At last the king was able to make his escape through a secret passage to Marie-Antoinette’s room and then down the staircase, straight past the guards, and out of the main palace entrance. For over two weeks before this, a friend, the Chevalier de Coigny, had visited the Tuileries each evening in similar clothes to those planned for the king’s escape. The guards, seeing the same corpulent figure in a brown and green suit, grey wig and hat, assumed this was the Chevalier de Coigny once more, and let him pass. With uncharacteristic cool, Louis even stopped in full view of the guards to tie up one of his shoe buckles. He had left a declaration behind in his rooms at the Tuileries, revealing why he had felt compelled to leave Paris. He argued that the country had deteriorated while he had not been in
control; the deficit was ten times bigger, religion was no longer free, and lawlessness was commonplace. He called upon all Frenchmen to support him and a constitution that guaranteed “respect for our holy religion.”
Everyone in the escape carriage was waiting for Marie-Antoinette. just as she ventured out of the palace, another carriage passed right in front of her. It was La Fayette and some guards on their nightly security round. She stepped back quickly, pressing herself against a wall. They had not seen her, but she was so shaken that she mistook her route through the palace and was soon lost in a warren of narrow dark passages. For almost half an hour she frantically tried to get her bearings while at the same time avoiding the armed guards patrolling the corridors.
Meanwhile, La Fayette approached the carriage again, as he left the palace. To their relief, he did not stop to check the passengers; it was not uncommon to see carriages waiting in the Petit Carrousel. When the queen finally made her escape, the king was so delighted, wrote Madame de Tourzel, that he “took her in his arms and kissed her.” Fersen urged the horses on cautiously and the carriage moved forward, slipping out of the Tuileries unnoticed.
At last, they made their way through Paris and once through the customs post discarded their escape coach for the specially built
berline.
Unfortunately, at the next change of horses, Fersen had to leave the party. The king feared that if their escape were discovered, it would make their position untenable if a foreigner had escorted the royal party to the border. With the cool and capable Fersen now gone, they were much more vulnerable. The three bodyguards riding on top were junior officers, more used to receiving orders than giving them, and leading the expedition was the king, a man not noted for his decisive action. The
berline,
smartly painted in green, black and lemon and drawn by six horses, with its lavishly appointed interior, “a little house on wheels,” was the sort of vehicle that would draw attention to itself as it trundled through the countryside.
Everything went as planned. Six fast horses were waiting at every staging post and by early morning, with Paris now several hours behind him, Louis smiled to think of his valet at the Tuileries, entering his bedroom and raising the alarm. “Once we have passed Châlons there will be nothing to fear,” he
told Marie-Antoinette with great confidence in his waiting troops. However, the
berline
was three hours behind schedule. Apart from the delay in leaving the palace, some of the relays had taken a little longer than they had planned. Worse still, while crossing a narrow bridge at Chaintrix, the horses fell and the straps enabling the carriage to be drawn were broken. They improvised a repair but more precious minutes were lost. Nonetheless, they passed Châlons successfully at around five in the afternoon. Their armed escort was to be waiting for them at the next stop: Pont de Somme-Vesle.
As they approached the town, their eyes discreetly scanning the horizon from behind the green taffeta blinds, there were no soldiers to be seen. The village was silent. The king did not dare knock on the doors to find out if the troops had been waiting there. He sensed something had gone terribly wrong. Had the escape plan been discovered? Were their lives now at risk? “I felt as though the whole earth had fallen from under me,” he wrote later.
The soldiers had, in fact, arrived in Pont de Somme-Vesle early in the afternoon under the leadership of the Duc de Choiseul. As they waited in the village for the king, the local people became alarmed at the sight of so many armed men. Since the peasants assumed that the soldiers were there to enforce the collection of overdue rent, a huge crowd gathered, armed with pitchforks and muskets, preparing to fight if necessary.
