At last the Commissioners could watch that driven group. Three nights without sleep, two of agony; three days, one of flight, two of intolerable heat, insult, violence, and a snail’s-pace progress, had left them feverish, and yet—as sufferers are when all is quite abnormal—interested in tiny things, and careless. Their linen was dirty in the extreme—the Queen’s grey dress stained, torn, and roughly mended; the King’s brown coat a very dusty brown; but their faces were clean—they had washed at Epernay—and they were not unlively.

It got darker and darker. The noise of the crowd outside calmed a little, though from time to time a great rustic head would lumber in at the window to stare at royalty. The Queen, who had talked rapidly from the moment she had seen her deliverers, Madame Elizabeth, who had caught and pressed Pétion’s arm and clung in a foolish ecstasy of terror, kept up a ceaseless chatter—and the King, against his wont, joined in. They had not meant to leave the country—far from it. “No” (from the King); “I said so positively. Did I not?” (appealing to his wife). “We are really anxious about the three Guardsmen. We went to Mass at Chalons this morning—but it was constitutional, I assure you.” Only once did the reserve of an earlier (and a later) time appear upon the Queen: it was when Barnave hinted that one of the men on the box was Swedish, when Pétion added that the man who had driven the coach from the Tuileries was a Swede—called?... he pretended to hesitate about the name: the Queen had said, “I am not in the habit of learning hackney coachmen’s names,” and, after saying it, was, for perhaps the first time in two hours, silent. Then she forgave them—forgave Barnave at least—and talked on in lower tones. She was getting to like Barnave. The little boy, playing with the buttons on Barnave’s coat, made out the letters on them: “It says ‘We will live free or die.’” He was proud to read such small letters so well. He repeated the phrase, but no one of his elders answered him.

Pétion, upon the back-seat, felt an arm upon his in the darkness. He remembered the same arm as it held him close when he had met the berline two hours before. He saw under the moonlight the white and small hand of Madame Elizabeth lying near his, and it occurred to him^[23] that this very pious, very narrow, very distant girl either suddenly loved him or feigned love in order to corrupt his republican ardour—for he was already a republican.

It is objected with indignation that women of birth do not so demean themselves with country lawyers. The indignation is fatuous, but the objection is well found. Women of birth have indeed so profound a repugnance for his class that even the bait of a great fortune, though it often compels them to a marriage, will hardly overcome the loathing, and if they must yield to passion it is more commonly to favour a groom than a solicitor. But this woman had no such frailties. She was saintly, foolish, well bred and bewildered. She may have made herself as pleasant a companion as it was in her power to be, for by such easy arts the rich, when they fall, will always try to appease their conquerors. More than that she certainly did not do. The Queen knew better in what way to command her captors; she fixed upon Barnave, and within the first day of their companionship she had drawn him from that other camp into hers.

They slept at Dormans—so much as they could sleep with the mob howling all night in the square outside. Next day, Friday, the third of that return, the fourth of their martyrdom, they continued the Paris road. The day was yet hotter than the yesterday had been, and the violent and the out-o’-works from Paris began to join the crowd. At evening the tower of Meaux stood up before them against the red sky.

There, at Meaux, Marie Antoinette took a turn with Barnave; long, quiet looks, a familiar and continued conversation, a stroll in the garden alone and decent confidences during the night, finally captured Barnave. He was, from the moment of their return to Paris, the Queen’s.

He suffered no conversion in opinion, he did not forget his early political principle, he simply became indifferent to it and a servant of something that lived and suffered and exercised also upon some few—and he was one—a charm, perhaps of voice, perhaps of carriage, but, at any rate, of sex.

He worked henceforward absolutely for Marie Antoinette. He achieved so little that his name will hardly appear again in this record of her fall, but his name should be retained as a proof of what she still was to men.

He has long been accused of treason. He would have told you that he betrayed a formula, a phrase, to be the more loyal to a soul and body which he had come, as by a revelation, to understand. But Barnave was wrong: not to bodies or things, but to ideas, are men rightly subject: religion resides in dogma: loyalty must express itself in a creed, and the Word is God. These reasonings against reason, these preferences of the thing to the idea, are dangerous to honour.

