The Days of the French Revolution

by Christopher Hibbert

  Fersen, as generous as he was debonair, offered to lend the King and Queen all the money he had; and if this sum, 600,000 livres, proved insufficient for their purposes, he undertook to borrow the rest. He also took it upon himself to provide a four-wheeled covered carriage which would be commodious enough to carry the two royal children and their aunt Elisabeth as well as the King and Queen; for Louis and Marie Antoinette were both determined that the family should not be parted. This carriage, a sumptuous berlin with dark green and yellow bodywork, paler yellow wheels and white velvet upholstery, ordered in the name of a friend of Fersen, Baroness von Korff, was kept in the courtyard of Fersen’s hotel so that it should become a familiar sight to the citizens of Paris. It was occasionally to be seen, drawn by six horses, driven as fast as it would go – which was disappointingly slowly – along the Vincennes road so that Fersen could test its reliability.

  On the night of the escape from Paris the berlin was to be taken first to the courtyard of the house of Eleonora Sullivan’s rich Scottish lover, then to an agreed spot just beyond the customs post on the road outside the Porte Saint-Martin. Three of the King’s former bodyguard were to wait there with it, dressed in yellow liveries which Fersen had bought at a sale of the effects of an émigré prince. Fersen himself, dressed as a cabman, was to drive the royal family to the rendezvous in a hired carriage. Once he had got them, suitably disguised, into the carriage Fersen foresaw no difficulties. The berlin to which they would be transferred outside the Porte Saint-Martin would rattle off under cover of darkness through Châlons. Ponte de Sommeville, Saint-Ménéhould, Clermont, Varennes, Dun and Stenay towards the north-east frontier where troops of the Marquis de Bouillé, whose headquarters were at Metz, had been asked to provide an escort on the last stages of the journey. But the great difficulty would be in spiriting the family out of the palace.

  The first problem arose when a woman who worked in the palace as a cleaner and who was known to spy for her lover, a convinced republican, decided to postpone the holiday which she had been due to take. The proposed flight would have to be put off until she had gone. The new date set was the night of Monday 20 June.

  At ten o’clock that night the Queen woke her children, dressed the Dauphin in a girl’s frock and pulled a wide-brimmed bonnet down over his eyes. ‘He looked so beautiful,’ his sister recalled, ‘but was so sleepy that he could not stand and did not know what was happening. I asked him what he thought we were going to do, and he answered, “I suppose to act in a play since we have got these funny clothes on.”’ His mother then led him and his sister downstairs to rooms which had until recently been occupied by the King’s First Gentleman who had emigrated. Since his departure the door of these lodgings had been left unguarded. The Queen unlocked it. The children’s governess, the Duchesse de Tourzel, crept out with her two charges to find Fersen waiting for them, whip in hand, playing the part of a hackney-coachman to perfection, so the Duchess thought, whistling, gossiping with a passer-by, taking occasional pinches of snuff. When she and the children came out he hurried them away to the waiting carriage while the Queen went back into the palace and eventually to bed. Soon after eleven when all seemed quiet she got up again, put on a brown dress and a black hat with a heavy veil, and waited for the King to come to her bedroom where it had been arranged he would change into a brown suit and a dark green overcoat and cover his hair with a grey wig. Wearing similar clothes and such a wig, the Chevalier de Coigny, who looked rather like the King, had left the Tuileries for the past twelve nights at the same time each night. So it was hoped that when the King left on the night of the 20th he would be mistaken for the Chevalier. And so he was. He walked past a sentry who did not challenge him; and as Fersen emerged from the shadows to join him, he made for the line of carriages which was habitually drawn up in the courtyard for the use of those whose business detained them at the palace until late at night. He climbed into one of them with Fersen and found the children already inside. Soon afterwards the Queen, who had left the palace the same way as the children, joined him there.

