Revolutionsbryllup (1915)

France, May 1793, the year of the Revolution. The Jacobins are pressing for the complete abolition of the monarchy and are ruthlessly pursuing the last remaining monarchists. Their European neighbors are alarmed and have troops at the ready to put an end to the revolutionary madness of a Robespierre. Under the protection of Austrian troops, the nobleman Erneste de Tressailles also intends to take part in the liberation from tyranny as a member of the White Squadron, and rides with the Austrians into Château de Trionville. He sends his fiancée, Alaine de L’Estoile, a blooming orange branch with one of the hussars; her maid, Léontine, receives it. This is the signal for the forthcoming wedding, which is to take place at Trionville. The couple proceed to the wedding ceremony in the château chapel amid great celebration, while the steward has a feast prepared. As the couple sit at the wedding table and eat, the guests receive terrible news: the Jacobins are approaching! Indeed, their rifle volleys can already be heard. Erneste jumps up and climbs out of the window down into the courtyard to hurry to his men. Meanwhile, the Jacobins advance onto the château grounds, led by Commissioner Montaloup. They rudely barge into Alaine’s living quarters, where she is terrified, and jab at portraits of her ancestors with their sabre points. Erneste, who escaped in a rowing boat across the château pond, is “welcomed” and arrested on the opposite bank by Lieutenant Colonel Marc Arron. He is taken back to the château, where a summary tribunal is held. Erneste, an “émigré”—and, under the revolutionary decree, one of those who are all to be executed—is sentenced to death. Prosper, Alaine’s loyal servant, had tried to help her husband by removing from his cap the Bourbon cockade that would betray the marquis. The Jacobins shoot him first, because he had claimed to be the owner of the cockade, which had been hidden under his foot and was eventually discovered. Alaine, in turn, who had made no attempt to flee, is acquitted by the Jacobin tribunal. In a rare display of honor among the revolutionaries, the Marquis Erneste is allowed to spend his wedding night—his last night altogether—with his bride. The next morning, he is to meet the same fate as Prosper. While Erneste and his wife Alaine desperately search for a way out in the great hall, the Jacobins are holding a great feast with the household staff downstairs in the kitchen. Alaine devises a way out and sends her maid, Léontine, to Lieutenant Colonel Marc Arron to ask him to meet her in her room. There, she makes the revolutionary officer the following offer: she will grant him this night if, in return, he lets her newly wedded husband escape. Arron, who is indeed attracted to the Marquise, then exchanges clothes with Erneste, who can now escape in a Jacobin uniform. Alaine realizes that Arron’s courage and bravery far surpass Erneste’s, and willingly gives herself to him, though he waives his right to spend the night with her. In the revolutionary, the Marquise sees all the qualities she had hoped to find in her husband, who has escaped. Morning approaches, and Arron faces up to his responsibility. He firmly refuses the pistol offered to him for suicide. When Montaloup learns of Erneste’s escape, he sends his men out in search of him. As for Chevalier Marc Arron, he faces the death penalty for helping a condemned nobleman and émigré escape. When the Jacobins try to force their way into Madame’s salon because no one will open the door, another group of Jacobins streams in through the other door, with the Marquis in tow: he had turned himself in voluntarily. But it is all to no avail; both men are sentenced to death. Montaloup tears up his death sentence, but Arron goes to the window and orders the soldiers below, who are aiming their rifles at him, to fire. With the words, “Long live Alaine de L’Estoile, long live the Republic,” he falls beneath a hail of bullets. Alaine takes his dying body in her arms and says, “He loved me.”