To the scaffold (36 page)

The subjects were sovereign, but they were hungry; the grain crop recently harvested, though bountiful, had not yet reached Paris. And the King was taking threatening steps, ordering the Flanders regiment to Versailles, strengthening the bodyguard, equivocating rather than cooperating when the National Assembly presented him with their decrees. The Parisians were hungry, they were impatient with the sluggish pace of change outside their city, above all they were suspicious. Why was the King creating a new military bastion at Versailles, if not to launch an attack on Paris? Why was there no grain, if not because the Queen, who hated them, was trying to starve them? And why was the Queen's brother, Emperor Joseph, making peace with the Turks (as the newspapers and the orators informed them he was), if not to turn his armies against the Parisians and all other friends of liberty in France?

"We need a new dose of revolution," announced one of the Paris newspapers. We need to bring the King and his court to Paris, proclaimed another. The King was being controlled by his wicked wife, and by the aristocrats who wanted to bring to a halt the progress of liberty. Unless King Louis was safe and secure among his Parisians, the aristocrats might spirit him away in secret, then run the government without him. And their first step would be to crush the revolution in the capital.

Their fears at fever pitch, incited by the rousing champions of liberty who spoke in the cafes of the Palais Royal, encouraged by

agents of the Due d'Orl^ans, who aspired to replace his cousin, on the morning of October 5 hundreds of women (and men dressed as women) gathered at the Hdtel de Ville and began to walk toward the high road to Versailles. Dozens, hundreds more people fell in step behind the women, who were shouting "Bread! Bread!" and calling for the return of the King to his capital. Soldiers of the National Guard fell in with the marchers, some fifteen thousand of them, ignoring the commands of their General Lafayette, who ultimately gave in and followed the swelling crowd.

The women led the way, brandishing kitchen knives, skewers, brooms, their shouts all but drowning out the drums of the National Guard.

"Hang the Queen, and tear her guts out!" they screamed.

"How shall we divide her up?"

"How Fd like to rip her belly open and tear out her heart!"

"Fll have a leg!"

"I want the innards!"

The women held out their aprons, wrote a lawyer who saw the procession pass, "as though they already carried in them what they had promised themselves, and in that attitude they danced."

The rain that fell more heavily with each mile they marched, the muddy road they marched along, wet through, their aprons soaked and their shoes heavy, hampered them not at all. They sang, waved their knives and broomsticks, exhorted one another to hold firm to their purpose of hanging the Queen and making cockades out of her entrails. With every mile the threats became more venomous, the suggested torments more obscene.

A servant brought word of the advancing horde of marchers to Antoinette at Trianon. She sent a hasty note to her husband, who was hunting at Meudon, and then hurried back to the palace. There all was "general disquiet and consternation," the page Hez^cques recalled afterward. The King was not expected to return for hours, the courtiers were terrified, and, as usual, no one was in charge. Late in the afternoon the dull roar of thousands of tramping feet and shouting voices could be heard. Only the few hundred men of the royal bodyguard were on duty to repel the crowd as it streamed into the Place d'Armes in front of the palace gates. Some of the demonstrators invaded the meeting hall of the National Assembly, where the women, their "hunting knives or

half-sabers hanging over their skirts," dimbed on the benches, screaming for bread, booed and mocked the deputies and pretended to flirt with the president, Mounier. The commotion was indescribable, with muddy-skirted women singing, talking and shrieking their demands while the deputies tried in vain to carry on their business. Guns were going off in the streets, the noise and confusion were dizzying.

At length Louis returned from his hunt, tired and bedraggled, and agreed to receive a delegation of the Parisians, along with Mounier. The meeting was businesslike, the King blamed the National Assembly (which, he said, had "tied his hands") for the shortage of food in Paris and promised to do what he could to remedy it the following day. While conversing with the deputation, however, he must have been distracted by the shouted abuse audible from the courtyard below the windows, and by the mounting panic among the servants and courtiers. He still hoped, Madame Tourzel believed, "by kindness to recall the wandering spirits to himself," but he had just enough sense to order the huge iron outer gates of the palace shut. (Shutting them took hours; they had been open for a hundred years or more, and were rusted into position.) Ministers, advisers, military officers pleaded with him to call out the Flanders regiment, or at least to move some cannon into position to threaten the demonstrators—who, of course, had cannon of their own. But he refused, and in any case, the soldiers could not have been counted on to actually fire on the crowd if ordered to do so. Lafayette and his National Guard, traveling more slowly than the civilians, were still on the road; the Versailles National Guard had joined the crowd.

