Daughters of the Storm (15 page)

The marquise stirred, winced from the pain in her arm and pressed her good hand to her face. Héloïse bent over to comfort her and was dismayed to notice lines on her mother's face that she had never seen before. Suddenly, the marquise looked all of her forty years.

‘Monsieur le Marquis?' she was asking.

Héloïse was assaulted by a sudden fear. It was unlike her mother to be so unfocused.

‘He is safe,' she replied.

Sophie went over to the marquise and knelt by her side.

‘Don't distress yourself, Aunt Marguerite,' she tried to comfort her. ‘We will find him.'

The marquise threw her a weak smile and touched Sophie's hand.

‘You are a good girl,' she said approvingly. ‘I will write and tell my sister so.'

In the bedroom, Héloïse was relieved to see that Louis was fully conscious and had been observing them through the connecting door. Héloïse sent him a little smile and Louis returned it.. A poor, weak apology of a smile, but recognisable nevertheless.

‘How?' he asked.

‘You were fortunate,' Héloïse replied, not wishing to over-tax him.

‘Yes, I was,' said Louis enigmatically, and so softly that Héloïse had to bend over to hear him. Her heart gave one wild thump and, to hide her confusion, she busied herself with the pillows.

‘Look at me,' he begged.

She raised her head.

‘You are beautiful,' he told her. ‘I just wanted to make sure.'

Héloïse hoped he was not delirious, although she knew perfectly well that Louis was in command of his senses.

‘Thank you,' she replied.

Louis turned his head.

‘Who are they?' he asked.

Héloïse explained, but Louis' gaze anchored on her face.

‘Do you always entertain strange gentlemen in your bed?'

‘In my bedroom perhaps, as is the custom,' she said. ‘But not in my bed. But, monsieur, how can you joke at such a time as this?'

Héloïse could have bitten her tongue out, for his mouth contracted.

‘I was forgetting,' he said. ‘Tell me what has happened and I must return to my duties.'

He made to rise. Héloïse pushed him back down on to the pillows. Louis reached again for her hand. His felt hot and dry, and she regarded him with renewed concern.

‘Tell me,' he said. ‘Their Majesties. Are they safe?'

‘If I knew,' replied Héloïse, choosing her words with care, ‘I would tell you.'

‘Mon Dieu,'
he exclaimed impatiently. ‘What a time to be wounded.'

‘You must remain quiet,' ordered Héloïse. ‘Or you will harm yourself.'

Louis surprised her by agreeing. He closed his eyes.

A little while later, she adjusted the bandage and smoothed back his hair. Louis appeared to be dozing. Héloïse eased her weary body upright. She longed to loosen her laces and to wipe away the moisture that trickled down her shoulders under her tight busk. Instead, she wiped her face with the hem of her skirt and searched in a chest for a comb. Sophie entered the room and Héloïse placed a finger on her lips to indicate that Louis was asleep.

The sound of footsteps in the corridor broke the silence. Instinctively, the two girls moved closer together. The footsteps came nearer. Héloïse and Sophie looked at each other. Each knew what the other was thinking. Héloïse picked up the empty pitcher and Sophie grabbed a spindly chair by the wall. Héloïse remembered thinking, quite irrelevantly, what a painting Sophie would make. Sophie's once elegant gown was now limp and stained, and her fair hair was scraped back anyhow from her face with a borrowed ribbon, but her eyes were full of defiant fire and life.

A movement from the bed made Héloïse swing round. Louis had managed to pull himself upright and was clinging to the bedpost. Sophie went to help him.

‘Thank you,' he said gratefully, and tried to tuck his shirt into his breeches.

In the salon, meanwhile, both Ned and William had positioned themselves by the door, ready to spring on intruders. William's stomach tightened and a pulse beat quite clearly on Ned's temple. The door opened slowly. Héloïse grasped at the pitcher. And then dropped it again.

