by Susan Nagel
Fersen, an experienced soldier, performed his duty. He drove the carriage at a slow pace around the neighborhood to avoid suspicion. He then stationed the coach at the Petit Carrousel near the Tuileries to wait for the King and Queen. Inside the coach, the passengers waited nervously. The Dauphin hid on the floor under Madame de Tourzel’s skirt. Marie-Thérèse saw General Lafayette pass very near to the carriage on his way to the King’s coucher. An hour later, a woman approached the carriage and Marie-Thérèse held her breath in fear until the door opened and the person was revealed to be her aunt, Madame Elisabeth, who had made her way to the coach alone on foot. When Madame Elisabeth entered the carriage, she accidentally stepped on the foot of the little boy who, realizing the seriousness of the situation, and that they were not, in fact, playing a game, stifled a cry. Madame Elisabeth reassured the children that their parents were fine and that they would be with them soon.
The Queen waited until her servants were asleep and then changed into simple clothes – a plain taupe dress and a black hat with a thick violet veil. It was impossible for the King to get away until his coucher had finished, and even then Louis would be tied by a cord round his wrist to that of his valet – a tradition in case His Most Christian Majesty should need anything during the night. After the coucher, General Lafayette once again made his rounds and all seemed quiet. The King waited until his valet was asleep and then slipped the cord from his wrist. Dressed in the wig and costume of a lackey – a dark green jacket with mother-of-pearl buttons, a white satin vest, black silk pantaloons, white stockings and shoes with silver oval buckles – Louis escaped, as had the Queen, to meet a guard provided by Comte Fersen. The King then made his way to rendezvous with his family at midnight, and once the Queen was assured that the King had escaped the palace, she, accompanied by a member of the loyal gardes du corps, made her way to the Petit Carrousel also. En route, Marie Antoinette spied General Lafayette, who had been assigned by the National Assembly to keep a close eye on the royal family and who was making another tour of the palace grounds. As soon as he was out of sight she continued to the coach. Marie-Thérèse remembered watching her parents reunite, the King declaring: ‘How happy I am that you are here,’ as he embraced his wife. Madame de Tourzel recalled that the King and Queen then both embraced her.
Finally together, the carriage bearing the royal party began to proceed through Paris slowly and cautiously. Madame Brunier and Madame de Neuville followed behind in a calèche. Two very tense hours later and well behind schedule, their caravan reached the city gates. Once outside Paris, at Bondy, they looked for the second carriage to take the family to safety – the berlin that had been ordered for ‘Madame de Korff’ six months earlier. When Fersen finally discovered the carriage, liveried in bottle green with black trim, lemon-yellow axle and wheels, he found that it had only four horses rather than the necessary six and so hooked up two horses from the smaller carriage. The King, aware that Fersen was in love with the Queen, graciously thanked the Swede for his help. Fersen insisted that he wanted to remain with the royal family to guide them to freedom. The King, however, declined Fersen’s offer, and the two men bade each other adieu. Marie-Thérèse did not understand the significance of that moment until she was much older, but recalled that Fersen mounted his horse and set off for Holland at full gallop at the same time the royal family’s coach began its own flight.
The papers carried by the party identified them as: a valet by the name of ‘Durand’ (the King), a ‘Madame Bonnet’ (the Queen), ‘Aglaë’ – a girl of about twelve (Madame Royale), her younger ‘sister’ ‘Amélie’ (the Dauphin), and their nurse ‘Rosalie’ (Madame Elisabeth). Madame de Tourzel was primed to be the ‘Baronne de Korff’, a middle-aged woman and the alleged owner of the coach. There was, in fact, a real Madame de Korff, a Russian woman whose passport had been handed by the ambassador Simolin to Fersen. Three of the King’s most loyal gardes du corps posed as drivers.
The interior of the coach, equipped as a traveling home, was lined in white velvet, and contained a larder, a cooker, a canteen big enough for eight bottles of water and spirits, a table that could be raised for eating, and a leather chamber pot. Stories told after the ill-fated journey often exaggerated the carriage’s cumbersomeness. However, it had been constructed well for its purpose, and its top traveling speed – about 6 miles per hour – was no slower than a typical cabriolet pulled by two horses.
