‘You cannot imagine the intrigues that are being woven all around us, and every day I make strange discoveries in my own house.’
Marie-Antoinette, letter to Gabrielle de Polignac, Tuesday, 28 July 1789
NOT LONG AGO, in the old days, the place had served her well as a pied-à-terre. When she attended the Opera and the performance finished late, it had been a blessing to spend the night in Paris and to avoid the long ride home on a dusty road. Now that she had been forced to make it her permanent home, its disadvantages were obvious. Even when the tenants had been evicted and their apartments refurbished, it felt cramped and over-complicated. She occupied the ground floor and an entresol on one side of the building; her husband and the children were on the floor above. If things had been different, she and some of the ladies might have been pleased to be lodged in the city, but she rarely came home after dark these days, and had never much enjoyed the thought of her husband enthroned in his geography room, peering down through his telescope as her carriage entered the courtyard.
She was used to the inconvenience: all her homes had been building sites. Sometimes, she found herself envying the peasant who could put up his hovel in a day. There were rooms she had planned that she would never see, except as watercolour sketches and paste-board models. After the wedding, her first bedroom had been strewn with the confetti of flaking plaster and gold paint. In her impatience to be settled she had ordered a plain white ceiling, but His Highness had insisted on a full restoration, with paintings of corpulent nymphs set in gilded stucco. As she came to know the ins and outs of family history and finance, this regime of endless renovation had at least allowed her to impose her own taste. Parts of the gardens were almost exactly as she had intended. The old labyrinth had been uprooted and replaced with an English grove in which she could almost imagine herself at home. But now, in the new residence, every ‘improvement’ was dictated by circumstance.
Carpenters had installed sliding doors behind the shelves in some of the wardrobes. A section of wood panelling behind a tapestry disguised another secret door that opened onto a small staircase. The false floors that had been added for forgotten purposes made it hard to form an impression of the building as a whole. Her home had been turned into a maze. To reach the courtyard, she would have to slip out of her apartments at the rear, walk along a corridor past an empty apartment, then descend another staircase. Nothing would ever have been straightforward in such a place, and she was not entirely unhappy to be leaving it behind.
Her apartments looked away from the courtyard, onto the gardens and the river to the left. When the wind blew from that direction and threw rain against the glass, she saw nothing but dim avenues of trees marching towards the Place de Louis XV. The gardens had been noisier in the daytime since soldiers, servants and poorly dressed people had been allowed in. At night, they were closed to the public and, presumably, empty, but there were sounds to which she had recently become attuned, a vast and blurry soundscape formed by distant walls and embankments that seemed to catch the whispers of the city.
Beyond the railings and the line of trees that were treated as though the terrace were the back-lane in a village, Parisians learned to swim in their river under wooden sheds, and engaged in other incomprehensible activities that involved shouting and waving long poles about. On the far bank, there was nothing much to see. She knew from some of her friends and her husband’s confessor that the people there enjoyed a finer prospect (her home was part of the vista), though they were disturbed by the wood yards that spoiled the appearance of the riverbank. If the piles of wood caught fire, her friends would be forced to flee by the servants’ quarters into the web of streets behind the grand facades of what was now the Quai Voltaire. Some of them, she knew, would be forced to flee in any case.
THOUGH ELABORATE on paper, the plan would apparently be straightforward in the execution. She had organized the journey herself as far as Châlons, but her husband had shown a lively interest in the smallest details. After the horrendous exodus from Versailles, when the guardsmen’s heads were wigged and powdered and held aloft on pikes, it had been a consoling hobby. He was a man who liked to fiddle with simple but intricate mechanisms. More than once, he had been found kneeling at doors in various parts of the building, trying to pick the lock. He was thrilled by the thought of a modern house crammed with curious contraptions. A certain M. Guillaumot, a relative of her friend, M. de Fersen, who was to drive the coach, had been commissioned to design an underground fortress for the new home, which, she supposed, would hardly allow for much decorative fancy.
