Lafayette (51 page)

Lafayette reminded them of their oaths to king and country and argued against their project, but gangs of armed men gathered about them and soon filled the square, chanting
“A Versailles! A Versailles!”
—“To Versailles!” In the background, the notorious Jourdan Coupe-Tête leaned nonchalantly against
a lamppost, his black beard hiding all expression, his swift, sharp knife hidden within the black shroud that draped over his ghoulish form. A cold autumn rain began to fall; Lafayette pledged to end the food crisis and went into the city hall to write orders for the National Guard to scour the countryside, seize all wheat, and bring it to Paris. An hour later, he emerged and mounted his white horse to lead his men to the wheat fields. Unnerved by the vicious mob around them, however, his troops had grown impatient— and wet.

“A Versailles! A Versailles!”
demanded the unrelenting mob. His troops joined the chant and crowded about his horse. “It is not for La Fayette to command the people,” a voice shouted, “it is for the people to command him!”
³³
A prisoner of his own army, he had little choice but accede to their demands or face mutiny and, possibly, a useless death at the nearby lamppost, where the implacable Coupe-Tête and his blade awaited. Moreover, he heard a new and more dangerous voice ring out for the first time—the anarchists crying,
“A bas la nation!”
—“Down with the nation; down with France!”
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He knew that if his grenadiers joined the anarchists at Versailles, the royal family and the National Assembly were doomed.

Lafayette agreed to lead his guardsmen to Versailles but demanded that they reaffirm their oaths to protect the king, the royal family, and the palace from the mob and contain the disorder. Although they warned they would not fire “on women begging for bread,”
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Lafayette agreed and sent word to the Paris Assembly that he was obeying the will of the people and leaving for Versailles. In a face-saving pretense that it retained authority over the military, the Assembly issued an official decree that “ordered the commandant general to go to Versailles . . . to prevent disorder” and to “request the king” to come to live “in his ancestral home in Paris.”
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After renewing their oaths of loyalty to king and country, the grenadiers let their general pass, then reined their horses into formation behind him and, at five in the afternoon, rode smartly off the square into the driving rain to begin the twelve-mile trot to Versailles. A huge mob, including Coupe-Tête, followed on foot, some of them raising an occasional cry of
“Vive Lafayette!”
At the rear, behind the anarchists, a mob of brigands trailed to pillage homes and churches along the way and perhaps the palace itself. Behind them, other National Guard units fell into place. By the time they reached the Champs-Elysées, the cold autumn rain had drenched the entire procession, and the shouts, silenced by chills and shivers, gave way to the sounds of twenty thousand sloshing feet. Lafayette saw the lights in Jefferson’s former home as he rode up the hill to Chaillot wondering how to convert an obviously humiliating defeat into victory—as he had done so long ago at Barren Hill. He wondered what Washington would have done. Neither of his friends was there to advise him. By mid-evening he reached
the Pont de Sèvres over the Seine, about halfway to Versailles—and crossed, calling it his own “Rubicon.”
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“Lafayette has marched by compulsion,” Morris recounted, “guarded by his own troops who suspect and threaten him. Dreadful situation, obliged to do what he abhors or suffer an ignominious death, with the certainty that the sacrifice of his life will not prevent the mischief.”
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It was midnight when Lafayette reached Versailles; a troop of king’s officers intercepted him with a message that the king “regarded his approach with pleasure and had just accepted
his
Declaration of the Rights of Man.”
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There would be no armed conflict with the mob. Relieved at the king’s cession, Lafayette led his army of troops and tramps in an unearthly torchlight parade down the broad avenue de Paris through the center of Versailles toward the palace gates. Some provocative shots rang out from the darkness beyond, but the mob was too weary to respond. A few hundred yards from the palace, the steady slosh of the marchers slowed and fell silent as Lafayette stopped before the National Assembly hall. It was a shambles. Earlier in the day, the mob of women had overrun it, demanding bread. Many still lay sleeping on the benches and floors.

Lafayette went to the palace gates. Inside the Cour Royale, or royal courtyard, the Black Musketeers, his old regiment of ceremonial bodyguards when he was a boy, stood ready to fire. Earlier in the day they had used rifle butts to repel the howling women who tried to breach the tall grillwork around the palace courtyard. The king had forbidden them to fire on women and ordered the palace bakery to send all its bread to the hungry mob.

“Here comes Cromwell!” a voice rang out, as Lafayette approached.

