Cities of Old Romance

9-Versailles

The October Women Had Mud in Their Shoes but the Feet of the Queen Were Bare.

BY CARL T. ROBERTSON.

B

OURGEOIS Paris, on picnick-

ing bent, goes numerously tc Versailles, saunters in the Ital ian groves and loiters along the geometrical walks, lingers among the colonnades and bosquets where kings

and king's mistresses and imitative courtiers and courtiers' mistresses have played Cupid's game of hide and seek under many a summer moon. Bourgeois Paris comes out on

stated days

to see the great fountains play. and perchance to trudge conversationally through the palace. And tourists come in squads, companies and regiments.

CARL T.ROBERTSON STANDIFORD PHOTO

Last year the palace of Versailles had 479.000 visitors, almost as many as came to the Louvre. But only 32,000 visited the Trianons, and of these probably a considerable majority went only as far as the Great Trianon, the altogether uninteresting semi-palace which Louis XIV built for the Maintenon. It now houses a collection of old royal coaches. Scarcely any of the Paris throng and very few tourists trickle through into secluded forest of the Little Trianon where Marie Antoinette frolicked gayly with her gayly frolicksome playmates, and where she built her model hamlet and played daintily and expensively at being milkmaid or shepherdess while France was tumbling in cyclopean ruin about her pretty heedless head.

The hamlet stands much as Marie left it toward noon of the fifth day of October, 1789.

A Well-Starched Hamlet. Marie's builders took pains to prevent the hamlet from looking new. Cracks and scars were artfully inflicted, and other hints of debility and mossy age were added by the crafty painters. Since then the hamlet has been occasionally restored. but no trace of the work is discernible. Buildings include the farm house, the bailly's house, the parsonage, the dairy, the mill, and other edifices supposed to appertain to an idyllic abode of rustic simplicity. In Marie's time there were chicken coops and barns and manure piles, but we are assured that they were all seemly. The sheep were led to pasture with blue ribbons. When Marie visited the dairy house the cows were scrubbed in advance, and the royal mildmaid was given a Sevres vase instead of a plebeian pail,

The forest is a real forest, growing as forests ought to grow, and

not

according to the geometrical tyranny of an Italian landscaper. The knolls and grottoes are artificial. So is the little brook, and the clear Jakelet by the hamlet-artificial and very costly, created by piping water all the way from Marly.

The palace of the Little Trianon is the only pretty edifice of Versailles despite the fact that it was built by that old goat. Louis XV, for his Dubarry. It is a dainty bijou. fit refuge for the pink-cheeked dainty queen. All about are the loveliest gardens, and just beyond the flowers is the forest.

Through the summer of 1789 the States General were meeting at Versailles and the time came when the Third Estate, representing all France except the privileged few of the nobles and the clergy, took oath never to adjourn till it had achieved & Constitution for France. The king. stolid and weak, had to sit in the palace and listen to purblind advisers when he would have been much happier puttering about his private blacksmith forge or hunting at Meudon--the only activities he ever truly enjoyed. It made little difference to Marie where Louis might he, as long as he was not at the little Trianon. At the little Trianon the queen Wax absolute mistress by her own request and by the consent of Louis. And Louis, who had a sense of pride, and who, moreover, was insufferably bored by the butterfly activities of his wife and her giddy coterie, never came to the Little Trianon without an invitation. He had no key, and the Invitations were few.

With her company of silly sateliites Marie romped and jigged. fluttered and flitted. There were private Theatricals and fashionable fragile music. Yes, douhiless Marie flirted a little when the moon was right. But if at heart Marie was not altozether a prude she was instinctively. fundamentaliy and steadfastly virtu51:8. She was a handsome, selfish, commonplace woman, with no aim in life beyond the gratification of her Praving for ceaseless frivolity. It is said she never read a book. She was neither lovabie nor admirable, but of Marie's chasuty there is no doubt except in such minds as question anything that is good.

The Royal Shepherdess. The summer of 1759 had been gloribus at the Little Trianon. Much of the time Marie had gone about in a short kirtle, displaying the neatest ilk-clad ankles; and sometimes she and her playmates had even dixbensed with costly fabrics and had lecked themselves in rustic garb of expensive weave. Not for economy's sake, oh no! They had nerely deemed it good fun to ape he picturesque garments of the real ustics who cleaned the chicken oops and did the other necessary work on the fantastic farm.

