Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini (best color ebook reader txt) 📕

ninety-six per centum of the nation, proceeded to do it. As a beginning the nobility and clergy were pronounced to be no more than two corporations no wise representative:

They willed it so, and they had it so.

The Oeil de Boeuf was intensely amused. This Third was so droll in its fantastic contortions. The rejoinder was of the simplest. It consisted in closing the Hall of the Menus Plaisirs where the Assembly was held. How the gods must have laughed at those so reckless laughers! André-Louis certainly laughs as he writes of it.

“Again brute force against ideas. Again the manner of La Tour d’Azyr. The Assembly no doubt had too dangerous a gift of eloquence. But how to conceive that the closing of a hall is to cripple the deliberations of an assembly! Are there no other halls, or failing halls, the broad canopy of heaven itself?”

The Third evidently thought so, for, finding the hall closed to them and guarded by soldiers who refused them admission, they repaired through the rain to the tennis-court, utterly destitute of furniture, and there announced (by way of revealing to the Court the futility of its measures against them) that wherever they were there the National Assembly was. Upon that they made their formidable oath not to separate until they had fulfilled the purpose for which they had been convoked, until they had given France a constitution⁠—an oath very properly concluded amid shouts of “Vive le Roi!”

Thus a protest of loyalty to their King was mingled with a declaration to resist the vicious and corrupt system of which he was the unfortunate centre.

Le Chapelier best expressed that day precisely what was in the mind both of the Assembly and of the nation at large, harmonising their loyalty to the throne with their duty as citizens, when he moved “that His Majesty be informed that the enemies of the country obsess the Throne, and that their counsels tend to place the monarchy at the head of a party.”

Yet Privilege, as barren of invention as of foresight, contented itself with repeating its former tactics. M. le Comte d’Artois, having announced that on the morrow he would play tennis, the members of the Third found themselves on that Monday, the twenty-second of June, excluded from the tennis-court as on the Sunday they had been excluded from the Menus Plaisirs. This time, that errant, long-suffering Assembly which is to begin by giving bread to starving France must postpone its measures so that M. d’Artois may have his game of tennis. Yet M. le Comte does not, suffering from the general myopy, perceive the sinister aspect of his action. Quos Deus vult perdere⁠ ⁠… The Assembly moved patiently on, as it had done before, and found an asylum this time in the Church of Saint Louis.

And now those self-doomed humorists of the Oeil de Boeuf, driven by their petty insolence, prepare to push things to the length of bloodshed. If this National Assembly cannot understand a hint, it shall be given something plainer, something that it cannot possibly fail to understand. In vain does Necker try to build a bridge across the gulf; the King⁠—unfortunate captive of Privilege⁠—will have none of it. He insists⁠—as no doubt was insisted with him that he should⁠—that the three orders shall remain distinct. If they desire a reunion, he will permit it, but for this occasion only, and to treat only of general affairs, which general affairs do not comprise any matters concerning the respective rights of the three orders, the constitution of future States General, feudal and seigneurial property, or privileges pecuniary or honourable; in short, nothing that can alter the existing regime, nothing of all that purpose by which the Third is inspired.

The royal convocation of these States is revealed at last as an impudent mockery, a thing devised solely to mystify and to delude.

The Third, notified, repairs to the Menus Plaisirs to meet the other orders and hear the royal declaration. M. Necker is absent; the rumour runs that he is on the point of departure. Since Privilege will not use the bridge of his providing, he will certainly not remain to have it supposed from his presence that he approves the declaration to be made. How could he approve it, since it changes nothing? It declares that the King will sanction equality of taxation if the nobility and the clergy will renounce their pecuniary privileges; that property shall be respected, particularly tithes and feudal rights and dues; that on the question of individual liberty the States are invited to seek and to propose means that will reconcile the abolition of letters-de-cachet with the precautions necessary to spare the honour of families and to repress the beginnings of sedition; that in the matter of throwing State employment open equally to all, the King must refuse, particularly in so far as the army is concerned, in the institution of which it is not his wish to make the slightest modification⁠—by which it is meant that the military career must remain a privilege of the noblesse, as hitherto, and that no man who is not nobly born may aspire to any rank above that of an under-officer.

And lest any doubts should linger in the minds of the already sufficiently disillusioned representatives of ninety-six per centum of the nation, comes from that sluggish, phlegmatic prince the challenge:

“If you abandon me in so beautiful an enterprise, I shall, alone, dispose for the welfare of my people; I shall consider myself, alone, their true representative.”

And upon that he dismisses them:

“I order you messieurs, to separate at once. Tomorrow morning you will repair to the chambers assigned to your respective orders, there to resume your sittings.”

And so His Majesty departs followed by Privilege⁠—nobility and clergy. He returns to the Château to receive the acclamations of the Oeil de Boeuf. And the Queen, radiant, triumphant, announces that she confides the fate of her son, the Dauphin, to the nobles. But the King does not share