CHAPTER TWENTY
GREAT HOPES
“At the end of last year . . . I had great hopes.”
MARIE ANTOINETTE TO THE PRINCESSE DE TARANTE, 31 DECEMBER 1791
“It is only from here and only we who can judge the moment and the favourable circumstances that might at last put an end to our woes and those of France.” With these anxious words, written to the Emperor Leopold on 19 December 1790, Marie Antoinette addressed the problem at the heart of any plan of escape: its timing. There was indeed much to disquiet her. France abounded with wild rumours about her future, as Prince Charles of Liechtenstein, the envoy of Leopold II, discovered: the Queen was about to be seized and shut up in a fortress; alternatively she was to be put to death for adultery so that the widower Louis XVI could marry Orléans’ daughter. Meanwhile the Queen’s own perturbation over the possible invasive action of the Princes increased with the months, and not without reason. Artois was reported to be planning to take Lyons and to hive off Alsace from France. The Queen told the Emperor that Louis XVI had written formally to the King of Sardinia and his son-in-law Artois to say that if they persisted in these damaging conspiracies, allegedly on Louis’ behalf, the King would have to disown them officially. For all this, Marie Antoinette was beginning to have “great hopes,” as she would confess to the Princesse de Tarante later.1
If the counter-revolutionary Princes signified trouble abroad, the French Catholic clergy offered similar complications at home. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy of July 1790 was followed up at the end of November by the idea of an oath to the state. All priests had to swear it, “non-jurors” being forbidden to exercise their priestly functions. Torn between his duty as a loyal son of the Church, and that of a monarch concerned with his country’s welfare, Louis XVI tried desperately to get the Pope to tolerate the oath. The alternative was the introduction of “a division into France,” in other words a damaging schism in the French Catholic Church between jurors and non-jurors.2
Pius VI, a man in his seventies who had been Pope since 1775, had no sympathy with the ultramontane tendencies of monarchs in his own time, nor, for that matter, with the libertarian ideals of their subjects. He had already clashed with Joseph II over the latter’s projected limitations of papal power in his own dominions, known as “Josephinism”; as for France, he had condemned La Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme of August. Now Pius VI declined to compromise. Nevertheless Louis XVI signed the decree on 26 December. January 1 1791 was the “fatal day” when the clergy had to decide whether or not to take the oath.
It was also the day on which the Dauphin Louis Charles was given dominoes made of stone and marble torn from the ruins of the Bastille as a New Year’s gift by members of the National Guard. The verses that accompanied the gift alluded to the Bastille when its walls had enclosed “the innocent victims of arbitrary government”; now these toys were intended as the homage of the people and—significant postscript—“to teach you the extent of their power.” The Marquise de Tourzel had a slightly different version: the boy received the gift from Palloi, an architect, one of the chief destroyers of the Bastille, with outward politeness—and inner fury.3
Battle lines were being drawn. On 10 March 1791 the Pope issued a condemnation of the French Revolution in general and the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in particular. Three days later, an answer to the chivalrous rhetoric of Burke’s Reflections was published in England. The author was Thomas Paine, a Quaker-educated political writer who had spent thirteen years in America and was a passionate advocate of its independence. The Rights of Man, written in support of this new revolution and dedicated to George Washington, resulted in Paine being accused of treason in England; he fled to France. The book was, however, an instant bestseller, both in English and in translation.4
On quite a different level the scabrous pamphlets attacking the Queen were also bestsellers. Drink, lesbianism, sexual voracity generally (“three quarters of the officers of the Gardes Françaises had penetrated the Queen”), featured as before in works such as The Memoirs of Antonina, printed in London in two volumes. Here, due to the demands of such numbers on her time, she was described as preferring lovers in the style of a grenadier “who abridges preliminaries and hastens to the conclusion.” Marie Antoinette was also credited with a new admirer, La Fayette. The story was ridiculous enough to those who knew Marie Antoinette’s personal dislike for the man she derisively nicknamed “Blondinet” for his sandy looks and whose clumsy dancing she had scorned years ago; but it was a useful twist for his enemies in the saga of her debauchery. Soirées Amoureuses du Général Mottier [La Fayette] et la Belle Antoinette was a piece of pornography supposedly written by “the Austrian woman’s little spaniel.” Having enjoyed a rich sexual education at the hands of his mistress, the pet, jealous of being supplanted in the royal bed by La Fayette, had decided to describe the Queen’s bawdy nights with the revolutionary.5
The anguished King was left with the approaching problem of his Easter duties, the absolute necessity of taking Communion to celebrate Easter Sunday—24 April in 1791—that was enjoined on all the faithful. How could he accept the sacrament at the hands of a juror priest? How could he manage to avoid it?*77 He had, after all, signed a decree officially condemning the non-jurors. There was another unhappy consequence to the split engendered by the Civil Constitution of the Clergy: the King’s pious aunts reacted to it with horror.
