After the meal, the King would slump in his chair and doze, or go to his apartments to do so. Antoinette would retire to her apartments where she would talk with her friends. Fersen was a frequent visitor, but she did not see him alone. Their passionate love-making belonged to the Trianon, and each was aware of the longing in the other to return there. The Tuileries offered them no opportunities.

Fersen was continually anxious for Antoinette’s safety. He, even more than Antoinette, found it difficult to forget that terrible drive from Versailles on October 6th, and his active mind was concerning itself with one thing: escape.

Antoinette knew this; and in it was her comfort.

The family took their supper together; and with them would be Provence and Josèphe, Adelaide and Victoire (strangely subdued these days) bewildered, clinging together, wondering what was happening to their world.

The Queen often suggested a game of cards or billiards – anything to prevent those fearful silences, those sudden bursts of conversation which would often end in the hysterical tears of Adelaide and Victoire.

Then early to bed – the King to his apartments, the Queen to hers. They had not shared a bed since Fersen had become her lover.

Louis slept soundly, for no disaster could rob him of his sleep or his appetite; but in her bed Antoinette lay sleepless, listening to the tramp of the guards, afraid to sleep lest she dream of those hideous shouts, lest she see in her fantasy those leering faces close to hers; afraid to sleep lest they should come upon her while she was unaware, as they had at Versailles. Always waiting, listening, wondering what that night and the day which followed would hold.


* * *

The Parisians were ashamed of the march from Versailles, for it was soon realised that those screaming hordes did not represent the people of Paris. The poissardes and the women of the Market even went so far as to present a petition to the Tuileries in which they firmly stated that they had no part in the outrage, and that they considered justice should be done to those who were responsible for it.

It had become clear to many of those who sincerely wished for reforms that the revolution, which they had hoped to bring about by peaceful means, was in the hands of the rabble. Some of these, including Lally-Tollendal, left the country because they did not wish to be involved in shameful massacres.

La Fayette, suspecting the march to Versailles to have been organised by Orléans, declared that he was an ardent supporter of liberty and he believed that if Orléans were successful there would be no liberty in France. There was no point in replacing one absolute monarch by another.

He sought out Orléans and, in the blunt way of a soldier, told him of his suspicions.

‘I suspect,’ said La Fayette, ‘that you, Monseigneur, are at the head of a formidable party which plans to send the King away – perhaps worse than that – and proclaim yourself Regent. I am afraid, Monseigneur, that there will soon be on the scaffold the head of someone of your name.’

Orléans professed his utmost surprise. ‘I understand you not,’ he said.

‘You will now do your utmost to have me assassinated,’ retorted La Fayette. ‘If you attempt this, be sure you will follow me an hour later.’

‘I assure you that you wrong me. I swear this on my honour,’ said the Duke.

‘I must accept that word,’ said La Fayette coolly, ‘but I have the strongest proof of your misconduct. Your Highness must leave France or I shall bring you before a tribunal within twenty-four hours. The King has descended several steps from the throne, but I have placed myself on the last. He will descend no further, and to reach him – and the throne – you will have to pass over my body. I know you have cause for complaint against the Queen – so have I – but at such a time we must forget all grievances.’

‘What proof have you of my complicity in the events of October?’ demanded the Duke.

‘Ample proof. Aye, and I can get more. I know, Monseigneur, that you had a hand in organising that rabble which marched to Versailles – mostly men dressed as women, not good Parisians, but hirelings, foreigners and rough men of the South, your paid agitators. It has been suggested that you were with them to guide them to the Queen’s apartments.’

‘This is absurd.’

‘Then stand before the Tribunal and prove it.’

The Duke shrugged his shoulders. The events of those October days had failed; he saw that. The King was still the King; the Queen was still alive; they were prisoners in the Tuileries, it was true, but the Tuileries was now the Court; and many good citizens had become disgusted by the methods of the mob.

He said: ‘These are dangerous days. Any man may be accused of he knows not what. I will leave the country for a while if that is necessary.’

