Free The Lost King of France: A True Story of Revolution, Revenge, and DNA by Deborah Cadbury Page A

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 were cries of “No children! No children!” The queen ushered her children inside to safety. For a few minutes, she faced out the murderous, armed crowds alone with incredible nerve. “She expected to perish,” reported her daughter, but happily “her great courage awed the whole crowd of people, who confined themselves to loading her with insults, without daring to attack her person.” No one fired. After a while, she simply curtsied and went back into the palace, gathered her son into her arms and wept.
    However, their ordeal was not over. The menacing cry went up, “The
king to Paris.” The king felt he had no alternative but to agree, in order to avoid further bloodshed. He decided he must take his family with him as it was too dangerous to leave them behind. “I confide all that I hold most dear to the love of my good and faithful subjects,” he told the vengeful mob in the courtyard.
    By one o’clock in the afternoon, everything was ready for the departure of the royal family. “They wished to prevent my father from crossing the great guard rooms that were inundated with blood,” reported Marie-Thérèse. “We therefore went down by a small staircase … and got into a carriage for six persons; on the back seat were my father, mother and brother; on the front seat … my Aunt Elisabeth and I, in the middle my uncle Monsieur and Madame de Tourzel … . The crowd was so great it was long before we could advance.”
    It was the most extraordinary and grotesque procession. News had spread that the royal family was forced out of Versailles and thirty thousand, at least, had gathered to escort the king to Paris. The scene was terrifying; a great swirling mass of humanity, most intent on harm, some so drunk with hatred that any form of violent disturbance could erupt within seconds. Leading the “horrible masquerade”—in the words of one courtier—was the National Guard, with La Fayette always in view near the royal coach. The poissardes, market women and other rioters followed like so many furies, brandishing sticks and spikes, some with the heads of the king’s murdered guardsmen on their pikes. These gruesome trophies were paraded with devilish excitement as they danced around the royal coach, all too conscious that power was indeed an intoxicating mixture as they endlessly threatened obscene and imminent death to the queen. Many had loaves of bread from the kitchens of Versailles stuck on their bayonets and were chanting, “We won’t go short of bread anymore. We are bringing back the Baker, the Baker’s wife and the Baker’s boy.” Behind were the household troops and Flanders regiment, unarmed; many obliged to wear the revolutionary cockade. They were followed by innumerable carriages bearing the remnants of the royal court and deputies from the new National Assembly. Count Axel Fersen, who was in one of the carriages following the king, wrote of their six-and-a-half-hour
journey to Paris: “May God preserve me from ever seeing again so heartbreaking a spectacle as that of the last few days.”
    For the royal family, forced to take part in this terrifying and, until then, almost unimaginable procession, it was a definitive end of an era. In the distance behind them, glimpsed only through a forest of pikes and a sea of hostile faces, the Palace of Versailles, which for more than a century had epitomized the Bourbon’s absolute power, slowly retreated from view, quietness