No such word as "economy" ever ind a place in the sadly abridged exicon of Marie Antoinette. To her conomy was as unthinkabie as unpeakable; as unthinkable as that he people of France had any rights. lights? What are they? Privileges of royalty and nobility and clergy he knows-but her eyes flash indig. lation when one mentions "rights" of the unwashed or even of lawyers nd shopkeepers and other such

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bourgeois trash. Are the people starving? For Marie the people" do not exist. They are beyond the ' [circumference of her sympathy. Do dying mothers cry for bread? "Let 'em eat cake,” says Marie. History : somewhat doubts that Marie actually said this; but whether she said it or did not say it matters little. The sentiment was distinctly Marie's sentiment, and so we do Marie no wrong by settnig it down as Marie's own pleasantry. Of toplofty pride, of || blind selfishness, of egotistical arrogance and mulish stubbornness Marie was guilty without mitigation. And yet she was, as we say, a "good" woman. She was chaste before wedlock, and she was virginal for seven years after marriage till Louis assented to a slight operation by the surgeons. For the boy and the girl she tardily bore after the king's reconstruction she possessed the mother instinct in some considerable measure. But even mother love was subordinate to the frenzied love of pleasure.

Some have charged that the revo-

faithful' wives, and, in a pathetic fitful way, affectionate mothers.

The Cows Are Scrubbed. Regardless alike of foul lampoons and the hunger moan of France Marie and her sweet-scented emptypates played away the hours and the days of the happy summer. Oath of the tennis court, rumblings of National Assembly right under the windows of the king's palace, mean nothing to a queen who appraises as nothing everything outside the boundaries of her play world. She and her select troupe trip lightly among the gardens, frolic on clean, soft sward, dance in the doll palace, scamper in the pretty forest, pet the scrubbed COWS and the ribboned sheep, sniff tolerantly the necessary" odor of the discreet dung piles, and glance benignly down upon the needful actual peasants, be-frilled and be-ribboned, who must do the unseemly work in as seemly a way as possible. They must do it prettily,

The Little Trianon.

lutionists who guillotined her originated the filthy tales of Marie's immorality. Not the gutter rascals (as the royalist historians love to call the revolutionary patriots) but the envious scandal mongers of the court itself invented the libels and started their circulation. Perhaps Marie had herself to blame, for she mercilessly snubbed all the petty court parasites who were not hand-picked members of her own folly-driven Trianon clique. In envy and malice the nonelect hurled offal at the heedless little queen. Bourgeois wits and filth purveyors spread the poison and pamphleteers and poetasters dished it out to the people and thereby established Marie in the popular imagination as a Lesbian pervert and a monster of promiscuous unchastity.

Radical writers have not let the libel die. But the aristocrats and conservatives who have done most of the writing have been equally mendacious in painting Marie Antoinette as a saintly martyr; a gentle, generous, long-suffering queen; a devoted wife and an ideal mother. You and I know many such women as Marie Antoinette, though they are not queens. Smart and alert, but with no intellectual breadth or depth. Overwhelmingly selfish, perceiving nothing desirable in life but the whirling circle of social pleasure and fictitious excitement. Arrogant without justification. But not inherResentful ently cruel or malicious.

of responsibility. But substantially

too, so as to be worthy of the pink silk bow-ties on their rustic shoes. Од

Oct. 5 — memorable among memorable days-the Paris women are so hungry that they decide to march four leagues or less to Versailles where hunger has never been and never can be. The Paris women are massing at the Hotel de Ville, demanding bread and guns and gunpowder-and Marie is out at the Little Trianon. It is early for the Little Trianon, perhaps noon, and most of those who have frolicked almost to the autumn dawn are horizontal and mayhap snoring. Marie is out in the woods. breathing the damp air of the cold October day. There is rain coming.

Yes, there is rain coming, and worse than rain. Marie will scamper back, on light silken feet, to be in the big Versailles palace before the

rain comes. And what is coming

with the rain!

Coming With the Rain. The hungry women of Paris are coming. They are coming with loud staccato yelps of hate and anger: Already they have smashed a few windows and half-hanged a priest. They have brought ammunition, and they are lugging two cannons. Most of the women are not lovely to look upon. They are hard women of the markets and the faubourgs, hardfaced, hard-handed, hard-voiced too, and withal hard-hearted. For a long

| time they have been eating black bread of poorest quality, and little of it. Their no-account babies have been starving and dying—babies of no account to Marie Antoinette and her playfellows, but of very considerable account to hard-faced and horny-fisted mothers. 1

One queer male, a very tall and slim young man named Stanislas |Maillaird, who was yesterday no better than a very minor omicèr of the law court of the Chatelet, leads the women; he is somewhat dandifled and wears a long, white coat; and he has a drum which goes rataplan, rataplan all the way to Versailles through the October rain and mud. Rataplan, rataplan goes the drum of Maillard, ever soggier in the rain. Mud and cold water are in the shoes of the women. Squish, squish goes the cold mud between the tough toes of the tough unhandsome females. (Not quite all of them tough and unhandsome, though; for certain pretty girls, some of them undoubtedly frail and others quite all right, are march(ing, too.)

