But meanwhile the insurgents were rapidly approaching the palace, and already the tramp of the leading column might be heard. The tocsin had continued its ominous sound throughout the night, and at six in the morning the main body of the insurgents, twenty thousand strong, and well armed-for the new council had opened to them the stores of the arsenal- began their march under the command of Santerre. As they advanced they were joined by the Marseillese, who had been quartered in a barrack near the Hall of the Cordeliers, and their numbers were further swelled by thousands of the populace. Soon after eight they reached the Carrousel, forced the gates, and pressed on to the royal court, the National Guard and Swiss falling back before them to the entrance to the royal apartments, where the more confined space seemed to afford a better prospect of making an effectual resistance.
But already the palace was deserted by those who were the intended objects of the attack. Roederer, and one or two of the municipal magistrates, in whom the indignity with which the new commissioners of the sections had treated them had excited a feeling of personal indignation, had been actively endeavoring to rouse the National Guards to an energetic resistance; but they had wholly failed. Those who listened to them most favorably would only promise to defend themselves if attacked, while some of the artillery-men drew the charges from their guns and extinguished their matches. Roederer, whom the strange vicissitudes of the crisis had for the moment rendered the king's chief adviser, though there seems no reason to doubt his good faith, was not a man of that fiery courage which hopes against hope, and can stimulate waverers by its example. He saw that if the rioters should succeed in storming the palace, and should find the king and his family there, the moment that made them masters of their persons would be the last of their lives and of the monarchy. He returned into the palace to represent to Louis the utter hopelessness of making any defense, and to recommend him, as his sole resource, to claim the protection of the Assembly. The queen, who, to use her own words, would have preferred being nailed to the walls of the palace to seeking a refuge which she deemed degrading, pointed to the soldiers, and showed by her gestures that they were the only protectors whom it became them to look to. Roederer assured her that they could not he relied on. She seemed unconvinced. He almost forgot his respect in his earnestness. "If you refuse, madame, you will be guilty of the blood of the king, of your two children; you will destroy yourself, and every soul within the palace." While she was still hesitating between her feeling of shame and her anxiety for those dearest to her, the king gave the word. "Let us go," said he. "Let us give this last proof of our devotion to the Constitution." The princess spoke. "Could Roederer answer for the king's life?" He affirmed that he would answer for it with his own. The queen repeated the question. "Madame," he replied, "we will answer for dying at your side-that is all that we can promise." "Let us go," said Louis, and moved toward the door. Even at the last moment, one officer, M. Boscari, commander of a battalion of the National Guard, known as that of Les Filles St. Thomas, whose loyalty no disaster had ever been able to shake, implored him to change his mind. His men, united to the Swiss, would be able, he said, to cut a way for the royal family to the Rouen road; the insurgents were all on the other side of the city, and nothing could resist him. But again, as on all previous occasions, Louis rejected the brave advice. He pleaded the risk to which he should expose those dearest to him, and led them to almost certain death in committing them to the Assembly. Some of De Mailly's gentlemen gathered round him to accompany him; but such an escort seemed to Roederer likely to provoke additional animosity, and at his entreaty Louis trusted himself to a company of his faithful Swiss and to a detachment of the National Guard, who formed themselves into an escort to conduct him to the Assembly, whose hall looked into one side of the palace garden.
The minister for foreign affairs walked at his side. The queen leaned on the arm of M. Dubouchage, the minister of marine, and with the other hand led the dauphin. The Princess Elizabeth and the princess royal followed with another minister. And thus, with the Princess de Lamballe, Madame de Tourzel, and one or two other ministers and attendants, the royal family left the palace of their ancestors, which only one of them was ever to behold again. As they quit the saloon, moved down the stairs, and crossed the garden, their every step was one toward a downfall and a destruction which could never be retraced. Marie Antoinette felt it to be so, and, as she reached the foot of the staircase, cast restless and anxious glances around, looking perhaps even then for any prospect of succor or of effectual resistance which might present itself. One of the Swiss misunderstood her, and with rude fidelity endeavored to encourage her. "Fear nothing, madame," said he, "your majesty is surrounded by honest citizens." She laid her hand on her heart. "I do fear nothing," and passed on without another word.
As they crossed the garden the king broke the silence. "How unusually early," he remarked, "the leaves fall this year!" To those who heard him, the bareness which he remarked seemed an omen of the fate which awaited himself, about to be stripped of his royal dignity; perhaps even, like some superfluous crowder of the grove, to fall beneath the axe. The Assembly had already been deliberating whether it should invite him to take refuge with them when they heard that he was approaching. It was instantly voted that a deputation should be sent to meet him, which, after a few words of respectful salutation, fell in behind. A vast crowd was collected outside the doors of the hall. They hooted the king, and, still more bitterly, the queen, as they advanced. "Down with Veto!" was the chief cry; but mingled with it were still more unmanly insults, invoking more especially death on all the women. But the Guards kept the mob at a distance, though when they reached the hall the Jacobins made an effort to deprive them of that protection. They declared that it was illegal for soldiers to enter the hall, as indeed it was; yet without them the princes must at the last moment have been exposed to all the fury of the mob. At this critical moment Roederer showed both fidelity and presence of mind. He implored the deputies to suspend the law which forbade the entrance of the troops, and, while the Jacobins were reviling him and his proposal, he pretended to suppose that it had been agreed to, and led forward a detachment of soldiers who cleared the way. One grenadier look up the dauphin in his arms and carried him in; and, although the pressure of the crowd was extreme, at last the whole family were placed within the hall in such safety as the Assembly was able or disposed to afford them.
Louis bore himself not without dignity. His words were few but calm. "I am come here to prevent a great crime. I think I can not be better placed, nor more safely, gentlemen, than among you." The president, who happened to be Vergniaud, while appearing to desire to give him confidence, yet avoided uttering a single word, except the simple address of "sire," which should be a recognition of the royal dignity, if indeed his speech was not a studied disavowal of it. Louis might reckon, he said, on the firmness of the National Assembly: its members had sworn to die in support of the rights of the people and of the constituted authorities: and then, on the plea that the Assembly must continue its deliberations, and that the law forbade them to be conducted in the presence of the sovereign, he assigned him and his family a little box behind the president's chair, which was usually set apart for the reporters of the debates. A Jacobin deputy proposed their removal into one of the committee-rooms, with the idea, as he afterward boasted, that it would be easy there to admit a band of assassins to murder them all; but Vergniaud and his party divined his object and overruled him. It might seem that the Girondins, though they had been the original promoters and chief organizers of the insurrection, were as yet disposed to be content with the overthrow of the throne, and had not arrived at the hardihood which can not be sated without murder; and it is a remarkable instance of the rapidity with which unprincipled men sink deeper and deeper into iniquity, that they who now exerted themselves successfully to save the life of Louis, five months afterward were as unanimous as the most ferocious Jacobins in destroying him.