THE BODY GUARD SAVED.

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The crowd was knocking louder and louder to enter the oilde-bœuf. The guards barricaded the place, piling up benches, stools, and other pieces of furniture; the lower panel was burst in. They expected nothing but death; but suddenly the uproar ceased, and a kind clear voice exclaimed: Open!" As they did not obey, the same voice repeated: Come, open to us, body guard; we have not forgotten that you men saved us French Guards at Fontenoy.'

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It was indeed the French Guards, now become National Guards, with the brave and generous Hoche, then a simple sergeant-major-it was the people, who had come to save the nobility. They opened, threw themselves into one another's arms, and wept.

At that moment, the king, believing the passage forced, and mistaking his saviours for his assassins, opened his door himself, by an impulse of courageous humanity, saying to those without : "Do not hurt my guards."

The danger was past, and the crowd dispersed; the thieves alone were unwilling to be inactive. Wholly engaged in their own business, they were pillaging and moving away the furniture. The grenadiers turned that rabble out of the castle.

A scene of horror was passing in the court. A man with a long beard was chopping with a hatchet to cut off the heads of two dead bodies, the guards killed on the stairs. That wretch, whom some took for a famous brigand of the south, was merely a modèle who used to sit at the Academy of Painting; for that day, he had put on the picturesque costume of an antique slave, which astonished everybody, and added to their fear.*

His name was Nicolas.

According to his landlord, the man had never given any proof of violence or ill-nature. Children used to take that terrible man by the beard. He was in fact a vain half-silly person who fancied he was doing something grand, audacious, and original, and perhaps wanted to realize the bloody scenes he had beheld in pictures or at the theatre. When he had committed the horrible deed, and everybody had recoiled from him, he suddenly felt the dreariness of that strange solitude, and sought, under different pretexts, to get into the conversation, asking a servant for a pinch of snuff, and a Swiss of the castle for some wine, which he paid for, boasting, and trying to encourage and comfort himself.-See the depositions in the Moniteur. The heads were carried to Paris on pikes; one by a child. According to some, they departed the same morning; others say, a little before the king, and,

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THE QUEEN BEFORE THE PEOPLE.

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Lafayette, awakened but too late, then arrived on horseback. He saw one of the body guards whom they had taken and dragged near the body of one of those killed by the guards, in order to kill him by way of retaliation. "I have given my word to the king," cried Lafayette, "to save his men. Cause my word to be respected." The man was saved; not so Lafayette. A furious fellow cried out: "Kill him!" He gave orders to have him arrested, and the obedient crowd dragged him accordingly towards the general, dashing his head against the pavement.

He then entered the castle. Madame Adelaide, the king's aunt, went up to him and embraced him : It is you," cried she, "who have saved us." He ran to the king's cabinet. Who would believe that etiquette still subsisted? A grand officer stopped him for a moment, and then allowed him to pass: "Sir," said he seriously, "the king grants you les grandes entrées."

The king showed himself at the balcony, and was welcomed with the unanimous shout of "God save the King! Roi!"

Vive le

"The King at Paris!" was the second shout, which was taken up by the people, and repeated by the whole army.

The queen was standing near a window with her daughter beside her, and the dauphin before her. The child, playing with his sister's hair, cried: "Mamma, I am hungry!" O hard reaction of necessity! Hunger passes from the people to the king! O Providence! Providence! Pardon ! This one is but a child!

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At that moment several voices raised a formidable shout : "The queen!" The people wanted to see her in the balcony. She hesitated: "What! said she, "all alone?" Madam, be not afraid," said Lafayette. She went, but not alone, holding an admirable safeguard,-in one hand her daughter, in the other her son. The court of marble was terrible, in awful commotion, like the sea in its fury; the National Guards, lining every side, could not answer for the centre; there were

consequently, in presence of Lafayette, which is not likely. The body guard had killed five men of the crowd or National Guards of Versailles, and the latter seven body guards.

HESITATION OF THE ASSEMBLY.

279

fire-arms, and men blind with rage. Lafayette's conduct was admirable; for that trembling woman, he risked his popularity, his destiny, his very life; he appeared with her on the balcony, and kissed her hand.*

The crowd felt all that; the emotion was unanimous. They saw there the woman and the mother, nothing more. "Oh! how beautiful she is! What is that the queen? How she fondles her children! Noble people! may God bless you for

your clemency and forgetfulness!

The king was trembling with fear, when the queen went to the balcony. The step having succeeded: "My guards," said he to Lafayette, "could you not also do something for them?' "Give me one. Lafayette led him to the balcony, told him to take the oath, and show the national cockade in his hat. The guard kissed it, and the people shouted: "Vivent les gardes-du-corps !" The grenadiers, for more safety, took the caps of the guards, and gave them theirs, so that, by this mixture of costume, the people could no longer fire on the guards without running the risk of killing them.

