Without waiting for the arrival of the courier Valory, who was supposed to ride ahead to report progress, he proceeded to take his dragoons back in the direction of Montmédy. Goguelat did not argue against the decision, nor did he remain at the poste. Instead he helped to warn those further down the line that everything had gone wrong. Choiseul had Léonard with him, who had accompanied him on his trip back from Paris on the instructions of Marie Antoinette (the coiffeur kept bemoaning the fact that he was in tell-tale silk stockings and breeches). He now told him to take his cabriolet and spread the news that “the treasure” would after all not be arriving.12
At six o’clock Valory arrived at the poste at Somme-Vesle and was appalled to find no sign of the dragoons. When the berlin itself arrived at six-thirty, there was similar consternation. What did Choiseul’s absence mean? What should they do now without the military escort which had been so carefully planned in the weeks before the escape? No one had any idea, not the three junior bodyguards, accustomed to take orders rather than giving them, and not the King. As to Choiseul’s motivation, the Marquise de Tourzel’s explanation was hardly too extravagant: “Heaven, who wanted to test our august and unfortunate sovereigns to the end, let him leave.”13
In the end, for want of any more imaginative solution, the berlin simply rolled on again, reaching Orbeval—where there was still no sign of Choiseul—and thence to Sainte-Menehould. It was now about eight o’clock, and the royal family had been travelling for eighteen hours. Here there were in fact forty dragoons of Choiseul’s regiment, under the command of Captain d’Andouins; they had been installed in order to safeguard the passage of this mythical “treasure.” But these troops had unsaddled and d’Andouins, who in any case believed that everything had gone wrong, kept his distance from the family to avoid suspicion. All the time the royal luck was running out. Someone now recognized the King in a brief moment when he put his head out of the carriage, or at least suspected his identity.
This was one Drouet, in his late twenties, an official of the Sainte-Menehould poste, who was a strong supporter of the Revolution. Afterwards a colourful story was spun concerning Drouet’s recognition, how he quickly compared the face when he saw it with the assignat in his pocket, which the King himself had given him. The fact was that the “the infamous Drouet,” as he became from the royalist point of view, had served seven years in the army; his attention, like that of the rest of the town, might have been caught in the first place by the sight of the dragoons, added to which Louis XVI had quite a distinctive appearance, assignat or no assignat. Furthermore the gossip about the berlin’s contents was spreading in the district. Fresh horses always had to be accompanied by local postilions in order to take charge of them when their relay was over. It is possible that the King had in fact been recognized as early as Chaintrix and Châlons; but there the inhabitants were more discreet—or more respectful.14
Drouet’s suspicion was not yet certainty and the berlin was allowed to depart. It was not until an hour and a half later that Drouet and another man, Guillaume, set off in pursuit; they did so at the orders of the municipality.*83 By this time, the royal party had reached Clermont. Here the Comte de Damas, Colonel of the Dragoons of Monsieur (the Comte de Provence), had been ordered to await the King’s passing with 140 men. Unlike Choiseul, Damas had only been let into the secret of the escape fifteen days before its execution and was sufficiently out of touch to believe that the Vicomte d’Agoult would be with the King in the berlin. Wrongly alerted by Léonard that there would be no arrival of the “treasure,” Damas was put under pressure from his officers to stand down. He had thus allowed the horses to be unsaddled and his men to go to sleep at about nine o’clock.15
By the time Damas was in a position to send a quartermaster named Rémy and a few troops after the King, Drouet and Guillaume had arrived. They now received some vital information about the berlin’s route from another quarter. It might have been expected that the King would roll on east to Verdun. In fact, Verdun, like Metz, had all along been seen as a potential hazard. After Clermont, it was intended that the berlin should turn sharply north on a more obscure route, through wooded hills. Unfortunately Rémy missed this turning, and continued for some time towards Verdun, delaying his meeting with the berlin. It was Drouet and Guillaume who learnt of the fateful words spoken to the postilions of the fresh horses at Clermont: “Take the road to Varennes.”16
The royal party reached Varennes-en-Argonne, a “miserable little town” of perhaps one hundred inhabitants, at about eleven o’clock at night. Miserable as it might be, Varennes’ peculiar layout turned out to be crucial to the royal fortunes. The main street descended a steep hill to a bridge over the Aire River, with a further section of the town, including its castle and the Hôtel Le Grand-Monarque, on the far side; this meant that Varennes was effectively divided into two. There was now an urgent need for fresh horses, especially as the postilions of the current relay had been instructed by their employer, a woman, to get home without fail the next day for the harvest. Yet—almost unbelievably—no one in the party had the faintest idea where the new horses were supposed to be found.
