Marie Antoinette

by Hilaire Belloc

In a small room whose window looked towards the east the Queen, with some few of her women, waited for the day. The ceiling was low, and its air of privacy gave some little respite from the strain of the eve and of the morrow. She lay upon a sofa, but she could not sleep; she spoke but rarely and that in low tones, and vaguely watched the night. With the first grey of the morning she rose, unrested, and bade them dress her boy, the child who alone in that great house had slept throughout the alarms. Then, under the growing light, she saw the Princess Elizabeth near her, who called her and took her to a window whence she might watch the rising of the sun. They stood together beside the open casement gazing at the city in silence.

Early as was the hour (it was but little past four) the tone of the air already promised a blinding summer’s day. The end of darkness had lifted no mist from the gardens. The last heats of yesterday blended with the new warmth of the sunrise that stretched bright red across the far suburbs where the populace stood to arms; behind the confused high roofs and spires of their capital the two Princesses saw advancing at last great beams of power and, enflaming the city, an awful daybreak. The younger woman was afraid and spoke her thought, saying that it looked like some great disaster, a burning spread before them.

Now that it was broad day the vigour of the Queen returned. She became again the will of the defence, and its leader—if it had a leader. She had not expected defeat even in the worst silences of the night; with the new day she was confident of success.

The commander of the Paris Militia, one Mandat, who had lately come by rote to that function, she knew to be sound. He had garrisoned the bridge-head by which alone the transpontine mob could cross the river to the palace; his cavalry also held the narrow arch at the Guildhall, by which alone the east end could come. Pétion, now become the Mayor of Paris, who had been summoned to the palace for a hostage, had gone—the Parliament had demanded him—but Mandat remained and his presence sufficed for her. Upon that presence she relied: when she came to seek him she found that he too had disappeared. The Town Hall had summoned him twice, and twice he had refused. At the third summons he had gone, suddenly, unescorted, “to account for his municipal command.” She began to wonder, but her hope was still maintained. She crossed to the room where she could find her husband, and she engaged upon the last act which freedom permitted her to command.

Still pursued by memories of what the Court had been, she determined to show the King to his subjects, and to present a sight which should exalt his soldiery and linger in history as the appeal which saved him.

The King obeyed her summons: he had better have remained for repose, for she found him but recently awakened from a stupor into which he had fallen at the end of the night when all his garrison had risen to the alarm.

The servitors, the gentlemen, the Militia, and the strict Swiss beside them saw, as they stood drawn up in a rambling line upon the western garden terrace, the figure for which they were to die.

He appeared at the main central door, weary, dishevelled, and, as it were, aged. His violet coat recalled the periods of mourning. The shadow in which he stood enhanced the sombre colour of his clothing and the pallor of his freckled face; his stoutness and his habitually sanguine temper rendered that pallor unnatural and suggested catastrophe or disease. His paunch was obvious, his hair deplorable. With such an introduction to their loyalty he wandered heavily from end to end of the line. There was a laugh—by one light-head he was covertly insulted as he passed—he was certainly of less and less moment in their eyes with every step he took in this unhappy review. When it abruptly ended, old Mailly went down stiffly on one knee and tendered his sword, then stiffly rose again. Again in the ranks some one laughed. From this scene the King returned to his room in silence.

She also, the Queen, returned from it angry and in tears, the more embittered that she herself had designed the thing.

The first news that met her on her return to the palace was the death of Mandat. As the details were told her she understood, though vaguely, what a blow had fallen. He had reached the Town Hall “to account for his command,” but had found there, not the hesitating constitutional body which he expected and which had a right to summon the head of the Militia. He had found instead a ring of new faces, the insurrectionary Commune: the Revolution, maddened and at bay, had glared at him across the lights of the hall. As he went down the steps to the street, blinded by that vision of terror, some lad shot him dead, and with that deed the whole plan of the defence crumbled. The bridge-head and the archway were abandoned.