BOOKS.
THE PRISON LIFE OF MARIE ANTOINETTE.* Ow October 16th in the present year, exactly a hundred years will have elapsed since the execution of Marie Antoinette. Nothing therefore could be more opportune than the re- publication of this brilliant and touching little sketch of one of the most impressive, and in some sense ominous, events of the century which has elapsed since it occurred. The sketch has been greatly improved in several respects since it first appeared something like twenty years ago. It has gained in its tone of sympathy with the masses, while it has not lost in its tone of sympathy with the classes, and nothing could be more opportune at the present day than such a reminder as this volume furnishes of the meaning of a true collision between the masses and the classes,—the former ignorantly raging against misused power, and avenging themselves furiously on those who were least guilty for its misuse ; the latter helplessly suffering for the sins of predecessors, and yet wholly failing, even in the depth and dignity of their sufferings and their violent deaths, "to turn the hearts of the disobedient to the wisdom of the just." We may well hope that no tragedy of equal, or anything like equal, terror and anguish, is in store for men of this generation. Only once in this century,—in the rising of the Commune after the evacuation of Paris by the German armies,—have we had anything that even threatened a return of the great social agony of 1793, though between 1848 and 1852 the old thunder- storm seemed more than once to be rolling back again in an at- tenuated form. Carlyle has told the great story of the social tornado in language that can never be forgotten. But Carlyle's sympathy with the chief victims of the French people's fury was but limited. He took a sort of grim delight in exhibiting the interior of the volcano in all its terrible destructiveness, and rather regarded its victims as valuable for the purpose of gauging, more or less adequately, the force of the upheaval, the frenzy of the elements, than as human beings who were the innocent objects of a wrath stirred up by the accumulated vices, follies, and blunders of a class- selfishness which they were feebly endeavouring to reform. With that class-selfishness we need hardly say that Mrs. Bishop has no sort of sympathy ; but, on the other hand, she has a great and eager sympathy with those unfortunate beings who were the first to expiate its sins, and her carefully studied and sifted narrative of those sufferings makes one of the most popular and vivid little pictures of the obverse of Oarlyle's medal, that we have ever come across. We have been recently and justly told how fatally astray are the ethics which model themselves on "cosmic forces," and try to imitate the pitiless- nese of Nature's method of crushing what is unfit to survive. Assuredly never were ethics of that type better (though un- consciously) illustrated than in the agonies of the Reign of Terror. And this fascinating little volume makes us feel in the most effective way, though without any attempt to harrow needlessly the feelings of the reader, what heights and depths of inhumanity as well as injustice, popular wrath can attain. If this little book were ever to become, as it well might, a book popular among the English democracy, we should have in that popularity a better guarantee against the blind destructive passion of angry mobs, than any number of direct political exhortations to sobriety and temperance could provide. The lesson was partly lost upon France, because the successors of Louis XVI. had never learned it for themselves, and were men in whom the great tragedy of 1793 and the following years had produced little of that pity and that fear by which all tragedy ought to purify the fountains of human action. But the lesson which was lost on France,— at least, for a time,—may yet prove to be fruitful in the more teachable and earnest ranks of English democracy. What Bourbon Kings could not learn by the example of the errors, passions, and expiations of their own order, English artisans and labourers may learn by the example of the errors, sins, and cruelty of those who excited so deeply the wonder and awe of Europe when they exhibited the misery and passions and convulsion fits of a great people plunging and writhing first in the delirium of a great fever, and then in the bloodthirstiness of a great crime. Mrs. Bishop gives us an
• The Prison Life of Marie Antoinette and her Children, the Dauphin and the Duchess() D'Angouldmo, By AL 0. Bishop. London : Kogan Paul, Trench, and 00.
