The presence of the deputies imposed silence on the shouts and howlings of the people.  The king had come into the Tuileries, and before him bowed the people in dumb respect.  They quietly allowed that this their king should open the carriage wherein the other king, the king by God’s grace, Louis XVI., sat a prisoner; they allowed that the king by the grace of the people, the National Assembly, through its twenty deputies, should render liberty to Louis and to his family, and lead them quietly under their protection into the Tuileries.

But from this day the Tuileries, which for centuries had been the palace of the kings of France, now became a prison for the King of France!

Louis XVI. was returned, not as the head, but as the prisoner of the state; from the moment he left Paris, the ermine mantle of his royalty had fallen from his shoulders upon the shoulders of the National Assembly; King Louis XVI. had dethroned himself.

Amid these fatal storms, amid these ever-swelling revolutionary floods, there was yet an hour of happiness for Josephine.  Out of the wild waves of rebellion was to rise, for a short time, an island of bliss.  The National Assembly, whose president, Alexandre de Beauharnais, had once more, in the course of the sessions, been re-elected by general acclamation, declared itself on the 3d of September, 1791, dissolved, and its members vanished to make room for the Legislative Assembly, which organized the very next day.

Alexandre de Beauharnais, after having so long and so zealously discharged his duties as a citizen, returned to his Josephine, to his children; and, weary with the storms and debates of the last months, longed for a quiet little place, away from the turmoil of the capital and from the attrition of parties.  Josephine acquiesced gladly in the wishes of her husband, for she felt her innermost being shattered by these last exciting times, and perhaps she cherished the secret hope that her husband, once removed from Paris, would be drawn away from the dangerous arena of politics, into which his enthusiasm had driven him.  She was, and remained at heart, a good and true royalist; and as Mirabeau, dying in the midst of revolution’s storms, had said of himself, that “he took to his grave the mourning-badge for the monarchy,” [Footnote:  Mirabeau died on the 6th of May, 1791.—­See, on his death, “Count Mirabeau,” by Theodore Mundt, vol. iv.] so also Josephine’s heart, since the flight to Varennes, wore the mourning-badge for the unfortunate royal family, who since that day had to endure so much humiliation, so much insult, and to whom Josephine in her loyal sense of duty consecrated the homage of a devout subject.

Josephine, therefore, gladly consented to the viscount’s proposal to leave Paris.  Accompanied by their children and by the governess of Hortense, Madame Lanoy, the viscount and his wife went to a property belonging to one of the Beauharnais family near Solange.