumarchais' comedy; hours altogether dedicated to the care of her beauty; the fashions, which were raised to the importance of state affairs; the milliners and the hairdressers, who had

cle:

and a comedian. His body grows, his babbling increases, and his features are becoming marvel lously ugly,-ugly beyond all possible rivalship; and, still more, he's a random speechifier. He is sickly; and if I were obliged to create a substi tute for him, where on earth should I find another specimen of such stuff? He is turbulent, and yet he is also gentle and complying, but his complaisance becomes foolish. He is all back and belly, like Punch, but capable of acting on occasions like the tortoise, patiently presenting

his shell to a storm of blows; thus this great | cealing himself at Verriere, a hamlet of the monster of a Gabriel goes begging everywhere, Swiss mountains, in the vicinity of Pontarlier. that he may bestow charity on beggars, following On the news of this flight the families of Do in this respect the example of his mother, in Ruffey and Monnier, kept Sophie in strict dospite of everything I can say to them that there mestic captivity at Pontarlier, but despair and is nothing more contrary to my principles. The love enabled her to find accomplices amongst other day, at one of those fêtes which we some- her servants to aid her in corresponding with times give, and where prizes are bestowed on the Mirabeau. She conjured him to permit her to best runners, he gained a prize of a hat; and sacrifice everything to their re-union. During turning towards another child who had no cap, the night she scaled the walls of M. de Monnier's he put his own cap, which was a good one, on garden; and, in the dress of a man, guarded onthe head of the young peasant, exclaiming: ly by a single guide, she clambered over the Take you that I have n't got two heads!' mountains which separate Pontarlier from SwitAt the moment he appeared to me like the em-zerland, crossed the frontiers, and joined Miraperor of the world. Something of a divine char- beau at Verriere; there they concealed for awhile acter shone rapidly in his countenance. I thought their name and their fault from the researches of it, I wept over it, and the lesson did me good." But a few days after, as if repenting his emotion, this father wrote to his brother: "It has only just sprung forth, and the overflowing is already complete: it is a contrary, fantastic, impetuous, troublesome spirit, with a leaning to evil before it knows what evil is, or is capable of effecting any: a lofty heart under the jacket of a child; a strange but noble pride; the embryo of a Hector in a flurry, that wishes to swallow up all the world, before he is twelve years old!"

of their two families. They deluded themselves with solitude and with dreams: but neither the one nor the other bad brought with them the necessary means of existence. Switzerland of fered neither safety nor literary labor for Mirabeau, and indigence drove them to Holland. Mirabeau, as yet unknown to fame, or only known by the scandal of his youth, nobly sought work from the rich booksellers of Holland, to whom the freedom of thinking gave, at this period, a monopoly of political and philosophical publications. Rebuffed in the first instance, he persevered till he procured the publication of his "Essay on Despotism." He labored day and night upon all subjects to preserve Sophie from want; libels with which the venal presses of Holland he even prostituted his pen to those licentious

Of Mirabeau's love affairs, his debts, his wanderings in many lands, we have here the story, wrought out in the highest style, of our poetical historian. His affair with Madame de Monnier is told with some new particulars; and for those who wish to gain a thorough in-bread at the price of his modesty, and contrived at that time infected Europe. He earned his sight into the mental constitution of this extra-by dint of his lucubrations and the servility of a ordinary being, we know of scarcely any bet- hired writer, to live in laborious mediocrity at ter study than his conduct to Sophie de Mon- Amsterdam, under the name of Sainte-Matnier from first to last.

thieu.

When the lovers were caught, carried back to Paris, and thrown into separate prisons, they continued to correspond:

Mirabeau absconded; but instead of flying to Switzerland, he concealed himself in the town of Pontarlier, where the charms of Madame de Monnier still retained him. Information of his residence at Pontarlier, and of his interviews with He was at length informed of the birth of his Sophie spread again through the province. The daughter in the prison of Madame de Monnier, family of De Ruffey, to remove Madame de but he was refused a sight of the child. "I could Monnier from the place, summoned her to Dijon, destroy everything," he wrote through a mysteMirabeau followed her thither in secret. Their rious channel to its mother; I revolt against the intercourse being suspected, they were watched whole universe. I could wish this moment to and discovered. Mirabeau was arrested by the make you a holocaust of everything that is neithking's order, and shut up in the castle of Dijon, er you nor me; but, very different from Jephtha, while Sophie returned to her husband at Pontar- I should make an exception of my daughter." lier. The irresistible seduction of Mirabeau was This fruit of despair did not survive. The first exercised at Dijon as at Joux, and at the Châ-rigors of Mirabeau's prison were at length softteau d'If, on those who guarded him. M. de ened, not by paternal indulgence, but by the inMontherot, commandant of the Castle of Dijon, terest which his letters, full of the despairing elocould not prevent his military and compassion-quence of the suppliant, excited in M. Lenoir, ate heart from loving, pitying, and serving the the manager of the prison, and in M. Bouchier, young man. He forwarded without scruple the the intermedium between the prisoner and the correspondence of Mirabeau with Madame de Government. He was allowed books, paper, Monnier, his family, and the ministers; he wrote study, and even correspondence with Sophie, unhimself to M. de Malesherbes, and to the Minis-known to the two families. Their letters, which ter-of-War, for the pardon of his prisoner, and multiplied with the hours as they flew, and were to solicit his liberation. He even allowed him as indefatigable as hope, asburning as memory, to go at liberty, on his parole, to Dijon. Mira- as heart-rending as the cry of the victim on the beau availed himself of this door, which M. de scaffold, nourished with delirium during two Montherot intentionally opened for him, to fly years of solitude the famished soul of the prisoninto Switzerland. He drew nigh to Sophie, con-er. This correspondence is the longest cry of