A fringe of male ruffians, or of gaunt scarecrows who look like the offscourings of rascaldom, attaches itself to the column. Some of the males doubtless belong to some of the women whose day it is.

The women weave into Versailles, | Maillard's drum is stilled. The National Assembly finds makeshift lodgings here and there for wet wòmen with shoes full of toe-squidgy mud. It gets food for them, too. So they sleep, or try very wetly to sleep, through an October night which is not brief.

A Fun-Loving_Body-Guard. They are awake early, as why shouldn't they be? King's bodyguards, a company composed solely of noblemen, had galloped recklessly among them in the evening, breaking patriot groups, guffawing as wetfooted women and scarecrow males scampered and dodged. Hateful and triple-hated body-guards. Tax-eating, high-nosed nobles. At 5 o'clock in the morning, with the October dawn scarcely' breaking, a fun-loving body-guard fires a musket from a window of the palace and kills a young Parisian named l'Heritier; he is a cabinetmaker and a soldier's son; the pavement is smeared with his brains. Silly body-guard, annoymous forever, and doubtless immune from punishment. The women storm the palace; they kill two bodyguards who try to halt them at the grand staircase; they pour into the palace like a stream of malodorous human sewage; and they desire to kill the queen. Not poor heavy Louis the king, but the light and wicked queen who has joked about giving cake to hungry babies.

They surge against the door of the queen's bedchamber; two brave bodyguards defend it till they are battered to pulp and cut into queer patterns. (Both of them, miraculously, gurvive.) The score of the battle is two to one in favor of the women: Versailles loses the two body-guards killed at the stairway; Paris loses only l'Heritier, the young cabinetmaker whose brains are scattered by the fun-loving sharpshooter, and yet it was one of the momentous fights of history.

No Time for Stockings. While the body-guards at her door are fighting off the mob Marie ja persuaded from her bed by urgent insistence; what an ungodly and unqueenly time o' the morning for the Queen of France to get up! A petticoat is pinned over her nightgown and a shawl is thrown over her shoulders. She flees barefoot, carrying her stockings, but no shoes, in her hands. A split minute before the lynchers break down the door Marie has filed through another door, locking it behind her, and has come running to the chamber of the king. Here for precious minutes she must beat with her fists and shriek, waving futile stockings, till at last she is heard and admitted, and her subsequent whereabouts becomes unknown to the invaders.

The mob's rage evaporates after it finds Marie has escaped and after it has smashed much magnificent furniture and toted about on poles the heads of the two body-guards of the marble stairway. But it insists that the king and queen must go back to Paris. There is plenty in Versailles; shall there be famine in Paris if the Parisians hold custody of "the baker and the baker's wife?" It is the 6th of October and a fine day after the rain. Stanislas Maillard, who has left his drum somewhere, rides back in a fine carriage from the royal stables. Everyone is good natured. Men and women stick their heads through the windows of the royal carriage and speak familiarly but not maliciously to the king and queen. Poor Louis smiles. Marie Antoinette had not believed such agony could be in life. It is, no more than a mild foretaste of four years of steadily increasing anguish.

It is really the beginning of the end for Louis and Marie. Louis, who is guiltless of everything except stupidity and royal birth, will at last be escorted respectfully in a closed carriage to the guillotine and executed amid the regrets of those who know his death is necessary for the safety of the republic.

Marie will be jolted through the streets of Paris on a two-wheeled cart. She will be seated on a plank. Her wrists will be tightly bound behind her back. Thousands upon thousands will curse her on her way; and a nation will rejoice when her head drops in Sanson's basket.

She deserved what came to her. though some of the charges brought forward at her trial were hideously faise. Posterity might forgive Marie for the calious selfishness and heartless frivolity of the Trianon days; but common sense and logic justifies the execution of the woman who. after the ride from Versailles, had been for years slyly and ceaselessly plotting the destruction of the nation and the spirit of freedom. It seems to me there has been a deal of superfluous weeping over Marie Antoinette. If there are those who have tears which must be shed let them weep for Louis XVI, as for a butchered ox, but let them dampen few pocket handkerchiefs in mourning for Marie. Deliberately she made her bed, and the French republic compelled her to lie in it.