The beleaguered royal bodyguard was no match for the thousands who kept up their milling and shouting long after nightfall. Finally, in desperation, Louis ordered that six light carriages be made ready to carry him and his family and servants to safety. But the carriages were stopped by the demonstrators long before they could reach him. Fortunately, at this juncture—it was now near midnight—the Paris National Guard arrived. Lafayette, exuding calm, apologized to the King for his inability to control his soldiers and then garrisoned two thousand of them in the palace, promising to guarantee the safety of the royal family. With the two thousand guardsmen in place, and a few of the bodyguard on duty as well, Louis felt more secure, even though there had

been some fighting and fifteen or sixteen men of the bodyguard had been killed.

It might have been possible for the King and Queen, with their children, to slip out of the palace in disguise some time during the night, under Lafayette's protection. No one will ever know. Instead they spent an anxious night, frightened by rumors that the Paris National Guard was unreliable, exhausted by the day's tensions. Antoinette went to bed at two o'clock in the morning, protected by the men of the bodyguard outside her bedchamber and by four of her women who sat against the door on the inside. One of the four women was the sister of Madame Campan (Madame Campan herself was away from Versailles that night), and afterward she told the Queen's biographer what ha[>-pened just before dawn.

At about 4:30, she said, the women were startled by "horrible yells and discharges of firearms." What they heard was the angry crowd invading the palace, incited by several guardsmen who shot and killed two of their number. One of the women ran to rouse Antoinette. Madame Campan's sister opened the door, and saw one of the bodyguard "holding his musket across the door, and attacked by a mob, who were striking at him; his face was covered with blood. He turned round and exclaimed, 'Save the Queen, madame; they are come to assassinate her.'"'

Quickly, she bolted the door again, then ran to Antoinette.

"Get up, madame," she cried, "don't stay to dress yourself, fly to the King's apartments."

Antoinette got up, threw a petticoat over her nightgown and ran to the door which led to the oeil-de-boeuf. It was locked, but frantic knocking brought one of Lx)uis's servants, who opened it. Louis was not in his apartments, he had gone to look for Antoinette. He soon returned, however, and Madame de Tourzel brought in the children. Everyone, probably including Fersen, who later wrote that he was "witness to it all," clustered in the oeil'de-boeuf and waited in terror as the Parisians swarmed through the palace. The King's sister Elisabeth, Provence and his wife, Adelaide and Victoire, the ministers, servants and officials, all huddled in the dim room—it was not yet daylight, and there was a dense mist in the air—listening to the fearful shouts and cries of pain and triumph, the musket fire and clash of swords. The bodyguards were loyal, but the National Guard gave way before the

tidal wave of rain-soaked, furious bodies pouring in from the palace courtyards.

Then Lafayette arrived from the nearby mansion where he had spent the night, leading a battalion of grenadiers from Paris who managed to intrude themselves between the crowd and the door to the oeil-de-boeuf, rescuing the trembling victims inside. The royals and their entourage were safe for the time being. Yet the demonstrators, forced outside, could not be dispersed. The pale early morning light revealed them, "a crowd of almost naked women," one witness wrote, "and men armed with pikes, threatening the windows with terrifying cries." It was a sight to horrify even the most hardened soldier. People waved axes, cudgels, long knives. The severed heads of two of the murdered guardsmen were stuck on poles and displayed aloft. Not a few in the crowd had blood on their clothes, on their hands and faces. And they had been thwarted in their desire for more blood—the blood of the Queen.

Louis found his courage and went out on the balcony above the crowd, but his calming words were unheard.

"The Queen! The Queen!" the people shouted.

Someone had brought Antoinette a yellow and white dressing gown to wrap over her nightgown. She stepped out on the balcony beside Louis, her posture regal as always but her hair disheveled and her face very pale. She held her daughter and son by the hand.