While she sat in her drawing room discussing the contents of the trunk (the diamonds, a warming pan, a silver basin, etc.), the King was talking to a group of men who were about to set off on a great expedition through France, from the Channel coast to the Mediterranean Sea. Their mission was to determine the exact line of the Paris meridian, which ran a few yards from where she sat, across the Place du Palais-Royal and the maze of alleyways that huddled between the Tuileries and the Louvre. Mathematical exactitude would force them to pass through wild regions south of the Loire that were untouched by civilization, and whose inhabitants had never heard of Paris. But once they had finished, they would be able to create maps of unprecedented accuracy, which, among other things, would keep His Highness happily engrossed for weeks on end.
Their own expedition called for a similar degree of precision, but it would be considerably more dangerous. M. de Fersen had ordered a special long-distance coach that was to wait outside the city at the Barrière Saint-Martin. Meanwhile, General de Bouillé was positioning loyal troops at various key points along the route to the eastern frontier. Nothing had been left to chance. The coach contained a well-stocked larder, a cooker, and a false floor that could be turned into a dining table. Apart from this, and its great size, it was unremarkable. The King himself had selected the three guards who were to assist in the departure. He had been advised to employ men who were used to finding their way in difficult circumstances – a gendarme, a soldier, and a retired postmaster who was said to know ‘every road in the kingdom’ – but His Majesty had wanted to demonstrate the high regard in which he held his gardes du corps, and had asked the commanding officer to provide three men, without revealing the nature of their mission.
To avoid arousing suspicion, they were to leave in four separate groups. The governess would take the dauphin and his sister to the nearby Rue de l’Échelle, where M. de Fersen would be waiting outside a busy hotel, disguised as a cab driver. Three-quarters of an hour later, they would be joined by the King’s sister Mme Élisabeth, and, when the ceremony of the Coucher du Roi was over and the King had been put to bed, by the King himself, dressed as a valet de chambre. (Every night for the last two weeks, a valet whose height and orb-like corporation gave him a remarkable resemblance to the King had left by the main door, and the sentries were used to seeing him pass.) The Queen would leave the palace last of all, with one of the trusted bodyguards, M. de Malden.
The route from her apartments to the corner of the Rue de l’Échelle was short enough to present no obvious difficulties. The Tuileries Palace formed what would have been the western edge of a great rectangle if the Louvre had ever been completed. It was separated from the Place du Carrousel and the warren of medieval slums that occupied most of the rectangle by three walled courtyards. The courtyard closest to the river and her apartments, and furthest from the Rue de l’Échelle, was the Cour des Princes. Once beyond the courtyards, one might be said to have left the palace. Then there was just the Place du Carrousel, a corner of the King’s stables, and the lozenge-shaped remnant of a square before the Rue de l’Échelle.
The total distance was less than five hundred yards.
The courtyards were always busy with lawyers, ambassadors, servants and, recently, rough-looking men whose business was known only to themselves. Cabs and carriages waited in line for their passengers to emerge from the palace and the neighbouring hotels. Few people believed the rumours spread by some hysterical journalists that the royal family was intending to escape, but M. de La Fayette had doubled the guard just in case, and ordered the palace to be lit as though for a grand occasion. The Queen was to wear a broad-brimmed hat to hide her face – a needless precaution, she thought, since some of her own friends had failed to recognize her after her hair had turned white. In the unlikely event that she was stopped by a sentry, she was to identify herself as Mme Bonnet, a governess. One day, the people of Paris, who had been led astray by ruffians, would say that their Queen had been well suited to the role.
