The Lost King of France: The Tragic Story of Marie-Antoinette's Favourite Son

Soon after this the army of women, soaked and splashed with mud, arrived at the gates, demanding bread and shouting violent abuse at l’Autrichienne. Marie-Thérèse was in no doubt of their intentions. ‘Their [principal] purpose was to murder my mother,’ she wrote, ‘also to massacre the bodyguards, the only ones who remained faithful to their king.’ Terror reigned at Versailles.

The captain of the guard asked the king for authority to disperse the crowd. Louis could not bring himself to fire against women and agreed to meet a delegation. Their spokesperson, a demure seventeen-year-old called Pierrette Chabry, in spite of fainting at the critical moment, managed to get across the need for bread. The king reassured her that he had given orders already for any grain held up on the roads around Paris to be delivered at once. Gratefully, she asked to kiss the king’s hand.

Outside the palace, the crowd were not so easily appeased and shots rang out. Marie-Antoinette begged Louis to flee Versailles with his family. The king delayed, tormented with indecision. ‘A fugitive king, a fugitive king,’ he said over and over again, unable to come to terms with such a momentous defeat. How could he be driven from his palace merely by a crowd of hungry women? He missed his moment. When he finally decided on flight, the crowd were prepared and would not allow him to depart. They mounted the carriages, cut the harnesses and led the horses away.

As dusk fell, the crowd camped around the palace; bonfires were lit, a horse was roasted. The arrival of the National Guard of Paris was ambiguous. Would they protect the king or further the interests of the crowd? At midnight, Lafayette was presented before the king and reassured him that the National Guard would stop the mob from attacking the palace. Comforted by this, finally, at two in the morning the royal family attempted to get some rest. ‘My mother knew that their chief object was to kill her,’ wrote her daughter. ‘Nevertheless in spite of that, she made no sign, but retired to her room with all possible coolness and courage … directing Madame de Tourzel to take her son instantly to the king if she had heard any noise in the night.’

However, at five in the morning, some women discovered that the gate to the Cour des Princes was not properly locked. There was a call to action. The crowd surged into the palace and entered the inner courtyard, the Cour de Marbre, by the royal quarters. Many rushed straight up the stairs leading to the queen’s apartments, yelling obscenities. A guard later reported that he heard: ‘we’ll cut off her head … tear her heart out … fry her liver … make her guts into ribbons and even then it would not be all over.’ One of the bodyguards tried to defend the stairway. He was stabbed with pikes and knives and dragged half alive into the courtyard where his head was chopped off with an axe. Inside the palace, according to Marie-Thérèse, another of the guards, ‘though grievously wounded, dragged [himself] to my mother’s door, crying out for her to fly and bolt the doors behind her’. Just at this point, the queen’s femme de chambre opened the door of the queen’s antechamber and was horrified to see this bodyguard holding a musket valiantly across the door as he was struck down by the mob. ‘His face was covered with blood,’ wrote Madame Campan. ‘He turned round and exclaimed: “Save the queen, Madame! They are come to assassinate her.” She hastily shut the door on the unfortunate victim of duty and fastened it with a great bolt.’ Seconds later, ‘the wretches flung themselves on him and left him bathed in blood’.

Hearing firing and shrieks outside her door, ‘my mother sprang from her bed, and half dressed, ran to my father’s apartment, but the door of it was locked within’, wrote Marie-Thérèse. Within moments the rioters had burst into the queen’s empty bedroom and cut her bedclothes to shreds with their sabres and knives, to cries of ‘Kill the bitch’ or ‘Kill the whore!’ Those protecting the king did not realise it was the queen herself – not rioters – at the door. For several terrifying minutes she was trapped, hammering on the door, unable to enter the king’s apartments. ‘Just at the moment that the wretches forced the door of my mother’s room, so that one instant later, she would have been taken without means of escape … the man on duty … recognised my mother’s voice and opened the door to her.’

In the frenzy of the night, the king was trying to reach the queen’s apartment to bring her to safety, Madame de Tourzel was trying to protect the Dauphin, while the queen went in a frantic search of Marie-Thérèse. Gradually, they all reunited in the Salon de l’Oeuil de Boeuf, where they could hear axes and bars thumping against the door as the guards tried to drive the rioters away with their bayonets. It was only when the guards had driven the rioters outside to the courtyard that Lafayette finally emerged with his men and managed to save the bodyguards.

