Many other prisoners at the Conciergerie were allowed far greater privileges than the queen was. They were permitted to walk about the corridors and courtyards chatting with each other. Women wore full toilette in the mornings, and changed into chic evening gowns in the late afternoon. Small luxuries such as warm blankets, fresh linen, and plentiful candles were readily available to them. But the queen was not offered such freedom or amenities. The worst aspect of her last months was her solitude and lack of occupation. At first she was allowed some travel books—The Travels of Captain Cook, A Voyage to Venice, A History of Famous Shipwrecks (she confided to the prison warden that she “read of the most terrifying adventures with pleasure”). But later she was denied access to books, and was not permitted pen or paper; the only thing she could do in daytime was to watch the guards playing backgammon, a game at which she had been very skilled. Her days’ main events were the meals, which I admit were simple but excellent—dinner offered soup, a ragout of beef, chicken, or duck (her favorite), a plate of vegetables, and a dessert. The food was of the highest quality. For upon being told for whom it was intended, market women offered the best they had; and although she had always been a picky eater the queen seldom left any vegetables on her plate. When she grew weary of watching the guards’ backgammon games she played with the two rings she still wore on her fingers, and which had not yet been confiscated by her guards—she would take them off, put them on again, and pass them from one hand to the other several times in one minute. She had wept terribly when her mother’s little gold watch had been taken from her—it was her last link with her mother and her youth.
One wonders whether the stream of visitors allowed into Marie Antoinette’s cell—there were several a week, mostly persons of royalist beliefs, and a majority of them British—annoyed her or gently allayed the terrible tedium of her days. The visits were made possible by heavy bribes and the cooperation of Michonis, whose income was thus nicely supplemented. My brother, who was still in Brussels, was offered a description of one of these visits that he found most painful. It was from an Englishman who claimed to have paid twenty-five louis to enter the queen’s prison. “He found the queen seated with her head lowered and covered by her hands and extremely poorly dressed. She did not even look up.”
Upon hearing accounts of her life at the Conciergerie, Axel wrote me the following letter from Brussels: “I no longer live, because…suffering all the pain I suffer is not living…. To be incapable of doing anything for her is dreadful for me…. I would give my life to save her and I can’t. My greatest happiness would be to die for her and to rescue her. I would have this happiness if cowards and villains had not deprived us of the best of masters [Gustavus]. He alone would have been capable of liberating her…. He would have dared everything and conquered all.”
“I even reproach myself for the air I breathe when I think she is shut up in a dreadful prison,” he wrote a few days later. “This notion is breaking my heart and poisoning my life, and I’m constantly torn with grief and rage.” A few days later still: “Why did I have to lose all means of serving her?”
ON A PARTICULARLY hot late August day, as Michonis entered the queen’s cell on his usual rounds, he was accompanied by a rather short man in his midthirties with a round, pockmarked face who wore two carnations in his buttonhole. Marie Antoinette startled, trying not to show her surprise. It was the Chevalier de Rougeville, the man who had saved her life in June of the previous year by persuading her to stay away from the mob when it invaded the Tuileries. Rougeville himself was amazed by the sight of this old woman who now looked like “a deformed specter.” As described later by Michonis—fortunately for hapless scriveners such as I, all these men wrote memoirs—Rougeville, a consummate actor, betrayed no emotion. He took the carnations from his buttonhole and threw them behind the screen that stood in the queen’s cell. Having found a subterfuge to be alone for a minute without her visitors or guards, she saw that the flowers contained notes, which she quickly perused. “I’ll always seek to show you my devotion,” one note read. “If you need three or four hundred louis to give to the men about you I’ll bring them.” The other note mapped out a well-thought-out plan for her escape. She summoned the two visitors back, on the pretext that she wished to complain to Michonis about the prison food. And while Michonis diverted her guards she spoke to Rougeville.
“You’re risking too much for me,” she said.
“Don’t worry about me,” Rougeville answered. “I have money, men, and the means to get you out of here.”
