After months spent at the Tuileries under perpetual threat of attack, at first the king and queen were relieved by this new mode of confinement. By the Commune’s order, they were cut off from all communication with the outside world. So they lost sense of the menace still posed by the Parisian mob. But the next uprisings, known as the September 3 massacres, reminded them all too brutally that the Revolution was still raging unabated. The immediate incentive for the September 3 massacres was an impulse to avenge those patriots who had died during the insurrection of August 10, three weeks earlier. The Parisians’ rage was also prompted by new reports of the Prussian army’s success, particularly by the unexpected defeat of French troops at Longwy at August’s end. Moreover, there were rumors of plots being hatched within the prisons: it was feared that if enemy troops reached Paris, they would open the doors of these jails and, aided by the former convicts, cause an even greater massacre of patriots.
Early on the morning of September 3, Parisians learned that Verdun was about to fall to the Prussians. The Commune decreed a levée en masse. And soon thereafter the slaughter in the jails began. Among the first to be attacked was the prison of L’Abbaye, where scores of prisoners—prominent aristocrats, priests, judges, royal bodyguards—were killed by a group of some fifty neighborhood patriots that included jewelers, butchers, and café owners. There followed the onslaught on the prison of Bicêtre, where more than 1,700 beggars and other harmless castoffs were killed, among them thirty boys between the ages of twelve and fourteen. At the Salpetrière, girls of ten were murdered. At the Carmelite prison, more than two hundred priests were massacred by a crowd who sang the hymn “Dies Irae” as they went about their slaughter. The murderers moved on to the prisons of Saint-Firmin and La Force, where they killed Madame de Lamballe in a particularly sadistic manner. A total of more than two thousand innocent citizens thus met their demise.
On the afternoon of September 4, soon after the onslaught on La Force began, the king and queen had started their after-dinner game of backgammon when they heard a growing roar below their window. They then heard a terrible shriek. It was from the valet Cléry, who came rushing into the monarchs’ room to close its curtains: the head of Madame de Lamballe was being paraded in front of the queen’s window. Municipal guards next appeared in the room. One of them bluntly told Marie Antoinette the truth: “It is the head of Lamballe, which they have brought here to show you and to make you kiss,” he told the queen; “this is how the people takes its revenge upon tyrants.” Upon hearing these words, Marie-Thérèse reported, Marie Antoinette fainted. All through the following night the princess could hear her mother’s sobs. The queen was lucky that the details of Madame de Lamballe’s death were never reported to her: she had been disemboweled, her heart devoured, and her intestines trailed through the streets of Paris to the palace of her brother-in-law, the Duc d’Orléans.
A DISAGREEABLE, irascible couple called the Tisons had been assigned to watch over, and serve, the royal family during their incarceration at the Temple. In addition to their domestic chores—keeping house, overseeing the family’s meals—they were ordered by the Commune to spy on the prisoners. The queen, according to her daughter, immediately realized that the Tisons were probably incapable of pity or compassion, and that she could never mollify them by any friendly deed or gesture. But there was another member of the Temple staff—twenty-nine-year-old Francois Turgy—who turned out to be more than kindly disposed to them, who was, in fact, an ardent royalist and a passionate admirer of the queen. Turgy, who had been employed as a scullery boy at the kitchens of Versailles, had moved on with much of the domestic staff to the Tuileries. Not having lived at the palace, he was spared the massacre of the servants that occurred there on August 10. A highly resourceful fellow, Turgy managed to get himself designated to the Temple kitchen through a series of subterfuges, telling Commune members that he had been sent there by the Assembly, and telling his section leaders at the Assembly that the Commune had appointed him there. Turgy’s job was to set the table and serve the royal family their meals. And despite the vigilance with which the king and queen were surveyed by their guards—roast meats and even rolls were torn into pieces to make sure that they did not contain messages—Turgy managed to communicate with them. As he mounted the winding stairwell toward their floor, for instance, he might insert a note in the stopper of a bottle. Moreover, when out of earshot of the Tison couple he was occasionally able to whisper a few words to Madame Elisabeth or the queen, and eventually he established a code of finger signals with which he could transmit to them news of the outside world. “If the Austrians are successful on the Belgian frontier,” so Turgy later described details of his sign language to me, “place the second finger of the right hand on the right eye…. When they are within fifteen leagues of Paris…place it on the mouth.”
