The vast throng departs at about one…
October 1789 CE
By now the mass of people has grown to over sixty thousand, and the return trip takes about nine hours.
The procession can seem merry at times, as guardsmen hoist up loaves of bread stuck on the tips of their bayonets, and some of the market women ride gleefully astride the captured cannon.
Yet, even as the crowd sings pleasantries about their "Good Papa", their violent mentality cannot be misread; celebratory gunshots fly over the royal carriage and some marchers even carry pikes bearing the heads of the slaughtered Versailles guards.
A sense of victory over the ancien régime is imbued in the parade, and it is understood by all that the king is now fully at the service of the people.
No one understands this so viscerally as the king himself.