The last days of the French monarchy

What he spoke in his simple, good-natured, rather thick voice was, for those who heard it, enormous. His first words raised the issue directly, before men had well realized the shock—the royal authority was advising a reversal of all that had been done in the six days:

“I thought, gentlemen, that I had done all in my power for the good of my subjects.... The States General” [not the National Assembly] “have been open now near two months, and they are not yet agreed upon the preliminaries of their business.... It is my duty, it is a duty which I owe to the common weal, and to my realm and to myself, to end these divisions.... I come to repress whatever has been attempted against the laws.”

He sat down, and every phrase in the five minutes or so of the declaration drawn up for him had seemed to the Commons and their partizans a challenge.

The king’s face, if witnesses may be trusted, showed some surprise. There is an air in assemblies which can be felt, though not defined, and the dense rows in black at the end of the hall were hostile.

Barentin came up the steps of the throne and knelt, as custom demanded, then turned and said in a loud voice, “The king orders you to be covered.”

Bailly put on his hat, sundry of his Commons followed his example. The privileged orders for some reason made no such gesture. In the passions of the moment it was thought that they deliberately insulted the third order, as though not caring for the privilege of remaining covered before the king, if the Commons were to share that privilege. At any rate, Bailly nervously uncovered again, and those who had first followed his example followed it once more. There was a little laughter, a little subdued challenging. They ceased as the articles of the king’s main declaration—Necker’s document—were read for him by his minister.

There were twenty-five of them; each was short, and their delivery no great matter in time. But in effect they were capital. They maintained the separation of the three orders. They broke the unity of the National Assembly. They permitted common sessions only to debate questions which were common to all three.

Louis spoke again for a moment. Next were read the thirty-five articles Necker meant for a “liberal” constitution to the nation.

Those who have attended the ritual of assemblies know how superficial and imperfect is the effect of such a preliminary single reading. Men strain their ears for this point and for that, but they do not grasp the details of what has been put before them. What reaches from the lips of the reader to his audience is not, as in book-work, a precise and complete plan; it is only a general effect. Those thirty-five articles, droned out in the official accent, liberally as many of them were interpreted upon a further study, tolerably co-ordinated as they may have seemed to Necker and to those who drafted them in the clique of the council-chamber, were taken by the Commons as a direct challenge. And the Commons were right. The French Revolution was not permitted for politicians’ work of this kind. Flame is not made for pap. Yet challenging as Necker’s futilities were to the ardour of the time, it was not they that determined the gravity of that short hour. What determined it was the last and third speech of the king.

Louis rose for the third time at the conclusion of this reading, and in brief sentences told them they had heard his will. He reminded them that they could do nothing without his specific approbation; he used the famous phrase that, if he were abandoned in his enterprise, “he would alone carry out the good of his peoples.” His last sentence was this:

“I order you, gentlemen, to separate at once, and to-morrow to come each of you to the place set apart for your respective orders, there to resume your debates. To this effect I have ordered the Grand Master of Ceremonies to prepare the places where you are to meet.”

During each brief interlude of the king’s own speaking all had preserved a profound attention. During the reading of the articles there had been now and then a slight applause, especially from certain of the nobles at the article in favour of the old feudal dues, and to that applause there had come isolated cries of “Silence!” from the Commons. Nothing else had disturbed the ease, the dignity, and the rapidity of this one hour pregnant with war: one hour; for it was eleven when the king first entered; as he rose to dismiss them and leave the hall it was noon.

When the king had passed behind the glorious, roof-high curtains of the throne, and so gone out, there was a noise of men moving.

All the three hundred of the nobility rose and followed him. A great number of the clergy—most of that order—trooped after. The hall was left desolate in its centre; most desolate where its great empty dais, splendid with the purple drapings and the embroidered lilies of gold, and the empty throne dominated the floor below.

The far end and the dark aisles behind the columns were still filled with the Commons in a crowd. Some remained still seated, some few more had risen; all were keeping silent, and only a very few crept shamefacedly along the walls toward the doors.

With the Commons there now mixed such of the clergy as had dared to remain, and not a few of the public audience; of these last many lingered curiously, hanging on in the corners and sides of the place, watching for what was to come.