It was unthinkable for the two surviving Mesdames Tantes, Adélaïde and Victoire (the nun Louise had died in 1787), to make their Easter Communion at a Mass said by a juror. No conception of their nephew’s good, nor that of the royal family as a whole, troubled these royal ladies. There were to be no compromises with the manners of the old order; for example, the aunts made a fearful fuss at the idea of dining at Saint Cloud with Pauline de Tourzel who had not been officially presented—what a precedent! According to etiquette, the girl ought to eat alone. (But the King simply said: “There will never be similar circumstances. Admit her!”)7 Now the aunts began to make arrangements to depart for the more wholesome spiritual atmosphere of Rome, finally leaving on 19 February.
The flight of Mesdames Tantes turned out to be a public relations disaster. A dragoon charge was needed to clear away hostile crowds as they went; then the aunts were halted for eleven days in the course of their journey by other angry demonstrators. In order to proceed, they were, ironically enough, obliged to appeal for the implementation of the National Assembly’s new law by which all citizens could travel as they pleased. The Assembly spent four hours debating the issue, all because, as one deputy furiously exclaimed, “two old ladies prefer to hear Mass in Rome rather than in Paris.”8 Finally agreement was reached.
Nevertheless a deputy named Antoine Barnave, a Protestant lawyer from Grenoble, made an important point when he argued for the symbolic importance of this departure: Mesdames should not be allowed to go while the position of the royal family was still being discussed by the Committee of the Constitution. Certainly this contested departure made two points for the future: first, royalties who were dissatisfied with the present situation in France, for all their emollient words, were preparing to flee; second, they could be stopped . . . “You know that my aunts are going,” wrote Marie Antoinette to Leopold in advance. “We do not believe that we can prevent them.”9 But a more resolute sovereign than Louis XVI, one who had indeed learnt that early lesson about “firmness” being the most necessary virtue to a king, might have done so.
The fact was that the situation regarding the departure—or escape—of the main royal family was at the most delicate stage. And it was Marie Antoinette who found herself, perforce, the practical instigator of the action. The King’s depression as ever took the form of semi-stupor. When he discussed business with his Minister of the Royal Household, the King might have been talking about the affairs of the Emperor of China, said Montmorin sadly in January 1791. Louis’ personal unhappiness, caused by the odious religious situation to which he had reluctantly agreed, was not helped by serious illness in the spring. He suffered from high fever and began to cough up blood: was it the fatal tuberculosis that had carried off so many members of his family including his elder son? He was treated with a series of debilitating emetics and purges. For about a week, the King lay in bed. His strongest emotion seems to have been a deep, hurt bewilderment. As he told his favoured confidante the Duchesse de Polignac in a letter some weeks later: “How can I have these enemies when I have only ever desired the good of all?” He quoted Molière in L’École des Femmes: “The world, my dear Agnes, is a strange thing.”10
Marie Antoinette on the other hand, was developing a more positive attitude, although she still had a residue of melancholy. “Oh my God!” she wrote to her brother Leopold in October 1790. “If we have committed faults, we have certainly expiated them.” She too felt misunderstood by the French, who were “a cruel, childish people,” while at the same time she felt equally misunderstood by the émigrés, so blithely ignorant in their exile of the true conditions in France.11 But Marie Antoinette had also begun to believe fervently in the cause of kingship, for a reason indicated in that letter to her sister Marie Christine of the previous May. She wanted “her poor child” to have a happier future than their own, and that was a future in which he sat on the throne of France.
