“Fetch a doctor.”
‘ Bayon, cursing, gave the order; but everyone outside was determined that the doctor should be brought in record time.
All the time I watched Madame Neuville lying there on the floor I was praying: “Oh God, send Bouille.”
But it was the doctor who came, not Bouille, and Madame Neuville could no longer keep up her pretence. She was given a potion and helped to her feet. She swayed and would have fallen again, but Bayon supported her and with the help of the doctor dragged her out to the cabriolet.
No sign of Bouille.
“A Paris!” shouted the mob. No more waiting. There was no help for it.
We must all follow Madame Neuville out of the house. A shout went up when we appeared. I held the Dauphin’s hand tightly, too frightened for him to fear for myself.
It was coming again . I knew so well. I should never forget. The humiliating ride . a longer one this time, not merely from Versailles but from Varennes to Paris.
The journey to Paris lasted three days. I thought when we had come from Versailles that I had reached the nadir of humiliation, horror, discomfort and misery; I was to learn that I had not done so.
The heat was intense; we could not wash or change our clothes, and all along the route were those shrieking screaming savages. I cannot call them people—for all semblance of human kindness and dignity seemed to have left them. They hurled insults at us—mostly at me. I was the scapegoat as I had become accustomed to being.
“A bos Antoinette V they screamed.
“Antoinette h la Ian-temel’ Very well then, I thought, but quickly—quickly. Gladly I will go rather than submit to life in these circumstances. Only let my children go freely. Let them live the lives of ordinary gentlefolk . but let me die, if that is what you want.
They had set two men of the National Assembly to guard us—Petion and Barnave. I suppose they were not bad fellows; indeed I know they were not, now. There was a difference between the rabble and those who believed that the revolution must come about for the good of France, whose creed was liberty, equality, fraternity;
they would have been ready to bargain for it around a conference table and Louis would have been eager to grant them what they wished. Men such as these were far removed from those animals outside who shrieked obscenities at us, who demanded our heads . and other parts of our bodies . who wanted blood and who laughed with demoniacal joy at the thought of shedding it. Oh yes, these men were different. They talked to us, as they thought, reasonably. We were only people, they told us. We did not deserve to be privileged because we were born in a different stratum of society from them. The King listened gravely, inclined to agree with them. They talked of the revolution, and what they wanted from life, and the inequalities of it; it was not reasonable to suppose that a people would go on indefinitely in want while a certain section of society spent on a gown what would keep a family in food for a year.
The Dauphin took a fancy to the two men and they to him. He read the words on the buttons of their uniforms.
“Vivre libre ou mourir.”
“Will you live freely or die?” he asked them gravely; and they assured him they would.
I felt that Elisabeth and Madame de Tourzel were near breaking point.
I knew that it was for me to keep them sane. My way of doing it was to attempt a lofty indifference. It did not please the mob, but it forced some respect from them. When we were obliged to draw up the blinds of the berline, which they demanded now and then, and Bamave or Petion would declare we had better do so as this mob was getting violent, I would sit staring straight ahead. They would come up to the window and call obscenities at me and I would ” look straight ahead as though they were not there. ” Whore! ” they shouted and I would not seem to hear. They jeered, but it had its effect on them. ( Food was brought to tike berline for us; the people shouted that they wanted to see us eat. I Elisabeth was terrified and thought we should pull up the blinds as the crowd demanded, but I refused to do so.
We must keep our dignity,” I told her.
Madame, they will smash the berline,” said Bamave.
But I knew that to draw up those blinds was to degrade ourselves, and refused to do so until I wished to throw out my chicken bones, and this I did into the crowd as though they did not exist for me.
Petion was the fiercer of the two; I detected in Bamave an admiration for me. He admired my manner with the mob and I could see that he was changing his ideas of us. He had thought arrogant aristocrats were unlike human beings, but I noticed how astonished he seemed when I spoke to Elisabeth and called her ‘little sister,” or she addressed the King as ‘brother.” These men were astonished at the way we talked to the children and impressed by the obvious affection between me and my family.
They must have been fed for years on those absurd scandalous sheets which had circulated through the capital. They thought I was some sort of monster incapable of any tender feelings—a Messalina, a Catherine de Medici.
Petion tried in the beginning to speak insolently of Axel. There had been many rumours about our relationship.
We know that your family left the Tuileries in an ordinary fiacre and that this was driven by a man of Swedish nationality,” he said.
I was terrified. They knew, then, that Axel had driven us!
We should like you to tell us the name of this Swede,” went on Petion, and I could see by the gleam in his eye that he enjoyed talking about my lover before my husband.
Do you think I would know the name of a hackney coachman? ” I demanded scornfully. And the haughty look I gave him so subdued him that he did not broach the subject again.
Pedon was a fool. When Elisabeth slept she was next to him her head fell on his shoulder and I could see by the smug manner in which he sat still that he believed she had laid it there purposely. As for Bamave, his manner was becoming more and more respectful towards me with the passing of every hour. I believed that given the opportunity we could have turned these two men from their revolutionary ideas and that they would have been our loyal servants.
These were the lighter moments of that nightmare journey. It lives with me now; in so much horror it still haunts me.
We were exhausted, dirty, unkempt; the heat seemed more unbearable than ever, the crowds more dense and hostile.
When someone in the crowd called “Vive Ie Roi,” the mob turned on him and cut his throat. I saw the blood before I could stop myself looking.
This was Paris that same city in which I had once been told, a lifetime away, that two hundred thousand of its people had fallen in love with me.
They were all round the berline now.
A face looked in at me, lips drawn back in a snarl, lips I realised I had once kissed.
“Antoinette a la lanterne.”
It was Jacques Armand, that little boy whom I had found on the road and brought up as my own until my children had arrived and made me forget him.
Were all my past sins and careless frivolities coming home to roost like so many vultures watching for the end?
I held my son against me; I did not wish him to see.
He was whimpering. He did not like it. He wanted to see the soldiers, he said. He did not like these people.
“We shall soon be home,” I told him.
Home that dark, dank prison from which a few days ago we had escaped.
We were ingloriously home.
Exhausted, desolate, we made our way to our old apartments.
“It is over,” I said. We are where we were before we attempted to escape But of course that was not true. We had gone forward towards disaster.
There was no longer a King and Queen of France. I knew it—although no one had told me yet.
I took off my hat and shook out my hair.