AS A FOREIGNER in Paris, like herself, M. de Fersen, a Swedish nobleman, was probably better equipped for the task than a native. A French aristocrat would not have been able to sustain a casual conversation, as M. de Fersen did, in cab-drivers’ slang, nor would he have had the wit to provide himself with a cheap snuff-box from which to offer his bothersome interlocutor a pinch. Thanks to his skilful impersonation, he was able to stand his ground in front of the lodging inn, until Mme de Tourzel arrived with the King’s daughter and the sleeping dauphin dressed as a little girl. Without waiting for the King’s sister, Fersen set off with his precious cargo, drove along the quays, turned right across the Place de Louis XV and returned along the Rue Saint-Honoré to rejoin the line of cabs in the Rue de l’Échelle.
While they waited in fearful silence, a woman circled the cab. The door opened, and Mme Élisabeth clambered in, stepping on the little dauphin, who was hidden under Mme de Tourzel’s skirts. She explained in flustered tones that she had passed within a whisker of M. de La Fayette’s coach, which was taking him to attend the Coucher du Roi. Then they settled down to wait for Their Majesties to emerge from the palace.
From the corner of the Rue de l’Échelle, it was possible to see some of the upper windows of the palace, brilliantly lit from the outside, as though a great spectacle were about to begin. The bells of neighbouring churches began to strike midnight, but there was still no sign of the King. It was not until the dignitaries had departed – somewhat later than expected – and the valet de chambre had seen His Majesty washed, disrobed and laid between the sheets, that a portly servant who would have answered to the name Durand walked calmly down the steps of the main entrance and passed through the sentry-box of the Cour des Tuileries. As the servant began to cross the Place du Carrousel, the sentry’s attention was drawn by the sound of a brass shoe-buckle clattering across the cobbles. He saw the servant retrieve his buckle, kneel down and deftly make the necessary repair, before setting off again in the direction of the Rue de l’Échelle.
Though the unforeseen delay had made the occupants of the cab almost sick with apprehension, the King, as he settled into his seat opposite the ladies, expressed the view that these small setbacks were just the sort of contretemps that proved the soundness of the plot. Even a clockwork mechanism contained imperfect pieces, which, by compensating for one another’s failings, in a well-regulated system of balances and escapements, coaxed the whole machine into a satisfactory semblance of accuracy. He was not, therefore, unduly troubled by the non-appearance of the Queen.
BY THEN, AS PLANNED, the Queen had left the palace on foot with M. de Malden. They had passed, unchallenged, through the guard-post of the Cour des Princes, and were about to cross the Place du Carrousel when a blaze of light approached from the side. Just in time, they squeezed into the narrow guichet that led out of the square, and, as the carriage thundered by, she saw quite distinctly, framed by its window, the features of M. de La Fayette. An impulse stronger than the instinct for survival made her try to hit the carriage with her stick. According to one of the other bodyguards, M. de Malden tried to reassure the Queen, though it seems more likely that the Queen had to reassure her escort, and that she tried to instil in him the courage that comes with a sense of destiny and duty. In a few moments, they would be sitting safely in M. de Fersen’s cab, well on their way to meeting the coach at the Barrière Saint-Martin.
It was then that something apparently extraordinary but in fact quite normal occurred. It was described in the years to come by several of the people involved, including General de Bouillé. The most detailed account, and the closest in time to the incident itself, was written by her chaplain, M. de Fontanges, who recorded his later conversations with the Queen. Some modern historians have doubted that such a thing could ever have happened, but they live in an age when cities are filled with aids to navigation, when there are enough signposts to obliterate the sights they indicate, and when the streets of Paris could be carpeted several times over with street-maps of Paris.
As the coach disappeared into the night, the Queen and her bodyguard left the Tuileries through the guichet in which they had taken cover. They knew, from the King’s instructions, that they were to turn left on leaving the palace. They also knew that it was impossible to go wrong, and that despite the momentary confusion caused by the appearance of La Fayette’s coach, they were only a few hundred yards from the meeting point.
In front of them, beyond the parapet, was the river, and, a little to the right, clearly delineated by the reflector lamps, the Pont Royal, which led to the Left Bank. A few lights were burning in the tall houses on the opposite bank, but the quays were deserted, and so, without wasting any more time, they crossed the Pont Royal, and hurried into the street that opened on the far side of the bridge.
