Chapter 5: The Candle Omen.

IN the meantime the Royal Family had continued their road to Paris. The pace was so slow and delayed that it was six o’clock before the carriage containing so much sorrow, hatred, passions and innocence, arrived at the city bars.

During the journey the Dauphin had complained of being hungry. There was no want of bread as many of the pikes and bayonets were holding up loaves and the Queen would have asked Gilbert to get one, if he had been by. She could not ask the mob, whom she held in horror.

“Wait till we are in the Tuileries Palace this evening,” she said, hugging the boy to her.

“But these men have plenty,” he protested.

“But that is theirs, not ours. And they went all the way to Versailles for it as there was none in Paris, these three days.”

“Have they not eaten for three days?” said the Prince. “Then they must be awful hungry, mamma.”

Etiquet ordered him to address his mother as Madam, but he was hungry as a poor boy and he called her mamma as a poor boy would his mother.

Ceasing to grieve, he tried to sleep. Poor royal babe, who would cry many times yet for bread before he died.

At the bars a halt was made, not to repose but to rejoice over the arrival. It was hailed with song and dance. A strange scene almost as terrifying in this joy as the others had been for ghastliness.

The fishmarket-women got off their horses, captured from the slain Lifeguardsmen, hanging their swords and carbines to the horns. Other women and the market-girls jumped off their cannon, which appeared in their alarming smoothness.

They all joined hands and danced around the royal carriage. Separating it from the deputies and the National Guard, an omen of what was to follow. This round dance had the good intention to set the enforced guests at ease: the men and women capered, kissed, hugged and sang together. The men lifted up their partners as in Teniers’ pictures.

This went on as night was falling, on a dark and rainy day, so that the dancing by the light of torches and the gun-stocks and fireworks, took fantastic effects of light and shade almost infernal.

After half an hour all shouted a general hurrah; all the firearms were shot off at risk of shooting somebody; and the bullets came down in the puddles with a sinister plash.

The prince and his sister wept; they were too frightened to feel hungered.

At the City Hall a line of troops prevented the crowd from entering the place. Here the Queen perceived her foster-brother, and confidential servant, Weber, an Austrian who had followed her fortunes from home, and was trying to pass the cordon and go in with her. To be more useful to the Queen he had put on a National Guard uniform and added the insignia of a staff-officer. The Royal Groom had lent him a horse. Not to excite suspicion he kept at a distance during the journey. Now he ran up at her call.