When the King Took Flight (13 page)

Finally the drivers agreed to proceed to the center of Varennes
while the party looked for more horses. They advanced slowly
through the darkness, the street illuminated only by the lanterns of
the cabriolet. They began to hear voices, shouts, someone crying,
"Fire! Fire!" Madame de Tourzel remembered the moment vividly:
"We thought we had been betrayed, and we drove down the street
with a feeling of sadness and distress that can scarcely be described." They passed under the archway by the inn of the Golden
Arm. And there they were stopped.36

For the royal family and their supporters, the night in Varennes
could only have been a prolonged agony, the stuff of their worst
nightmares-those "eight deathly hours of waiting," as Madame de
Tourzel described them. There were moments of hope: the seeming
willingness of the town leaders to help them, the miraculous appearance first of Choiseul and Goguelat, and then of Damas and
Deslon at the head of their cavalry units. To the last moment there
was also the wishful assumption that General Bouille was nearby,
that he was on his way to deliver them. But Louis resolutely rejected his officers' proposals to extricate the family violently, lest
harm befall his wife and children. The town council's change of
heart soon thereafter, its refusal to allow them to continue their
journey, was a bitter disappointment. The appearance of the couri ers from Paris, ordering their return to the capital, brought final humiliation and defeat.

For a time they tried to stall. They requested that the children be
allowed to sleep longer, that they themselves be given time to rest.
One of the nursemaids even feigned a violent stomachache. In the
end, they asked and were granted a moment alone to gather their
thoughts, time which they spent preparing a common story and
burning the incriminating documents in their possession. Finally, at
about half past seven in the morning, the royal party was led from
Sauce's store and taken to the two carriages, which had now been
turned around. The family was frightened by the great sea of people filling the street and the square beyond the river, jostling for a
view of the king and queen, shouting continuously, "Long live the
nation! Long live the king! Back to Paris!" The duke de Choiseul,
ever gallant, helped the queen into the berline. She turned and
asked him, "Do you think Monsieur Fersen has escaped?" The duke
said that he believed he had. Soon afterward he was pulled away
into the crowd, badly beaten, and eventually led away to prison in
Verdun, along with Damas and several other officers. Only the wily
Goguelat with his bandaged pistol wound somehow managed to slip
out of town, to be captured several days later on the Austrian border. As the carriages moved slowly up the hill along the road back
toward Paris, the family looked across the river, still wondering
what had happened to Bouille.37

At that very moment, the general was a good hour and a half
away. He had been told the disastrous news at a little after four that
morning by his youngest son, who caught up with him as he and his
officers had almost reached Stenay after abandoning their long wait
outside Dun. It had taken another forty-five minutes to get the bulk
of his royal German cavalry, three or four hundred strong, into the
saddle and riding back toward Varennes. As they approached the
town they encountered hundreds of peasants and guardsmen in full
mobilization, marching in all directions with drums and flags, and
on several occasions they were forced to draw their sabers and
charge, threatening a fight before the crowds gave way. When they finally arrived on the hill above Varennes, it was nine or half past.
And they went no further.

Bouille would later argue that the bridge had been dismantled
and that they were unable to ford the river. But the commander of
the Varennes cavalry had waded the river on horseback a few hours
earlier, and the road actually crossed to the right bank of the Aire
only a couple of miles farther south. More likely, the general had
been informed that the king was now two hours away and that he
was surrounded by several thousand armed guardsmen. Menaced
from all sides by the local population, concerned about the condition of the horses after their long ride south, and perhaps nursing
doubts about the reliability of his own cavalry-who would in fact
go over to the patriots a few hours later-the general now turned
and retreated to Stenay. He had a quick cup of coffee in his inn,
gathered together his two sons and about twenty officers, and rode
into exile in Austrian Belgium, a few miles away.38 Two days later
the baron Klinglin, one of the officers who had worked most closely
with Bouille over the previous months, wrote a letter to his sister.
He lamented the failure of "our sublime conspiracy." "How difficult it is to overcome fate! What a strange destiny that the leaders
of an insignificant little town like Varennes should have halted the
king. Oh my dear friend, how sweet it would have been to have
died, if only we could have saved the king!"39

By the time Bouille had begun his retreat the royal cortege was
just entering Clermont. Those in the king's party would never forget the terrifying journey back to Paris. Compared with the race to
Varennes on June 21, the return was ponderously tedious, dragging
on for four long days. The hottest weather of the summer had now
settled in, and the pace of the carriages was usually too slow to raise
even a hint of a breeze. The enormous crowds of people tramping
along outside raised great clouds of dust that only intensified the
misery. Valory, who sat atop the berline with his hands tied, recalled
the ordeal: "We were cooked by the sun and choked by the dust.""

