It is difficult to conceive the welter of the time: distracted orders flying here and there along the hundred miles of cordon that stretched from Ardennes to the channel: orders contradictory, unobeyed, or, if obeyed, fatal. Commands shifted and reshifted; civilians from the Parliament carrying the power of life and death and muddling half they did; levies caught up at random, bewildered, surrendering, deserting; recruits too numerous for the army to digest; a lack of all things. No provisions entered Maubeuge.
July dragged on, and Maubeuge could hear down the west wind the ceaseless booming of the guns round Valenciennes. Upon July 26th, Dubay, the Representative on mission for the Parliament, sent to and established in Maubeuge, heard an unusual silence. As the day drew on a dread rose in him. The guns round Valenciennes no longer boomed. Only rare shots from this point and from that were heard: perhaps it was the weather deceived him. But all next day the same damnable silence hung over the west. On the 30th he wrote to the Parliament: “We hear no firing from Valenciennes—but we are confident they cannot have surrendered.” They had surrendered.
So Valenciennes was gone!... Condé was gone.... Maubeuge alone remained, with the little outpost of Le Quesnoy to delay a moment its necessary investment and sure doom.
The officer in command of Maubeuge awaited his orders. They came from Paris in two days. Their rhetoric was of a different kind from that in which Ministers who are gentlemen of breeding address the General Officers of their own society to-day. The Committee of Public Safety had written thus: “Valenciennes has fallen: you answer on your head for Maubeuge.”
Far off in Germany, where that other second avenue of invasion was in dispute, the French in Mayence had surrendered.
So July ended, and immediately, upon the 1st of August, the defiant decree was thrown at Europe that the Queen herself should be tried. So closely did that decision mix with the military moment that it was almost a military thing, and at half-past two on the morning of the 2nd the order reached her: she in turn was to go down the way so many had begun to tread.
She showed no movement of the body or of the mind. Night had already brought her too many terrors. The two women were awakened. The decree of the Convention which ordered the transference of the Queen to the Conciergerie for her trial was read. She answered not a word, but dressed herself and made a little package of her clothes; she embraced her daughter gently, and bade her regard Madame Elizabeth as her second mother; then stood for a moment or two in the arms of that sister-in-law who answered her in whispers. She turned to go and did not look backward, but as she went out to get into the carriage which was to carry her across the City, she struck her head violently against the low lintel of the door. They asked her if she was hurt, and she answered in the first and only words that she addressed to her captors that nothing more on earth could give her pain. The carriage travelled rapidly through the deserted streets of the night, the clattering of the mounted guard on either side of it. It was her one brief glimpse of the world between a prison and a prison.
As the Queen drove through the night, silent as it was, there reached her those noises of a City which never cease, and which to prisoners in transition (to our gagged prison victims to-day as they cross London from one Hell to another) are a sort of gaiety or at least a whiff of other men’s living. These noises were the more alive and the more perpetual in this horrid August dark of ’93 because a last agony was now risen high upon the Revolution; the news had been of defeats, of cities fallen, of Valenciennes itself surrendered: so that the next news might be the last. All night long men sat up in the wine-shops quarrelling on it; even as her gaolers drove her by, she saw lights in dirty ground-floor windows and she heard from time to time snatches of marching songs. It was the invasion.
