So many as eight Parlements get exiled: (Montgaillard, i. 308.) others might need that remedy, but it is one not always easy of appliance. At Grenoble, for instance, where a Mounier, a Barnave have not been idle, the Parlement had due order (by Lettres-de-Cachet) to depart, and exile itself: but on the morrow, instead of coaches getting yoked, the alarm-bell bursts forth, ominous; and peals and booms all day: crowds of mountaineers rush down, with axes, even with firelocks,--whom (most ominous of all!) the soldiery shows no eagerness to deal with. 'Axe over head,' the poor General has to sign capitulation; to engage that the Lettres-de-Cachet shall remain unexecuted, and a beloved Parlement stay where it is.
Besancon, Dijon, Rouen, Bourdeaux, are not what they should be! At Pau in Bearn, where the old Commandant had failed, the new one (a Grammont, native to them) is met by a Procession of townsmen with the Cradle of Henri Quatre, the Palladium of their Town; is conjured as he venerates this old Tortoise-shell, in which the great Henri was rocked, not to trample on Bearnese liberty; is informed, withal, that his Majesty's cannon are all safe--in the keeping of his Majesty's faithful Burghers of Pau, and do now lie pointed on the walls there; ready for action! (Besenval, iii. 348.)
At this rate, your Grand Bailliages are like to have a stormy infancy. As for the Plenary Court, it has literally expired in the birth. The very Courtiers looked shy at it; old Marshal Broglie declined the honour of sitting therein. Assaulted by a universal storm of mingled ridicule and execration, (La Cour Pleniere, heroi-tragi-comedie en trois actes et en prose; jouee le 14 Juillet 1788, par une societe d'amateurs dans un Chateau aux environs de Versailles; par M. l'Abbe de Vermond, Lecteur de la Reine:
A Baville (Lamoignon's Country-house), et se trouve a Paris, chez la Veuve Liberte, a l'enseigne de la Revolution, 1788.--La Passion, la Mort et la Resurrection du Peuple: Imprime a Jerusalem, &c. &c.--See Montgaillard, i.
407.) this poor Plenary Court met once, and never any second time.
Distracted country! Contention hisses up, with forked hydra-tongues, wheresoever poor Lomenie sets his foot. 'Let a Commandant, a Commissioner of the King,' says Weber, 'enter one of these Parlements to have an Edict registered, the whole Tribunal will disappear, and leave the Commandant alone with the Clerk and First President. The Edict registered and the Commandant gone, the whole Tribunal hastens back, to declare such registration null. The highways are covered with Grand Deputations of Parlements, proceeding to Versailles, to have their registers expunged by the King's hand; or returning home, to cover a new page with a new resolution still more audacious.' (Weber, i. 275.)
Such is the France of this year 1788. Not now a Golden or Paper Age of Hope; with its horse-racings, balloon-flyings, and finer sensibilities of the heart: ah, gone is that; its golden effulgence paled, bedarkened in this singular manner,--brewing towards preternatural weather! For, as in that wreck-storm of Paul et Virginie and Saint-Pierre,--'One huge motionless cloud' (say, of Sorrow and Indignation) 'girdles our whole horizon; streams up, hairy, copper-edged, over a sky of the colour of lead.' Motionless itself; but 'small clouds' (as exiled Parlements and suchlike), 'parting from it, fly over the zenith, with the velocity of birds:'--till at last, with one loud howl, the whole Four Winds be dashed together, and all the world exclaim, There is the tornado! Tout le monde s'ecria, Voila l'ouragan!
For the rest, in such circumstances, the Successive Loan, very naturally, remains unfilled; neither, indeed, can that impost of the Second Twentieth, at least not on 'strict valuation,' be levied to good purpose: 'Lenders,' says Weber, in his hysterical vehement manner, 'are afraid of ruin; tax-gatherers of hanging.' The very Clergy turn away their face: convoked in Extraordinary Assembly, they afford no gratuitous gift (don gratuit),--if it be not that of advice; here too instead of cash is clamour for States-General. (Lameth, Assemb. Const. (Introd.) p. 87.)
O Lomenie-Brienne, with thy poor flimsy mind all bewildered, and now 'three actual cauteries' on thy worn-out body; who art like to die of inflamation, provocation, milk-diet, dartres vives and maladie--(best untranslated);
(Montgaillard, i. 424.) and presidest over a France with innumerable actual cauteries, which also is dying of inflammation and the rest! Was it wise to quit the bosky verdures of Brienne, and thy new ashlar Chateau there, and what it held, for this? Soft were those shades and lawns; sweet the hymns of Poetasters, the blandishments of high-rouged Graces: (See Memoires de Morellet.) and always this and the other Philosophe Morellet (nothing deeming himself or thee a questionable Sham-Priest) could be so happy in making happy:--and also (hadst thou known it), in the Military School hard by there sat, studying mathematics, a dusky-complexioned taciturn Boy, under the name of: NAPOLEON BONAPARTE!--With fifty years of effort, and one final dead-lift struggle, thou hast made an exchange! Thou hast got thy robe of office,--as Hercules had his Nessus'-shirt.
On the 13th of July of this 1788, there fell, on the very edge of harvest, the most frightful hailstorm; scattering into wild waste the Fruits of the Year; which had otherwise suffered grievously by drought. For sixty leagues round Paris especially, the ruin was almost total. (Marmontel, iv.
30.) To so many other evils, then, there is to be added, that of dearth, perhaps of famine.
