Again the distracted wife and mother hesitated, torn between two equally compelling loyalties. But the cries of the children were an invention of the Minister. The only sound that reached the listening group was the howling of the mob, and it came from both before and behind them.
Seizing on the sudden silence among the group that followed M. Lajard’s intervention, Roger thrust his way forward and said quickly, “Take Her Majesty to her bedroom. There lies her only safety. We will bring her children to her. Hurry, now! For God’s sake hurry, or it will be too late.”
For a moment it looked as if his disguise would cause the wrecking of his plan. Up to then the Queen’s friends had been so desperately concerned with preventing her from going to the Œil de Bœuf that they had taken scant notice of the unsavoury-looking stranger in their midst. Now, the faces turned towards him showed doubt, hostility and suspicion. Fearing that he was attempting to lead the Queen into a trap, some of them quickly exclaimed against his proposal, while others demanded his reason for it. But the Princesse de Lamballe gave him one swift stare, then supported him wholeheartedly.
Although she had failed to identify Roger, and the existence of the staircase leading up to her room was a most closely guarded secret, his voice was vaguely familiar to her. She guessed that he must be some friend in disguise who knew of it, and felt he was right in inferring that it was the one hope of getting the Queen away to some safe hiding place.
“Messieurs!” she cried. “Who this man is I do not know, but I regard his suggestion as sensible. As Superintendent of Her Majesty’s Household I take full responsibility. M. le Duc, be good enough to bring the royal children to Her Majesty’s apartment.”
De Choiseul hurried away, the Princess put an arm round the weeping Queen’s shoulders to draw her forward, and Roger heaved a sigh of relief. Once inside the bedroom he intended to disclose himself to Madame de Lamballe and take charge of the situation. The courtiers were loyal and brave, but they lacked imagination, and they would rather have died than commit such a horrifying breach of etiquette as to ask the Queen to crawl into a cistern. That was what he meant to do as soon as they could get her up to the attics, and he had good hopes now that within another ten minutes he would have her out of danger.
A minute later he realised that he had been counting his chickens before they were hatched. As they hurried down the corridor the sounds of the mob grew louder. They came from the Dauphin’s apartment, which was separated from the Queen’s only by a small antechamber, and at any moment the mob might break through. He saw now that they must take a desperate gamble. When the group reached the door of the Queen’s boudoir they halted there in consternation. It sounded as if all hell had been let loose in the rooms beyond, but whether the mob was in only one or in all of them it was impossible to tell. Above the din a woman’s voice screamed, “We want the Austrian! Search, my friends, search, and we’ll get her dead or alive!”
The Queen gave a moan, and murmured, “Oh, why do they hate me so? I have never sought to harm them,” then despairingly clasped Madame de Lamballe and let her head fall on the Princess’s shoulder.
Pushing past them, Roger ran across the boudoir, eased open the door of the Queen’s bedchamber and peered through the crack. The scene he glimpsed made his heart sink. The mob was already there, and behaving like Furies let loose from Hades. Having failed to find the Queen they were venting their hatred on her possessions and sullying her intimate belongings. The curtains had been torn down, the mirrors smashed; clothes, footwear, cosmetics and ornaments lay in an indescribable jumble on the floor. A sailor was slaking his lust with a negress on the bed, a bearded man was urinating on one of the pillows, and a fishwife was senselessly stabbing through one of the Queen’s night robes again and again with a large knife.
His hopes of getting the Queen away now shattered, Roger softly closed the door, locked and bolted it. Then, rejoining Madame de Lamballe, he said, “We are too late. If there are reliable troops in the Salle du Conseil our best course now would be to go there.”
Again the little group hurried the Queen away, this time through a series of small rooms until they reached the great state apartment. In it they found a dozen guards, who ran to the Queen and assured her of their loyalty; but the royal children were no longer there and the mob from the Œil de Bœuf could now be heard approaching. In a frenzy of anxiety for her little ones the Queen insisted that she must find them, and turned back towards her private apartments.
