The royal family took twenty hours to flee from Paris to the border between the Marne and the Meuse; yet the return from the village of Binarville to Paris took a full four days. In June’s summer heat, the sun was merciless, and the sealed carriage became an oven, so hot that sweat poured down their backs without pause—yet the most eminent people inside the coach did not dare to open the windows for air.

  That was because every time they passed a village or a town, crowds came out along the road to stare at the fallen King and Queen. With so many people moving and running, dust rose into the sky, and the coachman could scarcely see the road ahead. Thus, again and again, the great carriage was forced to stop. And whenever it did, the curses and hateful stares of the people pressed down like a storm. For everyone already “knew” the truth of the royal family’s flight to the frontier: that they had joined hands with German mercenary legions, colluded with foreign anti-French forces, and meant to rely upon the Austrian army to crush the French people.

  Louis XVI, faced with these malicious “rumours,” did nothing but deny, deny, and deny again, swearing to the crowd that he had never had any intention of fleeing. Yet no one was willing to believe this fat man who could not even tell a convincing lie. As for Antoinette, she did not, like her husband, waste her strength on such a war of attrition. From beginning to end, the Queen sat upright in her seat with a stern face, soothing the two children beside her. Only when someone tried to take away the Dauphin did she fight back with all her might, paying any price to uphold the dignity of the House of Bourbon.

  Antoinette’s bearing had no effect on the soldiers or the people, yet it won the respect of the two deputies; they immediately withdrew their contemptuous gaze. Above all, Barnave, himself of noble birth, was deeply captivated by the Queen’s innate nobility and by the immense force that lay within her words. By the time the carriage returned to Paris, Barnave had already been taken captive by the Queen in spirit, and he would voluntarily become a political adviser at the Tuileries.

  On June 25, the weather was still oppressive, and the King and his family re-entered Paris. On both sides of the Rue Saint-Antoine stood countless citizens, silent and unmoving; the dust raised by the carriage and its cavalry escort was suffocating. Many felt an inexplicable anxiety about the future. The clearest expression of the mood of Paris’s 600,000 citizens was a huge placard hung above the Rue Saint-Antoine, bearing the words: “He who insults the King shall be beaten to death; he who praises Louis shall be hanged!” At a whistle command, the National Guard lining the road all the way to the Tuileries produced their weapons. As if by tacit agreement, they inverted their muskets, butts upward—like an escort at a funeral. One might say this was precisely what it was.

  When the carriage finally came to a halt at the Tuileries, the King and Queen stepped down. Louis XVI seemed no different from before—save that, on his impassive face, there appeared an awkward smile and a helpless sorrow. He struggled to cope with the prosecutor’s harsh questioning, insisting again and again that he had had no plan to flee. “Mm—only a trip, that is all.”

  But Queen Antoinette’s hair had already turned grey, and wrinkles covered her face. From the moment she descended, she maintained her silence; her eyes were full of sorrow—and contempt. Fortunately, Barnave remained at Her Majesty’s side throughout, sparing the royal family the worst humiliations of the mob. In her heart Antoinette swore that, when the King prevailed again and ruled again, she could pardon Barnave, exile Pétion and General Lafayette, but she must execute the Champagne bastard who had ruined the flight to the last step—General André Franck.

  After the royal couple re-entered their Tuileries “apartments,” Queen Marie took the children upstairs to rest. Louis XVI, carefree and thick-skinned, dropped into a broad armchair and muttered nonsense: “Damn this heat, it is infernal—so our family trip—mm, our trip—has ended early. And now I’m hungry. Bring me a roasted chicken—no, two roasted chickens. Thank God, I’m truly starving.”

  Although Louis XVI’s family had returned to their double-guarded “palace prison,” the consequences of the King’s flight were far from over. Paris was thrown into turmoil from top to bottom; the Assembly’s Left, Centre, and Right all fought without pause. In these five days, the foundations of the French monarchy suffered unprecedented damage: the dynasty lost its authority, and the King’s standing collapsed. Yet Louis XVI still behaved as though it meant nothing. Neither the future of the kingdom nor his own fate held the slightest interest for him.

  To prevent the King and Queen from attempting another gamble, the Tuileries’ occupants were subjected to dreadful surveillance, confinement, and humiliation. Even their bedchamber was kept under strict watch. The doors to the King’s and Queen’s chamber had to be left open by a narrow slit, so that the blue-uniformed soldiers (the National Guard) standing in the corridor could, by the light through the crack, see the lofty monarchs within. This wretched condition continued for more than thirty days.

  General Lafayette persuaded another faction among the constitutional aristocrats, and Barnave agreed that the National Constituent Assembly under his influence, the Paris City Hall represented by Bailly, and the National Guard represented by Lafayette would form an alliance to defend the constitutional monarchy of the Kingdom of France—to keep Louis XVI’s trembling crown upon his head, and to ensure the correct implementation of the in France.

