The house was full of regrets, all the more piercing because they did not care to acknowledge them. They were yesterday’s men now, mere spectators at a tragedy that had scarcely begun.
The first blow fell in the heat of mid-August.
The same evening that I last wrote to you, I learnt that my poor brother Charles has been arrested, interrogated at the Assembly and taken from there to the Abbaye prison.
It was hot, every day was hot now. The King and Queen went to Mass in the Tuileries chapel with Madame Elizabeth and Marie Thérèse. The royal ladies never lifted their eyes from their missals. Everyone knew that the attack was coming that night. Armed men were all over the city.
Rosalie’s cousin François was at a matinée at the Comédie when he heard the rumour. He was the elder of the two Liancourt boys who had preferred to go partridge shooting and miss the Condor’s lecture. Both of them, François and Alex, had no truck with the new ideas of their father. Liancourt could not understand it and said, with a smile, that his sons were a throwback. He gave them an enlightened education, sent them to England to learn about modern farming and parliamentary democracy. But both of them remained resolutely counter-revolutionary even before there was a revolution to counter. Rosalie and Charles had teased their heavy cousins and thought them too stupid to understand how the world was going. But now Rosalie was disenchanted and fearful, and even Charles had lost his ideals (or illusions) and come to rejoin the King.
And to rejoin the King was François’s first thought too. He rushed out of the foyer of the Comédie like a man fleeing a fire in the theatre and ran, casting his officer’s dignity to the winds, down the rue de Vaugirard (where the Comédie had shifted for the season) and across the river to the Tuileries where he found a crazy scene. Gone were all the precedence and ceremony of the King’s couchee. The whole court had crowded into the King’s bedchamber, sitting higgledy-piggledy wherever they could find a space, on the floor, on the royal commode, on Monsieur Carlin’s beautiful ormolu consoles, with some piffling marquis vainly trying to remind them that they must not be seated in the Presence, while the King himself, still in his purple coat with his wig awry and the powder splashed all over his shoulders, wandered around, red in the face, near tears, looking like an actor who had just been booed off the stage.
They got no sleep that night, lying wide-eyed on sofas listening to the raucous sound of the tocsin. Already before dawn broke red and bloody – rouge matin, gros chagrin – there were reckoned to be five thousand men pressing towards the Tuileries.
At about five in the morning François accompanied the King, corpse-pale now, on a tour of his guards.
Quick now, what next? Stay or go? How long could the National Guard hold out? The National Assembly was just across the yard in the old Riding School. Shelter there? They spoke in broken whispers, plans and projects no sooner muttered than abandoned.
By eight o’clock the Queen was decided and she decided the King. ‘I am going to the Assembly,’ he said. ‘Marchons’ – a strange echo of that wild song that had come up from Marseilles.
So they went through the west garden door across the courtyard. Madame de Lamballe said, ‘We shall never come back.’ Marie Antoinette broke down once, and then again, and then again. François took her arm and found that she was trembling.
The Dauphin kicked at the pile of leaves that the gardeners had piled up in the corner. The King looked at the leaves as though he had never seen leaves before. ‘What a lot of leaves,’ he said, ‘they are falling early this year.’
Inside the Riding School they were led into the little box behind the President’s chair reserved for the Assembly reporters, the logographie as it had been portentously labelled. The logographie was a hole of a place, no more than ten feet square, with a grille at the back that was open to the full glare of the sun. The stenographers could not endure shifts in the box longer than a couple of hours before demanding to be relieved. All day long the King and his ladies sat and sweltered while the scattered delegates debated their fate. Out in the streets the dreadful tally of the night before was being totted up. Corpses everywhere, on the streets, in cellars and stables and churches that had been smashed open.
One member of the new Assembly was not in the Chamber to see the King and Queen sweat the day out. Citizen Condorcet was busy, desperately busy, along the corridor in the Commission of Twenty-one drawing up the indictment against the King. Never were his matchless skills as an editor more urgently needed. He boasted afterwards that it took him no more than half an hour to knock out a decree suspending His Majesty and setting up a provisional ministry to be elected by the Assembly, to be followed by the calling of a National Convention. While the Assembly was digesting all this – not without angry protestations, they wanted the King dethroned not merely suspended – Condorcet moved on to work up a proclamation designed to calm the citizens of Paris and to inform them that the members of the Assembly had sworn to uphold liberty and equality or die at their posts. That took another thirty minutes or so.
The Twenty-one had also to choose who was to lead this provisional ministry, who was to take the helm in this whirlwind? Condorcet did not hesitate. They needed a man who had the confidence of the people whose fury had just toppled the throne, a man who could somehow contain the explosive energies of the masses, who by his oratory, his strength of character, would not disgrace the ministry or the Assembly that he would have to confront and dominate. Citizen Danton alone filled the bill. ‘I chose him and I do not repent of it in the least,’ Condorcet said later. He did not add, as he might have done, ‘We need a man with a voice like a cathedral organ, a man with the carriage of a bull and a cock like a maypole, a man of passion and instinct, while I am only a mathematician.’
