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María was playing the Indian airs that he loved best. Then he sang a danza of his own composing, dreamy and pensive, as a danza must be, but wedded to verses of his own which throbbed with love of the mother-soil and a latent wistfulness for liberty over all its length and breadth. The girl's murmured wonder came from a heart much moved, and Jesús María wept as he told her how he had once dreamed of working for the regeneration of Mexico, but how he had failed in the test of manhood, and was now a broken creature whose dreams lay all behind him. But Piedad refused gaily to listen to that, and they began to discuss plans; and presently he was all on fire with a new scheme of patriotic service.

Los enredados, those children of time, how could their slumber of resignation be pricked into wakefulness more surely than through their music? Why might not he, the rejected, pull the rags of his life about him and set out to fertilize the soil of freedom with his songs? More songs such as he had just sung her-songs of revolution so disguised as to deceive the authorities, and so decorated as to beguile the Inditos' implicit discernment of poesy and wit; songs that would pass from mouth to mouth, from pueblo to pueblo, from valley to valley, from the table-land to the hot country, from the sands to the volcanoes, from the crumbling temples of the Mayas to the windy plains of the northern frontier; songs that he himself would sing and play and teach to old and young, wandering far and wide with staff and fiddle, like a minstrel of old, daring the jealous forces of feudalism and foreign capital, and spiritually armed for any fate, slowly, sweetly, and surely firing the heart of a people for great enterprises!

The girl laughed and cried at that picture of roaming under the roof of heaven, and her voice thrilled with understanding. But, alas! Doña Rita's interpretation of what she had heard was that the intruder, her rival, was inciting Jesús María to

abandon his mother. She divined that if he ever did set out on that adventure, Piedad would inevitably accompany him. By and by her mind became fixed in the belief that the two were waiting and hoping for her to die. She no longer spoke to Piedad, and all her words to her son were steeped in acid. One of her studied habits was to refer to Piedad, as if inadvertently, as "La Palma," and then to correct herself hastily, with a thin, significant laugh. The two suffered much from the thought that her health was failing, as indeed it was, and Jesús María excelled himself in filial consideration, but to no purpose. She became minutely secretive in her ways, often whispered with the nana, and, telling herself that she feared poison, refrained ostentatiously from tasting anything offered her by Piedad or her

son.

It was

She blamed herself for having introduced the pollution of which she now despaired of ever ridding the house of Ixtlan, and she wished passionately that her son had died before her arrival at his bedside with that daughter of Judas. Tortured by the present, appalled at the future, her mind took refuge in the past. One day she was missed in the house. thought that she had gone to church and had remained long in prayer. Toward evening Jesús María, leaning on the arm of Piedad, he was very weak,-set out on an anxious search of the churches, the parks, the streets, and appealed at last to the police. As darkness came, the two returned home, only to find that there was no news. But now the nana, after long meditation and muttering, took a candle and went slowly down among the shadows in the patio, and fumbled at a great door; and soon she uttered a long, mournful cry, which froze their hearts and fetched them to her quickly.

Doña Rita was seated in the carriage, her hands folded in her lap, her head against the faded upholstery, her face serene in the inviolable aristocracy of death.

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UPO

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

PART ONE: THE ROYAL SÉANCE

BY H. BELLOC

Author of "Robespierre," "Marie Antoinette," etc.

PON the crest of the steep and thickly wooded hills that rise from the left bank of the Seine below Paris, you may find a village the old stones of which, and something spacious in its whole arrangement, are consonant with its name. It is called "Marly of the King."

There the great trees, the balustrade, and gates still standing recall the palace. to which the French monarchy retired when leisure or fatigue or mourning withdrew it from Versailles; for it was a place more domestic and far less burdened with

state.

To the gates of that great country house there came near ten o'clock, just after the hour when full darkness falls on a midsummer evening, a great coach, driving from Versailles. It was the coach of the Archbishop of Paris, coming urgently to see the king, and the day was Friday, the nineteenth of June, 1789. They were in the full crisis that opened the Revolution. The tall windows of the palace were fully lit as the coach came up the drive. The night air was cold, for those June days were rainy and full of hurrying cloud. The Archbishop of Paris and his colleague of Rouen, who was with him, were summoned by their titles

into the room where Louis XVI sat discussing what should be done for the throne.

Two days before, upon the Wednesday, the commons of the great Parliamentthe Commons House in that great Parliament which had met again after a hundred years, and which now felt behind it the nation-had taken the first revolutionary step and had usurped authority. The quarrel which had hampered all reform since this Parliament of the States General had met six weeks before; the refusal of the two privileged orders and particularly of the nobles to vote with the commons and to form with them one National Assembly; the claim of the privileged orders and particularly of the nobles to bar whatever the popular representatives might decide-all that had been destroyed in spirit by a new act of sovereignty.

Using the title that was on all men's lips and calling themselves the "National Assembly," the commons had declared that the whole assembly was an indivisible body, and alone the organ of the nation. They had used with conscious purpose the solemn words, "Desires and decrees," which hitherto throughout all these centuries had never appeared above any

seal or signature save that of a king. They had put body into this spiritual thing by the enormous decision that no tax should be paid in the kingdom that had not their approval.