  On the third day after the King returned to Paris, Barnave testified at a special hearing convened jointly by several working committees of the Assembly:

  “Honourable gentlemen, to put the King on trial—even the slightest political change would ignite a revolution like a spark, and an unbounded revolution will surely bring us an immense catastrophe. This is beyond doubt! …Therefore, gentlemen, we must all fully understand that our common interest lies in ending the Revolution as soon as possible. And to end it, we must restore the King to his throne, implement the , and grant Louis XVI the lawful authority that ought to be his…”

  Five hours later, the majority of deputies in the Assembly reached a consensus and accepted Barnave’s resolution to restore the King at once. The Constituent Assembly set the tone: in this flight, the King, the Queen, and their family were innocent. The guilty ones were those rebels who had coerced the King into flight—those were the unforgivable criminals!

  Who were they?

  They were Marquis de Bouillé, who wrote to the National Constituent Assembly and voluntarily confessed;

  They were the Mayor of Chalons, Chabert, arrested on the spot by General André;

  They were…

  Once this tone was set, the aristocratic gentlemen were satisfied. But the other 590,000 Parisians were not. They thought: after finally dragging the fat man and his wife and children back to Paris, there must be a public denunciation, something of the sort. Thus the representatives of Paris’s forty-eight districts began to coordinate and conspire. Their goal was only one: to drive Louis XVI from the throne and establish a “republic in which they might, perhaps, become King themselves.”

  On the other hand, the Constitutionalists’ stance also pleased André. It meant that the aristocratic gentlemen of Paris would no longer concern themselves with what else had occurred in the Marne—nor did they wish to. They left André free to expand his rule rapidly from Reims to Chalons-en-Champagne, and then to the whole of the Marne.

  By August, the former Mayor of Reims, Basile, replaced the resigning Governor of the Marne and became the new provincial executive; the former judge of the Reims minor-crimes court, Barreau, was chosen as a Justice of the Marne High Court; because Chief Provincial Prosecutor Thuriot took leave due to ill health, André served as Acting Chief Provincial Prosecutor (automatically stepping down in September); meanwhile, the former Acting Mayor of Chalons-en-Champagne, Lecques, was transferred to Reims to serve as Mayor (Reims being vice-provincial in rank, higher in status than Chalons—thus a promotion); and the former Reims Prosecutor, Berthe Desmont, took office as the new Mayor of Chalons…

  Just as André was about to return to Paris, he appointed the newly promoted Lieutenant Colonel Brune as the commander of the National Guard in the Marne, responsible for daily training and for assisting the gendarmerie headquarters in directing the province’s six Guard battalions and the many rural militia units… Moreover, authority over all civil administration and military affairs (including the city Guards) belonged respectively to the provincial administrative bureau and to the officers’ council of the Champagne Composite Brigade, and was then reported to André for final decision. Throughout this entire process, André’s political and military intentions were carried out without dispute.

  At the same time, more than one hundred kilometres away, in Charleville-Mézières, the capital of the Ardennes, Legoff obtained the governorship he had long coveted. As part of the bargain, Colonel Brice of the former Reims National Guard became the commander of the National Guard in the Ardennes. Two weeks later, Major Macdonald—appointed by André—led 500 mounted infantry and “wiped out” the remaining bandits in the Forest of Ardennes, to the delight of the province’s people, especially merchants passing through the region. Thus Major Macdonald, originally of the Champagne Composite Brigade, became for a time a great hero among the Ardennais. Before long, the General Council of the Ardennes Commune, at Governor Legoff’s proposal, appointed Macdonald—now promoted to Lieutenant Colonel, a son of Sedan in that province—as Colonel Brice’s assistant, and concurrently as commander of the city National Guard of Charleville-Mézières.

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  André’s method—supporting his own forces in the Marne and the Ardennes and steadily building a dictatorial rule—met, as ever, the resistance of numerous local power-brokers. They even sent representatives to Paris, asking the National Constituent Assembly to refuse to punish the dictator André. Yet without exception, they were rejected by the national legislature.

  Before long, these isolated, unsupported resistances were suppressed. In the Marne, the anti-André faction was cleanly eradicated by the gendarmerie on the very day of the King’s flight to the frontier. The Ardennes proved somewhat more troublesome; but with the covert cooperation of the “forest bandits” under Macdonald’s command, the intelligence department led by Major Penduvas spent more than three months before it finally purged most of the opposition within the Ardennes.

  In late July 1791, a sudden smallpox epidemic broke out among two million people across the Southern Netherlands and the northeast of France. As usual, about 5%—roughly 10,000—died in this century’s plague, and 15% were left physically disabled by the virus. What differed from the past was that, in the Marne, the smallpox death rate was under five per thousand; in particular, around Reims, where the government had forcibly imposed cowpox inoculation, almost no one contracted smallpox.