Marie-Thérèse recalled that the journey was at first uneventful, though its outcome would haunt her for the rest of her life. Town after town passed as the royals raced toward the eastern border. The careful planning of the Queen, Comte Fersen and their co-conspirators seemed to be working well. Posing as servants, the royal family stopped and changed horses at ramshackle inns. They reached Meaux at six in the morning and changed horses. At ten in the morning they stopped in the tiny village of Viels-Maisons, where the King relaxed for a few moments. The Queen, nervous that he was taking too long and was being too cavalier about timing, prayed that nothing would prevent them from reaching Pont-de-Somme-Vesle, a little over an hour from Châlons. There, the Duc de Choiseul would be waiting for them with his own cavalry of mercenaries and royalists.
Though due to arrive at Châlons between 12.30 and 1.30 in the afternoon of the following day, June 21, the King’s carriage passed through the town hours later, at some time between 3 and 4 p.m. At Pont-de-Somme-Vesle, the Duc de Choiseul and his men, thinking that the King’s delay meant that he had changed his route, were nowhere to be seen. The cavalry had also received confusing information from the Queen’s hairdresser, who was hours ahead, near Verdun.
In the meantime, the disappearance of the royal family had been discovered in Paris in the early hours of the morning. The National Assembly had ordered Lafayette to dispatch soldiers on horseback to catch the escaping berlin, or at least spread word throughout the provinces that the King was on the run. The Comte d’Hézecques claimed that Lafayette had been forewarned by one of his spies at the Tuileries that the royal family was going to take flight. Hézecques was also certain that on the evening of June 20, the General had, in fact, seen Madame Royale in her carriage. It was also noted that Baillon, one of General Lafayette’s aides de camp, had arrived in Châlons long before the King. Although when he appeared before the National Assembly on the morning of June 21, Lafayette claimed he could not have anticipated the escape plan, it seems that he had, in fact, set a trap for the King. After all, the General’s reputation, badly tarnished from his blunders during the invasion of Versailles in October 1789, could once again sparkle with the well-timed capture of the fugitive King.
Marie-Thérèse wrote in her account that when the party arrived at Châlons-sur-Marne they were recognized immediately. There had been a series of sightings along the way in various towns and the royal family believed that their disguises had failed them and that they had been identified owing to their fame. In truth, the King bore little resemblance in real life to the slim and handsome engraving of his face on the coins of the realm, and he had in fact been apprehended because the postmasters and gatekeepers in many of the towns had been alerted to watch for the carriage, a detailed description of which had been circulated. The son of the local postmaster in Sainte-Menehould, a Jacobin leader named Drouet, received a note from a man named Viet, the postman from Châlons, which read, ‘On behalf of the National Assembly, it is hereby ordered that all good citizens make every attempt to stop the berlin with six horses in which, suspected of traveling is the King, the Queen, Madame Elisabeth, the Dauphin and Madame Royale.’ The local populace noticed a green berlin led by six horses. In addition, its three coachmen wore the livery of the Prince de Condé, the famous military hero of the Seven Years War, who was now poised in Coblenz with an army. Marie-Thérèse remembered that one of the officers in Clermont whispered to the King that His Majesty had been betrayed.
The royal family proceeded with great anxiety through Sainte-Mene-hould. Drouet was determined to be the man to
personally apprehend the King, but should royalist troops of the Prince de Condé be nearby ready for combat, he had insufficient militia at his disposal for battle. Instead, Drouet ordered his local compatriots to keep watch on the vehicle, while he and the innkeeper, Guillaume La Hure, galloped on to Varennes, a town divided by the River Aire, to warn of the King’s approach. Everyone knew that in Varennes the King would have to stop and change horses, and while the King’s carriage was disabled, the townspeople could strike.
