XXIX. THE BOX OF THE LOGOGRAPH.

The royal family has just entered the session chamber. It will find there not an asylum, but the vestibule of the prison and the scaffold. The man who had taken the Dauphin from the Queen's arms at the door of the Assembly set him down on the secretary's desk with an air of triumph, and the young Prince was greeted with applause. Marie Antoinette advanced with dignity. According to Vaublanc's expression, she would not have had a different bearing or a more august serenity on a day of royal pomp. Louis XVI. took a place near the president. The Queen, her daughter, Madame Elisabeth, and Madame de Tourzel sat down on the ministerial benches. As soon as the Dauphin was left to himself, he sprang towards his mother. A voice cried: "Take him to the King! The Austrian woman is unworthy of the people's confidence." An usher attempted to obey this injunction. However, the child began to cry, people were affected, and he was allowed to remain with the Queen. At this moment some armed noblemen made their appearance at the extremity of the hall. "You compromise the King's safety!" exclaimed some one, and the nobles retired.

Order was restored. Louis XVI. began to speak. "I came here," said he, "to prevent a great crime, and I think that I could be nowhere more secure than amidst the representatives of the nation." Alas! the crime will not be prevented, but only adjourned. Vergniaud occupied the president's chair. "Sire," he replied, "you may count on the firmness of the National Assembly. It knows its duties; its members have sworn to die in defending the rights of the people and the constituted authorities."

So they still called Louis XVI. Sire; presently they will call him nothing but Louis Capet. They allow him to take an armchair near the president; but in a few minutes they will find this place too good for him. And it is the voice of this very Vergniaud who, a few hours from now, will pronounce his deposition, and five months later his sentence of death.

Hardly had the unhappy King sat down when Chabot, the unfrocked Capuchin, claimed that a clause of the Constitution forbade the Assembly to deliberate in presence of the sovereign. Under this pretext his place was changed, and Louis XVI. with all his family was shut up in the reporters' gallery, sometimes called the box of the Logograph. This miserable hole, about six feet high by twelve wide, was on a level with the last ranks of the Assembly, behind the president's chair and the seats of the secretaries. It was ordinarily set apart for the editors, or rather for the stenographers of a great newspaper which reported the proceedings, and which was called the Journal logographique, or the Logotachygraphe, usually abbreviated into the Logographe. Louis XVI. seated himself in the front of the box, Marie Antoinette half-concealed herself in a corner, where she sought a little shelter against so many humiliations. Her children and their governess took places on a bench with Madame Elisabeth and the Princess de Lamballe. Several noblemen, the latest courtiers of misfortune, stood up behind them.

Roederer, who was at the bar, then made a report in the name of the municipal department, in which he explained all that had taken place. He declared that he had said to the soldiers and National Guard detailed for the defence of the Tuileries: "We do not ask you to shed the blood of your brethren nor to attack your fellow-citizens; your cannons are there for your defence, not for an attack; but I require this defence in the name of the law, in the name of the Constitution. The law authorizes you, when violence is used against you, to repress it vigorously.... Once more, you are not to be assailants, but to act on the defensive only."

Roederer added that the cannoneers, instead of complying with his urgent exhortations, gave no response save that of unloading their pieces before him. After having explained how greatly the defence was disorganized, he thus ended his report: "We felt ourselves no longer in a position to protect the charge confided to us; this charge was the King; the King is a man; this man is a father. The children ask us to assure the existence of the father; the law asks us to assure the existence of the King of France; humanity asks of us the existence of the man. No longer able to defend this charge, no other idea presented itself than that of entreating the King to come with his family to the National Assembly.... We have nothing to add to what I have just said, except that, our force being paralyzed, and no longer in existence, we can have none but that which it shall please the National Assembly to communicate. We are ready to die in the execution of the orders it may give us. We ask, while awaiting them, to remain near it, being useless everywhere else." The Assembly, not then suspecting that it would so soon depose Louis XVI., applauded without contradiction from the galleries. The president said to Roederer: "The Assembly has listened to your account with the greatest interest; it invites you to be present at the session."