All day long Condorcet laboured, while thousands died outside and Louis and Marie Antoinette sweltered in the box. By the evening the Queen’s fichu was wet with sweat and her handkerchief was soaked with tears. Cousin François had squeezed into the box too and she asked if she could borrow his handkerchief. But he could not lend it to her, because it was wet with the blood of the Vicomte de Maille. He went out to borrow another handkerchief from one of the guards and never spoke to her again.
Night was falling now and the Condor was coming to the end of his heroic day’s labour. He went to relieve Vergniaud in the President’s chair. And there he sat till three in the morning. Behind him in the stale dark air the King sat in his box looking out with his lorgnette at this strangest of all plays, for it was about his own fate.
There was a little corridor leading to the logographie where the King’s shrunken guard had gathered to protect him if they could. François went out to see if his cousin Charles was there, not just to say hello but to try to soothe Charles’s choleric impulses, which he knew all too well.
As he came into the ill-lit foul-smelling passage, Charles was coming on duty to relieve a guard who was going off to dine. Just as François had feared, Charles was in a violent rage, stamping his foot, his hands twitching. ‘When that fucker Condorcet comes past, I’m going to spit in his face if I don’t break his neck.’
But all they could see through the little window in the corridor was the imperturbable back of Citizen Condorcet’s head, and all they could catch was the stray remark of the Acting President as he guided the Assembly through the script he had devised for its dying hours.
‘Spitting won’t help,’ François said, taking his cousin’s arm, but Charles shook him off and went to report to the captain of the guard. François too went off, in search of whatever supper he could find. A good soldier always seized an opportunity to refuel.
When he came back, it was nearly eleven o’clock. He peered into the Assembly where only twenty or thirty members were left. He could hear Condorcet’s harsh quaver rejecting some new amendment.
Then he saw a figure lying asleep on a bench just in front of the King’s box. François peered closer and saw it was Charles. He looked like a little boy sleeping. H
is eyelashes were as long as his sister Rosalie’s.
How close they all were in the grey hours of the night: the King and Queen in their box, Condorcet in his President’s chair, Charles stretched out on his bench – a counterpane would have covered the lot of them.
Later still that night, after François had gone, Charles was woken up and arrested and taken to the Abbaye prison, on suspicion of what who knew – for plotting, for falling asleep, for neglecting his duty, for sticking by the King? The Abbaye was full of such bewildered angry people.
The party of refugees at La Roche-Guyon had gone to take the waters at Forges-les-Eaux, a quiet little spa town a day’s drive away in the rolling Bray country. Forges had few attractions: a down-at-heel convent, a royal hunting box (disused) and the mineralised waters that spouted from the strange geological formation known as the Button of Bray. They went for a change of air in a place that was not too far from home. Perhaps the waters might help Madame d’Enville’s aches and pains. They needed to take a deeper refuge from the storm, to retreat into anonymity for a while, away from the proud chateau against the cliff that was so indelibly associated with their name.
Every morning the Duke took his mother’s arm and they processed slowly down the street from their lodgings towards the little pavilion that sheltered the spring. Behind them followed the half-dozen friends and supporters who had followed the Duke into this deep refuge: the Breton La Bourdonnay, Dolomieu the mineralogist, and of course the faithful Madame d’Astorg and Monsieur Patricot. A chair was brought for the old Duchess, so that she could sit down while the attendant held the silver-gilt cup against the burbling fountain. Rosalie sometimes stayed behind in her room, pleading a migraine, to use the leisure and solitude to allow her thoughts to flow more freely in her letters to Wm.
Charles was well, she said, he was sharing a room with two other royal guards who had been arrested at the same time. The room was large so that they did not get on top of each other (she might have been writing about a new boy at boarding school who was settling in well). Dear old Patricot had permission to go and see Charles every day and get him anything he needed. His only complaint was the lack of exercise. As there was no evidence against him, she was beginning to hope that he might be freed in a couple of days (two of his fellow prisoners had already been released). Next week they would return to La Roche. The sooner the better in fact. Forges had turned out to be a dismal hole, with nothing to be said for it. Poor little brother, he had caused them so much pain, but the happiness of seeing him again would cancel it all out.
She had reckoned without the man of passion. This was Danton’s hour. The same day that Rosalie was confiding her hopes to paper in her musty lodgings at Forges, the Minister of Justice was calling the nation to arms. The patrie would be saved, the people would defend her frontiers and her cities against her enemies whether they came from without or within. The tocsin that would sound was not a signal of dread but a summons to charge against the enemies of the fatherland. ‘To vanquish them, messieurs, we need boldness, boldness unremitting, boldness for ever and France will be saved.’
Boldness was to begin at home, in the Minister’s own backyard. The Inspector of Prisons had warned him that the prisoners were at dire risk from the mob. The Minister’s response was magnificent: ‘I don’t give a fuck about the prisoners, they can fend for themselves.’
