The Hidden Diary of Marie Antoinette

by Carolly Erickson

  “Whatever happens,” I say, “we are bound to be in greater danger than ever for as long as the fighting lasts. We cannot affect the outcome by remaining here as hostages.”

  “I am no hostage,” Louis mutters when I say this. “I am King of France, as my forefathers were. As my son will be.”

  Whenever he begins talking in this vein I know it is useless to argue further. I leave him to his pastimes, writing his book on the forest and making his locks (he has brought all his lock-making equipment here from Versailles) and playing cards with Stanny, who always wins.

  I sometimes think how strange it is that Louis, who never wanted to be king and who used to talk so often of his Theory of Mistaken Destiny, should now defend his crown so stubbornly. And so blindly, refusing to see the danger we are all in.

  March 16, 1790

  “There is an old priest to see you.”

  Sophie told me this late last night, just after I had gotten Louis-Charles to sleep at last. Like me, he has nightmares, and dreads going to sleep because he knows he will be awakened by fearsome dreams.

  The last person I wanted to see was some old priest, no doubt one of the many visionaries who come to see us here and insist on telling us about seeing the face of the Virgin Mary on a wine cask or hearing the voice of Jeanne d’Arc saying “Save my beloved France!”

  Yet the old man who leaned on his cane in the doorway of my salon was not some troublesome visionary, but Father Kunibert! A much older, stooped, enfeebled Father Kunibert, his thick eyebrows now snow-white in his wrinkled forehead. When I went forward and kissed his dry cheek and led him toward the fire I saw that he had tears in his eyes, though when he spoke, his voice still crackled with condemnation, and the tears soon dried.

  “Why in heaven’s name are you still in this accursed country?” he asked when he had warmed himself. “Can’t you see that the devil and all his demons have been unleashed here?”

  “I know, Father Kunibert,” I said, sitting beside the old man who stared at me quizzically. “But Louis will not leave. Not yet.”

  “Then you must go without him.”

  His words chilled my heart. Though I had never admitted it, I had been thinking the same thing.

  “Do it now. Come back to Vienna with me. I have a large coach. I can conceal you and the children. I am a person of no importance, just a weak old foreigner with a clerical collar. The National Guard will not bother with me at the border. They will let me pass, especially if I rant and shake my fist and curse at them. They will laugh and wave me on.”

  I sighed. My shoulders slumped. Part of me longed to follow Father Kunibert’s advice, to walk away from the din and turmoil of the Tuileries, the battles with Louis, the fears and nightmares, and take refuge in a carriage leaving for my homeland, where my family would embrace me and protect me. I am weary. Father Kunibert was offering me rest.

  “Louis feels that before long we will be rescued,” I said, my voice low and tremulous. “He wants to wait.”

  “Who is going to rescue you? Not your brother Joseph. I have come to bring you the news that Joseph is dead. Not even Count Mercy knows yet. I wanted you to hear about it first.”

  I could not stop the tears. I bowed my head and sobbed like a child, while the logs in the fire hissed and snapped and even the buzz of voices in adjacent rooms, usually annoyingly loud, seemed subdued.

  Joseph is dead! I knew he was ailing, Axel had cautioned me of the gravity of his decline. Yet I had been thinking that he would be there for as long as I needed him, as I surely did now. My crusty, blunt, worldly, humorous brother, gone!

  And who was now emperor? My brother Leopold, of course. Joseph had no children that lived—no legitimate children at least. The next oldest male in our large family, Leopold, would become his successor. Had become his successor.

  Leopold had always been a cautious, rather colorless man, and I had never been close to him. He cared little for me—though he must care about the honor of our dynasty. And about preventing the spread of anarchy from France to other countries. No doubt he would offer us assistance.

  I raised my head and wiped my tearstained face with my handkerchief.

  “Have you brought me a message from Leopold?”

