The season was late; the foliage was but just turning; the gorgeous leaves hung tremulous in that still air: none fell. The masses of colour in the thickets of Viroflay were tapestried and immovable; and all this silence of the world was soft as well. The air had about it that tender, half-ironical caress which it possesses on perfect autumn days in the Parisis, and the sky was of that misty but contented blue which they know very well who have wandered in that valley upon such days. Cleaving through such beatitude, a long line of shrieking and of clamouring, of laughter and of curses, of the shrill complaints of women, of the moans of pain and of fatigue, mixed with the sudden wanton discharge of muskets, went, for mile after mile; the populace were drawing back their King to Paris.
THE TUILERIES FROM THE GARDEN OR WEST SIDE, IN 1789
It is not seven miles from the palace to the river—not another four to what were then the barriers of the city. They took for these eleven miles all but seven hours. The coaches crawled and pushed through the swarm of the angry poor. The Queen, her husband and her children, Monsieur, Madame Elizabeth, the governess of the royal children—all sat together in one great coach rumbling along in the midst of insult and of intolerable noise. From where she sat, facing the horses near the window, the Queen could see far off at the head of that interminable column two pikes slanting in the air. The heads of the Guards who had saved her were upon them.[[16]] She could see here and there, close under those trophies, glints of yellow, where certain of the Foot Guards were marched like prisoners along, with the blue of the national Militia flanking and escorting them on either side; and, mixed in the crowd, the Mounted Guardsmen were there, prisoners also, with the Mounted Militia holding them. Of all that followed after she could see nothing; but she could hear. There was the rumbling of the wheels of the two cannon, the great sixty waggons loaded with flour, and she could hear the cries that cursed her own name. The afternoon wore on. The sun lay low over the palace they had left. It was dusk by the time they reached the river; it was dark before they came to the barriers of the town.
[16]. Or else they were not: there are two versions.
There, by the same gate of entry which the first of the Bourbons had traversed two hundred years before, the Monarchy re-entered that capital which, for precisely a century, it had, with a fatal lack of national instinct, abandoned. Bailly, the Mayor, met them under torches in the darkness and presented the keys of the city. The Royal Family must needs go on, late as it was and they lacking food, to the Hotel de Ville, that the crowds of the city might see them. It was not until ten o’clock that the unhappy household, the little children broken by such hours and so much fasting, found themselves at last under the roof of the Tuileries.
The Tuileries were a barracks.
The huge empty line of buildings, which, had they been thus abandoned to-day, would have been made a Sunday show, had in that age been put to no use; they had become in the absence of the Court but a warren of large deserted rooms. Furniture was wanting; there was dust and negligence everywhere; the discomfort, the indignity, the friction were but increased by the hasty swarms of workmen who had been turned on in a few hours to fit the place for human living. No more exact emblem of the divorce between the Crown and Paris could be found than the inner ruin of that royal town-house, nor could any deeper lesson have been conveyed—had the last of the Bourbons but heeded it—than the reproach of those rooms.
As for Paris—Paris believed it had recovered the King. The month and more that followed was filled with a series of receptions and of plaudits. The Bar, the University, the Treasury, last of all the Academy—all the great bodies of the State were received in audience and joined in a general welcome. Parliament was at work again before the end of the month, first in the Archbishop’s palace upon the Island, later in the great oval manège or riding-school which lay along the north of the palace gardens. It was there that all the drama of the Revolution was to be played.[[17]]
[17]. Those curious to retrace the very sites of history may care to know exactly where the manège stood, since in the manège, as a great phrase goes, “La France fit l’eternel.” The major axis of its ellipse corresponded to the pavement to the north of the Rue de Rivoli under the Arcades, and the centre of this axis was where the Rue Castiglione now falls into the Rue de Rivoli. Its southern wall slightly overlapped the line of the present railing of the Tuileries Gardens; its northern was about in a line with the northern limit of the property now occupied by the Continental Hotel.