La Fayette then went to the King, who was very distressed to hear of the suspected perfidy of his cousin.

‘A member of my own family,’ he murmured. ‘Is it credible?’

‘It can be proved,’ said La Fayette, ‘that certain cries were heard among the October mob. Not only “Vive le bon Duc d’Orléans”, Sire, but “Vivre notre roi d’Orléans”. You are most unsafe while Orléans lives.’

‘He is my cousin,’ said Louis helplessly.

‘He would have seen your head on the lanterne, Sire.’

Louis shook his head. ‘Let him be sent to England. He is fond of the English, and they of him. He will then be out of our way. And let it be said that he goes on a mission for me. I would not wish it to be known that I suspect a member of our family – my own cousin – of such conduct.’

So with the exile of Orléans, and with him the writer Choderlos de Laclos whose writings had done so much to stir the people, there was quiet in the city – though a brooding quiet – pregnant with smouldering danger.

There remained one formidable leader of the Orléans group: Mirabeau.


* * *

The events of October had had their effect on Honoré Gabriel Riquetti, Comte de Mirabeau. He was an aristocrat by birth and it was because, in view of his past, he had been rejected by the nobility, that he had offered his services to the Third Estate. His great energy, which he liked to remind people was equal to that of ten men, and his powers as both speaker, writer and diplomat, had been at the service of Orléans. Now Orléans was exiled, and Mirabeau believed he saw a way of welding the King and the people together; and he determined to use all his vast energies to this purpose. Believing that he alone could save France, he wrote to the King offering his services.

‘I should,’ he wrote, ‘be what I have always been, the defenders of monarchical power regulated by the laws, and the champion of liberty as guaranteed by monarchical authority. My heart will follow the road which reason has pointed out to me.’

The King did not answer his letters. Antoinette had seen them and she remembered that Mirabeau had been one of those men who had helped to foster the revolution and bring to the royal family much humiliation and terror. She reminded the King of this and pointed out that such conduct, by a man of noble birth, was doubly treacherous.

Mirabeau waited for his replies. He was now obsessed by his plan to save France and was becoming more and more convinced that he was the only man who could do so. He thought of his past, of all the years of loose living which lay behind him. He remembered all the poisonous obscenities which he had written; he thought of the numerous mistresses who had loved him in spite of his somewhat terrifying appearance (his face was hideously marked by smallpox, and his thick hair stood out in an untidy thatch about it); he remembered his reckless extravagance and numerous bankruptcies; and desperately he wished to make his mark upon the world before he died. He also wished to satisfy his creditors. He was suffering from a life of excesses and in spite of that unflagging energy he knew he had not long to live. He was obsessed by his desire to set right what he had helped to start. He wanted to turn the bloody revolution into a peaceful one.

And it occurred to him that there was one person who was preventing this: the Queen.

For she was now the King’s chief adviser, and Mirabeau knew that the King with his high ideals was not the man to make the necessary decision.

Mirabeau thereupon began courting the Queen’s attention, and the letters he wrote to Louis were intended to flatter her.

‘The King has but one man to support him,’ he wrote. ‘That is his wife. The only safeguard for her lies in the reestablishment of royal authority. It pleases me to fancy that she would not care to go on living without her crown; and of this much I am certain, she will not be able to save her life if she does not save her crown. She must show moderation and must not believe she will be able, whether by the aid of chance or intrigue, to overcome an extraordinary crisis with the help of ordinary men and ordinary measures.’

Still his letters were ignored.

He knew this was due to the Queen. The winter passed; the spring came; the brooding quiet continued, but Antoinette – a prisoner in the Tuileries – did not believe that it had come to stay.


* * *

With the coming of the summer it was decided that the royal family must leave the Tuileries, for the hermit-like life they were leading was having its effect upon their health. The King had grown fatter and more unwieldy; he did not hunt now, and a daily game of billiards did not give him the exercise to which he was accustomed. The Queen was pale, and the children had suffered from the many colds they caught in the draughty lamp-lit corridors.