Outside in the marble courtyard, the crowd demanded to see the king. He emerged onto the balcony; but this did not appease the crowd, who began to shout for the queen. Inside, Marie-Antoinette turned white, ‘all her fears were visible on her face’. Dazed and numbed by the attempt on her life, she hesitated. Everyone in the room urged her not to face the crowd. Outside, the yells echoed ever more insistently around the courtyard and rose in a great cry: ‘The queen to the balcony!’ Summoning extraordinary courage, she stepped out, her hair dishevelled, in a yellow-striped dressing gown, her children by her side. For Marie-Thérèse and Louis-Charles, looking through the familiar gilded balustrade on the sea of hostile faces staring at them, it was a terrifying glimpse of the full force of the hatred of the French people. ‘The courtyard of the chateau presented a horrible sight,’ recalled Marie-Thérèse. ‘A crowd of women, almost naked, and men armed with pikes, threatened our windows with dreadful cries.’

There were cries of ‘No children! No children!’ The queen ushered her children inside to safety. For a few minutes she faced out the murderous, armed crowds alone with incredible nerve. ‘She expected to perish,’ reported her daughter, but happily ‘her great courage awed the whole crowd of people, who confined themselves to loading her with insults, without daring to attack her person’. No one fired. After a while she simply curtsied and went back into the palace, gathered her son into her arms and wept.

However, their ordeal was not over. The menacing cry went up: ‘The king to Paris!’ The king felt he had no alternative but to agree, in order to avoid further bloodshed. He decided he must take his family with him as it was too dangerous to leave them behind. ‘I confide all that I hold most dear to the love of my good and faithful subjects,’ he told the vengeful mob in the courtyard.

By one o’clock in the afternoon everything was ready for the departure of the royal family. ‘They wished to prevent my father from crossing the great guard rooms that were inundated with blood,’ reported Marie-Thérèse; ‘we therefore went down by a small staircase … and got into a carriage for six persons; on the back seat were my father, mother and brother; on the front seat … my Aunt Elisabeth and I, in the middle my uncle Monsieur and Madame de Tourzel … the crowd was so great it was long before we could advance.’

It was the most extraordinary and grotesque procession. News had spread that the royal family was forced out of Versailles and thirty thousand, at least, had gathered to escort the king to Paris. The scene was terrifying: a great, swirling mass of humanity, most intent on harm, some so drunk with hatred that any form of violent disturbance could erupt within seconds. Leading the ‘horrible masquerade’ – in the words of one courtier – was the National Guard, with Lafayette always in view near the royal coach. The poissardes, market women and other rioters followed like so many furies, brandishing sticks and spikes, some topped with the heads of the king’s murdered guardsmen. These gruesome trophies were paraded with devilish excitement as they danced around the royal coach, all too conscious that power was indeed an intoxicating mixture as they endlessly threatened obscene and imminent death to the queen. Many had loaves of bread from the kitchens of Versailles stuck on their bayonets and were chanting, ‘We won’t go short of bread any more. We are bringing back the baker, the baker’s wife and the baker’s boy’. Behind were the household troops and Flanders regiment, unarmed – many obliged to wear the revolutionary cockade. They were followed by innumerable carriages bearing the remnants of the royal court and deputies from the new National Assembly. Count Axel Fersen, who was in one of the carriages following the king, wrote of their six-and-a-half-hour journey to Paris: ‘May God preserve me from ever seeing again so heart-breaking a spectacle as that of the last few days.’

For the royal family, forced to take part in this terrifying and until then almost unimaginable procession, it was a definitive end of an era. In the distance behind them, glimpsed only through a forest of pikes and a sea of hostile faces, the palace of Versailles, which for more than a century had epitomised the Bourbons’ absolute power, slowly retreated from view, quietness descending, the only sound the hammers of workmen fastening the shutters. Now the king, impassive and silent, was a consenting victim to the barbarity of the mob, as he allowed his family to be led in humiliation to Paris. Inside the coach, he held a handkerchief to his face to hide his shame and tears. Next to him was the queen, clutching her four-year-old son tightly, her expression bearing ‘the marks of violent grief’. She tried to ignore the poissardes who climbed onto the carriage, yelling still more insults and abuse at her. ‘Along the whole way, the brigands never ceased firing their muskets … and shouted “Vive la nation!”’ wrote Marie-Thérèse. Occasionally the young Dauphin – terrified as this horrific grown-up world suddenly burst in on his orderly life with such force – bravely leaned out of the window and pleaded with the crowds not to harm his mother. ‘Grâce pour Maman! Grâce pour Maman!’ he cried. ‘Spare my mother, spare my mother …’.

