Page:A Book of Escapes and Hurried Journeys.pdf/40

 secrecy and uncomfortable jolting. He would go back to Paris to the people with whom he was so popular.

Indeed, he had no other choice. The advance guards of Bouillé's horse were even then appearing on the heights behind the Aire, but there were 10,000 men in Varennes, cleared and nothing but artillery could have the place. JBouillé's even time, could have done nothing, had he been in When, about seven o'clock, the royalist general himself looked down on the bridge, he saw a cloud of dust on the Clermont road which told him that the berline had begun its return journey, accompanied by thousands of marching citizens, seemed The adventure was so certain had shipwrecked over. What had on a multitude of blunders, and the strange perversities of fortune. The King and Queen were returning to a prison from which there was to be no-outlet but death.

What of the young Swede, Count Axel Fersen, whom we last saw at Bondy receiving from Marie Antoinette the broad gold ring? The lovers of queens have for the most part been tragically fated, and his lot was no exception to the rule. It is hard for us to-day to