A Book of Escapes and Hurried Journeys

I. THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES-2

A quarter of an hour later the berline arrived. The King, who was following the road with a map and a guide-book, asked the name of the place and was told Somme-Vesle. Remembering that there Choiseul was to have met them, doubt for the first time seems to have fallen upon the little party. That quarter of an hour, as it turned out, was to be the difference between success and failure.

III

It was now early evening, and with fresh horses the berline rolled through the pastures and lanes to where, with the setting sun upon them, rose the woody ridges of the Argonne . Just below the lift of the hills lay Ste. Menehould. At the hour of sunset its streets had the pleasant stir which evening brings to a country town. Men and women were gossiping and drinking outside their doors. There was a handful of French dragoons under Captain Dandoins in the place, sent by Bouillé, and at the door of the post-house stood one Jean Baptiste Drouet, who had once been a dragoon in the Condé regiment. He was a dark, loutish fellow, saturnine of face, still young, very strong, active and resolute. He was a fervent patriot, too, and that afternoon he had heard strange rumours coming from the west. As he saw the cabriolet enter with its mountain of bonnet boxes, and then the huge berline with its yellow-liveried guards, he realized that something out of the common was happening. The green blinds were up to let in the evening air, and the faces of both King and Queen were plain to the onlookers. The berline did not halt, but rumbled over the bridge of Aisne and up into the high woods. But Drouet had seen enough to make the thing clear to him. The King and Queen were in flight; they were going towards Metz !

The ex-dragoon was a man of strong resolution and quick action. The drums were beat; Dandoins and his troop were arrested and disarmed, and with another old dragoon of Condé, one Guillaume, an inn-keeper, Drouet set off hell-for-leather on the trail.

The great coach with its eleven horses and its yellow-liveried guards on the rumble, climbed slowly up to the summit of the Argonne ridge. There were about 400 feet to climb, and it was some four miles to the crest. After that came the little village of Islettes in a hollow, and then a stretch of four miles to the town of Clermont in the valley of the river Aire. There the royal road must turn at right angles down the Aire to Varennes, which lay nine miles off, a flat straight road in the valley bottom. Drouet and Guillaume had the last two horses left in Ste. Menehould, and the berline had an hour's start of them. They believed that the King was going to Metz , and that what was before them was a stern chase on the highroad.

The berline reached Clermont about twenty minutes to ten. At Clermont there were royal troops, and Drouet had no notion how to deal with them; but he hoped somehow to raise the people in the town on his side. The occupants of the berline had now lost all their high hopes of the morning. They realized that they were late and that somehow their plans were miscarrying, and they were in a fever to get past Varennes into the protection of Bouillé's army. It took a quarter of an hour to change horses at Clermont, and then about ten o'clock the Metz road was relinquished and the great vehicle lumbered off at its best pace down the Aire valley.

About the same moment Drouet and Guillaume came within a mile of Clermont. The night had grown very dark and cloudy, though there was somewhere a moon. They heard voices and discovered it was the postilions from Ste. Menehould turning homewards. These postilions had a story to tell. The berline was not on the Metz road. They had heard the orders given to turn northward to Varennes.

Drouet was a man of action, and in a moment his mind was made up. He must somehow get ahead of the royal carriage which was on the road in the valley below. The only chance was to cut off the corner by taking to the woody ridge of the Argonne , which stretched some 300 feet above the open plain. Now along that eastern scarp of the Argonne runs a green ride which had once been a Roman road. He and his companion galloped through the brushwood till they struck the ride.

It was, as Carlyle has called it, "a night of spurs." Three parties were straining every nerve to reach Varennes: the anxious King and Queen in the great berline, jolting along the highway; the Duke de Choiseul, who had taken a short cut from Somme-Vesle, avoiding Ste. Menehould, plunging with his hussars among the pathless woods; and Drouet and Guillaume making better speed along the green ride, while from the valley on their right the night wind brought them the far-off sound of the King's wheels. There seemed still a good chance of escape, for at Varennes was Bouillé's son with more hussars, waiting in that part of the village which lay east of the Aire bridge.

