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the Tuileries for the king and queen. ‘We saw Monsieur de la Fayette pass close by us, going to the king’s coucher,’ recalled Marie-Thérèse. ‘We waited there a full hour in the greatest impatience and uneasiness at my parents’ long delay.’ Eventually, to her alarm, ‘I saw a woman approach and walk around our carriage. It made me fear we were discovered’. However, it was her Aunt Elisabeth, disguised as a nurse to Baronne de Korff. ‘On entering the carriage she trod upon my brother, who was hidden at the bottom of it; he had the courage not to utter a cry.’

      At last the king was able to make his escape through a secret passage to Marie-Antoinette’s room and then down the staircase, straight past the guards, and out of the main palace entrance. For over two weeks before this, a friend, the Chevalier de Coigny, had visited the Tuileries each evening in similar clothes to those planned for the king’s escape. The guards, seeing the same corpulent figure in a brown and green suit, grey wig and hat, assumed this was the Chevalier de Coigny once more, and let him pass. With uncharacteristic cool, Louis even stopped in full view of the guards to tie up one of his shoe buckles. He had left a declaration behind in his rooms at the Tuileries, revealing why he had felt compelled to leave Paris. He argued that the country had deteriorated while he had not been in control; the deficit was ten times bigger, religion was no longer free, and lawlessness was commonplace. He called upon all Frenchmen to support him and a constitution that guaranteed ‘respect for our holy religion’.

      Everyone in the escape carriage was waiting for Marie-Antoinette. Just as she ventured out of the palace, another carriage passed right in front of her. It was Lafayette and some guards on their nightly security round. She stepped back quickly, pressing herself against a wall. They had not seen her, but she was so shaken that she mistook her route through the palace and was soon lost in a warren of narrow dark passages. For almost half an hour she frantically tried to get her bearings while at the same time avoiding the armed guards patrolling the corridors.

      Meanwhile, Lafayette approached the carriage again, as he left the palace. To their relief, he did not stop to check the passengers; it was not uncommon to see carriages waiting in the Petit Carrousel. When the queen finally made her escape, the king was so delighted, wrote Madame de Tourzel, that he ‘took her in his arms and kissed her’. Fersen urged the horses on cautiously and the carriage moved forward, slipping out of the Tuileries unnoticed.

      At last they made their way through Paris, and once through the customs post discarded their ‘escape’ coach for the especially built berline. Unfortunately, at the next change of horses Fersen had to leave the party. The king feared that if their escape were discovered, it would make their position untenable if a foreigner had escorted the royal party to the border. With the cool and capable Fersen now gone, they were much more vulnerable. The three bodyguards riding on top were junior officers, more used to receiving orders than giving them, and leading the expedition was the king, a man not noted for his decisive action. The berline, smartly painted in green, black and lemon and drawn by six horses, with its lavishly appointed interior, ‘a little house on wheels’, was the sort of vehicle that would draw attention to itself as it trundled through the countryside.

      Everything went as planned. Six fast horses were waiting at every staging post and by early morning, with Paris now several hours behind him, Louis smiled to think of his valet at the Tuileries, entering his bedroom and raising the alarm. ‘Once we have passed Châlons there will be nothing to fear,’ he told Marie-Antoinette with great confidence in his waiting troops. However, the berline was three hours behind schedule. Apart from the delay in leaving the palace, some of the relays had taken a little longer than they had planned. Worse still, while crossing a narrow bridge at Chaintrix, the horses fell and the straps enabling the carriage to be drawn were broken. They had to improvise a repair but more precious minutes were lost. None the less, they passed Châlons successfully at around five in the afternoon. Their armed escort should be waiting for them at the next stop: Pont de Somme-Vesle.

      As they approached the town, their eyes discreetly scanning the horizon from behind the green taffeta blinds, there were no soldiers in sight. The village was silent. The king did not dare knock on the doors to find out if the troops had been waiting there. He sensed something had gone terribly wrong. Had the escape plan been discovered? Were their lives now at risk? ‘I felt as though the whole earth had fallen from under me,’ he wrote later.

      The soldiers had, in fact, arrived in Pont de Somme-Vesle early in the afternoon under the leadership of the Duc de Choiseul. As they waited in the village for the king, the local people became alarmed at the sight of so many armed men. Since the peasants assumed that the soldiers were there to enforce the collection of overdue rent, a huge crowd gathered, armed with pitchforks and muskets, preparing to fight if necessary.

      When the king had still not arrived by late afternoon, Choiseul had panicked. He feared that the king’s escape had been foiled somewhere on the road and that the armed peasants would attack his men. Rashly, not only did he give orders that his own men must disperse but also passed these instructions to the other staging posts down the line. ‘There is no sign that the treasure will pass today,’ he wrote. ‘You will receive new instructions tomorrow.’ Barely half an hour after Choiseul’s departure, the king’s berline drove into the village.

      Without its armed escort, the carriage wound its way for a further two hours along the country road to the next town, Sainte-Ménehould, the anxious passengers inside still daring to hope that all was not lost. When they arrived, once again, there was still no evidence of any dragoons. At last, Captain d’Andouins, who had been in command of the soldiers in this village, approached the berline. The captain told the king briefly that the plan had gone awry but he would reassemble his troops and catch up with the king. Unfortunately, as he moved away, he saluted the king.

      The vigilant postmaster of the village, one Jean-Baptiste Drouet, noticed that the captain saluted the person in the carriage. Even more surprising, as the carriage departed, he thought he recognised the king leaning back inside. Drouet sounded the alarm. A roll call of drums summoned the town’s own National Guard, who stopped the king’s soldiers leaving the village.

      By this time, on the streets of Paris there was commotion as news of the daring escape spread. ‘The enemies of the revolution have seized the person of the king,’ Lafayette announced, and gave orders that the king must be found and returned at once to the capital. A dozen riders were found to spread this message quickly throughout France. Meanwhile, at Sainte-Ménehould, Drouet had obtained permission from the local authorities to set off at speed and detain the berline.

      In the lumbering berline, the royal family continued their way ‘in great agitation and anxiety’. By eleven o’clock that night they were approaching Varennes, just thirty miles from the border and safety. Unknown to the royal party, their driver had been overheard giving instructions to take the minor road to Varennes and this had been passed on to Drouet. With the pursuit closing in on them, they stopped, as arranged, in the upper part of Varennes for their fresh horses. These were nowhere to be seen and the postilions – responsible for the horses – refused to take the tired horses any further. A dispute began between the postilions and the drivers of the coach. In desperation, the king, queen and Madame Elisabeth stepped out, frantically searching in the pitch black for the new horses themselves. These were in fact in the lower part of the town, beyond the River Aire, being held by officers who had no idea the king was so near. Just at this point, Drouet came racing past the carriage, and went straight to find the mayor of Varennes to alert him to the royal fugitives in his village.

      The king finally persuaded the drivers that the horses must be in the lower part of the village and the berline set off down the steep slope. Suddenly there was a jolt. ‘We were shocked by the dreadful cries around the carriage, “Stop! Stop!” Then the horses’ heads were seized and in a moment the carriage was surrounded by a number of armed men with torches,’ recalled Marie-Thérese. ‘They put the torches close to my father’s face, and told us to get out.’ When the royal party refused, ‘they repeated loudly that we must get out or they would kill us all, and we saw their guns pointed at the carriage. We were therefore forced to get out’.

      As alarm bells resounded round the village, the royal party was led to the mayor’s house,

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