With her left hand, she led her son. The courtiers flowed before and after the trio: she reached the theatre doors just as the glasses were being emptied for the twentieth time to shouts of:
"God save the King! Long live the Queen!"
The applause burst like a mine exploding when the King and Queen and Prince Royal were seen on the floor. The drunken soldiers and heated officers waved their hats on their swords and shouted. The band began to play from the Opera of Richard Coeur-de-lion, Blondel's song of "Oh, Richard, oh, my King!" which so transparently alluded to the King in a kind of bondage that all voices took up the song.
The enthusiastic Queen did not see that the soldiers were intoxicated: the surprised King had too much good sense not to see more clearly, but he was weak and flattered by this reception, so that he let the general frenzy overcome him.
Charny, who had drunk nothing but water during the part of the banquet which he attended, stood pale at this participation of the Royal Family in what would now be a historical event by their presence.
But his apprehension was still greater when he saw his brother Valence, the hussar lieutenant, approach the Queen and speak to her when encouraged by a smile. It was consent, for she unpinned from her cap the cockade she was wearing and presented it to her imprudent Knight. It was not even a royal rosette, but that of Austria: the black insignia of the foreign foe! This was not rashness but treason to the country. So mad was the concourse that they to whom Valence Charny presented the black cockade, tore off their white ones and they who were wearing the tricolors trampled them under foot.
The exultation became so high that the august guests had pains to return to their rooms without trampling on those who prostrated themselves in their passageway.
All this might have been overlooked as the freak of an orgie, but after the Royal Family departed, the guests turned the banquet hall into a town taken by assault. The soldiers whooped and as the bugles blew the charge—against what enemy? the absent nation! they climbed the balconies where the ladies held over helping hands.
The first soldier to reach the boxes was a grenadier whom a nobleman decorated with the ribbon he was wearing in his buttonhole: the Order of Limburg, that is, of no value. But all the sham battle was fought under the Austrian colors while the national one was shouted down. Only a few dull protests were heard, drowned under the trumpet blasts, the hurrahs, and the music of the band. The tumult came menacingly to the crowd at the doors. Astonished at first, they were soon indignant as it was known that the tricolor had been spurned and the black streamer flaunted in its stead.
An officer of the National Guard had been badly beaten in the scuffle to uphold the honor of the latter, but it was not known that Charny, the Queen's favorite, had taken all the blame of the outrages on himself.