The Knight of Maison-Rouge

by Alexandre Dumas

  “Really!” said Geneviève. “Was it that bad?”

  “Worse. I’ll tell you all about it later. Right now I’m starving. It’s Maurice’s fault, he had me running all over the quartier Saint-Jacques last night. Allow me to dig into your breakfast, which I see neither of you has touched.”

  “You know, he’s right!” cried Maurice, with infantile joy. “Let’s eat. I haven’t had a thing and neither have you, Geneviève.”

  He glanced at Lorin when he said her name, but Lorin didn’t bat an eye.

  “So you guessed it was her? Really?” he asked Lorin. “It wasn’t exactly hard!” replied Lorin, cutting himself a thick slice of rosy ham.

  “I’m hungry too,” said Geneviève, holding out her plate.

  “Lorin,” said Maurice, “last night I was sick, you know.”

  “You were more than sick, you were out of your mind.”

  “So be it! But I think it’s you who aren’t feeling well this morning.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You haven’t yet made up a rhyme.”

  “I was just getting around to it, this very instant,” said Lorin.

  “When he sits among the Graces

  Phoebus always strums his lyre;

  But when he follows Venus’s traces

  Phoebus of music can quickly tire.”

  “That’s more like it! He’s always got a quatrain up his sleeve!” laughed Maurice.

  “But you’ll have to make do with that one, since we’re about to broach matters that aren’t so gay.”

  “What is it now?” asked Maurice anxiously.

  “What it is is that I’ll soon be on guard duty at the Conciergerie.”

  “At the Conciergerie!” cried Geneviève. “Near the Queen?”

  “Near the Queen … I think so, yes, madame.”

  Geneviève went pale. Maurice frowned and made a sign to Lorin, who cut himself another slice of ham, twice the size of the first.

  The Queen had, in fact, been conducted to the Conciergerie, where we will now follow her.

  34

  THE CONCIERGERIE

  At the corner of the pont-au-Change and the quai aux Fleurs, where the flower market is, sit the remains of the old palace of Saint Louis,1 which was known as the Palace par excellence, just as Rome was once called the Capital; it continues to bear this sovereign name even though, for some time now, the only kings to inhabit it are clerks of the court, judges, and litigants.

  It is a huge and somber palace, the Palais de Justice, promoting fear rather than love of that harsh goddess. On show there you’ll find all the paraphernalia of human vengeance brought together in one compact space. Here are the rooms where they hold those charged and awaiting trial; further along are the rooms where they are judged; below that the cells where they are locked up when they have been condemned; at the door the small space where they are branded with an abominable branding iron that burns; and a hundred and fifty paces away from the main square lies that other, larger square where they are killed. This is the place de Grève,2 where what is begun in the Palais de Justice is finished off.

  Justice, as you can see, has everything to hand.

  This whole pile of buildings heaped on top of one another, mournful, grey, pierced by tiny barred windows, where the cavernous vaults resemble the iron-barred caves along the quai des Lunettes—this is the Conciergerie.

  The prison has dungeons that the waters of the Seine regularly slosh with black alluvium. It has mysterious exits that once ejected into the river victims it was in certain interests to make disappear.

  From the perspective of 1793, as tireless purveyor of victims for the scaffold, the Conciergerie was, you might say, overflowing with prisoners who could be turned into the condemned in an hour at most. In those days, the old prison of Saint Louis really meant business—as the leader in the death trade.

  Under the archway over the entrance, at night, a red lantern swung as sinister ensign of this house of horrors.

  The day before the day when Maurice, Lorin, and Geneviève breakfasted together, a heavy sound of rolling wheels shook the cobblestones of the quai de l’Horloge and the prison windows. The rolling stopped in front of the ogival door. Gendarmes banged on the door with the scabbards of their sabers, the door opened, and the carriage rolled into the courtyard; with the door firmly shut behind her and the bolts shot home, a woman descended.

