Paris and Versailles remained calm, if on edge. Lafayette, on his white charger, and the National Guardsmen, in their new uniforms of blue coats, white facings, lapels, vests and leggings, with their red trim, patrolled and kept the peace. For a moment, it began to seem as if the threat of the collapse of organised authority could be contained. Two executive committees, designed to centralise policy on appointments and security, were set up, no one perceiving that this would effectively pave the way for a revolutionary police state and a network of spies and informers. The tricolour cockade, made of dimity cotton, was everywhere and the staunchly nationalistic Mercier greeted it as a fitting emblem for the new ‘citizen-warrior’. Hunger and suspicion were, so the thinking went, to be allayed by patriotism and a show of armed discipline.
Frédéric, recently appointed by his father as second-in-command to the Garde Nationale of Versailles, was soon called upon to act. Like his father and father-in-law, Frédéric was anxious for reform, but like them he feared it was coming too fast, too soon. When, one day in late August, two men, convicted of plotting to create a shortage of food, were due to be executed, the Commander-in-Chief of the Versailles Gardes refused to return from Paris to confront the mob gathered to free the plotters. It was Frédéric who had to rally the Gardes, threaten them with dismissal if they disobeyed his orders, and insist that the hangings proceed. Though the actual executions distressed him, he was convinced that firmness would help the fragile sense of order. Like Lucie, he believed in discipline and clarity. Very little trace of his wild youth remained.
There was a long-established custom at Versailles that at the end of the summer, on the feast day of St Louis, a deputation of market women came from Paris to pay homage to the Queen. Wearing neat white gowns, they brought bunches of flowers, and curtseyed. But the poissardes, the market women and fishwives of Les Halles, who descended on Versailles in October 1789, were in quite another mood.
On 2 October, a banquet was held in the great theatre of the château to welcome the Flanders regiment, summoned to Versailles as a precautionary measure to protect the royal family and the Assembly. Towards the end of dinner, Lucie and Cécile went to watch the scene. Unwisely, given the general sense of precariousness, the King and Queen decided to make an appearance, bringing with them the boisterous 5-year-old Dauphin; they were received with cries of ‘Vive le Roi’ and the little boy was paraded around the hall by one of the Swiss Guards. A young courtier, the 19-year-old Duchesse de Maillé, foolishly decided to distribute white ribbons, the colour of the Bourbon kings, to some of the soldiers. Frédéric, in a whisper, said to Lucie that he feared that inflammatory remarks were being made.
Next day, rumours duly spread round Paris that an ‘orgy’ of treason and gluttony had been held. Stories of the sumptuous feast seemed outrageous to those queuing outside empty bakeries. On Monday the 5th, however, Versailles woke to a calm, rainy day. The Assembly continued with its deliberations; the King went hunting in the forest of Verrières; the Queen visited Le Petit Trianon; and Lucie went driving with Pulchérie de Valance, who was about to give birth to her second child. As they crossed the main avenue of the park, a horseman galloped past them, shouting: ‘Paris is marching here with guns.’ They hastened to the château to find Frédéric frantically despatching riders to search for the King and bring back the Queen, while disposing his Garde Nationale in battle order before the iron gates leading into the Cour Royale. The gates were closed and locked, the doors and entrances to the château barricaded. The Swiss Guards and the Flanders regiment took up positions at various strategic points, all facing towards the Grande Avenue, up which the attackers were expected to come. There was a lull. It continued to rain.
Just before three o’clock, the King and his suite arrived at a gallop up the avenue. Saying nothing encouraging to the soldiers standing in the pouring rain, and whose mood was already uncertain, he shut himself away in his apartments. Lucie, standing at her windows above the courtyard, watched. ‘The Gardes,’ she noted, ‘were getting their first taste of war.’
