Marie Antoinette: The Journey

by Antonia Fraser

  At Dormans, on the other hand, where the second night was spent with the King dozing in an armchair, they were kept awake all night by cries of “Long live the nation!” and “Long live the National Assembly!” There were threats to shoot the Queen at Épernay—if she could be got without hitting the King. And although the King and Queen were decently treated by the Bishop at Meaux—a juror—in whose house they spent the third night, there was real trouble from Claye onwards. It was 25 June, “one of the hottest days I ever felt,” wrote Grace Elliott, but the people would not allow the berlin to travel faster than at walking pace. The swearing, which was meant to be heard by the royal party, added to their discomfort, and the insolent smoking outside the open windows even more so. It was symbolic of the way the Queen was now demonized that various stories of her offering food out of the window to hungry people along the route all had the same denouement. The recipients of her charity were speedily warned off with the cry: “Don’t touch it! It’s sure to be poisoned.”27

  At the barriers of the city of Paris, there was a vast crowd. But the reception of the royal family was now subject to organization and there was no more danger of mob violence. La Fayette ordered that the normal sign of respect to the King was to be ostentatiously ignored; every head was to be covered as he passed and even the kitchenhands had to put their greasy cloths on their heads. At the same time an order was posted: “Whoever applauds the King will be flogged; whoever insults him will be hanged.” So the infinitely slow, infinitely melancholy cortège of exhausted would-be fugitives reached the Tuileries through crowds that were for the most part silent.

  The Queen’s “proud and noble air” even in these circumstances did not fail to arouse comment, both adverse and sympathetic. The press was as ever busy inflaming public opinion against her, this Medea who had been ready to plunge her arms into the blood of the French people. Now it was “the rage of Madame Capet at this terrible contretemps” that they claimed was visible on her face. The envoy from Bourbon Parma, Virieu, saw on the contrary a woman who was “defeated” even though she remained every inch the Queen. But the angelic looks of “the dear little Dauphin”—still the Child of the Nation whatever his parents’ misdemeanours—received general approbation.28

  When the party finally reached the Tuileries at eight o’clock at night, having travelled since seven that morning, Louis XVI was almost too exhausted to get out of the coach. The three bodyguards and two waiting-women were taken to the Abbaye prison as much for their own protection as for punishment and the Marquise de Tourzel was also held. François Hüe, the Dauphin’s chief valet, had rushed back to the palace in time to receive his charge, although when the little boy put out his arms to him, Hüe was brushed aside by a National Guard. It was not until later that they were reunited. Once in bed, Louis Charles called out to Hüe: “As soon as we arrived at Varennes, we were sent back. Do you know why?” Hüe told him quickly not to talk about the journey. That night Louis Charles had a nightmare in which he was surrounded by wolves and tigers and other wild beasts who were going to devour him. “We all looked at one another,” remembered Hüe, “without saying a word.”*8529

  By this time the Comte and Comtesse de Provence, successfully accomplishing their individual escapes with one attendant each, were reunited at Namur in Belgium. Fersen had also reached Brussels, bearing a letter from the King to Mercy d’Argenteau, conveying to him the money and letters of exchange that had reached him earlier. Count Esterhazy, referring to Fersen under the coded name of “La Chose” (literally, The Thing) described Fersen’s absolute despair on hearing the news of the recapture although, like the Queen herself, Fersen put on a brave face in public. The reaction of Provence, now the senior royal at liberty, was to be rather different: “There wasn’t a trace of tears in those eyes as dry as his heart,” wrote the Marquis de Bouillé, who even discerned “a few sparks of perfidious satisfaction.”31

  The Dauphin’s innocent question, although brushed aside by Hüe, deserves answering. What did go wrong at Varennes? There is a supplementary question: what would have happened if the King had successfully reached Montmédy?

  The first point that should be made is that the risky escape from the Tuileries was in itself successful. The King turned to Valory at Varennes when there were no horses to be found and exclaimed: “François, we are betrayed!” In fact, that was not the case. No one betrayed the royal family and up until the devastating absence of Choiseul at the poste of Somme-Vesle after which “everything was abandoned . . . to the caprices of fortune,” things went remarkably well, with only minor—and commonplace—incidents like the breaking of harness with which to contend.

  Afterwards the responsibility for the disaster of the royal family’s recapture was the subject of a long war of words in which successive generations also took part, supporting the respective roles of the Duc de Choiseul and the Marquis de Bouillé; belligerent declarations were made such as “Defence forces me to be on the offensive.” Among other first-hand accounts were those of the Comte de Damas, who was arrested like Choiseul on 22 June and who wrote a Rapport while in prison; of the courier Valory; and of the equerry Moustier. Madame Royale gave her child’s-eye view four years later. The Marquise de Tourzel was chiefly concerned in her Mémoires to rebut the charge—“I cannot pass over it in silence”—that it was her presence in the berlin that caused all the trouble, on the grounds that she had only carried out her duty at the orders of the Queen.32

