The door leading into the King’s apartments was locked on the inside. The Queen and her ladies battered on it, screaming for help. At length it was opened by a frightened valet. The King was not there: at the sound of the tumult he had hurried off through a secret passage to the Queen’s room, and seeing that she had escaped, he had gone to fetch the Dauphin. He suddenly appeared with the boy in his arms.
By now Lafayette, who had gone to bed at the Hôtel de Noailles, had been roused from his sleep and had galloped over to the palace where the National Guard had succeeded in stopping the fighting and had cleared the mob out of the building. But the courtyards were still full of shouting demonstrators, firing their muskets in the air, parading the severed heads of the royal guards on pikestaffs and crying out, ‘Le Roi à Paris! Le Roi à Paris!’ According to the Marquis de Ferrières-Marsay, the Duc d’Orléans ‘was walking cheerfully about among them, in a grey frock-coat and a round hat with a riding whip in his hand. He smiled at some and talked in a carefree manner to others. All around him the air resounded with shouts of “Our father is with us! Long live King Orléans”…At the same time…men dressed as women were spreading word among the crowd that M. de Lafayette was a traitor and that they must get rid of him. One of the leaders…was advising a group of men and women who thronged round him and to whom he was handing money, “We want the heads of both the Queen and M. de La Fayette. That man is a traitor. He left Paris against his will and very late in the day.” At these words a man with a hideous face disguised as a woman displayed a kind of sickle and swore that he would be the one to cut off the bitch’s head…Troops of women and men armed with pikes and muskets were everywhere hunting the men of the Bodyguard…The barbarous horde manifested a savage pleasure, some of them bathing their hands in the blood [of the dead Guards] and wiping it over their faces, others dancing round the bodies…’ Everywhere there were calls for the King to go to Paris and threats to Lafayette.
Another less partisan informant, Elizabeth Girard, a ‘bourgeoise de Paris’, who later gave evidence before an official inquiry, confirmed that ‘all the people, without distinction, especially the journeymen locksmiths who were there in great numbers, were saying that they had lost a day’s wages, that if the King didn’t come to Paris, and if the Bodyguard were not killed, Lafayette’s head should be stuck on the end of a pike.’ And Claude Fournier, an officer of the National Guard and well-known agitator, claimed that he had called to the fishwives, using the kind of language that they would have used themselves, ‘Sacrées bitches, can’t you see that you are being buggered about by the King and Lafayette…The whole damned lot will have to be taken to Paris.’
Eventually Lafayette himself expressed the opinion that order could never be restored until the royal family showed themselves to the people. So the King went out on to the balcony. There were a few scattered cheers but these were almost drowned by shouts of ‘The Queen! The Queen!’
Marie Antoinette had recovered her composure. Her children’s governess said that she appeared, indeed, quite unmoved by her ordeaclass="underline" ‘Her countenance was sad but calm.’ Wearing a dressing-gown of yellow and white stripes, her hair disordered, she came out on to the balcony, her four-year-old son on one side, her daughter, now eleven, on the other, holding their hands. ‘No children! No children!’ the crowd below shouted up at her. So she turned and bent down to help the children back through the window before facing the mob once again, her head erect, unflinching as several muskets were levelled at her. For two minutes she stood there as the mood of the women changed from hostility to grudging respect. Gradually, one after the other, the muskets were lowered. A few women even cried out ‘Vive la Reine!’ but these, so Jeanne Martin said, were silenced by ‘the common people…who hit them to make them quiet’. The Queen turned away and went back into the palace.
She did not conceal the fright she had had [theMarquis de Paroy told his wife]. She sighed wearily and, taking the little Dauphin into her arms again, she covered him with kisses and began to cry. This made us all cry, too. Then the Queen went back with the King into the inner cabinet room where I followed them. We were hoping that the danger had passed…But numerous shouts were still heard, ‘The King to Paris! The King to Paris! The King on the balcony!’…The shouts of the populace grew louder and louder. The King consulted with his Ministers for a few minutes. Then he came on to the balcony again, preceded by M. de La Fayette and followed by the Queen, who said, passing in front of me, ‘We are going to Paris.’ For a reply I raised my eyes to heaven.
‘My friends,’ the King announced from the balcony, his words greeted by repeated cheers, ‘I will go to Paris with my wife and children.’
That afternoon the King and Queen, their two children and the governess, climbed into the royal carriage with Monsieur and the King’s sister, Elisabeth. The carriage was surrounded by women waving banners and flags, branches bedecked with coloured ribbons and loaves of bread impaled on the points of bayonets. Several were drunk, some threatening to soak the Queen’s hands in the entrails of the Household Guards, others dancing in the mud, singing songs, jumping on to the backs of soldiers, knocking off their caps and bearskins and putting them on themselves, a few sitting astride the guns and horses of the National Guard, waiting for the disorderly procession to move off.
The National Guard led the way, escorting wagon-loads of wheat and flour. Then came a regiment of Grenadiers, followed by the disarmed Gardes du Corps and the Flanders Regiment. The royal carriage came next, Lafayette, riding beside it; and, rolling along through the mud behind it, trailed a line of carriages bearing a hundred deputies of the National Assembly who were now to transfer their debates from Versailles to Paris, where they were to meet for a fortnight in the great hall of the archdiocese, before moving to the Manège, a riding school near the Tuileries.
At the rear of the column, and on either side of the wagons of grain, marched the market-women, their decorated branches amidst the gleaming iron of pikes and musket barrels giving the impression, so one observer thought, of ‘a walking forest’. It was still raining, and the roads were ankle-deep in mud, yet they all seemed content, even cheerful. Occasionally they burst into song on the six-and-a-half-hour march, passed ribald jokes down the ragged ranks or danced along, holding out their aprons. They called out to the people who stood to watch them pass by that they were bringing back to Paris the baker, the baker’s wife and ‘le petit mitrorn’, the baker’s boy.
‘The Queen sat at the bottom of the coach with the Dauphin on her knees…while some of the blackguards in the rabble were firing their guns over her head,’ recorded the Comte d’Artois’s Scottish gardener, Thomas Blaikie. ‘As I stood by the coach one man fired over the Queen’s head. I told him to desist but he said he would continue.’