The coach and the cab with the ladies in waiting, seemed in the human sea like a ship with her tender. Incidents stirred up the sea into heaving furiously at times when the coach disappeared under the billows and appeared very slow to emerge.
Though it was six miles to Clermont where they arrived, the terrible escort did not lessen in number as those who dropped off were replaced by new-comers from the countryside who wanted to have a peep at the show.
Of all the captives on and in this ambulatory prison the worst exposed to the popular wrath and the plainest butt of the menaces were the unhappy Lifeguards on the large box seat; as the order of the National Assembly made the Royal Family inviolable, the way to vent spite on them by proxy, was to plague these men. Bayonets were continually held to their breasts, some scythes, really Death's, gleamed over their heads, or some spear glided like a perfidious serpent, in the gaps to pierce the flesh with its keen sting and return to the wielder disgusted that he had not drawn more blood.
All at once they saw a man without hat or weapon, his clothing smeared with mud and dust, split the crowd. After having addressed a respectful bow to the King and the Queen, he sprang upon the forepart of the carriage and from the trace-chain hooks upon the box between the two Lifeguards.
The Queen's outcry was of fear, joy and pain. She had recognized Charny.
Fear, for what he did was so bold that it was a miracle he had reached the perch without receiving some wound. Joy, for she was happy to see that he had escaped the unknown dangers he must have run, all the greater as imagination was outstripped by the reality. Pain, for she comprehended that Charny's solitary return implied that nothing was to be expected from Bouille.
In fact, while Charny had reached the royalists at Grange-au-Bois on a horse he picked up on the road, his attempt to guide the army ended in failure: a canal which he had not noted down in his survey, perhaps cut since then, was brimful of water and he nearly lost his life, as he did his horse, in trying to swim across it. All he could do, on scrambling out on the other side from his friends, was to wave them a farewell, for he understood that the cavaliers as a mass could not succeed where he had fallen short.
Confounded by the audacity of this recruit to the lost cause, the mob seemed to respect him for this boldness.
At the turmoil, Billet, who was riding at the head, turned and recognized the nobleman.
"Ha, I am glad that nothing happened him," he said: "but woe to whomsoever tries this again, for he shall certainly pay for the two."