No one knows for certain whether it was M. de Malden who led the way, or whether, out of deference to the Queen, he simply followed in her wake. The other two guards left personal accounts of the night’s adventure: François-Melchior de Moustier remembered only that the Queen had been frightened by the sight of La Fayette and became separated from her guide; François de Valory wrote a more detailed account, but his notes were lost, and when he came to retell the story in 1815, he found that his memories had faded. However, he did recall being told that the Queen ‘at once left the arm of her guide and began to flee in the opposite direction, with the guide following her as closely as he could’. The third bodyguard, who might have settled the matter, never wrote his memoirs, for a reason that might be guessed. The Queen herself, in conversations with her chaplain, graciously shared the blame: ‘Her guide knew Paris even less than she…They turned right instead of left, and crossed the Pont Royal.’
In ideal circumstances, a rational person might have paused to consider the situation, and realized that, if the chosen route were correct, the Tuileries Palace must lie on an island…But circumstances were not conducive to calm reflection, and since the street in question lay on approximately the same line as the palace and the Rue de l’Échelle – though in the opposite direction – the route was sufficiently plausible to allow wishful thinking to lead the way.
The street they had entered was the Rue du Bac, named after the ferry that had been used to carry the stones that built the Tuileries. But street signs were still a rarity: it was not until 1805 that the Prefect of Paris made sense of the muddle by inscribing the names of streets on yellow porcelain plaques – red letters for those that ran parallel to the Seine, and black for those that ran away from it.
They passed one street and then another, expecting at any moment to see M. de Fersen’s cab standing on a corner. The road bent slightly to the right, and ran between the high walls of grand hôtels, and then between a convent and a chapel. They might have been in the aristocratic faubourg of a provincial town. Calculating their position from the probable delays and the known itinerary, and assuming a speed of four miles an hour, they must have advanced along the Rue du Bac until all hope of finding the Rue de l’Échelle was lost, to the point where the sounds of wailing and an occasional scream might lead a stranger to imagine that he had stumbled on a secret purgatory on the edge of the city: the Rue du Bac ended in an area once reserved for lepers, between the Hospice des Incurables and the Petites Maisons, where lunatics were locked away.
Only now did they turn back towards the river. But instead of retracing their steps, they chose a different route, as though, in addition to being lost, they had still not realized that their principal mistake lay in crossing the river.
AT THIS POINT, attention inevitably turns to M. de Malden. There is no question of his deliberately misleading the Queen. He was simply a man who was used to following orders, who found himself in an unknown street at night with a woman who lashed out at passing carriages, and who had a surprising ability to get lost a few yards from her own home; a woman, moreover, who, in view of her rank, might not take kindly to contradiction.
The Queen may well have reproached her escort with incompetence. She may even have suggested ways in which he might have prepared himself better for a journey of less than five hundred yards. Not only her own life but also those of her children and her husband were at stake, not to mention the future of civilized Europe.
M. de Malden’s failure to equip himself with a map, or to study one in advance, is perhaps not quite as reprehensible as it seemed to General de Bouillé when he wrote his memoirs and exclaimed at the ‘inconceivable ignorance’ of the Queen’s escort. (He was too polite to criticize the Queen herself.) But to explain exactly how M. de Malden was able to lose his way so completely would require a long detour in a story which is itself a long digression. Suffice it to say (since a brief digression is after all unavoidable) that M. de Malden was a man of his time: he might follow the dictates of Reason, but he could look for enlightenment only where Reason had cast its light.