It was “the monsters” in France—both Marie Antoinette and her critics were free in their use of this word—who threatened this future, and in this connection, she warned her brother Leopold against the Freemasons, whose societies had been used by the monsters to link themselves together: “Oh God, guard my homeland and you from similar perils.” The émigrés, especially Artois, might come into this threatening category too, if they sought to circumvent the role of the King on the grounds that he was a virtual prisoner and thus subject to unlawful pressures. At the same time any wife who becomes obsessed by her son’s heritage—in the lifetime of his father—must have a slightly different agenda from that father himself. Marie Antoinette was by now quite convinced of the need to escape in order to save the crown: “Too much delay risks losing everything.”12 Louis XVI still wavered.
He could hand a kind of roving commission to the Baron de Breteuil to approach the European powers with a view to restoring his “legitimate authority,” as he did on 26 November 1790. He could despatch the young Comte Louis de Bouillé, son of the soldier Marquis, to the Emperor in an ambassadorial capacity, as he did in early January 1791. On 4 February there was a further tentative step forward when the Comte de La Marck was sent off to the Marquis de Bouillé himself at Metz with a commission from the King.13 But as yet, unlike Caesar crossing the Hellespont, Louis could not decide to burn his boats.
Of course the logic of Marie Antoinette’s position—that the crown of France must be preserved at all costs—dictated that she should have escaped accompanied only by the Dauphin. (Madame Royale’s gender, which prevented her accession, also meant that her security was never seen as an issue; unlike her Austrian mother, the Daughter of France was not subject to personal threats.) Originally put forward by Marie Antoinette’s secretary, Augeard, with the idea that Louis Charles should be dressed as a girl, this plan of a mother-and-son flight was always the one with the best hope of success. Comte Louis de Bouillé reiterated it to the Queen in January 1791.14 A plainly dressed woman in an age when garments automatically spoke a person’s rank, an obscure little girl . . . There were few to connect such a limited party with the glorious goddess of Versailles (or its wicked Queen for that matter) and the boy prince who was the hope of the nation.
There was a further impetus to removing Louis Charles from the nation’s acquisitive gaze. Both his status and his future education were becoming a matter of debate. A memoir on the subject by the Abbé Audrein, Vice Rector of the Collège des Grassins, was presented to the National Assembly on 11 December 1790, and printed in the newspaper L’Ami du Roi shortly after Louis Charles’s sixth birthday on 27 March 1791. The Dauphin should be put through an elaborate programme of education in various colleges that would report on his prowess to four carefully chosen governors once a month. He would eat “frugal but healthy” food and be attended to only by the small number of servants necessary. As an adolescent, he was to do military service under an assumed name, the final summary of his progress to be circulated throughout the nation. Such a regime was not harsh—resembling perhaps the education of a modern heir to a throne—but it was the principle that was sinister from the point of view of the Dauphin’s parents: that royal children “belong to the Nation and must be brought up by it.”15
A debate on the Regency took place in the National Assembly on 22 March, in the wake of the King’s serious illness. Women, including of course the boy’s mother, were specifically excluded, with cries at one point of “Males only!” Yet it was notable that Marie Antoinette was not eliminated altogether from the care of her son in these circumstances; if the possibility of the Regency was stripped from her in the new Constitution, she was still envisaged as his Guardian, given the strength of the mother’s traditional role.16 The boy’s closest male relative was in fact to be chosen—but only so long as he was still in France, and provided he was not the heir to another throne. The former provision excluded Artois (but not, for the time being, Provence) while the latter carefully ruled out Louis Charles’s Austrian relatives. The order of regency would therefore be: Provence, then Orléans . . . and after that a Regent was to be elected.
These dark clouds gathering over the head of her son did not convince Marie Antoinette to change her mind and escape with Louis Charles alone. As she told Comte Louis de Bouillé, the royal family had sworn to stay together after the events of 6 October and she intended to honour that promise. This was a woman who was fully capable of courage; ruthlessness was another matter.
The commissioning of a large and durable travelling coach, a berline de voyage, on 22 December 1790 was a significant moment in the Queen’s escape plans. The berlin stood for several things. One was the large size of the party to which Marie Antoinette was inexorably committed, for it could transport six adults inside. Another was the intimate participation of Count Fersen in all the practical details. Ostensibly the berlin was commissioned by one of Fersen’s friends, the Franco-Russian “Baronne de Korff,” in order to travel to Russia—one of those endless trans-European journeys common at the time among a cosmopolitan aristocracy with which Fersen himself was so familiar. In fact the man who paid the 5000-odd livres for the berlin was Fersen himself. At all events, this was a carriage “unknown” to belong to the King and Queen, whose official carriages were highly recognizable.
