by Susan Nagel
The French royal family mourned the murdered King and suffered his loss deeply. Marie Antoinette gently told her daughter of Gustav’s assassination, and Marie-Thérèse, who had fond memories of the Swedish king, sobbed to her father that the new King, Gustavus IV Adolphus, was so young. Louis XVI explained to Marie-Thérèse that he was well aware of the new King’s age because the boy had been born just weeks before her. He then told her that before she was born he knew that he was going to have a daughter since he believed no two kings were born in the same year. Marie-Thérèse then asked her father if her birth had disappointed him. ‘Certainly not,’ the King replied, hugging her. It was clear that he had meant every word. He had not for one moment cherished his firstborn child any less for not having been born his son and heir.
Madame Tussaud’s recalled Madame Royale as a vibrant young lady dressed in a white muslin dress with a blue sash, whose beautiful blonde hair flowed in rich profusion against her lovely fair skin. Sadly, at thirteen years old, Marie-Thérèse, a witness to unspeakable acts of violence, had grown wan and prematurely serious, and was barely recognizable as the child frolicking at the Trianon. There were to be no parties, no rides on horseback in the country, no silly madcap escapades, and certainly no merry teenage times. The murder of one king close to her resonated and filled her with dread as the anniversary of the aborted escape and capture at Varennes drew near. Every moment she feared for the lives of her parents and brother her melancholy deepened.
Both Madame Royale and the Dauphin were extremely sensitive to their parents’ emotions; they could read the pain on their parents’ faces. Although the King and Queen tried to protect their children, the restricted living arrangements made it inevitable that the children would learn of the growing tensions between the King and the Assembly and between France and Austria. In addition to encouraging exiled Frenchmen to invade their own country, the Austrians were openly harboring French émigrés and providing them with funds. The French government protested but the equally hotheaded Franz II had no desire to bow to the demands of the Legislative. In the spring of 1792, France felt it had no choice but to declare war on Austria. With most of the Continent involved in the imbroglio, Louis XVI was grateful that George III of England and his Parliament once again decided not to become involved. The two kings maintained a cordial correspondence: the French King thanked his English ‘brother’ for his resolve in remaining patient in the face of France’s internal disputes; the English King addressed the now fallen French King with great respect, deferring to Louis’s wishes and offering him his friendship.
Now at war with Austria, the French boiled with hatred for ‘l’Autrichienne’. After the King refused to sign a decree that ordered, among other things, the deportation of priests, the citizenry disdainfully gave the royal couple a new sobriquet, ‘Madame et Monsieur Veto’. Madame Campan reported that as the anniversary of the flight to Varennes approached, the King became increasingly morose and barely said ‘one word’ for ten days except when his sister tried to jolly him up by playing card games with him or when the Queen employed ‘every affectionate expression’.
Just as the royal family and their courtiers had feared, the anniversary of the flight to Varennes brought with it more violence. Marie-Thérèse later described events at the Tuileries as a ‘massacre’. She wrote that it all began when a ‘mania’ for planting ‘liberty trees’ swept Paris. A group of citizens had asked the King for permission to plant a tree and have a small celebration in the garden at the Tuileries Palace. Although the King suspected that this was a ploy to gain access to the palace and harm the royal family, he acquiesced and granted permission for the people to have their ceremony. By the time the group had wound its way from the Carrousel to the palace, most of them were, according to Marie-Thérèse, drunk and unruly. The anti-royalist soldiers stationed to guard the palace made little effort to repel the crowd and the royal family was left protected by just a few loyal courtiers and grenadiers who were unable to keep the ‘desperadoes’, as Campan referred to them, from entering the palace and penetrating the royal family’s personal chambers.
Some in the crowd who had made their way to the door of the King’s chambers screamed for the head of the Queen. A number among them mistook the King’s sister, Madame Elisabeth, for Marie Antoinette. As the intruders lunged at the King’s sister, someone shouted that they had the wrong woman, to which Madame Elisabeth replied defiantly: ‘Do not undeceive them!’, declaring that she was willing to lay down her life for her sister-in-law.
