The eruption of the mob had been as rapid as the bursting of a storm. The immediate forming of the La Fayette’s Militia Guard and its victory proved almost as rapid. The first shot had been fired at six, probably by one of the Guards at the central door: within an hour the Militia had cleared the rabble out, even the tenacious pillagers were dislodged, and the populace stood, thrust outside the doors and massed in the narrow marble Court beneath the King’s windows, in part discomfited but much more angry, and with a policy gradually shaping in the common mouth: a policy expressed in cries that “they would see the King,” that “the King was their King,” that “they must bring back the King to Paris.”
The morning had broken clear and fine and quite calm after the rain of yesterday and the wind of the night; its light increased with the advancing hours: the energy of the mob remained—and in the midst of it a long-bearded man, half mad, an artist’s model, was hacking off the heads of the two Guards who had been killed when the palace was rushed.
The Queen looked down upon the flood of the people from the windows of her husband’s room. Her sister-in-law was at her shoulder, her little daughter close to her left side, and in front of her, standing upon a chair, the Dauphin was playing with his sister’s hair and complaining that he was hungry: and all the while the mob shouted for the King.
The King showed himself. They would see the Queen too: and La Fayette, still their adviser and still trusted in a bewildered way as a sort of saviour, told her it was imperative that she should come. She went, therefore, to the great central room of all that house, the room which had been the state bedroom of Louis XIV., and stepped out upon the balcony of its central window, holding her children by the hand. The mob roared that they would have no children there. She waved them back into the room, and stood for some moments surveying the anger of the unhappy thousands packed beneath, with the new and serene day rising in the eastern heaven behind them. Her hands were on the rail of the balcony. She hardly moved. There were weapons raised in the tumbling crowd: one man aimed at her and then lowered his musket. La Fayette came forward, took her right hand, knelt and kissed it, and the little scene was over.
How could she have known until that moment that there were such things?
It was certain more and more as the day grew to noon that the Court must obey and that the populace had morally conquered. In a little inner room the King and Queen sat together, and together they decided (or, the King deciding, she could not but decide in the same necessity) that they would return to Paris. She turned to her husband and said: “Promise me at least this: that when next such an occasion shall come, you will fly while yet there is time.” Louis, to whom the idea of flight was hateful, let his eyes fill with tears, but did not answer.
Louis’ decision to return was a wise decision. The popular demand was not to constrain but to possess their King. It was not until later that the changing mood of Paris and its success seemed to make of that moment of October the beginning of the King’s captivity; with some little difference in persons and in wills, this yielding to what all the national sentiment demanded might even yet have made of the Crown once more an active national emblem and of the person of the King a leader.
It was half-past one when the carriages with difficulty came to the palace. It was two before the march to Paris began.
The road from Versailles to Paris falls and falls down a long easy valley which the woods still clothe on either side of the very broad and royal highway: the woods rose in that autumn afternoon dense and unbroken for many miles. Two things contrasted powerfully one against the other: the howling turbulence of the crowd, the stillness of nature all around. It was as though some sort of astonishment had struck the trees and the pure sky, or as though these were spectators standing apart and watching what tempests can arise in the mind of man.