When the king had still not arrived by late afternoon, Choiseul had panicked. He feared that the king’s escape had been foiled somewhere on the road and that the armed peasants would attack his men. Rashly, not only did he give orders that his own men must disperse but also passed these instructions to the other staging posts down the line. “There is no sign that the treasure will pass today,” he wrote. “You will receive new instructions tomorrow.” Barely half an hour after Choiseul’s departure, the king’s
berline
drove into the village.
Without their armed escort, the carriage wound its way for a further two hours along the country road to the next town, Sainte-Menehould, the anxious passengers inside still daring to hope that all was not lost. When they arrived, once again, there was still no evidence of any dragoons. At last,
Captain d’Andouins, who had been in command of the soldiers in this village, approached the
berline.
The captain told the king briefly that the plan had gone awry but he would reassemble his troops and catch up with the king. Unfortunately, as he moved away, he saluted the king.
The vigilant postmaster of the village, one Jean-Baptiste Drouet, noticed that the captain saluted the person in the carriage. Even more surprising, as the carriage departed, he thought he recognized the king leaning back inside. Drouet sounded the alarm. A roll call of drums summoned the town’s own National Guard, who stopped the king’s soldiers leaving the village.
By this time, on the streets of Paris there was commotion as news of the daring escape spread. “The enemies of the revolution have seized the person of the king,” La Fayette announced and gave orders that the king must be found and returned at once to the capital. A dozen riders were found to spread this message quickly throughout France. Meanwhile, the postmaster at Sainte-Menehould, Jean-Baptiste Drouet, had obtained permission from the local authorities to set off at speed and detain the
berline.
In the lumbering
berline,
the royal family continued on their way “in great agitation and anxiety.” By eleven o’clock that night they were approaching Varennes, just thirty miles from the border and safety. Unknown to the royal party, their driver had been overheard giving instructions to take the minor road to Varennes and this had been duly passed on to Drouet. With the pursuit closing in on them, they stopped, as arranged, in the upper part of Varennes for their fresh horses. These were nowhere to be seen and the postilions—responsible for the horses—refused to take the tired horses any further. A dispute began between the postilions and the drivers of the coach. In desperation, the king, queen and Madame Élisabeth stepped out, frantically searching in the pitch black for the new horses themselves. These were, in fact, in the lower part of the town beyond the river Aire, being held by officers who had no idea the king was so near. Just at this point, Drouet came racing past the carriage, and went straight to find the mayor of Varennes to alert him to the royal fugitives in his village.
The king finally persuaded the drivers that the horses must be in the lower part of the village, and the
berline
set off down the steep slope. Suddenly
there was a jolt. “We were shocked by the dreadful cries around the carriage, ‘Stop! Stop!’ Then the horses’ heads were seized and in a moment the carriage was surrounded by a number of armed men with torches,” recalled Marie-Thérèse. “They put the torches close to my father’s face and told us to get out.” When the royal party refused, “they repeated loudly that we must get out or they would kill us all, and we saw their guns pointed at the carriage. We were therefore forced to get out.”
As alarm bells resounded round the village, the royal party was led to the mayor’s house, up a narrow, spiral stairway to a small bedroom where they were detained. “My father kept himself in the farthest corner of the room, but unfortunately his portrait was there, and the people gazed at him and the picture alternately,” wrote Marie-Thérèse. They evidently did not believe Madame de Tourzel, who “complained loudly of the injustice of our stoppage, saying that she was travelling quietly with her family under a government passport, and that the king was not with us.” As the accusations became increasingly confident and acrimonious, the king was obliged to admit the truth. During the night, as the news spread through the region, hundreds of armed National Guardsmen began to arrive, some with cannon, making escape increasingly impossible. Eventually, at around five in the morning, two agents of Monsieur de La Fayette arrived. They presented the king with a decree from the Assembly ordering his return to Paris.
“There is no longer a king in France!” Louis declared as he heard the decree, in effect demanding his arrest.
