A fortnight after Mirabeau’s death the mob had prevented the king from leaving Paris, in a perfectly open manner, for a visit to one of his suburban palaces, and the great militia guard of the palace had not shown discipline or loyalty. After that nothing remained but to fix a date for secret flight, and this date was ultimately fixed for the night of the twentieth of June. Fersen worked out all the plans in detail. He had the great travelling-coach, or “Berline,” specially built. The commander of the army upon the eastern frontier, Bouillé was warned and provided a succession of cavalry outposts to receive the fugitives when they should have proceeded a little more than a hundred miles from Paris, and to pass them on in safety to Montmédy upon the extreme frontier. Thence, when he should safely have reached it, the king was to issue his proclamation to the army and to the people. The travelling disguises for the royal family were prepared; three gentlemen of their former guard were trusted to accompany the flight. A passport in the name of a Mme. de Korff, a Russian lady resident in Paris, was obtained, and the queen was to travel in that name with her two children, and her husband as a servant. PART TWO THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES Upon the evening of Monday, the twentieth of June, 1791, a little before nine o’clock, Axel de Fersen was leaning, with his chin in his hands, his elbows upon the parapet, looking over the bridge called the Pont Royal, which leads from the Tuileries to the southern bank of the Seine. He watched the dying light upon the river below, and waited with desperate impatience in his heart, his body lounging in affected indolence. The sky above was cloudy. The day had been hot, but its last hours not sunlit. A freshness was now coming up from the Seine over the town, and the noises of life and movement that rise with the closing of the working hours in the capital filled the streets. He was dressed in the rough habit of a cabman, and the poor coach of which he had the driving stood in rank with others a little way from the gate of the palace. As he so gazed, two men, one with a sunken, long-jawed face and small, peering eyes, the other frail, slight, and younger, both dressed in a faded yellow livery as of servants to some rich man of a time before the Revolution had abolished liveries, came up to him. He knew already who they were. They were Moustier and Valory, two gentlemen of the king’s disbanded guard who, in the disguise of servants, had volunteered to serve Louis in his flight. Fersen gave them the instructions they awaited. One was to find and conduct the great coach Fersen had had built and to keep it waiting for him at the gates of the city; the other was to act as outrider and to go before to prepare the relays. A third, Malden, remained hidden in the apartments of the king.