Soon after midday he set out, accompanied by the queen, his brother the Count de Provence, his sister the Princess Elizabeth, and his children.  It was a strange and shameful retinue that escorted the King of France to his capital.  One party of the rioters, with Maillard and another ruffian named Jourdan, the chief of the Coupe-tetes, at their head, had started two hours before, bearing aloft in triumph the heads of the mangled Body-guards, and combining such hideous mockery with their barbarity that they halted at Sevres to compel a barber to dress the hair on the lifeless skulls.  And now the royal carriage was surrounded by a vast and confused medley; market-women and the rest of the female rabble, with drunken gangs of the ruffians who had stormed the palace in the morning, still brandishing their weapons, or bearing loaves of bread on their pike-heads, and singing out that they should all have enough of bread now, since they were bringing the baker, the bakeress, and the baker’s boy to Paris.[7] The only part of the procession that bore even a decent appearance was a small escort of ’different regiments—­the Guards, the National Guards, and the Body-guards; many of the latter still bleeding from the wounds which they had received in the conflict and tumult of the morning.  A train of carriages containing a deputation of the members of the Assembly also followed; Mirabeau himself having just earned a motion that the Assembly was inseparable from the king, and that wherever he was there must be the place of meeting for the great council of the nation.  Yet, in spite of the confidence which their presence might have been expected to diffuse among the mob, and in spite of the hopes of coming plenty which the rioters themselves announced, the royal party was not even yet safe from further attacks.  Some ruffians stabbed at the royal carriage as it passed with their pikes, and several shots were fired at it, though fortunately they missed their aim and no one was injured.[8]

To the queen the journey was more painful than to any one else.  A few weeks before she had congratulated Mademoiselle de Lamballe on not being a mother—­perhaps the bitterest exclamation that grief and anxiety ever wrung from her lips; and now the keenest anxieties of a mother were indeed added to those of a queen.  The procession moved with painful slowness.  No provisions had been taken in the carriage, and the little dauphin was suffering from hunger and begging for some food.  Tears, which her own danger could not bring to her eyes, flowed plentifully as she witnessed the suffering of her child.  She could only beg him to bear his privations with patience; and she had the reward of the pains she had always taken to inspire him with confident in her, in the fortitude with which, for the rest of the day, he bore what to children of his age is probably the severest hardship to which they can be exposed.[9]