At Varennes, Drouet supervised the overturning of a furniture cart in the road so that the King could not reach the royalist soldiers waiting on the other side of the bridge. Young revolutionaries bearing torches surrounded the King’s carriage. A small group of armed men seized their horses’ heads and conducted the carriage slowly through town. Marie-Thérèse recalled having heard a salvo of shrieks, ‘Stop! Stop!’ as their carriage proceeded. The rebels ignited fires and rang bells to announce the capture of the royal family.
The royal party was taken to the home of the Mayor, a man named Sauce who sold candles, where they were to spend the night. Marie-Thérèse explained that her father ‘kept himself in the farthest corner of the room, but unfortunately his portrait was there’. However, it took quite some time for the people to be convinced that, based on the portrait on Sauce’s wall, the overweight, middle-aged man in their midst was indeed His Majesty and not some mere aristocrat. All through the night, unruly peasants with pitchforks stood guard outside the Mayor’s home. Madame Sauce feared that her neighbors would take retribution against her and her husband for ‘harboring’ the royal family, and so she felt great relief when, at about three o’clock in the morning, Lafayette’s aide de camp, Baillon, and another officer arrived to escort the King and his family back to Paris. Certain that his well-paid-for cavalry would arrive to rescue them, Louis tried to stall for time, asking Baillon not to disturb his children, who were sleeping. Baillon informed the King that if he thought he could prevent the soldier from doing his job, His Majesty was mistaken.
The cavalry, however, was nowhere to be seen. General Bouillé’s son and his army had been stranded the other side of the bridge for hours and, while the King was being taken prisoner, the young Bouillé had fallen asleep. The young Duc de Choiseul, son of the minister to the late King Louis XV, meanwhile, directed his forces toward Varennes but had become lost in the woods and did not arrive until daylight.
When Choiseul at last arrived in town, he was directed to the Mayor’s house and was allowed to meet with the King. Choiseul then presented Louis with a harebrained plan of escape. He could provide the royal family with seven horses and they could all ride away! The King, worried that one of his children in flight might fall or be hit by a bullet, refused the scheme. Louis had no choice but to surrender and to face the crowds of Varennes. The local rebels ordered the royal family back into their carriage and back to Paris. Having neither changed clothes nor slept, and traveling in stifling heat, the royal family prepared to return to the capital. The carriage wended its way back through the same towns it had traveled through on its way east, the very towns whose monuments had been erected to honor the marriage of their King and Queen some twenty years earlier.
Word of the King’s attempted escape had, it seemed, traveled much faster than the royal berlin. The perception that the King was abandoning France inspired anger and contempt among the citizens all along the route back to Paris. In Sainte-Menehould, a local aristocrat named Dampierre, a royalist who had come to see the King’s carriage, was flung to the ground, trampled by a horse and hacked to bits by a saber-wielding Jacobin. The coach traveled back through Châlons, where Marie-Thérèse felt they were treated kindly, and through Épernay, where they were intercepted by representatives of the National Assembly sent to escort the royal family back to Paris. The representatives – Pétion, Barnave, Maubourg, Dumas, and his nephew, La Rue – stopped the carriage and accused the King of trying to escape the country. The King replied that they were mistaken; his destination was Montmédy, and he had had no intention of leaving his kingdom. The men then ordered Marie-Thérèse and Madame Elisabeth out of their carriage so that they could travel in another one while the men shared their watch between two coaches. When Madame Royale refused to budge, Antoine Barnave and Jérôme Pétion climbed in the royal berlin. Barnave inserted himself between the King and Queen, who put the Dauphin on her lap. Pétion positioned himself between Madame de Tourzel and the King’s sister, both women taking turns to have Marie-Thérèse on their laps.
