PART TWO

THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES

Upon the evening of Monday, the twentieth of June, 1791, a little before nine o’clock, Axel de Fersen was leaning, with his chin in his hands, his elbows upon the parapet, looking over the bridge called the Pont Royal, which leads from the Tuileries to the southern bank of the Seine. He watched the dying light upon the river below, and waited with desperate impatience in his heart, his body lounging in affected indolence.

The sky above was cloudy. The day had been hot, but its last hours not sunlit. A freshness was now coming up from the Seine over the town, and the noises of life and movement that rise with the closing of the working hours in the capital filled the streets. He was dressed in the rough habit of a cabman, and the poor coach of which he had the driving stood in rank with others a little way from the gate of the palace.

As he so gazed, two men, one with a sunken, long-jawed face and small, peering eyes, the other frail, slight, and younger, both dressed in a faded yellow livery as of servants to some rich man of a time before the Revolution had abolished liveries, came up to him. He knew already who they were. They were Moustier and Valory, two gentlemen of the king’s disbanded guard who, in the disguise of servants, had volunteered to serve Louis in his flight. Fersen gave them the instructions they awaited. One was to find and conduct the great coach Fersen had had built and to keep it waiting for him at the gates of the city; the other was to act as outrider and to go before to prepare the relays. A third, Malden, remained hidden in the apartments of the king.

Night fell, an hour passed, and two women in the conduct of a man who hurried them across the bridge were put into a chaise that there awaited them and drove off. Fersen knew that mission also. These were the two waiting-women of the queen, going on ahead through the night to the second posting-station at Claye upon the eastern road. A little while later--it was eleven o’clock, or a little past--a woman came to him leading two children, two girls, it seemed, one old enough

[Illustration: “VIVE LE ROI! VIVE LA NATION!”

A Cartoon of 1789

_To face p. 55_ ]

to walk alone, the other whom she held by the hand. It was Mme. de Tourzel, the governess of the royal children. The elder girl was the princess Royal. The young child, disguised as her sister, was the Dauphin, the little heir to the throne. Many were going in and out of the palace at that moment. This small group in sombre clothing attracted no one’s eye in the half-light. The children were put into the cab, the woman followed, and Fersen, with the most cabman-like way in the world, climbed slowly up to his box and drove at a very quiet pace westward along the quay that flanks the Tuileries gardens. He came to the great open place which to-day is called the Place de la Concorde, where the half-finished bridge had only just lost its last workman with the end of the day; he turned to the right across its paving and up the unfinished Rue Royale until he came to the narrow Rue St. Honoré, where again he turned his shabby team to the right and drove as leisurely eastward.

There is a place, now rebuilt out of all recognition, the ways broadened, all the houses modern, where a street still called by the name of “Ladder Street” (the Rue de l’Echelle) comes into the Rue St. Honoré. It is a very short street leading toward the palace. Between the Tuileries and those few yards of way there stood in those days a number of great houses, the homes of certain nobles who had been about the court, and in the midst of their confused carved fronts was an archway that led to the royal stables, and by a narrow lane to the courtyard of the palace itself.

In that Street of the Ladder Fersen halted, drawing his cab up toward the curb. The long detour over which he had purposely lingered had taken him nearly three-quarters of an hour; it was near twelve. He got down from the box, went to the carriage window, and said a word or two, bidding the woman and the two children wait in patience. Then he paced up and down the rough paving as midnight deepened, sauntering in the fashion of cabmen that await a fare.

Such light as there was between the high houses came from dim oil lamps slung from wall to wall and far apart. There was light also in the guardroom at the corner of the archway, and there a militiaman stood sentry with fixed bayonet, for every issue from the palace was thus guarded. The street was full of people coming and going from that little town the Tuileries, and as the hour wore on, the great equipages of those who attended court passed in to take their masters up at the royal porch and passed out again on their way homeward.