Around four o’clock, the leading column of fishwives, exhausted, some of them drunk, could be seen advancing through the misty autumn early evening up the avenue. The neat white gowns they usually wore to Versailles were filthy and the women carried not flowers but muskets and pikes, ransacked earlier from the Hôtel de Ville, as well as broom handles and kitchen knives. Prevented from entering the château by Frédéric and his men, they pushed their way into the Assembly, where they harangued the deputies and demanded an audience with the King. At this stage, though somewhat inebriated, most of the women were still in a good humour. They had come to demand food from the King, and they were confident that they would get it. But from her window, where Lucie remained all day, she saw the Gardes stationed in the courtyard begin to grow restless; soon, in ones and twos, they drifted away to join the women, in spite of Frédéric’s attempts to maintain order. One Guardsman, suddenly losing his temper, aimed his musket at Frédéric: the shot missed him but hit another officer, breaking his elbow.
A small delegation of women, with a rather pretty and fairly clean 17-year-old at their head, was nonetheless admitted into the King’s apartments; he listened to their complaints and promised to release grain stocks and have them delivered to Paris. By six o’clock, Louis had also promised to sign the decrees voted by the Assembly, as well as the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. It looked as if the women would now withdraw. But there was a sudden commotion. A group of fishwives, steered that way, Lucie would later say, by an unknown treacherous insider, discovered a small door leading on to a staircase in the Cour Royale, rushed through it and up the stairs into the ministers’ apartments. Lucie, who was in her rooms above, found herself surrounded by angry, gesticulating women. She was rescued by Frédéric, who led her to the Great Gallery of the château, now thronged with agitated, anxious courtiers and their families. No one knew what would happen next.
The King had been hesitating about whether to take Frédéric’s advice and depart for the safety of the château at Rambouillet. When he finally decided to go, and the waiting carriages were brought round, it was too late: the poissardes, with furious cries of ‘The King is leaving’, unhitched the horses and led them away. ‘This good Prince,’ Lucie later wrote, ‘repeating over and over again “I do not want to compromise anyone” lost precious time.’ M. de la Tour du Pin now offered his own carriages; but the King refused. In the Great Gallery, the courtiers continued to pace up and down. Lucie, excited and restless, hoping to find Frédéric or her father-in-law, wandered from darkened room to room, past ladies sitting whispering on stools and perched on tables. ‘The waiting,’ she wrote, ‘seemed unbearable. I was so agitated that I could not remain still a moment.’
At about midnight, Frédéric came to the Gallery to say that the Garde Nationale of Paris, with Lafayette a ‘prisoner of his own troops’, had just arrived. They, too, were soaking. Lafayette had tried but failed to prevent them setting out; he was reluctant to accompany them, and only did so in the hopes that his presence might act as a brake to any violence. Admitted to the King’s presence, he brought with him a plea to allow the Paris Gardes to protect the royal family, rather than the Swiss Guards and the Flanders regiment. The King agreed. All now seemed calm.
The fishwives, having eaten everything they could lay their hands on in the château, stretched out to sleep in the stables, in the coach house, on the floors of the kitchens and on the benches of the Assembly. The King and Queen retired to their bedrooms, the candles were blown out in the Great Gallery, and Frédéric accompanied Lucie back to the Princesse d’Hénin’s apartment, since their own was full of wet, sleeping women. The sight of them, noted Lucie, was ‘most revolting’. Versailles was quiet. Frédéric begged his father to get some rest. Making a last tour of inspection of the courtyards and the passages, he found the Gardes at their posts.
The attack came as dawn was breaking. Frédéric, keeping a vigil at the win
dows of the Ministry of War, heard the sound of tramping feet. Through the dim, uncertain light he could just make out people advancing with axes and sabres, pushing their way through a gate which should have been locked. By the time he reached the courtyard, the guard on duty was dead and the mob was racing across the Cour Royale; a group of some 200 people broke away and stormed up the marble staircase towards the royal apartments. A troop of bodyguards, hearing the din, took refuge in the guardroom, leaving one of their men locked outside to be torn to pieces.