3 THE TUILERIES (#ulink_70426b38-8db5-578c-9faf-881bec7775dc)

The Tuileries Palace, a large jail filled with the condemned, stood amid the celebration of destruction. Those sentenced also amused themselves as they waited for the cart, the clipping, and the red shirt they had put out to dry. And through the windows, the queen’s circle could be seen, stunningly illuminated.

Châteaubriand, Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe (1849–50)

The royal family were taken to the Tuileries, a sixteenth-century palace in the heart of Paris by the Seine. For over sixty years it had been abandoned as a royal residence and servants and artisans had settled into the rabbit warren of dark chambers and seemingly endless, dimly lit galleries and stairways. The place was crowded and in disrepair. Rooms were hurriedly prepared for the royal family, but it was soon found that the doors to the Dauphin’s room would not close and had to be barricaded with furniture. ‘Isn’t it ugly here, Maman,’ said Louis-Charles. Marie-Antoinette replied, ‘Louis XIV was happy here. You should not ask for more.’ Yet he was clearly anxious. The young child who had lived surrounded by richness and elegance, with never a cross word, found, in the space of a few days, his world had become an unrecognisable, frightening chaos. The queen asked the Marquise de Tourzel to watch over him all night.

Woken by the clamour of the crowd outside their windows in the gardens of the Tuileries, Louis-Charles was still terrified. ‘Good God, Maman! Is it still yesterday?’ he cried as he threw himself in her arms. Struggling to understand their change in fortunes, later he went up to his father and asked why his people, who once loved him so well, were ‘all at once so angry with him and what had he done to irritate them so much?’ The king took his young son on his lap. ‘I wanted money to pay the expenses occasioned by wars,’ he replied. He carefully tried to explain how he had tried, unsuccessfully, to raise money through the parlement and then through the Estates-General. ‘When they were assembled they required concessions of me which I could not make, either with due respect for myself or with justice to you, who will be my successor. Wicked men, inducing the people to rise, have occasioned the excesses of the last few days; the people must not be blamed for them.’

The king and queen were forced to face the fact that they were now detained in Paris indefinitely – at the people’s pleasure. They no longer had their own bodyguards; the Tuileries was surrounded by the National Guard, who answered to the Assembly. With six armed guards constantly tailing them and their movements closely monitored, the queen quickly made the young prince understand the importance of treating everyone about him politely and ‘with affability’ – even those that they distrusted. The Dauphin ‘took great pains’ to please any visitors. When he had an opportunity to speak to any important dignitaries, he often looked for reassurance from his mother, whispering in her ear, ‘Was that all right?’ With his customary charm, he soon made friends with the sons of National Guards, and established his own pretend ‘Royal Dauphin Regiment’ with himself as colonel. People flocked to see him when he was allowed outside where he kept his own pet rabbits and tended a small garden.

Marie-Antoinette struggled to keep up a semblance of normality, and various possessions claimed from Versailles helped as she set about making the Tuileries as comfortable as possible. She drew strength from devoting herself to her children. ‘They are nearly always with me and are my consolation,’ she wrote to Gabrielle de Polignac, who was now safely out of the country. ‘Mon chou d’amour [the Dauphin] is charming and I love him madly. He loves me very much too, in his way, without embarrassment. He is well, growing stronger and has no more temper tantrums. He goes for a walk every day which is extremely good for him.’ The queen still had a few of her friends around her, such as the loyal Princesse de Lamballe, who invariably accompanied her when she had to receive deputations of poissardes and others, who had come for a hundred reasons, but mostly to air their grievances. Count Axel Fersen also remained discreetly in Paris, in case he could be of any use to the queen.

The king desperately allowed himself to hope that all these arrangements would be temporary, and that he would eventually be restored to Versailles with full power. But power lay in the Assembly, renamed the ‘Constituent Assembly’, and, gallingly, now installed in the building opposite the Tuileries and flying the new flag which bore the words: ‘Freedom. Nation. Law. King.’ Although Louis was still king, his authority to pass laws had been effectively taken over by the Assembly. In principle, he retained a delaying veto, yet in the intimidating atmosphere of his confinement in the Tuileries, he was fearful of using even this remaining influence.