  She was immediately swallowed up by the cavernous registration office. A few curious heads bobbed up, creeping forward to check out the prisoner by the light of their torches, and appeared in halftones before plunging back into darkness. Then a few vulgar guffaws could be heard, along with crude farewells batted about by men leaving the building who could be heard but not seen.

  The woman brought in had remained penned inside the first wicket with the gendarmes. She could see that she had to go through a second wicket, but she did not realize that she needed to pick her feet up and lower her head at the same time, for suddenly a step comes up at you from ground level right where the ceiling descends.

  Still unused to prison architecture, no doubt, despite the prolonged stay she had already enjoyed in one, the prisoner forgot to duck and banged her head violently against the iron beam.

  “Did you hurt yourself, citizeness?” one of the gendarmes asked.

  But the woman moved on without a murmur of complaint, even though her forehead clearly bore the mark of contact with the iron beam and looked about to bleed.

  Soon the concierge’s armchair could be made out, an armchair more venerable in the eyes of prisoners than a king’s throne is in the eyes of courtesans, for the concierge of a prison is the dispenser of favors and every favor is vital for a prisoner, for often the slightest favor changes his or her gloomy sky into a luminous firmament.

  Richard,3 the concierge, was comfortably ensconced in his armchair, and though thoroughly convinced of his importance he had not budged an inch, despite the clanging of the gates and the rolling of the carriage, which announced the arrival of his new guest. Richard the concierge took up his tobacco, eyed the prisoner, opened a great walloping register, and hunted around for a quill on a small black wooden inkstand, where the ink, solidified around the edges, still preserved a bit of moist sludge in the middle, just as there is always a bit of molten matter in the middle of a volcano’s crater.

  “Citizen concierge,” said the chief of the escort, “do the committal on this one for us and make it snappy—they’re waiting impatiently for us in the Commune.”

  “Oh! It won’t take long!” said the concierge, pouring into his inkpot a few drops of the dregs of the wine in his glass. “My hand’s made for the job, thank the Lord! Your surname and Christian name, citizeness?”

  Dipping his pen in the improvised ink, he prepared to squeeze in at the bottom of a page that was already practically full the committal details of the new inmate, while the benign-looking citizeness Richard stood behind him, gazing with open-mouthed amazement that bordered on respect at the woman her husband was questioning—a woman who looked so sad, so noble, and so proud at once.

  “Marie Antoinette Jeanne Josèphe de Lorraine,” the prisoner replied, “Archduchess of Austria and Queen of France.”

  “Queen of France,” the concierge repeated, gripping the arms of his chair and hoisting himself up in amazement.

  “Queen of France,” repeated the prisoner in the same uninflected tone.

  “In other words, Widow Capet,”4 said the chief of the escort. “Which of the names will I list her as?” asked the concierge. “Whichever you like,” said the chief escort, “as long as you list her pronto.”

  The concierge fell back into his chair and, with some trepidation, wrote in his register the Christian names, surname, and titles that the prisoner had given herself, listings whose reddish ink can still be seen today, though the rats of the revolutionary Conciergerie have gnawed the page at the most precious spot in all the register.

  Mother Richard went on
standing behind her husband’s armchair; but a feeling of religious commiseration had caused her to join her hands in an attitude of prayer.

  “Your age?” continued the concierge.

  “Thirty-seven years and nine months,” replied the Queen.

  Richard began writing again, then listed the details of her physical features and ended with general formulae and personal notes.

  “Right!” he said. “Done!”

  “Where are we taking the prisoner?” asked the chief of the escort. Richard took a second pinch of tobacco and looked at his wife.

  “Blast!” said the woman. “We weren’t notified, so heaven knows.…”

  “Find somewhere!” said the brigadier.

  “There’s the Council Chamber,” ventured Madame Richard.

  “Hmmm. That’s on the spacious side,” muttered Richard.

  “So much the better if it is! All the more room to lodge the guards there.”

  “The Council Chamber it is, then,” said Richard.

  “But it’s uninhabitable for the present, as it doesn’t have a bed.”

