The president, Jean Joseph Mounier, had gone to consult the King leaving his chair to the Bishop of Langres who was quite incapable of controlling the rabble. ‘Order! Order!’ the bishop called as the women clambered on to the platform. ‘We don’t give a fuck for order,’ they shouted back at him. ‘We want bread.’ Several of them pushed their faces at him, demanding to be kissed. He obliged them with a sigh. Others threatened to play boule with the head of ‘that damned Abbé Maury’. A few, who had gone into assommoirs were now quite drunk, some of them vomiting over the benches. One of the prettiest sat down on the knee of her ‘little mother Mirabeau’ who seemed very happy to hold her.
Eventually the King agreed to see a deputation of women in the Salle de Conseil if Mounier would take them there.
M. Mounier appeared with twenty of these women at the palace gates all of which were closed and guarded [recorded the Marquis de Paroy in a letter to his wife]. I found myself by chance inside one of the gates and, recognizing the President of the Assembly, who was being crushed by the crowd, I told the officer of the guard who he was. M. Mounier told the officer the object of his mission. They let him in with six women, and I accompanied them to the King’s apartment where they were introduced. I noticed that two of them were quite well dressed and not at all of the class of person to which the others belonged, though they affected their language. They had come, they said, to ask for bread from the King.
The King walked into the room, looking rather nervous, to ask the women what they wanted. ‘Sire,’ replied one, a pretty girl who sold flowers at the Palais Royal, ‘we want bread.’
‘You know my heart,’ the King told her. ‘I will order all the bread in Versailles to be collected and given to you.’ At these words the girl fainted. Revived by smelling salts, she asked to be allowed to kiss the King’s hands. ‘She deserves better than that,’ His Majesty said and took her into his arms. Thrilled by their generous reception, the women whom Mounier had chosen as representatives came out again into the courtyard to find that the others who had marched with them were far from disposed to share their pleasure at the King’s generosity. The deputation had been duped, they were told; even if the King meant what he said, the Queen and the aristocrats at Court would soon see that he broke his promise. A few women began to chant again, as they had done on the march, ‘Bread! Bread! Meat at six sous the pound! No more talking…We’ll cut the Queen’s pretty throat! We’ll tear her skin to bits for ribbons!’ The six representatives were forced to go back and obtain a written declaration. Pacified by this, some of the women then returned to Paris with Stanislas Maillard.
The King now comforted himself with the thought that the trouble was over. He sent the Gardes du Corps and the Flanders Regiment, which had been ordered to march to the palace, back to their barracks. But soon after nine o’clock he learned that he must shortly expect other visitors at Versailles. For in Paris hundreds of men of the National Guard had converged upon the Hôtel de Ville demanding to be led to Versailles. Their commander, Lafayette, had been reluctant to take them there. He had sat on horseback by the steps of the Hôtel de Ville, attempting to pacify them. But they refused to listen to him, going so far, as he afterwards said, to threaten to hang him from the lampost on which Foullon de Doué had been murdered unless he agreed to their demands. So, at length, the Commune gave him instructions to march off with the Guard, ordering two delegates to accompany him and to ask the King to return to Paris.
Spattered with mud, Lafayette arrived at Versailles with these delegates, and some 20,000 National Guardsmen and other armed civilians, at about eleven o’clock. Advised once again to flee by his Ministers and the Queen, and this time also by Mounier, the King at first agreed to do so. But after some Ministers had already left the palace and were rattling along with their families in coaches on the road to Rambouillet, he changed his mind following a conversation with Necker: he would stay behind after all and see what Lafayette had to say. He greeted him courteously, accepted without demur the arrival of the National Guard, agreed to approve the Assembly’s decrees and the Declaration of Rights. He listened politely while the Commune’s delegates made their request for his return to Paris and, while he did not immediately commit himself to this, he seemed willing to consider it.
It was now two o’clock in the morning. The crisis appeared to be past. All was quiet. An officer, looking down into the courtyard from the Aile des Ministres, could see no movement. The women had gone away to find places of shelter from the still-pouring rain; many of them had taken off their skirts and petticoats to wring out the water, shocking an officer who complained that ‘the scenes which took place amongst them were anything but decent’.
Assured by Lafayette that he and his family would come to no harm, the King went to bed. So did the Queen who was suddenly awakened at dawn by the noise of trampling feet and by loud shouts on the staircase that led up to her apartments: ‘Death to the Austrian! Where is she? Where is the whore? We’ll wring her neck! We’ll tear her heart out! We’ll fry her liver and that won’t be the end of it.’ ‘I’ll have her thighs!’ cried one. ‘And I’ll have her entrails,’ called others. ‘I’ll have her kidneys in a fricassee!’
A gate leading into the Cour des Princes had been left unlocked. A horde of armed women had pushed it open and had poured into the courtyard led by Nicholas Jourdan, a savage-looking, bearded model from the Academy of Painting and Sculpture, whose arms were naked to the elbow and whose hands and blue overcoat were already smeared with blood. As the crowd had approached the palace one of the Gardes du Corps had opened fire from a window, hitting a young journeyman cabinet-maker who had fallen dead in the courtyard. Enraged by this, the crowd had rushed forward, and Jourdan, brandishing an axe, had attacked one of the other Guards and cut his head off. A second Guard had also been decapitated as Jourdan and the women had rushed across the Cour des Princes into the Cour Royale and, shouting for the ‘Austrian whore’, had started to mount the staircase.
An officer attempting to bar their way, the blood pouring down his face, called out ‘Save the Queen!’ through the anteroom door. ‘Save the Queen! They are going to kill her.’ As he was knocked down with the butt of a musket wielded with such force that the trigger penetrated his skull, the Queen, who had leapt out of bed, put on a shift and petticoat, picked up a pair of stockings and was about to put those on as well when two of her ladies dashed into her room and urged her not to trouble to dress but to make for the King’s apartments before the mob broke down the door. So, with her stockings in her hand and a cape round her shoulders, she and her ladies rushed through the Petits Cabinets, locking the doors behind them, towards the Salon de l’Oeil de Boeuf. As they ran, the mob behind them battered down the bedroom door, poured into the room, and finding the bed empty, slashed at the sheets with their axes and swords.