Another potential champion of the royal family’s was Citizen Lepitre, the owner of a small boarding school who was a skilled Latinist; he had only joined the revolutionary forces for reasons of personal survival, and soon made it clear to the former king and queen that he sympathized with them. Upon one occasion, seeing Louis reading his copy of Virgil’s Aeneid, he asked the king if he could borrow the book, and addressed the request in perfect Latin. Louis, amazed that one of the guards was so familiar with the classics, gave it to him with great pleasure; Lepitre would eventually engage in the rescue efforts that would attempt to liberate Marie Antoinette.
At first the news communicated by Turgy was heartening. Brunswick met with no resistance as his troops advanced toward Paris. From Verdun they marched into the Argonne and captured Stenay, where a year beforehand, in June 1791, the royal family had hoped to be rescued by Bouillé. But a bit farther on, at Valmy, a few miles off the road I’d planned for the royal family to take to Varennes, the course of the war was abruptly reversed: the allied armies were resoundingly defeated by the French revolutionary forces. Valmy, one of the world’s most decisive battles, was commented on by Goethe, who witnessed the event, as the beginning of “a new era in the world’s history.”
The ragtag army of the penniless French Republic defeating the well-drilled regiments of several wealthy European countries, and sealing the fate of my beloved royal family? I never would have thought it possible, and I doubt if historians will ever explain it. I was in Brussels with Eleanore Sullivan, Craufurd, and the Comte de Mercy when I learned of Brunswick’s rout. We were not only horrified but totally puzzled by the news: his defeat seemed inexplicable. It was attributed to a variety of causes: a violent outbreak of dysentery among his forces was one; another, more ideological reason, was that patriotism instilled into the newborn French Republican army an esprit de corps, a savage valor, that was mightier than any physical force. Rumors also spread that Brunswick, who was known to be greedy and corruptible, had been bribed with five million francs by a wealthy republican to lose the battle. His retreat, unlike his leisurely advance, was very hurried. On November 6 Eleanore Sullivan and I, accompanied by the Russian minister, Monsient de Simolin, were taking a walk in the forest outside Brussels. Suddenly, coming from the west, we heard the faint sound of artillery fire. Over dinner that night at Craufurd’s, the Comte de Mercy assured us that the sound was nothing more than a celebration of Saint Charles’s Day. But in the middle of the meal a courier arrived with an urgent message for Mercy to report to the palace of Archduchess Maria Cristina, Marie Antoinette’s sister. She informed him that the Austrian army had suffered a crushing defeat and that the French were arriving in Brussels in a matter of days.
Eleanore, Craufurd, Simolin, and I left for Düsseldorf two days later. We did not reach our destination until the third week of December; it took us five weeks from Brussels because of the mayhem on the roads. We often made do with the humblest circumstances as we rode southward through Germany, sleeping on straw pallets on stable floors. The roads were dense with fleeing émigrés—merchants and aristocrats, the rich and the poor—walking toward freedom, carrying the
ir possessions on poles slung over their shoulders. Once settled in Düsseldorf, we began to hear of the horrors committed by revolutionary troops as they surged through France. The country’s treasures were being methodically plundered by Jacobin functionaries and by thieves. Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, indeed! What a hypocritical slogan! The most shameful sacking took place in churches, where reliquaries and crucifixes were picked of their precious stones and melted down, and where masterpieces by such artists as Van Eyck and Van der Weyden were destroyed. Few leaders of the revolutionary troops were more outraged by this rampage than their commander in chief, General Dumouriez. Dumouriez, a Girondin by conviction, was already offended by the fact that the French war ministry had fallen to the extremists—the minister of war was now in the pay of the rabble-rousing Marat. When he learned that arms and ammunition that should have been directed to the French army in Belgium were being diverted to Marat’s private army, he made his own plans for the future: he would eventually defect to the Austrian side.
