Weathered hands, both young and old, ungloved, hardened from work with scythes or brushes, stained with grime, would reach out and touch him. Sometimes they would handle his tunic or hold out a lame child, hoping that his touch, the touch of the Bourbons, the touch of monarchy (which they professed to abhor), would cure it. These simple creatures still yearned for kings and magic and talismans, though they would be loath to confess to it. I observed as one man with a small blade crept beside Orléans’s coach and silently set to work removing two or three golden tassels from the hammercloth. He held his relics to his lips before pushing them deep into his pocket.

But for our sojourn that night at Chantilly, we rarely remained for more than half an hour at any one hostelry. These spectacles were brief affairs, short dramas enacted on a rural stage, and afterwards, the coachmen and footmen would mount their perches and the crowds would part to cries of ‘Vive Orléans!’ Only once did they shout something other than that.

As we quit the small town of Verberie, an angry old man stepped into the road. I caught his eye as we flew past. His jaw was jutted and his hand clenched some piece of filth from the fields. ‘Aristocrat!’ he roared from his gut as he hurled his clod. I thought it odd that I was the only one amongst us to gasp as it struck the back of our coach. I turned and watched him through the rear window, shaking his fist at our trail of dust.

Chapter 15

WE ARRIVED AT the barrier de Clichy before the city walls by late morning the following day. All along the road from Chantilly, the sun had pressed heavily upon the roof of our vehicle. Neither our fans nor the open windows succeeded in cooling us and Fantouche and Moustache panted and whimpered like two colicky infants.

At the time, I recall thinking there was something curious about our approach to Paris: the road leading from the city was all but deserted. The longer we were upon it, the fewer carts and Berlins we encountered, so that when we appeared at last before the barrier, it did not come as a surprise to discover it shut fast and overrun with National Guardsmen.