At first it was a set of drunken songs far off, and then a clamour in the streets. At last, quite close, separate cries and loud demands, and hammering at the gates; and next a nasty crowd burst in. They were not very numerous, but they were drunk and mad with blood; and they dragged with them the body of the only woman killed during all those horrors, a corpse stripped, perhaps mutilated, and separate from it a head with powder on the hair. This head, thrust upon a pike, some of the foremost raised before the window; and Louis, slow of vision though he was, recognised it for the Princesse de Lamballe’s. His wife was at the table behind him. The window was high, deep and distant. Louis cried suddenly, “Prevent the Queen...!” But, whether she had seen or had not seen that dreadful thing, the Queen had fainted.
Without, Danjou, acting as promptly as a soldier, was standing on the steps, giving the mob all the words that came to him of flattery, rhetoric, or menace; and getting them at last to scramble down from the heaps of broken brick and rubble they occupied, and to go, taking their trophy with them. Within, her sister and her husband attended the Queen.
She was quite broken down. The night fell, but again she could not sleep. She passed the dark hours sobbing with pain, until yet another day had dawned upon her. And still a long way off in Paris the massacres continued. Still, through the first week of September and the second, advanced the army of the invaders which was to save them as it came victorious; or at the worst it came at least to destroy their enemies and the city which had dared to imprison them.
News did not reach the prisoners save at such intervals, or in such broken whispers, or by such doubtful signs that they could make little of it: but whether they knew much of that news or little, the army was irresistibly advancing: the French troops which were to oppose it were increasingly falling in value: the passes of Argonne were forced—all but one. Dumouriez was turned; and by the 20th of September Prussia and Austria were present, armed, four days’ march from the gates; and there was no force at all between them and Paris. That same day the Parliament in Paris met the menace by declaring the Republic.
Upon the morrow the most extreme of the extremists, Hébert, the cleanly and insane, looked in to mock them coldly; while outside the booming voice of Lubin proclaimed in a most distinct proclamation, phrase by phrase, that the French Monarchy was no more. The King went on reading, the Queen went on sewing; for such was the occupation of either as they heard those words. The slow hours of the equinox passed without news or disturbance in the city; but meanwhile, out where the armies were, a prodigious and as yet unexplained thing had happened. Austria and Prussia and the Emigrants had failed. The strong cities which they had easily taken, the passes of Argonne which they had almost as easily forced, the contemptuous and just strategy by which they had marched round the worthless forces of the National Defence and now stood between it and Paris—all these by some miracle of war had availed them nothing: and in a muddy dip before the windmill of Valmy the whole campaign had failed.
I wish I had the space here to digress into some account of that inexplicable day. I know the place, and I have well comprehended the conditions of soil and of gunnery under which the Prussian charge failed even before its onset. Nor could any study more engross, nor any examination prove more conclusive, than an analysis of the few hours in which this accident of European history was decided upon the ground which, centuries before, had seen Gaul, and therefore Europe, saved from Attila. But neither the limits nor the nature of my subject permit me; and it must be enough to say that on the 21st of September at Valmy, a few yards from the road whereby the King had fled to Varennes, by the failure of one charge the invasion failed. In a few days the retreat of the army that was to rescue or to avenge the King and the Queen had begun; and from that moment the nature of their imprisonment changed.
Upon the 29th of September pens, ink and paper were taken away from the prisoners, and on the evening of the same day there once more entered the cleanly and insane Hébert, who read to them the order that Louis XVI should be separated from his family and imprisoned in another set of rooms in the Tower.
Those relations which had been at first ridiculous, later tolerated, and though affectionate not deep, between the Queen and her husband, her dislike of his advances towards the Liberal movement, her angry amazement at his patriotism in the early days of the revolt,—all these which are too often read into her last emotions in his regard, must be in part forgotten when we consider how they all lived together behind those thick walls. Every human soul that left the group was something lost to them for ever. Of the two that had last left them, the head of one, shown murdered, had been seen at the window. And moreover, this order to separate the King meant almost certainly some form of approaching disaster. The children also were a bond. For they knew nothing of whatever early phantasies, whatever recent disagreements there had been between the wife and the husband, and they must now have their father hidden from them.