The Court had forgotten the popular conception of the Monarchy; but the populace necessarily preserves a longer memory than the rich. The thing was a menace, upon the whole not ill-humoured: a violent recollection that the King was the servant of the common weal, and its symbol, something to be handled, met, and perhaps ordered. The mob, in whom atheists can see no more than a number of poor men, cried out its significant cries, against “Mr. and Mrs. Veto,” making a popular jest of this public power. But in those moments when one jest perhaps might have put the King at the head of popular emotion again, he and his wife remained no more than what the decline of the Monarchy had made them; individuals in peril, and courageous; not the Nation incarnate.
If any Angel had for its function the preservation of the French Crown and Nation, that Angel, watching such a gulf between the people and the Monarchy, must have despaired of the latter’s hope and of the former’s survival: nevertheless, despite that divorce, the French people after grievous wounds have survived.
The last group which that roaring torrent of the rabble saw was the Queen and her children, her friends, especially Madame de Lamballe and the governess, the Duchess of Tourzel, a soldier or two, a minister and one or two others, crowded in the recess of a window behind a great table which had been pushed into the embrasure to defend them. The little heir to that Monarchy which had failed to understand sat on the table, very much afraid, and the Queen put on his head with loathing the red cap of liberty which the mob demanded. The day was sweating with heat, the cap was thick and dirty, and Santerre, who was there, passing them forward by bands in front of the table, a popular leader of the crowd, seems to have ordered that it should be removed. It was already nearly dark; it was half-past eight before that violent but not tragic tumult had subsided, and before the last of the street people went back out of the palace, which they thought rightly a public thing, on to the public paving which at least was still certainly theirs.
Outside, during all that night, all the talk was of the war.
When would the invaders cross the frontier and when would the first shock come?
CHAPTER XVI
THE FALL OF THE PALACE
From half-past eight in the evening of the 20th June 1792 to eight in
the morning of the 10th August 1792