One could not see from that hall any part of the life without. Its windows were high. Its principal light was from the glazed, oval skylight in the roof, covered and tempered by a veil of cloth. One could not hear the crowd which had gathered outside in the broad avenue to see the king and his coaches go by, and which remained in great numbers to attend the exit of the Commons when these should leave. That inner place was isolated. But the seven or eight hundred men standing at bay therein could feel all about them the great mass of soldiery upon the heights in the woods, the regiments marching in from the frontiers, the counter-gatherings of mobs and of armed civilians down the valley in Paris, two hours away—all the expectancy of arms.

Workmen entered to remove the hangings and to dismantle the hall. Still the Commons kept their places, as yet undecided; no general decision taken, none proposed; but yet the mass of them unmoving, and by their mere unmoving refusing the command of the crown.

It was at this moment, before as yet the artisans had begun their business of ladders and hammering, that there came out from the robing-room and from behind the cloths of the throne a figure with which the ceremony of the States General had already rendered them familiar: it was young Dreux Brézé, elegant, a trifle effeminate, little more than a boy. He carried his white wand of the master of ceremonies, as he had carried it when the session opened, and his person was, by the costume of his office, all gold and plumes and many diamonds.

He performed his simple duty: he came up to Bailly, the president, and said:

“Sir, you heard the order of the king?”

Bailly answered in silence, while men craned forward to hear:

“Sir, the Assembly stands adjourned only by its own vote. I cannot disperse it until it has debated upon that adjournment.” A pompous rigmarole enough, but thick with coming years.

Said young Brézé:

“Am I to give that to the king as your reply?”

And Bailly answered:

“Yes.”

Then, turning to his colleagues, Bailly had begun to give his reasons to them, when he found striding up to his side, and facing Brézé, the heavy vigour of Mirabeau. It was Mirabeau, so striding up, who in his powerful voice interposed. With no official right to mandate, he spoke most famous words, of which tradition has made a varied and doubtful legend, but which were in substance these:

“Go tell those that sent you we are here by the will of the nation.” He added either that force alone (of bayonets or what-not) could drive the Commons out, or, as some say, that such force was powerless.

Even as Mirabeau was speaking, Brézé, having had his answer from Bailly the official head of the Commons, thus recalcitrant, moved away. The custom of the court was on him, and he moved out backward with his white wand. Of the men who saw that piece of ritual, some said within themselves that the thing was a sign, and that sovereignty had passed from the Bourbons.

When he had gone, there was silence again for a little while. It was broken by the workmen setting to their labour of dismantling the hall. Bailly ordered them to cease, and they obeyed the order.

The genius of the French people for decision and for manifold co-operation appeared again and again throughout the Revolution, in debate, in street fighting, upon the battle-field. Nowhere did it appear more clearly than at this origin of all the movement.

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Without traditional procedure, with no waiting on initiative from above, immediate, spontaneous and collective action decided all.

One voice, proposing an adjournment until to-morrow, was voted down at once. Next Sieyès, with his firm, accurate mouth, pronounced a graven phrase expressing the mind of all: “You are to-day what you were yesterday.” Immediately, upon the motion of Camus, a man too legal, but well able to define, the Commons and such of the clergy as had remained with them voted unanimously their contradiction to the throne. They voted that all that they had passed, and all that they had done, they still maintained.

As the hands which had been raised everywhere to vote this motion fell again, the corner of French history was turned; and those curious to choose a precise point at which the outset of any matter may be fixed, should choose that moment, the fall of those hundreds of hands, for the origin of modern Europe, its vast construction, its still imperilled experiment.

One thing more remained to be done, though the general sense of those present did not at first grasp its necessity; the proposal and the carrying of it proceeded from the vivid sanity of Mirabeau. He it was who proposed that they should vote the inviolability of themselves, the deputies of the nation.

To pass that decree meant that if the Assembly should win, it would have, for the punishment of any that had attempted to defeat it by force, the awful weapon which a solemn declaration of intention gives. But it also meant that if the Commons were defeated, they had been guilty of treason.

