The Countess De Charny - Volume II (15 page)

The count made no reply , but, approaching the king, said : ” Sire, you had better take my hat and give me yours ; for yours may lead to your being recognised.”

“On account of the white plume? You are right,” responded the king. “Thank you, monsieur.”

And he took Charny ‘s hat and gave the count his.

“Will the king be exposed to any danger during this short walk?” asked the queen.

“You see that even if he is, I am doing my best to avert it, madame,” replied Charny, respectfully, but coldly.

“Is your Majesty ready?” asked the Swiss captain to whom the duty of protecting the king in his walk across the garden had been intrusted.

“Yes,” answered the king, pulling Charny ‘s hat down over his face.

“Then let us start.”

The king walked between a double line of Swiss Guards, who kept step with the monarch.

FROM ELEVEN O’CLOCK UNTIL NOON. 125

Suddenly loud outcries were heard to their right. The gate leading into the palace garden near the Floral Pavilion had been forced open, and a crowd of people who had heard that the king was on his way to the Assembly rushed in. A man who seemed to be the leader of the mob carried a banner in the shape of a head on the end of a pike.

The captain of the Swiss Guard ordered a halt, and prepared to fire upon the insurgents.

“Monsieur de Charny,” exclaimed the queen, “if you see that I am likely to fall into the hands of these wretches, you will kill me, will you not?”

“I cannot promise you that, madame, but I swear that before a single hand touches you, 1 shall be a dead man.”

“Hold!” cried the king; “that is poor Mandat’s head: I recognise it.”

The band of murderers dared not approach too near, but they heaped all sorts of insults upon the king aud queen. Five or six shots were fired. One Swiss was wounded, another killed. The captain ordered his men to take aim , and they obeyed.

“Don’t fire, I beseech you, monsieur,” cried Charny; “if you do, not one of us will reach the Assembly alive.”

“You are right, monsieur,” answered the captain. ” Shoulder arms ! “

The soldiers obeyed, and the party continued its course diagonally across the garden.

Although it was only midsummer, the heat had shrivelled the leaves of the chestnut-trees, and turned them yellow. The ground, too, was strewn with dead leaves.

“The leaves fall early this year,” remarked the king.

“Did not some rabid fellow predict that our monarchy would last only until the fall of the leaf?” asked the queen.

“Yes, madame,” replied Charny.

” And what was this clever prophet’s name?”

“Manuel.”

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Above the party, on the tenace, which they were obliged to cross to reach the Kiding School, where the Assembly still held its sessions, was a large crowd of angry men and women, yelling and brandishing their weapons threateningly. The danger was all the greater because the Swiss could no longer keep in line. The captain endeavoured to force his way through the throng, however; but this so infuriated the rabble that Eœderer called out to him, “Take care, or the king will certainly be killed.”

A halt was ordered, and a messenger despatched to the Assembly to notify that legislative body that the king asked an asylum within its walls. The Assembly immediately sent out a delegation ; but the sight of this delegation only increased the wrath of the mob.

“Down with Veto! Down with the Austrian ! They ‘ve got to abdicate or die ! ” the mob shouted angrily.

The two children, seeing that their mother was specially in danger, pressed close to her side.

” Why do all these people want to kill my dear mamma. Monsieur de Charn}-?” asked the dauphin.

The Swiss escort had been driven back one by one, and the royal family was now protected only by the half-dozen gentlemen who had left the Tuileries with them, and the deputation sent by the Assembly. It was evident, too, that there would be great difficulty in getting the king into the hall through the hostile throng which blocked the entrance. At the foot of the steps the struggle began.

“Put up your sword, or I will not answer for the consequences,” said Eœderer to Charny; and Charny obeyed without a word.

The king was obliged to push back a man who shook his fist in his face; and the little dauphin, almost suffocated, screamed, and held up his hands as if for help.

A man sprang forward, seized him, and tore him from his mother’s grasp.

” Monsieur de Charny ! my child ! In Heaven’s name, save my child ! ” the queen cried wildly.

