‘We are safe here,’ said his mother gently. ‘Safe in the old Palace of Louis Quatorze.’

But that night the Dauphin woke in his hastily improvised bed, screaming that he saw men in his room, men with heads on pikes, and they were marching all round him.

His mother had him brought to her, and she kept him beside her. Madame Royale slept on the other side of her.

Only the King slept soundly, the sleep of exhaustion.

And lying in that grim old Palace, splendid no longer, damp, unlived in, full of foreboding, Antoinette felt that she was a prisoner – a prisoner whom the people had condemned to death.


Chapter XII

MIRABEAU

Through that dreary winter the royal family lived, shut off from the world, in the ancient Palace of the Tuileries. How different this from the glories of Versailles, the charm of Trianon! Antoinette’s apartments were on the ground floor, those of the King and the children on the first floor; and these apartments had their own private staircases – dark and smelling of damp, as were all the passages of the Palace; and even during the day they were lighted by oil lamps which smoked and gave out a foul smell. All these passages, staircases and apartments were patrolled by the National Guard, so that the royal family were not allowed to forget for one waking moment of the day or night that they were the country’s prisoners.

But that almost unnatural calm of the King, allied with the stately courage of the Queen and the youthful innocence of their children, created an atmosphere of royalty even in this dark prison. Antoinette was able to ignore the presence of her guards; to Louis they were, as were all his subjects, his dear children, playing a game of which he did not altogether approve but which he accepted as a childish vagary; as for the children, Madame Royale had her mother’s dignity, and the Dauphin was soon on good terms with the soldiers.

Each day was very like another. Antoinette spent a great part of the morning with her children. She liked to be present while they had their lessons; again and again it was necessary to call the Dauphin’s attention to that which the Abbé Davout was trying to teach him. His thoughts strayed and were often with the soldiers who could always be seen from the windows.

Every day the family attended Mass; and they had their midday meal together, like any family of the bourgeoisie, while the children prattled and their parents smiled at each other over their artless talk. Antoinette had never felt that she belonged so intimately to her family as she did in those days at the Tuileries.

After the meal, the King would slump in his chair and doze, or go to his apartments to do so. Antoinette would retire to her apartments where she would talk with her friends. Fersen was a frequent visitor, but she did not see him alone. Their passionate love-making belonged to the Trianon, and each was aware of the longing in the other to return there. The Tuileries offered them no opportunities.

Fersen was continually anxious for Antoinette’s safety. He, even more than Antoinette, found it difficult to forget that terrible drive from Versailles on October 6th, and his active mind was concerning itself with one thing: escape.

Antoinette knew this; and in it was her comfort.

The family took their supper together; and with them would be Provence and Josèphe, Adelaide and Victoire (strangely subdued these days) bewildered, clinging together, wondering what was happening to their world.

The Queen often suggested a game of cards or billiards – anything to prevent those fearful silences, those sudden bursts of conversation which would often end in the hysterical tears of Adelaide and Victoire.

Then early to bed – the King to his apartments, the Queen to hers. They had not shared a bed since Fersen had become her lover.

Louis slept soundly, for no disaster could rob him of his sleep or his appetite; but in her bed Antoinette lay sleepless, listening to the tramp of the guards, afraid to sleep lest she dream of those hideous shouts, lest she see in her fantasy those leering faces close to hers; afraid to sleep lest they should come upon her while she was unaware, as they had at Versailles. Always waiting, listening, wondering what that night and the day which followed would hold.


* * *

The Parisians were ashamed of the march from Versailles, for it was soon realised that those screaming hordes did not represent the people of Paris. The poissardes and the women of the Market even went so far as to present a petition to the Tuileries in which they firmly stated that they had no part in the outrage, and that they considered justice should be done to those who were responsible for it.

It had become clear to many of those who sincerely wished for reforms that the revolution, which they had hoped to bring about by peaceful means, was in the hands of the rabble. Some of these, including Lally-Tollendal, left the country because they did not wish to be involved in shameful massacres.

La Fayette, suspecting the march to Versailles to have been organised by Orléans, declared that he was an ardent supporter of liberty and he believed that if Orléans were successful there would be no liberty in France. There was no point in replacing one absolute monarch by another.

He sought out Orléans and, in the blunt way of a soldier, told him of his suspicions.

‘I suspect,’ said La Fayette, ‘that you, Monseigneur, are at the head of a formidable party which plans to send the King away – perhaps worse than that – and proclaim yourself Regent. I am afraid, Monseigneur, that there will soon be on the scaffold the head of someone of your name.’

Orléans professed his utmost surprise. ‘I understand you not,’ he said.

‘You will now do your utmost to have me assassinated,’ retorted La Fayette. ‘If you attempt this, be sure you will follow me an hour later.’

‘I assure you that you wrong me. I swear this on my honour,’ said the Duke.

‘I must accept that word,’ said La Fayette coolly, ‘but I have the strongest proof of your misconduct. Your Highness must leave France or I shall bring you before a tribunal within twenty-four hours. The King has descended several steps from the throne, but I have placed myself on the last. He will descend no further, and to reach him – and the throne – you will have to pass over my body. I know you have cause for complaint against the Queen – so have I – but at such a time we must forget all grievances.’

