It was ten at night; the hundreds of candles guttered and glimmered over a handful of exhausted men upon the benches of the Parliament; Mangin handed his message to the Chair, and his ride was done. Good Lord! what a ride!
Beauharnais was in the Chair: remarkable for this, that his widow married Napoleon.
Beauharnais read the message: “The King is taken!”
As Parliaments go that Parliament was drastic and immediate; it came to its conclusion in two hours—a space of time that meant thirty miles to a courier. It nominated, somewhat after midnight, three commissioners: Barnave, Pétion, Maubourg—of the centre, of the left, and of the right—and with them Damas for military orders. Each young, each growing in fame—Barnave and Pétion already famous—they left together with the morning.
It was Thursday, Corpus Christi. Every village of the Marne valley was garlanded and upon holiday, the church doors stood open to the humming air of midsummer, the peasants, most of them at games, some few in procession or coming out from Mass upon that great Feast, made every stage of the road alive; as the sun rose to noon, the population of the villages on either slope of the river valley poured in like rivulets down the chalky lanes, swelling the mob upon the great highway. By the afternoon the throng had so largely increased that the carriage of the Parliamentary Commissioners could no longer go at the trot; it was walked, as was walked, surrounded by a larger, dustier, much fiercer crowd, that other carriage, the berline, which was crawling to meet them across the flat miles of Champagne.
The hills grew higher, the dale narrower, as their slow progress brought them past Dormans, and gradually, with the multitude about them, to Mareuil. The setting sun was on the famous vineyards and on the fringe of forest far above: they were anxious perhaps whether they would meet the returning fugitives while yet it was light, and so be spared the risk of confusion and perhaps disaster in the darkness.
But that meeting could not now be far off. Rumours first, then couriers, going before the gradual advance of the King’s captors, announced his advent, and the three Commissioners wondered what they would see. Reports had already moved them, true details in the midst of much fable, of invasion and of fancied massacres and fires ... the mob at Chalons, the sleepless night of consultation, the irruption of a violent militia from Rheims, the terrible slow march on the Epernay road with its jeers and anger and threats of death; the violent jostle at Epernay itself—the fear that the prisoners might never reach the capital. They had heard composedly of these things, with clearer and clearer detail as the later passages of the long agony were given: they were now very near the meeting.
The hot day had fallen to its end, and evening was come quite pure over the high plateaus that bound the valley; it was darker upon the water-meadows of the valley floor when they saw before them, a long way off, the dust, and heard the noise, when they came near and smelt the incalculable crowd that roared round the carriages of the King.
The advent of the Commissioners of Parliament threw an abrupt silence over the French, ever avid for worship: these three dissimilar men, one of whom alone approached greatness, were taken as transubstantiate with the National power. In such an attitude, near the doors of the berline, in the centre of the compact thousands that were massed, hats off and reverent in gaze, between the hillside and the river, Pétion read the Decree of the Assembly.