Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France by Lucy Moore Page B

allée that leads straight up to the palace. Germaine de Staël, who had driven to Versailles by the back roads as soon as she heard news of the march, had already arrived, but a reluctant Lafayette, at the head of the seditious National Guard, was some hours behind her. The great gates had been drawn across the palace entrance for the first time in its history. ‘Every eye was turned towards the road that fronts the windows of the palace of Versailles,’ recalled Germaine. ‘We thought that the cannon might first be pointed against us, which occasioned us much alarm; yet not one woman thought of withdrawing in this great emergency.’ Both inside and outside the palace women were preparing themselves to participate in history.

    After much discussion, fifteen were chosen to appear with Maillard before the National Assembly. Maillard spoke for them, raising rumours of grain hoarding, which the women believed was an aristocratic plot. Deputy Robespierre, immaculate as usual, rose to his feet to confirm the rumours of hoarding. Maillard took the floor again, this time asking that the royal bodyguard be requested to adopt the tricolour cockade to make amends for the insult they were said to have made to it.
    As he spoke, the women waiting outside flooded into the assembly hall, declaring that the bodyguards in the palace courtyard had fired on them. The mood in the hall became riotous, almost carnivalesque: the marchers levelled hostile remarks at the Bishop of Paris, threatened to murder a guard, derided the king’s failure to sign the Declaration of Rights and spread their wet clothes out to dry. One woman sat in the chair reserved for the president of the Assembly; others tried to participate in the debate and vote with the deputies. They mocked the rituals of government, shouting insults so as to disrupt proceedings, some dropping off to sleep on the deputies’ benches.
    Outside, the town of Versailles had shut down. One of Marie-Antoinette’s ladies-in-waiting tried to get back into the palace at about nine on the evening of the 5th, but a National Guard sentry from Versailles recognized her at the gates and sent her back to her lodgings. ‘You must not be seen in the street,’ he told her. ‘You have nothing to fear for your friends, but there will not be a single lifeguardsman [royal bodyguard] left tomorrow morning.’
    Meanwhile the Assembly’s president, Jean-Joseph Mounier, had taken a deputation of women to see the king himself. Much impressed by Louis’s paternal sympathy and concern (he fetched smelling-salts for a seventeen-year-old flower-girl, chosen as spokeswoman, who fainted at his feet), they returned to the assembly hall bearing a signed order for any delayed wheat to be delivered to Paris immediately. Mounier and some of the women now went back to Paris to inform the people of the king’s promises; the remainder stayed in Versailles, the lucky ones finding beds in stables and coach-houses, others huddling in the lee of buildings wrapped in their damp clothes. Many of them wept with exhaustion and confusion, saying they ‘had beenforced to march and did not know why they were there’, miles from home and without shelter on a cold, damp night.
    The king then agreed without qualification to sign the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, which he had delayed doing for almost a month. He consulted his ministers about whether he should resist the hostile approaching National Guard by force, or flee, and decided to do neither. ‘Habits of formality’ stopped him escaping, then or later, according to the daughter of an aristocrat who urged flight.
    When Lafayette arrived with the factious Guard it was almost midnight. Versailles was quiet, but wide awake: the tinderbox still smouldered. Alone and unarmed, the general was permitted into the palace to see the king, and told him – after swearing to die at his feet – that if Louis would guarantee food for Paris, allow the patriotic