Afterwards, the nature of the coach, apparently both cumbersome and awesomely opulent, was the subject of much ill-informed comment; it was seen as some kind of doomed symbol. But there was in fact “nothing extraordinary” about it, in the words of the Marquise de Tourzel, given the purpose for which it was designed: a long, long traverse of roads that would at best be unreliable. Such a berlin, apart from being well sprung, had to be strong, which inevitably made it slow. Sometimes described as bright yellow, the berlin was actually green and black, with a white velvet interior, the only flashes of yellow being on the wheels and undercarriage as was customary at the time.17
Hospitality along such a notional route would be quite as unreliable as the roads, so the voyagers would expect to be virtually self-sufficient. In the case of the real journey that was projected, such containment was of course equally vital. So the berlin was to be “a little house on wheels,” with a larder, a cooker for heating meat or soup, a canteen big enough for eight bottles, a table that could be raised for eating, concealed beneath the cushions, as well as leather pots de chambres: all “very convenient” as the Governess noted.*78 The same practical convenience applied to the Queen’s nécessaire, a kind of superior picnic basket made of beautiful smooth walnut with a silver basin, tiny candlesticks and a teapot, which doubled as a dressing-case, whose furnishings included little tortoiseshell picks as well as a mirror. She actually had two made, one going as a blind to Marie Christine in Brussels: “I’ll be delighted if she uses it since I have another just the same for my own use.”*7918
Such elaborate arrangements underlined another important aspect of the projected journey. If the royal party set out as fugitives, they certainly did not intend to arrive as such. It was as the King and Queen of France, with all the appurtenances of majesty, that Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette intended to disembark. The King’s crown and royal robes were therefore to be included in the baggage. The loyal crowds who were confidently expected to flock to their ill-used sovereign had, after all, to be able to recognize him when they saw him. Where kings were concerned, appearance and ceremony made the monarch. In short, Louis XVI was to remain within the frontiers of France itself.
In Marie Antoinette’s lengthy correspondence throughout the spring, via couriers since she no longer trusted the posts, she was quite as inflexible on this subject as she was over the nature of their joint escape. Precisely what “the Austrian woman” did not actually want was for the King to be seen to flee to Austria or its dominions; these included Belgium and its capital, which already housed many of their supporters. Even if things went badly inside France, Marie Antoinette preferred to head for Switzerland, via Alsace, rather than Austria.19
On the other hand, the Queen did expect assistance from her homeland, as she always called it, and many of her letters to Count Mercy, himself in Brussels, concerned her attempts to secure it. What was wanted was a massing of Austrian troops on the north-west frontier. This would in turn give the Marquis de Bouillé at Metz an excuse to move his own troops in order to combat the imperial menace. In reality these troops were intended to act in support of the King when he arrived.20
The real trouble with this plan was that Emperor Leopold was not only the brother of the Queen of France but he was also the head of a great power with an ambiguous attitude towards France, alliance or no alliance. As the Comte de La Marck saw for himself, the Emperor was by no means displeased by France’s weakened state, due to its inner turmoils. The requested Austrian troops would cost money to move, and that would need subsidizing: a difficult task for the French King (or in fact the Queen) who were so short of finance. More money had to be borrowed—from bankers in Belgium and from Fersen, Fersen’s mistress Eléanore Sullivan and her protector, Quentin Craufurd.
The real key to the Emperor’s behaviour was expressed by Count Mercy himself in a long and embarrassed letter of 7 March 1791.21 He told the Queen—who touchingly but unwisely still imagined that he had her best interests at heart—that she should not count on exterior help. Nor should she have any illusions about the general behaviour of great powers who famously “do nothing for nothing.” However humiliating this truth might be, the Queen should try to come to terms with it. She should concentrate on how they might be propitiated—or in other words how they might be bribed to help the royal family. The King of Sardinia, for example, wanted Geneva and the King of France would lose little by supporting this claim. Spain was interested in the territorial limits of Navarre. The German feudal princes with lands in Alsace, anxious about their privileges, could be won over. Although Mercy claimed that the Emperor himself was above all this, he did touch on Austria’s interests with regard to Prussia, which must be borne in mind.
