Catching one unfortunate guard by himself, he was dragged down the stairs; and his head, instantly severed from his body, was mounted on a pike, which rather served to irritate than glut the fury of the monsters, who were still hunting after blood or plunder.
The most desperate found their way to the queen’s chamber, and left for dead the man who courageously disputed their entrance. But she had been alarmed by the tumult, though the miscreants were not long in making their way good, and, throwing a wrapping-gown around her, ran, by a private passage, to the king’s apartment, where she found the dauphin; but the king was gone in quest of her: he, however, quickly returning, they waited together in a horrid state of suspense. Several of the guards, who endeavoured to keep back the mob, were wounded; yet all this happened in a very short space of time.
The promptitude and rapidity of this movement, taking every circumstance into consideration, affords additional arguments in support of the opinion, that there had been a premeditated design to murder the royal family. The king had granted all they asked the evening before; sending away great part of the multitude delighted with his condescension; and they had received no fresh provocation to excite this outrage. The audacity of the most desperate mob has never led them, in the presence of a superiour force, to attempt to chastise their governors; and it is not even probable that banditti, who had been moved by the common causes of such insurrections, should have thought of murdering their sovereign, who, in the eyes of the greater number of frenchmen, was still shrouded by that divinity, tacitly allowed to hover round kings, much less have dared to attempt it.
La Fayette was quickly roused; and, sending his aides-de-camp to assemble the national guards, he followed the ruffians with equal celerity. They had actually forced the king’s apartment at the moment he arrived; and the royal family were listening to the increasing tumult as the harbinger of death,—when all was hushed,—and the door opening a moment after, the national guards entered respectfully, saying they came to save the king;—‘and we will save you too, gentlemen,’ added they, addressing the body-guards, who were in the chamber.
The vagabonds were now pursued in their turn, and driven from room to room, in the midst of their pillage, for they had already begun to ransack that sumptuously furnished palace. From the palace they repaired to the stables, still intent on plunder, and carried away some horses, which were as quickly retaken. Every where they pursued the body-guards, and every where the generous parisian troops, forgetting their piqued pride and personal animosity, hazarded their lives to save them.—Till, at length, order was perfectly established.
Such was the termination of this most mysterious affair; one of the blackest of the machinations that have since the revolution disgraced the dignity of man, and sullied the annals of humanity. Disappointed in their main object, these wretches beheaded two of the guards, who fell into their hands; and hurried away towards the metropolis, with the insignia of their atrocity on the points of the barbarous instruments of vengeance—showing in every instance, by the difference of their conduct, that they were a set of monsters, distinct from the people.
Whilst nature shudders at imputing to any one a plan so inhuman, the general character and life of the duke of Orleans warrant the belief, that he was the author of this tumult. And when we compare the singularly ferocious appearance of the mob, with the brutal violation of the apartment of the queen, there remains little doubt, but that a design was on foot against the lives of both her and the king.—Yet in this, and most other instances, the man has wanted courage to consummate his villany, when the plot he had been following up was ripe.
It is, perhaps, not the least noble faculty of the mind, to question the motives of action, which are repugnant to the feelings of nature, outraging the most sacred feelings of the human soul. But it is the developement of a character, that enables us to estimate it’s depravity; and had the conduct of that wretch ever varied, the veil of mystery might still have remained unrent, and posterity, hearing of the judgment of the châtelet, would have believed Egalité innocent. The court had become highly obnoxious to the nation, and with it the king was implicated, in spite of the efforts of Mirabeau, and some other favourites of the people, to render him respectable; so that there wanted not a plausible: reason for suspecting, that the duke might aspire at obtaining the regency, though Louis was neither massacred, nor allowed to escape. But the present scheme being disconcerted, fear, for a while, damped his ambition: and La Fayette, finding that these suspicions still formed a pretext to excite commotions, with a view to quiet the minds of the parisians, seconded the importunities of the duke, who wished to visit England, till the affair blew over. The king, therefore, was prevailed on to give him a nominal commission, to be made use of as a plea to obtain liberty of absence from the assembly, of which he was a member.
He was certainly very apprehensive of an investigation of the business; and revenge and ambition equally giving way to personal fear, he left his colleagues to finish the constitution, and his agents to recover his fame, by representing the story as a calumny of the royalists, against whom the public were sufficiently enraged to credit any aspersion.
The bold tone he assumed the july following was far from being a proof of his innocence; because it was not very probable, that a cunning man should take his measures in such a critical affair without due precaution.—On the contrary, he would labour to sink so entirely into the back-ground of the plot, as to render it difficult, if not impossible, for him to be perceived. And this was practicable to a man, who was willing, in the promotion of his purpose, to dissipate the most splendid fortune.