The Royal Life Guard; or, the flight of the royal family.

"To begin with, all goes well," said Charny: "At two in the morning none suspected our flight."

They breathed easier: the questions were multiplied. He related that he had entered the town and been stopped by a patrol of volunteers who however became convinced that the King was still in the palace. He entered his own room and changed his dress: the aid of Lafayette who first had a doubt, had become calm and dismissed extra guards.

He had returned on the same horse from the difficulty of getting a fresh one so early. It almost foundered, poor beast, but he reached Bondy upon it. There he took a fresh one and continued his ride with nothing alarming along the road.

The Queen found that such good news deserved the favor of her extending her hand to the bearer; he kissed it respectfully, and she turned pale. Was it from joy that he had returned, or with sorrow that he did not press it?

When the vehicle started off, Charny rode by the side.

At the next relay house all was ready except a saddle horse for the count which Isidore had not foreseen the want of. There would be delay for one to be found. The vehicle went off without him, but he overtook it in five minutes. It was settled that he should follow and not escort it. Still he kept close enough for the Queen to see him if she put her head out of the window and thus he exchanged a few words with the illustrious couple when the pace allowed it.

Charny changed horses at Montmirail and was dashing on thinking it had a good start of him when he almost ran into it. It had been pulled up from a trace breaking. He dismounted and found a new leather in the boot, filled with repairing stuff. The two guardsmen profited by the halt to ask for their weapons, but the King opposed their having them. On the objection that the vehicle might be stopped he replied that he would not have blood spilt on his account.

They lost half an hour by this mishap, when seconds were priceless.

They arrived at Chalons by two o'clock.

"All will go well if we reach Chalons without being stopped," the King had said.

Here the King showed himself for a moment. In the crowd around the huge conveyance two men watched him with sustained attention. One of them suddenly went away while the other came up.

"Sire, you will wreck all if you show yourself thus," he said. "Make haste, you lazybones," he cried to the postboys: "this is a pretty way to serve those who pay you handsomely."

He set to work, aiding the hostlers.

It was the postmaster.

At last the horses were hooked on and the postboys in their saddles and boots. The first tried to start his pair when they went clean off their feet. They got them up and all clear again, when the second span went off their feet! This time the postboy was caught under them.

Charny, who was looking on in silence, seized hold of the man and dragged him out of his heavy boots, remaining under the horse.

"What kind of horses have you given us?" demanded he of the postinghouse master.

"The best I had in," replied the man.

The horses were so entangled with the traces that the more they pulled at them the worse the snarl became.

Charny flew down to the spot.

"Unbuckle and take off everything," he said, "and harness up afresh. We shall get on quicker so."

The postmaster lent a hand in the work, cursing with desperation.

Meanwhile the other man, who had been looking on had run to the mayor, whom he told that the Royal Family were in a coach passing through the town. Luckily the official was far from being a republican and did not care to take any responsibility on himself. Instead of making the assertion sure, he shilly-shallied so that time was lost and finally arrived as the coach disappeared round the corner.

But more than twenty minutes had been frittered away.

Alarm was in the royal party; the Queen thought that the downfall of the two pair of horses were akin to the four candles going out one after another which she had taken to portend the death of herself, her husband and their two children.

Still, on getting out of the town, she and the King and his sister had all exclaimed:

"We are saved!"

But, a hundred paces beyond, a man shouted in at the window:

"Your measures are badly taken – you will be arrested!"

The Queen screamed but the man jumped into the hedge and was lost to sight.

Happily they were but four leagues from Sommevelle Bridge, where Choiseul and forty hussars were to be posted. But it was three in the afternoon and they were nearly four hours late.

CHAPTER XI.

THE QUEEN'S HAIRDRESSER

On the morning of the twenty-first of June, the Count of Choiseul, who had notified the King that he could wait no longer but must pick up his detachments along the road and fall back towards Bouille, who was also at the end of his patience, was told that a messenger from the Queen was at last at his house in Paris.

It was Leonard the Queen's hairdresser. He was a favorite who enjoyed immense credit at the court, but the duke could wish for a more weighty confidant. But how could the Queen go into exile without the artist who alone could build up her hair into one of those towers which caused her to be the envy of her sex and the stupefaction of the sterner one?

He was wearing a round hat pulled down to his eyes and an enormous "wraprascal," which he explained were property of his brother. The Queen, in confiding to him her jewels, had ordered him to disguise himself, and placed himself under the command of Choiseul. Not only verbal was this direction but in a note which the duke read and burned.

He ordered a cab to be made ready. When the servant reported it at the door, he said to the hairdresser:

"Come, my dear Leonard."

"But where?"

"A little way out of town where your art is required."

"But the diamonds?"

"Bring them along."

"But my brother will come home and see I have taken his best hat and overcoat – he will wonder what has become of me."

"Let him wonder! Did not the Queen bid you obey me as herself?"

"True, but Lady Ange will be expecting me to do up her hair. Nobody can make anything of her scanty wisp but me, and – "

"Lady Ange must wait till her hair grows again."

Without paying farther heed to his lamentations, the lord forced him into his cab and the horse started off at a fast gait. When they stopped to renew the horse, he believed they were going to the world's end, though the duke confessed that their destination was the frontier.

At Montmirail they were to pass the balance of the night, and indeed at the inn beds were ready. Leonard began to feel better, in pride at having been chosen for such an important errand.

At eleven they reached Sommevelle Bridge, where Choiseul got out to put on his uniform. His hussars had not yet arrived.

Leonard watched his preparations, particularly his freshening the pistol primings, with sharp disquiet and heaved sighs which touched the hearer.