Marie-Antoinette was less accepting. “Insolence!” she declared. “What audacity, what cruelty,” and she threw the document on the floor. She was overcome by rage and despair, by the bungling and lack of decisiveness, as events had slowly shaped themselves into disaster. When the agents of La Fayette put pressure on the king, saying Paris was in uproar over his departure and women and children might be killed, Marie-Antoinette replied, “Am I not a mother also?” Her anxiety for her two children was her paramount concern.
The royal family tried to play for time. Surely General de Bouillé would send a detachment to rescue them? As the king’s young daughter points
out, they could so easily have been carried off to the frontier “if anyone had been there who had any head.” However, by daybreak all they could hear was the sound of some six thousand people gathering outside, jeering and demanding that the king turn back. At last, at seven in the morning, “seeing there was no remedy or help to be looked for,” wrote Marie-Thérèse, “we were absolutely forced to take the road back to Paris.”
It took almost four terrifying days in the stifling heat to make the dismal and humiliating return journey under heavy guard. The crowds lining the roads back to Paris were aggressive and threatening; their mood was unpredictable. The people wanted to see the king, so the windows were open, the blinds drawn back; they were “baked by the sun and suffocated by the dust.” “One cannot imagine the suffering of the royal family on this luckless journey,” wrote Madame de Tourzel. “Nothing was spared them!” On top of their carriage were three of their bodyguards handcuffed in fetters and in danger of being dragged down and killed.
For the king it was a terrible defeat. Yet again, he had failed. He had failed as a king, and brought his country to revolution. He had failed as a husband to protect his wife: she was now subject to even worse unknown terrors. He had failed as a father to bring his precious children to safety. Travelling with his loyal wife, his devoted sister and his young children, he knew that any words of assurance to them were empty promises; events had moved beyond his control. And somehow the failures had piled up despite his best efforts. He had always tried to avoid bloodshed; he couldn’t bear anyone to be hurt on his behalf. Yet his very gentleness and compassion had led inexorably to this utterly terrifying point in their lives. “I am aware that to succeed was in my hands,” he wrote later to General de Bouillé. “But it is needful to have a ruthless spirit if one is to shed the blood of subjects … . The very thought of such contingencies tore my heart and robbed me of all determination.”
During the midafternoon, a local nobleman, the loyal Comte de Dampierre, rode up to salute the king, “in despair at the king’s being stopped.” The crowd was enraged at Dampierre’s proroyalist gesture and tried to pull him off his horse. According to Marie-Thérèse, “Hardly had he spurred
his horse, before the people who surrounded the carriage fired at him. He was flung to the ground … . A man on horseback rode over him and struck him several blows with his saber; others did the same and soon killed him.” The scene was horrible, wrote Marie-Thérèse, “but more dreadful still was the fury of these wretches who, not content with having killed him, wanted to drag his body to our carriage and show it to my father.” Despite his entreaties, “these cannibals came on triumphantly round the carriage holding up the hat, coat and clothing of the unfortunate Dampierre … and they carried these horrible trophies beside us along the road.”
Worse was to come at Épernay the following day. At one point the royal family was obliged to abandon their carriage to enter a hotel, struggling through a crowd of angry people armed with pikes “who said openly that they wished to kill us,” wrote Marie-Thérèse, shocked by their bloodcurdling threats. “Of all the awful moments I have known, this was one of those that struck me most and the horrible impression of it will never leave me … . My brother was ill all night and almost had delirium so shocked was he by the dreadful things he had seen.”
Ahead, a hostile reception was waiting for them in Paris. Following orders from La Fayette, the people lining the streets kept their heads covered and remained absolutely silent, to show their contempt for this monarch who had tried to flee. La Fayette’s orders were so strictly observed that “several scullery boys without hats covered their heads with their dirty, filthy handkerchiefs,” recorded Madame de Tourzel. As they made their way down the Champs-Élysées and across the Place Louis XV, it was like an unspoken, public decoronation, as the citizens of Paris refused to acknowledge the royal status of their king and queen.