  “No. I want to talkto you ABOUT Leopold, to make certain you understand your true situation. I tell you plainly, Antonia”—his bushy white eyebrows rose and he fixed his watery pale blue eyes on me—” he will not help you. He persuaded Joseph, when Joseph was dying, not to send you any troops or money. Leopold hesitates. That is his nature, to be hesitant.”

  “But surely, once he knows that we are captives here, that we have seen our splendid palace of Versailles wrecked and our servants murdered before our eyes—”

  “He is quite aware of what has gone on here.”

  I let the full meaning of the old priest’s words penetrate my mind. What he was saying was, your family will not come to your aid. You cannot count on them, ever. Not unless you leave France. Perhaps not even then.

  “There is someone else I can rely on,” I said at length, my voice low. “Count Fersen. He will never forsake me.”

  Father Kunibert snorted his disapproval. “Your liaison is common knowledge. I advise you to repent and ask the lord and your husband for forgiveness. However, under the circumstances, I am glad you have a protector you can count on. I’m certain that if he were here now, with us, Count Fersen would want you to go to Vienna with me.”

  “Yes he would.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “He has gone to Spain, to try and persuade King Charles to send us money and soldiers.”

  “Spain! Joseph used to call it the weakest kingdom in Europe. You’ll get precious little help from Spain!”

  At that moment I felt so tired and dejected I wanted only to sleep—a dreamless, nightmareless sleep.

  “Ah, Antonia! You have much to bear. You always were a stalwart girl, the best of Maria Theresa’s daughters. And the one with the truest heart.”

  “I never knew you thought well of me, Father.”

  “I couldn’t very well tell you, could I? I was your confessor. My role was to chastise you for your sins, not praise you.”

  “I still keep the journal you asked me to write in.”

  He smiled. “I only wanted to make you think a little about what you were doing. I knew if you had to write down your sins that you would ponder them—at least for the time it took to clean your pen.”

  He reached over and patted my hand, then took his cane and I helped him to his feet.

  “Tomorrow I will go to Count Mercy. The next day I leave for Vienna. You can send a message to me through Baron Goulesco in the rue des Maturins. Think carefully about all I have said, and thinkof your children. Come to Vienna with me!”

  I have not yet decided what to do. If only Louis would agree to leave with us!

  April 7, 1790

  The National Assembly has done nothing to punish the Italian assassin who attacked me, I am told. He was allowed to leave the country and return to Italy last week, without so much as a reprimand from the deputies.

  I am doing all I can for poor Father Kunibert, who was arrested shortly after he left the Tuileries palace on the night he came to see me. When the guards who arrested him asked him to explain his reasons for wanting to talk with me he became indignant and spoke out against the assembly. Immediately he was taken to prison and so far neither my attempts to have him released or Mercy’s have had any effect.

  June 4, 1790

  We have come to St.-Cloud to spend the summer here. How good it feels to breathe country air instead of the stench of Paris! St.-Cloud is a summer palace, open to the outdoors, with few fireplaces in the rooms and views of the lovely gardens from all the windows. I walkin the fragrant, flower-filled gardens and feel the cool mist from the Grand Jet, the great spout of water, ninety feet high, that erupts from the pool at the foot of the cascade. Throughout the gardens there is the constant sound of water plashing an
d trickling and rushing over rocks, a refreshing and soothing sound. And no shouting and chanting crowds to keep us all on edge with the ceaseless clamor.

  St.-Cloud is my house, my very own. Louis made it over to me six years ago. I wanted to tear down the old chateau and build a new one from the ground up, but the cost was too high. So I had the house enlarged and added new façades, and remodeled my apartments in white paneling with delicate gilded ornaments. It has turned out well, I think, and if only our lives were more peaceful we would be able to enjoy it to the full, for the game is plentiful in the park adjacent to the house and Louis enjoys hunting and riding here and I cannot get enough of the sweet country air.

  To be sure, we are not very far from Paris and can see the city in the distance, and hear the faint sound of the tocsin ringing, calling the people to be on alert. An ominous sound. Whenever I hear it I feel a shiver of fear.

