_VARENNES_
_From midnight of Monday, June 20, 1791, to just after seven in the
evening of Saturday, June 25, 1791_
IT was no longer night; it was near day, the brightening air smelt of
morning. The links of the harness-chains clattered a little as the relay
horses were hacked against the pole of the big carriage. Fersen
sauntered to the carriage window of that side upon which the Queen sat.
He called out loudly her supposed mistress’s assumed name, “Madame
Korff,” saluted her and turned to go on his lonely cross-country ride to
Bourget and the Brussels road, by which he also purposed to fly. But,
even as he turned, they say that she held his hand a moment and slipped
upon his finger a ring. It was a ring of yellowish gold, broad and
heavy, and having set in it an unknown stone. It is still preserved.
Here is the story of the ring:—
* * * * *
It was again the 20th of June—the summer solstice that strikes, and
strikes again and again, at the Bourbons and at the soldiers of the
Bourbons. Nineteen years had passed since the dawn when Fersen had left
the Queen at Bondy, seventeen since he had broken his heart at her death
and had become silent. His campaigns had forbidden him to show
prematurely the effect of advancing age; indeed, as men now count age,
he had not reached the limits of decline—his fifty-fifth year was not
accomplished.... But emotions so inhuman and so deep had so torn him in
his vigour that there had followed a complete and an austere silence of
the soul: he had long seemed apart from living men. His face preserved a
settled severity, his eyes a contempt for the final moment of danger:
that moment had come.
He was Marshal of the Forces; the populace of Stockholm was in rumour,
for the North still had vigour in it, impregnated from France. He had
been torn from his carriage, chased from the refuge of a room, and now
stood bleeding on the steps of the Riddenholm alone (the Squires were
within the church, barricaded: they had left him outside to die). The
populace, hating him, hated even more a ring which they saw large and
dull upon his finger, for they said among themselves that the ring was
Faëry and that death issued from its gem whenever it was held forward;
Death flashed from it and struck whomsoever it was turned upon. Charles
Augustus himself had seen it upon parade; it had lowered upon him and he
had fallen dead from his horse.... Fersen, so standing, wounded and
alone, with the mob roaring round the steps, held his sword drawn in his
right hand—but the ring upon his left was a better weapon, and no one
dared come forward.
At last a traitor (since there is a traitor in every tragedy), a servant
of his who had turned fisherman, drew other fishermen round him and
whispered to them to gather stones: thus, from a distance, standing upon
the steps above them, Fersen was stoned and died.
When he was quite dead the populace drew round his body, but they would
not go too near, and even as they approached they shielded their eyes
from the ring. But this traitor, Zaffel, bolder than the rest, went
forward also with an axe, and, shielding his eyes also, he hacked the
finger off. The people cheered as they would cheer a man that had
plucked a fuse from a shell. He ran, with his head still turned, to the
river-side, and he threw the finger with the Queen’s ring upon it far
out into the stream.
Next day Stockholm was as calm as though there had been no evening
tumult. Zaffel at early morning took his boat out upon the cold lake
water by a pleasant breeze, and pointed up river: he had a plan to fish.
When he had left the many islands of the town behind him and had passed
into a lonely reach of pine-trees, he felt a gentle shock upon the keel,
and the boat stood still.... He went forward to the bows and looked
over; he could see nothing but very deep green water bubbling below. As
he came back aft the masthead caught his eye, and there, clasping it,
was a severed hand; the blood which was apparent at the wrist was not
running. The hand grasped the trunk of the mast with rigour, and Zaffel,
as he saw it, shuddered, for one finger of that hand was gone.
The boat went forward in spite of the tide and aslant the wind, with the
sheet loose and the sail at random, and he in the boat could feel for
hours that the impulsion of its course was from the masthead to which he
no longer dared a look upwards. The boat cut steadily across the eddies
of the Moelar. At times he tried the tiller, but he found the fixed
movement unresponsive to his helm.
There is no darkness in the North at this season, but a twilight which,
if there are clouds, fades from the grey of evening to the grey of dawn;
he had sat, cold, crouching in the stern of his boat, throughout all the
hours of the day, and now this grey twilight was upon him. In the midst
of it he saw far up-stream a white rock from which, as it seemed to him,
some phosphorescence glowed unnaturally, and in the midst of that light,
upon a ledge of the stone, was the ring. He took it, as at a command;
then at last he dared look up at the masthead. He saw the hand, now
whole, relax and change and disappear, and he felt the boat go free,
turn and drift down-stream.
When he was back upon the quays of Stockholm, all his body trembling
with a fast of twenty-four hours and with the cold of the morning, his
neighbours as they caught the mooring-rope asked questions of him. He
answered them with meaningless songs, and then, as the vision returned,
with pointings and terror. He was mad.
They took him off to the Bethel beyond the stream. On the Knights’
Island, within the church of Riddenholm, the Squires who had deserted
Fersen upon the day before were at that moment gathered round the coffin
to do honour to his burial; and upon the pall they noticed (some
curious, some indifferent) the broad band of yellowish gold and the
unknown stone.
When it came to the burial, the grave-diggers dared not put it into
earth as they should have done; they gave it to his family. With them it
still remains, to do evil and disturb his sleep.
* * * * *
From Bondy the great carriage went forward under the growing light of
the day. At Claye a cabriolet with the Queen’s waiting-women joined and
followed the berline. That increasing light forbade the family to sleep;
they settled in comfort upon the broad and padded seats of white velvet,
leaning back into them, and every word they said revealed the enlarging
confidence of their souls. The King felt himself already upon horseback;
the Queen and the Duchess repeated the rôles they were to play on
whatever little public occasions the rapid journey might involve them
in. The Duchess as Madame Korff, in whose name the transport had been
made out; the Queen as her governess—and so forth. They went rapidly in
that mixed landscape of wood and market-garden and half-continuous
village which still marks the confines of Paris and of the influence of
Paris. Now they were in the open country, with Paris quite forgotten,
now in a district with a dialect of its own—sure test of honesty and of
freedom. The country-sides were awake, the mowers were in the field; the
road was down among the narrow pastures of the Marne, and at last in
Meaux, where for the first time they halted for a relay.
So near to Paris, the wealthy equipage and its suite attracted no
curiosity, while prudence still restrained the travellers from showing
themselves in the market square, fatigued as they may already have been
by a continuous travelling of now over five hours—for it was past six
and the town was astir by the time the berline and the cabriolet had
rumbled in. To this concurrence of good accidents the neighbourhood of
the capital added another element, for the posting station of Meaux was
so used to the continual passage of considerable travellers (how many of
the emigrants had it not re-harnessed!) that not only was the whole
place incurious, but also the relay was rapidly effected. It was not a
quarter of an hour before they were off again upon the Chalons road.