Marie-Thérèse managed to grab her brother and flee through a secret exit in his bedroom just as the invaders started to hack at the bedroom door. They soon found their mother and the three of them hid in the Cabinet du Conseil surrounded by a group that included the Princesse de Lamballe, Madame de Tourzel, Madame de Mackau and the Princesse de Tarente. The bloodbath, in which many of the royal family’s most faithful household troops were slaughtered, continued until the evening. As the hours worn on, the Queen became increasingly frantic from being separated from the King. Madame Campan wrote that one ‘barbarian’ who made his way into the Cabinet du Conseil carried a dirty rag doll suspended from a pole with the words, ‘Marie Antoinette to the lantern’ written on it. Another had pinned an ox’s heart to a board with the words ‘heart of the King’ encircling it. Obscene placards referred to the King as a cuckold. One man pointed at a shaking Marie-Thérèse and asked the Queen, ‘How old is the girl?’ Marie Antoinette replied: ‘Old enough to always remember these scenes with horror.’
In order to humiliate the royal family further, the invaders had forced the King and Queen each to put on the bonnet rouge – the red cap of the revolutionaries, but late in the evening officials of the National Assembly were able to restore order and the family was reunited. The next day it was found that all of the doors to the family’s apartments had been broken down. One servant, Merlin de Thionville, wrote that grown men in the service to the King openly wept at the violation of the King’s home and family.
Pauline de Tourzel observed that from this day on Marie-Thérèse’s demeanor mirrored that of her mother’s, assuming a mantle of bravery over a ‘presentiment of doom’. Louis Charles, in contrast, too young and impressionable to pretend, simply stopped speaking and continuously clung to his mother. Every night for weeks thereafter, disturbances and loud noises emanated from the streets outside the Queen’s rooms on the ground floor of the Tuileries. Afraid for her safety, the Queen’s staff and the King begged her to sleep on the second floor, and eventually she acquiesced. One evening in July, a servant spy removed a set of keys from the King’s pocket while he slept and set out to kill the Queen. Madame Campan, who had been asleep in the bed alongside the Queen, recalled that at one o’clock in the morning they were woken by the intruder. As the Queen stood frozen with fear, locked in Madame Campan’s arms, another servant fought off and killed the would-be assassin.
On 14 July, the royal family was again required to appear for the national celebrations. Madame de Stael was among those present. Necker’s daughter had always defended her father and often openly criticized the Queen; but on this occasion she was impressed by Marie Antoinette’s courage, realizing that the Queen and her children must have been terrified to be among the crowd. De Staël reported that despite the fact that the Queen’s eyes were red and swollen from crying, she appeared to all to be serene and pretended to be enjoying the pomp and circumstance. The King earnestly played his part as well and after he took his oath to the nation for the second time he rejoined his family on the dais.
Just eleven days later, on July 25, on the anniversary of the Declaration of Pillnitz, Charles William Ferdinand, the Duke of Brunswick, commander of the Allied Army of the Austrian and Prussian Armies, issued a new threat, later known as the Brunswick Manifesto. His declaration warned the French rebels that an army had been marshaled by the Holy Roman Empire and was on its way to rescue the beleaguered French King and his family. His statement gave notice th
at if, by the time the army arrived, it had been discovered that Louis and his family had been harmed in any way, the army would level, loot and take unimaginable vengeance against Paris. When news of the manifesto reached Paris on August 1, the masses reacted with fury and the streets were filled with cries for vengeance. French citizens were now certain that their King and ‘l’Autrichienne’ were collaborating with the Germans, and when the army of more than 75,000 Germans and French émigrés – the army of princes who marched ‘for God and King’ – crossed the Rhine, the Legislative Assembly issued an order to prepare for war.
The royal family waited for the inevitable. The Queen burned papers and dispersed quantities of money to her surviving members of staff. The King, with the help of a locksmith – who unfortunately turned out to be a Jacobin – constructed a safe inside a wall in which to preserve papers of a sensitive nature. The safe opening was then painted to make it appear part of the stonework. Amongst these papers were minutes of a private meeting that the King had held with his ministers during which he had expressed his objections to the war with Austria; a war that he had been forced to declare the previous spring.