  Only a year ago, in the first weekof June, my precious Louis-Joseph died in my arms. So much has happened since then!

  July 20, 1790

  I agreed to receive the Comte de Mirabeau, the most powerful member of the assembly, with great reluctance. Axel thinks Mirabeau will be able to help us in our escape plans and told me quite bluntly, “Mirabeau can be bought.”

  He is said to be grossly immoral. According to rumor he slept with his sister and has seduced hundreds of women. At least one of them, an honorable married woman whom he led astray and all but destroyed, died after he abandoned her. Scandal follows him and he has been in prison at least three times.

  I received him in the orangerie, away from the house and without the servants present, as he has come in the greatest secrecy and does not want any of his assembly colleagues to find out about his visit. I had heard that he is very ugly but did not realize until he crossed the threshold of the long, narrow orangerie that he is also quite deformed. His head is grotesquely large, his body massive and fleshy. He has a monkeylike face, with small, bright restless eyes set in a mass of olive skin deeply pitted and scarred from smallpox. There was a disturbing grin on his face as he approached me, yet much to my surprise he was holding out to me a bouquet of fragrant narcissus, one of my favorite flowers.

  “For you, madame,” he said in a grating voice, his thick southern accent very noticeable and disagreeable to me as I am accustomed to hearing Parisian speech. He held out the flowers and I took them, smelling them and enjoying the rich scent.

  “These are quite the fashion in Paris at the moment. Women wear them pinned to their liberty caps. You must have a liberty cap, no?”

  “I would be glad if you would state your business, Count Mirabeau.”

  “Plain Monsieur Mirabeau, if you please. We have recently abolished all noble titles.”

  “Including mine?”

  “Yours first and foremost. Yours and your husband’s.”

  “Whatever your assembly may do, or attempt to do, I am who I am. Nothing can alter my heritage—or yours.”

  “I have not come here to debate our social standing, but to offer you my assistance.”

  “At a price, no doubt.”

  “Naturally. Now that we former aristocrats have no more lands and patrimony, we must work for a living. I am an advocate for the people, that is my profession.” He sat down on one of the wrought iron benches among the orange trees, leaned back and crossed his legs.

  It was a bold, indeed a shocking gesture. No one had ever before sat in my presence, while I was still standing, without asking my permission. And he seemed perfectly at his ease doing it.

  “As an advocate for the people, I offer you a bargain,” he was saying. “I will help you leave France, and in return I expect a pension of six thousand francs, and the position of chief minister in a new constitutional government, of which your husband will be titular head.”

  “Why aren’t you speaking to him about this?”

  “We both know why.”

  He is no fool. His directness and his intelligence are refreshing, even if his manners are appalling.

  “What makes you think the king”—I deliberately called Louis “the king” rather than “my husband”—“would agree to leave? No one has yet been able to persuade him that it would be in his own best interests, or that of the country, for him to go.”

  “I am well aware that you are anxious to go and that he is reluctant. Don’t bother to deny it—your conversation with the priest from Vienna was overheard and brought to my attention.”

  “I want that priest, my old confessor, released.”

  “I will see what can be done.”

  Mirabeau was a formidable sparring partner. I was not at all certain that I could match him, stroke for stroke.

  “I will ask you a question, madame. THE question. What will it take for Louis Capet to read the handwriting on the wall? Do you remember that passage from the Bible about King Nebuchadnezzar? A mysterious hand wrote words on the wall. The message read, ‘You have been weighed in the balance, and found wanting.’ The monarchy, madame, has been weighed in the balance, and the people find it wanting—in usefulness. I don’t happen to share that view. I believe that a king can serve a useful purpose in France, provided he is willing to make himself the servant of the assembly. He must do as we say, and not the other way around.”

  “You must realize that he could never agree to that. He would work with all his strength—as would I—to see you destroyed first.”