  “True,” said his wife, “I didn’t think of that.”

  “Bah!” went one of the gendarmes. “We’ll put a bed in there tomorrow, and tomorrow will soon be upon us.”

  “In any case, the citizeness can spend the night in our room,” said Madame Richard.

  “Oh, yes, and what about us?” asked her husband.

  “We won’t go to bed; like the citizen gendarme says, a night is soon over.”

  “Well, then,” said Richard, “take the citizeness to my room.”

  “While we’re doing that, you’ll get the receipt ready for us, won’t you?”

  “It’ll be here when you get back.”

  Madame Richard took a candle that was burning on the table and led the way. Marie Antoinette followed without a word, composed and pale as ever. Two wicket clerks to whom Madame Richard signaled closed off the stairs. The Queen was shown a bed, which Madame Richard promptly made up with fresh white sheets. The clerks stationed themselves at the exits, and then the door was locked with a double lock and Marie Antoinette found herself alone.

  How she passed that night no one knows, for she passed it face-to-face with God.

  It was only the next day that the Queen was taken to the Council Chamber, an extended rectangular box whose wicket gate opened onto a corridor of the Conciergerie and which was divided into two sections lengthwise by a half-curtain partition that did not come up to the ceiling.

  The men on guard duty took over the outer section. The other became the Queen’s bedroom.

  A thickly barred window let light into each of the two sections. A screen was used as a door, separating the Queen from the guards and closing off the opening between the two cells. The entire chamber was tiled with clay bricks. The walls had once been decorated with gilt wood paneling and fleur-de-lys5 wallpaper, and strips of paper still hung raggedly here and there.

  A bed set up facing the window, a chair placed close to the screen—such was the furnishing of the royal prison cell.

  On entering the room, the Queen asked to be brought her books and her needlework. She was brought Les Révolutions d’Angleterre, which she had begun at the Temple, as well as Le Voyage du jeune Anarcharsis6and her tapestry.

  The gendarmes settled into the neighboring cell, for their part. History has preserved their names, as it does all the most insignificant beings whom Providence associates with great catastrophes and who see reflected on themselves a spark of that luminous energy that causes thunder as it smashes either the thrones of kings or the kings themselves.

  The Commune had appointed these two men as brave patriots; they were supposed to remain at their fixed post in the cell until Marie Antoinette’s judgment. It was hoped that this expedient would prevent the almost inevitable hitches of shift duty with guards changing several times a day. Thus the two guards had had a terrible responsibility thrust upon them.

  The Queen learned of this arrangement the very day it came into play through the conversation between the two men, whose every word reached her unless they had some special reason for lowering their voices. She felt both anxiety and joy when she heard about it, for if, on the one hand, she was bound to realize that the two men must be rock solid if they had been selected from among so many men, she reflected that, on the other, it would be easier for her friends to corrupt two known guards at a fixed post than a hundred unknown men picked at random and coming into her orbit unexpectedly and for just a day at a time.

  The first night, before getting into bed, one of the guards had a smoke, as was his habit. The tobacco smoke slid through the gaps in the partition and laid siege to the unhappy Queen, whose sufferings had exacerbated her sensitivities rather than blunting them. She soon found herself seized by the vapors and nausea; her head was heavy with lack of oxygen. But, faithful to her policy of indomitable pride, she did not complain.

  As she lay awake, with an insomnia brought on by her physical ills, listening to the undisturbed silence of the night, she thought she heard a whine coming from outside. The whine was mournful and prolonged; it was eerie and piercing, like the noise of wind whistling through deserted passages when a tempest borrows a human voice to breathe life into the passions of the elements.

  She soon recognized that this noise that had at first made her start, this painful and persistent cry, was the mournful lament of a dog howling on the quai. She immediately thought of her poor Black, whom she had forgotten while being shunted from the Temple and whose voice she felt she recognized. Indeed, the poor animal whose excessive vigilance had given his mistress away had followed behind her, out of sight, and pursued her carriage right to the Conciergerie gates; he had only run away momentarily when he was almost chopped in two by the double iron blade that shut on her.

