"Yes! I am your king, and in your hands I place my destiny, and that of my wife, my sister, and my children. Our lives and the fate of the empire depend upon you. Permit me to continue my journey. I have no design of leaving the country. I am but going to the midst of a part of the army, and in a French town, to regain my real liberty, of which the factions at Paris deprive me. From thence I wish to make terms with the Assembly, who, like myself, are held in subjection through fear. I am not about to destroy, but to save and to secure the Constitution. If you detain me, I myself, France, all, are lost. I conjure you, as a father, as a man, as a citizen, leave the road free to us. In an hour we shall be saved, and with us France is saved. And, if you have any respect for one whom you profess to regard as your master, I command you, as your king, to permit us to depart." [Illustration: CAPTURE AT VARENNES.] The appeal touched the heart of the grocer and the captors by whom the king was surrounded. Tears came into the eyes of many, they hesitated; the expression of their countenances showed that they would willingly, if they dared to consult the dictates of their own hearts, let the king pass on. A more affecting scene can hardly be imagined. It was midnight. Torches and flambeaux were gleaming around. Men, women, and children were hurrying to and fro in the darkness. The alarm bell was pealing out its hurried sounds through the still air. A crowd of half-dressed peasants and artisans was rapidly accumulating about the inn. The king stood pleading with his subjects for liberty and life, far more moved by compassion for his wife and children than for himself. The children, weary and terrified, and roused suddenly from the sleep in which they had been lost in their parents' arms, gazed upon the strange scene with undefined dread, unconscious of the magnitude of their peril. The queen, seated upon a bale of goods in the shop, with her two children clinging to her side, plead, at times with the tears of despair, and again with all the majesty of her queenly nature, for pity or for justice. She hoped that a woman's heart throbbed beneath the bosom of the wife of the mayor, and made an appeal to her which one would think that, under the circumstances, no human heart could have resisted. "You are a mother, madame," said the queen, in most imploring accents, "you are a wife! the fate of a wife and mother is in your hands. Think what I must suffer for these children--for my husband. At one word from you I shall owe them to you. The Queen of France will owe you more than her kingdom--more than life." "Madame," coldly replied the selfish and calculating woman, "I should be happy to help you if I could without danger. You are thinking of your husband, I am thinking of mine. It is a wife's first duty to think of her own husband."