There was only one man on duty outside the Queen’s rooms. He just had time to call through the locked door to her bedroom that people were coming to kill her, when the women fell on him, shouting that they had come to tear out the heart of the ‘Austrian whore’ and to ‘fricasser’ her liver. His unconscious body, blocking the doorway, held them up long enough for the Queen to escape along a secret passageway to the King’s apartments. The poissardes, bursting into her bedroom, plunged their pikes into her mattress.
Lucie, deeply asleep in Princesse d’Hénin’s apartment, was woken by Cécile, who said that she could hear shouting. When the two girls leaned out of the window, then climbed on to the ledge for a better view, they could still see nothing, but cries of ‘Kill them! Kill them! Kill the bodyguards!’ were clearly audible. At this point Marguerite appeared, trembling and terrified, saying that she had just seen a man with a long beard hack off the head of one of the guards. She also said that she had seen the Duc d’Orléans, a man none of the liberals trusted and whom Lucie was convinced was behind the disturbances, among the rioters.
As it grew light, the King, at the urging of Lafayette, agreed to appear on the balcony overlooking the courtyard, where some 10,000 women, disaffected Guardsmen and men with pikes, were milling around and shouting. The Queen, who came to join him, made as if to bring out the Dauphin and his sister, but was prevented from doing so by cries from the crowd of ‘Not the children’. What the people wanted was for the royal family to go to Paris.
At 12.30 on 6 October a ragged, mournful cortège duly set off, through blustery winds and heavy rain. The carriages of the King, the Queen, the royal children, the King’s sister Mme Elisabeth, and his brother and sister-in-law the Comte and Comtesse de Provence were followed by several cannon, decorated by the fish-wives with laurel leaves, by wagons containing flour from the King’s stores, and by a large crowd of women, singing and shouting. The heads of two bodyguards danced before the royal carriage, impaled on the top of pikes Lucie missed the closing hours of the attack on Versailles. Frédéric had insisted that she leave for the safety of a house at the Orangerie, and there she waited, in mounting fear and anxiety, for news. She was alone, Cécile having gone in search of her children; Marguerite was at the Ministry of War packing up their belongings. ‘I do not think,’ Lucie wrote 30 years later, remembering the events of that day, ‘that I have ever in my life passed such cruelly anxious hours. The cries of people being murdered rang in my head. The slightest noise made me tremble.’
When Frédéric finally arrived, he told her that the King’s parting words to him had been: ‘You are completely in charge here. Try to save my poor Versailles for me.’ Lucie begged to be allowed to stay with him, but Frédéric was adamant that she should accompany the Princesse d’Hénin to the safety of the Château of Saint-Germain, where her lover Lally-Tollendal kept rooms. Lucie’s presence, Frédéric said, would only ‘paralyse the effort which it was his duty to make to justify the King’s trust in him’.
Before leaving, Lucie returned to the silent and deserted Ministry of War. The only sound to be heard in the vast palace of Versailles, that she had known only as a bustling, crowded village of colour and movement, was the banging of doors and shutters, many of which had not been closed in decades, and which were now being barricaded against looters. Chairs and tables lay on their sides, knocked over by the rushing crowd. Discarded clothing was scattered around the floor. Versailles, for the first time in almost a hundred years, was empty. The Comte d’Hézecques, who as a boy had been a royal page dressed in crimson velvet embroidered with gold, walked, much as Lucie had, through the empty and echoing rooms, discovering corridors and whole apartments he knew nothing of.
The 3-hour drive to Saint-Germain, in a poorly sprung carriage, was bumpy and painful. When Lucie reached Lally-Tollendal’s apartment she collapsed. For a while, it looked as if she would miscarry. But she rallied, and both she and the unborn baby survived a ferocious cupping.
