In addition to his dark blue great-coat and his wide hat, Henri wore anything which he found available, and chose, for his distinctive mark, red handkerchiefs of immemorial Chollet make about his head and neck, and another about his waist to hold his pistols. It is striking to find him, the soul of conservatism, in the identical dress of the Cordeliers, “the red brothers of Danton,” cravatted and girdled in their Paris fashion, and flaunting the _bonnet rouge_. The appropriation of the hated color must have been of malice prepense, as a bit of not illegal bravado, and a slap of exquisite fun at the tailorish pomp and circumstance of war. Henri made a mountain guy of himself to some purpose. Among the Blues at Fontenay it quickly became a universal order to fire at the Red Handkerchief. The other leaders were unable to persuade him to doff it. “They know me by that,” was his aggravating answer, “and besides, it is so comfortable!” But they adorned themselves quickly with the same insignia, and saved him from the sharp-shooters. Such was the origin of the officers’ earliest uniform; and with their flapping boots, their huge swords, and these floating flame-colored gingham plaids, they must indeed have resembled the “brigands” of their enemies’ fancy. Henri continued to take pride in his Chollet turban, and was apt to consider a hat, except on festal occasions, as a piece of tautology. Later, after the conference at Fougères, he adopted the white sash, with its famous little black knot.
Those officers and civic adherents who encompassed the royal family at Paris, between the tragic forsaking of Versailles and the dawn of the regicide year, were, as well they knew, standing under oak-boughs in a gathering storm. Event was treading on the heels of event; every hour was oracular; it was impossible not to forecast the morrow, and to dread or defy it, as habit might prompt. Through the charged and purple air strange figures were passing: Mirabeau, borne dead to the Pantheon, to be eldest of its sleepers; Lafayette, with brave step and smile of compromise, riding through the blue national guards; the Queen, appearing in white on balconies, calm before mobs, with her firm fair arm about her little son; Barbaroux and Roland escorting Madame as she goes reluctantly from her happy dream-time in the garret of the dingy Rue Saint Jacques into place and authority; Camille Desmoulins, ever sauntering loose-haired, with a soiled roll of writing, and a sarcasm not unsweet upon his tongue; the Chéniers; Vergniaud; Westermann, with his hard, tenacious intelligence not yet amply employed; and Robespierre, “the last word of the Revolution, which, thus early, no man could read;” regal maskers, flown to the frontiers and snared at Varennes, and marched back to the capital amid din of sabres; couriers arriving with verifications of the butcheries at Avignon, and bishops departing, after a rapturous _Te Deum_ in the cathedral, each to his seething diocese; stout foreigners drinking in the Faubourg Saint Honoré, and darkly prognosticating ruin for this whole wild smithy where so much old iron was being lighted and beaten into new uses; Maillard and his murder-men of the Abbaye, walking yet peaceably, but looming on the horizon like huge dripping spectres of the worst that was to be;--such was the panorama, such the France, all of which Henri de La Rochejaquelein literally saw, and part of which, belying the adage, he was not. He, too, had been at the Café Valois; he, too, had watched on the quays the gaming soldiers his colleagues, and the knowing tri-color demoiselles; and heard through his lonely windows, by night, the mounting chorus of