In early August, the Legislative Assembly closed the gates to the Tuileries, hung a banner of tri-colored ribbons over the Terrasse des Feuillants, and designated a demarcation between what was considered ‘national property’ and the Tuileries Palace – now mockingly called the ‘property of Coblenz’. It was now not a matter of if but when the Tuileries would be assailed again.
Chapter X
Two Orphans
On August 9, 1792, the King, the Queen, Marie-Thérèse and Madame Elisabeth attended Mass as usual. One person present noticed that the ladies did not once raise their eyes from their prayer books. This pious scene was subsequently painted by Hubert Robert. For weeks everyone at the Tuileries had been extremely tense, poised for an invasion of the palace. For the first time in living memory, the King’s coucher was cancelled. The King routinely wore his bulletproof breastplate, and that evening, after supper, the entire family convened in the Cabinet du Conseil with a handful of ministers to wait, as Madame de Tourzel described it, with ‘funereal anxiety’.
After putting the Dauphin to bed, his valet de chambre, Jean-Baptiste Cléry, slipped outside the palace gates to learn that an attack on the palace had been planned for midnight at which time a tocsin would ring. Forty-eight alarm bells representing each section of Paris began to toll and continued throughout the night. The King, the Queen, Madame Elisabeth and Madame Campan did not allow themselves to sleep. At 4 a.m. the Queen discovered that the Marquis de Mandat, the new head of the National Guard forces defending the Tuileries, had gone to seek instructions from the Assembly. Unbeknown to him, a radical splinter group had taken over the Hôtel de Ville. The insurgents accused him of authorizing his troops to fire on the people, ordered him to the Abbaye Prison and dispatched a new commander, Santerre, to the Tuileries. Mandat did not even make it to the prison. On his way out of the Hôtel de Ville, he was attacked and murdered by a mob. His head was skewered on a pike and paraded around the streets.
Just two hours later, at 6 a.m. on the morning of August 10, Marie-Thérèse accompanied her parents, her aunt and her brother, to inspect the guard in the courtyard of the palace. François Armand Frédéric, Comte de La Rochefoucauld, a military man who stood near the King, was stunned that His Majesty could not utter one word of encouragement to the soldiers. The Queen also told Madame Campan that the King had displayed no energy and she felt that all was lost.
From about 7 to 10 a.m., the sound of cannon fire blasted through the air in the city. Nine hundred Swiss Guard had been assigned to the Tuileries but their numbers were minuscule compared to the 20,000 citizens who, after having broken into the Arsenal, were on the march from Saint-Antoine on the Rive Droit and Saint Marceau on the Rive Gauche. Armies of sans-culottes – citizen revolutionaries – flooded the Place du Carrousel and the vicinity of the palace. The cannons were turned toward the Tuileries in anticipation of a skirmish. Marie Antoinette begged her husband to order the troops to arms, but the King would not, refusing once again to spill the blood of Frenchmen.
With that decision most of the National Guard defected, leaving the royal family stranded except for their Swiss Guard troops. Pierre-Louis Roederer, a municipal officer, encouraged the King to take his family and seek refuge nearby at the National Assembly. The King refused. Roederer argued that the legislative body was far more sympathetic to the King than the new extremist group and would protect him. At last, the King conceded and sent word to members of the Assembly, requesting that they rescue his family; but the legislators did not respond. Instead, a handful of government officials arrived at the Tuileries and urged the King to take his family to the Assembly’s convention hall. Joseph Weber, the Queen’s childhood friend, served as a grenadier in the Filles-de-St Thomas brigade, a battalion that remained loyal to the royal family. Weber and many of his comrades abandoned their positions in the city and in the palace grounds to guard the Queen’s body personally. When he arrived inside the palace the Queen was surprised to see him and begged him to take care; he, however, insisted that he would ‘not forsake her’, and advised the royal couple not to separate under any circumstances.
