592

IMPRUDENT PREPARATIONS.

This journey to Varennes was a miracle of imprudence.* It is sufficient to make a proper statement of what common sense required, and then to follow an opposite course; by using this method, if every memoir perished, history might still be recovered.

First of all, the queen orders an outfit to be made for herself and her children, two or three months beforehand, as if to give notice of her departure. Next, she bespeaks a magnificent travelling-case, like the one she had already, a complicated piece of furniture that contained all that could have been desired for a voyage round the globe. Then again, instead of taking an ordinary carriage of a plain appearance, she charges Fersen to have a huge capacious Berlin constructed, on which might be fitted and piled up, a heap of trunks, leathern boxes, portmanteaus, and whatever else causes a coach to be particularly conspicuous on the road. This is not all; this carriage was to be followed by another, full of female attendants; whilst, before and behind, three body-guards were to gallop as couriers, in their new bright-yellow jackets, calculated to attract attention, and make people believe, at the very least, from the colour, that they were people belonging to the Prince de Condé, the general of the emigrants!-Doubtless, these men are well prepared?—No, they had never travelled that road. But these guards must be resolute men, armed to the teeth?-They have nothing but small hunting knives. The king informed them that they would find arms in the carriage. But Fersen, the queen's man, doubtless fearing, on her account, the danger of a resistance by force of arms, had forgotten the weapons. All this is a ridiculous want of foresight; but now we behold the miserable and ignoble side of the picture. The king allows himself to be dressed as a valet, and disguises himself in a grey coat and a little wig. He is now Durand, the valet-de-chambre. These humiliating particulars are in the simple narrative of the Duchess of Angoulême; the fact is also stated in the passport given to the queen and Madame de Tourzel, as a Russian lady, the Baroness de Korff. Thus, this lady is so intimate with her valet-de-chambre (an indecorous arrangement, which alone revealed all the rest) that she places him in her carriage, face to face, and knee to knee !

A pitiful metamorphosis! How well he is disguised! Why, who could know him? Or rather, who would know him now?-France ? Certainly not. If she beheld him thus, she would look another way.

"You will put in the carriage-box," said Louis XVI., "the red coat with gold lace, that I wore at Cherbourg." What he thus hides in the box would have been his defence. The dress the king of France wore on the day when he appeared against England, amidst his fleet, was better calculated to consecrate him than the holy ampulla of Reims. Who would have dared to arrest him, if, throwing open his dress, he had shown that coat?-He ought to have kept it, or rather to have kept the French heart, as he then possessed it.

* The Count de Provence (Monsieur), on the contrary, was saved very cleverly. Madame de Balbi, a sensible woman, (and his mistress, if it were possible for him to have had one), persuaded him to trust himself to d'Averay, a young Gascon, who carried him off in a common cabriolet. He travelled alone, and Madame went off by a different road. (See Relation d'un voyage à Coblentz, 1823).

CHAPTER XIV.

THE KING'S FLIGHT TO VARENNES (20th-21st JUNE, 1791). WHAT grieves us, moreover, among other things, in this journey to Varennes, and lessens the idea we would like to entertain of the king's goodness of heart, is the indifference with which he sacrificed, by his departure, and abandoned to death, men who were sincerely attached to him.

By the force of circumstances, Lafayette found himself to be the involuntary guardian of the king, and responsible to the nation for his person; he had shown, in various ways, and sometimes even in compromising the Revolution, that he desired beyond everything else the restoration of the kingly power, as a guarantee of order and tranquillity. Although a republican in ideas and theory, he had nevertheless sacrificed to monarchy,—his weakness and ruling passion,—his popularity. There was every reason to suppose that, at the startling news of the king's departure, Lafayette would be torn to pieces.

And what would become of the minister Montmorin, an amiable but weak-minded man, and so credulous with the king, that on the 1st of June he wrote to the Assembly, in reply to the newspapers, that he affirmed, on his responsibility, on his life, and on his honour," that the king had never thought of quitting France?

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And what especially would become of the unfortunate Laporte, the steward of the king's household, and his personal friend, to whom he had left, at his departure, without consulting him, the terrible task of laying his protestation before the Assembly? The first blow of the popular fury would necessarily fall upon that unfortunate but involuntary messenger of a declaration of war from the king to his people: in that war, Laporte would infallibly fall the first victim; he was to be the first dead man: he might order his coffin and prepare his shroud.

