The Countess of Charny; or, The Execution of King Louis XVI

"Do not fire," said Charny; "or not one of us will reach the House alive."

"That is so," observed the captain; "carry arms."

The soldiers shouldered their guns and all continued crossing diagonally. The first heats of the year had yellowed the chestnut-trees, and dry leaves were strewing the earth. The little prince found some sport in heaping them up with his foot and kicking them on his sister's.

"The leaves are falling early this year," observed the king.

"Did not one of those men write that royalty will not outlast the fall of the leaf?" questioned the queen.

"Yes, my lady," replied Charny.

"What was the name of this cunning prophet?"

"Manuel."

A new obstacle rose in the path of the royal family: a numerous crowd of men and women, who were waiting with menacing gestures and brandished weapons on the steps and the terrace which had to be gone over to reach the riding-school.

The danger was the worse from the Swiss being unable to keep in rank. The captain tried in vain to get through, and he showed so much rage that Roederer cried:

"Be careful, sir – you will lead to the king being killed."

They had to halt, but a messenger was sent to the Assembly to plead that the king wanted asylum.

The House sent a deputation, at the sight of whom the mob's fury was redoubled.

Nothing was to be heard but these shouts yelled with wrath:

"Down with Veto!" – "Over with the Austrian!" – "Dethronement or death!"

Understanding that it was in particular their mother who was threatened, the two children huddled up to her. The little dauphin asked:

"Lord Charny, why do these naughty people want to hurt my mamma?"

A gigantic man, armed with a pike, and roaring louder than the rest, "Down with Veto – death to the Austrian!" kept trying to stab the king and the queen.

The Swiss escort had gradually been forced away, so that the royal family had by them only the six noblemen who had left the palace with them, Charny, and the Assembly deputation.

There were still some thirty paces to go in the thick crowd.

It was evident that the lives of the pair were aimed at, and chiefly the queen's.

The struggle began at the staircase foot.

"If you do not sheathe your sword," said Roederer, "I will answer for nothing."

Without uttering a word, Charny put up his sword.

The party was lifted by the press as a skiff is tossed in a gale by the waves, and drawn toward the Assembly. The king was obliged to push away a ruffian who stuck his fist in his face. The little dauphin, almost smothered, screamed and held out his hands for help.

A man dashed forward and snatched him out of his mother's arms.

"My Lord Charny, my son!" she shrieked; "in Heaven's name, save my boy!"

Charny took a couple of steps in chase of the fellow with the prince, but as soon as he unmasked the queen, two or three hands dragged her toward them, and one clutched the neckerchief on her bosom. She sent up a scream.

Charny forgot Roederer's advice, and his sword disappeared its full length in the body of the wretch who had dared to lay hands on the queen.

The gang howled with rage on seeing one of their number slain, and rushed all the more fiercely on the group.

Highest of all the women yelled: "Why don't you kill the Austrian?" – "Give her to us to have her throat slit!" – "Death to her – death!"

Twenty naked arms were stretched out to seize her. Maddened by grief, thinking nothing of her own danger, she never ceased to cry:

"My son – save my son!"

They touched the portals of the Assembly, but the mob doubled their efforts for fear their prey would escape.

Charny was so closely pressed that he could only ply the handle of his sword. Among the clinched and menacing fists, he saw one holding a pistol and trying to get a shot at the queen. He dropped his sword, grasped the pistol by both hands, wrenched it from the holder, and discharged it into the body of the nearest assailant. The man fell as though blasted by lightning.

Charny stooped in the gap to regain his rapier.

At this moment, the queen entered the Assembly vestibule in the retinue of the king.

Charny's sword was already in a hand that had struck at her.

He flew at the murderer, but at this the doors were slammed, and on the step he dropped, at the same time felled by an iron bar on his head and a spear right through his heart.

"As fell my brothers," he muttered. "My poor Andrea!"

The fate of the Charnys was accomplished with the last one, as in the case of Valence and Isidore. That of the queen, for whom their lives were laid down, was yet to be fulfilled.

