Having passed the berlin they rode flat out down the hill, through the cobbled streets and across the stone bridge to the house of the local procurateur, a grocer and chandler named Jean Baptiste Sauce. Coming out into the street with a lantern in his hand, Sauce called out the National Guard who took up their positions beside an archway that spanned the main street by the church. Soon the lamps of the berlin appeared in the darkness, and Sauce walked out into the middle of the street shouting, ‘Halt!’ The berlin came on despite the order and, as the National Guardsmen appeared from behind the arch, bayonets fixed to their muskets, Sauce cried out again, ‘Halt! Halt! One step more and we fire!’ The horses clattered to a halt.
Sauce went up to the carriage, knocked on the door and asked to see the occupants’ passport. The Duchesse de Tourzel passed it through the window. Sauce took it from her and went into a nearby inn to examine it in a better light than his lantern afforded. It was made out in the proper form for the Baroness von Korff and her party. Sauce began to think there must have been a mistake, but Drouet insisted. ‘I tell you the King and Queen are in that carriage. I’ve seen them. If you let them go you’ll be guilty of treason.’
So Sauce asked the travellers to alight. He led them into his small shop, a wooden building with bundles of candles and pots of brown sugar in the window, and took them up the narrow stairs to a bedroom where the two children lay down on the bed. The two ladies sat on rickety, straw-bottomed chairs, and the man who claimed to be the Baroness’s steward walked up and down restlessly as they waited for the arrival of a judge, Jacques Destez, who had lived at Versailles for a number of years and had often set eyes on the King. He came into the room at last, looked in astonishment at the figure in the green overcoat and immediately knelt before him. ‘Oh, Sire!’ he said.
‘Yes,’ the King answered in immediate acknowledgment of this identification. ‘I am, indeed, your King.’
Sauce was as impressed and overawed by their Majesties’ presence in his bedroom as was Destez. Having listened to the King’s explanations as to why he had left Paris, he told them respectfully that in the morning he would provide them with an escort to take them on their journey.
But before dawn Captain Bayon arrived, together with one of Lafayette’s aides-de-camp, Jean Louis Romeuf, who brought with him a decree from the Assembly confirming Lafayette’s order for the royal family’s return to the Tuileries. They were both embarrassed. Romeuf averted his glance when he saw the Queen. Bayon stammered when he addressed the King: ‘Sire, you know – all the people of Paris are, er…You will not go any further, Sire – the interests of the state…Sire…’
“Well, what is it you want?’ the King asked him brusquely.
‘Sire, a decree from the Assembly.’
‘Where is it?’
‘My companion has it.’
Romeuf held out the paper, looking at the floor. The King snatched it from him and, having read it, said, ‘There is no longer a King in France.’
He handed it to the Queen who also read it, then gave it back to him. He placed it on the bed where the children were still lying down. But the Queen suddenly seized it and flung it on to the floor with the angry comment, ‘I will not have my children contaminated.’
At these words the people standing in the threshold of the room began to murmur angrily ‘as though she had profaned the most sacred thing in the world’.
The King seemed to be in his usual quandary as to what ought to be done. He asked Bayon and Romeuf if they might not wait until ‘at least eleven o’clock, as though still hoping that de Bouillé’s troops might arrive. But then, as the crowds in the street outside shouted more loudly than ever, ‘They must go back! They must go back! To Paris! To Paris!’, he began to realize that he had no alternative but to obey the Assembly’s commands. The Duc de Choiseul, who had now ridden into the town with his hussars and had pushed his way into Sauce’s shop, quietly urged him to make a dash for the frontier with his family: there were fresh horses ready in the street below as well as the hussars. There were also, though, as the King well knew, hundreds of armed men there, and hundreds more National Guardsmen were still converging on Varennes from the neighbouring towns and villages. So, after breakfast, during which Madame Sauce suggested that he must be crazy to consider giving up all the money the nation paid him, it was decided that the royal family would have to return to Paris.
Before leaving, the King begged to be left alone for a few minutes with his family. When the others had gone he persuaded Sauce to go down to the carriage, to make an excuse for entering it and to bring back a box from a secret receptacle whose position he described to him, giving him the keys. On Sauce’s return he opened the box. Inside were papers which he and his wife and sister frantically tore into tiny pieces, heaping them up in a bowl while Sauce stood on guard at the door. No sooner had the King set them alight, however, than there was a loud knocking at the door. He hurriedly picked up the bowl and hurled both it and its contents out of the window. The people below chased the fluttering fragments but, although they later tried to fit the charred edges together, they could make nothing of the writing on them.
It was now half past seven in the morning. The royal family walked down the steps towards the carriage, on whose box the officers of the bodyguard had been sitting affecting imperturbability at the curses of the crowd who now let out repeated shouts of ‘Vive la Nation!’ The King and Queen climbed in followed by the children and the Duchesse de Tourzel, and Choiseul closed the door. ‘Don’t leave us,’ the Queen begged him, leaning out of the window; but the berlin jolted forward, and, as the mob surged after it, he was knocked to the ground.
The return journey to Paris was a dreadful ordeal. At Sainte-Ménéhould, the berlin, escorted now by a vast crowd of curious onlookers and by National Guards, some in uniform, others not, was halted while the mayor made a speech of admonition and rebuke. Later, an old quixotic nobleman, who rode up with the cross of St Louis on his breast to make the King an elaborate salute, was shot in the back as he rode away. The crowds increased, shouting insults and threats, spitting at the windows. Then near Pont à Binson, two members of the Assembly, Antoine Barnave and Jérôme Pétion, who had been sent out to meet the carriage, climbed into it, obliging the Queen to take the Dauphin on her knee. Pétion, soon to be Mayor of Paris, a good looking, though fat and vain and tiresomely garrulous man, afterwards gave a detailed account of the last stages of the journey. He described how anxious the Queen and Madame Elisabeth were to assure him that the King had had no intention of leaving the country, and how the King, whose linen was now very dirty, on several occasions offered him something to drink and poured it out for him, trying to make conversation. He began to talk about the English, their industry and keen commercial sense; but he uttered a few sentences only, then became embarrassed and blushed. Often ‘the difficulty he found in expressing himself made him shy’.
We stayed for twelve whole hours in the carriage [Pétion continued] without once getting out. What surprised me particularly was that neither the Queen nor Madame Elisabeth nor Madame de Tourzel showed any sign of wanting to get out. The Dauphin made water two or three times. The King himself unbuttoned his breeches and made him pee into a big silver cup. Once Barnave held the cup. It has been said that the coach contained an English convenience. Perhaps it did; but I saw no sign of one.