Fersen knew that the last ceremonies would not be over until very late, but that did not relieve his increasing anxiety. The darkness seemed to grow more profound as he waited. He watched with as little show as might be the throngs that passed back and forth through the archway. He saw no figure of those he was awaiting until, when it was quite dark--for though there was a moon, the curtain of clouds grew thick--he saw, or thought he saw, seated upon a stone bench against one of the great houses, a woman whose attitude even in that gloom he thought he recognised. With the same leisurely pace of a man free from employment he sauntered past, noted the gray dress and broad, gray veiled hat under the dim light of the distant lamps, and the veil about the face, and coming closer still, knew that it was Madame Elizabeth, the king’s sister. He spoke in a whisper, without turning to her or stopping as he went slowly by. He made an imperceptible movement of the head toward the cab, saying, “They wait for you.” She did not move, and he feared for a moment that she might not have understood what he had said nor recognized him, for he dared not linger. He paced back again toward his charge and again whispered the words as he passed, still looking down at the ground; and this time the woman rose, went to the cab, and entered it.

The lights behind the shutters of the great houses had gone out, the distant noises in the palace hard by had ceased, the last of the equipages were rumbling through the archway, and still there was no sign of new-comers for him. It was long past midnight, nearly one o’clock. Another of the cabmen in the rank spoke to him. He answered as best he could with the manner, accent, and slang of the trade. He offered this unwelcome friend a pinch of snuff from a rough box; then he went back as though to look to his horses, felt their legs, stood about them a little, and patted them.

There was still, but very rarely, a belated servant or so passing out from under the arch, and at last, when his fever of expectation was at the height, he distinguished two such, a man and a woman, coming toward him unhurriedly. As they came nearer, and the feeble glimmer of the lamps showed

[Illustration: THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY PETRIFIED. THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY REVIVIFIED

Caricatures by Gillray

_To face p. 58_ ]

them less confusedly, he marked the lumbering walk of the man. He wore a round soft hat, and a big overcoat against the freshness of the night air, and had the air of a familiar upper servant. At his side, with an upright gait and a certain poise of the head that Fersen knew, alas! for him, better than anything else on earth, went the woman. Fersen went forward, mastering his respect, and led them to the carriage; and then, without delay, but still careful to give no cause for remark by his haste, he drove northward over the noisy granite sets of the streets.

By what tortuous ways Fersen drove the king and his family one may hardly guess. They were puzzled to find him following many street turnings other than those that would lead them to the nearest gate of the city on the north and so to the great frontier road. But Fersen did what he did knowingly. It was his business in this turn of the night to make sure that the last point of his plan had been obeyed and that the great travelling-carriage had gone on before and was waiting for them outside the limits of the city. He called at the stables and found one trusted servant of his to assure him that the thing had been sent and that all was ready. Then only did he turn toward the east and the north and make for the barrier at the end of the Rue St. Martin, which was then the gate of Paris and the beginning of straggling houses and the open country.

They did not reach that barrier till two o’clock. Already they breathed some faint air of morning.

No one challenged them. It was one cab like another, driving to the suburbs with some belated middle-class party that had dined in Paris that night. There were lights and music still in the house of the gate-keeper at the barrier, for there had been a wedding in his family that day, and they were feasting. After the glare of that light, Fersen looked in vain through the night for the Berline. Then, with some few minutes so lost, he saw the black hump at last, drawn up well to the right and close to the bordering ditch. The guardsman, Moustier, and Balthazar, his own coachman, were sitting their horses immovable. They had waited thus immovable for some hours. Very rapidly the travellers passed from the cab to the coach, and leaned back in the comfortable white velvet cushions of its upholstering. Fersen himself, sending back the cab I know not how, took his place upon the broad box of the Berline, and the four horses felt the traces and started. The journey had begun.

Toward the north-east, to which the great road ran, there was already a hint of dawn, and great Paris just behind would not sleep long into the light. Therefore the horses, Fersen’s own, with only a short stage before them, were urged to a vigorous pace through the short, lonely suburb and still more lonely fields beyond, and Fersen’s coachman, who rode as postillion upon the leader, spared them little.

It was near three o’clock when they reached the first posting-house at Bondy, three miles from the boundary of the city, and just outside the wall and railings of the park in that place. The guardsman Valory, who was outrider, had been there for an hour. The six horses for the carriage were awaiting it, as also the two horses which he and the third guardsman, Malden were to ride, to the next stage. As they unharnessed Fersen’s steaming beasts, Fersen himself, as coachman coming down from the box, waited a moment until the fresh team was in and the postillions mounted. Then he looked in at the window of the coach, and taking off his hat to the queen, he said, “Good-bye, Madame de Korff,” and under the growing light would no longer linger. He was off at once by the by-lane to the Brussels road beyond. He and those whom he had so worked to save were to meet at Montmédy.