“Monsieur,” Lafayette fired back, “Cromwell would not have come here alone.”
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The king had left orders to admit Lafayette, who proceeded to the monarch’s apartment, “covered with mud from head to foot,” to reaffirm his oath of allegiance and present the mob’s two demands: food and the transfer of the king and his government to Paris. With his brother the comte de Provence at his side, the king agreed to the first demand, but deferred deciding on the transfer to Paris. It was three in the morning; they were all too exhausted to debate. Lafayette accepted the king’s one concession and went across the road to sleep at the Noailles mansion, the Versailles home of Adrienne’s grandfather. He had spent twenty exhausting hours without food or rest; he was encrusted with mud and filth. A servant brought him food and wine; another dressed his hair until he announced, “Good morning! I am falling asleep . . .” and collapsed.
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At 6:00
A.M.,
an aide’s cry awakened him; a mob had smashed through the palace gate, reached the Cour de Marbre, the innermost marble courtyard of the palace, and fallen upon the Black Musketeers, the adolescent
royal bodyguards, who continued observing the previous day’s orders not to fire. As some attackers streaked up the staircase to the queen’s apartments, others dragged the captured bodyguards to Jourdan Coupe-Tête, who quickly dispatched two of the helpless boy-soldiers and impaled their severed heads on pikes as trophies, then smeared their blood on his beard and hands to excite the people’s lust. Upstairs, the queen’s bodyguards shouldered shut the doors to her apartments against the surging mob, allowing her to escape through a secret passageway to the king’s apartments, before they, too, fell to the mob.

Lafayette raced out of the Noailles mansion, his knight’s blood aboil. He leaped on the first horse he found. Brandishing his sword, he charged furiously through the palace gates into the mob, and, at the sight of the two musketeers’ heads on pikes, drove his great horse into the rioters, his grenadiers following at his flanks. The terrified rioters fell back before the advancing horses, racing off with their grisly trophies on the road to Paris—along with golden candelabra, silver-threaded tapestries, and any other palace treasures they could carry. Lafayette demanded Coupe-Tête’s arrest, but it was too late. His black shroud had vanished. Lafayette spurred his horse up the hill to the entrance of the royal apartments, where the mob was about to disembowel a bevy of royal bodyguards. “Fortunately, Lafayette arrived in time,” sobbed one of the guardsmen afterwards. “He saved our lives.”
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After ordering guardsmen to present bayonets to the crowd, Lafayette raced up the stairs to the king’s apartments. Terrified courtiers, ministers, deputies, and servants cringed in every corner, beneath tables, behind sofas. At the door of the king’s apartment, a court official uttered the last gasp of the ancien régime at the onrushing figure of the marquis de La Fayette: “Monsieur,” he called out, “the king accords you the right to enter his cabinet.”
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Before he reached mid-sentence, Lafayette had penetrated the king’s salon, where he found the king and queen unharmed, along with their three terrified children and the king’s sister, brother, and aunts. He also found his sad old friend from Newport, the comte d’Estaing, whom the king had appointed commander of the Royal Guard. Lafayette assured them all he would see to their safety. It was 8:00
A.M.

Two hours later, with the angry crowd still milling about below, Lafayette convinced Louis to yield to the crowd’s demands that he go to Paris. Lafayette then stepped onto the balcony and “angrily assailed the crowd” for invading the sanctity of the royal residence and attacking the royal bodyguard. Louis followed him, with his wife and children, and announced that they would all go to Paris. After they stepped inside, the crowd called for Marie-Antoinette’s head, and Lafayette asked the unpopular queen: “Madame, what do you intend to do?”

“I know the fate that awaits me,” she said calmly. “I am ready to die at the feet of my king and in the arms of my children.”

“Come with me, Madame,” Lafayette replied.

“What! Haven’t you seen the gestures they’ve made at me?”

“Yes, Madame, but let us go,” and they stepped onto the balcony “above a sea of faces that roared their anger at the Austrian.” Lafayette could not make himself heard, and he decided on a decisive, though potentially dangerous gesture: he kissed the queen’s hand. The crowd fell silent, shocked at first, then gradually began to cry out,
“Vive le général! Vive la reine!”
—“Long live the general! Long live the queen!”
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For the moment, the royal family was safe. Across the courtyard, however, the queen could see the mob continuing to brutalize the royal guard. “Now that you have saved us,” she pleaded, “what can you do for our guardsmen?”