In 1791, Paris was effectively uncharted. There were one or two beautifully engraved maps of the city that showed the streets in the proper proportions. These maps were known to army officers, librarians, kings and rich collectors, few of whom had any practical use for them. Strangers were commonly advised to climb a monument if they wished to form an impression of the city as a whole. Crude plans sold by stationers showed the approximate location of the principal sights and avenues, but little else. A map was supposed to be a compliment to the city, not a brutal exposure of its medieval meanderings and cul-de-sacs. Cointeraux’s map of ‘Paris As It Is Today’ (1798) painstakingly omitted all the minor streets, ‘for otherwise the map would have presented nothing but a veritable chaos’.
The inhabitants of Paris had managed quite well since the days when the city was confined to an island. Most people never left their quartier, and for those who went further afield, there were cabs. ‘Parisians’, said Louis-Sébastien Mercier, ‘take cabs for even the shortest journey’. This may have been good sense as much as laziness: ‘Not even the inhabitants of the capital may flatter themselves on knowing its streets’, the Larousse encyclopedia observed in 1874. The topographical knowledge of cab drivers themselves is something of a mystery. In all the centuries of regulations pertaining to hired carriages, there is not a single mention of the need to be familiar with the streets. There are hundreds of rules concerning speed and sobriety, suspension and interior padding, the proper feeding of horses, the undesirability of blocking pavements, driving through processions, insulting pedestrians, mistreating female passengers and removing one’s clothes in warm weather, but nothing that required a driver to know the shortest way to get from one place to another. But since cabs eventually displayed lanterns of different colours to show which part of Paris they would serve, it might be assumed that the drivers’ knowledge had always been limited in any case, and that the exact route was often left to the whim of the cab horse.
Half a century after Marie-Antoinette was lost on the Left Bank, the benefits of a city map were still far from obvious, even to the people who printed them. In 1853, a guide for typesetters ‘who do not know the capital’, but who wished to find work there, listed sixty printing-works in an extraordinarily long piece of prose that was intended to serve as an itinerary. The unemployed typesetter was to have himself delivered to a print-shop on the Rue de Rivoli (‘formerly no. 14 of the Rue des Fossés-Saint-Germain, the staircase on the right after the first courtyard’), and then,
On leaving this establishment, turn left along the Rue de Rivoli as far as the Rue Saint-Denis, where you should turn right and go down to the very end of this street, cross the Place du Châtelet and the Pontau-Change, and into the Rue de la Barillerie, which is facing you, to the first street on the right, which is the Rue de la Sainte-Chapelle, where, at no. 5, is M. Boucquin.
The complete tour, ‘supposing that one spend two minutes in each workshop, will occupy seven and a half hours’ – after which the unfortunate typesetter could make a start on the list of ‘all print-shops within a 100-kilometre radius of Paris’.
It so happens that, on that Monday night, perhaps not far from the Rue du Bac, the man best able to direct the Queen was working on one of the great masterpieces of modern cartography. Somewhere in that vast, confusing city, Edme Verniquet was squinting through a spyglass, measuring the angle of a street corner while a servant held up a torch. (He and his team of sixty geometers always took their measurements at night, when they could work without being jostled by the crowd, pestered by dogs, or crushed by carriages.) His dream was to create the first completely reliable map of Paris on a scale that would show every buckling wall and crooked niche: he had started work on it, at his own expense, fifteen years before, and it was still several years from completion. The King had given his blessing to the project, but the new government proved less enthusiastic. When it was asked to fund the expedition, a député demanded that the matter be sent to committee for discussion, ‘in order to determine whether or not this map is really of any use’.
IF THE QUEEN and her escort had shared Edme Verniquet’s bird’s-eye view of Paris, they would have seen that the street whose course they had followed formed the outer edge of a spider’s web of lanes centred on the Croix Rouge crossroads. Some of those lanes were reassuringly straight, but they bisected other streets at odd angles, creating squares that were parallelograms, and trapezoids that seemed to rearrange themselves from one day to the next. Time in those asymmetrical streets passed at some indeterminable speed. It might have been five minutes or half an hour since they crossed the bridge to the Left Bank.