Bailly, perhaps from confusion, perhaps from timidity, himself hesitated, until Mirabeau, understanding well what force it is that governs men, said:

“If you do not pass this motion, sixty of us, and you the first, will be arrested this very night.”

A column of troops had already been formed outside the doors, though the decision to strike at once was, perhaps in fear of Paris, not acted on by the crown. Five hundred and twenty-seven members passed the decree, and of these thirty-four voted “No,” four hundred and ninety-three, “Yes.” Its operative words are significant:

This voted, there was no more to be done.

The many men who had thus risked all looked at one another; Bailly declared the session at an end. They came out upon the crowds that still waited in the lifting weather outside, that cheered a little, and that wonderingly followed the dispersion of the deputies to their homes.

The king and those who had left with him had lunched at the mid-day hour. They were past their coffee when the business of their antagonists was thus accomplished. The Commons and the curious who had waited in the streets for their exit were late for luncheon that day.

A week later, and two days more than a week, the battle was won. The clergy had joined the Commons in a body, the nobles in batch after batch. The National Assembly was fully composed at last, and Louis himself, writing to the privileged orders—such as still refused—to bow to the Commons, had accepted defeat. His sovereignty was from that moment lost.

PART TWO

THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES

INTRODUCTION

After the successful assertion by the Commons of their new usurped powers over the crown, just described, a second attempt at coercion, backed by the foreign mercenary troops in the service of the king, failed. The depots of arms at the Invalides and the Bastille in Paris were sacked by the populace, and the latter was taken by force upon the same day, July 14th, 1789. The first principles of the Revolution were laid in resolutions of the parliament at Versailles during the summer, notably the declaration known as that of the “Rights of Man” and the abolition of the feudal property of the nobility.

Another popular rising in the capital in the month of October brought the court back to Paris, and the parliament followed it. For eighteen months the tide of democratic reform rose with greater and greater violence, and while the crown still remained the sole executive of the nation, possessed of all immediate control over the regular armed forces and the disbursement of public money, the personal peril of the royal family grew greater, and the term within which it seemed certain that the executive would lose its authority drew near.

There stood between the monarchy—the one vital institution of the French—and its ruin no real forces save the personality of Mirabeau and the regular troops. As against the latter there had been raised and organized a considerable militia, duly armed by law and present in every village and town in the country; while the mass of the regular troops had purposely been stationed at a distance from Paris through the growing power of the parliament.

A foreign war was threatened through the desire of every ancient authority in Europe to repress the movement, and with this approaching threat of invasion, which could not but serve the king, the unpopularity, and therefore the danger, of his family grew greater still.

Mirabeau, who dominated the parliament by his personality even more than by his oratory and his prodigious industry, had secretly entered into the service of the court in his determination to save the monarchy, in the fall of which he believed would be involved the breakdown of the country. He had drawn up a regular plan presupposing and inviting civil war. He would have the king leave Paris for some town such as Compiègne, not more than a day’s posting away, and from that point appeal to the people and to the army to support him. All this work of Mirabeau was being done in the winter of 1790-91.

Meanwhile the personal alarm of the queen,

backed by her rare energy, preferred a complete flight with her husband and children, either to the frontier itself or beyond it, a total undoing of the Revolution if that flight were successful, and the return of the monarchy, backed, not only by the army, but by the threat of foreign powers and of invasion.

In this perhaps impracticable and too heroic scheme, utterly anti-national, her great ally was Fersen, a Swedish nobleman who had loved her with devotion from his first youth, and whom she, since her misfortunes began, had come to love as devotedly in return.

It seems certain that the overmastering ability of Mirabeau would have carried his plan and would probably have saved the French monarchy had he lived. But he died from overwork upon the second of April, 1791. With him lacking, nothing could prevent the maturing of the queen’s plan.

A fortnight after Mirabeau’s death the mob had prevented the king from leaving Paris, in a perfectly open manner, for a visit to one of his suburban palaces, and the great militia guard of the palace had not shown discipline or loyalty.

After that nothing remained but to fix a date for secret flight, and this date was ultimately fixed for the night of the twentieth of June.