admirable foretaste of her subject in the picture of Louisa XVI.'s great incompetence to rule and great competence to suffer :-
ft For it is not as he was monarch, but as he was husband and father, not as the dull artisan of Versailles, crowned by mistake, but as he was strong and brave when there were no more problems of government to be solved, that we must respect the King. Louis Capet, as the servant of God, the pious and devoted head of his little household, is the living protest against those theories of the Contrat Social ' with which he had, while King, the folly to tamper. The egotism and sensuality of the upper classes were- well rebuked by the expiations of the Temple. Good men who denied original sin, and believed that, once free of the ancient ways,' man must be happy and virtuous, might well be cured of their fatal optimism at the sight of Madame Elisabeth's murder,. and of the destruction of the child-prince, by malice of which no similar instance is known to history. The royal family, united in adversity, noble, strong with the unconquerable strength of right principle, remains a witness to the social value of the Law by which they lived. Not when he convoked the States General and flattered the people was Louis kingly. He was awkward,. dull, and vulgar in the purple, but in prison he reasserted the power of royalty as a social institution. There, birth and tradi- tional dignity bore in gentle fashion the test of daily insult, while piety and a certain spiritual perception that the Docalogue was a law superior to all other laws, lifted the inferior and somewhat animal Prince to a royal place in the sight of men. Providential equality' was rebuked, for surely in this family of discrowned Capets were providential superiorities, h nobility which none may question, a leadership in courage, faith, and love, which the be- liever in equality may explain away if he can, but which remain more eloquent than his theories. The inefficiencies of Louis, the early frivolities of Marie Antoinette, bring in stronger relief the lessons it was theirs to teach in later life. Neither of them, how- ever, as becomes every day more clear, had committed any wrong that could lessen our perception of the vicariously sacrificial elements in their sufferings. Another King might have con- trolled or led the storm which rose round the old monarchy. Louis might have more firmly checked the treacherous insolence of the courtiers led by his own kinsmen, experiments in reform might have been more prudently attempted by a loss conscientious. man. When he began to reign he was without grace or dignity,. timidly brusque, dull in manners, yet easily angered, fond of rough games and schoolboy jokes, of hunting and eating, yet not without the rudiments of those qualities by which he was afterwards ennobled. A good idea of Louis may be found in a letter from the Emperor Joseph IL to his brother Leopold. The situation of my sister with the King is singular,' he writes. • The man is a little weak, but not stupid. He has ideas, he has judgment, but an apathy of body as of mind. He converses reasonably, he has no curiosity or wish to instruct himself, in short, the fiat lux has. not yet been pronounced, the matter is yet inform.' Hardest of his shortcomings to forgive is the indifference with which Louis left his wife, during the first years of her residence at Versailles,, to be the prey of calumny and intrigue, often indeed exposing her to misconstruction, and half countenancing the party headed by his aunts, and composed of all who disliked M. de Choiseul. It was the Court that first gave her that name of l'A.utrichienne which hunted her to the scaffold."
Our author narrates the early days of the Revolution,. especially the insurrection of the women and the immediate consequences, with great spirit, so far as it bears on the per- sonal history of the Royal family. She knows her Carlyle, but she knows also much which Carlyle, when he wrote his great work, did not and could not know ; and she shows how much share what M. Taine calls "the Macbiavels of the market-place," had in bringing about the first acts of the.
Revolution. Then the story of the imprisonment of the- Royal family, of the execution of the King, of the separation of the Dauphin from his mother, to whom he was passionately attached, and of the plot to get the attestation of the young Prince to the false and foul accusations against the Queen,— a plot which only succeeded after a long course of compulsory intoxication, which darkened the child's conscience and dulled his intellect,—is told with great vividness ; and the execution of the Queen herself is narrated in all its pathos and dignity.. Of the worst cruelty of all, the abandonment of the Dauphin- for many months to filth and starvation, the piteous story is told without too much insistence on its horrors; but after-
the treatment of the poor little captive had been somewhat ameliorated, and kinder guardians had been placed over him,.
the one ray of light which lifts the torture to the level 'of tragedy is thus admitted ; (the Prince had never heard of his.