At this time, a dreadful discharge of great guns announced that the besiegers and the garrison were hard at work.

CHAPTER XV.

THE BLOOD-STAINS

For a space, the Swiss might believe that they had dealt with an army and wiped it off the earth. They had slain nearly four hundred men in the royal yard, and almost two hundred in the Carrousel; seven guns were the spoils.

As far as they could see, no foes were in sight.

One small isolated battery, planted on the terrace of a house facing the Swiss guard-house, continued its fire without their being able to silence it. As they believed they had suppressed the insurrection, they were taking measures to finish with this battery at any cost, when they heard on the water-side the rolling of drums and the much more awful rolling of artillery over the stones.

This was the army which the king was watching through his spy-glass from the Louvre gallery.

At the same time the rumor spread that the king had quitted the palace and had taken refuge in the House of Representatives.

It is hard to tell the effect produced by this news, even on the most firm adherents.

The monarch, who had promised to die at his royal post, deserting it and passing over to the enemy, or at least surrendering without striking a blow!

Thereupon the National Guards regarded themselves as released from their oath, and almost all withdrew.

Several noblemen followed them, thinking it foolish to die for a cause which acknowledged itself lost.

Alone the Swiss remained, somber and silent, the slaves of discipline.

From the top of the Flora terrace and the Louvre gallery windows, could be seen coming those heroic working-men whom no army had ever resisted, and who had in one day brought low the Bastile, though it had been taking root during four centuries.

These assailants had their plan; believing the king in his castle, they sought to encompass him so as to take him in it.

The column on the left bank had orders to get in by the river gates; that coming down St. Honore Street to break in the Feuillants' gates, while the column on the right bank were to attack in front, led by Westerman, with Santerre and Billet under his orders.

The last suddenly poured in by all the small entrances on the Carrousel, singing the "It shall go on."

The Marseilles men were in the lead, dragging in their midst two four-pounders loaded with grape-shot.

About two hundred Swiss were ranged in order of battle on Carrousel Square.

Straight to them marched the insurgents, and as the Swiss leveled their muskets, they opened their ranks and fired the pieces.

The soldiers discharged their guns, but they immediately fell back to the palace, leaving some thirty dead and wounded on the pavement.

Thereupon, the rebels, headed by the Breton and Marseilles Federals, rushed on the Tuileries, capturing the two yards – the royal, in the center, where there were so many dead, and the princes', near the river and the Flora restaurant.

Billet had wished to fight where Pitou fell, with a hope that he might be only wounded, so that he might do him the good turn he owed for picking him up on the parade-ground.

So he was one of the first to enter the center court. Such was the reek of blood that one might believe one was in the shambles; it rose from the heap of corpses, visible as a smoke in some places.

This sight and stench exasperated the attackers, who hurled themselves on the palace.

Besides, they could not have hung back had they wished, for they were shoved ahead by the masses incessantly spouted forth by the narrow doors of the Carrousel.

But we hasten to say that, though the front of the pile resembled a frame of fire-works in a display, none had the idea of flight.

Nevertheless, once inside the central yard, the insurgents, like those in whose gore they slipped, were caught between two fires: that from the clock entrance and from the double row of barracks.

The first thing to do was stop the latter.

The Marseillais threw themselves at the buildings like mad dogs on a brasier, but they could not demolish a wall with hands; they called for picks and crows.

Billet asked for torpedoes. Westerman knew that his lieutenant had the right idea, and he had petards made. At the risk of having these cannon-cartridges fired in their hands, the Marseilles men carried them with the matches lighted and flung them into the apertures. The woodwork was soon set aflame by these grenades, and the defenders were obliged to take refuge under the stairs.

Here the fighting went on with steel to steel and shot for shot.

Suddenly Billet felt hands from behind seize him, and he wheeled round, thinking he had an enemy to grapple: but he uttered a cry of delight. It was Pitou; but he was pretty hard to identify, for he was smothered in blood from head to foot; but he was safe and sound and without a single wound.