Upon our arrival I heard that the Convention was bringing Louis XVI to trial. I was in the deepest torment, all the more so because I initially feared that the queen was going on trial with him. My dear, gentle Louis! Writing to Thomas Jefferson, Gouverneur Morris, the American ambassador, gave an excellent estimate of the king. “It is strange that the mildest monarch who ever sat the French throne, one who was precipitated from it precisely because he would not adopt the harsh measures of his predecessors, a man whom one can not charge with one criminal or cruel act, should be prosecuted as one of the most nefarious tyrants who ever disgraced the annals of human nature.”
Once a large majority of its deputies found the king guilty, the Convention deliberated from the eighteenth to the twentieth of January concerning the nature of his punishment. The American-born deputy Tom Paine suggested that Louis be sent to the United States, where he might be rehabilitated as a good patriot. “Ah, citizens,” Paine cried out, “give not the tyrant of England the triumph of seeing the man perish on the scaffold who aided my so much loved America to break its chains!” He was shouted down on the grounds that Paine’s religious sect—he was a Quaker—was notorious for its opposition to the death penalty. A few deputies voted for banishment, many for death with a reprieve, and a narrow majority of fifty-three for immediate death. The vote was cast on the twentieth of January 1793; and needless to say, that swine, that rotter the Duc d’Orléans, who had taken the nom de guerre of “Philippe-Égalité” upon being elected deputy to the Convention by his Paris district, voted for his own cousin’s demise. Even some of the hard-line revolutionaries were appalled by d’Orléans’s ballot. “Miserable wretch,” Danton muttered to Robespierre; “he of all people could have refused to vote.”
LOUIS XVI HAD BEEN separated from his family on December 11, a few weeks before his trial. This had been a fresh source of sorrow for the queen. In this gauche, ungainly man she had once derided with her frivolous friends she had recently discovered many precious qualities—his courage and fortitude, the gentleness, calm, and patience he maintained in the most perilous circumstances. I suspect that her tenderness for him had turned into love—no, more, into passion. She had made his bed herself, had sat by him round the clock whenever he fell ill. In the thrall of this new devotion, she announced that she wished to die with him, that she would henceforth refuse all nourishment. Soon after their separation one of the family’s guards took such pity on her that on one particular night he arranged for the royal family to have supper together. Marie-Thérèse reports that the queen displayed immense delight upon this prospect, weeping with joy and passionately embracing her children and her sister-in-law. Even their most ferocious guardian, the cobbler Simon, burst out: “In truth, I think these damned women are capable of making me cry!”
The king, in turn, living in unprecedentedly close quarters with his wife, came to esteem her own brand of courage, and treasure as he never had before her extraordinary familial devotion. Their parting may have been all the more painful because each of them had just begun to cherish qualities they had never perceived in each other during their twenty years of marriage. On the eve of his death, the king seemed to have finally experienced, after all these years, the sweet certainty of knowing he was loved. “Alas,” he said to his confessor in his last hours, “it shall be worse because I love so deeply, and am so tenderly loved in return!”
On Christmas Day, the king would compose his last will and testament. I have read that extraordinary document many times, have marveled at its generosity and clemency, have been increasingly touched, over the years, by those words that relate to Marie Antoinette: “I beg my wife,” he wrote, “to forgive me all the pain which she may have suffered for me and the sorrows that I may have caused her during our union.” And then there comes that enigmatic phrase: “Should she have anything with which to reproach herself, may she feel sure that I hold nothing against her.” Reproach herself for what? For those froths and follies of her youth that had led her to be calumniated as no previous consort in French history, and had played a part in leading her husband to the Temple? Or did the words allude to a more specific issue—Marie Antoinette’s liaison with me?