The postillions urged on their mounts, the short whips cracked, and they were gone. Fersen saw the great mass go swaying up the road, dark against the growing dawn, and went off lonely upon his separate flight to the north.

As for the travellers, touched by that effect of morning which all feel, by the unnatural exhilaration of those strained hours of no sleep, and of a release apparently begun, they broke into making plans for their disguise, reassuring themselves with every mile that passed and feeling the first sense of relief that they had known for two tortured years. The sleepy little boy who was their fortune and the heir was set more comfortably back against the white cushions in his girl’s clothes that he might rest. The five others, wakeful and eager, pretended to learn their rôles. Mme. de Tourzel was to be the mistress; the queen, the governess Rochet; the Princess Elizabeth, a

[Illustration: MADAME ELISABETH

From a photograph by Braun, Clément & Co., New York, of a painting by Mme. Vigée Lebrun, in the possession of Mme. la Marquise du Blaisdel

_To face p. 63_ ]

companion; and the king a steward under the name of Durand. There was almost a spirit of comedy in the coach. The king talked of his new liberty and of riding, perhaps of the autumn hunting that he loved; and they conversed also of the nature of their journey, where--and upon this perhaps they were more guarded--there might be peril, especially as they passed through the one considerable town of Châlons; but also of how, not two hours beyond that place, at Somme-Vesle, a posting-house in the midst of Champagne, they would meet the first troop of their chain of mounted escorts thrust out from the army, and how with these they would henceforward be safe.

They were late. They were already a full hour behind that time-table which men who understood the essentials of order as the king had never understood them had laid down for their guidance. But the pace was brisk, the road was passing swiftly by, and the accident of such trifling unpunctuality so early in their adventure did not oppress them. There was no one with them accustomed to command or to understand the all-importance of exactitude in any military affair.

That little company, if we think of it, was an isolated thing and most imperfect for such a task: three women bred to a court and to the habits of leisure or of successive pleasures; two children; the unwilled, heavy king and husband, who never did or could decide, and whose judgment was slow to the point of disease. Beyond these were only the three guardsmen, almost servants.

At Claye, the next relay, they found the queen’s two waiting-women, who, abandoned for hours, had awaited them in their chaise, and were bewildered, wondering if they were lost. From Claye onward, the sun having now risen, though hidden behind the level roof of clouds and the day fully begun, they passed through fields without villages, with scarcely a house, where the peasants in the eager work of the high summer were already abroad. The fourfold rank of great trees which dignified the road went by in monotonous procession. The quick change of horses at Meaux raised their hopes still higher, and as they opened their picnic-bags, bringing out bread and meat and wine to break their fast, they spoke in jests, increasingly secure. To Malden riding by the carriage door, the queen beckoned, and offered wine and food, and she told him familiarly of how the king had laughed roundly, saying that Lafayette, the master of the militia in Paris, and officially the guardian of the court, would be woundily puzzled that day. So much for that fresh early morning when all was well.

The wide royal road, full of the Roman inheritance, breasts beyond Meaux a sharp, high, wooded hill, and the drag up that hill was long and slow. Upon its farther side, on to the Marne again, goes a sharp pitch, down which the shrieking brakes created an equal delay. It was fully eight o’clock when they had come along the riverside to the lovely valley of the Sellot, winding between its wooded guardian hills to join the greater river.

There two roads part, each leading equally to Châlons and to the east; the main one still follows the Marne, but the second, somewhat shorter, cuts across the plateau to the south of the river, which few, even in the travelling of to-day, know, and which those who had planned the flight had chosen on account of its few towns and villages and less frequented inns. Yet it was precisely in this chosen stretch of thirty miles, by this less-frequented of the two roads to Châlons, that their evil was to come upon them.

The hour’s delay which one accident and another--the lateness of the moment in which the last of the court had left the palace, the slight time lost in peering for the Berline through the darkness at the gate, the long drag up and down the forest of Meaux--had burdened them with, was now perhaps more nearly grown to an hour and a half; but not one of that little company could guess how much this meant, or how such errors breed of themselves and add, how one strained and anxious man, watching during that Tuesday at the head of a little troop of horse in the lonely plains beyond Châlons, would be broken, and with him all their fortunes, by such incapacity. For save where it walked the hills, as heavy coaches must, the Berline went bravely enough, covering its eight miles an hour or more; and the sense of speed made up with them for the realities of time and of co-ordinated distance wherein they were incompetent indeed.