  But the poor creature had soon come back and, realizing that his mistress was locked away in this great stone tomb, was calling her, howling, as he waited for the caress of a reply, ten feet away from the sentry.

  The Queen did reply—with a sigh that caused her guards to prick up their ears. But as this sigh was followed by complete silence, they were quickly reassured and dropped back off to sleep.

  The next day, the Queen was up and dressed at the crack of dawn. Sitting by the barred window through which the filtered daylight descended, bluish, over her thin hands, she looked as though she was reading, but her thoughts were miles away.

  The gendarme known as Gilbert pushed the screen back a little and watched her in silence. Marie Antoinette heard the noise the screen made as it folded in on itself and scraped the brick floor; but she did not look up.

  She had positioned herself in such a way that the gendarmes could see her head entirely bathed in the morning light. The gendarme Gilbert signaled to his comrade to come and watch her with him through the opening. Duchesne went over.

  “You see,” said Gilbert in a lowered voice, “how pale she is; it’s positively frightening! Her eyes are red, she’s in pain; you’d have to say she’s been bawling her eyes out.”

  “You know very well,” said Duchesne, “the Widow Capet never cries; she’s too proud for that.”

  “Well then, she must be sick.” Raising his voice, Gilbert said: “Tell me then, citizeness Capet, are you sick?”

  The Queen raised her eyes slowly and her gaze was level, clear, and quizzical as she studied the two men.

  “Are you talking to me, messieurs?” she asked in a voice full of sweetness, for she felt she’d noticed a spark of interest in the tone of the man who had addressed her.

  “Yes, citizeness, we were,” Gilbert continued. “We asked you if you were sick.”

  “Why sick?”

  “Because your eyes are very red.”

  “And you’re very pale, too,” Duchesne put in.

  “Thank you, messieurs. No, I’m not ill; but I suffered a lot last night.”

  “Oh, yes, with all your worries.”

  “No, m
essieurs; my worries being always the same, and religion having taught me to lay them at the foot of the Cross, my worries don’t make me suffer more one day than any other. No, I’m ill because I didn’t sleep last night.”

  “Ah! You’re not used to the new digs, the new bed,” said Duchesne.

  “And then again, the lodgings aren’t the best,” added Gilbert.

  “It’s not that either, messieurs,” said the Queen, shaking her head.

  “Ugly or beautiful, where I live is a matter of indifference to me.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “What is it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Please forgive me for saying so, but I was most put out by the odor of the tobacco that monsieur is still exhaling as we speak.”

  Indeed, Gilbert was smoking again; it was, when it came down to it, his most common occupation.

  “Oh, my God!” he cried, quite troubled by how sweetly the Queen had spoken to him. “So that’s it! Why didn’t you say so, citizeness?”

  “Because I didn’t think I had any right to disrupt your habits, monsieur.”

  “All right, you won’t be inconvenienced any more, not by me at least,” said Gilbert, throwing away his pipe, which smashed on the tiles. “I won’t smoke again.”

  With that he turned and closed the screen again, dragging his companion with him.

  “It’s possible they’ll cut her head off—that’s the nation’s business; but why make that woman suffer any more than she has to? We’re soldiers, not torturers like bloody Simon.”

  “It’s all a bit aristocratic, what you’re doing there, mate,” said Duchesne, shaking his head.

  “What do you call aristocratic? Go on, tell me.”

  “I call aristocratic anything that vexes the nation and pleases our enemies.”

  “So in your books,” said brave Gilbert, “I’m vexing the nation because I don’t continue to smoke out the Widow Capet? Come off it! You see, me, I remember my oath to the nation and the orders of my brigadier, that’s all. Now, I know my orders by heart: ‘Do not let the prisoner escape, do not let anyone in to see her, remove any correspondence she tries to write or maintain, and die at your post.’ That’s what I promised to do and I’ll keep my promise. Long live the nation!”