FROM ELEVEN O’CLOCK UNTIL NOON, 127

Charny started towards the man ; but this left the queen so unprotected that two or three arms were outstretched towards her, and one hand seized her by the fichu that covered her breast.

The queen uttered a cry; and, forgetting Eœderer’s counsel, Charny plunged his sword in the body of the man who had dared to lay violent hands upon the queen.

The crowd yelled with rage on seeing one of their num-ber fall. The women shouted: —

” Kill the Austrian. Give her to us, so we can strangle her ! Death to the Austrian ! “

But the queen, half crazed with anxiety and grief, forgot her own danger, and cried again and again, “My son, oh, my son ! “

Just as the little party reached the doorway, the mob, as if feeling that their prey was about to escape them, made one even more desperate effort.

Among the clenched fists so threateningly upraised, Charny saw one holding a pistol pointed straight at the queen. The crowd was so dense that he could use only the pommel of his sword; so, dropping that, he grasped the pistol with both hands, tore it from the miscreant’s grasp, and discharged it full at the breast of the nearest assailant. The man was stunned as well as wounded, and fell to the ground. The sword was already in the possession of a vagabond, who was endeavouring to kill the queen with it; Charny threw himself upon the assassin, and in the brief interval thus afforded the queen was half carried, half dragged after the king into the hall of the Assembly building.

She was saved ; but as the door was hastily closed behind her, Charny sank on the doorstep, felled by a blow upon the head from an iron bar, and stabbed in the breast with a pike.

“Like my dear brothers!” he murmured, as he fell. “Poor Andrée!”

Like his brothers George and Isidore, Olivier de Charny ‘s

128 LA COMTESSE DE CHARNY.

destiny was fulfilled. That of the queen was about to overtake her.

Just then a deafening discharge of artillery announced that the insurgents were making a formidable attack upon the palace.

FROM NOON UNTIL THREE O’CLOCK. 129

CHAPTER XVI.

FROM NOON UNTIL THREE o’CLOCK.

For a moment, like the queen herself when she saw the advance guard take flight, the Swiss probably believed they had encountered and defeated the main body of insurgents. They had killed about four hundred men in the palace courtyard, and one hundred and fifty or two hundred more in the Carrousel. They had also captured seven pieces of artillery. They had not been able to silence one small battery, however, placed on the terrace of a house facing the Swiss Guard-house; and, thinking they had put down the insurrection, they were about taking measures to put an end to the battery, cost what it might, when the roll of drums and the rumbling of heavy artillery reached their ears from the direction of the river-side.

These sounds proceeded from the main army of insurgents, which the king had seen with the aid of his field-glass from the window in the Louvre.

At the same time it began to be rumoured among the guards that the king had left the palace to seek a shelter in the Assembly.

It is difficult to describe the effect of this announcement even upon the most devoted Royalists. The king, who had solemnly sworn to die at his post, had deserted it, and gone over to the enemy, or given himself up as a prisoner without even striking a blow.

The National Guards considered themselves relieved from all obligations, and all, or nearly all, of them left the palace. Several noblemen followed their example, deeming it useless to remain and be slain for a cause that acknowledged itself lost.

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Only the Swiss remained, silent and morose, the slaves of discipline. From the upper part of the terrace, near the Floral Pavilion, they could see approaching nearer and nearer those determined denizens of the faubourgs whom no army had ever successfully resisted.

The insurgents had their plan. They supposed the king was still in the palace, and intended to surround it on every side, so as to capture the monarch.

The column advancing up the left bank of the river had received orders to force the gateway on the river-side. Those approaching by way of the Saint-Honore were to force open the Feuillant gate. The column on the right bank of the river, under command of Westermann, was to attack the front of the palace.

This last body of men burst into the Carrousel, singing the Ça ira. The Marseillais headed this column, dragging two small four-pounders loaded with grape.

Nearly two hundred Swiss were in the square, drawn up in battle array. The insurgents marched straight towards them, and the minute the Swiss raised their muskets to fire, the insurgents unmasked their battery, and opened fire themselves.