Nor was that error, that growing error in exactitude, all that they had to face.

[Illustration: THE END OF THE FLIGHT OF THE ROYAL FAMILY AT VARENNES

_To face p. 66_ ]

THE PURSUIT

It was perhaps at eight o’clock in Paris that morning, at the most half an hour later, that the whole populace became alive to what had happened. The drums were beating, rallying the militia, the crowd was filling the square in front of the palace. At that moment, when strong action in pursuit of the fugitives could not be long delayed, they were only just upon this upland road leaving the Marne; they had a start of, say, forty-five miles, fifty at the most, before the first rider could surely mount and be galloping in pursuit. The carriage rolled on fairly with Valory, its outrider, on before, Malden trotting at the door, and the chaise with the queen’s two waiting-women swaying in a cloud of dust behind. It rolled on eastward through that high, little-known land of wide, hedgeless fields; it was about ten o’clock when it came down into a sort of shallow cup lower than the plain, wherein lies that little place called “Old Houses”--Viels-Maisons. Very few men, I think, of those who travel or speak of their travels know the tiny group of roofs. It has not thirty families round its church. It meant to the travellers nothing but an insignificant posting-house and a relay. But it was there that their fate first touched them, for there a chance postillion, one called Picard, glanced at their faces, and knew them for the king and queen.

Like so many upon that full and dreadful day, he yielded entirely to caution. The king was still the king. There was divided authority in France; and whether reward or punishment would follow any act no man could tell on such a day as this until it was known which of the two combatants, the crown or the parliament, would rule at last. So Picard said nothing; but he had seen. Others also were to prove discreet, but a little less discreet than he.

The coach went on through the lonely land, past one small town, Montmirail, which later Napoleon’s resistance was to render famous, and on again into the empty fields, still eastward. It grew to be noon, hot and almost stormy under the lowering sky. Louis the King, with his road-book spread upon his knee, followed with curiously detached interest the correspondence of the map with the dull landscape outside. As the carriage stopped at one posting-house after another, and as he would plunge his hand into his leather money-bag to give his guardsman the wages of the postillions, he was not content thus to show his face at the window, he would even stretch his legs a bit and get down from the carriage to pace to and fro while each fresh team was harnessing.

“We are safe now,” he said; and again, “There is no fear of our being recognized now.” All the air of that little company had come to be one of security, though one man had already marked them down, and already the galloping out in pursuit from the gates of Paris had begun.

The governess and the royal children caught that air of security, and where a long hill put the horses at a walk, they got out and climbed it on foot. There was only one small incident of which to this day we cannot tell whether it was of any moment or no. The little princess had noted it and had been disturbed. It was the presence of a traveller who for a time rode alone upon his horse behind them, walking when they walked, trotting when they trotted. It may have been no more than a coincidence that his way lay with theirs. Long before Châlons he had turned off by a by-road and disappeared.

There is, making a sort of western wall for the Champagne country, a very sharp and even range of hills running north and south. These are the escarpment of that plateau of which I have just spoken, and over which for many hours the coach had been travelling on. These hills end abruptly to the south, but just beyond the precipitous slope in which they terminate there stands across a narrow, clean-cut valley one isolated height called the Mont Aimé; so that the gap is a sort of gate into the flat country below, which stretches eastward in a wide, rolling, chalky plain, the lower Champagne, of which Châlons is the capital and centre. Beyond that plain, eastward and very far away, another low, level line of hills, the Forest of the Argonne, marks the very distant horizon.

Through this gate, which is a landmark for miles throughout the plain, passes the road; and half an hour beyond, or a little more, where the road crosses the small water of the Soude, three or four houses round one posting-house, by name Chaintrix, break the monotony of the fields. The travellers reached it just in the sultriest part of the day. They had not greatly added to their error in time; they were not much, if at all, behind the hour and a half of debt against fate which they had already suffered to accumulate, when fate

[Illustration: THE ROYAL FAMILY AT VARENNES, JUNE 22, 1791

_To face p. 71_ ]

touched them again. This time it was with a stronger gesture than when, four hours before, the postboy at Viels-Maisons had looked askance and known them for what they were.

