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If it was the duty of the Revolutionary Tribunal, of deplorable memory, to demand in 1793 from any one an explanation of the massacres of the Champ de Mars, it was not Bailly assuredly who ought to have been accused in the first place. The political party whose blood flowed on the 17th of July, pretended to have been the victim of a plot concocted by its adversaries.
The day before his duties had kept him in the neighborhood of the Champ de Mars and the Esplanade of the Invalides, and on this day he had remained in the Place du Palais-Bourbon until nearly noon, when the troops were sent forward to clean out the barricades of the quartier, as far as the Rue des Saints-Peres.
The palace of the King of Rome, which was to face the Pont de Jena and the Champ de Mars, would have been in some measure isolated from Paris, with which, however, it was to be connected by a line of palaces.
When her first emotions gave way to nature, she threw herself into my arms, and, for some time, her feelings were so overcome by the dangers which threatened these worthy men, that she could only in the bitterness of her anguish exclaim, 'Oh! this is all on my account! And I think she was almost as much alarmed for the safety of these faithful men, as she had been for that of the King on the 17th of July, when the Jacobins in the Champ de Mars called out to have the King brought to trial a day of which the horrors were never effaced from her memory!
The charge of one of the regiments of cuirassiers, 1000 strong, upon the Champ de Mars, was one of the finest sights imaginable. The clattering of the horses feet on hard ground, and the rattling of the armour, increasing as they advanced, exceeded the sound of the loudest thunder.
And that day was spent by Maurice in the quarters of the Champ de Mars and the Invalides, firing and falling back slowly from street to street. He had not been able to find his battalion; he fought in the ranks with comrades who were strangers to him, accompanying them in their march to the left bank without taking heed whither they were going.
He gave me a description of the scene of Dreyfus's public degradation on the Champ de Mars which was like a chapter of Carlyle's French Revolution at first hand. It was crammed with detail and so intensely dramatic that it made the scene live over again. I asked him at last in surprise: "But surely you were not there?"
"It is foolish," he said, gaily, to his companion, "to flaunt a face like yours in Paris by daylight." They had driven from Meudon in a hired carriage to the corner of the Champ de Mars, in those days still innocent of glass houses and exhibition buildings, for Paris was not yet the toy-shop of the world; and from the Champ de Mars they came on foot through the ill-paved, feebly lighted streets.
The palace of the King of Rome, which was to face the Pont de Jena and the Champ de Mars, would have been in some measure isolated from Paris, with which, however, it was to be connected by a line of palaces.
Three days after this disaster, a bill of exchange for a thousand francs, drawn by Philippe upon his mother, arrived from New York. The poor fellow, misled like so many others, had lost his all in the Champ d'Asile.
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