By chance or by smell, they found their way back, via the Rue des Saints-Pères or some other adjacent artery, to the river, and re-emerged on the quai, but further upstream from the Pont Royal. The walls of the Louvre faced them from the opposite bank. The quais were still deserted, but a sentinel had resumed his post on the far side of the bridge. To the left, the Queen could see, as though in memory, her wing of the Tuileries Palace, and perhaps for the first time surmised its place in the larger scheme of the city. A short distance beyond it, her husband and children were sitting in the cab, counting the minutes, wondering when the King’s absence would be discovered, and whether or not the Queen had been arrested as a traitor.
Perhaps it was the calm that comes with desperation, or perhaps just the impatience of someone who, having wrapped up for a long journey, is forced to take vigorous exercise: as though the whole adventure had been a masquerade, and there was no further need for dissimulation, the Queen and her escort now walked up to the sentinel on the bridge, and asked for directions to the Hôtel du Gaillardbois on the Rue de l’Échelle.
Assuming that he knew the way, the sentinel could hardly have directed two citizens on foot to take a short-cut through the palace, and they could hardly be seen to ignore his directions – which would explain why the Queen’s involuntary exploration of Paris led her into the labyrinth of slums that had survived for centuries on the very doorstep of the royal palace.
The Quartier du Doyenné was a relic of the medieval city. Coiled within that small space were almost three miles of malodorous alleyways, some of which were barely distinguishable from drains. There were slums that might once have been abbeys, and curious dips and mounds that were the uninscribed memorials of the vaults and streets of earlier ages. Some of the cul-de-sacs led to patches of wasteground cluttered with stones intended for the Louvre. At night, it looked as though the Louvre itself were being demolished, while the ancient hovels in its midst were preserved in a state of permanent decay.
As they picked their way through the unlit lanes, a church bell struck a quarter or a half of the hour. In a small town, they might now have taken their bearings, but in Paris, a peculiar situation had arisen. The oldest churches, like Notre-Dame, pointed east-south-east along the river, following Christian tradition, with the rising sun illuminating the window behind the altar. But such was the demand for space that other churches had had to fit themselves in as best they could. Saint-Sulpice, founded in 1646, was probably the last church in Paris to be ‘oriented’ now, they pointed in all directions. Of the four churches within two hundred yards of the Queen and her escort, only one pointed east. Seen from the air, the great fleet of churches would appear to have moored itself in a busy harbour full of smaller vessels each going about its own business. By the end of the eighteenth century, it was only a man with the science of Edme Verniquet who could look to the churches of Paris for guidance, by climbing their steeples and using them as triangulation points.
Since the several accounts of the escape disagree in the details, it is impossible to say exactly how much of that labyrinth they explored, or how much time had elapsed when they came upon the Rue Saint-Honoré and walked along its lighted pavements for a hundred yards to find the other members of the royal family beside themselves with anguish. The King – according to the governess’s account – displayed the affection that had often struggled to express itself in the years of pomp and protocol. He threw his arms around his Queen, kissed her quite passionately, and exclaimed, several times, ‘How happy I am to see you!’
M. de Fersen, knowing the tricks that streets can play, instead of trying to reach the north-eastern perimeter by passing through Paris at its widest point, drove east along the Rue Saint-Honoré and the meandering Faubourg Saint-Antoine, all the way to the Bastille, where he turned left and followed the boulevards until, at long last, after a journey of more than three miles, he took what might be called the exit at the Barrière Saint-Martin. He could, of course, have turned left much earlier at the church of Saint-Merri, and pursued the conveniently straight hypotenuse provided by the Rue Saint-Martin. But it is easy to give directions after the event. The expedition, all told, went off much better than it might have done. As the custom-built carriage raced through the Forest of Bondy and set out across the plains of Brie and Champagne, passing the point at which the news from Paris could have overtaken them, the King declared himself extremely satisfied. He imagined the effect that his address to ‘Frenchmen, and above all Parisians’ would have on the National Assembly, and he announced to the other occupants of the coach with undisguised delight,
So, here I am out of that city of Paris, where I’ve had to swallow so much bile. I can tell you all that, once I’ve got my arse back in the saddle, you’ll see a very different man from the one you’ve seen until now!