This was essential information, given that Varennes was too small and insignificant to have its own poste and arrangements had therefore had to be made in advance. There was a vague supposition that their best bet was “the Clermont end of the town,” yet no horses were to be found there and the town was in darkness. It was one of the unfortunate but lethal effects of Choiseul’s withdrawal that the horses’ whereabouts—altered by Goguelat to the far (Stenay) end of the town—was never passed on by either man.
As it was, the King’s party was left knocking on doors in the darkness in the upper part of Varennes, while in the lower part, across the bridge near the castle, at the Hôtel Le Grand-Monarque, two comparatively junior officers waited with the missing horses, as well as a detachment of the Royal German Regiment. One officer, Charles de Bouillé, younger son of the Marquis, had been chosen because the presence of his father or Comte Louis might have drawn too much attention; the other, Raigecourt, was also a younger son. These officers had posted no lookout and were thus for some time in complete ignorance of the events happening only a short distance away from them—and their men.17 Once Drouet and Guillaume rode by, giving the alarm at the local inn, Le Bras d’Or, the town began to wake up. But at this crucial point, the bridge over the Aire was blocked by a conveniently overturned furniture wagon.
Not only were Charles de Bouillé’s hussars now cut off from the royal party but so, in theory, were the additional one hundred hussars on the road further north at Dun. Their acting commander, Lieutenant Rohrig, was also quite junior, Goguelat having sent back the experienced commander of the squadron, Deslon.18 There were in fact several fords over the Aire. But no one among the royalists seemed to know where they were. When Charles de Bouillé was at last alerted to the King’s arrival, he found that a deep trench in the water, which had been cut for a nearby mill, made the only ford he knew impassable. He then turned north. In short, the lack of preparations at Varennes was a disaster. Unlike the delays, it was an avoidable disaster. This was something about which both Valory and Choiseul agreed afterwards.
The Queen, on the arm of Malden, took temporary refuge at the large house of an invalid, a Monsieur de Préfontaine; since he had worked for the Prince de Condé, here was a friendly contact that could have been established in advance, but had not. Meanwhile about half an hour was wasted while Valory and Moustier tried to coerce the postilions into going further.19 They resolutely refused. It was said later that their royalist employer bitterly regretted the intransigent orders she had given about the priority of the harvest. The two bodyguards looked in vain for the fresh horses.
By this time the procurator of the local commune, Monsieur Sauce, had become involved, thanks to Drouet. Another barrier was set up at the top of the town, while the postilions were told: “Your passenger is the King.” The alarm for fire in the town was set
off, a traditional method for rousing the sleeping inhabitants. National Guards began to be summoned. Six passing dragoons, who happened to observe the commotion and might have assisted the royal party, had no officer to command them and therefore did nothing. In all of this, time was of the essence if the berlin was to go on its way with the new relay, or alternatively if the royal party was to be rescued by other means.
Procurator Sauce also understood the value of time, or rather delay, since the task of arresting the King of France in the middle of the night, without any authority, was to say the least of it delicate. In such an extraordinary situation, the appearance of coercion had to be avoided. It was thus, on the excuse of the irregularity of their passports, that the royal family was persuaded to accept the “hospitality” of Sauce’s house until morning, when no doubt they would be continuing on their journey.