The Marquis de Guinot stood surveying the scene, and beside him was the man Héloïse had done her best to forget. Hervé de Choissy smiled his cruel smile. How typical of him, she thought, noting his immaculate linen and freshly pressed redingote, to look so... s
o au point.
Observing her expression, de Choissy raised his eye-glass and his smile broadened. He inclined his head towards Héloïse in a private greeting.

‘Ma chère.'

The marquis greeted his wife, who stretched out her uninjured hand towards him.

Héloïse stared at her father in consternation. She had never seen him looking so dishevelled. The marquis' hair had lost most of its powder and his tail-coat was rumpled beyond recognition; he was obviously exhausted. Marie-Victoire burst into tears in the corner and Héloïse went to lay a comforting hand on her shoulders.

‘We shall be returning to Paris,' said the marquis at last. ‘The king has decided to give in to the rebels' demands and to take up immediate residence in the Tuileries Palace. The Parisians have promised to return home. Versailles will be abandoned and we shall, of course, accompany the king.'

The marquise slumped back in her seat.

‘Where will all this end?' she asked for all of them.

‘I wish I could answer that,' replied her husband. ‘I cannot feel the king has been wise in his decision, but it is our duty to obey.'

‘I shall never forgive them,' the marquise declared. ‘They are unforgivable.'

Louis slumped back on to the bed and tried to master the weakness that threatened to overwhelm him. In response to the marquis' enquiry, Héloïse hastened to explain who he was. The marquis went over to Louis.

‘I owe you thanks for my daughter's safety,' he said. ‘When this incident is over, then I hope you will allow me to thank you properly. Meanwhile you must rest and I must return to the king.' There was incomprehension as well as anger in his voice. ‘I never thought I would live to see this day,' he finished.

There was nothing any of them felt they could add. Overnight, a precedent had been established, and all of them felt it was too dangerous to try to explain it.

The marquise reasserted some of her authority.

‘We must pack,' she said.

The marquis kissed her hand.

‘I shall leave it to you, as always,' he said. ‘I will send over any of our household I find and I shall order the carriages.'

The noise of departure became audible. Horses' hoofs clattered on the stones and there were sounds of hastily issued orders. Marie-Victoire slipped into the bedroom and began to repack. De Choissy raised a manicured hand.

‘Now that you are persuaded that I need not be hit on the head, perhaps I can persuade you to take a glass of wine.'

He went over to the table and poured out the remnants of the wine. Héloïse accepted a glass. ‘Drink,' he admonished in an undertone. ‘You will have need of it.'

He handed out the rest of the glasses.

‘It appears the mob did succeed in invading the queen's bedchamber,' he informed them. ‘Fortunately, Her Majesty managed to escape in time. Later, she went on to the balcony and managed to quieten the rebels. I saw her as I arrived. I had been warned there was trouble, so I took a different route from my usual one.'

His light, carefully modulated tones forced the others to resume a semblance of normality., Torn between hatred and admiration, Héloïse gulped at her wine – a hatred she couldn't shake off and a genuine appreciation of his composure.

‘Come,' said de Choissy, and slipped his arm possessively around Héloïse's waist, pressing his fingers into the curve between her hip and breast. He led her to the window. ‘This is a historic moment, and we should observe it.'

It was a strange sight: a tangled confusion of men and women, of sweating, restless horses and immobilised carriages which stretched towards Paris as far as the eye could see. Framed in the palace windows, the courtiers clad in their silks and satins watched in silence as their king departed to the jeers of his subjects. Their silence said everything, and it said nothing.

When, at last, the procession wound its way down the majestic avenue, the silence deepened. It enfolded the once crowded rooms in its pall, broken only here and there by the echoes of shutters banging into the emptiness.

The spectacle of the Bourbons virtually imprisoned by their own people sent a cold draught through Europe's corridors of power. Where would it end? Which sovereign would be next? Nevertheless, none of the watchers was going to risk going to war to help the tottering French monarchy, except perhaps Sweden, and she was too bankrupt to do more than issue promises. Instead, an army of secret agents were sent by their governments into battle, slipping through the unpredictable, often treacherous, waters that lapped the infant revolution. Once in place, they fanned out into the streets, towns and cities where they listened and waited. For what? No one was quite sure.