  The transfer took place safely beyond the Porte Saint-Martin; and before three o’clock next morning Baroness von Korff’s berlin had reached Bondy. Inside sat the Baroness’s two children (the Dauphin and his sister), their governess (the Queen), her steward (the King) and the Baroness herself (the Duchesse de Tourzel). Fersen wished them farewell at Bondy and galloped away to Belgium while the berlin, drawn by six fresh horses from the post-house, lumbered off for Claye and, through Meaux, towards Chaintrix and Châlons. ‘Lafayette must be feeling most embarrassed by now,’ the King remarked contentedly, looking at his watch.

  Dawn came and there was no sign of any pursuit. ‘When we’ve passed Châlons,’ the King said, ‘we shall be safe. We shall then find the first detachment of troops and after that we shall have nothing to fear.’ Forty hussars under the young Duc de Choiseul had been sent out by the Marquis de Bouillé to meet them just beyond the town at the village of Pont de Sommeville. Once they got there they would be out of danger.

  When the berlin clattered to a halt outside the post-house at Pont de Sommeville, however, there was no sign of the promised soldiers. Fersen had calculated its time of arrival as ‘Tuesday at 2.30 at the latest’. But there had been delays on the way: a wheel had struck the wall of a narrow bridge, the traces had snapped and the horses fallen, and even where the road surfaces were good it had proved impossible to drive the heavily loaded vehicle at more than about seven miles an hour. It was not, therefore, until six o’clock in the evening that the royal family reached Pont de Sommeville. By then the Duc de Choiseul had become alarmed by angry peasants who disbelieved his story that he was ‘in their village to escort pay for the army in the east’ and who supposed that he had come instead to enforce the collection of overdue rents on behalf of a local landowner. Threatened by these peasants who brandished pitchforks and pointed muskets at the faces of his men, Choiseul decided to withdraw from the village into a nearby forest where he became lost in the darkness.

  So, when the horses had been changed at the post-house, the berlin had to move off again unescorted to Sainte-Ménéhould. Here the King had expected to find a detachment of dragoons, but again he was disappointed, for their commander, who had been constantly questioned by suspicious villagers throughout the afternoon, had received a message from Choiseul at Pont de Sommeville that there was no likelihood of the royal party arriving that day and had consequently allowed his men to dismount and to go for a drink in a wine shop. On the appearance of the berlin he walked up to it, saluted and told the King in a low voice that the plans had misfired and that he would have to stay out of His Majesty’s way for fear of increasing the suspicions of the villagers. The villagers, however, were by now quite sure as one of them said later, that ‘something very odd was going on’. They had not been convinced by the dragoon captain’s evasive excuses for his men’s presence in Sainte-Ménéhould, they had seen him salute the occupants of the new, expensive carriage and had watched him as he whispered his brief message through the window before walking hurriedly away. It was decided, therefore, to call out the National Guard and to disarm the dragoons while they were still dismounted. Thus it was that, as the berlin continued on its way through the outskirts of the town, the King looked behind in vain for the escort that he had been promised.

  In Paris the flight of the royal family had been discovered early in the morning of 21 June when one of the King’s valets de chambre had woken in his truckle bed in the King’s room. He had detached from his arm the cord by which the King roused him if he needed him in the night; he had opened the shutters, removed his bed and the screen that shielded it from the King’s, opened the door for the Pages of the Bedchamber, and approached the drawn curtains of His Majesty’s bed. ‘Sire,’ he had announced, bowing respectfully, ‘it is seven o’clock.’ He then drew the curtains and discovered the bed to be empty.

  The Queen’s bedroom and the children’s were also found to be des
erted. And soon the tocsin was ringing and crowds of people from all over Paris were surging round the Tuileries, at first in a mood of indignant anger, so one observer considered, then in one of taunting contempt. They pushed through the gates on which was hung a sign reading ‘House to let’, telling a worried postman who was trying to deliver letters to mark them, ‘Gone away. Left no address’. They then streamed into the palace, examining the rooms with curiosity, insisting that the palace servants remove their livery but otherwise neither molesting anyone nor doing any damage. A cherry hawker sat with her basket on the eiderdown quilt of the Queen’s bed. ‘Now,’ she said. ‘Today, it’s the nation’s turn to be comfortable.’