Fortunately, while her friends were trying to restrain her, the Duc de Choiseul and Madame de Tourzel came running in with the children. But there was not a moment to be lost. As the Queen snatched the Dauphin and his sister to her, the mob began to hammer on the south doors of the Council Chamber.
Momentarily overtaken by panic, the Queen, her ladies, gentlemen and guards all ran towards the north doors. But halfway to them they halted, arrested by the sound of pounding feet and blood-curdling yells coming from that direction. Part of the mob that had invaded the Queen’s bedroom had broken out of it and resumed its murderous hunt for her. Some of the guards swiftly shut and bolted the doors, but it now lay in the lap of the gods whether the Queen would live or die in the Council Chamber, for she was trapped in it.
The men hastily shepherded her and her ladies into the bay of one of the big windows, then drew the long council table across it as a barrier. The guards lined up in front of it, and with madly beating hearts the whole party awaited the outcome of their desperate situation.
No one spoke; the guards now stood rigidly to attention; the eyes of the Queen’s companions were riveted on the south doors of the Chamber. Under the buffeting of the mob they shivered and vibrated. An axe-blade crashed through an upper panel and remained wedged there. The hinges creaked and groaned as a crowbar was forced in to lever them from their sockets. A rain of blows from pikes, scythes and sabres rattled on the woodwork like a hailstorm. Suddenly there fell a lull. It was followed by a resounding bang. The doors shook from top to bottom. Some of the attackers had picked up a heavy settee and were using it as a battering-ram. Again a lull. Another crash. The doors bulged inwards. For the third time a score of men threw against them their whole weight and that of the settee. With a detonation like the snapping of a bridge carried away by an icefloe, they flew wide open. The blast of air through the opening rocked the great chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. There came a deafening howl of triumph, and the mob surged in.
CHAPTER V
THE QUEEN’S ORDEAL
Afterwards, Roger could not have given a coherent account of the terrible hours that followed. They had seemed an unending nightmare of horror in which every few moments brought a new crisis, and a new apex of ever-mounting fear that a bloody massacre must ensue within a matter of seconds.
He could not have said how they had escaped being overwhelmed in the first mad rush. Perhaps it had been the sight of the little handful of grim-faced guards, so clearly determined to die rather than allow hands to be laid on the Queen. Perhaps it was the barrier of the broad table, which made it impossible for them to reach her without climbing over it and exposing themselves to a sword-thrust from one of her gentlemen. But as these material obstacles to their hate and rage were so flimsy, it seemed more probable that they had been quelled by the mental aura of calm, innocence and dignity that emanated from Marie Antoinette herself.
From the moment that she had regained her children her tears and hysteria had ceased. For a time she had seemed entirely absorbed in quieting their fears; then, when Roger had next glimpsed her, she was standing between them, drawn up to her full height, and facing her enemies with a cold, fearless challenge in her glance.
The group they made was one picture that would for ever remain indelibly imprinted on Roger’s mind. She had aged a great deal since he had last seen her. Although she was only thirty-six, her eyes were pouched, her face lined and her hair white; yet in her fine forehead, aquiline nose and Habsburg underlip, she still possessed t
he lineaments of regal beauty. Madame Royale, her eldest child, was a girl of fourteen, also with Roman features, but of the coarser, Bourbon type. The Dauphin was a beautiful little boy of six and a half. He was her third child, his elder brother having died in ’89; but unlike the former heir to France, who had been sickly from his birth, this little chap was healthy, vigorous, intelligent, and had such charm of manner that he was beloved by all who came in contact with him. The girl was standing and the Dauphin perched on the table, each with one of their mother’s arms about them as she faced the mob.
Another picture that Roger would never forget was that of a woman who, nearly four hours later, screamed at the Queen, “It is you, Austrian whore, who is the cause of all the unhappiness in France!”
“So they have told you,” replied the Queen sadly, “but you have been deceived. You call me Austrian, but I am the wife of the King of France and the mother of the Dauphin. In all my feelings I am French. Never again shall I see the country of my birth, and I was happy when the French people loved me.”
