The Lost King of France: A True Story of Revolution, Revenge, and DNA by Deborah Cadbury Page B

reconcile himself to the idea of
fleeing from his own people. Now, at last, the urgent need for escape began to take shape in his mind.
     
    Six hundred National Guardsmen, increasingly more loyal to the nation rather than the king, were now patrolling the Tuileries, and spies were everywhere. However, the king and queen could count on one very loyal and capable ally: Count Axel Fersen. Determined to rescue the queen from her impossible position, he told his father, “I should be vile and ungrateful if I deserted them now that they can do nothing for me and I have hope of being useful to them.”
    Axel Fersen advised the king and queen to escape separately, in light, fast carriages, but they insisted on travelling together with the children, in a more capacious, but much slower, berline. They aimed to reach Montmédy, a border town almost two hundred miles to the east by the Austrian Netherlands. Here, protected by a garrison led by his faithful general, Marquis Louis de Bouillé, the king hoped to unite his supporters and challenge the right of the Assembly to usurp his authority.
    Fersen coordinated arrangements for their escape. Fresh horses were needed at staging posts every fifteen miles from Paris. For the last eighty miles, once they had passed Châlons in the Champagne region, troops would be waiting at various points from the Pont de Somme-Vesle to escort them to the border. Throughout the spring meticulous arrangements were in progress. At the palace, secret doors were constructed to assist the escape. Disguises and passports were obtained for the royal family. The Marquise de Tourzel would pose as a wealthy Russian woman, “Baronne de Korff,” travelling with her two “daughters,” Marie-Thérèse as Amélie and Louis-Charles as Aglae. The king would be dressed simply as her valet and the queen, in black coat and hat, was to be the children’s governess.
    On the planned day of departure, June 20, 1791, the king and queen tried to keep a semblance of normalcy but their anxiety did not pass unnoticed. Marie-Thérèse was only too aware that her mother and father “seemed greatly agitated during the whole day,” although she had no idea why. Her anxiety only increased when in the afternoon her mother found
an opportunity to take her aside and whisper that “I was not to be uneasy at anything that I might see,” and that “we might be separated, but not for long … . I was dumbfounded.”
    “I was hardly in bed before my mother came in; she told me we were to leave at once,” wrote Marie-Thérèse. Marie-Antoinette had already woken the dauphin. Although more asleep than awake, Louis-Charles was annoyed to find himself being dressed as a girl. His daytime games were all of soldier heroes and now he thought he was about to command a regiment, shouting for his boots and sword. At half past ten Marie-Antoinette escorted them downstairs and out through an empty apartment to a courtyard where Fersen was waiting, dressed as a coachman and even smoking tobacco.
    The dauphin, in his plain linen dress and bonnet, hid at the bottom of the carriage under Madame de Tourzel’s gown. To attract less attention, the carriage made several turns around the nearby streets before waiting near the Tuileries for the king and queen. “We saw Monsieur de La Fayette pass close by us, going to the king’s coucher,” recalled Marie-Thérèse. “We waited there a full hour in the greatest impatience and uneasiness at my parents’ long delay.” Eventually, to her alarm, “I saw a woman approach and walk around our carriage. It made me fear we were discovered.” However, it was her aunt Élisabeth, disguised as a nurse to Baronne de Korff. “On entering the carriage she trod upon my brother, who was hidden at the bottom of it; he had the courage not to utter a cry.”
    At last the king was able to make his escape through a secret passage to Marie-Antoinette’s room and then down the staircase, straight past the guards, and