[Illustration:
Sketch Map of the Road from
=PARIS= TO =VARENNES=
June 21st. 1791
]
By the route they had chosen, which had the advantage that it was
somewhat shorter and, what was of even more importance, less frequented
than the main way through Chateau Thierry and Epernay, the distance
before them to Chalons, the next large town, was somewhat over seventy
miles. It would fill the whole morning and more. They fell to talking to
one another with some little anxiety as to what might happen when
Chalons, with its considerable population, its newspaper and its
activity, was reached. But their immunity at Meaux, the advent of a
pleasing, shaded and tolerable day, the remote country-sides through
which they passed after branching off the main road at La Ferté, dulled
their fears, or rather exorcised them. They fell to eating—a sort of
picnic without plates, cutting their meat upon their bread, and drinking
their wine from a cup passed round. No sunlight fell upon the green
blind of the off-side window to fatigue their eyes; no reflections of
excessive heat as the morning rose shone from the road upon the white
velvet of the cushions: they were in comfort and at ease.
By eight they were upon the side-road they had chosen; by ten, at the
hour when the peasants were reposing under the high quadruple rank of
roadside trees, with their scythes at rest beside them, they came to the
post of Viels-Maisons. They were behind their hour—a trifle—but they
were by this time quite secure in mind. The governess had given the
children air, and had walked with them up the long hill by which the
road leaves the Marne valley. The pace had been hardly business-like,
perhaps to save fatigue. The King had sauntered from the carriage more
than once to stretch his legs at the post-houses; there were even
occasions upon which he had spoken to the little groups of peasants that
surrounded the carriage as the new horses were put in. For a moment
indeed some anxiety—very probably baseless—had arisen amongst them at
the sight of a horseman who seemed to be following the carriages; the
children and their governess, who were on the back-seat, had noticed a
rider far down the road behind them, but he turned off and was seen no
more.
In the stables of Viels-Maisons was a postillion of the name of Picard;
his action is worthy of note to any one who would comprehend the nature
of this journey, the emotions which it aroused in those who witnessed
it, and the tangle of authority amid which the flight was driven. His
action is worthy of note especially to those who would see, as it is
necessary to see, the Champenois peasantry who form the background of
all the picture. He first, at this long distance from Paris, fifty miles
and more, recognised the King.
He might have sold the knowledge; he might have gambled on the royal
family’s success, have whispered his recognition, and have waited for
his reward; he might have presupposed the final success of the National
Government, and have taken immediate steps to earn its gratitude by
denouncing the King. This peasant did none of these three things; he
held his tongue.
The carriages rolled onward. At mid-day when, at one of the posting
stations in that great bare dusty plain, an isolated place, the King had
strolled out again, in the interval of the harnessing, to joke with a
knot of poor yokels and to give charity to them, Moustier, one of the
Guards who were acting as drivers, ventured a timid remonstrance, and
Louis said what should never be said within the hearing of the gods—that
he was now safe from all accidents. When he had said this he continued
to talk to the poor about him; he talked of their crops and of the hay
that he saw tedding.
It is possible that some one of these wondered a little overmuch at the
grand people; it is possible there had been rumours: but if any beggar
or mower among them guessed, he also held his tongue—and the carriages
rolled onward.
* * * * *
The day, still veiled and moderate, was at its height; it was two
o’clock, or a little later, when the road, which had hitherto borne
every mark of age, took on the appearance of new work, the line of trees
was interrupted, and the stones of the kerb were clean and freshly sawn.
A green valley, then but imperfectly drained though but slightly below
the general level of the Champagne, lay across its course.... An older
track had skirted this marshy land, but for now six years the road had
cut straight across the doubtful soil upon a great embankment, which was
one of those new engineering works of which the reign, for all its
financial embarrassment, had been full. Upon this embankment stood (and
stands) the posting-house, and upon such a site little else could stand.
There were at that time but two other roofs: a blacksmith’s forge and a
tavern. The post was called “The Petit Chaintry”; it is Chaintrix
to-day, and a hamlet still. Here lived an elderly man, Lagny, a widower,
with his daughters and one son-in-law, by name Vallet, a dangerous lad,
for he had travelled, and had been himself brought up in the noise and
curiosity of an inn; nay, he had seen Paris, and had marched with the
Federals upon the Champs de Mars the year before. Only rarely did Vallet
visit his wife’s home—but there is a fate and a God. In this lonely
plain of Champagne where no one travels, where few then knew Paris,
even, let alone the Court, this man happened on that one day to be at
the stables of his father-in-law’s posting-house; he happened also to be
by nature—the nature of a townsman—garrulous and touched with melodrama.
He recognised and worshipped the King. From that moment the secret was
dissolved: and in loyalty perhaps half-an-hour was consumed.
No record remains of the spreading of the news, but proof remains of the
result. Vallet insisted on riding himself upon the leaders; he rode
hard, and twice he let his horses down, breaking harness; so that an
hour perhaps was lost by his hard riding. Before even the berline and
its attendant cabriolet left Chaintry, Lagny and his daughters had been
told. The royal family had not denied the recognition; they had even, in
reward for the loyalty displayed, bestowed gifts upon the inn-keeper. It
is certain that the news must have spread through the country-side.
In such an atmosphere of recognition, nay, of open dependence upon the
loyalty of those who knew them, they traversed the remaining twelve
miles of road and entered Chalons, where alone they feared arrest and in
whose crowds only detailed forethought and plan could have preserved
them unknown. That plan and that forethought had been wholly absent; a
vague instinct of its necessity had in the morning haunted the fears of
the travellers, but now, after the safety and isolation of the many long
hours from Meaux, it was forgotten.
They entered the big town at four o’clock; the two carriages drove
clattering through its streets; they pulled up at the posting-house in
the Rue St. Jacques. Viet, the post-master, came out to see to the
horses. A crowd gathered, and to every one in that crowd and to Viet,
and to any one of the town who cared to ask, the presence of the King
was perfectly well known. It was discussed with approval or disapproval;
indeed, the journey would have ended here, but that Viet himself, true
to the character of the peasant (for he was peasant-born), refused all
risk. Officially he knew nothing; he would neither detain nor speed the
King; he was obstinately silent. Whether Louis won, or his enemies, he,
Viet, at least would be safe.
As he was buckling the last of the fresh horses, a man dressed with care
and with some appearance of wealth approached him, and insisted upon
what was, by the Constitution, his duty; but Viet gave him no change and
was still silent. The man, dressed with care and with some appearance of
wealth failing to move this very minor functionary, went off to the
Mayor, Chorez by name; there was no time to lose; horses are unharnessed
and others harnessed in but a little delay. The Mayor was as silent as
Viet; he took refuge in that common excuse of temporisers and cowards—he
demanded “proof.” It is probable that the well-dressed man with some
appearance of wealth went off upon the frontier road. We do not know,
for we do not even know his name; but when a little before five o’clock
the berline had halted a moment at the foot of a rise, surely it was the
same man who passed it rapidly and muttered to the royal family as he
passed: “You have planned ill!”