When they first drove out of Varennes, they had been accompanied by some six thousand national guardsmen, marching in double columns with some semblance of order, led by the Parisian guardsman and messenger Bayon. But as they made their way west, countrypeople converged from every direction: men, women, and children, often whole villages arriving en masse, in carts or on foot,
carrying every conceivable weapon. Observers were staggered by
the numbers of people, spilling off the road into the surrounding
fields and following like a great swarm: this "countless multitude,"
as the bodyguard Moustier remembered, "of every age and of both
sexes, armed with muskets, sabers, pitchforks, pikes, axes, or sickles." The deputy Petion, who accompanied the family on the last
half of their journey, said much the same: in addition to the guardsmen, there were "old men and women and children, some carrying
sickles or long spits, others with clubs, swords or antique guns.""
Many came simply to gawk at the king and the queen, whom they
had never seen, never hoped to see. Others, members of their town
or village militias, rushed to the defense of both the nation and the
king-for at first there were rumors that the monarch had been kidnapped. Often it was their first chance to put to use their company
flags and colorful new uniforms, previously worn only in parades
around the town square. At times the crowds were in a celebratory
mood, especially when the royal cortege crossed the communities
touched by the previous night's panic. People exalted at their victory sang and danced and drank to the health of the nation and the
king. Mayors gave splendid speeches, patterned on the rhetoric they
had read in accounts of National Assembly debates. The faithful
Madame de Tourzel was shocked by the many harangues the king
had to endure from local dignitaries, anxious to lecture him on his
thoughtlessness in abandoning his people, in causing them such a
fright-even if he had only been heeding the advice of treacherous
councilors. Town officials, she felt, "had only one thought in mind:
to glory in their own triumph and to humiliate the royal family. It
was a joy for them to overwhelm the unfortunate monarchs with
bitter invectives."42

Yet there was also a strong element of fear. General Bouille and
his four hundred cavalrymen, galloping down the road to Varennes, had caused an enormous fright among the countrypeople, a fright
that quickly spread from village to village and was magnified by
the movement of other troops in the region. Soon reports began
spreading of thousands of soldiers, perhaps the whole Austrian
army, led by the villain general, arriving to punish the people of
Lorraine and Champagne for capturing the king."3 Among the
crowds following the cortege, swept by ever-changing rumors, the
festive mood could be rapidly transformed into anger and a desire
for revenge. Usually the outrage was directed not toward the monarch-cries of "Long live the king!" could be heard throughout the
journey-but toward those presumed to have influenced or kidnapped him. However, the crowds had few qualms about targeting
the queen. There were the inevitable coarse references to Marie's
sex life, and snide remarks about the dauphin's "real father." When
Marie offered a piece of chicken to a guardsman who had been particularly kind and obliging, a great roar rose up that it was poison,
that the young man should not touch it. But hatreds were focused
above all on the three bodyguards, seated prominently above on the
driver's seat, still dressed in their rich yellow livery coats, symbolic
of all that was hateful under the Old Regime. Assumed by many to
have been the instigators of the flight, they were continually threatened verbally and pelted with rocks or dung. On several occasions
groups tried to approach the berline and attack them physically, before being pushed away by the national guardsmen."