  In September, after the Académie des Sciences confirmed the efficacy of cowpox inoculation as a medical miracle, the people of the Marne were filled with boundless gratitude toward André, who had gone to Paris—even though many among them had once sworn to kill that shameless dictator. In Paris and elsewhere in France, and across the European medical world, there was an uproar: belief, half-belief, doubt, mockery, and even outright opposition all coexisted.

  After October 1791, a great number of medical experts, urgently commissioned by their statesmen, arrived in succession at Reims. Their purpose was to evaluate and confirm the real effect of cowpox inoculation, and to master its procedures. For an English physician and André had, under the joint notarised witnessing of English and French notaries, signed a legal instrument on September 11, 1791, in the Reims City Hall: the technique of cowpox inoculation was contributed freely to all humanity; any person or organisation could use it without authorisation—free of charge and fully lawfully.

  …

  From July through the end of August, after the fugitives Louis XVI and his Queen returned to Paris, André’s attention remained fixed on the internal construction of his old and new territories; he “fenced land and raised horses” at ease across the Marne and the Ardennes, never showing the slightest intention of intervening in national affairs.

  Yet in Paris, Philippe, Duc d’Orléans—who had behaved himself for years—could finally restrain himself no longer. In 1791, this Duc led a powerful faction, allied with a liberal bloc that was deeply dissatisfied with the old order and equally dissatisfied with the moderate Constitutionnel government.

  In the eyes of many lesser property-holders who sought a greater political voice, this prince—generous in appearance but weak in will—was an ideal candidate, capable of making certain lawful concessions to ordinary proprietors. After the King’s flight, Duc d’Orléans grew restless, and attempted to push a proposal through the Jacobin Club…

  In the reception room of the Palais Royal, Duc d’Orléans’s fist again crashed onto a small, flimsy table, striking it so hard that the wooden boards nearly came apart. Across from him sat his dedicated private secretary, Laclos.

  A quarter of an hour earlier, Laclos had just brought Duc d’Orléans bad news: several centre-right factions of the Constituent Assembly had unanimously rejected a plan proposed by a few Jacobin deputies—“to depose the fugitive King Louis XVI, enthrone the six-year-old Dauphin as King Louis XVII, and appoint Duc d’Orléans to organise a supervisory committee and serve as Regent for eight to twelve years.”

  …

  It was General Lafayette who stepped forward in the Assembly hearing and firmly opposed deposing Louis XVI in favour of the child Dauphin. The Commander-in-Chief of the National Guard even threatened that, even if his mortal enemy Duc d’Orléans became Regent through a chain of conspiracies, Lafayette would drive the shameless usurper down with his sword. With Barnave and others supporting him, the matter of punishing the King’s flight was quietly dropped.

  “Damn him—damn Lafayette! I will make you regret it!” the Duc roared again and again, though it was nothing more than verbal fury, without any real threat.

  As Duc d’Orléans’s secretary, Laclos knew this temper well, and always assumed that, after venting his anger, the man above would recover his reason and consider the long game.

  But this time Laclos was wrong. The blazing fury Lafayette had provoked in Duc d’Orléans had burned away all restraint. He decided he would no longer yield; he would teach Lafayette a lesson that would never be forgotten.

  “…If he dares to order his men to fire, Lafayette will become the enemy of the people, the criminal of history, and he will be forced to flee Paris like the fugitive King… If he chooses to submit, he will kneel before me like an obedient dog, accept all my arrangements, and cease to threaten my interests.”

  The moment he heard Duc d’Orléans’s plan, Laclos felt his mind go blank. He stared at the magnate before him—his own master—with his mouth parted in astonishment. When he regained his senses, he immediately rose to oppose it.

  Laclos said bluntly, “Your Highness, this idea is extremely dangerous. If carried out, it is very likely to plunge Paris into large-scale riot, and it will split the National Constituent Assembly once more in its final two months. Moreover, I cannot be certain we have the strength to restrain those people’s ambitions. Please think again: those who can destroy one King will have no scruples left—and they can destroy another King just as easily. And beyond that, they will want more…”

  “Monsieur, there is nothing more to consider!” the Duc cut him off roughly. He shouted his order: “Now you will go to Danton—to Marat—to Brissot—to Desmoulins—and also to Billaud-Varenne, these anti-monarchist Republicans. They will support my plan, and launch a new revolution to drive that stupid pig Louis XVI—who knows only eating, drinking, and relieving himself—from the throne.”