Barnave and Pétion wrote reports for the National Assembly about their journey with the royal family. Both men commented that they found the royal family surprisingly likeable and ordinary. Pétion’s account is, however, risible and wholly unreliable. He fantasized that the pious twenty-seven-year-old Madame Elisabeth found him so attractive that they flirted with one another during the journey and that as she began to doze, she rested her head on his shoulder, and that they exchanged glances in the moonlight. Pétion wrote that as soon as Marie-Thérèse fell asleep, he stretched out his arm and Madame Elisabeth slipped her arm through his and he ‘felt the movements of the body and the warmth which passed through her clothing … I believe that if we had been alone, that if, by some enchantment, the others had vanished, she would have slipped into my arms and would have given herself up to the promptings of nature.’ When he was thirsty, the vulgar Pétion asked Madame Royale for a drink and on the final day of the journey he placed a horrified Marie-Thérèse on his lap, writing that she must have enjoyed herself because he was so handsome. One of the less likely outcomes of the journey was the bond that developed between the Queen and Barnave, who would shortly serve as her advisor.
The children were terrified as crowds tried to overturn the carriage and poke lances through its sides. All along the road peasants brandished rifles and scythes, and bloody incidents continued throughout the haul back to Paris. When the family stopped for a moment in the village of Chouilly, the crowd spat in the King’s face and some tore at Marie Antoinette’s dress. In Épernay, the children heard someone cry that she would eat the heart of the Queen. Another woman screamed that she would see the Queen go to the scaffold. The Dauphin began to suffer from a form of stress-induced delirium. At Dormans, he dreamed that he was in a forest and that a pack of wolves was trying to eat his mother. He woke up sobbing and would not stop until he had sight of her.
The royal family did not have the opportunity to change clothing until they reached Meaux, where the King borrowed a shirt from the bailiff ahead of his re-entry into Paris. On Saturday, June 25, they arrived in Bondy on the capital’s outskirts where mobs of people hurled themselves onto the berlin in an attempt to harm its passengers. Marie-Thérèse heard the crowd scream ‘Whore!’ at her mother, and of her brother, ‘We know very well he is not the son of fat Louis!’
The flight eastwards, ending at Varennes, had taken less than twenty-four hours; the return journey lasted an interminable three and a half days. Nearly five days after their departure, the royal family was once again inside the gates of Paris. Although an edict had been passed in the capital forbidding violence, there was no guarantee that the populace would behave peacefully, and officials knew they were placing the family at great risk. Instead of heading directly to the Tuileries upon its return, the King’s carriage was paraded around Paris so that its citizens could see the face of their humiliated King, like a defeated enemy. Lafayette, expecting large crowds, had authorized placards to be placed on the walls of buildings that read, ‘Anyone who applauds the King will be beaten; anyone who insults him will be hung.’
Madame de Staël observed that the royal children looked stunned as they traveled through the crowd-filled streets of the capital. From her unbearably stuffy and claustrophobic carriage, Marie-Thérèse searched the faces of the angry crowds for molecules of sympathy and found but one. A well-dressed woman whose tears reflected the emotion that the Princess longed to see stood out in Marie-Thérèse’s me
mory as one small comfort. Marie-Thérèse, with great pain, recalled seeing General Lafayette, seated on his great white horse at the Place Louis XV, enjoying his moment in the sun. Since his return to France after the American War of Independence, Lafayette’s star had faded and the military hero had shown that he could be less than brilliant. Now that France’s most-wanted fugitives had been recaptured, Lafayette’s star was once again on the rise. In contrast, the King had suffered an immense loss of prestige even in the eyes of the moderates who previously had wanted to place him at the head of a constitutional monarchy. As Louis XVI said himself, from that moment on he was politically impotent and there was no longer a king of France.
Chapter IX
The Losing Side
In the statement the King left for his subjects to read after his escape, he avowed that he had no intention of leaving the country; rather he was merely, as he titled the document, ‘Leaving Paris’. He explained in his proclamation to ‘all Frenchmen’, that, as his own family had been so thoroughly denied their own ‘liberté’, and he, their monarch, was presently caught in the kind of stranglehold that made it impossible to perform his duties, he felt it necessary to remove his family from the hotbed of the ‘Île de France’. Louis firmly believed that most of the politicians were, at heart, monarchists, and he was convinced that if he could operate from Montmédy in northeastern France, he would be able to regain a measure of control over the torrent of reforms emanating from the radical faction in the Assembly.