“I’m not concerned about myself. I’m only anxious about my children.”
“Is your courage low?”
“If I’m weak and downcast,” the queen answered, placing her hand on her heart, “this is not.”
“Take courage, we’ll save you. I’ll come back the day after tomorrow, and bring you the money you need for your keepers.”
“Look at me, look at my bed,” she added in parting, “and tell my family and my friends about my condition.”
Michonis’s scheme might well have been successful, for his reputation as a good patriot was impeccable, and he had a fairly high-standing rank in the police. His plan was to get to the Conciergerie late in the evening, wave some official-looking documents at the concierge, Richard, and say that upon orders of the Convention he had come to escort Marie Antoinette back to the Temple. Guards would then take them to the carriage in which Rougeville would be waiting for them. They would be whisked to Madame de Jarjayes’s secluded country château near Paris and hence, some days later, to Germany. The keystone of the plan, however, was to obtain the help of the queen’s two principal guards, Gilbert and Dufresne, both of whom seemed to respect her, and also might be amenable to bribes.
The queen approached Gilbert and offered him an immediate reward of fifty livres, which, she promised, would later be increased by larger sums. She also gave him a note written in pinpricks—some friendly soul must have loaned her a needle—which she asked him to give to Michonis and Rougeville. It asserted her trust in Rougeville, and agreed to the escape plan.
The first steps of the rescue strategy, engaged in on the night of September 2, went according to schedule. The queen and Michonis passed through a number of prison gates without any problem. But as they were about to walk through the door that led onto the street, one of the queen’s two guards, Gilbert, prevented the prisoner and her friends from going any farther. The rescue plan was thus sabotaged: Gilbert’s patriotism had prevailed over his greed. The following day, when Michonis returned to the Convention, which was investigating reports of the plot, he denied any complicity, but was arrested. Rougeville, in order to avoid retribution, instantly fled Paris for Belgium.
As a consequence of this pitiful attempt Marie Antoinette was moved to an even smaller and darker cell. The Richard couple was dismissed and replaced by one Monsieur Bault and his wife, who were threatened with the guillotine in case the prisoner tried to escape again. My heart breaks at the details of the queen’s last weeks of captivity. She was no more allowed a screen behind which she could change her clothes; she was not permitted a lamp or candle; and no one, neither the guards nor the Baults, was authorized to speak to her. Rosalie’s gentleness and silent respectfulness were her only solaces. “I prolonged the various preparations for the night so that the solitude and darkness imposed on my mistress might be delayed as long as possible,” Rosalie would write in her reminiscences. “She noticed these little attentions, which were the natural outcome of my loyalty and respect, and she thanked me for them with a friendly glance as if I had done more than my simple duty.”
There was another solace in Marie Antoinette’s last weeks: she received a visit from a Mademoiselle Fouché, about whom little is known aside from the fact that she had arranged for a nonjuring priest, Abbé Magnin, to visit the queen. The queen received him with joy, and upon his third visit the prison warden allowed him to remain with the queen for an hour and a half. Abbé Magnin would la
ter relate that he twice heard Marie Antoinette’s confession and brought her communion at the Conciergerie.
According to my brother, who wrote me almost daily from Brussels, there were a few men on the Committee of Public Safety who still hoped to use the former queen as a bargaining chip with the allies. One of them was Cambon, after whom one of Paris’s most elegant streets was later named. But as it grew clear that Marie Antoinette’s nephew, the Austrian emperor, took no interest in saving his aunt’s life, the enragés’ demands for the queen’s trial grew more strident. The most violent of these men was one Jacques-René Hébert, a particularly brutal instigator of the Reign of Terror. He had a pathological hatred for Marie Antoinette, and was the editor of a guttersnipe publication called Le Père Duchesne, which promulgated some of the most scabrous pornographic lies about the chaste queen. Upon the denouement of the Carnation Plot, he demanded that she be brought to trial by the Revolutionary Tribunal as soon as possible. “I’ve promised the head of Marie Antoinette to my readers,” he shouted at a meeting of patriots. “I’ll go off and cut it off myself if there’s any delay in giving it to me.” This time his wishes were fulfilled. When the public prosecutor Fouquier-Tinville was sent for, he demanded to fill the Tribunal’s rank of jurors and judges with men of his own choice. On October 3, Fouquier-Tinville was officially ordered to prepare a case against the Widow Capet.
