LITMIR.BIZ

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was lifted onto the horseshoe table at the centre of the stage. Rising to the occasion, he walked the length of the table, smiling at everyone as he carefully picked his way through the fine china and glassware. When the king and queen finally left, the theatre resounded with defiant shouts of ‘Down with the Assembly! Down with the Assembly!’ Yet there were spies everywhere and reports of the grand banquet spread like fire around Paris.

      It was an incendiary piece of news: while people were almost starving in Paris, banquets were apparently being organised for counter-revolutionaries in Versailles. Reports became wildly exaggerated. The feast was no less than an orgy at which red, white and blue cockades were crushed underfoot, to gleeful shouts of ‘Down with the nation!’ Did not the queen personally distribute white rosettes to each person at the feast? That week in Paris bread was becoming increasingly scarce, with many bakeries completely out of supplies. By Sunday 4 October bread riots even led to one baker being hanged, accused of hoarding flour in the expectation of higher prices. Increasingly bitter charges were made against the queen. It was widely rumoured that she was planning the counter-revolution and had given instructions for the stockpiling of flour at Versailles, hoping to crush the people with famine. The queen became a lightning conductor for much of the fury and frustration in Paris.

      Monday, 5 October. Church bells rang out around the Place de Grève by the Seine in Paris, traditionally the place used for executions and hangings. Women began to gather: the poissardes – or fishwives – and market women, servants and washerwomen converged on the square united by their desperate poverty and equally desperate need for bread, their anger and resolve strengthened by the sight of their own hungry children. Despite the rain, by early afternoon more than six thousand women had assembled, armed with anything they could find: pitchforks, scythes, kitchen knives, even skewers and sticks. Nothing could deter them; they had nothing to lose as they began to march the twelve miles to Versailles, with the now driving rain soaking their ill-clad bodies. Soon after they left, the National Guard of Paris, eager to support the women’s march, also began to assemble. By the late afternoon fifteen thousand National Guards set out for Versailles, reluctantly led by Lafayette.

      Marie-Thérèse, the queen’s daughter, still only ten years old, later wrote vividly of ‘that too memorable day’, which for her marked the beginning of the ‘outrages and cruelties’ that her family was to endure. That morning everything was tranquil at the palace; she was having her lessons, her Aunt Elisabeth had ridden out to her property at Montreuil, her father was hunting, her mother was in her gardens at Trianon. Madame Elisabeth was the first to hear that Paris was on the march and rushed to Versailles, in great agitation, to warn the queen. Her father raced back at three in the afternoon. The wrought-iron gates of the chateau were swung tightly shut against the people.

      Soon after this the army of women, soaked and splashed with mud, arrived at the gates, demanding bread and shouting violent abuse at l’Autrichienne. Marie-Thérèse was in no doubt of their intentions. ‘Their [principal] purpose was to murder my mother,’ she wrote, ‘also to massacre the bodyguards, the only ones who remained faithful to their king.’ Terror reigned at Versailles.

      The captain of the guard asked the king for authority to disperse the crowd. Louis could not bring himself to fire against women and agreed to meet a delegation. Their spokesperson, a demure seventeen-year-old called Pierrette Chabry, in spite of fainting at the critical moment, managed to get across the need for bread. The king reassured her that he had given orders already for any grain held up on the roads around Paris to be delivered at once. Gratefully, she asked to kiss the king’s hand.

      Outside the palace, the crowd were not so easily appeased and shots rang out. Marie-Antoinette begged Louis to flee Versailles with his family. The king delayed, tormented with indecision. ‘A fugitive king, a fugitive king,’ he said over and over again, unable to come to terms with such a momentous defeat. How could he be driven from his palace merely by a crowd of hungry women? He missed his moment. When he finally decided on flight, the crowd were prepared and would not allow him to depart. They mounted the carriages, cut the harnesses and led the horses away.