At that the woman suddenly burst into tears and exclaimed, “Pardon, Madame! Pardon! I did not know you before; now I see how good you are.”
Between those two clear pictures there was an endless blur of hideous faces that came and went. Unnoticed by Roger, the north doors of the Salle du Conseil had been opened, and a slow-moving procession of Furies, that packed the great room from wall to wall, began to filter through it. The pressure had forced the guards back from the front of the table to its sides, so that the ruffians and viragos leant right across it as they edged past, screaming their insults and obscenities in the very face of the Queen.
Many of them carried ghastly emblems of violence that they waved in front of her eyes—the still-bleeding heart of a calf labelled “Heart of an aristocrat”, two saws with a placard “To cut Veto and his wife in half”, rough caricatures of the Queen in the nude posturing in obscene attitudes with lovers falsely attributed to her, a model of a gibbet with her effigy suspended from it, and another of the new instrument of death recently invented by Doctor Guillotin.
Again and again some newcomer at the table raised a weapon to strike at her, but either at the critical instant other members of the crowd pulled them back, or the blow was averted by Roger and those who stood with him shouting, “Respect the Law! Do not disgrace the People!”
One hag threw two red caps of Liberty on the table and demanded that the Queen should put one on her own head and one on the Dauphin’s. Her eyes suddenly flashing with defiance, she exclaimed, “This is too much!” But the attitude of the crowd became so menacing that De Wittinghoff, a Livonian Field Marshal who was standing near her, placed one of the caps on her white hair, while M. Hue, a faithful valet de chambre, put the other on the boy’s fair curls.
De Wittinghoff was one of the many loyalists who, like Roger, on learning that the lives of the King and Queen were threatened, had determined to get into the Palace and assist in their defence. Some were nobles who had put on the oldest clothes that they could find in order to mingle with the mob, others simply honest citizens from every walk of life who still believed in and revered their Sovereigns. It was this leaven of brave, decent men, scattered among the crowd, that time and again prevented the criminals from the Faubourgs resorting to violence, either by tactful expostulations, or by bandying rough jokes with them that turned their rancour to coarse laughter.
It was, too, through the gradual infiltration of these secret allies into the invaded rooms that the Queen’s protectors now and then obtained whispered news of the King’s situation, which they were able to pass on to her. He had been attacked by a sans-culotte, but a brave youth of eighteen, named Canolles, who had formerly been nominated to the old Garde du Corps, had seized the man, forced him to his knees, and temporarily paralysed the hostility of the other insurgents by the extraordinary feat of making him cry “Vive le Roi!” The opera dancer, Joly, and a brewer named Acloque, had been among the first of the mob to break in, and at the earliest opportunity had assured the King that they had done so only with the object of dying in his defence. With quixotic daring, Stephanie de Bourbon-Conti had appeared dressed in a uniform borrowed from a National Guard, and, waving a sabre, had vowed that she would slay anyone who dared to lay a finger on the King.
These occasional tidings that the King was still alive and had loyal friends about him did much to support the Queen in her ordeal, but hour after hour the danger remained very great. The genuine mob still far outnumbered the loyalists, and the ever-present fear remained that some ruffian, half-crazed with drink, would start a massacre, for some mysterious agency was keeping the sans-culottes well supplied with free wine.
There could be little doubt that it had been paid for in advance by the conspirators and was being brought into the Palace under Santerre’s supervision, in the hope that when drunk the mob would commit excesses from which it still shrank while sober. Within half an hour of the King’s ordering the doors of the Œil de Bœuf to be opened the splendid chamber had become a vast boozing den. Every buhl and marquetry table was loaded with an array of bottles, and groups only paused in their drinking periodically to lurch over, and hector the King. To appease one gang he had to put on a red cap, and to dispel the quarrelsomeness of another he was forced to drink with them from the same bottle.
