crossed their last major obstacle and would soon be in the care of
the duke de Choiseul and his loyal cavalry. With his detailed itinerary at hand, the king was aware that they had fallen nearly three
hours behind, yet it probably never occurred to him that this could
pose a problem. The mood shifted abruptly, however, as they came
in sight of the small relay post at Somme-Vesle, isolated on the
main road at some distance from the village. In the great expanse of
openfield farmland surrounding them there were no troops in sight.
Valory cautiously inquired and discovered that the cavalry had indeed been there, waiting across a small pond beyond the relay, but
that the troops had been harassed by local peasants and had left an
hour earlier. At first the travelers thought that Choiseul might simply have pulled back to a quieter spot farther down the road. Yet
when they reached the next relay, he and his men were still nowhere
to be seen. As the family drove in the early evening toward the
town of Sainte-Menehould, framed against the dark band of the Argonne Forest, they were beset, in Tourzel's words, by "terrible
anxiety.""
The Debacle
Over the previous days, the organization of the king's escort had
initially gone quite smoothly, despite the modifications caused by
Louis' last-minute decision to delay his departure by one day.
As Fersen and the royal family completed their preparations and
launched the escape from Paris, General Bouille had been activating
a whole series of prearranged troop movements to prepare a reception for the king. The general himself had left his headquarters in
Metz on June i6, informing local officials that he was off to inspect
the frontiers for possible Austrian troop activities. Orders were
given to begin concentrating soldiers and large quantities of food
and supplies in Montmedy. On June zo he had arrived in Stenay, the
fortified town on the Meuse between Montmedy and Varennes. His
youngest son and another officer, the count de Raigecourt, had been
sent ahead to Varennes with a team of relay horses, joining some
forty German troops already stationed there. To avoid suspicion,
they were to keep the horses in the stables of an inn just east of the
river, leading them to the southern edge of Varennes only when
they were notified of the king's impending arrival. During the night
of June 20-21 the elder Bouille and a small group of officers had secretly ridden eight miles farther south to wait for the royal party in
a secluded position just north of the small town of Dun. Meanwhile, other contingents of German cavalry were led from the
south by commanders Damas and Andoins to take up positions in
Clermont and Sainte-Menehould respectively. On the morning of
June 21, Francois de Goguelat himself had led forty hussars from
Sainte-Menehould to Somme-Vesle, arriving about noon to meet
the duke de Choiseul-and the hairdresser Leonard-who were
waiting at the relay post.22
All these well-laid plans, however, were evolving not in a vacuum but in full view of a civilian population that was anything but passive. The townspeople of Varennes were not alone in their
growing apprehension about the unexplained troop movements
throughout the region during the month of June. The pervasive
suspicion of General Bouille, the "butcher of Nancy," and of the
aristocratic officers who commanded in the field was only intensified by the overwhelming presence of German-speaking mercenaries in all the contingents that people now saw passing. The tension was compounded by the army's failure to give ample advance
warning of the arriving cavalrymen. Town leaders were notified at
the last moment that the troops had been sent to protect money being shipped from Paris to pay the army guarding the frontier. But
the story did little to allay local fears. Why were there so many cavalrymen, when a single escort from start to finish should have been
sufficient? Why had the commanders
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