Marie Antoinette

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.

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.

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.

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.