High Lights of the French Revolution Author:Hilaire Belloc Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PART TWO THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES UPON the evening of Monday, the twentieth of June, 1791, a little before nine o'clock, Axel de Fersen was leaning, with his... more » chin in his hands, his elbows upon the parapet, looking over the bridge called the Pont Royal, which leads from the Tuileries to the southern bank of the Seine. He watched the dying light upon the river below, and waited with desperate impatience in his heart, his body lounging in affected indolence. The sky above was cloudy. The day had been hot, but its last hours not sunlit. A freshness was now coming up from the Seine over the town, and the noises of life and movement that rise with the closing of the working hours in the capital filled the streets. He was dressed in the rough habit of a cabman, and the poor coach of which he had the driving stood in rank with others a little way from the gate of the palace. As he so gazed, two men, one with a sunken, long- jawed face and small, peering eyes, the other frail, slight, and younger, both dressed in a faded yellow livery as of servants to some rich man of a time before the Revolution had abolished liveries, came up to him. He knew already who they were. They were Moustier and Valory, two gentlemen of the king's disbanded guard who, in the disguise of servants, had volunteered to serve Louis in his flight. Fersen gave them the instructions that they awaited, for one was to find and conduct the great coach he had had built and to keep it waiting for Fersen at the gates of the city; the other was to act as outrider and to go before to prepare the relays. A third, Malden, remained hidden in the apartments of the king. Night fell, an hour passed, and two women in the conduct of a man who hurried them across the bridge were put into a chaise that there awaited them and...« less