‘What proof have you of my complicity in the events of October?’ demanded the Duke.

‘Ample proof. Aye, and I can get more. I know, Monseigneur, that you had a hand in organising that rabble which marched to Versailles – mostly men dressed as women, not good Parisians, but hirelings, foreigners and rough men of the South, your paid agitators. It has been suggested that you were with them to guide them to the Queen’s apartments.’

‘This is absurd.’

‘Then stand before the Tribunal and prove it.’

The Duke shrugged his shoulders. The events of those October days had failed; he saw that. The King was still the King; the Queen was still alive; they were prisoners in the Tuileries, it was true, but the Tuileries was now the Court; and many good citizens had become disgusted by the methods of the mob.

He said: ‘These are dangerous days. Any man may be accused of he knows not what. I will leave the country for a while if that is necessary.’

La Fayette then went to the King, who was very distressed to hear of the suspected perfidy of his cousin.

‘A member of my own family,’ he murmured. ‘Is it credible?’

‘It can be proved,’ said La Fayette, ‘that certain cries were heard among the October mob. Not only “Vive le bon Duc d’Orléans”, Sire, but “Vivre notre roi d’Orléans”. You are most unsafe while Orléans lives.’

‘He is my cousin,’ said Louis helplessly.

‘He would have seen your head on the lanterne, Sire.’

Louis shook his head. ‘Let him be sent to England. He is fond of the English, and they of him. He will then be out of our way. And let it be said that he goes on a mission for me. I would not wish it to be known that I suspect a member of our family – my own cousin – of such conduct.’

So with the exile of Orléans, and with him the writer Choderlos de Laclos whose writings had done so much to stir the people, there was quiet in the city – though a brooding quiet – pregnant with smouldering danger.

There remained one formidable leader of the Orléans group: Mirabeau.


* * *

The events of October had had their effect on Honoré Gabriel Riquetti, Comte de Mirabeau. He was an aristocrat by birth and it was because, in view of his past, he had been rejected by the nobility, that he had offered his services to the Third Estate. His great energy, which he liked to remind people was equal to that of ten men, and his powers as both speaker, writer and diplomat, had been at the service of Orléans. Now Orléans was exiled, and Mirabeau believed he saw a way of welding the King and the people together; and he determined to use all his vast energies to this purpose. Believing that he alone could save France, he wrote to the King offering his services.

‘I should,’ he wrote, ‘be what I have always been, the defenders of monarchical power regulated by the laws, and the champion of liberty as guaranteed by monarchical authority. My heart will follow the road which reason has pointed out to me.’

The King did not answer his letters. Antoinette had seen them and she remembered that Mirabeau had been one of those men who had helped to foster the revolution and bring to the royal family much humiliation and terror. She reminded the King of this and pointed out that such conduct, by a man of noble birth, was doubly treacherous.

Mirabeau waited for his replies. He was now obsessed by his plan to save France and was becoming more and more convinced that he was the only man who could do so. He thought of his past, of all the years of loose living which lay behind him. He remembered all the poisonous obscenities which he had written; he thought of the numerous mistresses who had loved him in spite of his somewhat terrifying appearance (his face was hideously marked by smallpox, and his thick hair stood out in an untidy thatch about it); he remembered his reckless extravagance and numerous bankruptcies; and desperately he wished to make his mark upon the world before he died. He also wished to satisfy his creditors. He was suffering from a life of excesses and in spite of that unflagging energy he knew he had not long to live. He was obsessed by his desire to set right what he had helped to start. He wanted to turn the bloody revolution into a peaceful one.

And it occurred to him that there was one person who was preventing this: the Queen.

For she was now the King’s chief adviser, and Mirabeau knew that the King with his high ideals was not the man to make the necessary decision.

Mirabeau thereupon began courting the Queen’s attention, and the letters he wrote to Louis were intended to flatter her.

‘The King has but one man to support him,’ he wrote. ‘That is his wife. The only safeguard for her lies in the reestablishment of royal authority. It pleases me to fancy that she would not care to go on living without her crown; and of this much I am certain, she will not be able to save her life if she does not save her crown. She must show moderation and must not believe she will be able, whether by the aid of chance or intrigue, to overcome an extraordinary crisis with the help of ordinary men and ordinary measures.’

Still his letters were ignored.

He knew this was due to the Queen. The winter passed; the spring came; the brooding quiet continued, but Antoinette – a prisoner in the Tuileries – did not believe that it had come to stay.


* * *

With the coming of the summer it was decided that the royal family must leave the Tuileries, for the hermit-like life they were leading was having its effect upon their health. The King had grown fatter and more unwieldy; he did not hunt now, and a daily game of billiards did not give him the exercise to which he was accustomed. The Queen was pale, and the children had suffered from the many colds they caught in the draughty lamp-lit corridors.

There was only a little protest when it became known that the family intended to go to Saint-Cloud for the summer. The Orléanists made an attempt to rouse the mob, but this failed and, when the carriages left the Tuileries for Saint-Cloud, the people gathered about them, shouting: ‘Bon voyage au bon Papa.’