The town of Chalons lies upon the border of an extensive plain peculiar
in French history. Here, as tradition will have it, Attila’s army was
destroyed by the Romans and the Barbarians whom the Romans had trained.
It is a wide and desolate space, which the prosperity succeeding the
Revolution has transformed, but which, as we watch it to-day from a
distant height, still bears something of its ancient poverty—to the eye
at least—so level is it and so treeless. Far off to the eastward runs
the wooded wall of Argonne, very faint and small; at the base of this
the town of Ste. Menehould.
From Chalons to Ste. Menehould by the straight road bridging the plain
is a long day’s march, twenty-five miles or more: and there is very
little between. The passage of this bare, direct and dusty stretch was,
the fugitives might imagine, the very last and the least of the risks
they were to run. Chalons, which alone they feared, had not detained
them, the emptiness of the country-side renewed or rather rendered
absolute their confidence. Within an hour they would be at the culvert
of Somme-Vesle, an utterly deserted spot with nothing but the stables of
the post to mark it.
* * * * *
At this point of their successful journey let the reader note in what
order the guarding of the flight had been conceived by Bouillé.
The first stages of it—till beyond Chalons—were to be quite bare of
soldiery, lest suspicion should arise and Paris receive the alarm; but
once well past Chalons, the hundred miles and more accomplished, small
posts of cavalry, mostly German mercenaries, were to be placed, upon one
pretext and another, at intervals along the way, until at _Varennes_
Bouillé’s own son should meet the fugitives with his troop, and eastward
from Varennes the remaining miles to Montmédy, which was their goal,
they would need no special guard; they would be in the thick of
Bouillé’s army.
The first of these small posts was one of German mercenary _Hussars_
under the Duc de Choiseul, a nephew of the old statesman of Louis XV. It
was to expect the King at Somme-Vesle at _one_—giving as an excuse for
its presence escort for a convoy of bullion—but an exact keeping of the
time-table was urgently necessary, for it would be perilous for the
foreign troops to hang about indefinitely in these eastern villages.
It was at the lonely post-house Somme-Vesle, then, that the first
soldiers were to be looked for by the King; there, as it had been
arranged, the first Hussars would be seen, posted upon the lonely road;
these would close up immediately behind the carriage for a body-guard.
With each succeeding stage of the shortening trial troop after troop
would fall in and join that barrier and increase it, Dragoons at Ste.
Menehould, more at Clermont, till, before the evening gathered, the
Royal Family would have between them and the National Government of
Paris or the young patriots of the villages of the Marne, a guard of
their own soldiers, an escort warding them into the heart of the
frontier army that was to be their salvation.
The hour passed quickly—it was not yet six—when the King, who had
watched with his old interest in maps every detail of the road, and had
followed it with a guide-book upon his knee, heard the brake upon the
wheels; a slight descent ended, and the carriage drew up. A long
farmhouse, with stable-door and garden-gate shut tight and with no head
at a window, stood, French fashion, all along the kerb. They looked from
the window, noted the desertion of the fields, the silence of the house,
and the broad paved way, and asked with a growing anxiety, what they
feared to know, the name of the place.
The third Gentleman of the Guard, Valory, who had at each stage gone
before them to have the horses ready, came to the door and told them it
was the posting-house of Somme-Vesle: of soldiers not a sign; a few
peasants, slouching off to the fields.
* * * * *
Long before the King, with his delays of loyalty and his breakdowns, had
reached Chalons, just upon three, under that veiled sky and upon a dip
of that monotonous, dead straight, white road, close to the bridge and
posting-house of Somme-Vesle, half a troop of Hussars were up and
mounted. They were Germans, but their foreign gutturals were not heard
by the sleepy ostlers of the place, for, in some disorder, the little
knot of mounted men were at attention. At their head, upon his finer
horse, sat Choiseul, and with him Aubriot, a lieutenant of Dragoons, and
old Goguelat, used to commissariat, to organisation, and to plans. They
pointed westward up the Chalons road, looking along its right line
between the parallel perspective of its trees. Choiseul especially
strained his eyes to see whether no rising dust or no two distant specks
of a large vehicle and a cabriolet following it might announce the
advent of the King, but there was no sign upon the road.
He had so sat his horse for hours.
It was eleven when his light travelling-carriage had trotted up to the
stables,[22] his German soldiery had joined him before noon, and by one,
as the time-table of the plan had been given him, the berline should
have been there.
Footnote 22:
He had come from Paris, where he had made the last arrangements, and
with him and in his carriage he had brought Leonard, the Queen’s
hair-dresser. This garrulous fellow he had sent forward down the road
to Montmédy, and his mysterious hints at important secrets did much to
spread the news. See also Appendix G.
An anxious hour of waiting brought no news. Two o’clock passed. Yet
another hour of growing anxiety upon the soldiers’ part, of growing
suspicion in the inn. And now it was three o’clock; but there was no
sign upon the road.
Already the hoofs of these fifty mercenaries had been clattering and
pawning for three hours and more round and about the long white wall of
the posting-house. The ostlers, the few and sleepy ostlers, were not
fond of such visitors, nor were the peasants in the fields.
Choiseul had much to think about beside the punctuality of the fugitives
as he sat his horse there straining his eyes along the road. The people
of the place had asked him familiarly, in the new revolutionary manner,
what this body of horse was for; they might have added, “Why was it
foreign, mercenary horse?” Such a question was certainly implied.... Why
had an army of the frontiers thrown out a point of its cavalry-screen
towards its base against all the known rules of war, instead of towards
the frontier which it was to line and defend?... If it was for orders or
for manœuvring, why did they stick close to this one posting-house?...
Troops, even unsuspected troops, had been known to commandeer
food-stuffs without payment: and the peasantry were sullen.
All these things were passing in the minds of the French peasants there,
and Choiseul, who was also French, knew what was passing in their minds.
There was something more: the country-side was armed. The Revolution had
made of every village a tiny, ill-trained but furnished military post;
of every market-town a section, with two guns and a team of gunners; of
every city a rough volunteer garrison, with ammunition and with arms,
without discipline for a campaign, but in a momentary scuffle possessed
of the power to wound.
Had even this been all, what Choiseul did might not have been done; but
it was not all. There had always been present in the minds of these
officers upon the frontier the permanent indecision and fears of the
King. The date of the flight had been postponed and postponed. Choiseul
himself, who had been in Paris with the King twenty-four hours before,
was aware of that indecision and those fears.