When he saw the Swiss muskets leveled, he had called out for all to drop flat, and he had set the example.

But his followers had not time to act like him. Like a monstrous scythe, the fusillade had swept along at breast-high, and laid two thirds of the human field, another volley bending and breaking the remainder.

Pitou was literally buried beneath the swathe, and bathed by the warm and nauseating stream. Despite the profoundly disagreeable feeling, Pitou resolved not to make any move, while bathed in the blood of the bodies stifling him, and to wait for a favorable time to show tokens of life.

He had to wait for over an hour, and every minute seemed an hour. But he judged he had the right cue when he heard his side's shouts of victory, and Billet's voice, among the many, calling him.

Thereupon, like the Titan under the mountain, he shook off the mound of carcasses covering him, and ran to press Billet to his heart, on recognizing him, without thinking that he might soil his clothes, whichever way he took him.

A Swiss volley, which sent a dozen men to the ground, recalled them to the gravity of the situation.

Two thousand yards of buildings were burning on the sides of the central court. It was sultry weather, without the least breath; like a dome of lead the smoke of the fire and powder pressed on the combatants; the smoke filled up the palace entrances. Each window flamed, but the front was sheeted in smoke; no one could tell who delivered death or who received it.

Pitou and Billet, with the Marseillais at the fore, pushed through the vapor into the vestibule. Here they met a wall of bayonets – the Swiss.

The Swiss commenced their retreat, a heroic one, leaving a rank of dead on each step, and the battalion most slowly retiring.

Forty-eight dead were counted that evening on those stairs.

Suddenly the cry rang through the rooms and corridors:

"Order of the king – the Swiss will cease firing."

It was two in the afternoon.

The following had happened in the House to lead to the order proclaimed in the Tuileries; one with the double advantage of lessening the assailants' exasperation and covering the vanquished with honor.

As the doors were closing behind the queen, but still while she could catch a glimpse of the bars, bayonets, and pikes menacing Charny, she had screamed and held her hands out toward the opening; but dragged away by her companions, at the same time by her maternal instinct, she had to enter the Assembly Hall.

There she had the great relief afforded her of seeing her son seated on the speaker's desk; the man who had carried him there waved his red cap triumphantly over the boy's head and shouted gladly:

"I have saved the son of my master – long live the dauphin!"

But a sudden revulsion of feeling made Marie Antoinette recur to Charny.

"Gentlemen," she said, "one of my bravest officers, most devoted of followers, has been left outside the door, in danger of death. I beg succor for him."

Five or six members sprung away at the appeal.

The king, the queen, and the rest of the royal family, with their attendants, proceeded to the seats intended for the cabinet officers, and took places there.

The Assembly received them standing, not from etiquette, but the respect misfortune compelled.

Before sitting down, the king held up his hand to intimate that he wished to speak.

"I came here to prevent a great crime," he said, in the silence; "I thought I could not be in safety anywhere else."

"Sire," returned Vergniaud, who presided, "you may rely on the firmness of the National Assembly; its members are sworn to die in defending the people's rights and the constitutional authorities."

As the king was taking his seat, a frightful musketry discharge resounded at the doors. It was the National Guards firing, intermingled with the insurgents, from the Feuillants' terrace, on the Swiss officers and soldiers forming the royal escort.

An officer of the National Guard, probably out of his senses, ran in in alarm, and only stopped by the bar, cried: "The Swiss – the Swiss are coming – they have forced past us!"

For an instant the House believed that the Swiss had overcome the outbreak and were coming to recover their master; for at the time Louis XVI. was much more the king to the Swiss than to any others.

With one spontaneous movement the House rose, all of a mind, and the representatives, spectators, officials, and guards, raising their hands, shouted, "Come what may, we vow to live and die free men!"

In such an oath the royals could take no part, so they remained seated, as the shout passed like a whirlwind over their heads from three thousand mouths. The error did not last long, but it was sublime.

In another quarter of an hour the cry was: "The palace is overrun – the insurgents are coming here to take the king!"