The king was very reluctant to quit Versailles. To leave the royal residence was in his estimation the same thing as to abandon royalty. A few days before, he had rejected the entreaties of Malouet and other deputies, who in order to be further from Paris, had begged him to transfer the Assembly to Compiègne. And now, he must leave Versailles to go to Paris,-pass through that terrible crowd. What would befall the queen? He shuddered to think.

The king sent to entreat the Assembly to meet at the Château. Once there, the Assembly and the king being together, and supported by Lafayette, some of the deputies were to beseech the king not to go to Paris. That request

By far the most curious deposition is that of the woman La Varenne,—— the valiant portress of whom we have spoken. Therein we may perceive how a legend begins. This woman was an eye-witness,-—had a hand in the business; she received a wound in saving one of the body guard; and she sees and hears whatever is uppermost in her mind; she adds it honestly: "The queen appeared in the balcony; M. de Lafayette said: The queen has been deceived. She promises to love her people, to be attached to them, as Jesus Christ is to his Church.' And as a token of approval, the queen, shedding tears, twice raised her hand. The king asked pardon for his guards," &c.

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MOVEMENT UNFORESEEN.

was to have been represented to the people as the wish of the Assembly. All that great commotion would subside; fatigue, lassitude, and hunger would gradually disperse the people; they would depart of their own accord.

The Assembly, which was then forming, appeared wavering and undecided.

That

Nobody had any fixed resolution or determination. popular movement had taken all by surprise. The most keensighted had expected nothing of this. Mirabeau had not foreseen it, neither had Sièyes. The latter said pettishly, when he received the first tidings of it: "I cannot understand it; it is going all wrong.

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I think he meant to say: contrary to the Revolution." Sièyes, at that time, was still a revolutionist, and perhaps rather favourably inclined towards the branch of Orleans. For the king to quit Versailles, his old court, and live at Paris among the people, was, doubtless, a fine chance for Louis XVI. to become popular again. If the queen (killed, or in exile) had not followed him, the Parisians would, very probably, have felt an affection for the king. They had, at all times, entertained a predilection for that fat, good-tempered man, whose very corpulency gave him an air of pious paternal good-nature, quite to the taste of the crowd. We have already seen that the market-women used to call him a good papa: that was the very idea of the people.

This removal to Paris, which so much frightened the king, frightened, in a contrary manner, such as wanted to strengthen and continue the Revolution, and, still more, those who, for patriotic or personal views, would have liked to make the Duke of Orleans lieutenant-general (or something better.)

The very worst thing that could have happened for the latter, who was foolishly accused of wishing to kill the queen, was, that the queen should have been killed, and that the king, freed from that living cause of unpopularity, should return to Paris, and fall into the hands of such men as Bailly or Lafayette.

The Duke of Orleans was perfectly innocent of the movement of the 5th of October. He could neither help it, nor take advantage of it. On the 5th and the following night, he went restlessly from place to place. Depositions prove that he was seen everywhere between Paris and Versailles, but

CONDUCT OF THE DUKE OF ORLEANS.

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that he did nothing.* Between eight and nine in the morning of the 6th, so soon after the massacre, that the court of the castle was still stained with blood, he went and showed himself to the people, with an enormous cockade in his hat, laughing, and flourishing a switch in his hand.

To return to the Assembly. There were not forty members who repaired to the castle. Most of them were already in the entrance hall, and rather undecided how to act. The crowds of persons who thronged the tribunes increased their indecision. At the first word said about sitting at the Château, they began vociferating. Mirabeau then arose, and, according to his custom of disguising his obedience to the people in haughty language, said, "that the liberty of the Assembly would be compromised if they deliberated in the palace of kings; that it did not become their dignity to quit their usual place of meeting; and that a deputation was sufficient." Young Barnave supported the motion. Mounier, the president, opposed it, but in vain.

At length, they heard that the king had consented to depart for Paris; the Assembly, on Mirabeau's proposition, voted, that, for their present session, they are inseparable from the king.

The day was advancing. It was not far from one o'clock. They must depart, and quit Versailles. Farewell to ancient monarchy !

A hundred deputies surround the king; a whole army,-a whole people. He departs from the palace of Louis XIV.,

never to return.

The whole multitude begins to move: they march off towards Paris, some before the king, and some behind. Men and women, all go as they can, on foot or on horseback, in coaches and carts, on carriages of cannon, or whatever they could find. They had the good fortune to meet with a large convoy flour,-a blessing for the famished town. The women carried large loaves on pikes, others, branches of poplar, already tinted

of

* All that he appears to have done, was to authorise the purveyor of the Assembly, on the evening of the 5th, to furnish provisions to the people who were in the hall. There is nothing to show that he acted, to any extent, from the 15th of July to the 5th of October, except in an awkward and weak attempt which Danton made in his favour with Lafayette.-See the Mémoires of the latter.