Marie Antoinette (53 page)

The journey that followed was a nightmare. The weather, which had been overcast, became intensely hot. The dust on the roads was so great that the outriders were lost in a kind of fog. The royal family was not, however, permitted to close the windows of the carriage. As a result the dust clung to their clothes—the same clothes they had been wearing at their departure—which had become saturated with perspiration. The press of hostile people around them meant that the pace was intolerably slow. It had taken twenty-two hours to reach Varennes from Paris; during many of them the family had been buoyed up with hope. It now took nearly four days to return and the mood throughout was one of desolation.

Three deputies from the National Assembly were in charge; two of them, Jérôme Pétion and Antoine Barnave, crammed into the berlin. Barnave sat at the back between the King and Queen, who had Louis Charles on her knee; Pétion sat with Madame Elisabeth and the Marquise de Tourzel in front, the ladies taking it in turn to have Marie Thérèse on their laps. The third, Maubourg, offered to travel behind with the waiting-women to protect them from the abuse being hurled at them.

Pétion, a lawyer from Chartres in his early thirties who had been a member of the Estates General, was one of the many who had attached themselves to Robespierre’s rising star. At this point he was loud-mouthed and crude rather than overtly cruel—his pulling of the Dauphin’s long fair hair was probably meant as rough teasing rather than anything more sinister. As for his conviction that Madame Elisabeth, that earnest and devout spinster, succumbed to an instant physical attraction for him—he would recall her “smiles on a summer’s night” in his memoirs: that was more ludicrous than anything else. But of course his very presence in the stifling coach was itself offensive.

Barnave was a different matter. He was blessed with undeniable good looks, fine regular features and a wide mouth, and was “very well made,” according to the Duc de Lévis, despite his short hair. At the age of twenty-eight (six years younger than Marie Antoinette) he was a man who had acquired an intellectual interest in the whole notion of liberty and what it meant, through wide reading. It was he who had attacked the departure of Mesdames Tantes as being improper during the debate on the Constitution. Barnave now found himself launched into an argument with Madame Elisabeth, who far from joining in intimate caresses with Pétion was actually determined to bring home to the deputy the sheer outrage of what had been done to the royal family. She herself would never abandon her brother unless all practice of religion was forbidden, when her conscience might tell her to leave France. But how would Barnave understand that? He was “not only said to be Protestant” but was probably without any religion at all.

The Princess also turned to politics. “You are too intelligent, Monsieur Barnave,” she said, “not to have appreciated the love of the King for the French people and his genuine desire to make them happy . . . As for that liberty which you love to excess, you have considered only its advantages. You have not taken into account the disorders that come in liberty’s wake.” It was a spirited defence of an essentially conservative position. On the whole Marie Antoinette left the talking to her sister-in-law who was doing so well. It was not realized at the time that it was the Queen-in-distress, not the robust Princess, who made a striking impression on Barnave.

In effect, the return journey retraced the earlier route of the berlin: Clermont, Sainte-Ménehould, Châlons and on to La Ferté-sous-Jouarre, Claye and Meaux, leading finally to the Paris barrier. Not every experience along the way was unpleasant. The first night was spent at the intendancy at Châlons where people who remembered the lovely young Dauphine staying there on her bridal progress twenty-one years earlier wept for pity, even if recruits from the Jacobin clubs of nearby Rheims interrupted the Mass being said for the feast of Corpus Christi at the Sanctus; Marie Antoinette heard “with horror the indecent abuse that assailed her ears.” Nevertheless young girls tried to present the Queen with flowers and were annoyed to be prevented from reaching her by orders of the deputies. At La Ferté, the hostess of the inn where a meal was taken pretended to be the cook in order to serve the royal family decently. The King was supposed to have been shown a secret staircase by which he alone could have escaped, the Queen another exit. Neither consented to a plan that went against their shared concept of duty—to stay together to the end.

At Dormans, on the other hand, where the second night was spent with the King dozing in an armchair, they were kept awake all night by cries of “Long live the nation!” and “Long live the National Assembly!” There were threats to shoot the Queen at Épernay—if she could be got without hitting the King. And although the King and Queen were decently treated by the Bishop at Meaux—a juror—in whose house they spent the third night, there was real trouble from Claye onwards. It was 25 June, “one of the hottest days I ever felt,” wrote Grace Elliott, but the people would not allow the berlin to travel faster than at walking pace. The swearing, which was meant to be heard by the royal party, added to their discomfort, and the insolent smoking outside the open windows even more so. It was symbolic of the way the Queen was now demonized that various stories of her offering food out of the window to hungry people along the route all had the same denouement. The recipients of her charity were speedily warned off with the cry: “Don’t touch it! It’s sure to be poisoned.”

At the barriers of the city of Paris, there was a vast crowd. But the reception of the royal family was now subject to organization and there was no more danger of mob violence. La Fayette ordered that the normal sign of respect to the King was to be ostentatiously ignored; every head was to be covered as he passed and even the kitchenhands had to put their greasy cloths on their heads. At the same time an order was posted: “Whoever applauds the King will be flogged; whoever insults him will be hanged.” So the infinitely slow, infinitely melancholy cortège of exhausted would-be fugitives reached the Tuileries through crowds that were for the most part silent.