It was three, and half-past three, and later; it was four—and still
nothing appeared. The road still lay empty and silent; the posting-house
became, if possible, a trifle more curious; the group of peasantry
increased: the men were hustled. Why did not these foreign soldiers
unsaddle? What was the urgency? Choiseul had his reply ready, his casual
piece of news: “They were expecting treasure, and he was ordered to
furnish an escort.” Why, then, let them trot up the road to meet it!...
With every quarter of an hour the strain grew greater.
Four o’clock passed, and half-past four. It was for Choiseul to judge
exactly (as it has been for how many another soldier commanding
thousands where he commanded fifty) beyond what point resistance would
mean disaster. From time to time a peasant crossed a distant field
bearing perhaps a message to his armed peers; from time to time an
ostler would ask a question of one of the Hussars and disappear, bearing
perhaps a message of his own, and Choiseul thought, “If the country is
raised behind me in Argonne, the King is cut off and lost!”
Among so many Germans a French soldier was easier of approach. The
post-master of the place, lounging by, made up to speak to Aubriot. What
he said was this: “So the King is expected to pass?... At least, the
people are saying so....” He sauntered away.
It was near five. By Choiseul’s watch it was a trifle later still. The
situation could no longer be borne, and the moment for retreat had come.
Ten to one the King had not started after all....
As Choiseul left he saw that fresh horses were put into his
travelling-carriage; he ordered into it his valet and the Queen’s
hair-dresser, Leonard, whom he had brought from Paris; he gave them a
note which said that it had been necessary for him to abandon
Somme-Vesle, and that, moreover, he doubted if the Treasure would come
that day. He himself was going to rejoin the General, and new orders
must be issued on the morrow. This note was to be _shown_ to the officer
in command at Ste. Menehould, and _given_ to the officer in command at
Clermont. Thence they were to post for Montmédy. This note written and
handed, open, to his valet and Leonard, Choiseul saw the carriage go;
and when he had seen it well away, he turned rein, ordered his weary
Germans, and bent reluctantly eastward along the road which his command
had traversed that morning.
So they rode back till, at Orbeval, Choiseul took a guide, crossed
Neuville Bridge and plunged into Argonne, lest by following the high
road right into Ste. Menehould they might raise that alarm which at
every cost it was his duty to allay.... In vain. The country was already
awake: that rumour, that something in the air which no historian has
ever traced, had preceded him, and a woman in Ste. Menehould had said to
a soldier in a tavern that “the King would pass that way.”
In this way was the post of Somme-Vesle abandoned. It was in the
neighbourhood of half-past five when the cavalry filed out and up the
slight eastern slope of the road. Just hidden by the brow of hill behind
them as they left the spot where they had waited it for so long, the
King’s berline had begun the last climb before the descent to the
post-house. Fifteen minutes economised on the Royal Family’s delays
would have saved them.
* * * * *
The berline waited, as it had waited so often that day; the horses were
changed in as humdrum a fashion. Within the carriage a doubt had fallen
on the fugitives.... It was a lonely house in a lonely dip of the plain
with a vast, straight, empty road rising upon either slope before it and
beyond. They drove on to Orbeval, but in a mood now changed; they passed
Orbeval and approached the long hill-forest of Argonne.
It was already full evening; the clouds upon the western horizon had
lifted; the reddening and descending sun shone for the first time that
day against the rise of the Argonne woodland ridge and upon the bare
rolling folds of corn-land and of mown pasture at its base.
Under the level shafts of that sunset the belated berline approached
Ste. Menehould. They passed the lonely tavern upon the height called “At
the Sign of the Moon”; they saw for a moment upon their left a mill not
yet grown famous—the mill of Valmy. The shadows lengthened, and just as
the sun disappeared they rattled full speed into the main square of the
town.
The green blinds were up to admit the cool of the evening. The Queen
looked from her window, without concealment, and saw the gossiping and
curious crowd which a French town collects upon its public place at the
end of day. She saw the soldiers—some of them, she thought, saluted; she
saw their officer. He came up and addressed her respectfully in his
garlic-accent of Bearn. He certainly saluted fully, and she bowed her
acknowledgment of the salute. She saw and heard no more, unless perhaps
she saw, on the King’s side and through the open window of it, a young
man still heavy with the swagger of the dragoons (for he had served) and
still insolent with the brave insolence of soldiers; clear in eye,
hooked in nose, bronzed, short, alert and, as it were, itching for
adventure. If she did see this figure, she saw it for but a moment: the
horses were in, the whips were cracking, the carriage was on the move:
he had thus for a moment passed her window, coming in from the fields,
where he had been mowing; he had passed for a moment, and was gone. It
was Drouet, the acting post-master of the place, and the son of the old
post-master. He had noted that the yellow coach was huge and heavy; he
had carelessly said to his postillions, “Don’t kill the cattle”; then he
had gone off: it was but a moment of time.
They were off, a top-heavy haystack of a thing, rolling full speed up
the hill beyond the river, and right into the advancing darkness. As
they went, rising high with the road, through the orchards and into the
forest and the hills, they heard, far behind them, one pistol-shot and
then another, the distant noise of a crowd, high voices, and the
shuffling of horse-hoofs. But the cries grew fainter, and they had soon
left all far behind. They gained the complete silence of the high wood,
under the stars. They began the ascent of Argonne.
But already in Ste. Menehould all was known. The girl who had said “It
was the King” was now but one of many. The popular Council had met, and
hardly had it met, and hardly had the crowd outside in the square
appreciated the rumour, when those came in from Neuville village who had
an hour or two before watched the movement of Choiseul and his Hussars,
and the retirement of the cavalry over the bridge of Neuville into the
forest seeking Varennes. Their report added certitude to the general
clamour: “Choiseul and his Hussars had hung about the posting-house of
Somme-Vesle for hours!” “They had taken a guide and were in the woods
behind Ste. Menehould at that moment.” The troops in Ste. Menehould
itself must have the same purpose. There was no doubt at all it was the
King. And to this news there was added news, that Choiseul and his
Hussars were keeping in touch with the main road, scouting back from
time to time, ready and watching.
The handful of cavalry at Ste. Menehould were French, not German. When
Leonard had passed through, half-an-hour before, and had shown
Choiseul’s note to the officer in command, that Captain had bid his men
unsaddle and take their ease. They were now filled with the evening’s
fraternity and wine. There was an attempt to gather them against the
towns-people. It failed. And as the twilight lessened one resolution
after another was taken in the Town Hall with the rapidity that marked
the action of the Revolution everywhere, from Paris to the smallest
village. The municipal drum beating and the tocsin noisy against the
hills, vote after vote proceeded. The Captain of the troop was arrested;
the troop itself disarmed. The despatch of a courier to pursue and
intercept the King was decided, and that courier chosen and named.
