As he was buckling the last of the fresh horses, a man dressed with care and with some appearance of wealth approached him, and insisted upon what was, by the Constitution, his duty; but Viet gave him no change and was still silent. The man, dressed with care and with some appearance of wealth failing to move this very minor functionary, went off to the Mayor, Chorez by name; there was no time to lose; horses are unharnessed and others harnessed in but a little delay. The Mayor was as silent as Viet; he took refuge in that common excuse of temporisers and cowards—he demanded “proof.” It is probable that the well-dressed man with some appearance of wealth went off upon the frontier road. We do not know, for we do not even know his name; but when a little before five o’clock the berline had halted a moment at the foot of a rise, surely it was the same man who passed it rapidly and muttered to the royal family as he passed: “You have planned ill!”
The town of Chalons lies upon the border of an extensive plain peculiar in French history. Here, as tradition will have it, Attila’s army was destroyed by the Romans and the Barbarians whom the Romans had trained. It is a wide and desolate space, which the prosperity succeeding the Revolution has transformed, but which, as we watch it to-day from a distant height, still bears something of its ancient poverty—to the eye at least—so level is it and so treeless. Far off to the eastward runs the wooded wall of Argonne, very faint and small; at the base of this the town of Ste. Menehould.
From Chalons to Ste. Menehould by the straight road bridging the plain is a long day’s march, twenty-five miles or more: and there is very little between. The passage of this bare, direct and dusty stretch was, the fugitives might imagine, the very last and the least of the risks they were to run. Chalons, which alone they feared, had not detained them, the emptiness of the country-side renewed or rather rendered absolute their confidence. Within an hour they would be at the culvert of Somme-Vesle, an utterly deserted spot with nothing but the stables of the post to mark it.
At this point of their successful journey let the reader note in what order the guarding of the flight had been conceived by Bouillé.
The first stages of it—till beyond Chalons—were to be quite bare of soldiery, lest suspicion should arise and Paris receive the alarm; but once well past Chalons, the hundred miles and more accomplished, small posts of cavalry, mostly German mercenaries, were to be placed, upon one pretext and another, at intervals along the way, until at Varennes Bouillé’s own son should meet the fugitives with his troop, and eastward from Varennes the remaining miles to Montmédy, which was their goal, they would need no special guard; they would be in the thick of Bouillé’s army.
The first of these small posts was one of German mercenary Hussars under the Duc de Choiseul, a nephew of the old statesman of Louis XV. It was to expect the King at Somme-Vesle at one—giving as an excuse for its presence escort for a convoy of bullion—but an exact keeping of the time-table was urgently necessary, for it would be perilous for the foreign troops to hang about indefinitely in these eastern villages.
It was at the lonely post-house Somme-Vesle, then, that the first soldiers were to be looked for by the King; there, as it had been arranged, the first Hussars would be seen, posted upon the lonely road; these would close up immediately behind the carriage for a body-guard. With each succeeding stage of the shortening trial troop after troop would fall in and join that barrier and increase it, Dragoons at Ste. Menehould, more at Clermont, till, before the evening gathered, the Royal Family would have between them and the National Government of Paris or the young patriots of the villages of the Marne, a guard of their own soldiers, an escort warding them into the heart of the frontier army that was to be their salvation.
The hour passed quickly—it was not yet six—when the King, who had watched with his old interest in maps every detail of the road, and had followed it with a guide-book upon his knee, heard the brake upon the wheels; a slight descent ended, and the carriage drew up. A long farmhouse, with stable-door and garden-gate shut tight and with no head at a window, stood, French fashion, all along the kerb. They looked from the window, noted the desertion of the fields, the silence of the house, and the broad paved way, and asked with a growing anxiety, what they feared to know, the name of the place.
The third Gentleman of the Guard, Valory, who had at each stage gone before them to have the horses ready, came to the door and told them it was the posting-house of Somme-Vesle: of soldiers not a sign; a few peasants, slouching off to the fields.