MY BROTHER, still in Brussels, was cast into despair by the news that Marie Antoinette was about to go to trial. “All will be lost if this trial takes place,” he wrote Taube; “we can hope for nothing with these scoundrels who invent nonexistent evidence and condemn people on flimsy accusations and suspicions. No, my friend, let’s not hope for anything. Let’s resign ourselves to the Divine Will. Her death is already decided and we must now prepare ourselves for it and gather enough strength to endure this terrible blow. I’ve been trying to do so for some time…. God alone can save her now. Let us pray for His mercy and submit to His decree.”
Mercy d’Argenteau, spurred on by my Axel, decided to make his own appeal to the allies. “Now that [the queen] has been handed over to a bloodthirsty tribunal it should be our duty to take any step that is capable of saving her,” the ambassador wrote the Austrian emperor. “Future generations will hardly believe that Austria’s armies did nothing to prevent so enormous a crime, which took place only a few steps away from them.”
“Is the emperor going to allow the queen to perish without even trying to snatch her from her executioners?” Mercy wrote Francis I soon afterward. “Aside from political considerations, are there not private intentions owed by Austria to Maria Theresa’s daughter, who is about to suffer her husband’s fate? Is it fitting to His Majesty’s dignity or interest to witness the fate with which his august aunt is menaced, and do nothing to save her from her executioners?” But Mercy received no reply to these pleas. The Austrian emperor and his advisers had been studying the French situation, and had decided to let the French destroy themselves; with shocking heartlessness, they saw Marie Antoinette as just another of the Revolution’s victims. “A great purge should be effected in France,” wrote the ruthless Austrian chancellor, a man appropriately named Thugut. “The human species must be looked on as a tree that is ceaselessly pruned with an invisible hand—blood is the fertilizer of that tree.”
Mercy easily resigned himself to the notion that his pleas were useless. Axel was deeply upset by Mercy’s apathy. “Mercy has always made it clear that he was only devoted to the queen because of her mother,” he wrote, “whereas he should have been devoted to her because of her generosity and her trust in him.”
Meanwhile, at the Convention, Fouquier-Tinville was hard-pressed to find any documents that could be used against the queen beyond the transcripts of the interrogation that had followed the Carnation Plot. These interrogations had aimed to lure Marie Antoinette into expressing unpatriotic thoughts. But she did not fall into any traps, answering Fouquier’s questions with great skill.
“Were you pleased with the success of our enemies’ forces?” Fouquier asked the queen.
“I only sympathize with the success of my son’s country.”
“What is your son’s country?”
“Surely there can be no doubt. Is he not French?”
Fouquier had gotten so little from these exchanges that he decided to submit the queen to a preliminary examination on the two days that preceded her trial.
The examination took place in the Palais de Justice, that had once been the Grande Chambre of the Parlement of Paris; its vast, bare rooms were stripped of the exquisite fleur-de-lis tapestries and Dürer paintings that once decorated its walls, and were now hung with posters of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. The queen, who had suffered a particularly heavy hemorrhage that morning, had been wakened in the middle of the night, ordered to dress, and taken to the Palais de Justice by a group of guards. The questions asked of her there prefigured the four principal accusations that would be brought against her at her trial: that she had squandered French money on festivities and pleasures; that she had always sacrificed French interests to those of Austria and had sent huge sums of gold to her brother, the emperor; that she had been responsible for the decision to leave France that resulted in the flight to Varennes; that she had intrigued with foreign powers against France during the Revolution, and at home had “intrigued against liberty.” (In the following months, this same elastic accusation of “intriguing against liberty” would send to the scaffold most of Marie Antoinette’s worst enemies at the Convention, including Hébert and Robespierre.)