mother's death) :—
" The Jeunesse Dorde had begun to revive social forms in Paris,. and sanseultotism was forced to retreat before Notre Dame de. Thermic/or, as Madame Tallien was called, and her revival of luxury. Perhaps it was in sympathy with the new light, lurid and unheavenly as it was that the little Capet's guardians changed their manners to him. Laurent insisted that the visitors of the Commune should cease to call him wolf and viper,. and should address the prisoner as M. Charles, or Charles. But Laurent could do little in the face of the Convention, which re- =Rifled unchanged in its hatred of the Bourbon race. He was not allowed, except at meal-times, to see his charge, and then only in presence of the municipal commissioners. The solitude of the prisoner was so little alleviated, that his persistent indif- ference and silence are not so strange as they would have been had he been encouraged. No doubt his coarse and scanty diet, which had not been improved, increased the languor and depres- sion which nothing could move. One day Laurent obtained per- mission to take his ward to the roof of the tower. He waited to see what reviving influence the open sky and the distant sound of the city might have, but the child followed his keeper in silence. As he came down, he stopped before the entrance of the third story, whore his mother's apartments had been ; he grasped Laurent's arm, and his eager eyes fixed themselves on the door, but he said nothing. That evening he hardly touched his food. On another occasion, as he was on the platform,' a regiment passed with drums and music. Ile seemed to have forgotten the sounds, for he nervously seized his guardian's hand, but as the music continued to play his face brightened. Generally he looked upwards or straight before him as he walked, but one day he appeared to look for something between the flags and stones of the parapet of the roof. Some little flowers had thrust their weak stems among them. Long and patiently he collected them and made them into a little bunch, and when the time came for leaving the place, he took them carefully. When he and Laurent had got down to the door of the third story the boy held Laurent back with all his strength. You mistake the door, Charles,' said his guardian. But he had not mistaken ; he had dropped his gleanings at the threshold of what had been the Queen's apart- ment. He thought her still there to receive his offering, as in the old days at Versailles, when each day he brought her a nosegay gathered by himself."
We cannot refrain from adding the account of the last scene, which, like the one we have just quoted, is also of the purifying nature of true tragedy. The long torture of the child's loneliness ended peacefully at last :— "Even on that last night his guardians were obliged to leave him alone. Next morning, the 8th of June, Lame went up first to his room, for Gomin dreaded to find him dead. At eight o'clock, when Pelletan arrived, the child was up ; but the physician saw that the end was near, and did not stay many minutes. Feeling heavy and weak, the Prince asked to lie down as soon as the doctor was gone. He was in bed at eleven, when Dumangin came ; and with Pelletan's concurrence a bulletin was signed, which announced the fatal symptoms of the Prince's illness. He did not apparently suffer. Seeing him quiet, Gomin said to him, I hope you are not in pain just now.'—' Oh, yes, I still suffer, but much less ; the music is so beautiful.' Needless to say that there was no music perceptible to other ears in the Temple on that day ! 'Where do you hear it ?' asked. Gomin. Up there ; listen.' The child raised his hands, his eyes opened wide, he listened eagerly, and then in sudden joy he cried out, Through all the voices I heard my mother's.' A second after, all the light died away in his face, and his eyes wandered vacantly towards the window. Gomin asked him what he was looking at. But the dying boy seemed not to have heard, and took no notice of the guardian's questions. After a time Lame came upstairs to replace Gomin. The Prince looked at him long and dreamily, then on some slight movement of his, Lasne asked him if he wanted anything. Do you think my sister heard the music?' asked the child. It would have done her good.' Soon after he turned his eyes eagerly towards the window, a happy exclamation broke from his lips, then looking at Lasne, he said : I have a thing to toll you.' The guardian took his hand, the prisoner's head sunk on Lasne's breast, who listened in vain for another sound. There was no struggle, but when the guardian felt the child's heart, it had ceased to beat. It was a quarter past two o'clock in the afternoon."
We cannot imagine any story better calculated to inspire pity and horror of the ferocities to which democratic passion may lead, than thie terse, truthful, and brilliant sketch. If the frightful vices and luxurious selfishness of Louis XIV.'s and Louis XV.'s reigns ought to be studied by all aristocraoies, the frightful ferocities of the Reign of Terror ought equally to be studied by all democracies. No doubt, in a sense, the latter were the offspring of the former, but not in the same sense in which the oak is the offspring of the acorn. A democracy may be,—and, we trust, as it grows in self-know- ledge and self-governing power, often will be,—as mag- nanimous as it is irresistible, as quick to discern and resist its own temptations as to denounce and punish the offences of its oppressors. Certainly no story could be better adapted to warn it against the fury fits to which it is liable, than the pitiful narrative of this scholarly, popular, and brilliant little book.
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