Thereupon the same men who had sworn to die free in their hatred of royalty, rose with the same spontaneity to swear they would defend the king to the death. The Swiss captain, Durler, was summoned outside to lay down his arms.

"I serve the king and not the House," he said. "Where is the royal order?"

They brought him into the Assembly by force; he was black with powder and red with blood.

"Sire," he said, "they want me to lay down arms. Is it the king's order?"

"Yes," said Louis; "hand your weapons to the National Guard. I do not want such brave men to perish."

Durler lowered his head with a sigh, but he insisted on a written order. The king scribbled on a paper: "The king orders the Swiss to lay down their arms and return into barracks."

This was what voices were crying throughout the Tuileries, on the stairs, and in the rooms and halls. As this order restored some quiet to the House, the speaker rang his bell and called for the debating to be resumed.

A member rose and pointed out that an article of the Constitution forbade debates in the king's presence.

"Quite so," said the king; "but where are you going to put us?"

"Sire," said the speaker, "we can give you the room and box of the 'Logographe,' which is vacant owing to the sheet having ceased to appear."

The ushers hastened to show the party where to go, and they had to retrace some of the path they had used to enter.

"What is this on the floor?" asked the queen. "It looks like blood!"

The servants said nothing; for while the spots might be blood, they were ignorant where they came from.

Strange to say, the stains grew larger and nearer together as they approached the box. To spare her the sight, the king quickened the pace, and opening the box door himself, he bid her enter.

The queen sprung forward; but even as she set foot on the sill, she uttered a scream of horror and drew back, with her hands covering her eyes. The presence of the blood-spots was explained, for a dead body had been placed in the room.

It was her almost stepping upon this which had caused her to leap back.

"Bless us," said the king, "it is poor Count Charny's body!" in the same tone as he had said to the gory relic on the pike, "This is poor Mandat's head."

Indeed, the deputies had snatched the body from the cutthroats, and ordered it to be taken into the empty room, without the least idea that the royal family would be consigned to this room in the next ten minutes. It was now carried out and the guests installed. They talked of cleaning up, but the queen shook her head in opposition, and was the first to take a place over the blood-stains. No one noticed that she burst her shoe-laces and dabbled her foot in the red, still warm blood.

"Oh, Charny, Charny!" she murmured; "why does not my life-blood ooze out here to the last drop to mingle with yours unto all eternity?"

Three P. M. struck.

The last of her Life Guards was no more, for in and about her palace nearly a thousand nobles and Swiss had fallen.

CHAPTER XVI.

THE WIDOW

During the slaying of the last of his adherents, what was the monarch doing? Being hungry, he called for his dinner.

Bread and wine, cold fowl, and meat, and fruit were brought him. He set to eating as if he were at a hunting-party, without noticing how he was stared at.

Among the eyes fixed on him was a pair burning because tears would not come. They were the queen's. It seemed to her that she could stay there forever, with her feet in her beloved's blood, living like a flower on the grave, with no nourishment but such as death affords.

She had suffered much lately, but never so as to see the king eating, for the position of affairs was serious enough to take away a man's appetite.

The Assembly, rather than protect him, had need of protection for itself. It was threatened by a formidable multitude roaring for the dethronement, and they obeyed by a decree. It proposed a National Convention, the head of the executive power being temporarily suspended from his functions. The Civil List was not to be paid. The king and family were to remain with the Assembly until order was restored; then they were to be placed in the Luxembourg Palace. Vergniaud told the deposed sovereign that it was the only way to save his neck.

This decree was proclaimed by torch-light that night.

The lights at the Tuileries fell on the ghastly scenes of the searchers and the mourners among the dead. Three thousand five hundred insurgents – to omit two hundred thieves shot by the rioters – had perished. This supposes as many wounded at the least. As the tumbrels rolled with the corpses to the working quarters, a chorus of curses went up against the king, the queen, their foreign camerilla, the nobles who had counseled them. Some swore revenge, and they had it in the coming massacres; others took up weapons and ran to the palace to vent their spite on the dead Swiss; others again crowded round the Assembly and the abbey where were prisoners, shouting "Vengeance."