Seven miles after he left the highway Drouet came to an ancient stone set up in the forest which bears the name of the Dead Girl—a place only too famous in the Argonne fighting in the Great War. There he took the green ride to the right, and coming out of the woods saw the lights of Varennes a little before him. The town seemed strangely quiet. He and Guillaume had done eleven miles of rough going within an hour; now it was only eleven, and as they stopped to rest their panting beasts they listened for the sound of wheels. But there was no sound. Had the berline with its fateful load beaten them and crossed the bridge into the protection of Bouillé's men?

IV

Drouet rushed into the taverns to ask if any late revellers had seen a great coach go through. The revellers shook their heads. No coach that night had passed through Varennes. Suddenly came a cry, and he looked behind him up the long hill of the Clermont road. There, on the top, were the headlights of the coach. It halted, for it was expecting Bouillé's escort. The Clermont postilions were giving trouble; they declared that they were not bound to go down the hill, for the horses were needed early next morning to carry in the hay. At last the coach started, and the creak of its brakes could be heard on the hill. Drouet ran into the inn called "The Golden Arm," crying on every man who was for France to come out and stop the berline, since inside it was the King.

There was only one thing for him to do, to hold the bridge over the Aire. Now, at the bridgehead stood a great furniture van without horses, waiting to start for somewhere in the morning. Drouet and his handful of assistants pulled it across the bridge and blocked the approach. Meantime one Sausse, a tallow chandler and the procurator of the town, had appeared on the scene, and seen to the rousing of every household on the west side of the river.

Half-way down the hill to the bridge the road goes through an archway under an old church. At that archway the only two men of the company who had arms took up position, and when the berline arrived challenged it and brought it to a stand. Passports were demanded, and as the Baroness de Korff fumbled for them the Queen looked out of the window. She begged the gentlemen, whoever they might be, to get the business over quickly, as "she was desirous of reaching the end of her journey as soon as might be." It was an ill-omened phrase which was long remembered.

Meantime the two armed men had increased their numbers, and some of Bouillé's German hussars joined the crowd, more or less drunk. The cabriolet had also been stopped and the maids in it hustled into the inn. But it seemed that the passports were in order, and the Varennes officials were prepared to let the coach continue on its way. It was the crisis of the French monarchy. Escape seemed once more certain, when Drouet intervened. He knew that Bouillé's son was waiting beyond the river, and that Bouillé himself would arrive soon after dawn with ample forces. What he sought to gain was time; on no account must the King cross the Aire till morning.

The embarrassed officials yielded to his threats and fury. "If there is any doubt," said the procurator, "it will do no harm to wait for daylight. It is a dark night and the beasts are tired." He would endorse the passports in the morning. He assisted the King and the Queen to alight, and escorted them to his own house. Hope was not yet wholly gone, for there were still Choiseul and his hussars blundering through the Argonne woods. Meantime the fierce Drouet had had the tocsin sounded and every soul in Varennes was in the streets, waiting on some happening, they knew not what.

Just about dawn Choiseul arrived with his German troopers. He saw what was astir, and had he had Frenchmen in his command all might have been saved. He urged them to rescue the King, and ordered them to charge to clear the streets, which they did, and formed up outside M. Sausse's house, in which Marie Antoinette and her two children were lying huddled on truckle beds. Outside was the perpetual noise of drums and men; every one who could find any kind of weapon trooped up to it and thronged the square. Meantime, young Bouillé across the river had heard the tocsin, and, being uncertain what to do, had returned to his father.

When the morning light broadened the whole neighbourhood was gathered outside the procurator's house. M. Sausse, a devotee of official decorum, felt compelled to endorse the passports and let the royal family continue their journey. But Drouet had other views, and these views were shared by the crowds in the streets. Choiseul , had his mercenaries been of any value, had still the game in his hands. For the second time he ordered them to charge. But the German hussars, comprehending nothing except that there was a large number of formidable citizens opposed to them, sat still on their horses. The King in his green coat appeared at the window of his lodging and was greeted with cheers and with something else which meant the ruin of his hopes, for the mob of ten thousand with one voice shouted "Back to Paris !"