The queen answered such queries with poise and aplomb, and often caught her questioners’ mistakes. When the examining magistrate asked her why she did not keep her brother from making war on France, she reminded him that it was France, not Austria, that had declared war. At the end of this long, exhausting session, she was asked if she wished for counsels. She said she did. Two men—Citizens Doucoudray and Chauveau-Lagarde, the latter of whom had defended Charlotte Corday earlier that year—were appointed to be her lawyers. They had only some twenty hours to prepare their case.
“Like Messalina, Brunehaut, Frenegonde, once called queens of France, whose names are forever odious,”* so began the indictment which the lawyers would study that day, “Marie Antoinette, widow of Louis Capet, since her arrival in France has been the curse and the leech of the French people.” Comparing her to a “vampire” who had fed on French blood, the indictment elaborated on her “criminal intrigues” and “abnormal pleasures.”
Having less than a day to prepare their defense, the queen’s lawyers persuaded her to ask the Convention for a three-day delay. She wrote a letter to that effect, and asked that it be brought to the prosecutor Fouquier-Tinville so that he might deliver it to deputies of the Convention. In fact, this missive was never delivered to the Convention. Gode Gud! The following detail makes me despair of the male gender: having consulted the queen’s doctors, Fouquier did not wish the queen’s trial to be delayed, wanting it to be held during her menstrual period, when she was at her weakest. He kept Marie Antoinette’s missive, and after her death gave it to Robespierre, who hid it under his mattress, where it was discovered after his own execution the following year.
As Axel kept pointing out to me, Marie Antoinette’s trial was a most unusual event in European history: it marked only the second time that a monarch’s wife was brought to court and executed (I have Anne Boleyn in mind—Mary Queen of Scots was herself a ruler). Equally unusual, almost every charge against the queen could be traced to the slander that her own peers, and particularly her in-laws, had spread about her when she had first arrived at Versailles. It was not the French people, but her husband’s odious aunts, “Mesdames,” who had first referred to her as “L’Autrichienne” and thus branded her as a potentially hostile foreigner. It was her perfidious brother-in-law Artois who had started the gossip about her being a lesbian. It was the despicable Comte de Provence who had invented tales about her �
��lovers,” and had spread rumors about the orgies and debaucheries held at the Trianon, in revenge for the fact that he was never invited there.
The jurors chosen by Fouquier-Tinville included a wig-maker, a cobbler, a surgeon, a café owner, a hatter, and two carpenters. The trial, as the queen’s lawyers reported it to me, proceeded uneventfully through the morning of its first day. At one point the tricoteuses (lower-class women who took a sadistic pleasure in attending trials and executions, and worked at their knitting while watching the proceedings) shouted to Marie Antoinette that she should stand while answering the questions posed to her, so that they could hear her better. “Will the people ever be weary of my hardships?” she murmured. Drama came to the courtroom in the afternoon, when Hébert created a sensation by announcing that the guard Simon had “surprised the young Capet in indecent self-defilements, bad for his constitution.” When Simon asked him who had taught him such bad habits, Hébert related, young Capet replied, as he had a few weeks earlier when interrogated in the Temple, that he had learned them from his mother and his aunt. According to Hébert, the boy further revealed that the two women often made him lie between them, and that there then took place acts of “the most uncontrolled debauchery.” “According to what the young Capet said,” Hébert ended his testimony, “there is no doubt that there was an incestuous relationship between mother and son.”
This is where I, Sophie Piper, grow so enraged that I need to draw a breath and pause, and collect myself again. I ask the following question to all mothers who might read these pages: What worse suffering could those ruffians have imposed on the queen than they did through these scabrous accusations? What villainy, and above all, what sadism! Upon hearing about these moments of the trial, my brother Axel stood up and beat his fists against the wall, shouting, “The swine! The scoundrels!”
The Queen’s Lover Page 21