“Poor woman!” Louis said to one of his counsels during his last weeks. “She was promised a throne, and it has come to this.” Talking to his lawyers, he often referred to the ill will the French people had borne Marie Antoinette, to the pernicious influence of a recklessly hedonistic court, to the fact that she had been only fourteen when she arrived in its midst. They minded his words, for few persons who met the king during his solitary confinement—National Guardsmen, municipal officers, even members of the Commune—did not come to esteem and pity him. We have it on Cléry’s word—I know his memoirs by heart—that a local citizen from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine had a keen desire to meet the monarch. Cléry managed to arrange a visit. “What, sir, is this the king?” the citizen said to Cléry after the meeting. “How good he is! How he loves his children!”…“Ah,” he went on to say, striking his chest, “never could I believe that he has done us any evil!” For the king, affable as ever in his captivity, conversed at length with every one of his visitors and guardians, asking them about their childhoods, their work, their families, their children. Family was that focal point upon which these men, coming from radically opposite circumstances, found a common ground. Those citizens who came to know Louis, moreover, could not see the sense of his being separated from his nearest and dearest. What harm could have been brought by merely familial talk? Each time the king spoke of his wife and children his guards were very moved. “Today is my daughter’s birthday,” he said to them on December 19. “It’s her birthday, and I can’t even see her!” A few of these men broke into tears. Those who did not might well have repressed them.
The king would not be allowed to see his family until the night before his execution. But the queen could hear his steps as he left the Temple daily for the Convention hearings, and every evening she would hear him return accompanied by his lawyers and armed guards.
During the weeks of the king’s solitary imprisonment, the queen’s health began to fail. Always a picky eater, she now ate next to nothing, and her request for a dressmaker who could take in her clothes was granted.
On the twentieth of January, the eve of his scheduled execution, the king asked for a three-day reprieve during which he might better prepare to meet his God. His request was refused, and his execution remained fixed for the next morning. On the queen’s floor that same evening, a guard came in at eight o’clock and told the royal family that they could go down and see the king one last time.
They stayed in Louis’s quarters for almost two hours. The king, seated with his emaciated wife on his left and his sister on his right, drew his son toward him and made him stand between his knees. In one of his last instructions to him, he asked the child to never avenge his death; and since the boy had never pledged an oath before, the king took up his little hand and made him vow that
he would keep his promise. He then pressed his wife to his shoulder while his daughter, who passionately loved her father, clung to him and gave way to bitter tears. Marie Antoinette knew that Louis desired them to leave, and said, “Promise that you will see us again.”
“I promise,” he said, “at eight tomorrow morning, before I go.”
“Please come earlier,” she begged.
“All right, half an hour earlier.”
“Promise me.”
He repeated his promise. The two women and two children left through the great nail-studded oak door, and walked up the winding stairs. The queen threw herself fully dressed on her bed after she had put her boy to sleep, and Marie-Thérèse could hear her weeping for the following many hours.
As soon as his family had left, the king told his guards that in spite of his promise, his family should not be told of his departure for the scaffold the next morning, for it would make them suffer all the more. He then ate a substantial supper, which included half a chicken, a beef roast, and a bottle of champagne, and slept very soundly. He woke at 5 a.m., and heard Mass said by the priest permitted him by the Convention, a half-French, half-Irish curate called Abbé Edgeworth de Firmont, who had been educated in a Jesuit seminary in Toulouse. Louis received communion from the abbé, and proceeded to dress. At 8 a.m., a group of delegates from the Convention arrived. He asked them if Cléry might cut his hair to spare him the indignity of having it cropped on the scaffold, but permission was denied. Noticing that the deputies all wore their hats, he asked for his. He then took off his wedding ring and gave it to Cléry, saying, “You will give this to my wife, and tell her that our separation causes me much sorrow.” He also handed Cléry, to give to his son, the dauphin, the seal of France, thus transmitting to him the principal symbol of kingship.
The Queen’s Lover Page 18