Fersen worked out all the plans in detail. He had the great travelling-coach, or “Berline,” specially built. The commander of the army upon the eastern frontier, Bouillé was warned and provided a succession of cavalry outposts to receive the fugitives when they should have proceeded a little more than a hundred miles from Paris, and to pass them on in safety to Montmédy upon the extreme frontier. Thence, when he should safely have reached it, the king was to issue his proclamation to the army and to the people. The travelling disguises for the royal family were prepared; three gentlemen of their former guard were trusted to accompany the flight. A passport in the name of a Mme. de Korff, a Russian lady resident in Paris, was obtained, and the queen was to travel in that name with her two children, and her husband as a servant.

PART TWO

THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES

UPON the evening of Monday, the twentieth of June, 1791, a little before nine o’clock, Axel de Fersen was leaning, with his chin in his hands, his elbows upon the parapet, looking over the bridge called the Pont Royal, which leads from the Tuileries to the southern bank of the Seine. He watched the dying light upon the river below, and waited with desperate impatience in his heart, his body lounging in affected indolence.

The sky above was cloudy. The day had been hot, but its last hours not sunlit. A freshness was now coming up from the Seine over the town, and the noises of life and movement that rise with the closing of the working hours in the capital filled the streets. He was dressed in the rough habit of a cabman, and the poor coach of which he had the driving stood in rank with others a little way from the gate of the palace.

As he so gazed, two men, one with a sunken, long-jawed face and small, peering eyes, the other frail, slight, and younger, both dressed in a faded yellow livery as of servants to some rich man of a time before the Revolution had abolished liveries, came up to him. He knew already who they were. They were Moustier and Valory, two gentlemen of the king’s disbanded guard who, in the disguise of servants, had volunteered to serve Louis in his flight. Fersen gave them the instructions they awaited. One was to find and conduct the great coach Fersen had had built and to keep it waiting for him at the gates of the city; the other was to act as outrider and to go before to prepare the relays. A third, Malden, remained hidden in the apartments of the king.

Night fell, an hour passed, and two women in the conduct of a man who hurried them across the bridge were put into a chaise that there awaited them and drove off. Fersen knew that mission also. These were the two waiting-women of the queen, going on ahead through the night to the second posting-station at Claye upon the eastern road. A little while later—it was eleven o’clock, or a little past—a woman came to him leading two children, two girls, it seemed, one old enough

to walk alone, the other whom she held by the hand. It was Mme. de Tourzel, the governess of the royal children. The elder girl was the princess Royal. The young child, disguised as her sister, was the Dauphin, the little heir to the throne. Many were going in and out of the palace at that moment. This small group in sombre clothing attracted no one’s eye in the half-light. The children were put into the cab, the woman followed, and Fersen, with the most cabman-like way in the world, climbed slowly up to his box and drove at a very quiet pace westward along the quay that flanks the Tuileries gardens. He came to the great open place which to-day is called the Place de la Concorde, where the half-finished bridge had only just lost its last workman with the end of the day; he turned to the right across its paving and up the unfinished Rue Royale until he came to the narrow Rue St. Honoré, where again he turned his shabby team to the right and drove as leisurely eastward.

There is a place, now rebuilt out of all recognition, the ways broadened, all the houses modern, where a street still called by the name of “Ladder Street” (the Rue de l’Echelle) comes into the Rue St. Honoré. It is a very short street leading toward the palace. Between the Tuileries and those few yards of way there stood in those days a number of great houses, the homes of certain nobles who had been about the court, and in the midst of their confused carved fronts was an archway that led to the royal stables, and by a narrow lane to the courtyard of the palace itself.

In that Street of the Ladder Fersen halted, drawing his cab up toward the curb. The long detour over which he had purposely lingered had taken him nearly three-quarters of an hour; it was near twelve. He got down from the box, went to the carriage window, and said a word or two, bidding the woman and the two children wait in patience. Then he paced up and down the rough paving as midnight deepened, sauntering in the fashion of cabmen that await a fare.

Such light as there was between the high houses came from dim oil lamps slung from wall to wall and far apart. There was light also in the guardroom at the corner of the archway, and there a militiaman stood sentry with fixed bayonet, for every issue from the palace was thus guarded. The street was full of people coming and going from that little town the Tuileries, and as the hour wore on, the great equipages of those who attended court passed in to take their masters up at the royal porch and passed out again on their way homeward.