The advice given by Roederer to the King has been greatly blamed. The event has seriously influenced the judgment since passed upon it. If Louis XVI. had received the support he had a right to count on from the representatives, things would have appeared in quite another light. Count de Vaublanc, in his Memoirs, has rendered full justice to the loyal intentions of the municipal attorney. "The advice he gave has been accounted a crime," says M. de Vaublanc; "I think it is an unjust reproach. Until then he had done all that lay in his power to contribute to the defence of the palace. He must have seen clearly that as the King would not defend himself, he could no longer be defended. If the rebels had been attacked, neither M. Roederer nor any one else would have proposed going to the Assembly; but since they were on the defensive, and without any recognized leader, the magistrate might doubtless have been struck with a single thought: The King and his family are about to be massacred. The King put an end to all irresolution in saying these words: 'There is nothing more to do here.'"

At first, Louis XVI. seemed not to repent of the step he had been obliged to take. Even in that wretched hole, the Logograph box, his face at first was calm and even confident. As the shouting had increased outside, Vergniaud ordered the removal of the iron grating separating this box from the hall, so that in case the populace made an irruption into the lobbies, the King could take refuge in the midst of the deputies. In default of workmen and tools, the deputies nearest at hand, the Duke de Choiseul, Prince de Poix, and the ministers, undertook to tear away the grating, and Louis XVI. himself, accustomed to the rough work of a locksmith, joined his efforts to theirs. The fastenings having been broken in this manner, the unfortunate sovereign seemed not to doubt the sentiments of the National Assembly. He pointed out the most remarkable deputies to the Dauphin, chatted with several among them, and looked on at the session like a mere spectator in a box at the theatre.

The royal family had been nearly two hours at the Assembly when all of a sudden a frightful discharge of musketry and artillery was heard. The deputies of the left grew pale with fear and anger, thinking themselves betrayed. Casting glances of uneasiness and wrath at the feeble monarch, they accused him of having ordered a massacre, and said that all was lost. An officer of the National Guard rushed in, crying: "We are pursued, we are overpowered!" The galleries, affrighted, imagined that the Swiss would arrive at any moment. Excitement was at its height. Sinister, imposing, dreadful moment! Solemn hour, when the monarchy, amidst a frightful tempest, was like a venerable oak which lightning has just stricken; when terror, wrath, and pity disputed the possession of men's souls, and when the King, already captive, was present like Charles V. at his own funeral. Marie Antoinette had started. At the sound of the cannon her cheeks kindled and her eyes blazed. A vague hope animated her. Perhaps, she said within herself, the monarchy is at last to be avenged; perhaps the Swiss are about to give the insurrection a lesson it will remember; perhaps Louis XVI. will re-enter in triumph the palace of his forefathers. The daughter of Cæsars prayed God in silence, and supplicated Him to grant victory to the defenders of the throne.

Chimeras! vain hopes! Louis XVI. has no longer but one idea: to cast off all responsibility for events. He mustered up, so to say, the little authority he had yet remaining, to write hastily, in pencil, the last order he was to sign: the order to stop firing. He flattered himself that the prohibition to shoot would justify him completely in the sight of the National Assembly, and induce them to treat him with more consideration. But he asked himself anxiously who would be bold enough to carry his order as far as the palace. Would not so perilous a mission intimidate even the most heroic? M. d'Hervilly, who was at this moment in the box of the Logograph, offered himself. As the King and Queen at first refused his offer, and pointed out all the dangers of such an errand: "I beg Their Majesties," cried he, "not to think of my danger; my duty is to brave everything in their service; my place is in the midst of the firing, and if I were afraid of it I should be unworthy of my uniform." These words determined Louis XVI. to give M. d'Hervilly the order signed by his own hand; the valiant nobleman, bearing this order which was to have such disastrous consequences for the defenders of the palace, went hastily out of the Assembly hall and made his way to the Tuileries through a rain of balls and canister.