Writing to the Queen himself a few days later, the Emperor was similarly negative as well as circular in argument. The foreign powers could not think of interfering while the King and Queen were not in a state of safety. Although their only method of achieving that state was obviously to flee, the Emperor went on to say that the King and Queen should not be encouraged to do that, since the foreign powers were in no position to help them. Leopold could not even fix a date for an escape while his Austro-Turkish war—a legacy from Joseph II—went on. So the Emperor advised his sister and brother-in-law to wait until such time as they had developed their own resources—or were in pressing danger.22
Against this self-interested caution the Queen cried out with increasing desperation. Surely the other powers would help them? It was, after all, “the cause of Kings, not simply a matter of politics.” Furthermore “the cause of Kings” in France received an additional blow with the death of Mirabeau on 2 April. The Jacobins, including their newly elected president Robespierre, were secretly delighted, although the eight-day public mourning, plus a grandiose funeral cortège and a public burial, paid ostentatious tribute to the great man. Mirabeau had at least envisaged the continued need for a sovereign, or, as the Duc de Lévis put it, Mirabeau loved “liberty through emotion, the monarchy through reason and the nobility through vanity.”
On 14 April, still lacking a positive response from Vienna, Marie Antoinette wrote asking whether they could count on Austrian help, Yes or No? (Her italics.)23
It was Louis XVI’s determination to perform his Easter duties at the hands of a non-juror priest that brought about a cathartic resolution to the drama of delay. In spite of the advice of various counsellors to yield to duress, the King could not bring himself to take Communion at the hands of a juror at the parish church of the Tuileries, Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois. He therefore turned to the expedient that had been so successful the previous summer, when it was a question of fresh air rather than spiritual sustenance. He decided to make an expedition to Saint Cloud where, of course, it would be far easier for a non-juror to be slipped in.
Departure was scheduled to take place on the Monday of Easter Week, 18 April. It was now that the ugly consequences of the flight of Mesdames Tantes were seen. Rumours that the King was to follow suit had already led to demonstrations at the Tuileries. In this case, no sooner were the royal party and servants installed in their coaches in the Grand Carrousel courtyard of the palace than the cry went up that the King was trying to escape. A jeering mob surrounded the King’s own carriage, where he sat with his wife, sister and children, and prevented their progress. One courtier, the First Gentleman of the Bedchamber, was beaten, leaving the Dauphin to shout, “Save him! Save him!” before the Queen was able to take her son back inside the Tuileries. Even worse for the future was the fact that the National Guards refused to force the King’s passage. They announced that they too were committed to detaining the King, despite the best efforts of Mayor Bailly and La Fayette, their commander, to dissuade them. So the King sat immobilized for nearly two hours listening to the howls of abuse.24
Louis XVI remained outwardly calm, putting his head out of the carriage to remark that it was strange that he who had granted the nation liberty was not allowed it himself. Inwardly, however, the scene, with the mob in control of the guards, left a profound impression on him. Having disembarked, the King celebrated Easter at Saint-Germain and took the Sacrament from “the new curé” who was, of course, a juror. The Queen wore her court dress, garnished with Alençon lace and especially ordered for Easter from Rose Bertin, but at the Tuileries and not at Saint Cloud. She also purchased a length of ribbon à la nation (that is, tricoloured) to put in her hat. The Journal de Paris gave an emollient version of events: how numerous “citizens” had “pleaded with the King to remain.” The King in his Journal put it more succinctly: “They stopped us.”25 This incident meant that Louis XVI had at last joined his wife in realizing the necessity of escape.