For several months the king could not face the meetings of the Assembly, and took refuge in family life, spending more time with his children. While the deputies debated the future of France, he had a smithy installed in the Tuileries, and worked at making locks there, alone. For Louis, in his virtual prison, terrible despair and fragile hope had become the bread and butter of his daily life as he sank into helpless depression. ‘The late Grand Monarch makes a figure as ridiculous as pitiable,’ commented the English writer Edmund Burke. Burke was struck by ‘the portentous state of France – where elements which compose Human Society seem all to be dissolved, and a world of Monsters to be produced in the place of it’. Stripped of the glory of Versailles and the powers of an Absolute Monarch, the king seemed a spent political force.

Royal authority was also undermined by the continuous outpouring of vicious slander, especially against the queen. Absurdly, even while under the close scrutiny of the National Guard at the Tuileries, she was accused of every conceivable sexual obsession and debauchery: with the guards themselves, courtiers, actors, there was no limit to her superhuman appetite. In an updated version of Madame de La Motte’s Memoirs published in 1789, her passion for women was also set out in explicit detail: ‘her lips, her kisses followed her greedy glances over my quivering body’, claimed La Motte. ‘What a welcome substitute I made, she laughed, for the lumpish, repulsive body of the “Prime Minister”’ – her mocking name for the king. The image of her as an insatiable, tyrannical queen was invariably linked to her bloodthirsty lust for revenge on the French people for the uprising: ‘Her callous eyes, treacherous and inflamed, radiate sheer fire and carnage to gratify her craving for unjust revenge … her stinking mouth harbours a cruel tongue, eternally thirsty for French blood.’ Letters were ‘found’, allegedly written by her and intercepted by spies. ‘Everything goes well, we shall end by starving them,’ she was quoted as having written to Artois, one of her accomplices. The extremists in the Assembly knew that this skilfully orchestrated propaganda against the queen greatly advanced their political aims to slay royal power. She became the focal point, the hate object of all who were opposed to the monarchy.

As the moderates were forced out of the Assembly and radicals gained the upper hand, royal power continued to decline. Some extremists wished to abolish the monarchy altogether; others to limit its powers still further. It wasn’t long before the king found that his religious beliefs were to come under attack and, for Louis, this was the final straw. The Assembly increasingly saw the clergy as a pillar of a now discredited ancien régime, loyal to the king. Fearing it was a threat to the survival of the revolution, they searched for a way to reduce its powers. They still had to deal with the problem of the national debt and staving off bankruptcy and realised this problem could be tackled at a stroke. In November 1789 they simply nationalised all the church land, valued at a colossal three thousand million livres. The Assembly then moved swiftly to introduce the ‘civil constitution’ in which the state took responsibility for the administration of the clergy. By November 1790 it was decreed that every priest in the land had to swear an oath of loyalty to the state.

As a devout Roman Catholic, Louis’ instincts were to oppose this latest dictate from the Assembly. Yet fearful of where this might lead, finally that Christmas he felt coerced into signing the decree. This prompted the pope, Pius VI, to intervene, opposing the revolution. Any priest who took the oath was suspended, decreed the pope, unless he retracted the oath within forty days. Once more the Paris mobs took to the streets; an effigy of the pope was burned and the king was denounced for ‘treason’ for having received communion from a priest who had not sworn the oath. Louis came close to nervous collapse in the spring of 1791 and his doctors advised him to take a rest away from Paris. With the approval of the Assembly, the king resolved to take his family to Saint Cloud.

On 18 April 1791 at one o’clock, the king, queen, Marie-Thérèse, Louis-Charles and their entourage were in their berline in the courtyard of the Tuileries, ready to depart. However, a large, menacing crowd had gathered at the gates and blocked their path. Far from protecting the royal family, the National Guard refused to disperse the rioters. ‘They mutinied, shut the gates, and declared they would not let the king pass,’ recorded Madame Campan. Hearing of the emergency, Lafayette hurried to the Tuileries and ordered the guards to allow the king’s carriage to depart. It was impossible. The rioters became angry and abusive. The Marquise de Tourzel, who was in the carriage, wrote of the ‘horrible scene’ as she observed the king himself trying to appeal to the people. ‘It is astonishing that, having given liberty to the nation, I should not be free myself,’ he pleaded. It was no use. The crisis lasted two hours. Some of the king’s attendants were dragged away; one was violently assaulted. At this point, the Dauphin became frightened. He rushed to the window and cried out, ‘Save him! Save him!’ The royal family were obliged to admit defeat and go back inside the Tuileries, the king deeply depressed. There was no escaping the fact that had been evident for months: they were prisoners.

