Dawn came and there was no sign of any pursuit. ‘When we’ve passed Châlons,’ the King said, ‘we shall be safe. We shall then find the first detachment of troops and after that we shall have nothing to fear.’ Forty hussars under the young Duc de Choiseul had been sent out by the Marquis de Bouillé to meet them just beyond the town at the village of Pont de Sommeville. Once they got there they would be out of danger.
When the berlin clattered to a halt outside the post-house at Pont de Sommeville, however, there was no sign of the promised soldiers. Fersen had calculated its time of arrival as ‘Tuesday at 2.30 at the latest’. But there had been delays on the way: a wheel had struck the wall of a narrow bridge, the traces had snapped and the horses fallen, and even where the road surfaces were good it had proved impossible to drive the heavily loaded vehicle at more than about seven miles an hour. It was not, therefore, until six o’clock in the evening that the royal family reached Pont de Sommeville. By then the Duc de Choiseul had become alarmed by angry peasants who disbelieved his story that he was ‘in their village to escort pay for the army in the east’ and who supposed that he had come instead to enforce the collection of overdue rents on behalf of a local landowner. Threatened by these peasants who brandished pitchforks and pointed muskets at the faces of his men, Choiseul decided to withdraw from the village into a nearby forest where he became lost in the darkness.
So, when the horses had been changed at the post-house, the berlin had to move off again unescorted to Sainte-Ménéhould. Here the King had expected to find a detachment of dragoons, but again he was disappointed, for their commander, who had been constantly questioned by suspicious villagers throughout the afternoon, had received a message from Choiseul at Pont de Sommeville that there was no likelihood of the royal party arriving that day and had consequently allowed his men to dismount and to go for a drink in a wine shop. On the appearance of the berlin he walked up to it, saluted and told the King in a low voice that the plans had misfired and that he would have to stay out of His Majesty’s way for fear of increasing the suspicions of the villagers. The villagers, however, were by now quite sure as one of them said later, that ‘something very odd was going on’. They had not been convinced by the dragoon captain’s evasive excuses for his men’s presence in Sainte-Ménéhould, they had seen him salute the occupants of the new, expensive carriage and had watched him as he whispered his brief message through the window before walking hurriedly away. It was decided, therefore, to call out the National Guard and to disarm the dragoons while they were still dismounted. Thus it was that, as the berlin continued on its way through the outskirts of the town, the King looked behind in vain for the escort that he had been promised.
In Paris the flight of the royal family had been discovered early in the morning of 21 June when one of the King’s valets de chambre had woken in his truckle bed in the King’s room. He had detached from his arm the cord by which the King roused him if he needed him in the night; he had opened the shutters, removed his bed and the screen that shielded it from the King’s, opened the door for the Pages of the Bedchamber, and approached the drawn curtains of His Majesty’s bed. ‘Sire,’ he had announced, bowing respectfully, ‘it is seven o’clock.’ He then drew the curtains and discovered the bed to be empty.
The Queen’s bedroom and the children’s were also found to be deserted. And soon the tocsin was ringing and crowds of people from all over Paris were surging round the Tuileries, at first in a mood of indignant anger, so one observer considered, then in one of taunting contempt. They pushed through the gates on which was hung a sign reading ‘House to let’, telling a worried postman who was trying to deliver letters to mark them, ‘Gone away. Left no address’. They then streamed into the palace, examining the rooms with curiosity, insisting that the palace servants remove their livery but otherwise neither molesting anyone nor doing any damage. A cherry hawker sat with her basket on the eiderdown quilt of the Queen’s bed. ‘Now,’ she said. ‘Today, it’s the nation’s turn to be comfortable.’
Awakened in his house in the Rue de Bourbon, Lafayette leaped out of bed, hurriedly put on his uniform and big cockaded hat and rushed off towards the Pont Royal, followed by an angry crowd accusing him of having connived at the King’s escape. On his way he met Bailly who, accompanied also by a shouting mob and dressed in a black overcoat with a tricolour ribbon across his shoulders, appeared ‘nearly overcome with anxiety’. They stopped to talk above the roar of the crowd. ‘Do you think,’ Lafayette asked, ‘that the King and his family will have to be arrested and brought back to Paris for the public good?’ Bailly thought that they would but wondered who could give the orders. The Assembly were not due to meet until nine o’clock and something would have to be done before then.
‘All right, I will take the responsibility upon myself,’ Lafayette said and immediately began to dictate an order to an aide-de-camp:
The King having been removed by the enemies of the Revolution, the bearer is instructed to impart the fact to all good citizens, who are commanded in the name of their endangered country to take him out of their hands and to bring him back to the keeping of the National Assembly. The latter is about to assemble, but in the meantime I take upon myself all the responsibility of this order. Paris, June 21,1791.
Lafayette signed the paper, adding beneath the date, ‘This order extends to all the royal family’, and soon horsemen were riding in all directions out of Paris to find them. One of the horsemen was Captain Bayon who took the road to Valenciennes. He galloped through Meaux and east for Châlons, but after six hours in the saddle he felt he must have a rest. So he reined in his horse at Chaintrix, sending a message on to Sainte-Ménéhould that every effort must be made to stop the royal family if they had taken that road to the frontier. When this message reached the post-house at Sainte-Ménéhould the suspicions of the young postmaster, Jean Baptiste Drouet, were confirmed. Drouet had thought that the governess of Baroness von Korff’s two children looked just like the Queen whom he had seen once or twice when he had been in the army and was ‘equally struck’ by the resemblance of the steward to the face of the King printed on an assignat he had in his pocket. He had said as much to his wife, but she had not wanted him to get into trouble and had advised him to keep quiet. Now, feeling convinced that the woman must be the Queen, he and a friend galloped off in pursuit of the berlin through the Forêt d’Argonne on the road to Verdun.
Ten miles east of Sainte-Ménéhould is the little town of Clermont en Argonne. Here the berlin had stopped once again to change horses, and Drouet’s postilions riding back from the post-house there to Sainte-Ménéhould had overheard a shout from the box of the berlin as it continued on its journey: ‘Take the road to Varennes!’ Passing Drouet on their way through the Forêt d’Argonne, the postilions told him what they had heard. So Drouet and his companion, who had been making for Metz by way of Verdun, turned north for Varennes. ‘We went by a side road through the woods,’ Drouet recorded, ‘and reached Varennes at the same time as the berlin which was drawn up beside the houses at the top of the town. It was then about half past eleven and the night was very dark. But in order not to be recognized or suspected, we took off our cross belts and as we passed the carriage at a walk, I said in a loud voice, trying to pass ourselves off as merchants bound for a nearby fair, “Good Lord! We’ll be very late getting to Grandpré. Perhaps we shan’t get there at all with these tired-out horses.”’