In both the great rooms, and in those between them, the heat was stifling and the stench appalling. The bizarre scenes enacted were reminiscent of Hogarth’s impressions of Hell, and time seemed to stand still; but as twilight began to fall it became apparent that the plot to murder the Sovereigns was going to fail. Even the most bloodthirsty of the sans-culottes had ceased to threaten them, and were now regarding them only with curiosity. The ample potations of wine, instead of rousing them to violence, had imbued them with a drunken good humour. Curses and imprecations were replaced with raucous laughter; in wild abandon thieves and prostitutes set to dancing the carmagnole and singing the ça ira.
This change of feeling in the mob must have been reported to those who were so eagerly waiting to hear that the King and Queen were dead; for, now that it was clear that their instrument had failed them, the men who could have stopped a riot at its inception began to appear in an attempt to save their faces.
At eight o’clock word filtered through to the Queen’s protectors that a deputation from the Assembly, headed by the Girondins, Vergniaud and Isnard, had arrived in the Œil de Bœuf, and that close on their heels had come Pétion, who was responsible for maintaining order in the capital. All of them had hypocritically protested their loyalty to the King, and the treacherous Mayor had even had the audacity to declare that he had only just learnt that there was any trouble at the Palace. Then, immediately afterwards, in order to retain favour with the rabble, although he could no longer escape his duty to disperse them, he stood on a chair and addressed them with revolting servility:
“People, you have shown yourselves worthy of yourselves! You have preserved all your dignity amidst acute alarms. No excess has sullied your sublime movements. But night approaches and now you must withdraw yourselves.”
Some minutes later Santerre pushed his way into the Salle du Conseil, also anxious now to save his face. As he advanced to the table he noticed that in the foul, overheated atmosphere the little Dauphin was half stifled by the heavy cap of Liberty that came right down past his ears. Pointing to it, he exclaimed, “Take the cap off that child. See how hot he is!”
Then, leaning across the table, he stared at the Queen and said, “Ah, Madame, have no fear. I do not wish to harm you; I would rather defend you. But remember, it is dangerous to deceive the people.”
Drawing herself up she retorted indignantly, “It is not by you, Monsieur Santerre, that I judge the French people. It is by these brave men here!” and with a flash of her old impetuosity she reached out to press the hands of the nearest guards on either side of her.
The gesture acted like a spark to a powder-barrel, releasing the
feelings of loyalty that had been pent up for so many hours in the breasts of her defenders. The other guards, her gentlemen and a score of people in the crowd, pressed round her to kiss her beautiful hands. Cries of “Vive la Reine!” went up, and even a great part of the fickle mob joined in giving her this unexpected ovation.
Disgruntled and now a little frightened on his own behalf, Santerre quickly turned away. Concealing his feelings by a display of bluster, he began to drive the sans-culottes from the room.
Roger did not join in the loyal demonstration. He knew that the Queen and the Princesse de Lamballe had witnessed the part he had played that afternoon, so that in his new guise he must have won their confidence. That, he felt, was an ample reward for the comparatively small risk he had run, and, if handled skilfully, might prove a most valuable asset in future plans which he had as yet had no time to formulate. But his disguise had already served him so well that he was anxious to preserve it. Santerre could have noticed him only as one of the foremost among the rabble that he had led in the attack on the Palace, and Roger was quick to realise that if he could confirm this impression of himself in the revolutionary leader’s mind it should greatly assist him in the double game he meant to play. So, ignoring a sign from Madame de Lamballe to come to her, he set about helping Santerre to hustle the drunken revellers out of the room towards the grand staircase.
Pétion and his municipal officers were already clearing the rooms ahead of them, so by the time Santerre and Roger reached the staircase they were among the last to go down it. As they walked out to the Cour Royale, Roger gave his companion a sidelong glance and said:
“Well, here we are where we started! Things didn’t go as I hoped they would when we first broke in.”
“No,” muttered the big brewer, “the King got the best of us today, and the affair miscarried. But never mind. We’ll come back and settle his hash tomorrow.” Then he looked at Roger, and added, “I don’t know your face, Citizen. To what Section do you belong?”
The Man who Killed the King Page 10