The Tuileries presented an awful sight: smoking and bloody, deserted by all except the military posts which watched lest, under pretense of finding their dead, pillagers robbed the poor royal residence with its broken doors and smashed windows.

The post under the great clock, the main stairs, was commanded by a young captain of the National Guard, who was no doubt inspired by deep pity by the disaster, if one might judge by the expression of his countenance as each cart-load of dead was removed.

But the dreadful events did not seem to affect him a whit more than they had the deposed king. For, about eleven at night, he was busy in satisfying a monstrous appetite at the expense of a quartern loaf held under his left arm, while his knife-armed right hand unceasingly sliced off hunks of goodly size, which he inserted into a mouth opening to suit the dimensions of the piece.

Leaning against a vestibule pillar, he was watching the silent procession go by, like shades of mothers, wives and daughters, in the glare of torches set up here and there; they were asking of the extinct crater for the remains of their dear ones.

Suddenly the young officer started at the sight of one veiled phantom.

"It is the Countess of Charny," he muttered.

The shadow passed without seeing or hearing him.

The captain beckoned to his lieutenant.

"Desire," he said to him, on coming up, "yonder goes a poor lady of Doctor Gilbert's acquaintance, who is no doubt looking for her husband among the dead. I think of following her, in case she should need help and advice. I leave the command to you; keep good guard for both of us."

"Hang me if Doctor Gilbert's acquaintance has not a deucedly aristocratic bearing," remarked Lieutenant Desire Maniquet.

"Because she is an aristocrat – she is a countess," replied the officer.

"Go along; I will look out."

The Countess of Charny had already turned the first corner of the stairs, when the captain, detaching himself from his men, began to follow her at the respectful distance of fifteen paces. He was not mistaken. Poor Andrea was looking for her husband, not with the anxious thrill of doubt, but with the dull conviction of despair.

When Charny had been aroused in the midst of his joy and happiness by the echo of deeds in Paris, he had come, pale but resolute, to say to his wife:

"Dear Andrea, the King of France runs the risk of his life, and needs all his defenders. What ought I do?"

"Go where duty calls you, my dear George," she had replied, "and die for the king if you must."

"But how about you?" he asked.

"Do not be uneasy about me," she said. "As I live but in you, God may allow that we shall die together."

That settled all between those great hearts; they did not exchange a word further. When the post-horses came to the door, they set out, and were in town in five hours.

That same evening, we have seen Charny present himself for duty in his naval uniform at the same time that Dr. Gilbert was going to send for him.

Since that hour we know that he never quitted the queen.

Andrea had remained alone, shut in, praying; for a space she entertained the idea of imitating her husband, and claiming her station beside the queen, as he had beside the king; but she had not the courage.

The day of the ninth passed for her in anguish, but without anything positive. At nine in the morning next day she heard the cannon; it is needless to say that each echo of the war-like thunder thrilled her to the inmost fiber of her heart. The firing died out about two o'clock.

Were the people defeated, or the victors? she questioned, and was told that the people had won the day.

What had become of Charny in this terrible fray? She was sure that he had taken a leading part. On making inquiries again, she was told that the Swiss were slain, but most of the noblemen had got away.

But the night passed without his coming. In August, night comes late.

Not till ten o'clock did Andrea lose hope, when she drew a veil over her face and went out.

All along the road she met clusters of women wringing their hands and bands of men howling for revenge. She passed among them, protected by the grief of one and the rage of the other; besides, they were man-hunting that night, and not for women.

The women of both parties were weeping.

Arriving on the Carrousel, Andrea heard the proclamation that the rulers were deposed and safe under the wing of the Assembly, which was all she understood.

Seeing some carts go by, she asked what they carried, and was told the dead from the palace yards. Only the dead were being removed; the turn of the wounded would come later.

She thought that Charny would have fallen at the door of the rooms of the king or the queen, so she entered the palace. It was at the moment when Pitou, commanding the main entrance as the captain, saw, and, recognizing her, followed.