Henceforward Barnave was near her always: advised her secretly, wrote to dictation from her lips, ran risk and peril, and at last died by the same hands which had killed her also upon the scaffold.

This bishop’s palace at Meaux, the hall that Bossuet had known, was their last resting-place. The sun was well up, it was already warm when they left the town for the slow stretch of thirteen hours to Paris.

The weather would not change. The same intense and blinding heat pursued and tortured them; but it was now less tolerable than ever, both from the length to which the strain had been spun out, and from the increasing crowds which lined the old paved road in a wider and wider margin as they neared the capital. The flat hedgeless fields seemed covered with men—as the prisoners saw it through their low windows—to the horizon. The murmur beyond had swelled into a sort of permanent roar, which mixed with the songs and cries of the few hundred that still kept pace with the carriages, and, now that they had left the valley of the Marne and entered the dry plain that bounds Paris to the north, the drought and the dust were past bearing. The approach of evening afforded them no relief. At the gate of the city, where at least they might expect the contrast of the familiar streets and the approach to repose, they were disappointed. The driver had orders to skirt the barrier round to the western side. So for some two hours more this calvary dragged on: the ragged marchers themselves were exhausted, many clung to the sides of the coach. Some few had climbed upon its roof and jeered and threatened those three Guards, who sat silent in their yellow liveries not replying, awaiting their chance of escape at the end of this endless journey.

When the last slope into the town was climbed, the travellers, as they crossed the flat summit where is now the Triumphal Arch of Napoleon, could see at last before them, beyond lines of trees and about the innumerable heads, the windows of their palace sending back the evening light in a blaze, and to the left that huge oblong roof of the riding-school where sat the Parliament.

Meanwhile, as the berline passed the barrier, the bellowing and the songs, the tramping and the press of moving poverty, white with dust and parched to drunkenness, ceased suddenly. It was like a stream of anarchy breaking against that curious homogeneity of attitude and clear purpose which marked the capital upon every principal day of the Revolution and cut it off sharply from the provinces and even the suburbs around.

This new and purely Parisian crowd which they now entered, silent, dark-coated and with covered heads—largely of the middle class—thronged all the length of the Champs Élysées and packed the Place de la Concorde. The myriad fixed eyes of it saw the convoy show black against the western fight upon the summit of the hill; they watched it creeping down the avenue between the double fine of soldiery, each section of which, as the King passed, reversed arms as at a funeral soldiers reverse arms.

There was no sound. The spontaneous discipline which makes Paris a sort of single thing, living and full of will, so controlled this vast assemblage that neither a cry was raised nor a hat lifted. The note of the whole was silence.

During the full half-hour of that long approach down the hill this silence endured; the carriage was at the gates of the Tuileries Gardens, had entered them. Within the riding-school, the manège where sat the Parliament, to benches that rapidly emptied as the curiosity of the Deputies drew them away, Fursy was droning out a report upon fortified places of the first, the second, and the third class. Outside, the crowd still denser but silent as ever, the berline passed, and the sections saluted—a reversed salute, on either side; it was within a furlong of its goal when, from a platform outside the Parliament building, a young member of the Royalist right, drawing himself well up that he might be observed, lifted his hat and very gravely and pronouncedly made obeisance to the Crown.

The spell was broken. There was a scuffle, a hubbub, a general war; the slowly-moving crowd crested into weapons as a deep swell at sea will crest into foam. The postillions of the berline urged their horses; a hundred yards to go, and the hedge of soldiery was forced and the mob was upon the carriage. The three Guardsmen sat still untouched, with death upon them; but the horses floundered through the deafening cries and strugglers, trampling and rearing; the great vehicle was hauled and piloted in; the wrought-iron gates clanged behind it. It was past seven, and the journey was ended.

A week had gone. On Monday night they had watched with Fersen; all Tuesday fled; on Wednesday night and morning suffered at Varennes, and in the slow drag-back to Chalons; on Thursday at Epernay met the Commissioners; all Friday suffered their captivity till Meaux was reached—and now, as the light of Saturday began to fall, the hunting was over.