The Peasant and the Prince

by Harriet Martineau

First, numbers of the servants were sent off, to get everything made ready for the king, who was to follow on the 18th, to dinner. The servants were allowed to go without opposition; so that on the 18th, the apartments at Saint Cloud were ready, the dinner was cooking, and the attendants looking out along the road to Paris, wondering why the carriages did not appear, and fearing the dinner would be spoiled. Nobody came to eat it, however, unless it was given to the National Guard, a detachment of whom had gone forward, to be on duty about the palace.

At one o’clock, the great royal coach, drawn by its eight black horses, drove up to the palace-gate in Paris; and immediately the alarm-bell from a neighbouring church-steeple began to sound. The family were almost ready; but multitudes of people, summoned by the bell, collected presently, and declared that the coach should not move. Lafayette and his officers came up, and did what they could in the way of persuasion: but the crowd said, “Hold your tongues. The king shall not go.” They shouted, on seeing one of the royal family, “We do not choose that the king should go.” The royal party, however, entered the carriage, and the coachman cracked his whip; but some seized the reins and the horses’ heads; others shut the gates: and a multitude so pressed round the heavy coach that it rocked from side to side. Such of the royal attendants as attempted to get near for orders were seized, their swords taken from them, and their persons roughly handled. The children must have been grievously terrified; for even, their mother, so calm in danger, passionately entreated from the carriage-window that her servants might not be hurt. The National Guards did not know how to act. Lafayette and his officers rode hither and thither, trying to open a way: the driver whipped, the horses scrambled and reared; and the people pressed closer and closer, so that the great coach rocked more and more;—all in vain, it did not get on one inch.

All this, amidst tremendous noise and confusion, went on for an hour and three-quarters. Then Lafayette rode up to say he would clear the way with cannon, if the king would order it. The king was not a person to give any order at all; and least of all, such an order as that. So the royal family alighted, and returned into the palace, while the coach went back to the coach-house, and the eight black horses to their stalls.

The king and queen were not sorry for what had happened. This act of violence must prove so plainly to all the world that they were prisoners, that all the world would now think them justified in getting off, in any way they could. They might now devote themselves to the one great object of escape.

Poor little Louis must have been very sorry. He had seen the hay-making at Saint Cloud, last summer: and now he must have been pleased at the thought of the sweet fields and gardens of the country, and the woods just bursting into leaf. There were many woods about Saint Cloud. He knew nothing of armed nobles lurking there to save him and his family. What he thought of was the violets and daffodils, and fresh grass and sprouting shrubs,—the young lambs in the field, and the warbling larks in the air. And now, when actually in the carriage to go (his garden tools probably gone before), he had to get out again, and stay in hot, dusty, glaring Paris; and, what was far worse, in danger of seeing every day the sneering, angry faces which had been crowded round the carriage for nearly two hours; and of hearing, wherever he walked, the cruel laugh or fierce abuse with which his parents were greeted when they attempted to do anything which the people did not like. No doubt, the little boy’s heart was heavy when he was lifted from the coach, and went back into the palace.

How much happier he might have been if he had been one of the children he had seen hay-making at Saint Cloud, the year before! Or even as the child of a Paris tradesman he might have been happier than now, though the children of the tradesmen of capital cities seldom have a run in the fields, or gather violets in the fresh woods of April. But, as a shop-keeper’s child, he might at least have seen his father cheerful in his employment, and his mother bright and gay. He might have passed his days without hearing passionate voices, and seeing angry faces; without dreaming of being afraid. It was now nothing to him that he was born a prince, and constantly told that he was to be a king. He saw nothing in his father’s condition that made him think it a good thing to be a king; and he would have given all the grandeur in which he lived, all the ladies and footmen that waited upon him, all his pretty clothes, all his many playthings, all the luxuries of the palace, to be free from the terrors of the revolution, and to see his parents look as happy as other children see theirs every day.

He did not know it, but preparations were from this time going on diligently for an escape,—for a real flight, by night.

We must not suppose that in this, any more than other affairs, the king showed decision, or the queen knowledge and judgment. They could not show what they had not: and it was now too late for the king to become prompt and active, and for the queen to learn to view people and things as the rest of the world did, brought up, as she had been, in ignorance and self-will. She often complained (and we cannot wonder) at having to live and act among people who showed no presence of mind and good sense: but, really, the king, and everybody concerned, might well have complained of the ruin which her folly and self-will brought upon the present scheme,—the last chance they had for liberty. Not that she only was to blame. There were mistakes,—there was mismanagement without end; showing how little those who are brought up in courts, having everything done for them exactly to their wish, are fit for business, when brought to the proof.

The case was just this. Here were the king and queen, with a sister and two children, wanting to get away from Paris. They had plenty of money and jewels; plenty of horses and carriages; plenty of devoted servants and friends:—friends at hand, ready to help; friends at a distance, ready to receive them; and every court in Europe inclined to welcome and favour them. The one thing to be done was to elude the people of Paris, and of the large towns through which they must pass.

In such a case as this, it seems clear that, in the first place, everything at home should go on as usual, up to the very last moment; that there should be no sign of preparation whatever, to excite the suspicion of any tradespeople or servants who were not in the secret.