  “Spoken like an ex-aristocrat. I would take off my hat to you, if I were wearing a hat, or if we still observed those outworn customs. But I must say once again, and I urge you to listen to me, what will it take to make your husband see reason and emigrate? Anarchy throughout the country? Civil war? Another assassination attempt—on his life this time?”

  At this I felt frightened. I had been able to escape the Italian assassin and the poisoner. Louis might not be so lucky.

  “It could well happen, you know. He goes out hunting often, does he not? With only a few huntsmen and a trusted friend or two? He could easily be abducted, taken to some lonely place in the forest and killed.”

  It was true. Louis was very vulnerable—and so were my children.

  “I must not stay,” Mirabeau said. “I am watched, just as you are. And my visit here, if it became known, would harm my position and make it harder for me to assist you.”

  His leavetaking was as unceremonious as his arrival had been. He rose, turned his back on me and slouched off heavily toward the door of the orangerie.

  “Don’t forget,” he called out over his shoulder. “I am your best hope.”

  And don’t you forget, I retorted under my breath, that you are dealing with a Queen of France, and the daughter of Maria Theresa.

  September 1, 1790

  I have done all I can to prepare for our departure. New wardrobes for all of us have been made up and sent to Arras, along with a large armoire containing everything we are likely to need, from caps and combs and supplies of my orange-flower water and ether to games for the children and a traveling altar for saying mass.

  With Axel’s help I have ordered a spacious new traveling carriage with a stove and dining table so that we can eat on our way. It is a large and handsome vehicle painted dark green and yellow with upholstery of white velvet.

  Axel points out that it would be better for us to travel in farm wagons, so no one would look twice at us. Better still, he says, we should not travel as a family at all, but as individuals. He can send the children to the Normandy coast with one of Eleanora Sullivan’s trusted servants, an old Italian tightrope walker no one would ever suspect of hiding the dauphin and his sister the princess. King Gustavus will send a ship to pick them up. I can pretend to be one of the hundreds of cooks who serve the Royal Swedish Regiment. When the regiment goes back to Sweden, I can travel with it. Or I can join the thousands of farm laborers who come up from the south to harvest the grapes, and when the harvest is over I can leave with the others and cross the border into Italy.

  Loui
s is the most difficult to disguise, because of his size and because it will be hard for him not to insist on being treated as a king. But Axel thinks he can arrange for Louis to dress as a huntsman in the service of a Hungarian nobleman, Count Olezko, who could go hunting in the forest of Compiègne and leave Louis at his hidden retreat there. Chambertin would be waiting to accompany Louis by wagon, both of them disguised as farmers, on the journey north toward the border. As long as they kept to the forest paths and stopped only in small villages Axel thinks they could reach the border at Fourmes where he can arrange to have troops waiting.

  Either way, whatever plan we follow, we must go, and soon. My carriage will be ready before long. Perhaps, as Mirabeau thinks, some new terrible shocking thing will happen and Louis will suddenly change his mind and decide to go after all.

  October 17, 1790

  I have thought of a clever way to save Mousseline. We will arrange her marriage to a foreign prince. She is old enough to be betrothed, and she is still a princess of France. (Whatever Mirabeau may say about titles, she has the royal blood of the Bourbons and the Hapsburgs in her veins.) I will write to Carlotta and Leopold and Louis’s cousin Charles to see what can be arranged.

  December 1, 1790

  I am at my wits’ end with Louis. Sometimes I feel so exasperated with him that I could scream. I do scream, in private, when only Sophie and Loulou can hear me. I am at my worst at times like this when Axel is away (he has gone to Turin where Charlot is attempting to gather an army of emigres to rescue us) and there is no one but Chambertin to help me cope with Louis’s tantrums.

  He is as unmanageable as an unruly child. He curses at Lafayette when he comes to report on the soldiers. He even slams the door on me now.

  “Emigration, emigration, all this endless talk of emigration! I’m staying here. I’m never leaving! Ever!”