Here lived one Lagny with certain married and unmarried daughters, and with him, by just one coincidence, his son-in-law from miles away, Vallet by name, who for that one day was there. That son-in-law had been to Paris the year before for the Revolutionary feast upon the Champ-de-Mars. He had there stared at the king, and when the Berline stopped at his father-in-law’s door, and while yet the relay was waiting to be harnessed, he recognized his sovereign. Now it happened--so the doom of the king willed it--that all the small household, father and daughter and son-in-law, were Royalists of the old kind. They made obeisance openly; the king and the queen accepted that homage with delight, and at parting gave them gifts which still remain in testimony to the truth of this tale. Vallet insisted upon driving them himself,--with what consequences we shall see,--and what was more, this spontaneous little scene of enthusiasm added by some few minutes again--perhaps a quarter, perhaps half an hour--to the delay. The royal children had gone in to rest a little from the heat and from their fatigue. When they came out and the coach started, the postmaster and his daughters openly acknowledged their Royal guests before the servants of the farm and the postboys around.

Vallet himself rode upon the leaders--they whipped off before three o’clock--proud to be driving his king and filled with zeal. But his zeal was indiscreet. Twice he let the horses fall. Once his off wheel caught the parapet of a bridge. At least twice the traces broke, and time, now so heavily against them, turned still more heavily against them in the necessity of finding ropes and of mending. There must have been one more hour lost somewhere in that stage of the road.

When, well after four o’clock, the fugitives clattered into Châlons, the whole matter was public knowledge. Whether Vallet had spoken, or whether the news shouted across the fields had been carried by some galloper, or in whatever other way it spread, many knew it while the two carriages were halted for the next relay in the town. The little knot that gathered round the carriage knew what they were gazing at; the bolder among them murmured thanks that the king had escaped his enemies. The postmaster of Châlons knew it, the mayor knew it, and many others whose names have not been preserved, but whose words and attitudes have. None would take upon himself any responsibility in the great quarrel, and only one obscure threat reached their ears. An unknown man did say in a low voice one thing which has been recorded: at least we have it at second hand, but at good second hand, that the travellers heard during a halt a passer-by cry to them that their plans had miscarried and that sooner or later they would be held.

But this general recognition at Châlons disturbed them not at all. They were now not only secure in mind, as they had been for many hours, but also within touch of certain and physical security. For at the very next relay, not two hours along the road, was not the first of those armed posts of escort waiting for them, to surround them? To form a rear-guard, which should forbid all pursuit? To roll up further posts as the carriage still went eastward? And to form at last a whole body of cavalry, leading them on to the main army beyond Varennes? At that town, not fifty miles on, was the limit beyond which lay stationed in great numbers the army of Bouillé, the General privy to the plot and ready to do all things for the king.

Here, if we are to seize the last act of this disaster, we must have some picture of the scene in which it was played.

The lower Champagne, “The Champagne of the Dust,” as the peasants call it, heaves in wide, low billows that barely disturb the vast sameness of its flat until the Argonne, its limit and its wall, is reached to the east. With the Argonne are great trees again, and lively waters, and the recovery of rich land.

That country-side of the “Champagne Pouilleuse” is strange; it has remained for centuries thus empty to the sky, land often too poor for the plough, everywhere hungry and half deserted. The sluggish streams that make their way slowly through its shallow depressions are milk-white with the worthless chalky soil, and though now too regular plantations of stunted pines diversify it, planted in the hope of reclamation, it is of its nature a country without trees, as almost without men. Small, scattered villages hold its few people, and again and again one comes to patches as great as a rich

[Illustration: DROUET, THE POSTMASTER AT VARENNES

_To face p. 74_ ]

man’s estate that are left untilled and have lost almost all feature save the records of past wars. For here has been a great battle-field for ages. Across its flat one may still trace the lines of the Roman military roads. Here the French have made their chief modern ranges for the training of their gunners. Here Attila was broken in his great defeat, and you may see his enormous oval camp still standing, so large that it looks like the ruin of a town in the midst of the plain. Here also in the very next year that followed the flight of the king were to meet for the first time the armies of the Revolution and of Europe, and from these poor fields were to retreat the forces of the invasion, which did not return until, after twenty-two years, the republic and Napoleon had transformed the world. Here, yesterday, the fate of the world was decided once again in the Battle of the Marne.