The Swiss discharged their muskets once, then hastily retired into the palace, leaving thirty dead and wounded lying on the pavement of the courtyard; whereuj)on the insurgents, with the Marseillais still at their head, rushed upon the Tuileries.

Billot was anxious to fight in the same place where Pitou had been slain ; for he was strongly in hopes that the poor boy was only wounded, and that he might return the service Pitou had rendered him — Billot — on the Champ de Mars.

Billot was, consequently, one of the first to enter the central courtyard. There was such a smell of freshly spilled blood there that it seemed as if one must be in a slaughter-house; while in the glare of the midday sun a gas which looked like smoke rose from the heap of bodies.

FKOM NOON UNTIL THREE O’CLOCK. 131

The sight and the odor alike infuriated the assailants, and they rushed madly upon the palace j besides, retreat now would have been impossible, however much they might have desired it, on account of the immense crowd which was continually pouring into the square behind them, thus forcing them on into the fray.

Once in the central courtyard, these insurgents, like their predecessors in whose blood they were wading ankle deep, found themselves between two tires, — from the clock tower on one side, and a double row of barrack sheds on the other.

It was necessary to silence these barracks first of all, and the Marseillais rushed upon them ; but as they could not demolish them with their hands, they shouted for crowbars and pickaxes. But Billot promptly demanded mammoth cartridges, and Westermann, understanding and approving his subordinate’s plan, ordered them brought, together with tinder, sulphur, and matches.

As soon as these came, the Marseillais set fire to the fuses, at the risk of having the powder explode in their hands, and hurled the burning cartridges into the sheds. The barracks, of course, took fire, and their defenders were obliged to leave them and take refuge in the hall of the palace. Suddenly Billot, feeling himself pulled backward, turned, expecting to find himself confronted by an enemy; but when he saw who had seized him, he uttered an exclamation of joy; for it was Pitou, — Pitou, almost unrecog-nisable, and covered with blood from head to foot, but Pitou, safe and sound, without a single wound.

“When Pitou saw the Swiss taking aim at his comrades and himself, he had shouted to them to throw themselves flat on the ground, suiting the action to the word himself. But they had not time to follow his example, and in another moment Pitou found himself buried under a huge pile of corpses.

In spite of his very disagreeable situation, thus weighed down by dead bodies and soaked in their blood, Pitou re-

132 LA COMTESSE DE CHARNY.

solved not to utter a sound, but wait until a more opportune moment came for revealing himself. He had to wait a whole hour for this, however, and every minute of that hour seemed itself an hour.

At last, hearing the victorious shouts of the Marseillais, and Billot’s voice calling his name in the midst of them, he judged that the propitious moment had at last come, and, like Enceladus buried under Mount Etna, he shook olï the pile of corpses that covered him, and managed to regain his feet. Then, seeing Billot in the foremost rank of insurgents, he hastened to his side.

A brisk fusilade from the Swiss reminded Pitou and Billot of the gravity of their situation.

Nine hundred feet of shed on the right and left side of the central courtyard were on fire. The heat was intense, and there was not a particle of air stirring. The entire front of the palace was hidden by a thick veil of smoke. It was impossible to see which were the slayers or the slain, as Billot, Pitou, and the Marseillais forced their way through the smoke into the vestibule.

There they found themselves confronted by a bristling wall of bayonets, — the bayonets of the Swiss Guard.

Then began that heroic retreat, in which, leaving one of their number at each step and upon each stair, the battalion moved slowly backward. That night forty-eight dead bodies were found on the staircase alone.

Suddenly through the halls and corridors of the palace resounded the cry, “The king orders the Swiss to stop firing! ” It was then two o’clock in the afternoon.

This is what had occurred at the Assembly in the mean time, and brought about the order, which had the twofold advantage of lessening the fury of the victors, and saving the honour of the vanquished.

As the door closed between the queen and Charny, who she saw was fighting desperately for his life, Marie Antoinette screamed, and extended her arms towards the door; but, drawn along by her companions at a moment