The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of FranceYonge, Charles Duke
History
The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France
Yonge, Charles Duke
Marie Antoinette, Queen, consort of Louis XVI, King of France, 1755-1793
Soon after midday he set out, accompanied by the queen, his brother the
Count de Provence, his sister the Princess Elizabeth, and his children. It
was a strange and shameful retinue that escorted the King of France to his
capital. One party of the rioters, with Maillard and another ruffian named
Jourdan, the chief of the Coupe-têtes, at their head, had started two
hours before, bearing aloft in triumph the heads of the mangled
Body-guards, and combining such hideous mockery with their barbarity that
they halted at Sèvres to compel a barber to dress the hair on the lifeless
skulls. And now the royal carriage was surrounded by a vast and confused
medley; market-women and the rest of the female rabble, with drunken gangs
of the ruffians who had stormed the palace in the morning, still
brandishing their weapons, or bearing loaves of bread on their pike-heads,
and singing out that they should all have enough of bread now, since they
were bringing the baker, the bakeress, and the baker's boy to Paris.[7]
The only part of the procession that bore even a decent appearance was a
small escort of 'different regiments--the Guards, the National Guards, and
the Body-guards; many of the latter still bleeding from the wounds which
they had received in the conflict and tumult of the morning. A train of
carriages containing a deputation of the members of the Assembly also
followed; Mirabeau himself having just earned a motion that the Assembly
was inseparable from the king, and that wherever he was there must be the
place of meeting for the great council of the nation. Yet, in spite of the
confidence which their presence might have been expected to diffuse among
the mob, and in spite of the hopes of coming plenty which the rioters
themselves announced, the royal party was not even yet safe from further
attacks. Some ruffians stabbed at the royal carriage as it passed with
their pikes, and several shots were fired at it, though fortunately they
missed their aim and no one was injured.[8]
To the queen the journey was more painful than to any one else. A few
weeks before she had congratulated Mademoiselle de Lamballe on not being a
mother--perhaps the bitterest exclamation that grief and anxiety ever
wrung from her lips; and now the keenest anxieties of a mother were indeed
added to those of a queen. The procession moved with painful slowness. No
provisions had been taken in the carriage, and the little dauphin was
suffering from hunger and begging for some food. Tears, which her own
danger could not bring to her eyes, flowed plentifully as she witnessed
the suffering of her child. She could only beg him to bear his privations
with patience; and she had the reward of the pains she had always taken to
inspire him with confident in her, in the fortitude with which, for the
rest of the day, he bore what to children of his age is probably the
severest hardship to which they can be exposed.[9]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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