Fersen knew that the last ceremonies would not be over until very late, but that did not relieve his increasing anxiety. The darkness seemed to grow more profound as he waited. He watched with as little show as might be the throngs that passed back and forth through the archway. He saw no figure of those he was awaiting until, when it was quite dark—for though there was a moon, the curtain of clouds grew thick—he saw, or thought he saw, seated upon a stone bench against one of the great houses, a woman whose attitude even in that gloom he thought he recognised. With the same leisurely pace of a man free from employment he sauntered past, noted the gray dress and broad, gray veiled hat under the dim light of the distant lamps, and the veil about the face, and coming closer still, knew that it was Madame Elizabeth, the king’s sister. He spoke in a whisper, without turning to her or stopping as he went slowly by. He made an imperceptible movement of the head toward the cab, saying, “They wait for you.” She did not move, and he feared for a moment that she might not have understood what he had said nor recognized him, for he dared not linger. He paced back again toward his charge and again whispered the words as he passed, still looking down at the ground; and this time the woman rose, went to the cab, and entered it.

The lights behind the shutters of the great houses had gone out, the distant noises in the palace hard by had ceased, the last of the equipages were rumbling through the archway, and still there was no sign of new-comers for him. It was long past midnight, nearly one o’clock. Another of the cabmen in the rank spoke to him. He answered as best he could with the manner, accent, and slang of the trade. He offered this unwelcome friend a pinch of snuff from a rough box; then he went back as though to look to his horses, felt their legs, stood about them a little, and patted them.

There was still, but very rarely, a belated servant or so passing out from under the arch, and at last, when his fever of expectation was at the height, he distinguished two such, a man and a woman, coming toward him unhurriedly. As they came nearer, and the feeble glimmer of the lamps showed

them less confusedly, he marked the lumbering walk of the man. He wore a round soft hat, and a big overcoat against the freshness of the night air, and had the air of a familiar upper servant. At his side, with an upright gait and a certain poise of the head that Fersen knew, alas! for him, better than anything else on earth, went the woman. Fersen went forward, mastering his respect, and led them to the carriage; and then, without delay, but still careful to give no cause for remark by his haste, he drove northward over the noisy granite sets of the streets.

By what tortuous ways Fersen drove the king and his family one may hardly guess. They were puzzled to find him following many street turnings other than those that would lead them to the nearest gate of the city on the north and so to the great frontier road. But Fersen did what he did knowingly. It was his business in this turn of the night to make sure that the last point of his plan had been obeyed and that the great travelling-carriage had gone on before and was waiting for them outside the limits of the city. He called at the stables and found one trusted servant of his to assure him that the thing had been sent and that all was ready. Then only did he turn toward the east and the north and make for the barrier at the end of the Rue St. Martin, which was then the gate of Paris and the beginning of straggling houses and the open country.

They did not reach that barrier till two o’clock. Already they breathed some faint air of morning.

No one challenged them. It was one cab like another, driving to the suburbs with some belated middle-class party that had dined in Paris that night. There were lights and music still in the house of the gate-keeper at the barrier, for there had been a wedding in his family that day, and they were feasting. After the glare of that light, Fersen looked in vain through the night for the Berline. Then, with some few minutes so lost, he saw the black hump at last, drawn up well to the right and close to the bordering ditch. The guardsman, Moustier, and Balthazar, his own coachman, were sitting their horses immovable. They had waited thus immovable for some hours. Very rapidly the travellers passed from the cab to the coach, and leaned back in the comfortable white velvet cushions of its upholstering. Fersen himself, sending back the cab I know not how, took his place upon the broad box of the Berline, and the four horses felt the traces and started. The journey had begun.

Toward the north-east, to which the great road ran, there was already a hint of dawn, and great Paris just behind would not sleep long into the light. Therefore the horses, Fersen’s own, with only a short stage before them, were urged to a vigorous pace through the short, lonely suburb and still more lonely fields beyond, and Fersen’s coachman, who rode as postillion upon the leader, spared them little.