It was upon young Drouet, for his horsemanship and his courage, that the
choice fell. He took with him a companion, Guillaume, an inn-keeper,
such as he himself was; once a dragoon, as he himself had been. They
saddled the last two horses left in the stable and thundered off up the
long hill that rises from the town into Argonne, down the sharp ravine
of the Islettes, and onwards along the great eastern road—the road to
Metz—whither all thought the King was bound. An hour ahead of them on
that same road rattled the cabriolet and rolled the huge berline.
There was a moon, but the clouds covered her. The darkness of this, the
shortest night of the year, deepened for its brief hours, but there was
still a glow in the north as they neared, towards ten o’clock, the post
of Clermont. Drouet heard voices in the darkness before him; it was his
own postillions on their way back from the end of the stage, and Drouet
hailing them, heard that the travellers, when the relay horses were
harnessed, had given the order to leave the main Metz road and to turn
up northward to Varennes.
The military temper of this people! The halt had not lasted a moment,
but in the moment Drouet had formed his plan.
He had not, it seemed, a stern chase before him, a mere gallop up the
Metz road. The quarry had doubled, and along its track were Guards.
There were troops at Clermont as there had been at Ste. Menehould; there
would now be troops every few miles until the headquarters of the
treason should be reached; it was his business to warn the citizens
against Bouillé, to avoid the outposts of that commander, to cut by a
corner way across the elbow ahead of the royal carriages, to intercept
them and to thwart all. He took at once, therefore, to the wood upon his
left; he took it where now the railway most nearly approaches the road,
about half a mile beyond the level crossing, and plunged with his
companion into its long deep rides. He galloped up the steep to a farm
he knew upon the summit, risking holes and fallen trunks of trees. Once
there he followed, along the crest of the ridge, a green lane of
immemorial age that runs along the summit. It was well past ten. Up on
the ridge of the forest these two men galloped steadily and hard through
the night, with high trees like a wall on either side. Three hundred
feet below, upon the open plain that skirts the wood, the berline swayed
at speed along the paved high road. So the race ran. The fugitives slept
unwarned and deeply as they drew on to Varennes through the silent
darkness. On the hills above, with every beat of the hoof upon the turf,
the two riders neared and they neared. Upon who should win that race
depended the issue of Civil War.
On the issue of that race all the future depended: all France and all
Europe. The riders had eleven miles of rough woodland in the dark to
cover, an hour at most for their ride. Below them on the high road, with
a start of two miles and more, their quarry was hurrying, rolling to
Varennes. If the wheels and the smooth road beat them, it was Austria
over the frontier, France without government, defeat, and the end of
their new world; but if they in the woodlands beat the wheels on the
smooth road, then the Revolution was saved.
Through a clearing in the midst of the tangled undergrowth the two
riders saw before them, as they still rode furiously, the glimmer of a
known white stone, a landmark; they sheered down a ride to the right:
the wood ended abruptly, and they saw below them the lights of
Varennes—one or two at that late hour, and the twinkle of the town lamps
in the square of the town. The grasses of the forest were dull no longer
under the anger of their ride: they clattered on a high road for a
moment, next in the narrow street of Blainville Hill. They came down
upon the bridge head and saw the dark line of the river; they halted the
sweating beasts and strained to listen. They heard no sound, except the
panting of their mounts; there was no rumbling of wheels, no distant
approach of riders, no noise of cavalry. They had been beaten, and the
berline had already passed the town and its one bridge—or the wheels had
not yet rumbled in, and they had won. It struck eleven as they waited
so.
[Illustration:
Sketch Map
TO ILLUSTRATE DROUET’S RIDE
]
Guillaume crossed the bridge to the main square to see what he could
find, whether indeed they had come too late, and whether between them
and the fugitives was now cast abroad that compact screen of cavalry
which had failed at Somme-Vesle and at Ste. Menehould. Drouet stayed on
the hither side of the bridge, inquiring among the taverns of the upper
town if any had seen a large travelling-coach go by. It seems that no
one had noticed such a thing.... Yet the berline was there.
He saw it suddenly, up the steep hill; he saw the two great lights of
it, and he heard the postillions protesting that the stage was finished,
that they were not bound to go down the hill, that their mistress at
Clermont needed the horses early next morning for the carrying of her
hay. But even in the midst of the discussion, though he could not see
the horses in the darkness under the houses, he could hear the skid upon
the wheels, and he knew that the heavy vehicle had begun to move. He ran
down at once to a little inn called “The Golden Arm,” burst in upon a
group of rustic politicians, and warned them in one word that a large
carriage would next moment go braked and sliding past: that carriage
would hold, he said, the King, their public King—in flight for the
frontier.
* * * * *
The military temper of this people! Here were a handful of men in the
black darkness of a now moonless night, with not five minutes in which
to make the decision that should transform the whole polity in which
they lived. Yet they saw in a flash—and Drouet saw clearest of them
all—first that the high town was not occupied with troops, and that
therefore the commanding officers and those awaiting the King must be in
the low town beyond the river; secondly, that but one communication
connected the King and his rescuers, and that that communication was the
narrow bridge across the Aire, the river of Varennes; thirdly, that they
could gather in those few minutes no forces, even of the smallest,
wherewith to hold the bridge, and that the least noise, until the bridge
was held, would give the alarm.
There stood at the bridge head a great van for the removal of furniture,
packed, with its pole upon the ground, waiting for the dawn, when it
should be harnessed and start upon its road. In a moment they had drawn
it across their end of the narrow bridge and blocked the approach. In
the same moment certain of their companions had warned the officials of
the town, and these, especially Sauce, the Procurator, saw to the
rousing of every house upon the hither side of the river.
All this was done with such rapidity that the officials were astir, the
bridge barricaded, and two men already armed, before the royal carriage
had skidded half-way down the hundred yards of hill. At that point an
archway running under an old church blocked the road; at that archway
the two armed men posted themselves, and just as the outrider of the
fugitives had come into the narrow pass, the challenge was given which
ended the hopes of the Monarchy. For the two sentries thus improvised
challenged, the outrider dismounted voluble, the horses of the cabriolet
were thrown back upon their haunches, the huge coach and six behind it
slithered somehow to a stop upon the steep road, and the Queen suddenly
realised that the crash and the disaster had come. She heard the threat
to fire. She looked from her window, as the Duchess fumbled for the
passports, and uttered one of those phrases memorable in history for
their anti-climax: she begged the gentlemen who had stopped them to go
through the formalities quickly, _as she was desirous of reaching the
end of her journey as quickly as might be_.
