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When the royal family was brought back from Varennes to the Tuileries, the Queen's attendants found the greatest difficulty in making their way to her apartments; everything had been arranged so that the wardrobe woman, who had acted as spy, should have the service; and she was to be assisted in it only by her sister and her sister's daughter.
His answer was, "I think we are going to play a comedy;" but never had comedy more tragic ending. The royal party were discovered at Varennes, and brought back to the Tuileries amid the hootings and jeers of the mob. "The journey," says Lamartine, "was a Calvary of sixty leagues, every step of which was a torture."
The first time I saw her Majesty after the unfortunate catastrophe of the Varennes journey, I found her getting out of bed; her features were not very much altered; but after the first kind words she uttered to me she took off her cap and desired me to observe the effect which grief had produced upon her hair. It had become, in one single night, as white as that of a woman of seventy.
Madame Cardon, from Arras, met with no hindrance; and Leonard, the Queen's hairdresser, passed through Varennes a few hours before the royal family. Fate had reserved all its obstacles for the unfortunate monarch. Nothing worthy of notice occurred in the beginning of the journey.
Two had long been attached to the royal household: the wife of M. de Jarjayes, a gentleman of ancient family in Dauphiné, had been one of Marie Antoinette's waiting-women, and he himself, since the fatal expedition to Varennes, had been employed by Louis on several secret missions.
The 21st of June, at seven in the evening, two carriages and eleven horses arrived at Sainte Menehould, and I recognised the king and queen; but, fearful of being deceived, I resolved to ascertain the truth of this by arriving at Varennes, by a bye-road, before the carriages.
At the conclusion of this speech, Tallien, one of the devoted members, and Billaud Varennes, the leader of the rival party, opened the trenches, by some severe remarks on the oration of St. Just, and the conduct of those with whom he was leagued.
These artisans of the new order of things, so respectful of the law that they continued Royalists in 1791 and would fain have been Royalists still on the King's return from Varennes, so obstinate in their attachment to the Constitution, friends of the established order of the State even after the massacres of the Champ-de-Mars, and never revolutionaries against the Revolution, heedless of popular agitation, cherished in their dark and puissant soul a love of the fatherland that had given birth to fourteen armies and set up the guillotine.
We behold him again, after the arrest of the king at Varennes, resuming his projects for the destruction of that monarch, preparing the movements which took place at the Champ-de-Mars, on July 14, 16, 17, 1791, and attacking, on the 14th, in the Assembly, the principle of the inviolability of the sovereign, in the hope of having him arraigned; but at the end of the sitting, finding his opinion rejected, he began to tremble for his temerity, and required that they should not provoke the ruin of persons who had engaged in that affair.
He said that Charles Capet had given Simon an account of the journey to Varennes, and mentioned La Fayette and Bailly as having cooperated in it. He then added that this boy was addicted to odious and very premature vices for his age; that he had been surprised by Simon, who, on questioning him, learned that he derived from his mother the vices in which he indulged.
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