[39]. Even as it was, and in spite of his failure before Dunkirk, the Duke of York had plenty of time to bring back his remnant and help Coburg after that failure, and to have joined him in front of Maubeuge before the French attempted the relief of that town. The English commander could easily have been present at Wattignies, and would probably or certainly have prevented that miracle. But no one foresaw the miracle. Coburg did not ask York to come till the 7th of October. York did not march till the 10th, and even then he thought he had the leisure to waste a week in covering forty miles!
The combined forces spent the close of the week after Valenciennes had fallen in driving off such of the French as were still in the open under Kilmain. A few days later forty-seven battalions, of whom a full seventh were English and Irish men, marched off under York for Dunkirk, while Coburg at his ease sat down before the little town of Le Quesnoy, the last fortified support of Maubeuge upon the west. Upon the same day he brushed the French out of the wood of Mormal, the last natural obstacle which could protect Maubeuge when Le Quesnoy should have fallen. It was the 17th of August—but already in Paris there had passed one of the chief accidents of History: an accident from which were to flow all the tactics of the Great War, ultimately the successes of Napoleon, and immediately the salvation of the Revolution: Lazare Carnot had been admitted to the Committee of Public Safety.
In Paris the Queen endured that August: and, isolated from the world, she did not know what chances of war might imperil her through the fury of a defeated nation or might save her by the failure of the Terror and its martial law.
As she thus waited alone and in silence the pressure upon the Republic grew. Lyons had risen when Marat died. Vendée was not defeated: before the month ended the English were in Toulon.
As the hot days followed each other in their awful sameness she still declined: her loss of blood never ceased, her vigour dwindled. A doctor of great position, the surgeon Souberbielle,[[40]] visited the cell and denounced its dampness for a danger: nothing was done. She lived on, knowing nothing of the world beyond and above those dirty walls, but vaguely she hoped or imagined an exchange and to be reunited with her children—to survive this unreal time and to find herself abroad again with living men. No change or interruption touched the long watch of her soul until, when she had already passed three weeks and more in nothingness, that inspector of police who had already befriended her in the Temple, Michonis, entered; and a certain companion, spare and wild-eyed, was with him. It was a Wednesday—the last Wednesday in August; the month had yet three days to run.
[40]. He was famous for his operations for the stone, sat upon the Jury that condemned the Queen, was summoned for his art to Westminster Hospital, wondered in old age why the Restoration would not give his European fame a salaried post: thought it might be a fear of his infirmities of age: danced high and vigorously before the committee of medical patronage to prove, at ninety, his unimpaired vivacity, was refused any public salary, and died—some years later—a still active but disappointed man, “fearing that his politics had had some secret effect in prejudicing the royal family against him.”
These two men who so visited her were in league to help her, and fantastic fortune had put an official of the city at her disposal for escape.
The whole scene was rapid—she had barely time to understand the prodigious opportunity. She noticed in the hand of Michonis’s companion a bunch of pinks—perhaps she half recognised his face (indeed, he had fought in defence of the palace), she failed to take the flowers and he let them fall behind the stove—and the while Michonis was covering all by some official question or other. It was not a minute’s work and they were gone: but in the flowers, when, after her bewilderment, she sought them, she found a note. Its contents offered her safety. Michonis (it ran), trusted as an official, would produce an order to transfer her person to some other prison; in the passage he would permit her to fly. The note asked for a reply.
She had no pen or pencil, but she found a plan for answering, for she took a pin and pricked out painfully these words on a slip of paper: “I am watched; I neither write nor speak; I count on you; I will come.” The policeman of her guard—not the corporal—had been bought. He took the pricked slip of paper from her and gave it to the porter’s wife, her friend. Next day Michonis called for it, knew that the Queen was ready, laid all his plans, and on the Monday, by night, appeared at the door of the Conciergerie with his official order for the removal of the Queen.