Marie Antoinette

by Hilaire Belloc

Under the level shafts of that sunset the belated berline approached Ste. Menehould. They passed the lonely tavern upon the height called “At the Sign of the Moon”; they saw for a moment upon their left a mill not yet grown famous—the mill of Valmy. The shadows lengthened, and just as the sun disappeared they rattled full speed into the main square of the town.

The green blinds were up to admit the cool of the evening. The Queen looked from her window, without concealment, and saw the gossiping and curious crowd which a French town collects upon its public place at the end of day. She saw the soldiers—some of them, she thought, saluted; she saw their officer. He came up and addressed her respectfully in his garlic-accent of Bearn. He certainly saluted fully, and she bowed her acknowledgment of the salute. She saw and heard no more, unless perhaps she saw, on the King’s side and through the open window of it, a young man still heavy with the swagger of the dragoons (for he had served) and still insolent with the brave insolence of soldiers; clear in eye, hooked in nose, bronzed, short, alert and, as it were, itching for adventure. If she did see this figure, she saw it for but a moment: the horses were in, the whips were cracking, the carriage was on the move: he had thus for a moment passed her window, coming in from the fields, where he had been mowing; he had passed for a moment, and was gone. It was Drouet, the acting post-master of the place, and the son of the old post-master. He had noted that the yellow coach was huge and heavy; he had carelessly said to his postillions, “Don’t kill the cattle”; then he had gone off: it was but a moment of time.

They were off, a top-heavy haystack of a thing, rolling full speed up the hill beyond the river, and right into the advancing darkness. As they went, rising high with the road, through the orchards and into the forest and the hills, they heard, far behind them, one pistol-shot and then another, the distant noise of a crowd, high voices, and the shuffling of horse-hoofs. But the cries grew fainter, and they had soon left all far behind. They gained the complete silence of the high wood, under the stars. They began the ascent of Argonne.

But already in Ste. Menehould all was known. The girl who had said “It was the King” was now but one of many. The popular Council had met, and hardly had it met, and hardly had the crowd outside in the square appreciated the rumour, when those came in from Neuville village who had an hour or two before watched the movement of Choiseul and his Hussars, and the retirement of the cavalry over the bridge of Neuville into the forest seeking Varennes. Their report added certitude to the general clamour: “Choiseul and his Hussars had hung about the posting-house of Somme-Vesle for hours!” “They had taken a guide and were in the woods behind Ste. Menehould at that moment.” The troops in Ste. Menehould itself must have the same purpose. There was no doubt at all it was the King. And to this news there was added news, that Choiseul and his Hussars were keeping in touch with the main road, scouting back from time to time, ready and watching.

The handful of cavalry at Ste. Menehould were French, not German. When Leonard had passed through, half-an-hour before, and had shown Choiseul’s note to the officer in command, that Captain had bid his men unsaddle and take their ease. They were now filled with the evening’s fraternity and wine. There was an attempt to gather them against the towns-people. It failed. And as the twilight lessened one resolution after another was taken in the Town Hall with the rapidity that marked the action of the Revolution everywhere, from Paris to the smallest village. The municipal drum beating and the tocsin noisy against the hills, vote after vote proceeded. The Captain of the troop was arrested; the troop itself disarmed. The despatch of a courier to pursue and intercept the King was decided, and that courier chosen and named.

It was upon young Drouet, for his horsemanship and his courage, that the choice fell. He took with him a companion, Guillaume, an inn-keeper, such as he himself was; once a dragoon, as he himself had been. They saddled the last two horses left in the stable and thundered off up the long hill that rises from the town into Argonne, down the sharp ravine of the Islettes, and onwards along the great eastern road—the road to Metz—whither all thought the King was bound. An hour ahead of them on that same road rattled the cabriolet and rolled the huge berline.

There was a moon, but the clouds covered her. The darkness of this, the shortest night of the year, deepened for its brief hours, but there was still a glow in the north as they neared, towards ten o’clock, the post of Clermont. Drouet heard voices in the darkness before him; it was his own postillions on their way back from the end of the stage, and Drouet hailing them, heard that the travellers, when the relay horses were harnessed, had given the order to leave the main Metz road and to turn up northward to Varennes.

The military temper of this people! The halt had not lasted a moment, but in the moment Drouet had formed his plan.

He had not, it seemed, a stern chase before him, a mere gallop up the Metz road. The quarry had doubled, and along its track were Guards. There were troops at Clermont as there had been at Ste. Menehould; there would now be troops every few miles until the headquarters of the treason should be reached; it was his business to warn the citizens against Bouillé, to avoid the outposts of that commander, to cut by a corner way across the elbow ahead of the royal carriages, to intercept them and to thwart all. He took at once, therefore, to the wood upon his left; he took it where now the railway most nearly approaches the road, about half a mile beyond the level crossing, and plunged with his companion into its long deep rides. He galloped up the steep to a farm he knew upon the summit, risking holes and fallen trunks of trees. Once there he followed, along the crest of the ridge, a green lane of immemorial age that runs along the summit. It was well past ten. Up on the ridge of the forest these two men galloped steadily and hard through the night, with high trees like a wall on either side. Three hundred feet below, upon the open plain that skirts the wood, the berline swayed at speed along the paved high road. So the race ran. The fugitives slept unwarned and deeply as they drew on to Varennes through the silent darkness. On the hills above, with every beat of the hoof upon the turf, the two riders neared and they neared. Upon who should win that race depended the issue of Civil War.

On the issue of that race all the future depended: all France and all Europe. The riders had eleven miles of rough woodland in the dark to cover, an hour at most for their ride. Below them on the high road, with a start of two miles and more, their quarry was hurrying, rolling to Varennes. If the wheels and the smooth road beat them, it was Austria over the frontier, France without government, defeat, and the end of their new world; but if they in the woodlands beat the wheels on the smooth road, then the Revolution was saved.