St. Priest and de la Tour du Pin then offered their carriages, which were round at a back entrance. In them the Royal Family might yet have escaped. The Queen urged the King to take this last chance; but once again the malignant Necker intervened, arguing that such an attempt was now too dangerous. The foolish King took the advice of the Minister who had done more to bring about his ruin than any other man, instead of that of his courageous wife. Again deferring to her husband's judgment Madame Marie Antoinette made no further protest, nor did she suggest that she should seek safety with her children. With tears streaming down her face she rejoined her ladies, saying simply: "All is over; we are staying."
At midnight Lafayette arrived. In one breath he assured the King that he would rather have died than appear before him in such circumstances as the present; but he had been forced to it and had covered the last few miles only because his men were pushing their bayonets into his back. In the next he said that all his men wanted was to see the King, vouched for their complete loyalty, and offered to be personally responsible for the safety of the Royal Family and everyone within the palace.
The King listened without comment to these heroics,, and accepted the guarantee of protection for himself, his family and his servants. Others were not so sanguine. Their Majesties then retired. Lafayette posted detachments of his men round the palace; then went to bed and to sleep.
Meanwhile de Vaudreuil collected Monsieur de Beauveau, de la Marck, Monsieur de Chevenne, Roger, and several other gentlemen, and said to them that he believed the Queen's life to be in extreme danger. The Marquise de Tourzel, who had succeeded Madame de Polignac as governess to the royal children, had told him that during the course of the evening Her Majesty had received not one but several warnings.
One note, from a Minister of the Crown, had contained the words: "Madame, make your plans; or tomorrow morning at six o'clock you will be murdered."
A group of loyal deputies from the National Assembly had sought an audience, and assured her that she would be murdered during the night unless she saved herself by immediate flight. She had replied: "If the Parisians have come here to assassinate me it shall be at the feet of my husband. I will not fly."
They had then asked permission to remain with her; but she said that they needed rest more than she did, and giving them her hand to kiss, had bid them leave her.
As a last resort they had begged her to pass the night with the King; but, knowing that the plot was directed against herself, she refused, and ordered Madame de Tourzel, in the event of trouble, to take the children to the King, in order that she might face the danger alone, and keep it away from those she loved.
Finally, when her women besought her to take heed of these warnings, she had said: "I learned from my mother not to fear death. I shall await it with firmness."
When de Vaudreuil had finished telling of these sinister threats and superb courage, none of his hearers had a thought of sleep, in spite of the long day they had been through, and they arranged to post themselves in the various apartments which led to that of the Queen.
Roger was allotted the Oeil de Bceuf, one of the principal salons of the palace, so named from being lit by one large circular window. If the mob did break in it was most unlikely that they would come that way, as it did not contain any of the regularly used approaches to the Queen's apartments; but it was a good central post from which he could be called on for help from two directions.
It was now getting on for two o'clock in the morning. Most of the candles in the big room had been doused and the wood-fires flickered fitfully on the gilded carving of panel surrounds and door pediments. As Roger threw some more logs on one of the fires it flared up, fighting for a moment the pictures in the nearest panels, but the lights in the great crystal chandeliers had been put out and the painted ceiling was lost in shadow.
For a time he sat by the fire and idly followed the chain of events that had led to his being there. This was not his quarrel, and he wondered now at the impulse that had sent him galloping to Versailles in the middle of the day. In part it had been curiosity to see at first hand the outcome of this new crisis; but it had also been something more than that. He recognized that as a class the nobles and prelates-were now getting no more than they deserved as a result of generations of indolence and avarice, but many of the present generation were liberal-minded men and quite a number of them had shown him friendship. The cause of the people might be just, but the great bulk of them would also become sufferers in the long run unless order could be maintained; so it was fitting that every man,^ whatever his nationality, should lend his hand to resist violence.
Above all there was the Queen. As he thought of her innocence,, kind-heartedness and courage, he was glad to be sitting there; and knew that if the attack matured, and he lived through it, he would always feel proud and honoured at having drawn his sword in her defence.
Each time he found his thoughts drifting he stood up and walked about for a little to keep himself awake. An officer and two gentlemen of the bodyguard came through the apartment on their rounds every hour, otherwise the palace now seemed sunk in exhausted sleep. But it was not so with a large part of the 30,000 troops and 10,000 brigands massed outside. The drums beat all night and, sodden with the rain,, gave out a hollow menacing note.
It was half-past four in the morning when Roger started up from his reverie at the sound of a musket-shot. There followed a dull clamour pierced with yells and more firing, but muffled by the passages and walls. Roger had been asked to remain at his post, unless called on for help, so he eased his sword in its scabbard and with straining ears listened to the tumult that had broken out somewhere on the ground-floor of the palace.
After a few minutes there suddenly came a sharp rapping on the wall near which he stood, and a voice cried: "Open! Open! Let us through! Let us through!"
Moving quickly to the place from which the sounds were coming, he stared at it. Only then, in the dim light, did he perceive the crack of a small doorway, which had been skilfully concealed. It was barely five feet high and two and a half across; the upper part of it cut through the corner of a panel that contained a picture, and it followed so exactly the moulding of the wall as to be imperceptible to the casual glance. De Vaudreuii had not told him of its existence when posting him in the Oeil de Boeuf, and he had no idea where it led.
The banging and shouts on the far side of the door had now reached a crescendo. Roger thought that it was the mob who were trying to break through, and he hastily looked to either side along the dim passages for help to defend it when it gave way. But both the long corridors leading from the room were deserted. From the distance, shouts, shots, shrieks and the trampling of many feet could be heard.
Suddenly he realized that the voices beyond the panel held an imploring note and were those of women. It was possible that some of the inmates of the palace were endeavouring to escape that way from an attack on a range of apartments that lay beyond the door. Yet he could not be certain, and if he opened it he might be overwhelmed by the mob in a matter of seconds.