It was near three o’clock when they reached the first posting-house at Bondy, three miles from the boundary of the city, and just outside the wall and railings of the park in that place. The guardsman Valory, who was outrider, had been there for an hour. The six horses for the carriage were awaiting it, as also the two horses which he and the third guardsman, Malden were to ride, to the next stage. As they unharnessed Fersen’s steaming beasts, Fersen himself, as coachman coming down from the box, waited a moment until the fresh team was in and the postillions mounted. Then he looked in at the window of the coach, and taking off his hat to the queen, he said, “Good-bye, Madame de Korff,” and under the growing light would no longer linger. He was off at once by the by-lane to the Brussels road beyond. He and those whom he had so worked to save were to meet at Montmédy.

The postillions urged on their mounts, the short whips cracked, and they were gone. Fersen saw the great mass go swaying up the road, dark against the growing dawn, and went off lonely upon his separate flight to the north.

As for the travellers, touched by that effect of morning which all feel, by the unnatural exhilaration of those strained hours of no sleep, and of a release apparently begun, they broke into making plans for their disguise, reassuring themselves with every mile that passed and feeling the first sense of relief that they had known for two tortured years. The sleepy little boy who was their fortune and the heir was set more comfortably back against the white cushions in his girl’s clothes that he might rest. The five others, wakeful and eager, pretended to learn their rôles. Mme. de Tourzel was to be the mistress; the queen, the governess Rochet; the Princess Elizabeth, a

companion; and the king a steward under the name of Durand. There was almost a spirit of comedy in the coach. The king talked of his new liberty and of riding, perhaps of the autumn hunting that he loved; and they conversed also of the nature of their journey, where—and upon this perhaps they were more guarded—there might be peril, especially as they passed through the one considerable town of Châlons; but also of how, not two hours beyond that place, at Somme-Vesle, a posting-house in the midst of Champagne, they would meet the first troop of their chain of mounted escorts thrust out from the army, and how with these they would henceforward be safe.

They were late. They were already a full hour behind that time-table which men who understood the essentials of order as the king had never understood them had laid down for their guidance. But the pace was brisk, the road was passing swiftly by, and the accident of such trifling unpunctuality so early in their adventure did not oppress them. There was no one with them accustomed to command or to understand the all-importance of exactitude in any military affair.

That little company, if we think of it, was an isolated thing and most imperfect for such a task: three women bred to a court and to the habits of leisure or of successive pleasures; two children; the unwilled, heavy king and husband, who never did or could decide, and whose judgment was slow to the point of disease. Beyond these were only the three guardsmen, almost servants.

At Claye, the next relay, they found the queen’s two waiting-women, who, abandoned for hours, had awaited them in their chaise, and were bewildered, wondering if they were lost. From Claye onward, the sun having now risen, though hidden behind the level roof of clouds and the day fully begun, they passed through fields without villages, with scarcely a house, where the peasants in the eager work of the high summer were already abroad. The fourfold rank of great trees which dignified the road went by in monotonous procession. The quick change of horses at Meaux raised their hopes still higher, and as they opened their picnic-bags, bringing out bread and meat and wine to break their fast, they spoke in jests, increasingly secure. To Malden riding by the carriage door, the queen beckoned, and offered wine and food, and she told him familiarly of how the king had laughed roundly, saying that Lafayette, the master of the militia in Paris, and officially the guardian of the court, would be woundily puzzled that day. So much for that fresh early morning when all was well.

The wide royal road, full of the Roman inheritance, breasts beyond Meaux a sharp, high, wooded hill, and the drag up that hill was long and slow. Upon its farther side, on to the Marne again, goes a sharp pitch, down which the shrieking brakes created an equal delay. It was fully eight o’clock when they had come along the riverside to the lovely valley of the Sellot, winding between its wooded guardian hills to join the greater river.

There two roads part, each leading equally to Châlons and to the east; the main one still follows the Marne, but the second, somewhat shorter, cuts across the plateau to the south of the river, which few, even in the travelling of to-day, know, and which those who had planned the flight had chosen on account of its few towns and villages and less frequented inns. Yet it was precisely in this chosen stretch of thirty miles, by this less-frequented of the two roads to Châlons, that their evil was to come upon them.