The two armed men had increased now to eight; to this little group was
added a German soldier or two wandering aimlessly upon leave,
uncommanded and perfectly drunk. The ladies in the cabriolet had got out
and had been thrust into the inn; but even when matters had gone so far,
that incertitude and fear of responsibility, which had saved the family
thrice already in their flight, all but saved them again. The passports
seemed regular, and had it not been for the wild energy of Drouet, his
threats and his violence, the journey would have proceeded, the van
would have been rolled back from the bridge, the relay of horses in the
square of the lower town would have been harnessed, Bouillé’s own son,
who had been waiting in a hotel beyond the river all day and was waiting
there now in the dark expectant, would have accompanied them out of the
borough.... With the dawn, which was now not two hours off, the vanguard
of Bouillé’s cavalry would have ensured their safety for ever. But
Drouet stormed, shouted perpetually the words “High treason!” and gained
all that he desired, which was delay. “If there were any doubt,” said
Sauce, “to wait for morning would do no harm. The horses needed rest;
the night was dark.” He lifted the lantern in his hand and put it
closely and curiously into the face of the Queen: “You must get down,
Madame; you must get down.” He would not endorse the passport until the
morning.
Even during the few words of this conversation, the crowd had continued
to increase, and with the crowd the armed men. It occurred to the King
to command; he did it paternally, with a “Now then,” and a “Come, come,”
bidding the postillions go forward. Nothing happened. He looked out of
the window and saw that the postillions had dismounted, and there came
again, now from a great number of levelled muskets, the threat to fire.
There was but one faint and last chance against discovery: to pretend no
more than an inconvenience, and to do as they were bid.
The family got down wearily (for twenty-four mortal hours they had been
cramped upon that journey), entered the house of Sauce the Procurator
just opposite, and waited for the morning. Meanwhile in the street
outside the clamour of Ste. Menehould was repeated, the tocsin sounded
and the drum, the men of the town armed by tens and by hundreds, and at
last all the population, children and old men and women, were crowding
the street and filling it with perpetual noise.
It was not yet light when the Hussars, Choiseul and his Hussars, came
blundering out of the wood. Mercenary troops have great advantages. If
the troops are foreign the advantages are greater still; but a
disadvantage attaches to such troops, which is the need of interpreters.
They could understand nothing of what was going on around them; they
could not understand the speech that was made urging them to save
“their” King.
They were ordered to charge, and did so, clearing the street, and they
formed after the short charge in front of the mean house which held the
royal family. There could be no further doubt in the townsmen’s minds;
it was indeed the King.
The Hussars and the King and the Queen, their gaolers, the Municipality,
all were in a general agreement that with the dawn the Royal Family
should continue its journey. But meanwhile that incalculable element,
the populace, swelled out of all knowledge. When the first light showed
in the streets far more than the population of Varennes was there. They
poured in from the country-sides; the men going to the fields to catch
the grass with their scythes before the dew was off it heard the news
and came; those coming in for market to the lower town heard the news
and came; the Men of the Forest came. And the rumour that Bouillé was on
the march with his army, at the head of the hired German cavalry, did
but increase the crowd.
It was full day. For a second time under the increasing menace the
Hussars were ordered to charge. They hesitated; and against them, now in
rank, were the armed men of the local National Guard. The sun had risen.
Goguelat tried to force his way forward, trusting that if he did so his
Hussars would follow. But these looked on in a kindly German way,
bewildered, and the officer of the National Guard shot Goguelat, who
fell from his horse. The crowd, already morally impassable for its
determination and its arms, was now physically so. All down the street
to the bridge and all round, up the courts and alleys, one could see
nothing but the crowd; and the proportion of Militia uniforms among
them, the number of bayonets that showed above their shoulders,
increased as the hours passed, as four o’clock struck, and five, and
six. The King’s green coat had been seen a moment at the window; the
cheers that met it (for they were cheers, not groans) were now swelled
by the voices of some ten thousand armed men, and already the cry was
raised “for Paris.” ... Already had the scouts of Bouillé’s Uhlans
appeared far off upon the sky-line of the eastern hills.
He could never have passed the bridge in time. Nothing but artillery
could have cleared the town. The general and popular decision was made
and grew; no discipline, no individual command could meet it. The cry of
“Paris” filled the air, now with a meaningless noise, now with a comic
rhythm, such as impatient audiences make in theatres or soldiers on the
march. There were negotiations, but with every mention of “Montmédy” the
shout of “Paris” grew louder.
The couple of guns, which the National Guards of the town were allowed
by law, had at their head, as was only right, a gunner. It was this
gunner who brought the good news out at last and said that the King had
consented to return.
By seven the whole swarm of thousands, with the berline wedged in the
midst, were off back westward again upon the Paris road, a vast dust
about them, songs, and—what is more curious—speed, but a speed which was
soon crushed under the pressure of such a multitude. As they lost the
horizons of Varennes, the last sight they saw behind them was the main
body of Bouillé’s German cavalry as it came over and formed upon the
hill beyond the river, baffled. By ten, in a violent heat of the sun,
the throng had crawled to Clermont; the first, the only doubtful and the
fatal stage of the capture and the return was accomplished.
* * * * *
What had happened that the King’s mind should change? For all those
hours in Varennes every official had desired the continuation of the
journey; all the “responsibles” had withstood the growing anger of the
populace, when suddenly Radet, the gunner, had announced a capitulation,
and, almost as suddenly, within the half-hour before seven, after all
those dark and morning hours of delay, the King had consented to return.
What had happened was this: Two men had come with authority from the
Council of Paris and from the Parliament—Bayon and Romeuf were their
names; they had reached Varennes in the morning, the first exultant, the
second reluctant; each came burdened with that Authority by which the
French live, and both had entered the house of Sauce. The Queen had
stormed, and had dashed their written message of Authority to the
ground, but even the reluctant Romeuf had picked it up and laid it again
reverently before her. Authority by which the French five lay now in the
National Parliament. It was this which compelled the King. To this he
had yielded.
* * * * *
The military temper of this people!
The Parliament learnt the flight of the King at about eight or nine
o’clock in the morning following that midnight adventure. Bayon was
commissioned to “pursue, capture, and report” in the forenoon of that
day, the 21st of June. He started eleven hours behind the King. The
King, driven by Fersen, had passed the barriers of Paris, as we have
seen, just after midnight of the 20th.
It was close on noon when Bayon had shot like an arrow through the Porte
St. Martin, galloping hell and leather along the great frontier road.
Louis was at Chaintry then, _fifty miles_ ahead. An hour after Bayon,
Romeuf, who had been sent also, followed upon another trail: he was
royalist and hated the job, but he obeyed orders; at last he caught the
right scent from witnesses and rumour, and was thundering off with a
heavy heart, but a soldier, down the same way.
Bayon rode and he rode, a ride to test his breeches. Seventy miles,
eighty miles is a ride for any man. Bayon, relaying at every post and
covering, in between, his fifteen miles an hour or more, galloped into
Chaintry just before six in the evening, and there at Chaintry—where at
mid-day Louis and Marie Antoinette had graciously revealed themselves to
old Lagny—Bayon found a suspicious man, one De Briges, very evidently
employed to follow and to aid the fugitives. Bayon dismounted, held that
man prisoner, and dined, but not before he had sent on, by his written
Authority, Lagny’s boy helter-skelter up the road to rouse Chalons
beyond.