"No King! No children!" The King and the children retired to the oeil'de-boeuf onct again, leaving Antoinette at the mercy of the Parisians.

"There she is, the danmed whore!"

"We want her head, never mind the body!"

"Long live the Due d'Orleans!"

Antoinette, courageous and dignified, took the edge off the hostility (nothing could have subdued it entirely) by her quiet presence, and by the grace of her curtsy. Amazingly, no one shot at her or threw a tile or a stone. In a moment Lafayette joined her, and took her hand and kissed it.

''Vive la Reinef' cried a voice or two. ''Vive Lafayette!'"

Poised between awe and bloodlust, the crowd let the Queen step back into safety. The chanting continued, but now the chant was changed.

"To Paris! To Paris!*'

The King, called back on the balcony, acquiesced.

"My children, you want me to follow you to Paris. I consent, but on condition that I shall never separate from my wife and children." He retired to make his preparations.

It took more than seven hours for the long, straggling procession to return to Paris. The National Guard led off, each guardsman with a loaf of bread skewered on the end of his bayonet. Then came fifty wagons loaded with grain plundered from the palace, and behind the wagons was the royal carriage, its occupants constantly harassed by a burlesque escort of fishwives, prostitutes, the rabble of the Parisian streets, singing and cavorting madly all around them, drunk on power and on wine from the royal cellars. "Several of them rode astride upon cannons, boasting, in the most horrible songs, of all the crimes they had committed themselves, or seen others commit," wrote the Marquis de Molleville, who went along in the mass emigration from Versailles to Paris on October 6. "Those who were nearest the King's carriage sang ballads, the allusions of which, by means of their vulgar gestures, they applied to the Queen."^ Carried away by "paroxysms of brutal joy," deprived of sleep for nearly two days, badly nourished and under the strain of a powerful excitement, the women howled their triumph.

"Cheer up, friends," they shouted to the villagers who watched the wild procession pass. "We shall no longer be in want of bread: we bring you the baker, the baker's wife, and the little baker boy!"

As a macabre prank they took the severed heads of the two guardsmen to a wig-maker's shop and forced the poor man to groom and powder the bloody hair. Now the heads, mounted on pikes, were waved proudly above the marchers, along with long poplar branches torn from the trees in the park of Versailles. "At some distance," Molleville wrote, "this part of the procession had a most singular effect; it looked like a moving forest, amidst which shone pike-heads and gun-barrels."

Behind the forest of pikes walked the dispirited royal troops, the bodyguard and the Flanders regiment, some of the men wounded. Then came the carriages of some hundred deputies to the National Assembly, followed by another hundred carriages

filled with courtiers, clutching their valuables and fearing what might be in store for them once they reached the capital.

On through the afternoon this "grotesque saturnalia," as one newspaper account called it, proceeded, crossing the Seine at Sevres and filing on in the gathering dusk past the villages on the outskirts of the capital. The occupants of the royal carriage, their nerves constantly buffeted by the verbal assaults and threats of the marchers, deafened by musketfire, no doubt hungry and thirsty, as the little dauphin said he was, must have been nearly beside themselves by the time they reached Paris.

During the journey, Madame Campan wrote, the royals "heard incessantly a continued noise of thirty thousand muskets loaded with ball," which were charged and discharged in token of joy for the happiness of conducting the King to Paris.

"Fire straight!" people called out—yet often the musket balls struck the ornaments of the carriages, narrowly missing the King and Queen and their children. The smell of the powder was suffocating, "and the crowd was so immense, that the people, pressing the coaches on all sides, gave them the motion of a boat."^

Antoinette said little, but her face, which bore the "marks of violent grief," told all. She sat beside her husband, her jewel box near by, no doubt doing what she could to comfort her daughter and son. Lafayette rode beside the carriage, his presence offering limited protection, but she felt more anger toward him than gratitude. She may well have felt resentment for Louis, for being so stubbornly opposed to emigration, for overruling her pleas that they take refuge away from the palace on the previous day, for stupidly putting his trust in his "good people" who had come so close to murdering them all.