  Awakened in his house in the Rue de Bourbon, Lafayette leaped out of bed, hurriedly put on his uniform and big cockaded hat and rushed off towards the Pont Royal, followed by an angry crowd accusing him of having connived at the King’s escape. On his way he met Bailly who, accompanied also by a shouting mob and dressed in a black overcoat with a tricolour ribbon across his shoulders, appeared ‘nearly overcome with anxiety’. They stopped to talk above the roar of the crowd. ‘Do you think,’ Lafayette asked, ‘that the King and his family will have to be arrested and brought back to Paris for the public good?’ Bailly thought that they would but wondered who could give the orders. The Assembly were not due to meet until nine o’clock and something would have to be done before then.

  ‘All right, I will take the responsibility upon myself,’ Lafayette said and immediately began to dictate an order to an aide-de-camp:

  The King having been removed by the enemies of the Revolution, the bearer is instructed to impart the fact to all good citizens, who are commanded in the name of their endangered country to take him out of their hands and to bring him back to the keeping of the National Assembly. The latter is about to assemble, but in the meantime I take upon myself all the responsibility of this order. Paris, June 21,1791.

  Lafayette signed the paper, adding beneath the date, ‘This order extends to all the royal family’, and soon horsemen were riding in all directions out of Paris to find them. One of the horsemen was Captain Bayon who took the road to Valenciennes. He galloped through Meaux and east for Châlons, but after six hours in the saddle he felt he must have a rest. So he reined in his horse at Chaintrix, sending a message on to Sainte-Ménéhould that every effort must be made to stop the royal family if they had taken that road to the frontier. When this message reached the post-house at Sainte-Ménéhould the suspicions of the young postmaster, Jean Baptiste Drouet, were confirmed. Drouet had thought that the governess of Baroness von Korff’s two children looked just like the Queen whom he had seen once or twice when he had been in the army and was ‘equally struck’ by the resemblance of the steward to the face of the King printed on an assignat he had in his pocket. He had said as much to his wife, but she had not wanted him to get into trouble and had advised him to keep quiet. Now, feeling convinced that the woman must be the Queen, he and a friend galloped off in pursuit of the berlin through the Forêt d’Argonne on the road to Verdun.

  Ten miles east of Sainte-Ménéhould is the little town of Clermont en Argonne. Here the berlin had stopped once again to change horses, and Drouet’s postilions riding back from the post-house there to Sainte-Ménéhould had overheard a shout from the box of the berlin as it continued on its journey: ‘Take the road to Varennes!’ Passing Drouet on their way through the Forêt d’Argonne, the postilions told him what they had heard. So Drouet and his companion, who had been making for Metz by way of Verdun, turned north for Varennes. ‘We went by a side road through the woods,’ Drouet recorded, ‘and reached Varennes at the same time as the berlin which was drawn up beside the houses at the top of the town. It was then about half past eleven and the night was very dark. But in order not to be recognized or suspected, we took off our cross belts and as we passed the carriage at a walk, I said in a loud voice, trying to pass ourselves off as merchants bound for a nearby fair, “Good Lord! We’ll be very late getting to Grandpré. Perhaps we shan’t get there at all with these tired-out horses.”’

  Having passed the berlin they rode flat out down the hill, through the cobbled streets and across the stone bridge to the house of the local procurateur, a grocer and chandler named Jean Baptiste Sauce. Coming out into the street with a lantern in his hand, Sauce called out the National Guard who took up their positions beside an archway that spanned the main street by the church. Soon the lamps of the berlin appeared in the darkness, and Sauce walked out into the middle of the street shouting, ‘Halt!’ The berlin came on despite the order and, as the National Guardsmen appeared from behind the arch, bayonets fixed to their muskets, Sauce cried out again, ‘Halt! Halt! One step more and we fire!’ The horses clattered to a halt.

