Forced to go to Paris

Louis XVI, in a familiar position of inaction born of despair and indecision, with his family, as Versailles was being overrun, during the attack of October 1789. On the 9th, Fersen wrote his father, "I was a witness of all that happened on Monday the 5th and Tuesday the 6th of October, and of the arrival at Paris of the King and his family. I came back in one of the King's carriages. We were six and a half hours on the road. God forbid that I should ever again see such sorrowful sights as in these two days. The people seem delighted at seeing the King and the Royal Family at Paris. The Queen is greatly applauded, as she will always be by those who know her and do justice to her kind heart." Historian/author Stanley Loomis reported that 2000 carriages, filled with debris of the abandoned world of Versailles, followed in the wake of the King and Queen as they were escorted to Paris.