The Sauce house had two upper rooms. The royal family congregated in the back one, which was about fifteen feet by twenty, and the bodyguards sat outside under the window. The Queen asked for hot water and clean sheets for the children, who sank into instant sleep, and wine for the rest of the party (with the exception of herself). The King sat slumped in an armchair. Here at last at midnight, Choiseul and Goguelat reached the King, the former with his dragoons, having been lost in the wooded terrain. Damas also got through with a small party of loyal troops. Although crowds were beginning to gather outside the windows, these were mainly peasants. There was as yet no authority for the arrest. Therefore it was still perfectly possible at this point for the various bodies of troops in the neighbourhood to have simply forced through the liberty of the royal family, either by the threat of superior weapons, or by the use of them, as Choiseul and Goguelat suggested. No order was given to do so.
Whose failure was this? Louis XVI must take part of the blame. Fearing as ever the effects of violence on those around him, including his own family, he declined the sword that the Duc de Choiseul offered, telling him to put it away. Louis XVI clung to his paternalistic role, the only one he understood. At one point the King attempted to pacify the gathering crowds by appearing before them and announcing that he had no intention of leaving France and furthermore would return to Varennes, after he had been established at Montmédy. But there is a story that someone shouted from the crowd: “And what if your foot slipped [over the frontier]?” Even if apocryphal, it is one of those stories that capture the mood of the moment; it was not credible to simple people (nor, of course, to many more sophisticated ones) that the royal journey would really stop at Montmédy, so close to the frontier of the Empire.
Once again, however, Choiseul must bear a responsibility. The Duc had actually received an order in advance from the Marquis de Bouillé to go into the attack if the King was arrested at Châlons; that would have justified his action, if justification were needed. He was a soldier, not a courtier. It was a risk of course, like all unplanned military actions, but there were other soldiers in French royal employ who would have taken it.
After all, the King himself was never likely to take real command. When Goguelat, the ADC, managed to make his way to the King, the latter asked him when they were to depart. “Sire, we await your orders,” replied “Monsieur Gog.” As a soldier he at least was not afraid of violence. Goguelat tried to disperse the National Guards gathering outside and, drawing his sword, found himself the victim of an officer’s bullet; it struck his collarbone and his horse then threw him. Later Deslon, the commander of the squadron of hussars who had been at Dun, also got back into Varennes, although without his men. Asking for orders, he was told by Louis XVI that he had no orders to give, since he was a prisoner.20 Once again the lack of a senior advisor at the King’s side was a terrible disadvantage—even that cool plotter and professional soldier Count Fersen, the lack of whose “courage and sang-froid” the Marquis de Bouillé would later lament.
The arrival of emissaries from the National Assembly at about six o’clock in the morning, bearing orders for the immediate return of the King to Paris, changed the situation entirely. The anxious debate at the Hôtel de Ville about the King’s future was at an end. One of them, Romeuf, was familiar to the Queen because he was La Fayette’s ADC. At the sight of him, so thickly coated in dust from the journey, she exclaimed: “Monsieur, I would not have recognized you!” Nor, it seems, did she recognize their legitimacy. For the Queen’s exhausted despair gave way to rage—in which some criticism of the King may perhaps be implied. Valory reported how she cried out: “What audacity! What cruelty! Subjects having the temerity to pretend to give orders to their King!” And “the Daughter of the Caesars”—meaning her imperial parents—threw the order down on the bed where the Dauphin was sleeping.21
It was true that there was one last chance: the Marquis de Bouillé and that large force he had assembled on the excuse of defending the frontier, which was intended to support the King at Montmédy. Deslon knew German and Marie Antoinette remembered enough of the language of her childhood to ask him whether the Marquis de Bouillé would reach them in time; they expected him to rescue them. The Comte de Damas, who also knew German, was able to reply: “On horse and will charge,” before there were cries from their guardians: “Don’t speak German.”22
Bouillé, however, had only got as far as Stenay by about four o’clock, having waited on the Varennes–Dun road for some time, hoping to escort the berlin. He was aroused at four-thirty and his troops were ready to set out at five o’clock. But it needed several hours to make the journey to Varennes, given the rough nature of the road. The King pleaded to delay their departure and one of the waiting-women, Madame de Therville, even feigned illness in order to provide an excuse. It was in vain. They could not hold out beyond seven-thirty in the morning. So the wretched cavalcade set off.*84 The Marquis de Bouillé finally arrived in Varennes about an hour and a half too late.
