THE vanguard of the mob came pouring in.
They swarmed through the arches under the Long Gallery, and the main body of them still came swinging up to it along the river-side.
The sun, well up and brazen, touched the metal about them and sent dancing gleams from pikes and curved hooks bound to staves. Before that uneven crowd the long shadows of morning stood out sharply, thrown along the uneven paving of the narrow quays. They sang or jested; they jostled and could not order themselves. There were no soldiers among this first batch of the insurrection, nor even a body of the half-trained Militia, nor had they any guns. So they swarmed through the public archways under the Long Gallery, so they packed and surged in the square of the Carrousel. Before them were the walls of the central courtyard of the palace and a great gate shut against them.
Of the fourteen guns that the palace commanded, five faced them in this court, ready to fire should the crowd burst in. Three were advanced in the emptiness of the square; two, in support, were just outside the main door, whence the central staircase of the Tuileries swept up to the royal rooms. At that door the lads who had climbed the outer walls of the courtyard could also now see some few of the Guard drawn up in formation outside the palace door and already retiring; the rest were massed behind these in the hall: the solid body of Swiss who were the kernel of the defence.
These thousand mercenaries and more, immovable men, had in their attitude something at once of the grotesque and the terrible. Stiff and strict as lifeless things in their red and white, tight hose and muskets erect and firm, they were ready first for the volley, then for the charge, and every man (in that time, when ten rounds was thought a day’s provision) carried forty rounds upon him. The pale, unmoved faces of the mountaineers were here and there diversified by some livelier face, their rough-cut hair by the careful barbering of the wealthy, for there were gentry of the King’s who had borrowed uniforms of the Guard and had slipped in among them and now stood part of the silent rank.
The roaring of voices in the Carrousel beyond the walls of the courtyard increased continually; the outer noise of the sea of Paris rose with it every moment, and on the first floor, where the Royal Family and some few advisers sat, all this gathering crowd outside the courtyard walls was watched by those who were responsible for the unity of the nation in face of the advancing invasion, and for the person of what was still the King. Chief of those so responsible was Roederer. He stood there for that new public authority, the elected county-body which alone had legal power; he considered only the necessary survival of the King. Already, at dawn, he had advised that the King should leave the defence to others; now, hours later, as the mob and its noise swelled and swelled, he insisted once more. It was but a personal act whose value in the military thing that followed only those present could judge, nay, only those who knew, as only contemporaries can know them, the personal forces at work. There was no capitulation here.... But in the judgment of the greatest master of war, Louis leaving the defence by those few yards determined the issue; for it was Napoleon, himself perhaps a witness, who said that if the King had then been seen on horseback before the palace, his troops would have had the better of the fight. But the King did what he thought was necessary for the moment of peril, and guarded his family. He said, “Let us go.” As he passed through the corridors of the palace down to the main doors upon the garden side, he said to those who heard him, “We shall be back soon.” He believed it and they also. None saw in this precaution an element of defeat, and yet that sort of shadow which doom throws before itself as it advances vaguely oppressed the palace.
The King, the Queen, and their children, Madame de Lamballe and Madame de Tourzel, the governess, the handful of Ministers and friends, had nothing to do with the military scheme of the defence. Louis had thought it prudent, and his advisers also, that those few steps should be taken between the palace and the Parliament House that lay beyond the palace garden, and as they went along the broad garden way between the formal trees, few thought, if any thought, that those ten minutes in the privacy of their grounds were final. Later, all called it the beginning or the presage of defeat.
The King walked solidly on in front by himself, murmuring from time to time that the leaves had begun to fall very early that year. The Dauphin, holding the Queen’s hand, trotted by her side and amused himself by pushing away with his feet those same dead leaves, until, the sickly little chap growing weary, a Grenadier of the Royal Militia, which formed their escort, lifted the Prince in his arms against his blue coat. The Queen’s face, mottled red and white in the violence she did herself by that retreat, was now disfigured by tears, and the crowd beyond the palisades of the garden, seeing royalty thus taking refuge, broke through a gate and made a hubbub round the Parliament door. But a couple of dozen members made a way through them and met the Royal party, assuring them of an asylum within. With some little pushing, complaints and speechifying they got them into safety, and the King so took his place beside the Speaker in that great oval of the riding-school in the early but hot and sunlit morning, the Queen and the children behind him upon the Bench of the Ministers; and there the Grenadier gently put down the child.
CONTEMPORARY PRINT OF THE FIGHTING IN THE COURTYARD