Right across the sweep drives the great road from Châlons, twenty-five miles, till it strikes Sainte-Menehould, a country town at the foot of the Argonne. Only two relays break this long day’s stretch, Somme-Vesle and Orbeval, each an isolated farm and standing in one of those slightly depressed muddy-watered dips to which the road falls, and from which it as slightly rises again in its eastward progress across the plain. And there, at Somme-Vesle, at the Châlons end of the stretch, barely ten miles away, should be the first cavalry awaiting them, Choiseul’s troop.

It was in the hours between half-past four and six that the Berline was passing through this stage. That hour and a half of debt to fate which the loyalty of Lagny at Chaintrix had increased perhaps to two, the avoidable accidents under Vallet’s posting had stretched to nearly three.

Young Choiseul, the duke, had come in to Somme-Vesle. He had his orders to expect somewhat after noon at the earliest, at the latest by three, the carriage which held his master and the queen. His exact time-table said one, and at one that carriage had not yet reached Chaintrix! The officer was mounted, and his troop of forty also--forty German mercenaries esteemed more trustworthy in such a task than any troops of the nation. From one till two they still sat their horses, waiting in the road before the posting-house, with the width of the Champagne all about: a strange sight to see, so considerable an escort thus gathered, waiting for they would not say what! But here again, so oddly fast did the news travel, one man knew. As the afternoon wore on, and men sent riding up to the crest of the rise could see nothing coming down the road, the postmaster, as though to make conversation, strolled up to one man in subordinate command and said, “It seems that the king is to pass this way?” He was answered neither yes nor no.

Peasants came in from the fields; a little knot of men gathered; rumours went about. In those days all the French had evil words for the foreign mercenaries in the army. Some of the more ignorant of the field-workers began whispering that they were a press-gang, that they had come to seize men for the service. The better instructed were far more suspicious of something far more probable. Three o’clock passed, and there began to be some pressure upon the mounted men. A few were hustled; the gathering of peasants grew. Beyond all essentials was it essential, thus far from any support, to avoid a rumour of the truth, or at least the spreading of it; and for Choiseul to prevent any conflict between his little line of Germans and the gathering peasantry about. And in one of those agonies that soldiers always feel, whether the command be great or small, when synchrony fails and when they are waiting hopelessly for something that never comes, torn as soldiers always are in such delays between two necessities, Choiseul as the afternoon still drew on and the road for miles still showed quite empty, decided for the more immediate duty. A little longer, and his troop would have suffered assault, and the king, if after such inexplicable delay he did come at all, would come to find a country-side beginning to rise and his chances ruined.

But was the king coming? How often had not Choiseul been told of the perils, of the necessities, of the last moment of the repeated postponements! How well did he not know himself the chances of a postponement, he who had left Paris as a forerunner just before, and who had a good eye for the faults of the court! Hour after hour had passed; the king could not be coming, and to linger longer with his little German troop was in any case to ensure failure. He would ride away with his men across Argonne and join the main body at Varennes. He would not further rouse the growing talk of the fields by swelling the contingents to the east with his own, and by showing more soldiers than

[Illustration: THE RETURN TO PARIS

_To face p. 78_ ]

need be along the road. He would cut across the plain and through the woods. He rode away, and his men after him.

As the horses drawing the Berline topped the slight rise which hides from that approach the posting-house of Somme-Vesle, and as the flat dip, with the steading and the long wall of the courtyard, appeared before the travellers, the king from the window, the guardsmen riding at the side, saw in one moment a sudden nothingness, which struck them as though the whole of their chances had turned. Lounging before the gate of the stables were the few hostlers and servants of the place. Of the soldiers in their blue and white, and of their mounts, not a sign. It was inexplicable, but it spoke loudly. And the emptiness of Champagne became in that unexpected shock far emptier than before. The travellers did not speak to one another; they did not even press the relay. For the first time that day a sense of dread was growing in them. They went on under the evening.

For it was now already evening. The reddening sun broke for a moment through a rift in the western clouds; it shone upon tumbled, white fields, bare or with a meagre harvest, and, upon its ridge to the left, on the mill which was to be lifted into such fame fourteen months later under the name of Valmy: they were crossing that battle-field.