  Sauce went up to the carriage, knocked on the door and asked to see the occupants’ passport. The Duchesse de Tourzel passed it through the window. Sauce took it from her and went into a nearby inn to examine it in a better light than his lantern afforded. It was made out in the proper form for the Baroness von Korff and her party. Sauce began to think there must have been a mistake, but Drouet insisted. ‘I tell you the King and Queen are in that carriage. I’ve seen them. If you let them go you’ll be guilty of treason.’

  So Sauce asked the travellers to alight. He led them into his small shop, a wooden building with bundles of candles and pots of brown sugar in the window, and took them up the narrow stairs to a bedroom where the two children lay down on the bed. The two ladies sat on rickety, straw-bottomed chairs, and the man who claimed to be the Baroness’s steward walked up and down restlessly as they waited for the arrival of a judge, Jacques Destez, who had lived at Versailles for a number of years and had often set eyes on the King. He came into the room at last, looked in astonishment at the figure in the green overcoat and immediately knelt before him. ‘Oh, Sire!’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ the King answered in immediate acknowledgment of this identification. ‘I am, indeed, your King.’

  Sauce was as impressed and overawed by their Majesties’ presence in his bedroom as was Destez. Having listened to the King’s explanations as to why he had left Paris, he told them respectfully that in the morning he would provide them with an escort to take them on their journey.

  But before dawn Captain Bayon arrived, together with one of Lafayette’s aides-de-camp, Jean Louis Romeuf, who brought with him a decree from the Assembly confirming Lafayette’s order for the royal family’s return to the Tuileries. They were both embarrassed. Romeuf averted his glance when he saw the Queen. Bayon stammered when he addressed the King: ‘Sire, you know – all the people of Paris are, er…You will not go any further, Sire – the interests of the state…Sire…’

  “Well, what is it you want?’ the King asked him brusquely.

  ‘Sire, a decree from the Assembly.’

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘My companion has it.’

  Romeuf held out the paper, looking at the floor. The King snatched it from him and, having read it, said, ‘There is no longer a King in France.’

  He handed it to the Queen who also read it, then gave it back to him. He placed it on the bed where the children were still lying down. But the Queen suddenly seized it and flung it on to the floor with the angry comment, ‘I will not have my children contaminated.’

  At these words the people standing in the threshold of the room began to murmur angrily ‘as though she had profaned the most sacred thing in the world’.

  The King seemed to be in his usual quandary as to what ought to be done. He asked Bayon and Romeuf if they might not wait until ‘at least eleven o’clock, as though still hoping that de Bouillé’s troops might arrive. But then, as the crowds in the street outside shouted more loudly than ever, ‘They must go back! They must go back! To Paris! To Paris!’, he began to realize that he had no alternative but to obey the Assembly’s commands. The Duc de Choiseul, who had now ridden into the town with his hussars and had pushed his way into Sauce’s shop, q
uietly urged him to make a dash for the frontier with his family: there were fresh horses ready in the street below as well as the hussars. There were also, though, as the King well knew, hundreds of armed men there, and hundreds more National Guardsmen were still converging on Varennes from the neighbouring towns and villages. So, after breakfast, during which Madame Sauce suggested that he must be crazy to consider giving up all the money the nation paid him, it was decided that the royal family would have to return to Paris.

  Before leaving, the King begged to be left alone for a few minutes with his family. When the others had gone he persuaded Sauce to go down to the carriage, to make an excuse for entering it and to bring back a box from a secret receptacle whose position he described to him, giving him the keys. On Sauce’s return he opened the box. Inside were papers which he and his wife and sister frantically tore into tiny pieces, heaping them up in a bowl while Sauce stood on guard at the door. No sooner had the King set them alight, however, than there was a loud knocking at the door. He hurriedly picked up the bowl and hurled both it and its contents out of the window. The people below chased the fluttering fragments but, although they later tried to fit the charred edges together, they could make nothing of the writing on them.