He never saw her again.
A fortnight later he wrote his King in Sweden, detailing all that they had told him.
Before he could reply or act, the King of Sweden had been shot in a masked ball at Stockholm, and some days later, as the reader knows, he had died.
The Declaration of War had not only broken the original plan of the Queen; it had changed from a general and partly passive to a particular and active terror the life of Paris around her. Nothing had yet appeared to show as a reality what all knew in theory, the extreme peril of the nation, the military certitude inspiring the Allies, the despair increasing among what was left of the French Regulars. There had indeed been desertions immediately following the declaration of war, especially desertions of the German mercenaries, in bulk. A skirmish, or rather a panic upon the frontier, had also given evidence of the rot in the jumble of armed men whom the Revolution could summon. The first tiny action—it was hardly an action at all—had seen mutinies and the massacre of officers. Paris once more rose and fermented, and there was a surging around the walls of the palace. The enemy had not yet crossed the frontier; but in the short breathing space before he should appear, and while the royal family were holding a fortress, as it were, for their own security until that enemy should arrive, Parliament put as a sort of ultimatum to the King a demand for the execution of two decrees: one against the Clergy who would not subscribe to the Civic Oath; a second in favour of the formation of a camp of 20,000 volunteers under the walls of Paris.
The error of uniting in one requisition two such diverse pleas only posterity can recognise. For the men of the time there was a plain link between either demand, for the recalcitrant Clergy seemed to them nothing more than anti-nationalists, and it seemed to them that nothing but an anti-national desire for the occupation of Paris by the foreigner could make the King hesitate to permit the formation of the camp of volunteers.
It was upon the 19th of June that the King published his veto against both these bills or projects of the Parliament, behind which lay the violent opinion of active Paris.[[24]]
[24]. And what was more significative, the whole of the little wealthy reactionary minority was opposed to the projects, and signed a petition in proof of its opposition.
What follows is well known. Paris rose, and rising poured into the palace. It was the 20th of June: the anniversary of the flight: the summer solstice fatal to the Bourbons.
It has been said that the rising was artificial and arranged. The same nonsense is talked of the St. Bartholomew. No one who has seen such things can believe them artificial. They are corporate things. There was little violence, though there were many arms among those thousands upon thousands; and as they poured through the rooms, which opened one into the other like a gallery, they were not much more (save for their rough clothes and their arms) than the same populace which had demanded for generation after generation, and had obtained, the right to see, to visit, to touch their public King.