While thousands fought on the streets of Paris, the politicians debated the fate of the King and his family. Hours later, they agreed that the royal family should be escorted to the convention hall. There is a discrepancy in the accounts of August 10 concerning the presence of the Princesse de Lamballe. Both Hüe and Madame Campan claimed that Lamballe was with the royal family at the Tuileries the entire summer. Campan wrote that, while she was told to wait in the Queen’s apartments, Marie Antoinette quietly requested that the Princesse de Lamballe and Madame de Tourzel accompany the royal family to the Assembly. Hüe also placed Lamballe with the Queen at every moment. De Tourzel only mentioned that she left behind her own daughter, Pauline, at the Tuileries to follow the King. The Baronne de Courtot, the woman who was with the Princess at all times, contradicted both of their accounts. She wrote that she and Lamballe had returned once again to England and were there during the events of August 10. Courtot produced a letter that she had ‘preserved’ written by Marie Antoinette to Lamballe. Dated ‘10 aout 1792, Paris’, the letter explicitly warned Lamballe, according to Courtot in England on that day, ‘NE RETOURNEZ PAS’ (do not return) … ‘VOUS RESTEREZ LÀ’ (remain where you are).
The royal family proceeded through the courtyard to the Assembly. Joseph Weber was true to his word and placed himself among the soldiers who offered protection as the family made its way through the palace gardens past the Feuillants and throngs of hostile onlookers to the convention hall. Pauline de Tourzel recalled it as ‘a convoy of the death of royalty’. The crowd pressed the royal family so closely that someone was able to rob the Queen of her purse and a watch.
At the Assembly they found the doors barred shut, as some of the deputies inside maintained their resistance to accepting the royal family. Outside, the soldiers threatened to break down the doors if the royal family was not permitted to enter. After half an hour, the King, Queen and their entourage were taken to a narrow corridor, described by Marie-Thérèse as so dark that she could not see. There, she was held by a man she did not know and who she thought was going to kill her. Another half-hour went by and still she could not see her parents in the darkness. Finally, they all were brought into the main assembly hall at which point the King pronounced loudly that he had come to ask refuge for himself and his family. The ensuing commotion necessitated that soldiers stand guard around the royal family until the lawmakers found a place for them to stand at the bar. After that, the royal family was escorted to the press box, which Marie-Thérèse described as a ‘cage’. She could hear the sounds of musket and cannon fire and screams emanating from the direction of the Tuileries. At the palace, two-thirds of the 900-strong Swiss Guard, and many loyal friends and servants, were being slaughtered by the mob. The Dau
phin, fearful that his adored Pauline had been killed, ran shrieking and sobbing to Madame de Tourzel, which momentarily silenced the politicians. The royal family stood without food or water from morning until late in the evening while the deputies hurled accusations of treason at the King and Queen.
While the family was among the Assembly, Cléry, still at the Tuileries, saw four heads on spikes placed on the terrace of the Feuillants, which he believed to be a signal to attack the palace. He was correct. Immediately afterward, bullets and cannonballs riddled the walls of the palace. Constant gunfire from the Pont Royal closed it off as an avenue of escape so Cléry crawled through the Dauphin’s garden by the Seine where he saw a man looting the bodies of freshly murdered Swiss Guard. The Tuileries Palace was sacked, and the friends who had remained began to hide or flee for their lives. The Princesse de Tarente managed to help Pauline to safety, taking her to the house of the Duchesse de LaVallière, the Princess’s grandmother. Madame de Soucy was under strict instructions from the Queen to get Ernestine to safety, and the two began a dangerous escape through cadaver-strewn alleyways. Their skirts soaked in blood, the pair stopped at the Carrousel as they felt they could go on no further. Madame de Soucy tried to find a carriage and while she was gone someone mistook Ernestine for Marie-Thérèse and hurled a half-burned Swiss Guard, who was still on fire, at her feet. The girl began to swoon but managed to walk a few steps toward a small boutique. The owner of the shop, also convinced that the young girl was Marie-Thérèse, ran to her aid just as Madame de Soucy arrived in a carriage. Madame Campan was also making her way to safety and, as she headed past the Louvre to her sister’s house, stripped off her blood-soaked gown and took flight in her petticoats.