Sauce himself accompanied the coaches as far as Clermont, before turning back to see to the defense of his town against a possible
attack by Bouille. The cortege then moved along the main post road
to Sainte-Menehould, where the mayor gave another formal speech
and Drouet and Guillaume-who had returned home during the
night-ostentatiously joined in the march. West of the town a local
noble, the count Dampierre, who had witnessed the mayor's address
in Sainte-Menehould, attempted to approach the berline on horseback and speak to the family. When the guards pushed him back, he
shouted "Long live the king!," fired his musket in the air, and rode
off toward his chateau. The count was already widely hated by the local population, and groups of people followed him, shot him off
his horse, and killed him in the fields. It is unclear whether the king
himself saw the massacre, but the bodyguards watched in horror
from atop the carriage."

By the time the procession reached Chalons-sur-Marne at the
end of the day, the royal family had been almost forty hours without sleep. "It is almost impossible," as one witness put it, "to describe their state of exhaustion."46 But here they would know a few
hours of respite from the tension and fatigue. They were feted by
the mayor and the departmental leaders, who arrived to meet them
at the gates of the city, and they were given accommodations in the
palace of the former intendant. It was the very building where the
young Marie-Antoinette had once spent the night on her trip to
France from Austria, some twenty-one years earlier. Authorities
here were clearly more sympathetic to the plight of the monarch.
That night a small group of individuals even offered to help him escape, though Louis refused to consider leaving without his family,
and the plan came to nothing. The next morning the king and queen
attended Corpus Christi mass, but before the service was completed
they were hustled away by another company of national guards just
arrived from Reims. New stories were coming in that Varennes and
Sainte-Menehould had been sacked and burned by marauding armies, and the guardsmen insisted on moving the king rapidly back
toward Paris.47

They set out once again in late morning, advancing painfully
slowly with their great escort, now estimated at 15,000 to 30,000
people, following the Marne Valley rather than the shorter route
through Montmirail that they had used for their flight. They
stopped briefly for dinner in Epernay, but a riot broke out in the
streets, and Madame de Tourzel was nearly pulled away into the
crowds before they were rushed onto the road once again."8 Then
toward half past seven in the evening, as the route skirted the river
in the open countryside, the cortege suddenly came to a halt, and
the crowds hushed and pulled aside from the road ahead. Three
deputies sent by the National Assembly in Paris had arrived and were approaching on foot, preceded by the Assembly's sergeant
at arms. The representatives had learned that the king had been
stopped in Varennes some twenty hours earlier, and they had immediately dispatched three of their members, carefully chosen to represent the diverse political groupings in the Assembly. Antoine
Barnave led the way, a moderate Jacobin and gifted orator, only
twenty-nine years old and looking even younger. He was followed
by Jerome Petion, somewhat older, a fervent democrat and close associate of Maximilien Robespierre and the radical Jacobins; and by
Marie-Charles de Latour-Maubourg, a monarchist and a friend of
Lafayette. After the long hours of fear and uncertainty, the women
in the carriage were overcome with emotion at the appearance of
these men, men they had once so despised, but who now seemed to
promise their safety. Madame Elizabeth took the deputies' hands
and begged them to protect the three bodyguards, who had only recently been threatened with lynching. After a few words of comfort, Barnave formally read the decree of the Assembly, commissioning them to ensure the king's safe return to Paris. He then
climbed atop the berline and, sharply illuminated by the setting sun,
read out the decree a second time for the benefit of the crowd. It
was another extraordinary moment in the Revolution, clearly marking the transfer of sovereignty from the king to the nation.49

The deputies had been accompanied by the military officer
Mathieu Dumas, a moderate patriot and veteran of the War of the
American Revolution, and Dumas now took charge of the national
guard contingents, reestablishing some semblance of order in the
immense procession. Barnave and Petion squeezed their way into
the larger coach with the two children moved to the laps of the
women, and the much taller Maubourg found a place with the
nurses in the cabriolet. They spent that night in the small town of
Dormans, getting to bed well after midnight. The next day, as they
passed through the town of Chateau-Thierry, Dumas managed a
maneuver at the bridge that cut them off from most of their amorphous popular escort, and they were able to proceed rapidly to
Meaux, where they passed the night of June 24 in the bishop's residence. But more masses of people, guardsmen and spectators,
converged on the town during the night, and the final drive to the
capital through the summer heat was as slow and encumbered as before. "I have never experienced," wrote Petion, "a longer and more
exhausting day." 51