Lafayette, receiving warning from several quarters, would believe nobody but the king himself; he went to him, and asked him whether there was any truth in the reports. Louis XVI. gave such a decided simple answer, and in such a good-natured manner, that Lafayette went away completely satisfied; and it was merely to calm the anxiety of the public that he doubled the guard. Bailly carried this chivalrous feeling still further, and far beyond what his duty prescribed; for having received positive information from one of the queen's women, who had seen the preparations, he had the culpable weakness to forward to the queen this denunciation, which honour, at least, made it his duty to keep secret.

The king and the queen had announced that they would attend the parochial procession of the constitutional clergy on the following Sunday, the day of Corpus-Christi. The Princess Elizabeth testified some repugnance at this. On the 19th, the day before the departure, the queen,

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THE KING'S FLIGHT TO VARENNES.

speaking to Montmorin, who had just paid his visit to the king's sister, said to the minister, "She grieves me. I have done all in my power to persuade her. Surely she might sacrifice her own religious opinions for her brother."

The king delayed till the 20th of June, in order to wait till the woman who had denounced the affair should quit his service, and also to receive, as he says himself, a quarter's pay of the civil list. Lastly, it was only on the 15th of June that the Austrians were to have occupied the passages at two leagues from Montmedy. The successive delays that had taken place, and the movements of troops commanded and counter-ordered, were not free from inconvenience. Choiseul told the king, from M. de Bouillé, that if he did not depart on the night of the 20th, he (Choiseul) should remove all the posts stationed along the road, and pass over, with Bouillé, to the Austrian territory.

Before midnight, on the 20th of June, the whole of the royal family left the palace in disguise, by an unguarded door, and stood in the Place du Carrousel.

A very resolute soldier, recommended by M. de Bouillé, was to have entered the carriage, to give answers when required, and to conduct the whole affair. But Madame de Tourzel, the governess of the royal children, maintained the privilege of her charge. By virtue of the oath that she had taken, it was her duty, her right, not to quit the children; and the word oath made a great impression on Louis XVI. Moreover, it was a thing unheard of in the annals of etiquette for the royal children (Enfants de France) to travel without a governess. Therefore, the governess entered, and not the soldier ; and, instead of an able man, they had a useless woman. The expedition had no leader, nobody to direct it; it was left to go alone and at random.

The romantic character of the adventure amused the queen, in spite of all her fears. She delayed a long time to see the children disguised; she had even the incredible imprudence to go out into the Place du Carrousel, then in a blaze of light, to see them depart. They entered a hackneycoach, driven by Fersen, who, in order the better to mystify those who might follow, took a few turns through the streets, and then returned and waited an hour longer at the Carrousel; at length the Princess Elizabeth arrived, then the king, and next, but much later, the queen, escorted by one of the body-guards; the latter, being little acquainted with Paris, had caused her to cross the bridge, and had led her to the Rue du Bac. On her return to the Carrousel, she saw, with a feeling of joy and hate, Lafayette passing by in his carriage, on his return from the Tuileries, having missed the king's hour of retiring to rest. It is said that, in the childish joy of having tricked her jailer, she struck the wheel of the coach with a switch that she had in her hand, such as ladies were then in the habit of carrying. The thing is difficult to be believed. The coach was going very fast, and it was surrounded by several lackeys on horseback, carrying torches. The guardsman, on the contrary, affirms that she was frightened at the blaze of light, and left his arm to run away in a different direction.

Fersen, the driver, who was conducting so precious a burden in his coach, being hardly better acquainted with Paris than the body-guards,

IMPRUDENT PARTICULARS.

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went as far as the faubourg Saint-Honoré, in order to make for the Barrière Clichy, where the carriage was waiting at the house of an Englishman, Mr. Crawford. Thence, he drove to La Villette, and, in order to get rid of the hackney-coach in which the body-guards had followed, he overturned it in a ditch. He thence drove on to Bondy. There it was high time to separate. He kissed the hands of the king and queen, leaving her grateful, but fated never to meet again, at the moment when he had just risked his life for the attachment of his youth.

Another act of imprudence, among the many which characterised this journey, had been to send forward the female attendants a very long time before the royal family; so that they had arrived at Bondy six hours before. The postilion who had driven them had remained there, and now beheld, with astonishment, a person, dressed like a hackney-coachman, driving alone a grand carriage drawn by four horses.