By the time that Lucie, still very pale and alarming Frédéric by her lack of appetite, arrived back in Paris towards the end of October, M. de la Tour du Pin was preparing to move into the new Ministry for War in the Hôtel de Choiseul. A pleasant apartment was being done up for Lucie and Frédéric, with its own separate entrance and with windows that opened on to a garden. Frédéric was working closely with his father, and Lucie, with the help of the Princesse d’Hénin, again became hostess at their official dinners, though they were smaller and less grand than at Versailles. They dined at four in the afternoon, after which Lucie returned to her own apartment or went out visiting. On moving to Paris, Marie Antoinette had given up her boxes at the various theatres and Lucie, in the middle months of her pregnancy, was too fearful of the mood of the Parisian crowds to go without the safety of a guarded box. The Queen’s decision, she thought, had been a mistake, for it served only to isolate her still further from the already hostile people. Marie Antoinette, she wrote, ‘was gifted with very great courage, but little intelligence, absolutely no tact and, worst of all, a mistrust–always misplaced–of those most willing to serve her’.
Arthur had recently returned from the West Indies to represent Martinique at the Estates General, and was living not far away, at 9 Porte Saint-Honoré. He had left his new family behind, and was constantly short of money. When not at the Assembly, speaking on colonial and naval matters, he spent his days trying to collect dues and a settlement on the Dillon regiment, which, together with all other proprietory regiments, had been integrated into the French army. For almost the first time in her life, Lucie was able to spend time with her father. She had not seen him for nearly five years. They grew close.
Having been hauled back to Paris by the poissardes, the royal family had been installed in the Tuileries, the collection of buildings started by Catherine de’ Medici in the 16th century. Overlooking the Seine, and made up of several wings and pavilions and 368 separate rooms, the Tuileries were dark, decrepit and un-welcoming. None of the doors shut properly. With the precipitous arrival of the royal family, the buildings had been cleared hastily of their occupants, most of them actors, artists and the families of court servants. After a first night, with courtiers sleeping on floors and tables, apartments had been arranged for the King, the Queen, the Dauphin and his sister. The children had a new governess, Mme de Tourzel, the 41-year-old widow of a Grand Prévôt of France, a woman whose impeccable probity was intended to counter the reputation of the compromising and frivolous Duchesse de Polignac, now safely in Switzerland. Mme Elisabeth, the King’s sister, was allocated rooms on the ground floor of the south wing; she complained that the poissardes came to scowl at her through the windows.
Gradually, as the mirrors and Gobelin tapestries were brought from Versailles to decorate the royal apartments, the court reestablished itself. Rose Bertin appeared with swatches of material; Léonard came to dress the royal hair. Greater efforts were made to economise and live more simply, but otherwise the royal day passed curiously unchanged: the lever, attendance at Mass, lessons for the children, tapestry for the Queen, billiards with the King, the coucher. The Dauphin played in the Tuileries gardens. The King went hunting. Lucie, returning to court, found that full court dress with hoops was still required. When guests came, they often wore lilies and white ribbons, symbols of the Bourbons; but when they left, they exchanged them at the gates for a tricolour cockade, without which they were liable to be arrested. The King, no longer ‘above the law’, but subject to
it, was now simply Roi des Français, King of the French, and not Roi de France et de Navarre, a linguistic distinction meant to highlight his dwindling powers.
The Assembly had sat for its last session among the Doric columns and royal portraits of the Menus Plaisirs in Versailles on 14 October. Three days later the deputies resumed their deliberations in Paris in a hall of the Archbishop’s Palace, considerably shaken by the violence they had witnessed, though no one had actually been injured in the tumult. A few took the opportunity to slip away. Their confidence was not increased when a baker was lynched, and his head impaled on the now customary pike. Paris, as Gouverneur Morris gloomily observed, ‘is perhaps as wicked a spot as exists. Incest, Murder, Bestiality, Fraud, Rapine, Oppression, Baseness, Cruelty…’
Dancing to the Precipice Page 14
