At 6:00 A.M., and aide’s cry awakened him [Lafayette]; a mob had smashed through the palace gate, reached the Cour de Marbre, the innermost marble courtyard of the palace, and fallen upon the Black Musketeers, the adolescent royal bodygaurds, who continued observing the previous day’s orders not to fire. As some attackers streaked up the staircase to the queen’s apartments, other dragged the captured bodyguards to Jourdan Coupe-Tete, who quickly dispatched two of the helpless boy-soldiers and impaled their severed heads on pikes as trophies, then smeared their blood on his heard and hands to excite the people’s lust. Upstairs, the queen’s bodyguards shouldered shut the doors to her apartments against the surging mob, allowing her to escape through a secret passageway to the king’s apartments, before they, too, fell to the mob.
Lafayette raced out of the Noailles mansion, his knight’s blood aboil. He leaped on the first horse he found. Brandishing his sword, he charged furiously through the palace gated into the mob, and, at the sight of the two musketeers’ heads on pikes, drove his great horse into the rioters, his grenadiers following at his flanks. The terrified rioters fell back before the advancing horses, racing off with their grisly trophies on the road to Paris - along with golden candelabra, silver-threaded tapestries, and any other palace treasures they could carry. Lafayette demanded Coupe-Tete’s arrest but it was too late. His black shroud had vanished. Lafayette spurred his horse up the hill to the entrance of the royal apartments, where the mob was about disembowel a bevy of royal bodyguards. “Fortunately, Lafayette arrived in time,” sobbed one of the guardsmen afterwards. “He saved our lives.”
After ordering guardsmen to present bayonets to the crowd, Lafayette raced up the stairs to the king’s apartments. Terrified courtiers, ministers, deputies, and servants cringed in every corner, beneath tables, behind sofas. At the door of the king’s apartment, a court official uttered the last gasp of the ancien regime at the onrushing figure of the marquis de La Fayette: “Monsieur,” he called out, “the king accords you the right to enter his cabinet.” Before he reached mid-sentence, Lafayette had penetrated the king’s salon, where he found the king and queen unharmed, along with their three terrified children and the king’s sister, brother, and aunts. He also found his sad old friend from Newport, the comte d'Estaing, whom the king had appointed commander of the Royal Guard. Lafayette assured them all he would see to their safety. It was 8:00 A.M.