Now they are off, though very late; nevertheless they are going at a furious pace, one guard galloping at the coach-door, another on the box, and a third, M. de Valory, riding before to order horses, and giving munificently a crown over and above to each postilion, which nobody but the king was accustomed to do. One of the traces, having broken, caused them to lose a few minutes; and the king also delayed the carriage a little by wishing to walk up a hill on foot. However, there was no other impediment; more than thirty leagues of road, where no detachments had been posted, were now left behind; and, on approaching Châlons, the queen said to M. de Valory: "Francis, all goes well; we should have been stopped before now, if it was to have been."

All goes well-but for France or for Austria ?-For, indeed, whither is the king going?

He had told M. de Valory on the preceding evening: "To-morrow," said he, "I shall sleep at the Abbaye d'Orval," out of France, on the Austrian territory!

M. de Bouillé says the contrary; but even he also shows, and states clearly, that the king having no longer any safety to expect in the kingdom, must have changed his mind, and have at length fallen, in spite of his former resolution, into the Austrian net. The few troops that Bouillé still possessed were so little under his control, that after having gone forward a few leagues to meet the king, he was obliged to return in order to be among his soldiers, to watch over them and keep them in order.

The plan which had seemed French in October, and even so late as December, was no longer so in June, when M. de Bouillé beheld his command so limited, his Swiss regiments at a distance, his French troops gained over, and possessing at most but a small portion of German cavalry. The king knew this, and could no longer heed the repugnance he felt at the idea of taking refuge on the Austrian territory.

Bouillé's first plan was perhaps still more dangerous. If the king went out of France, he unnationalised himself, appeared an Austrian, and was condemned; he was then a foreigner, and France would have made war against him without hesitation. But Bouillé wanted to wage it on this side of the frontier, in France, yet hardly in France, not even in a fortress, but in a camp near Montmedy, a movable camp of cavalry, ever changing its position: there it was, as it were on neutral ground,

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PROBABLE ACTS OF VENGEANCE.

and could be in the kingdom, or out of it, at the same time. The military position in which it was placed, whilst good against the Austrians, "is still better," says Bouillé, "against the French." The king, when among these regiments of cavalry, behind these flying batteries, backed by the enemy, and able to retreat among them, or open our provinces to them, would have spoken in a decided manner; he would have said for instance : "You have no army; your officers have emigrated; your regiments are disorganised, and your magazines empty; I have let your fortifications throughout the Austrian frontier fall to ruin; you are exposed and defenceless. Well! the Austrians are coming, and so are the Spaniards and the Swiss; thus you are surrounded on all sides. Surrender, and restore the sovereign power to your master." Such might have been the part played by the king, had he become the centre of civil war, and the messenger of foreign warfare, able at pleasure to let in the enemy or bar them out. A few words about constitution would perhaps have been added to annul opposition; and in order that the old Assembly might lull the country into security, and give it up in a decent manner.

Liege and Brabant told plainly enough what was to be expected from this princely language. The Bishop of Liege, after returning with paternal language and Austrian soldiers, had harshly applied the old barbarous punishments of torture and the rack. Our emigrants did not wait for their return to circulate lists of proscription in France. Would the queen be merciful? Would she easily forget her humiliation in October, when she appeared in the balcony, weeping before the people? It was not very likely; for the female who had been the most accused of having led the women to Versailles, namely Théroigne, having been to Liege, was traced from Paris, pointed out, and handed over to the Liege and Austrian police (May 1791), who transported her as a regicide to the prisons of Marie Antoinette's brother, in a remote part of Austria. Doubtless there had been a cruel reaction in the taste of 1816; at this last-mentioned period-a period of provostal courts-M. de Valory, the body-guard and courier to the king in the journey to Varennes, was the provost of the department of Doubs.

In they afternoon, about four or five o'clock, says the Duchess of Angoulême (in the simple and natural account furnished by Weber), "they passed through the large city of Châlons-sur-Marne. There they were completely recognised; and many persons praised God on beholding the king, and offered up prayers for his escape."

But everybody did not praise God. There was a great fermentation throughout the country places. In order to account for the presence of the detachments along the road, they had had the unlucky idea to say that a treasure was about to pass, and that they were there to escort it. At a time when the queen was accused of sending money to Austria, this was the way to exasperate the minds of men, or at least to excite

attention.

Choiseul occupied the first post three leagues beyond Châlons; he had with him forty hussars, with whom, says Bouillé, he was to secure the king's passage, and afterwards block up the road against every traveller. If the king were arrested at Châlons, he was to deliver him by force of This is not very intelligible; it is not with forty horsemen that

arms.