  Choiseul’s account of events was written up in prison in August 1791 and he contended that it had subsequently been passed by the King and Queen (although Comte Louis de Bouillé strongly denied that they would have done this). Choiseul explained his defection at Somme-Vesle as due not only to the worrying delay in the schedule but also—even less plausibly—to his need to facilitate the King’s route to Châlons. Among the explanations that were variously offered for the disaster, he cited the lack of preparations at Varennes; that, however, was the overall responsibility of the Marquis de Bouillé.33

  On the other hand, the Marquis himself, who turned back from Varennes on finding the King taken away and who later emigrated to England, did receive a brief note of exoneration from the King: “You did your duty,” and signed “Louis.” The best epitaph on Bouillé’s failure at Varennes is that of his son Comte Louis, an avid memorialist. Comte Louis had originally remarked to his father on how happy he must feel at the prospect of liberating the King. While he was retreating from Varennes, in a state of profound dejection that his son never forgot, the Marquis reminded him of the conversation: “Well, do you still call me happy?”34

  There is, of course, the question of the route chosen by the King, the fact that Louis XVI “was unwilling to quit the French dominions, although but in travelling,” as was reported later to George III in England. It certainly would have been easier to head for Belgium. But that was to negate his plan to appear as the father of his people whom he would never abandon; afterwards, he described the attempted flight as one of the “most virtuous acts” of his life.35 Arguably the party for the escape was from the start too large. But that would not have mattered so much if some bolder, more authoritative personage had either been the sixth passenger in the berlin, rather than the Marquise de Tourzel, or else had been squeezed in as well. Then again, this lack of a proper advisor for the King would not have mattered so much if a crisis had not arisen, first at Somme-Vesle and then at Varennes as a result of the missing relay-horses, whose whereabouts Choiseul had not had an opportunity to impart. For the want of a nail, the kingdom was lost, as the folk-rhyme has it. The Duc de Choiseul, to whose appointment both King and Bouillé had agreed, was that nail.

  The escape, then, could have succeeded. The outcome of the proposed royal appearance at Montmédy is more difficult to predict. The point has been made that Louis XVI was not the first French King to use retreat from Paris as a method of advance, Henri IV being one notable example and the young Louis XIV under the tutelage of Anne of Austr
ia another. As Madame de Staël wrote afterwards, if the flight had succeeded, it would have put an end to the hypocritical situation whereby the actions of the National Assembly, with which Louis did not agree, were purported to be his.36

  Yet the combined vision of the King and Queen, in which happy and relieved subjects flocked to their father-sovereign, was surely unrealistic by the summer of 1791. The presence of Bouillé’s force, with the strong possibility of émigré assistance, meant that civil war was a more likely outcome, a solution that had been persistently rejected by the King (and the Queen). Added to which Louis XVI would hardly have made a stirring military leader, a role for which he had neither experience nor inclination. As it was, Louis XVI wrote in his Journal: “Departure at midnight from Paris; arrived and stopped at Varennes-en-Argonne at eleven o’clock in the evening.” And at the end of the year, as was his custom, he recorded the journeys he had made: “Five nights spent outside Paris in 1791.”37

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  UP TO THE EMPEROR

  “It is up to the Emperor to put an end to the troubles of the French Revolution.”

  MEMORANDUM BY MARIE ANTOINETTE, 8 SEPTEMBER 1791

  As the Duc de Choiseul conducted Louis XVI back to the berlin in Varennes, he felt “an inexpressible anguish” as if he was seeing King Charles I handed over to his executioners.1 For the time being, however, that appeared to be an exaggerated prophecy of doom. On 26 June deputies came from the National Assembly and cross-examined the King. By dint of taking to her bath—or sending a message that she had done so—Marie Antoinette managed to avoid being examined until the next day, by which time she was able to coordinate her evidence with that given by her husband. The Queen was very firm that she would never have taken part in the expedition if she had not been convinced that the King intended to stay in France.

  After a further two weeks, the dominant party in the Assembly, still hoping somehow to reconcile a traditional monarchy with reform, issued a statement on the matter of Varennes in which the guilt of the King was neatly fudged. Louis XVI and his family had in fact been “abducted” by the Marquis de Bouillé and his son. Fersen, Goguelat, Choiseul and Damas were, among others, nominated as guilty. It was a fiction preserved by Bouillé in the proclamation which he now issued: that he had had no orders from the King. After a while the equerries were released and allowed to emigrate, the King and Dauphin bidding farewell to them with embraces. The Marquise de Tourzel, on the other hand, was allowed to resume her duties, having been saved from incarceration by the Queen’s pleas about her ill health. As the new Constitution, so long discussed, neared completion, the King was still a necessary asset to the constitutionalist or Feuillant party;*86 his acceptance of the Constitution, leading perhaps to its acceptance by others abroad, was something to be negotiated. The “Triumvir” of the Feuillants’ leaders consisted of Alexandre de Lameth, the youngest of three brothers of noble birth but of democratic convictions; Adrien Duport, a proponent of judicial reform; and Antoine Barnave, who had recently spent two days in the Queen’s company in the berlin.