The Queen’s “proud and noble air” even in these circumstances did not fail to arouse comment, both adverse and sympathetic. The press was as ever busy inflaming public opinion against her, this Medea who had been ready to plunge her arms into the blood of the French people. Now it was “the rage of Madame Capet at this terrible contretemps” that they claimed was visible on her face. The envoy from Bourbon Parma, Virieu, saw on the contrary a woman who was “defeated” even though she remained every inch the Queen. But the angelic looks of “the dear little Dauphin”—still the Child of the Nation whatever his parents’ misdemeanours—received general approbation.

When the party finally reached the Tuileries at eight o’clock at night, having travelled since seven that morning, Louis XVI was almost too exhausted to get out of the coach. The three bodyguards and two waiting-women were taken to the Abbaye prison as much for their own protection as for punishment and the Marquise de Tourzel was also held. François Hüe, the Dauphin’s chief valet, had rushed back to the palace in time to receive his charge, although when the little boy put out his arms to him, Hüe was brushed aside by a National Guard. It was not until later that they were reunited. Once in bed, Louis Charles called out to Hüe: “As soon as we arrived at Varennes, we were sent back. Do you know why?” Hüe told him quickly not to talk about the journey. That night Louis Charles had a nightmare in which he was surrounded by wolves and tigers and other wild beasts who were going to devour him. “We all looked at one another,” remembered Hüe, “without saying a word.”
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By this time the Comte and Comtesse de Provence, successfully accomplishing their individual escapes with one attendant each, were reunited at Namur in Belgium. Fersen had also reached Brussels, bearing a letter from the King to Mercy d’Argenteau, conveying to him the money and letters of exchange that had reached him earlier. Count Esterhazy, referring to Fersen under the coded name of “La Chose” (literally, The Thing) described Fersen’s absolute despair on hearing the news of the recapture although, like the Queen herself, Fersen put on a brave face in public. The reaction of Provence, now the senior royal at liberty, was to be rather different: “There wasn’t a trace of tears in those eyes as dry as his heart,” wrote the Marquis de Bouillé, who even discerned “a few sparks of perfidious satisfaction.”

The Dauphin’s innocent question, although brushed aside by Hüe, deserves answering. What did go wrong at Varennes? There is a supplementary question: what would have happened if the King had successfully reached Montmédy?

The first point that should be made is that the risky escape from the Tuileries was in itself successful. The King turned to Valory at Varennes when there were no horses to be found and exclaimed: “François, we are betrayed!” In fact, that was not the case. No one betrayed the royal family and up until the devastating absence of Choiseul at the
poste
of Somme-Vesle after which “everything was abandoned . . . to the caprices of fortune,” things went remarkably well, with only minor—and commonplace—incidents like the breaking of harness with which to contend.

Afterwards the responsibility for the disaster of the royal family’s recapture was the subject of a long war of words in which successive generations also took part, supporting the respective roles of the Duc de Choiseul and the Marquis de Bouillé; belligerent declarations were made such as “Defence forces me to be on the offensive.” Among other first-hand accounts were those of the Comte de Damas, who was arrested like Choiseul on 22 June and who wrote a
Rapport
while in prison; of the courier Valory; and of the equerry Moustier. Madame Royale gave her child’s-eye view four years later. The Marquise de Tourzel was chiefly concerned in her
Mémoires
to rebut the charge—“I cannot pass over it in silence”—that it was her presence in the berlin that caused all the trouble, on the grounds that she had only carried out her duty at the orders of the Queen.

Choiseul’s account of events was written up in prison in August 1791 and he contended that it had subsequently been passed by the King and Queen (although Comte Louis de Bouillé strongly denied that they would have done this). Choiseul explained his defection at Somme-Vesle as due not only to the worrying delay in the schedule but also—even less plausibly—to his need to facilitate the King’s route to Châlons. Among the explanations that were variously offered for the disaster, he cited the lack of preparations at Varennes; that, however, was the overall responsibility of the Marquis de Bouillé.

On the other hand, the Marquis himself, who turned back from Varennes on finding the King taken away and who later emigrated to England, did receive a brief note of exoneration from the King: “You did your duty,” and signed “Louis.” The best epitaph on Bouillé’s failure at Varennes is that of his son Comte Louis, an avid memorialist. Comte Louis had originally remarked to his father on how happy he must feel at the prospect of liberating the King. While he was retreating from Varennes, in a state of profound dejection that his son never forgot, the Marquis reminded him of the conversation: “Well, do you still call me happy?”

There is, of course, the question of the route chosen by the King, the fact that Louis XVI “was unwilling to quit the French dominions, although but in travelling,” as was reported later to George III in England. It certainly would have been easier to head for Belgium. But that was to negate his plan to appear as the father of his people whom he would never abandon; afterwards, he described the attempted flight as one of the “most virtuous acts” of his life. Arguably the party for the escape was from the start too large. But that would not have mattered so much if some bolder, more authoritative personage had either been the sixth passenger in the berlin, rather than the Marquise de Tourzel, or else had been squeezed in as well. Then again, this lack of a proper advisor for the King would not have mattered so much if a crisis had not arisen, first at Somme-Vesle and then at Varennes as a result of the missing relay-horses, whose whereabouts Choiseul had not had an opportunity to impart. For the want of a nail, the kingdom was lost, as the folk-rhyme has it. The Duc de Choiseul, to whose appointment both King and Bouillé had agreed, was that nail.