So there was no one to stop the crowd that poured into the Abbaye, armed with the usual assorted weaponry – knives, axes, hatchets, sabres and various other butcher’s tools. Within an hour two dozen prisoners were slaughtered. Not as many as the hundred and fifty priests who were shot or hacked to death at the Carmelite convent that was being used as a holding centre. But having discovered how easy it was, the executioners made numerous return visits to the Abbaye (because they were being paid on piecework, so much per execution). By the end of the grisly business nearly half the prisoners in Paris had been killed, in the Carmelite and the Abbaye more than four-fifths of them, including Rosalie’s Charles. The Minister of Justice was well satisfied. The executions were an indispensable sacrifice to appease the people of Paris. The voice of the people was, after all, the voice of God.
Only two days after she had written to Wm in such high hopes, she wrote again on 3 September:
I received your letter and thank you for the pleasure it gave me. I was sure that you would share my sorrows, they are so cruel, so hard to bear. Maman is keeping her courage up. She is less broken than I feared, but happiness is finished for her and for me. One never recovers from such misfortunes. From now on I shall live only in my memories.
And she added, even in her overwhelming grief not forgetting the need to be discreet, Adieu, write to me through the different channels that I told you about.
She put down her pen and began desultorily to pack her things for the return to La Roche. Madame Postulard had gone for one last walk in the woods. Madame d’Astorg was taking a nap in her attic room. Anyway, these days Rosalie liked to do things for herself. Even folding the few dresses she had brought with her gave her the feeling that she might yet develop the strength to weather their misfortunes. She was standing idly in the middle of the room wondering whether the tight-waisted blue silk might be a little too hot for the journey when she heard the noise of running feet in the street. Like the rest of Forges, the street was usually quiet – on a Sunday afternoon it was like the grave – so she went over to the window.
Below her she could see the tumbled fair thatch of Pierre’s head and she could hear him ringing the bell furiously. She met him halfway down the stairs with Raffron, the maid who had let him in. He was wide-eyed and gasping for breath. ‘Madame, they are coming for us.’
‘Who, Pierre, who’s coming?’
‘The commissioners, madame, and there’s hundreds of feds with them on their way to the war, ugly brutes they are and most of them drunk.’
‘From Marseilles, are they? We saw some of them at Paris, they did terrible things.’
‘No, this lot are from Brittany, but they’re just as bad. I know for a fact—’ There was a fierce hammering at the door and three or four men in tousled uniforms burst in, looking more like the hunted than the hunters.
Through the open door behind them Rosalie could see a crowd of peasants stretching halfway down the street. They were carrying the usual staves and pitchforks and rusty old swords.
‘Where is he, where is he, La Roche-fou-cauld?’
‘He is out to lunch,’ Rosalie said with a calm that surprised her though she could feel her knees knocking. No less than the truth. The Duke was seeing his old friend Madame de Tracy who was taking the waters too.
‘Where, where?’ they shouted. And the people at the back took up the cry: ‘Where is he?’
Rosalie could see now that the commissioner who had spoken was trembling almost as badly as she was. He seemed propelled by the people behind, rather than leading them. She was wondering what sort of lie to tell next when the Duke saved her the trouble by coming in from the street and pushing between the commissioners with an almost apologetic courtesy as though slipping between two guests at a party. ‘Here,’ he said.
‘Citizen La Rochefoucauld, you are under arrest.’
‘Very g-good, and what exactly is the ch-charge?’
‘Aiding and abetting priests and émigrés.’
‘How strange, I am usually accused of being an enemy to both.’
‘Now then, this is neither the time nor place. You’ll have a chance to answer to the proper authorities. Officer, put guards on all the rooms and seal any documents. You are to come with us instantly.’
‘Please, let me speak to my mother first.’
‘It is not permitted to pass information to third parties.’ The commissioner was gaining confidence as his instructions came back to him.
‘May I at least kiss my wife?’
‘That is certainly permitted, citizen, we are not monsters.’
The commissioner supervised with
an almost fatherly indulgence the kiss that the Duke planted on Rosalie’s cheek.
They marched the Duke off to the town hall.
After they had satisfied their amour propre and conformed to the regulations as they saw them, the guards let the women into the old lady’s room but then insisted on staying while Rosalie explained what had happened.
‘If we had remained at La Roche,’ Madame d’Enville said reflectively, ‘at least we would have been murdered in our own beds.’
At nightfall they brought him back. He was ghost-pale.
‘You must be ready at four o’clock,’ the commissioner said. ‘We have to start before dawn for Vernon. It is for your own protection.’
They sat together in Madame d’Enville’s large sitting room at the back of the house. The three guards had brought in extra chairs and sat in a line in front of them, yawning and then gossiping sotto voce a little, then falling asleep and jerking awake again.
The Duke looked at his fob watch by the light of the candle on the dresser. ‘Time to go,’ he said.
But the commissioners still had their hands full with other business in the neighbourhood, so the prisoners sat in their travelling cloaks watching the blanched light angle in through the cracks in the shutters. When it was fully light, the maid, Mademoiselle Raffron, undid the shutters and Rosalie looked at her sad companions sitting on the bed side by side, each of them thinking that this would be the last day they would see dawn together.
Raffron brought up coffee and brioche from the kitchen, and they eked out the morning, talking in whispers as low as their guards’, both parties embarrassed to be so long in each other’s company. It was not till three in the afternoon that the commissioners returned and hustled them into the carriage, grumbling at them as though the delay had been all their fault.
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