This was the blow that had summoned the council round the king at Marly upon this Friday night. For now two anxious days doubtful issues and conflicting policies had pulled Louis this way and that, whether to yield, whether to compromise, or whether to strike back.

It was a fortnight since the sickly child who was heir to the throne had died, and this retirement of the royal family to Marly, consequent upon such mourning, was confused by the numbness of that shock also. The king perhaps more than the queen had suffered in his powers and judgment; for Marie Antoinette, the most vigorous and lucid of those gathered in council at Marly, the least national, and the least wide in judgment, was active at this moment for the full claims of the

crown.

With her at the king's side in the taking of this crucial decision stood other advisers. The king's two brothers, the elder and the younger, who, as Louis XVIII and Charles X, were to rule after the restoration, and who were now known under the titles of Provence and Artois, were in the palace together. Provence, the elder, very dull and heartless, was the more solid; Artois, the younger, empty, poor in judgment, was the least unattractive. They counted for their rank, and even Provence for little else.

Barentin was there, the keeper of the seals. He was a man of very clear decision, of straightforward speech and manner; a man with something sword-like about him. He thought and said that the king had only to move troops and settle matters at once.

There also, lit by the candles of that night, was the vacuous, puffed face of Necker, the millionaire. This man, famous through his wealth, which was ill acquired and enormous, an alien in religion as in blood, had become, by one of those ironies in which the gods delight, the idol of the national movement. He was pitifully inferior to such an opportunity, empty of courage, empty of decision, and almost empty of comprehen

sion. No idea informed him unless it was that of some vague financial liberalism (rather, say, moral anarchy) suitable to the crooked ways by which he himself had arrived. Those protruding eyes, that loose mouth, and that lethargic, self-satisfied expression were the idol that stood in the general mind for the giant things that were coming. Behind such brass was reddening the creative fire of the nation. Such a doorkeeper did Fate choose to open the gates for the armies of Marceau and Napoleon. All his advice was for something "constitutional." In days better suited for such men as he Necker would have been a politician, and a parliamentary politician at that.

To these, then, thus assembled entered the archbishops with their news. The news was this: that before sunset, just before they had left Versailles, the clergy had rallied to the commons. The bishops, indeed, all save four, had stood out for the privileged orders; but the doubt in which all minds had been since the revolutionary step of forty-eight hours before was resolved. The clergy had broken rank with the nobles; for that matter, many of the wealthier nobles were breaking rank, too. Decision was most urgent; the moment was critical in the extreme, lest in a few hours the National Assembly, already proclaimed, already half formed, should arise united and in full strength over against the crown.

In not two hours after the arrival of the prelates the decision, nearly reached before they came, was finally taken by the king. He would follow Necker, and Necker was for a long, windy, complicated compromise. Necker was for a constitution, large, liberal, preventing the action of the popular life, preventing the yes and no of creative moods, leaving to the crown as much as would preserve its power to dissolve the States General and to summon a new body less nationaland, above all, less violent. There is an English word for this temper, the word "Whig." But that word is associated in the English language with the triumph of wealth. wealth. Necker's muddy vision did not triumph.

That decision was taken upon this Friday night, the nineteenth of June, 1789 -taken, I think, a little before midnight. Artois was off to bed, and Provence, too.

The council was broken up. It was full midnight now when wheels were heard again upon the granite sets before the great doors, and the hot arrival of horses. The name announced was that of Talleyrand, the Bishop of Autun, and the king, perhaps angrily, refused to see him.

This man, with eyes like a ferret and an intelligence as keen as it was witty and narrow, a brad-awl of a mind, as invincible at intrigue as in vice, given up wholly to the search for personal advantage, had about him all that the plain piety of Louis XVI detested, and all that Louis XVI's slow mind most feared. The king had made him Bishop of Autun against his every judgment, and only at the call of Talleyrand's fellow-clergymen, who loved their comrade's witty sallies against religion and his reputation of the brain. It was a reputation that had led Rome to consider the making of him a cardinal, and only Louis himself had prevented it. For Louis profoundly believed. It was Louis who had said in those days just before the Revolution, "I will give no man the see of Paris who denies his God."

Such was Talleyrand, thirty-five years of age, destined to compass the ruin of the French church, to ordain to the schismatic body which attempted to replace it, to be picked out by Danton for his very vices as a good emissary to Pitt, to be one of the levers of Napoleon, to be the man that handed the crown to Louis XVIII at the restoration. Such was the man, full of policy and of evil, whom on that midnight Louis XVI refused to see.

The king refused to see him with the more determination that Talleyrand had asked for a secret audience. Talleyrand sent a servant to the king's younger brother, Artois, who knew him well, and Artois, who was in bed, asked him to come to the bedroom to speak to him, which he did; and there in that incongruous place, to the empty-headed man lying abed listening to him, Talleyrand, till well after midnight, set forth what should be done. He also came, he said, hot-foot from Versailles, a witness, and he had twenty times the grip of any of these others, he said, to seize what had happened.