  Duc d’Orléans’s restraint of more than three years finally erupted today. His purpose was to drive Louis XVI down—

  For that purpose, he endured keeping company with people who were not gentlemen, who did not hunt, who could not tell the difference between a racehorse’s nose and tail, forcing laughter alongside them;

  For that purpose, he endured the nauseating, scar-faced Danton staring shamelessly at his most beautiful mistress and at her lovely younger sister during banquets;

  For that purpose, he endured this fellow before him with goldfish eyes and sagging bags—lavishing on him more than 1,000,000 livres every year to squander, to bribe deputies and Paris Commune commissioners, and even beggars on the filthiest streets.

  …

  Was not all of it, all of it, for the sake of becoming King of France—or Regent?!

  When persuasion proved useless, Laclos, his heart turned to ash, lowered his head without expression. He bowed deeply to Duc d’Orléans and said, “In that case, Your Highness, I will obey your arrangements. But I hope you understand: this will be the last time I serve Your Highness.” With that, Laclos withdrew.

  Several weeks later, in mid-July, Paris’s Republicans and the Constitutionalists clashed violently, culminating in the massacre on the Champ de Mars. When the news reached Chalons-en-Champagne, André immediately ordered the Marne and the Ardennes to enter a Level Three alert, and required Chassé’s gendarmerie to strengthen patrols along the western border.

  Yet in public, André still maintained a cautious silence, saying not a single word about the unfortunate incident in Paris. Only once, in the Chalons administrative hall, did André tell Lameth (the younger one), a representative of the Feuillants Club (also called the Lafayette faction—Monarchistes who, after breaking from the Jacobin Club, had founded a new political club), that he understood the difficulties faced by Lafayette and Bailly, and therefore would not condemn that unhappy event.

  But on the other hand, André—long accustomed to practising two-faced methods—had already, in early June, deliberately instructed the intelligence department led by Major Penduvas to provide passports for Danton, Marat, Desmoulins, Brissot, Fréron, Legendre, and others who had been placed on wanted lists by the Paris City Hall, enabling them to seek refuge in Britain. He also arranged different escape routes for each of them, to avoid their capture by Lafayette’s men.

  (A brief note: regarding the bloodshed at the Champ de Mars caused by General Lafayette—readers may consult relevant materials for the causes and course of events. For certain reasons, I will not narrate this major historical event further; it will not be developed in the story here, and at most will be mentioned in passing.)

  …

  At a champagne estate on the Montagne de Reims, André poured a glass of champagne for Laclos, who had come from afar to throw in his lot with him. After the two drank it down in one, the master of the estate comforted his somewhat sullen guest.

  He said, “That Philippe—Duc d’Orléans—is a timid, foolish idiot who loves to show off! My friend, leaving the Palais Royal was a wise choice. Here, you can have anything you want. Oh, by the way—where do you wish to serve? In politics? In commerce? Or in the army—any will do.”

  Laclos raised his head and said, “I am tired of political intrigue and do not wish to run myself ragged any longer. As for business, I once owed a large sum because of it in my early years. So it is simpler to remain in the army.”

  André nodded. “The newly established Reims artillery school lacks an artillery director (equivalent to a deputy headmaster). I can recommend you for it. And one more thing—if you find it acceptable, this champagne estate is the home for you and your family in the Marne. Later, Second Lieutenant Lozère will arrange everything for you.”

  When Bouillé ordered the dissolution of the German legion, André had already dispatched Penduvas to Montmédy and Metz to select a group of these soon-to-be “unemployed” German mercenaries—primarily technical troops among cavalry, artillery, and engineers—to fill the newly formed Champagne Composite Brigade. In the end, he recruited more than 1,000 men, raising the Brigade’s total strength to 6,500. This was André’s last expansion after he temporarily stepped away from the Champagne Composite Brigade, and before the outbreak of war in 1792.

  …

  The failure of Louis XVI’s flight did not cause much stir in Europe. Only the émigré nobles in Coblenz clamoured that the rebels of Paris had kidnapped the King and Queen, and they again sent envoys to the Hofburg in Vienna, urging the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II to intervene militarily in France.

  In 1781, through the joint efforts of diplomats in Saint Petersburg and Vienna, Austria and Russia allied once more. In 1787, the Russo–Turkish War broke out. At the beginning of the following year, Austria declared war on the Ottoman Empire in accordance with the alliance. In September, the Austrian army was defeated by Ottoman forces near the Lodosh region. Because the Russian advance was fierce, the Austrians were able to redeploy and resume their offensive.

  In October 1789, after a siege of more than twenty days, the Austrians captured Belgrade. Yet after the outbreak of the French Revolution changed the international situation, and with the threat of Prussian invasion and fear of Tsarist Russia’s expansion in the Balkans, Austria weighed the balance and decided to seek a separate peace with the Ottomans in secret. In August 1791, the two sides signed the Treaty of Sistova. The Ottoman Empire exchanged parts of Bosnia for Belgrade…