The king felt his position becoming untenable. Politically, he had been systematically stripped of his powers, sidelined and humiliated. The events of that ‘cruel day’ had provided unnerving evidence that the National Guard could not be trusted to enforce the law and defend the royal family against a hostile mob. Up until this point, despite pressure from his wife and others, the king had been unwilling to reconcile himself to the idea of fleeing from his own people. Now, at last, the urgent need for escape began to take shape in his mind.

Six hundred National Guards, increasingly more loyal to the nation than to the king, were now patrolling the Tuileries and spies were everywhere. However, the king and queen could count on one very loyal and capable ally: Count Axel Fersen. Determined to rescue the queen from her impossible position, he told his father, ‘I should be vile and ungrateful if I deserted them now that they can do nothing for me and I have hope of being useful to them’.

Axel Fersen advised the king and queen to escape separately, in light, fast carriages, but they insisted on travelling together with the children, in a more capacious, but much slower, berline. They aimed to reach Montmédy, a border town almost two hundred miles to the east by the Austrian Netherlands. Here, protected by a garrison led by his faithful general, Marquis Louis de Bouillé, the king hoped to unite his supporters and challenge the right of the Assembly to usurp his authority.

Fersen coordinated arrangements for their escape. Fresh horses were needed at staging posts every fifteen miles from Paris. For the last eighty miles, once they had passed Châlons in the Champagne region, troops would be waiting at various points from the Pont de Somme-Vesle to escort them to the border. Throughout the spring meticulous arrangements were in progress. At the palace, secret doors were constructed to assist the escape. Disguises and passports were obtained for the royal family. The Marquise de Tourzel would pose as a wealthy Russian woman, ‘Baronne de Korff’, travelling with her two ‘daughters’, Marie-Thérèse as Amélie and Louis-Charles as Aglae. The king would be dressed simply as her valet and the queen, in black coat and hat, was to be the children’s governess.

On the planned day of departure, 20 June 1791, the king and queen tried to keep a semblance of normality but their anxiety did not pass unnoticed. Marie-Thérèse was only too aware that her mother and father ‘seemed greatly agitated during the whole day’, although she had no idea why. Her anxiety only increased when in the afternoon her mother found an opportunity to take her aside and whisper that she ‘was not to be uneasy at anything that I might see’, and that ‘we might be separated, but not for long … I was dumbfounded’.

‘I was hardly in bed before my mother came in; she told me we were to leave at once,’ wrote Marie-Thérèse. Marie-Antoinette had already woken the Dauphin. Although more asleep than awake, Louis-Charles was annoyed to find himself being dressed as a girl. His daytime games were all of soldier heroes and now he thought he was about to command a regiment, shouting for his boots and sword. At half past ten Marie-Antoinette escorted them downstairs and out through an empty apartment to a courtyard where Fersen was waiting, dressed as a coachman and even smoking tobacco.

The Dauphin, in his plain linen dress and bonnet, hid at the bottom of the carriage under Madame de Tourzel’s gown. To attract less attention, the carriage made several turns around the nearby streets before waiting near the Tuileries for the king and queen. ‘We saw Monsieur de la Fayette pass close by us, going to the king’s coucher,’ recalled Marie-Thérèse. ‘We waited there a full hour in the greatest impatience and uneasiness at my parents’ long delay.’ Eventually, to her alarm, ‘I saw a woman approach and walk around our carriage. It made me fear we were discovered’. However, it was her Aunt Elisabeth, disguised as a nurse to Baronne de Korff. ‘On entering the carriage she trod upon my brother, who was hidden at the bottom of it; he had the courage not to utter a cry.’

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 Lafayette 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, Lafayette 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 especially 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 had to improvise a repair but more precious minutes were lost. None the less, they passed Châlons successfully at around five in the afternoon. Their armed escort should 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 in sight. 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 its armed escort, the carriage wound its way for a further two hours along the country road to the next town, Sainte-Ménehould, 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 recognised 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,’ Lafayette 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, at Sainte-Ménehould, 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 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 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 Elisabeth 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-Thérese. ‘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 Guards began to arrive, some with cannon, making escape increasingly impossible. Eventually, at around five in the morning, two agents of Monsieur de Lafayette 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 Lafayette put pressure on the king, saying Paris was in uproar over his departure, 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.