He offered, as such men do, a bargain. He had prepared it, as such men will, for immediate acceptance; "all thought out,"

as people say to-day of commercial "propositions." Let him form a ministry. (He had actually brought in his carriage with him certain friends who would support him in it!) They would rapidly summon military force, dissolve the assembly at once, erect a new one that would be at the service of the crown. Artois dressed, and went to see the king. gave him short shrift, and bade him tell Talleyrand to go. Then Talleyrand, with that look in his eyes, I think, that was noted so often when, later, he found himself thwarted in any one of his million plots and forced to creep round by some new way, went out to serve the Revolution.

But his brother

At the same time there was sent through the night to Versailles the royal order, to be proclaimed by heralds, that no meeting. of the Parliament should take place until the Monday when, in the commons' hall, the king would declare his will to all the three houses, clergy, commons, and nobles assembled; and that will, of course, was to be the muddled compromise of Necker.

These things done, they slept at last in Marly, and the very early dawn of the Saturday broke in a sky still troubled, rainy, and gray.

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Bailly, the dignified spokesman of the commons in this awful crisis, was in his bed at Versailles, like everybody else except sentries, watchmen, and a few political intriguers, upon this very short summer night of dull, rainy weather. They knocked at his door and woke him to bring him a note. bring him a note. It was a very curt note from the master of the ceremonies at the court. It told him that the great hall in which the commons met was not to be used by the commons that day, that Saturday; for it was to be decorated for the royal session of all the estates, to be held there upon the Monday, when the king. would address the States General together and tell them his will.

It is not a weak spur to a man of such an age, especially if he is well to do, to have his dignity neglected and his sleep interrupted as well. Bailly had thought the commons worthy of more respect and of better notice. When, therefore, the members came, most of them under dripping umbrellas, to the door that should admit them to their great hall, Bailly was at their head as indignant as such a man could be. He found the door shut, a paper pinned upon it, whereon was written the royal order, and a sentry who told him and all his followers that no one could come in save the workmen; for it would take all that day to prepare the hall for the royal meeting upon Monday. They let Bailly in to fetch his papers, no

more.

The commons went off under their umbrellas in the rain, a straggling procession of men, mostly middle class, in good black knee-breeches and coat, in dainty buckled shoes not meant for such weather, Bailly leading them; they made off, this dripping lot of them, and made history quickly and well. They found in an adjoining street an empty tennis-court at their disposal, and there they met, organized a session, and took the oath, with one dissentient, that they would not disperse until they had achieved a new constitution for the French.

The French do things themselves, a point in which they differ from the more practical nations. For instance, Macmahon, the soldier and president, used to brush his own coat every morning. Barentin, the keeper of the seals, followed all this business, but he followed it in person. From the window of a house just across the narrow way he himself overlooked through the clearstory of the tennis-court. the swarm of the commons within, the public audience that thronged the galleries or climbed to the sills of the windows. He saw the eagerness and the resolve. He scribbled a rough note to be sent at once to Marly a note that has come to light only in the last few years, "Il faut couper court." That is, "End things up at once, or it will be too late."

THE royal session and the king's declaration were postponed. They did not take place upon the Monday for which they were planned; they were put forward to

the Tuesday, the twenty-third of June. What passed during those two days men will debate according as they are biased upon one side or the other of this great quarrel. Necker would have it in his memoirs that he was overborne by Barentin and, as one may say, by the queen's party; that his original compromise was made a little stronger in favor of the crown. To this change, like the weak and false man he was, he would ascribe all the breakdown that followed. I do not believe him. I think he lied. We know how he made his fortune, and we know how to contrast the whole being of a man like Necker with the whole being of a man like Barentin. Read Barentin's notes on those same two days, and you will have little doubt that Necker lied. That he muddled things worse through the delay and through the increasing gravity of the menace to the throne is probable enough. That he showed any vision or determination or propounded any strict policy is not morally credible. The document which the king was to read was drawn up wholly in his own hand, and he was wholly responsible.

Now turn to Versailles upon the morning of that Tuesday, the twenty-third of June, 1789, the court having come in from Marly, and all being ready for the great occasion. Remember that in the interval the commons had met again; the mass of the lower clergy had joined them, not by vote this time, but in person, and two archbishops and three bishops with them, and even from the nobles two men had

come.

It was therefore to be a set issue between the National Assembly now rapidly forming, that is, the commons triumphant, and the awful antique authority of the

crown.

If one had looked from the windows of the palace of Versailles upon that morning, still gray and rainy, still cold in weather, out toward the scene where so much was to be done, one would have caught beyond the great paved, semicircular place, beyond the gilded, high railings of the courtyard, in the central one of the three avenues, the broad road leading to Paris, the roof of a great barnlike building, a long parallelogram of stone and brick, with an oval skylight atop. There was but little to hide it, for the ground about

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