  It was La Fayette whose star was waning. Widely—if unfairly—blamed for the Varennes escape, he was defeated in October in the election for the Mayor of Paris by that very Pétion whose coarseness had caused so much disgust on the journey back. On the other hand the republicanism of the Feuillants’ opponents naturally received a further impetus from the events of Varennes. These included Robespierre, the fastidious president of the Jacobins, with his daily dressed and powdered hair worthy of a courtier, and his “catlike” appearance. This was the phrase of another Jacobin, Merlin de Thionville, the type of cat changing with time from domestic animal to wild cat and finally to “the ferocious aspect of the tiger.” Why should a king alone be inviolable, he enquired pointedly: “The people, aren’t they inviolable too?” Then there was Georges Danton, with his contrastingly shaggy appearance—he described himself as having “the rough features of liberty”—who had brought into being the extremist Cordeliers (Rope-Sellers) Club the previous year. Other opponents to the Feuillants were the journalists Camille Desmoulins and Jean Paul Marat, founder of the hostile newspaper L’Ami du Peuple, to whom “Louis and Antoinette” were public enemies.2 Lastly there was Jean Pierre Brissot, the son of a Chartres caterer. Much travelled in England and America, and founder of the newspaper Le Patriote Français, Brissot led the group that was later termed the Girondins, after the geographical area of France from which most of them came.

  On 17 July, two days after the King’s manufactured “acquittal,” a meeting was organized in the Champ de Mars at which republican petitions were presented at a kind of altar. Proceedings got off to a violent start when two men were discovered lurking beneath the altar. They had in fact no more political intent than to spy on the women’s legs but they were executed as spies of a very different sort. The behaviour of the National Guards under La Fayette was far more lethal. Through some kind of fatal misapprehension, there was firing on the crowds and fifty people were killed. Although the extremist leaders were for the present obliged to lie low—Danton vanishing to England—a precedent had been set for the kind of interfactional warfare that would now rage in French politics. As for the “tumult” in the capital city itself, that was well caught by an English visitor, Stephen Weston. Not only the French but every nation under the sun “from Siam to California” was represented among the crowds thronging the streets, all wearing appropriate dress, including Cossacks, Jews, Americans—a “Paul Jones” or a “nephew of Benjamin Franklin”—as well as deserters from various military forces, whether that of the Marquis de Bouillé, the émigré Princes, or just the Turkish army.3

  Although royalists—and optimists—hoped that the King might be the gainer in all this, the fact was that thanks to Varennes the reputation of Louis XVI had taken a severe knock. Marie Antoinette had, after all, no reputation left to lose; her unpopularity was now so great, reported the English ambassador, that if she had been released by the National Assembly, she would have been torn to pieces by the mob. There were renewed rumours that the Queen would be removed from her husband (and children) to be shut up in that convenient convent, after being tried for crimes against the nation. Maria Carolina in Naples, hearing of these ferocious prognostications, even thought that a convent might be the most secure refuge. “I would give my life blood to save her,” wrote the Queen of Naples to their mutual brother the Emperor Leopold, “not to make her the Queen of France again, but that she may finish her sad days in a convent.” (The Archduchess Marie Christine, characteristically less compassionate, simply thought it might have been better for “my poor sister” if she had never been married.) If these assaults on the Queen were nothing new, those on the King marked a distinct, and distinctly disagreeable, development in his relationship with those “children,” his subjects. Whatever the provocation, whatever the fudging, Louis XVI had tried to deceive the nation—and had been found out.4

  “The King has reached the lowest stage of vileness,” wrote Manon Roland, the pretty, spirited and intelligent wife of a Girondin deputy, who had established a salon in Paris. “He has been shown up nakedly by those around him; he inspires nothing but scorn . . . People call him Louis the False or the fat pig. It is impossible to envisage a being so totally despised on the throne.” The picture given in L’Ami du Peuple was indeed of a “Louis Capet” who was a hypocrite while being physically gross and “consoling himself with the bottle.” To the Jacobin Club, he was “perfectly contemptible.” It was a cunning intensification of the personal denigration of Louis XVI, as someone too base to occupy the dignified position he held at a time when that position itself was under attack. Meanwhile cartoonists abroad cheerfully made mock of the entire Varennes story, Gillray, for example, portraying the whole arrest as a slapstick comedy, while the King of England wondered when, if ever, the King of France would behave like a man. It was even believed—quite erroneously—that the greed of Marie Antoinette’s “beast of a husband”
had been responsible for their capture because he would insist that they stop and eat at various places en route.5

  It was hardly to be expected that the ordeal of Varennes would leave the Queen unaltered, mentally or physically. Her immediate emotions may be glimpsed in two letters written to Fersen at the end of June. The first is brief and begins baldly: “Be reassured about us; we are alive.” The second is full of pauses like sighs: “I exist . . . How worried I have been about you,” and “Don’t write to me, that will expose us, and above all don’t come here under any pretext . . . We are in view of our guards day and night; I’m indifferent to it . . . Be calm, nothing will happen to me . . . Adieu . . . I can’t write any more to you . . .” Using Count Esterhazy as an intermediary, the Queen sent Fersen two inexpensive rings with the fleur-de-lys on them, of the sort that were still generally on sale. One was inscribed: “Coward who abandons them,” and the other: “Many miles and many countries can never separate hearts.”6