The hour’s delay which one accident and another—the lateness of the moment in which the last of the court had left the palace, the slight time lost in peering for the Berline through the darkness at the gate, the long drag up and down the forest of Meaux—had burdened them with, was now perhaps more nearly grown to an hour and a half; but not one of that little company could guess how much this meant, or how such errors breed of themselves and add, how one strained and anxious man, watching during that Tuesday at the head of a little troop of horse in the lonely plains beyond Châlons, would be broken, and with him all their fortunes, by such incapacity. For save where it walked the hills, as heavy coaches must, the Berline went bravely enough, covering its eight miles an hour or more; and the sense of speed made up with them for the realities of time and of co-ordinated distance wherein they were incompetent indeed.

Nor was that error, that growing error in exactitude, all that they had to face.

THE PURSUIT

It was perhaps at eight o’clock in Paris that morning, at the most half an hour later, that the whole populace became alive to what had happened. The drums were beating, rallying the militia, the crowd was filling the square in front of the palace. At that moment, when strong action in pursuit of the fugitives could not be long delayed, they were only just upon this upland road leaving the Marne; they had a start of, say, forty-five miles, fifty at the most, before the first rider could surely mount and be galloping in pursuit. The carriage rolled on fairly with Valory, its outrider, on before, Malden trotting at the door, and the chaise with the queen’s two waiting-women swaying in a cloud of dust behind. It rolled on eastward through that high, little-known land of wide, hedgeless fields; it was about ten o’clock when it came down into a sort of shallow cup lower than the plain, wherein lies that little place called “Old Houses”—Viels-Maisons. Very few men, I think, of those who travel or speak of their travels know the tiny group of roofs. It has not thirty families round its church. It meant to the travellers nothing but an insignificant posting-house and a relay. But it was there that their fate first touched them, for there a chance postillion, one called Picard, glanced at their faces, and knew them for the king and queen.

Like so many upon that full and dreadful day, he yielded entirely to caution. The king was still the king. There was divided authority in France; and whether reward or punishment would follow any act no man could tell on such a day as this until it was known which of the two combatants, the crown or the parliament, would rule at last. So Picard said nothing; but he had seen. Others also were to prove discreet, but a little less discreet than he.

The coach went on through the lonely land, past one small town, Montmirail, which later Napoleon’s resistance was to render famous, and on again into the empty fields, still eastward. It grew to be noon, hot and almost stormy under the lowering sky. Louis the King, with his road-book spread upon his knee, followed with curiously detached interest the correspondence of the map with the dull landscape outside. As the carriage stopped at one posting-house after another, and as he would plunge his hand into his leather money-bag to give his guardsman the wages of the postillions, he was not content thus to show his face at the window, he would even stretch his legs a bit and get down from the carriage to pace to and fro while each fresh team was harnessing.

“We are safe now,” he said; and again, “There is no fear of our being recognized now.” All the air of that little company had come to be one of security, though one man had already marked them down, and already the galloping out in pursuit from the gates of Paris had begun.

The governess and the royal children caught that air of security, and where a long hill put the horses at a walk, they got out and climbed it on foot. There was only one small incident of which to this day we cannot tell whether it was of any moment or no. The little princess had noted it and had been disturbed. It was the presence of a traveller who for a time rode alone upon his horse behind them, walking when they walked, trotting when they trotted. It may have been no more than a coincidence that his way lay with theirs. Long before Châlons he had turned off by a by-road and disappeared.

There is, making a sort of western wall for the Champagne country, a very sharp and even range of hills running north and south. These are the escarpment of that plateau of which I have just spoken, and over which for many hours the coach had been travelling on. These hills end abruptly to the south, but just beyond the precipitous slope in which they terminate there stands across a narrow, clean-cut valley one isolated height called the Mont Aimé; so that the gap is a sort of gate into the flat country below, which stretches eastward in a wide, rolling, chalky plain, the lower Champagne, of which Châlons is the capital and centre. Beyond that plain, eastward and very far away, another low, level line of hills, the Forest of the Argonne, marks the very distant horizon.