The Queen told Mercy at the beginning of May: “Our situation here is frightful, in a way that those who do not have to endure it cannot hope to understand.” The religious split was emphasized by the fact that an effigy of the Pope was burnt in the gardens of the Palais-Royal. The “pressing danger” that was demanded by the Emperor to justify their flight had arrived. It was only when the King was free to show himself in some “strong city” that the people would, she believed, flock to him in astonishing numbers.26
It was now a question as to where that “strong city” might be. Metz was unreliable; although only a few of the officers were said to be “infected,” the whole of the infantry was “detestable” in its revolutionary sympathies, as was the municipality with its local Jacobin Club. Of the various possibilities, Montmédy, thirty-five miles from Metz, near the border of the Habsburg-led Empire (but inside it) and possessed of good communications, was the most popular choice. Montmédy was in Lorraine; hopefully the King’s “faithful Lorrainers” who had been pointed out to him at the Fête de la Fédération by Marie Antoinette would justify their reputation. The troops of the Royal German Regiment at Stenay on the Meuse, ten miles west of Montmédy, between Sedan and Verdun, were also supposed to be reliable.27
Other possibilities were Valenciennes, slightly north-west of Paris, which was originally favoured by the King but subsequently rejected for being too close to the Austrian Netherlands; and Besançon in the south, close to the Swiss border. The idea of leaving France via the Ardennes and then crossing back to a ’strong city” was also rejected because even the briefest departure might give an unfortunate impression of flight. If the choice, then, was to be Montmédy, what route should be followed to reach it? It was not exactly a light journey, 180-odd miles from Paris through terrain where anybody’s loyalty, whether soldier or citizen, might turn out to be doubtful. The obvious way was to go via Meaux and Rheims, and on to Montmédy itself: a straightforward route and the one favoured by the Marquis de Bouillé and Count Fersen, both experienced campaigners.
Suddenly the King asserted himself. He feared being recognized in and around Rheims, which was one of the few areas of France where he was known, thanks to the coronation ceremony there sixteen years ago. So the route chosen was to the south: Châlons-sur-Marne, then Sainte-Menehould, before turning north, through a small place called Varennes on the river Aire, on to Dun, crossing the Meuse, to Stenay and so to Montmédy. This involved using a minor road after Sainte-Menehould and in Bouillé’s view was just as dangerous. But the habit of obedience was too strong in the Marquis to allow him to disagree further with his sovereign. This was the way it was to be.28
Mid-month, Bouillé assured Fersen that the road from Sainte-Menehould to Stenay would be guarded by loyal troops. Fersen actually questioned the security of such a display. Might it not be better, more of a subterfuge, if the small party travelled unattended by any kind of military presence? Fersen’s logic, however, was not accepted by Bouillé; as with his deference to the King over the route, Bouillé’s habit of protecting the King was deeply ingrained.
It now became a matter of personnel—and personalities, as ever in any risky enterprise—both in the military command and in the composition of the berlin party. Those in the know in January 1791, according to Marie Antoinette, had originally been limited to the Baron de Breteuil (now abroad), the Marquis de Bouillé and the Marquis de Bombelles, who had close connections to Breteuil. Then there was the Baron François de Goguelat, ADC to Bouillé and “Monsieur Gog” to the Queen, who used him as an emissary to Fersen. He was, said Marie Antoinette, “a man of action, rather zealous but devoted.”29 Now, however, it was a question of extending the network. A key role was to be played by the young Duc de Choiseul, Colonel of the Royal Dragoons, a relation of Louis XV’s minister.
The character of Choiseul was already the subject of criticism in the early stages of planning. At thirty-one Choiseul was young and “immature” for his command. Although fervent for the royal cause—he had honourably stayed with his regiment instead of emigrating—Choiseul was not a good organizer. “Inclined to be chaotic,” said Fersen to Bouillé, worried that Choiseul might commit some indiscretion. Nevertheless Choiseul had some useful attributes. He might be rash but he was both grand and rich and he could therefore pay for the necessary relays of horses along the way. So the values of the court were in a sense allowed to permeate strategy.30
These values also affected the composition of the coach party. Originally it had been expected that Madame Elisabeth would join in the separate escape of the Comte de Provence and his wife. (In order to travel conveniently, Provence, obese as he might be, had taken up riding again.) But in accordance with her own fixed principle not to leave her brother, Madame Elisabeth was now to be a member of the main party. This meant that five people were already designated for the berlin, with, theoretically, room for one more. At this point protocol and duty dictated, at least to the Marquise de Tourzel, that she should be that one. Had she not given her word never to leave the Dauphin’s side? As a result of which she slept in his room every night, or, on that first dreadful night back at the Tuileries, had sat sleepless on his bed as a guardian. In spite of her health—the Marquise suffered badly from renal colic—she would not desert him now in his hour of danger.31 And that was that.