      As dusk fell, the crowd camped around the palace; bonfires were lit, a horse was roasted. The arrival of the National Guard of Paris was ambiguous. Would they protect the king or further the interests of the crowd? At midnight, Lafayette was presented before the king and reassured him that the National Guard would stop the mob from attacking the palace. Comforted by this, finally, at two in the morning the royal family attempted to get some rest. ‘My mother knew that their chief object was to kill her,’ wrote her daughter. ‘Nevertheless in spite of that, she made no sign, but retired to her room with all possible coolness and courage … directing Madame de Tourzel to take her son instantly to the king if she had heard any noise in the night.’

      However, at five in the morning, some women discovered that the gate to the Cour des Princes was not properly locked. There was a call to action. The crowd surged into the palace and entered the inner courtyard, the Cour de Marbre, by the royal quarters. Many rushed straight up the stairs leading to the queen’s apartments, yelling obscenities. A guard later reported that he heard: ‘we’ll cut off her head … tear her heart out … fry her liver … make her guts into ribbons and even then it would not be all over.’ One of the bodyguards tried to defend the stairway. He was stabbed with pikes and knives and dragged half alive into the courtyard where his head was chopped off with an axe. Inside the palace, according to Marie-Thérèse, another of the guards, ‘though grievously wounded, dragged [himself] to my mother’s door, crying out for her to fly and bolt the doors behind her’. Just at this point, the queen’s femme de chambre opened the door of the queen’s antechamber and was horrified to see this bodyguard holding a musket valiantly across the door as he was struck down by the mob. ‘His face was covered with blood,’ wrote Madame Campan. ‘He turned round and exclaimed: “Save the queen, Madame! They are come to assassinate her.” She hastily shut the door on the unfortunate victim of duty and fastened it with a great bolt.’ Seconds later, ‘the wretches flung themselves on him and left him bathed in blood’.

      Hearing firing and shrieks outside her door, ‘my mother sprang from her bed, and half dressed, ran to my father’s apartment, but the door of it was locked within’, wrote Marie-Thérèse. Within moments the rioters had burst into the queen’s empty bedroom and cut her bedclothes to shreds with their sabres and knives, to cries of ‘Kill the bitch’ or ‘Kill the whore!’ Those protecting the king did not realise it was the queen herself – not rioters – at the door. For several terrifying minutes she was trapped, hammering on the door, unable to enter the king’s apartments. ‘Just at the moment that the wretches forced the door of my mother’s room, so that one instant later, she would have been taken without means of escape … the man on duty … recognised my mother’s voice and opened the door to her.’

      In the frenzy of the night, the king was trying to reach the queen’s apartment to bring her to safety, Madame de Tourzel was trying to protect the Dauphin, while the queen went in a frantic search of Marie-Thérèse. Gradually, they all reunited in the Salon de l’Oeuil de Boeuf, where they could hear axes and bars thumping against the door as the guards tried to drive the rioters away with their bayonets. It was only when the guards had driven the rioters outside to the courtyard that Lafayette finally emerged with his men and managed to save the bodyguards.

      Outside in the marble courtyard, the crowd demanded to see the king. He emerged onto the balcony; but this did not appease the crowd, who began to shout for the queen. Inside, Marie-Antoinette turned white, ‘all her fears were visible on her face’. Dazed and numbed by the attempt on her life, she hesitated. Everyone in the room urged her not to face the crowd. Outside, the yells echoed ever more insistently around the courtyard and rose in a great cry: ‘The queen to the balcony!’ Summoning extraordinary courage, she stepped out, her hair dishevelled, in a yellow-striped dressing gown, her children by her side. For Marie-Thérèse and Louis-Charles, looking through the familiar gilded balustrade on the sea of hostile faces staring at them, it was a terrifying glimpse of the full force of the hatred of the French people. ‘The courtyard of the chateau presented a horrible sight,’ recalled Marie-Thérèse. ‘A crowd of women, almost naked, and men armed with pikes, threatened our windows with dreadful cries.’

      There

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