“Bring me one,” he ordered.

Ever aware of the power of symbols, Lafayette led the youngest, lowest ranked Black Musketeer he could find onto the balcony. Lafayette’s majestic figure and stage presence silenced the crowd. In his grandest, most theatrical manner, he turned to the young officer, gave him his own tricolor cockade to replace the white Bourbon cockade on his hat, and embraced the boy. The crowd roared its approval, and Lafayette’s National Guardsmen, until then reluctant to risk their own lives defending the royal guard, rushed to their sides, gave each their tricolor cockades, and turned against the crowd with raised bayonets to defend the musketeers. The grateful king responded by giving Lafayette command of the royal musketeers and all troops in the surrounding province of Ile de France.
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Lafayette’s next task was complex—leading a mixed throng of sixty thousand people to Paris, twelve miles away. Half had come to Versailles to slaughter the other half. Lafayette invested the order of march with symbolism, coaxing the mob to march first as a victorious army and lead the court and flour wagons to Paris. At one o’clock that afternoon, with the mob on its way, the royals were ready to leave. Half the National Guard were to march in front to buffer the royal family from the tail end of the mob. Behind the guardsmen a long train of wagons would follow, filled with flour from palace bins—a gift to the hungry people of Paris from the royal family. The royals would follow the flour wagons, with Lafayette and d’Estaing on horseback on either side as formal escorts. Behind the royal coaches, a long line of carriages would transfer the government from Versailles to Paris, rolling throughout the night and into the next day with courtiers, ministers, servants, and the rest of the huge population that worked and lived in what was the equivalent of a capital city. Lafayette assigned squads of trustworthy soldiers to remain at Versailles to protect what would soon be an empty palace but was nonetheless the most brilliant architectural jewel in France and home of the nation’s greatest artistic treasures.

On October 6, 1789, at one o’clock in the afternoon, King Louis XVI and his family quit Versailles for the last time and began a humiliating,
terrifying, six-hour ride to Paris, essentially as prisoners of the mob. Along the way, crowds of leering peasants hurled insults and clods of mud at the magnificent gold carriage as it passed. The comte d’Estaing tried to calm the queen, urging her to trust Lafayette and pointing out that the boys in the royal guards were marching arm in arm with national guardsmen—all of them now sworn to protect the royal family. Lafayette sent word to mayor Bailly of the cavalcade’s approach, and Bailly was at the city gates to greet the royal family when they arrived. He thanked the king for bringing flour to Paris to relieve the famine. Under the new protocol of the revolution, the city Assembly, he said, awaited his immediate visit to the Hôtel de Ville. Louis expressed his “pleasure and confidence to be among the citizens of my good city of Paris.”
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As the cavalcade resumed, the queen asked Lafayette if she and her exhausted children might abandon the line of march at the Tuileries Palace. Seeing the restless crowds in the streets ahead, he advised against it, fearing they might misinterpret her disappearance as a rejection of her royal obligations.

A double column of guardsmen stood between the Paris mob and the royal family as its soiled carriage rolled past the palace to the city hall, where the king and queen climbed the stairs to the Grande Salle to receive greetings from the Paris Assembly. Amid cries of
“Vive le roi!”
Mayor Bailly addressed the royal couple, citing the king’s expression of “pleasure” in returning to Paris.

“Pleasure
and
confidence,” the queen interrupted to correct him.

“Pleasure
and
confidence,” echoed the king.

The royal couple’s spontaneous humor—and Bailly’s immediate bow to them—sent waves of laughter and cheers through the assembly. “Gentlemen,” Bailly turned to his audience, “the words of the queen must surely make you happier than if I had not erred.” The assemblymen responded with shouts of
“Vive la reine!”
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Louis and Marie-Antoinette stepped out onto the balcony overlooking the square to wave to the huge crowd below. As the cheers of
“Vive le roi!”
rang out, Lafayette felt a grateful hand clasp his own. It was that of the king’s sister, Madame Elizabeth. Later, after Lafayette escorted the royal family safely into the Tuileries Palace, the king’s aunt, Madame Adelaide, embraced him, crying, “I owe you more than my life, Monsieur; I owe you the life of my poor nephew the king.”
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William Short, the American chargé d’affaires after Jefferson returned to America, reported that Lafayette’s success in saving the royal family “acquired for him from all parties the appellation of the guardian angel of the day.”
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