A trickle, then a stream, of carriages, bearing aristocratic families who were abandoning their estates and incomes, headed towards Mainz and Koblenz. They preferred the dullness of exile to the dangers of a France where the social order was under attack. In the Tuileries Palace the king struggled to retain what shreds of authority remained to him and to work with the National Assembly, while his family settled down to re-create Versailles court life in the musty old palace. Curious to see their sovereigns, the Parisians peered in through the windows and concluded that they were nothing much to look at after all. The king was fat and the queen, whose hair was streaked with grey, had lost much of her beauty.

The National Assembly followed the king to Paris and was ensconced in the old riding school close to the palace. The more conservative monarchists and constitutionalists sat to the right of the president's rostrum. The more radical and republican members sat to the left. There was fierce rivalry for the leadership of this ‘left' party which was composed of many liberal nobles as well as bourgeoisie and it was represented by many of the finest minds in France. Encouraged by the good harvest that had finally been garnered, these self-styled ‘patriots' set about pushing through their ideas for a France which was both free and equal.

The National Assembly now declared that the king ruled no longer by divine right but merely through the rule of law. It introduced a new constitution for the clergy which aimed to sever the historical ties that bound them to Rome and placed the clergy under the necessity of taking an oath in order to confirm their patriotism. Many of the clergy refused to take the constitutional oath and this increased their unpopularity.

The ‘federation' movement grew stronger. ‘We shall be free together,' went up the cry, and the provincial authorities, anxious to make their feelings known, urged the king to let their
fédérés
come to Paris. The king, suspicious of any such spontaneous representation, was persuaded, however, to allow
fédérés
from provincial National Guards to attend a ceremony of federation in the capital. On July 14th, 1790, the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, the whole of Paris turned out to celebrate the new France, and monarchists were reassured by the Parisians' enthusiastic reception of the king.

The underlying truth was stark. The king and queen were virtually impotent; they were surrounded by the wrong advisers; and the Revolution was launched on a course that no one could stop. Day by day, republican feeling grew. ‘It is easier', mourned Mirabeau, who had cause to regret his earlier support for reform, ‘to light the flames than to try to stamp them out.' Not even his powerful charisma could prevent the rising storm.

At Easter, 1791, the king and queen were prevented from leaving Paris for a holiday at St Cloud.

In June, a large yellow berline, outfitted in white Utrecht velvet and taffeta cushions, set off from Paris in the dead of night and lumbered its way towards the frontier, stopping frequently to let its occupants stretch their legs. At Varennes it was halted, and inside was discovered the royal family. In a sweltering heatwave, the berline crawled back to Paris and drew up in front of the brilliantly lit Tuileries. Out of it stepped the dusty, dishevelled and pathetic royal prisoners, never to leave Paris again.

In August, a document, signed by the King of Prussia and the Emperor of Austria, called on fellow monarchs to come to the Bourbons' aid. It achieved nothing and by September the king felt he had no option but to accept the new constitution which had been debated by the Assembly.

In November, a newly elected Assembly, almost totally purged of its former aristocratic members, decreed that all émigrés suspected of conspiring against France should return home. Safe in their headquarters outside France, the king's brothers, the dukes of Artois and Provence, continued to provide a focus for the royalist forces that had begun to mass on the borders.

As the year went by, life continued as normal for the poorer elements. The city had been divided into forty-eight sections, each of which elected three members to the Hôtel de Ville. Each section dealt with poor relief, and maintained a company of the National Guard which mounted guard at the section headquarters and at the
barrière.
The sections also organised a committee to search for saltpetre, badly needed for the manufacture of gunpowder. Markets hummed, the price of bread fluctuated and the journeymen, craftsmen and workers confined within Paris's walls struggled, as always, to make ends meet. But in the houses and salons of the rich and fashionable, in the cafés and theatres, in literary gatherings and political clubs, the political debates raged.
‘We
are all amusing ourselves,' wrote one observer. It became de rigueur for the fashionable to wear Constitution jewellery and Liberty caps decorated with blood-red ribbons.