Long before the King, with his delays of loyalty and his breakdowns, had reached Chalons, just upon three, under that veiled sky and upon a dip of that monotonous, dead straight, white road, close to the bridge and posting-house of Somme-Vesle, half a troop of Hussars were up and mounted. They were Germans, but their foreign gutturals were not heard by the sleepy ostlers of the place, for, in some disorder, the little knot of mounted men were at attention. At their head, upon his finer horse, sat Choiseul, and with him Aubriot, a lieutenant of Dragoons, and old Goguelat, used to commissariat, to organisation, and to plans. They pointed westward up the Chalons road, looking along its right line between the parallel perspective of its trees. Choiseul especially strained his eyes to see whether no rising dust or no two distant specks of a large vehicle and a cabriolet following it might announce the advent of the King, but there was no sign upon the road.
He had so sat his horse for hours.
It was eleven when his light travelling-carriage had trotted up to the stables,[[22]] his German soldiery had joined him before noon, and by one, as the time-table of the plan had been given him, the berline should have been there.
[22]. He had come from Paris, where he had made the last arrangements, and with him and in his carriage he had brought Leonard, the Queen’s hair-dresser. This garrulous fellow he had sent forward down the road to Montmédy, and his mysterious hints at important secrets did much to spread the news. See also Appendix G.
An anxious hour of waiting brought no news. Two o’clock passed. Yet another hour of growing anxiety upon the soldiers’ part, of growing suspicion in the inn. And now it was three o’clock; but there was no sign upon the road.
Already the hoofs of these fifty mercenaries had been clattering and pawning for three hours and more round and about the long white wall of the posting-house. The ostlers, the few and sleepy ostlers, were not fond of such visitors, nor were the peasants in the fields.
Choiseul had much to think about beside the punctuality of the fugitives as he sat his horse there straining his eyes along the road. The people of the place had asked him familiarly, in the new revolutionary manner, what this body of horse was for; they might have added, “Why was it foreign, mercenary horse?” Such a question was certainly implied.... Why had an army of the frontiers thrown out a point of its cavalry-screen towards its base against all the known rules of war, instead of towards the frontier which it was to line and defend?... If it was for orders or for manœuvring, why did they stick close to this one posting-house?... Troops, even unsuspected troops, had been known to commandeer food-stuffs without payment: and the peasantry were sullen.
All these things were passing in the minds of the French peasants there, and Choiseul, who was also French, knew what was passing in their minds. There was something more: the country-side was armed. The Revolution had made of every village a tiny, ill-trained but furnished military post; of every market-town a section, with two guns and a team of gunners; of every city a rough volunteer garrison, with ammunition and with arms, without discipline for a campaign, but in a momentary scuffle possessed of the power to wound.
Had even this been all, what Choiseul did might not have been done; but it was not all. There had always been present in the minds of these officers upon the frontier the permanent indecision and fears of the King. The date of the flight had been postponed and postponed. Choiseul himself, who had been in Paris with the King twenty-four hours before, was aware of that indecision and those fears.