One more halt, one more relay under the failing light, and the hoofs of the horses rang over the paving of Sainte-Menehould with the high woods of Argonne right before them. And as they came through the evening street, with all the people out to enjoy the new coolness of the air, that town more than any other they had yet passed knew thoroughly what was toward.

Gossip of it had been passing in the inns for hours. The post of hussars there waiting had angered men, but had been also too well explained, and their captain, as the coach waited for its horses, forgot the official secret and saluted when those within beckoned him to hear the news. Drouet, the son of the postmaster, himself now acting as postmaster of the place, sullenly ordered the harnessing, glancing ill-naturedly at the huge, yellow thing, with its heaped luggage, and tarpaulin atop, and telling his men in that hill country to spare their cattle. It was perhaps a close thing whether, amid the growing suspicion and anger of the place, one and then another and then a third passing the news, and all aflame against the foreign mercenaries set there for a guard, the coach would be allowed to start at all.

But the same fear and doubt of consequences held them here at Sainte-Menehould as it had held the much smaller number who had gradually heard the truth far up the road hours before. And the travellers began their climb unmolested under the falling night up into Argonne. One more relay in the darkness at Clermont, where the road to Montmédy branched off from that to Metz, and they were upon the last stage to Varennes and to safety.

But when they were gone, when they had thus been hardly allowed to go, the captain of the little troop of cavalry, sounding the boot and saddle, lit the flame. The militia were summoned by drummers throughout the streets, the German soldiers, mutinous with hunger after their long wait and supported in their mutiny by the town folk, failed to obey. The town council met, arrested, and examined the captain in command, and after one hour of increasing vehemence this decision was taken, which changed the story of France and of the world, “That the fugitives should be followed and detained.” And the two men chosen for this task of life or death--for should they fail, it was certainly death upon the return of the armies--were Drouet, the young postmaster, and Guillaume, both ex-cavalrymen and both men knowing, as they had need to know, the darkness of Argonne that night. Both were men of great courage.

The odds against them were heavy. Of eighteen miles their quarry had a start of seven. Further, they thought, as did all to whom the plan had not been given, that the king’s flight would be by the main Metz road. They knew nothing of his goal at Montmédy and of the turn-off toward Varennes which he would take at Clermont. They did not know that Varennes meant for him safety and for themselves immediate defeat.

They rode furiously up the road, and as they neared Clermont, nine miles on, having found in all those nine miles no sign of lights before them, in the pass where the great woods come close on each side and through which the road, the railway, and the stream run side by side to-day, Drouet heard voices in the darkness. He knew them for his own servants.

[Illustration: THE ARRIVAL OF THE ROYAL FAMILY IN PARIS, JUNE 25, 1791

_To face p. 82_ ]

He learned in one breathless question and answer that the coach had turned off the Metz road after the relay down toward the north and Varennes. He had to decide in the thick darkness, and at once, between following by the highway and cutting through the woods. He had the soldier in him, and he decided. He would take the chance of the woods, though he had eleven miles to go, and only an hour to ride it in. If he did merit anything of fate, he would come in ahead of his prey; and if he failed, he failed.

He took the steep bank up into the trees with Guillaume, and though the two men knew the woods well, it was miraculous that they could thus gallop through a clouded night, through paths which I, who have followed them in full day, found tortuous and confused and often overgrown. He came down with his companion into Varennes town by the lane that leads from the forest above. It was asleep save for one light where men were sitting drinking. The hour was just on eleven. They could not tell whether they had won or lost in that great race. But Drouet, full of immediate decision, roused here a house and there another, blocked the bridge that led eastward to the farther part of the town and out toward the army by dragging across it an empty wagon that lay by, and then strode up the main street of the place to find whether he had lost or won.

He came upon the Berline suddenly under an arch that spanned the way from house to house, the big thing almost filling the arch, and its two round lamps, with their reflectors, shining like great eyes. He heard some altercation, and shrill above the other voices one woman’s urging the postillions. They would consent to go only a few yards farther, to cross the river. And there was Bouillé’s son and his men waiting for them. Drouet took the leader’s reins and threw him back on his haunches. He had won the race.

What followed was the anticlimax and the despair: the mayor, roused and hesitating; the hussars drifting in--Choiseul and the rest--now powerless before an immense armed mob that had gathered under the new day; the gallopers arrived at last from Paris; the slow, dreadful return under the heat; and the restoration of the crown to the palace, which was henceforeward its prison.