His optimism at this point in the journey was fully justified. In fact, had it not been for the long delays in Paris, they would have reached Pont-de-Sommevesle, a hundred and ten miles to the east, before the royalist troops were forced to decamp by a suspicious populace; and they would not have been exposed to the curiosity of the citizens of Sainte-Menehould, one of whom, a postmaster’s son, recognized the King from the face on a coin. This was at eight o’clock in the evening of 21 June 1791: the journey had lasted barely six-and-a-half hours. At about the same time, one of those tireless Parisian wits, who seemed to thrive in even the darkest times, attached a piece of paper to the walls of the Tuileries Palace:
Citizens are advised that a fat pig has fled the Tuileries. Whoever encounters him is requested – in exchange for a modest reward – to bring him home.
16 October 1793
The view from the Place de la Révolution (formerly Place de Louis XV) was one of the finest in Paris. The afternoon sun shone through the trees on the Champs-Élysées and bathed the square in deep shadows and pink light – which is why the face of Charlotte Corday appeared to blush when her head was shown to the crowd. The phenomenon, observed by several thousand people, gave rise to an official scientific enquiry into the question of sensory survival, and, since Mlle Corday had dressed herself nicely in the manner of her native Caen, it started a fashion for lacy Norman bonnets.
The men and women who were taken to the square in open carts showed astounding calm. For all the ferocious, gloating rhetoric of the sans-culottes, there is scarcely a single account of an aristocrat disgracing herself with a cowardly display. The words of those who stood ten feet above the square and looked about them at the scene of chaos contained by uniformed soldiers and by the very architecture of the city are almost universally impressive:
‘O Liberty! What crimes are committed in thy name!’
(To the plaster statue erected in the square.)
‘May my blood cement the happiness of the French.’
‘Monsieur, I beg your pardon. I did not do it on purpose.’
(To the executioner, after stepping on his foot.)
They came in tumbrels from the Conciergerie, across the river, and along the Rue Saint-Honoré. It was a journey of about two miles. Some of them, as they descended from the cart and climbed the wooden steps, knew for the first time in their lives exactly where they were, and how they had got there. At the end of her ride through Paris, Mme Roland asked for pen and ink so as to record the last moments of her journey, and ‘to consign to paper the discoveries she had made on the way from the Conciergerie to the Place de la Révolution’.
Though she seemed to commune silently with herself and to concentrate on her courage, the Queen at times appeared to become observant of her surroundings. Several witnesses saw her studying the revolutionary inscriptions on the walls, and the tricolour flags that flew from windows. She would have heard the noonday cannon in the Palais-Royal. As the cart turned off the Rue Saint-Honoré and into the square, she was seen to look across the gardens towards the Tuileries Palace. ‘Signs of deep emotion’ were noted on her face by the official reporter.
From that vantage point, the city had an almost providential air. Several of Verniquet’s principal triangulation points were visible from the Place de la Révolution, and several more if the observer was on a platform: the dome of the Tuileries, the north tower of Saint-Sulpice and the summit of Montmartre. By some inexplicable design, the curve of the Seine appeared to have been straightened, so that the eye might have traced an uninterrupted line along the palace walls and the river to the hills beyond the city. The colonnades of the Tuileries, the tall houses that ran away to the east and the billowing architecture of clouds that rested on the rooftops made it possible to imagine that what had seemed a chaos created by the centuries was in fact a model of the heavenly city. From the centre of the square, one could see a long way and be seen from a great distance. A man who was standing that day in front of the Tuileries Palace, and who, hearing the noise of the crowd, climbed onto the pedestal of a statue, quite distinctly saw the blade of the guillotine fall, at a distance of almost half a mile.