Romeuf was less speedy, but a fine rider for all that. He started, as I
have said, an hour behind Bayon; he reached Chaintry (on account of
missing the scent at starting) two hours behind him, when Bayon, having
dined and sent forward that messenger, was already off in a carriage to
Chalons following the trail. They met at Chalons—a town all informed and
astir—thenceforward the two together—Bayon eager, Romeuf in despair for
his friends (but discipline constrained him), drove, not rode, past the
bonfire glare and howling of Ste. Menehould, all night through Argonne,
till by morning they came—with their Authority—to Varennes.
But in this day and night of hard-riding Frenchmen, a third must be
mentioned: Mangin, druggist and lawyer of Varennes, had galloped from
Varennes at dawn, had left his horse collapsed at Clermont, had relayed
and relayed, still riding, urging back to Paris to give news to the
Parliament.
He passed in a flash the carriage of Bayon, careless of it; long before
six he was at Ste. Menehould, changed horse, was off to Orbeval, changed
horse, was off to Somme-Vesle, changed horse, was off to Chalons, riding
and riding hard, nearly fifty miles and not yet eight o’clock. He eat
and drank and mounted, re-horsed, and on: what skin! All the long road
all day, gallop and change and gallop under the sun: twelve hours in the
saddle when he came to the deep Marne, sixteen when he dashed into
Bondy.... A companion who had met him rode on to share his triumph....
Mangin shook him off.... The suburbs of Paris ... the barrier—eighteen
hours of it before he dismounted and staggered into the Assembly! Lord!
what a ride!
It was ten at night; the hundreds of candles guttered and glimmered over
a handful of exhausted men upon the benches of the Parliament; Mangin
handed his message to the Chair, and his ride was done. Good Lord! what
a ride!
* * * * *
Beauharnais was in the Chair: remarkable for this, that his widow
married Napoleon.
Beauharnais read the message: “The King is taken!”
As Parliaments go that Parliament was drastic and immediate; it came to
its conclusion in two hours—a space of time that meant thirty miles to a
courier. It nominated, somewhat after midnight, three commissioners:
Barnave, Pétion, Maubourg—of the centre, of the left, and of the
right—and with them Damas for military orders. Each young, each growing
in fame—Barnave and Pétion already famous—they left together with the
morning.
It was Thursday, Corpus Christi. Every village of the Marne valley was
garlanded and upon holiday, the church doors stood open to the humming
air of midsummer, the peasants, most of them at games, some few in
procession or coming out from Mass upon that great Feast, made every
stage of the road alive; as the sun rose to noon, the population of the
villages on either slope of the river valley poured in like rivulets
down the chalky lanes, swelling the mob upon the great highway. By the
afternoon the throng had so largely increased that the carriage of the
Parliamentary Commissioners could no longer go at the trot; it was
walked, as was walked, surrounded by a larger, dustier, much fiercer
crowd, that other carriage, the berline, which was crawling to meet them
across the flat miles of Champagne.
The hills grew higher, the dale narrower, as their slow progress brought
them past Dormans, and gradually, with the multitude about them, to
Mareuil. The setting sun was on the famous vineyards and on the fringe
of forest far above: they were anxious perhaps whether they would meet
the returning fugitives while yet it was light, and so be spared the
risk of confusion and perhaps disaster in the darkness.
But that meeting could not now be far off. Rumours first, then couriers,
going before the gradual advance of the King’s captors, announced his
advent, and the three Commissioners wondered what they would see.
Reports had already moved them, true details in the midst of much fable,
of invasion and of fancied massacres and fires ... the mob at Chalons,
the sleepless night of consultation, the irruption of a violent militia
from Rheims, the terrible slow march on the Epernay road with its jeers
and anger and threats of death; the violent jostle at Epernay itself—the
fear that the prisoners might never reach the capital. They had heard
composedly of these things, with clearer and clearer detail as the later
passages of the long agony were given: they were now very near the
meeting.
The hot day had fallen to its end, and evening was come quite pure over
the high plateaus that bound the valley; it was darker upon the
water-meadows of the valley floor when they saw before them, a long way
off, the dust, and heard the noise, when they came near and smelt the
incalculable crowd that roared round the carriages of the King.
The advent of the Commissioners of Parliament threw an abrupt silence
over the French, ever avid for worship: these three dissimilar men, one
of whom alone approached greatness, were taken as transubstantiate with
the National power. In such an attitude, near the doors of the berline,
in the centre of the compact thousands that were massed, hats off and
reverent in gaze, between the hillside and the river, Pétion read the
Decree of the Assembly.
With excuses upon their part and voluble instance from the King, Pétion
and Barnave managed to get themselves into the carriage, for the Queen
took the Dauphin on her knee, the Princess stood before her aunt, and
Pétion, decorously straightened between the Duchesse de Tourzel and
Madame Elizabeth, faced Barnave, who sat, more generously large, between
the King and Queen.
[Illustration:
PÉTION
]
At last the Commissioners could watch that driven group. Three nights
without sleep, two of agony; three days, one of flight, two of
intolerable heat, insult, violence, and a snail’s-pace progress, had
left them feverish, and yet—as sufferers are when all is quite
abnormal—interested in tiny things, and careless. Their linen was dirty
in the extreme—the Queen’s grey dress stained, torn, and roughly mended;
the King’s brown coat a very dusty brown; but their faces were
clean—they had washed at Epernay—and they were not unlively.
It got darker and darker. The noise of the crowd outside calmed a
little, though from time to time a great rustic head would lumber in at
the window to stare at royalty. The Queen, who had talked rapidly from
the moment she had seen her deliverers, Madame Elizabeth, who had caught
and pressed Pétion’s arm and clung in a foolish ecstasy of terror, kept
up a ceaseless chatter—and the King, against his wont, joined in. They
had not meant to leave the country—far from it. “No” (from the King); “I
said so positively. Did I not?” (appealing to his wife). “We are really
anxious about the three Guardsmen. We went to Mass at Chalons this
morning—but it was constitutional, I assure you.” Only once did the
reserve of an earlier (and a later) time appear upon the Queen: it was
when Barnave hinted that one of the men on the box was Swedish, when
Pétion added that the man who had driven the coach from the Tuileries
was a Swede—called?... he pretended to hesitate about the name: the
Queen had said, “I am not in the habit of learning hackney coachmen’s
names,” and, after saying it, was, for perhaps the first time in two
hours, silent. Then she forgave them—forgave Barnave at least—and talked
on in lower tones. She was getting to like Barnave. The little boy,
playing with the buttons on Barnave’s coat, made out the letters on
them: “It says ‘We will live free or die.’” He was proud to read such
small letters so well. He repeated the phrase, but no one of his elders
answered him.
