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In July 1790, at her chateau Saint-Cloud, Antoinette secretly negotiated with the moderate revolutionary, Honoré, comte de Mirabeau, a sybaritic colossus and president of the Assembly who wanted to be the premier under an English constitutional monarchy. Antoinette, though horrified by the gigantic, messy count, offered him a salary for backing the king. ‘Madame, the monarchy’s saved!’ he boomed; she was ‘the only man the king has’. But Mirabeau died, succeeded in his mission to make constitutional monarchy work by his handsome, slim young deputy, Antoine Barnave. Louis and Antoinette offered the vain, ambitious Lafayette an ancient rank, that of constable, yet the swanning paladin, aspiring to be a Cromwell–Washington, refused – missing the chance to seize the leadership. Without a clear leader, the Assembly laid the foundations for modern society: Jewish rights and equality were granted, leading to the lifting of repression across Europe. But women were neglected; and slavery was positively supported by many of the revolutionaries. The Assembly’s abolition of nobility alienated 250,000 nobles; its persecution of priests sparked a Catholic counter-revolution in western France; its torment of the king mobilized the monarchs of Europe.

Extreme times offered extreme opportunities for those with extreme solutions. The Assembly’s delegates discussed a penal code, adopting Dr Guillotin’s proposal to create a rational instrument of humane execution. ‘Now with my machine,’ boasted Guillotin, ‘I’ll knock your head off in the twinkling of an eye and you’ll never feel it.’ He was not actually inventor of the guillotine, just its advocate, but many who laughed would ‘in the twinkling of an eye’ experience his ‘machine’. The hereditary executioner, known as Monsieur de Paris, was Chevalier Charles-Henri Sanson, who tested the guillotine on sheep and dead convicts. A medical student until he inherited his father’s position as a teenager, he was the fourth in this killing dynasty. Already executioner for three decades, he had supervised the gruesome punishments – by sword, axe and wheel – of the ancient regime. In 1757, when he was eighteen, he had executed an attempted royal assassin, Damiens, whom he tortured, castrated and, harnessing four horses to his limbs, tore apart, slicing his tendons to ease the dismantling, before burning him alive. Sanson recommended the guillotine to the Assembly. His expertise would be much used.

‘At last,’ Fersen told his sister, ‘on the 24th [December 1790] I spent a whole day with Her. It was the first. Imagine my joy.’ Antoinette’s beautiful day with ‘the lovable personage’ touched her. ‘The personage and I managed to see each other safely once,’ she told Yolande de Polignac. ‘You can judge our happiness.’

Louis and Antoinette now agonized over the constitution that the Assembly expected them to approve and demanded the right to move from Paris to Saint-Cloud. When permission was refused, Antoinette ordered Fersen to plan their escape to a fortress, Montmédy, where Louis could manage both the revolutionaries and his exiled brothers, who were inviting Austria to attack the Assembly.

On the hot night of 20 June 1791, two children and two monarchs jumped into a carriage bought by Fersen, with the king disguised as the servant of a Russian baroness (Antoinette). The dauphin thought he was going to a play ‘since we’ve all donned these odd dresses’. Their disappearance was noticed, couriers dispatched; they missed a rendezvous with loyal Hussars, and Antoinette’s hairdresser did not turn up, always a bad sign. When the carriage galloped into Varennes, they were recognized and arrested. The Bourbons were escorted triumphantly back to Paris by a delegation including the sympathetic thirty-year-old Barnave. An attraction flickered between him and Antoinette, the start of a secret correspondence about installing a moderate monarchy. When a priest showed support in the street, the crowd dismembered him and presented his hands and head to Antoinette.