While it is true that Marie Antoinette had counted on the Marquise in her secret plotting of early February, that was before Madame Elisabeth planned to travel in the berlin. At that point the Queen believed that the remaining space would be allotted to some responsible senior courtier, such as the Duc de Villequier or the Duc de Brissac, both in their mid-fifties, both accustomed to decision-making, both trusted by the King. The two Ducs had, however, recently emigrated, the King fearing reprisals upon them following the debacle of Easter Monday, although “ce bon” Brissac was lofty enough about facing peril. He had done what he had done, he said, for the sake of the King’s ancestors—and his own.32
There was no further attempt to insert a man of this calibre into the heart of the party, although it would certainly not have been physically impossible, given that two out of the designated six were children, one of them very small. For example, the Comte de Damas had expected that Vicomte d’Agoult, another loyal servant who had been accredited to him as an ADC by the King the previous autumn, would be fitted in.33 Instead, two equerries were to ride outside as bodyguards, along with a courier, the Comte de Valory. Two waiting-women, Madame Brunier for Madame Royale and Madame de Neuville for the Dauphin, were to follow in a light carriage. (Madame Thibault, for the Queen, had a separate passport to Tournai, from where she intended to join her mistress.) Count Fersen, who was to drive the berlin on the very first stage of its journey getting out of Paris, was to separate from the royal party after that was accomplished.
Fersen had originally expected to go the whole way to Montmédy, seeking permission from King Gustav to wear a Swedish uniform for the occasion, since his own French uniform was not with him, and he dared not order another one. But Louis XVI banned it. There has been some speculation as to his reason: did Louis XVI choose this moment for an uncharacteristic outburst of jealousy? It seems an unlikely development at this stage, given that Fersen was allowed to perform the risky task of driving out of Paris, with all the possibilities of discovery that that entailed. Perhaps it was snobbery, those court values again. The Duc de Lévis said afterwards that the role of coachman should have gone to “a grand French seigneur.”34 The most probable explanation lies in the fact that Fersen was a foreigner, for all his French military command, and everything was being done to avoid any foreign taint touching the King’s escape when he arrived at Montmédy.
Whatever the reason, the end result was a highly vulnerable composition to the berlin party: three adult royals who had spent most of their lives in a magnificent cocoon where ritual took the place of decision, a middle-aged woman in uncertain health and two children. As for Louis XVI, up until this point he had never even been involved at first hand in the question of the escape, having used a series of intermediaries; he was hardly prepared to act as leader in a crisis. The three male equerries were also comparatively junior and unused to command. It was important, under these circumstances, that nothing should go wrong.
The attitude of Mercy in Brussels and the Emperor in Austria did not become more encouraging throughout May and the early part of June, while the difficulties of raising money continued to bedevil the royal family’s preparations. Mercy bewailed the dangers of discovery—was it really the time for such a bold venture?—and Leopold continued to counsel prudence: “Calculate well the risks . . .” As late as 5 June, Leopold sent an indirect message that the royal family should stay in Paris and await rescue from outside. This provoked a horrified reaction from Marie Antoinette: “The glory of the escape must be ours . . .” But the Emperor did manage to embargo Artois from military action, telling him that he must obey his brother, while Louis XVI told the Duchesse de Polignac that he was being caused “a lot of disquiet” by Artois’ premature plans.35
The first date seriously put forward was 12 June, once a hostile chambermaid had finished her tour of duty. But that was the eve of the Feast of Pentecost and the King feared that there would be an inordinate amount of people in the streets. On that day the coiffeur Léonard went to the Tuileries at ten o’clock at night through a side door, and was admitted, armed with a note from the Queen, through the dark and deserted apartments. Then he was entrusted with the baton of a Marshal of France, to be given to the Marquis de Bouillé at Montmédy. He was also entrusted with the Queen’s personal casket of jewellery intended for Brussels, the Queen retaining only a set of pearls, some diamond drops and certain bijoux de fantaisie (coloured semi-precious stones) as well as the two diamond rings that she always wore. The Crown Jewels of France, being national property and liable to inspection, had already been handed over, to be inventoried by the National Assembly. Whit Sunday itself—13 June—was Marie Antoinette’s patronal feast of St. Antony, that day of celebration in her distant childhood. Now there were those in the Royal Chapel who sang, in Latin, “God protect the Nation!” as well as others who sang, “God save the King!”36