About six o'clock there arrived at Varennes two men from the Council in Paris, Bayon and Romeuf. They had ridden madly all day and night, and had brought a demand from the Council for their Majesties' immediate return. The Queen was furious, and flung the message on the ground. But the King had made up his mind. He had had enough of this undignified secrecy and uncomfortable jolting. He would go back to Paris to the people with whom he was so popular.

Indeed, he had no other choice. The advance guards of Bouillé's horse were even then appearing on the heights behind the Aire, but there were 10,000 men in Varennes, and nothing but artillery could have cleared the place. Bouillé, even had he been in time, could have done nothing. When, about seven o'clock, the royalist general himself looked down on the bridge, he saw a cloud of dust on the Clermont road which told him that the berline had begun its return journey, accompanied by thousands of marching citizens. The adventure was over. What had seemed so certain had shipwrecked on a multitude of blunders and the strange perversities of fortune. The King and Queen were returning to a prison from which there was to be no outlet but death.

V

What of the young Swede, Count Axel Fersen, whom we last saw at Bondy receiving from Marie Antoinette the broad gold ring? The lovers of queens have for the most part been tragically fated, and his lot was no exception to the rule. It is hard for us to-day to judge of the charm of Marie Antoinette; from her portraits her figure and features seem too heavy, though her hair and colouring were beautiful; but she seems to have had a share of that inexplicable compelling power which certain women have possessed—Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, Mary of Scots, Elizabeth of Bohemia—which makes men willing to ride on their behalf over the edge of the world. Fersen, who had worshipped her at first sight when a boy in his teens, was to spend the nineteen remaining years of his life a slave of tragic and tender memories. After her death he became a "fey" man, silent, abstracted, grave beyond other men, and utterly contemptuous of danger, one like Sir Palamede—

"Who, riding ever through a lonely world,

Whene'er on adverse shield or helm he came

Against the danger desperately hurled,

Crying her name."

He rose to be a famous soldier and marshal of the Swedish armies, and at the age of fifty-five was confronted with a riot in Stockholm . Inside the church of Riddenholm were the nobles of Sweden, barricaded and safe; outside on the steps he stood alone, having been dragged from his carriage, his sword in his right hand and on his left the ring of the Queen of France, which the people of the North believed to be a thing of witchcraft.

For a little he held the steps, for no man dared come within the sweep of his terrible sword or the glow of his more terrible ring. At last some one thought of stones. They were flung from a distance, and presently he was maimed and crushed till he died. Then, and not till then, the mob came near his body, shielding their eyes from the gleam of the ring. One man, a fisherman, Zaffel by name, took his axe and hacked the finger off while the crowd cheered. Averting his head he plucked at the thing, and, running to the river bank, flung it far into the stream.

The rest of the story of the ring is as wild a legend as ever came out of the North. It is said that Zaffel, going fishing next morning after the fury of the riots was over, came into a lonely reach of water and found his boat standing still. He looked up at the masthead, and there, clasping it, saw a hand lacking one finger. The mutilated hand forced the boat forward against tide and wind, and when he tried the tiller he found that the tiller had no effect upon the course. All day he sat in the boat shivering with terror, till in the cold twilight he saw in front of him a white rock in the stream, and upon a ledge of it Fersen's ring. He took it and glanced up at the masthead. The hand had now recovered its lost finger and had disappeared, and his boat was free once more to obey his direction.

In the early dawn of the next day he was back at Stockholm , babbling nonsense and singing wild songs, beyond doubt a madman. At that moment in the Riddenholm church the nobles, who had left Fersen to die, were gathered round his coffin in the act of burial. Suddenly something glimmered in the dark folds of the pall, and they saw with terror that it was the Queen's ring. When the coffin was lowered into the grave the gravediggers dared not fling earth upon the jewel. They feared that the dead man's spirit would haunt them, so they gave the ring to Fersen's family, with whom it remains to this day.

Marie Antoinette.