Count Damas had also arrived; and the king sat consulting with these officers and the magistrates of Varennes,--consulting, when he, with the aid which had arrived, should have been forcing his way out towards the frontier. There he sat, as usual, unable to decide upon anything; and while he sat doubting, the national soldiery poured in to the number of three thousand, and would presently amount to ten thousand. While he thus sat doubting, the people were handing jugs of wine about among the hussars; and when their commander came out from Monsieur Sauce's, at the end of an hour, he found them tipsy, and declaring for the nation against the king. There was still one other chance--one more opportunity of choice for him whose misfortune was that he never could make a choice. Another loyal officer, Deslons, arrived, with a hundred horse-soldiers. He left his hundred horse outside the barricade, entered himself, and offered to cut out the royal party,--to rescue them by the sword, if the king would order him to do so. "Will it be hot work?" asked the king. "Very hot," was the answer; and the king would give no orders.--In the bitterness of her regrets, the queen said afterwards, at Paris, that no one who knew what had been the king's answer to Count d'Inisdal about being carried off, should have asked him for orders;--that the officers should have acted without saying a word to him. The children were asleep on a bed up-stairs, and the ladies remonstrating with Madame Sauce, from hour to hour of this dreadful night: and the end of it all was that it was decided by somebody that the party were to go back to Paris, as the people in the market-place were loudly demanding. The poor queen's doubts and fears thus ended in despair. Weary as they all were,--after having travelled so far, and escaped so many dangers,--and now so near the frontier, so near Bouille's camp, so close upon the queen's own country,--they were to pursue their weary way back to Paris,--journeying in disgrace, prisoners in the eyes of all the people, to be plunged again into the midst of their enemies, now enraged by their flight. It would have been easier to a spirit like the queen's to have died, with those who belonged to her, in one more struggle,--in one rush to the camp, than to undergo the slow despair of a return among their enemies.