The journey that followed was a nightmare. The weather, which had been overcast, became intensely hot. The dust on the roads was so great that the outriders were lost in a kind of fog. The royal family was not, however, permitted to close the windows of the carriage. As a result the dust clung to their clothes—the same clothes they had been wearing at their departure—which had become saturated with perspiration. The press of hostile people around them meant that the pace was intolerably slow. It had taken twenty-two hours to reach Varennes from Paris; during many of them the family had been buoyed up with hope. It now took nearly four days to return and the mood throughout was one of desolation.
Three deputies from the National Assembly were in charge; two of them, Jérôme Pétion and Antoine Barnave, crammed into the berlin. Barnave sat at the back between the King and Queen, who had Louis Charles on her knee; Pétion sat with Madame Elisabeth and the Marquise de Tourzel in front, the ladies taking it in turn to have Marie Thérèse on their laps. The third, Maubourg, offered to travel behind with the waiting-women to protect them from the abuse being hurled at them.
Pétion, a lawyer from Chartres in his early thirties who had been a member of the Estates General, was one of the many who had attached themselves to Robespierre’s rising star. At this point he was loud-mouthed and crude rather than overtly cruel—his pulling of the Dauphin’s long fair hair was probably meant as rough teasing rather than anything more sinister. As for his conviction that Madame Elisabeth, that earnest and devout spinster, succumbed to an instant physical attraction for him—he would recall her “smiles on a summer’s night” in his memoirs: that was more ludicrous than anything else.24 But of course his very presence in the stifling coach was itself offensive.
Barnave was a different matter. He was blessed with undeniable good looks, fine regular features and a wide mouth, and was “very well made,” according to the Duc de Lévis, despite his short hair. At the age of twenty-eight (six years younger than Marie Antoinette) he was a man who had acquired an intellectual interest in the whole notion of liberty and what it meant, through wide reading. It was he who had attacked the departure of Mesdame
s Tantes as being improper during the debate on the Constitution. Barnave now found himself launched into an argument with Madame Elisabeth, who far from joining in intimate caresses with Pétion was actually determined to bring home to the deputy the sheer outrage of what had been done to the royal family. She herself would never abandon her brother unless all practice of religion was forbidden, when her conscience might tell her to leave France. But how would Barnave understand that? He was “not only said to be Protestant” but was probably without any religion at all.25
The Princess also turned to politics. “You are too intelligent, Monsieur Barnave,” she said, “not to have appreciated the love of the King for the French people and his genuine desire to make them happy . . . As for that liberty which you love to excess, you have considered only its advantages. You have not taken into account the disorders that come in liberty’s wake.” It was a spirited defence of an essentially conservative position. On the whole Marie Antoinette left the talking to her sister-in-law who was doing so well. It was not realized at the time that it was the Queen-in-distress, not the robust Princess, who made a striking impression on Barnave.
In effect, the return journey retraced the earlier route of the berlin: Clermont, Sainte-Ménehould, Châlons and on to La Ferté-sous-Jouarre, Claye and Meaux, leading finally to the Paris barrier. Not every experience along the way was unpleasant. The first night was spent at the intendancy at Châlons where people who remembered the lovely young Dauphine staying there on her bridal progress twenty-one years earlier wept for pity, even if recruits from the Jacobin clubs of nearby Rheims interrupted the Mass being said for the feast of Corpus Christi at the Sanctus; Marie Antoinette heard “with horror the indecent abuse that assailed her ears.” Nevertheless young girls tried to present the Queen with flowers and were annoyed to be prevented from reaching her by orders of the deputies. At La Ferté, the hostess of the inn where a meal was taken pretended to be the cook in order to serve the royal family decently. The King was supposed to have been shown a secret staircase by which he alone could have escaped, the Queen another exit. Neither consented to a plan that went against their shared concept of duty—to stay together to the end.26