Discreet preparations made the next day included the stopping of the medicine with which the King had been purging himself since his spring illness, for the possible embarrassment it might cause him. Publicly, the King and Queen went to the opera, where payments for the royal box had been kept up through thick and thin. The new piece given, Candeille’s Castor et Pollux, was a revision of Rameau’s opera performed at their wedding twenty-one years earlier. Counsellor Blumendorf, left behind at the Austrian embassy, sent Mercy a coded message from the Queen that departure wasimminent; Mercy’s reaction was to advise Blumendorf to burn all compromising papers in his possession—and at the first hint of trouble, to lodge Mercy’s money and assignats (the new revolutionary currency) care of the banker Laborde.37
During the week that followed, a number of loyal servants of the monarch were given a tip-off for the sake of their own security. These included the Vicomte d’Agoult, one of the rejected candidates to accompany the berlin, who was now provided with an excuse to emigrate. Joseph Weber, the foster-brother, had a private letter from the Queen: “Take shelter, get out.” The Princesse de Tarante, Marie Antoinette’s beloved friend—“If anything happened to her I should never forgive myself”—was sent away, but the Princesse de Lamballe, judged to be in too close touch with her brother-in-law the Duc d’Orléans, was not warned in advance. Madame Campan, whose tour of duty stopped on 1 June, was told to go and take the waters, while hiding a portfolio of papers with the painter Anne Vallayer Coster, that member of the French Academy whom Marie Antoinette had patronized.38
The new date was 19 June. According to the Duc de Choiseul, who visited the Tuileries in disguise having had a meeting with Fersen, the King now objected to the fact that this was a Sunday and insisted on yet another day’s delay. Choiseul headed back to Metz. Finally it was to be Monday night, 20 June. “All is decided,” wrote the Queen to Mercy, still angry at not having heard from the Emperor about his troops advancing. “We go, Monday, at midnight, and nothing can alter that plan, we should expose those who are working for us in this enterprise to too much danger.”39
Throughout the day itself Marie Antoinette was desperate to preserve an air of normalcy about her routine. The King gave one last interview to Fersen; they would meet next, if everything went according to plan, when the Count was dressed as a coachman on the box of the berlin. But if the rescue failed, Louis ordered Fersen to get out himself, to reach Brussels and try to organize something from there. The Queen also said farewell to Fersen—temporarily, it was to be hoped—but still she shed a few tears. At five o’clock she then took her children on a drive to the beautiful Tivoli gardens belonging to Monsieur Boutin, a financier, and made a display of walking in public with them. It was under cover of this expedition that Marie Thérèse, aged twelve and a half, was instructed by her mother not to be surprised by anything that might shortly happen to her. If she seemed upset, the girl was to tell the accompanying waiting-women that her mother had scolded her. The six-year-old Dauphin was thought to be too young to be let into the secret, and then there was his indiscreet tongue. As she returned to the Tuileries, the Queen instructed the National Guards to be ready to take them on a similar expedition the next day.40
The Dauphin went up to his apartments for his supper at eight-thirty, and the Marquise de Tourzel joined him in his room, as usual, at ten o’clock. The Provences arrived from the Luxembourg for a family supper that night as was customary. Everyone was in high spirits, Provence said later, and full of hope because they all expected to be meeting again in happier circumstances in four days’ time. Provence himself was riding out—thanks to his new lessons—disguised as an English merchant with one gentleman in attendance; the target in his case was Belgium where the Archduchess Marie Christine and the Archduke Albert had returned a few days previously. It was at this meal that the King confided to his brother for the first time the secret of his Montmédy destination; he ordered Provence to join him, via Belgium, at Longwy. Josephine de Provence, who knew nothing about any plans until this moment, was instructed to flee separately with one lady in attendance. All four, King, Queen, Provence and Josephine, embraced tenderly at the end of the evening.41
The adult royals at the Tuileries went up to bed just before eleven. The King was last seen by his two valets, the senior Lemoine and the boy Pierre Hubert, at twenty past the hour, when the heavy curtains of his great bed were formally drawn.