Through this gate, which is a landmark for miles throughout the plain, passes the road; and half an hour beyond, or a little more, where the road crosses the small water of the Soude, three or four houses round one posting-house, by name Chaintrix, break the monotony of the fields. The travellers reached it just in the sultriest part of the day. They had not greatly added to their error in time; they were not much, if at all, behind the hour and a half of debt against fate which they had already suffered to accumulate, when fate

touched them again. This time it was with a stronger gesture than when, four hours before, the postboy at Viels-Maisons had looked askance and known them for what they were.

Here lived one Lagny with certain married and unmarried daughters, and with him, by just one coincidence, his son-in-law from miles away, Vallet by name, who for that one day was there. That son-in-law had been to Paris the year before for the Revolutionary feast upon the Champ-de-Mars. He had there stared at the king, and when the Berline stopped at his father-in-law’s door, and while yet the relay was waiting to be harnessed, he recognized his sovereign. Now it happened—so the doom of the king willed it—that all the small household, father and daughter and son-in-law, were Royalists of the old kind. They made obeisance openly; the king and the queen accepted that homage with delight, and at parting gave them gifts which still remain in testimony to the truth of this tale. Vallet insisted upon driving them himself,—with what consequences we shall see,—and what was more, this spontaneous little scene of enthusiasm added by some few minutes again—perhaps a quarter, perhaps half an hour—to the delay. The royal children had gone in to rest a little from the heat and from their fatigue. When they came out and the coach started, the postmaster and his daughters openly acknowledged their Royal guests before the servants of the farm and the postboys around.

Vallet himself rode upon the leaders—they whipped off before three o’clock—proud to be driving his king and filled with zeal. But his zeal was indiscreet. Twice he let the horses fall. Once his off wheel caught the parapet of a bridge. At least twice the traces broke, and time, now so heavily against them, turned still more heavily against them in the necessity of finding ropes and of mending. There must have been one more hour lost somewhere in that stage of the road.

When, well after four o’clock, the fugitives clattered into Châlons, the whole matter was public knowledge. Whether Vallet had spoken, or whether the news shouted across the fields had been carried by some galloper, or in whatever other way it spread, many knew it while the two carriages were halted for the next relay in the town. The little knot that gathered round the carriage knew what they were gazing at; the bolder among them murmured thanks that the king had escaped his enemies. The postmaster of Châlons knew it, the mayor knew it, and many others whose names have not been preserved, but whose words and attitudes have. None would take upon himself any responsibility in the great quarrel, and only one obscure threat reached their ears. An unknown man did say in a low voice one thing which has been recorded: at least we have it at second hand, but at good second hand, that the travellers heard during a halt a passer-by cry to them that their plans had miscarried and that sooner or later they would be held.

But this general recognition at Châlons disturbed them not at all. They were now not only secure in mind, as they had been for many hours, but also within touch of certain and physical security. For at the very next relay, not two hours along the road, was not the first of those armed posts of escort waiting for them, to surround them? To form a rear-guard, which should forbid all pursuit? To roll up further posts as the carriage still went eastward? And to form at last a whole body of cavalry, leading them on to the main army beyond Varennes? At that town, not fifty miles on, was the limit beyond which lay stationed in great numbers the army of Bouillé, the General privy to the plot and ready to do all things for the king.

Here, if we are to seize the last act of this disaster, we must have some picture of the scene in which it was played.

The lower Champagne, “The Champagne of the Dust,” as the peasants call it, heaves in wide, low billows that barely disturb the vast sameness of its flat until the Argonne, its limit and its wall, is reached to the east. With the Argonne are great trees again, and lively waters, and the recovery of rich land.

That country-side of the “Champagne Pouilleuse” is strange; it has remained for centuries thus empty to the sky, land often too poor for the plough, everywhere hungry and half deserted. The sluggish streams that make their way slowly through its shallow depressions are milk-white with the worthless chalky soil, and though now too regular plantations of stunted pines diversify it, planted in the hope of reclamation, it is of its nature a country without trees, as almost without men. Small, scattered villages hold its few people, and again and again one comes to patches as great as a rich