Pétion, upon the back-seat, felt an arm upon his in the darkness. He
remembered the same arm as it held him close when he had met the berline
two hours before. He saw under the moonlight the white and small hand of
Madame Elizabeth lying near his, and it occurred to him[23] that this
very pious, very narrow, very distant girl either suddenly loved him or
feigned love in order to corrupt his republican ardour—for he was
already a republican.
Footnote 23:
He has recorded the sensation at length, in print.
It is objected with indignation that women of birth do not so demean
themselves with country lawyers. The indignation is fatuous, but the
objection is well found. Women of birth have indeed so profound a
repugnance for his class that even the bait of a great fortune, though
it often compels them to a marriage, will hardly overcome the loathing,
and if they must yield to passion it is more commonly to favour a groom
than a solicitor. But this woman had no such frailties. She was saintly,
foolish, well bred and bewildered. She may have made herself as pleasant
a companion as it was in her power to be, for by such easy arts the
rich, when they fall, will always try to appease their conquerors. More
than that she certainly did not do. The Queen knew better in what way to
command her captors; she fixed upon Barnave, and within the first day of
their companionship she had drawn him from that other camp into hers.
They slept at Dormans—so much as they could sleep with the mob howling
all night in the square outside. Next day, Friday, the third of that
return, the fourth of their martyrdom, they continued the Paris road.
The day was yet hotter than the yesterday had been, and the violent and
the out-o’-works from Paris began to join the crowd. At evening the
tower of Meaux stood up before them against the red sky.
There, at Meaux, Marie Antoinette took a turn with Barnave; long, quiet
looks, a familiar and continued conversation, a stroll in the garden
alone and decent confidences during the night, finally captured Barnave.
He was, from the moment of their return to Paris, the Queen’s.
He suffered no conversion in opinion, he did not forget his early
political principle, he simply became indifferent to it and a servant of
something that lived and suffered and exercised also upon some few—and
he was one—a charm, perhaps of voice, perhaps of carriage, but, at any
rate, of sex.
He worked henceforward absolutely for Marie Antoinette. He achieved so
little that his name will hardly appear again in this record of her
fall, but his name should be retained as a proof of what she still was
to men.
He has long been accused of treason. He would have told you that he
betrayed a formula, a phrase, to be the more loyal to a soul and body
which he had come, as by a revelation, to understand. But Barnave was
wrong: not to bodies or things, but to ideas, are men rightly subject:
religion resides in dogma: loyalty must express itself in a creed, and
the Word is God. These reasonings against reason, these preferences of
the thing to the idea, are dangerous to honour.
[Illustration:
BARNAVE
]
Henceforward Barnave was near her always: advised her secretly, wrote to
dictation from her lips, ran risk and peril, and at last died by the
same hands which had killed her also upon the scaffold.
This bishop’s palace at Meaux, the hall that Bossuet had known, was
their last resting-place. The sun was well up, it was already warm when
they left the town for the slow stretch of thirteen hours to Paris.
The weather would not change. The same intense and blinding heat pursued
and tortured them; but it was now less tolerable than ever, both from
the length to which the strain had been spun out, and from the
increasing crowds which lined the old paved road in a wider and wider
margin as they neared the capital. The flat hedgeless fields seemed
covered with men—as the prisoners saw it through their low windows—to
the horizon. The murmur beyond had swelled into a sort of permanent
roar, which mixed with the songs and cries of the few hundred that still
kept pace with the carriages, and, now that they had left the valley of
the Marne and entered the dry plain that bounds Paris to the north, the
drought and the dust were past bearing. The approach of evening afforded
them no relief. At the gate of the city, where at least they might
expect the contrast of the familiar streets and the approach to repose,
they were disappointed. The driver had orders to skirt the barrier round
to the western side. So for some two hours more this calvary dragged on:
the ragged marchers themselves were exhausted, many clung to the sides
of the coach. Some few had climbed upon its roof and jeered and
threatened those three Guards, who sat silent in their yellow liveries
not replying, awaiting their chance of escape at the end of this endless
journey.
When the last slope into the town was climbed, the travellers, as they
crossed the flat summit where is now the Triumphal Arch of Napoleon,
could see at last before them, beyond lines of trees and about the
innumerable heads, the windows of their palace sending back the evening
light in a blaze, and to the left that huge oblong roof of the
riding-school where sat the Parliament.
Meanwhile, as the berline passed the barrier, the bellowing and the
songs, the tramping and the press of moving poverty, white with dust and
parched to drunkenness, ceased suddenly. It was like a stream of anarchy
breaking against that curious homogeneity of attitude and clear purpose
which marked the capital upon every principal day of the Revolution and
cut it off sharply from the provinces and even the suburbs around.
This new and purely Parisian crowd which they now entered, silent,
dark-coated and with covered heads—largely of the middle class—thronged
all the length of the Champs Élysées and packed the Place de la
Concorde. The myriad fixed eyes of it saw the convoy show black against
the western fight upon the summit of the hill; they watched it creeping
down the avenue between the double fine of soldiery, each section of
which, as the King passed, reversed arms as at a funeral soldiers
reverse arms.
There was no sound. The spontaneous discipline which makes Paris a sort
of single thing, living and full of will, so controlled this vast
assemblage that neither a cry was raised nor a hat lifted. The note of
the whole was silence.
During the full half-hour of that long approach down the hill this
silence endured; the carriage was at the gates of the Tuileries Gardens,
had entered them. Within the riding-school, the _manège_ where sat the
Parliament, to benches that rapidly emptied as the curiosity of the
Deputies drew them away, Fursy was droning out a report upon fortified
places of the first, the second, and the third class. Outside, the crowd
still denser but silent as ever, the berline passed, and the sections
saluted—a reversed salute, on either side; it was within a furlong of
its goal when, from a platform outside the Parliament building, a young
member of the Royalist right, drawing himself well up that he might be
observed, lifted his hat and very gravely and pronouncedly made
obeisance to the Crown.
The spell was broken. There was a scuffle, a hubbub, a general war; the
slowly-moving crowd crested into weapons as a deep swell at sea will
crest into foam. The postillions of the berline urged their horses; a
hundred yards to go, and the hedge of soldiery was forced and the mob
was upon the carriage. The three Guardsmen sat still untouched, with
death upon them; but the horses floundered through the deafening cries
and strugglers, trampling and rearing; the great vehicle was hauled and
piloted in; the wrought-iron gates clanged behind it. It was past seven,
and the journey was ended.
A week had gone. On Monday night they had watched with Fersen; all
Tuesday fled; on Wednesday night and morning suffered at Varennes, and
in the slow drag-back to Chalons; on Thursday at Epernay met the
Commissioners; all Friday suffered their captivity till Meaux was
reached—and now, as the light of Saturday began to fall, the hunting was
over.
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