With excuses upon their part and voluble instance from the King, Pétion and Barnave managed to get themselves into the carriage, for the Queen took the Dauphin on her knee, the Princess stood before her aunt, and Pétion, decorously straightened between the Duchesse de Tourzel and Madame Elizabeth, faced Barnave, who sat, more generously large, between the King and Queen.
PÉTION
At last the Commissioners could watch that driven group. Three nights without sleep, two of agony; three days, one of flight, two of intolerable heat, insult, violence, and a snail’s-pace progress, had left them feverish, and yet—as sufferers are when all is quite abnormal—interested in tiny things, and careless. Their linen was dirty in the extreme—the Queen’s grey dress stained, torn, and roughly mended; the King’s brown coat a very dusty brown; but their faces were clean—they had washed at Epernay—and they were not unlively.
It got darker and darker. The noise of the crowd outside calmed a little, though from time to time a great rustic head would lumber in at the window to stare at royalty. The Queen, who had talked rapidly from the moment she had seen her deliverers, Madame Elizabeth, who had caught and pressed Pétion’s arm and clung in a foolish ecstasy of terror, kept up a ceaseless chatter—and the King, against his wont, joined in. They had not meant to leave the country—far from it. “No” (from the King); “I said so positively. Did I not?” (appealing to his wife). “We are really anxious about the three Guardsmen. We went to Mass at Chalons this morning—but it was constitutional, I assure you.” Only once did the reserve of an earlier (and a later) time appear upon the Queen: it was when Barnave hinted that one of the men on the box was Swedish, when Pétion added that the man who had driven the coach from the Tuileries was a Swede—called?... he pretended to hesitate about the name: the Queen had said, “I am not in the habit of learning hackney coachmen’s names,” and, after saying it, was, for perhaps the first time in two hours, silent. Then she forgave them—forgave Barnave at least—and talked on in lower tones. She was getting to like Barnave. The little boy, playing with the buttons on Barnave’s coat, made out the letters on them: “It says ‘We will live free or die.’” He was proud to read such small letters so well. He repeated the phrase, but no one of his elders answered him.
Pétion, upon the back-seat, felt an arm upon his in the darkness. He remembered the same arm as it held him close when he had met the berline two hours before. He saw under the moonlight the white and small hand of Madame Elizabeth lying near his, and it occurred to him[[23]] that this very pious, very narrow, very distant girl either suddenly loved him or feigned love in order to corrupt his republican ardour—for he was already a republican.
[23]. He has recorded the sensation at length, in print.
It is objected with indignation that women of birth do not so demean themselves with country lawyers. The indignation is fatuous, but the objection is well found. Women of birth have indeed so profound a repugnance for his class that even the bait of a great fortune, though it often compels them to a marriage, will hardly overcome the loathing, and if they must yield to passion it is more commonly to favour a groom than a solicitor. But this woman had no such frailties. She was saintly, foolish, well bred and bewildered. She may have made herself as pleasant a companion as it was in her power to be, for by such easy arts the rich, when they fall, will always try to appease their conquerors. More than that she certainly did not do. The Queen knew better in what way to command her captors; she fixed upon Barnave, and within the first day of their companionship she had drawn him from that other camp into hers.
They slept at Dormans—so much as they could sleep with the mob howling all night in the square outside. Next day, Friday, the third of that return, the fourth of their martyrdom, they continued the Paris road. The day was yet hotter than the yesterday had been, and the violent and the out-o’-works from Paris began to join the crowd. At evening the tower of Meaux stood up before them against the red sky.
There, at Meaux, Marie Antoinette took a turn with Barnave; long, quiet looks, a familiar and continued conversation, a stroll in the garden alone and decent confidences during the night, finally captured Barnave. He was, from the moment of their return to Paris, the Queen’s.