The Hidden Diary of Marie Antoinette

by Carolly Erickson

  “Please, sir,” I could not be quiet any longer. I was doubled over in pain and badly in need of my chamber pot.

  “Yes, yes. Madame Sauce!” he called out loudly. “Take this woman inside before she becomes a nuisance.”

  A stout gray-haired woman in a nightgown and white mobcap stepped out from the ever increasing crowd of villagers.

  “Come with me,” she said brusquely and helped me out of the carriage. The children and Madame de Tourzel followed. The woman led me into a dark shop where barrels of goods were arrayed in front of a wide counter.

  “Maman,” Louis-Charles said, his voice uncertain. He had never been in a place of this kind before.

  “It is all right, papa will come soon. We will be all right here.”

  To my great relief we were shown up some narrow stairs into a small bedroom lit by a single candle. The children lay down and Madame de Tourzel tucked them in bed. I went into an adjoining room and made use of the chipped porcelain chamber pot the woman handed me with evident distaste. Afterwards I bathed my face and hands in a washbasin and asked Madame de Tourzel for a willow bark powder for my pounding head.

  Outside, church bells had begun to ring and more and more houses were lit up. The whole village had come awake, dogs were barking and roosters crowing. I lay down next to Louis on a hard narrow bed, hoping the pain in my temples would grow less if I tried to rest.

  Presently I heard a noise at the window. I got up to open the shutter. On a ledge outside was a young cavalry officer, his white uniform smudged and stained. Evidently he had climbed up from the alley below, which was dark and deserted, all the villagers having assembled in the street facing the front of the houses and none in the back.

  “Madame, I must speak to the king.”

  I shook Louis out of his drowse, and drew him over to the window.

  “Sire, come quickly. I have twenty men waiting to take you to General Bouillé. He is only eight miles away. Give me your son and I can hand him down to safety. We have horses ready for you. But you must come now, at once.”

  Louis squinted at the young officer. “Is that the Duc de Choiseul?”

  “Yes, sire.”

  “You are a good young man, like your father before you.”

  “Thank you, sire. Now please! Do not hesitate!”

  “Go! Now!” I pushed Louis toward the window. “I’ll lift Louis-Charles out after you have gone.”

  “But—”

  “You must do this. It may be your only chance.”

  “But—the soldiers—the National Guard—”

  “We can outrun them, sire. Our horses are faster.”

  “Surely they will raise an alarm, fire at us.”

  “That is the chance we must take. But we will surprise them. We will be gone before they can take aim.”

  Prodded by me, Louis had put one leg over the windowsill.

  “What about you?” he said, turning back and looking at me. There was no affection in his eyes, only bewilderment.

  I shook my head, impatiently. “I am not important. You are. You and Louis-Charles. Besides,” I added ruefully, “I am the one they really want. The one they hate.”

  I heard a whistle from the alley. A signal, I assumed.

  “Hurry, sire. Hurry!”

  Louis started to climb out on the ledge, then stopped.

  “No,” he said quietly, and began to climb back in.

  I knew he was afraid of heights, but what a time to give in to his fears!

  “Go on!” I said, as loudly as I dared, not wanting to alert whoever was in the shop below us. “Don’t stop now! You can make it!”

  “I will not leave my family.”

  I knew that tone of voice. It had a terrible finality in it.

  Louis was now backin the room, brushing off his brown coat.

  “Ride to General Bouillé on my behalf,” he was telling the young officer. “Tell him to bring his entire force here, as swiftly as possible.”

  “But sire, what if—”

  “Go now.”

  There was no countermanding that regal voice. Crestfallen, the young duke agreed and began going back down toward the street, from which came another shrill whistle.

  “Be safe!” I called down after him. “And thank you.”

  Two hours, I thought to myself. With fresh, swift horses and a good road, he can be back with General Bouillé and his men in two hours. By then it will be dawn. What will they do with us then?

  With a sudden unexpected gesture Louis reached for me and embraced me, pressing me to his heart in a way he seldom did. I crumpled in his arms, and wept.

  Together we waited, counting the minutes, praying for General Bouillé and his men to come, while more National Guardsmen poured into the town and the restive, chanting crowd sang the hated Parisian song “Ça ira” and beat against the walls of the shop with sticks in a very unnerving way.

  Dawn came, and with it the distinct sound of hoofbeats. But there were not many riders, not General Bouillé and his hundreds. Only two. They came galloping up to the knot of officials standing in the street outside our building and I heard one of them announce in a voice of authority that he was Captain Romeuf, aide-de-camp to General Lafayette, and that he was carrying important papers from the National Assembly. The other rider was also an officer, but I did not hear anything he said.

  The newcomers conferred with the officials, while I kept thinking, two hours must have passed by now. Where is General Bouillé? He must come soon. I stood at the window, looking down, clenching and unclenching my fists.

  The official who had questioned us was addressing the crowd.

  “As you know, the Chief Public Functionary is here among us.” At these words loud boos came from the crowd. “He has been stopped here, by the loyal citizens of Varennes, before he could reach the frontier. By his attempt at flight, he has shown himself to be a deceitful traitor to the people of France. I took from him this musket.” The official held up Louis’s old gun, and at the sight of it the crowd booed again, more loudly this time. I could hear cries of “Shoot him with it!” “Death to the Chief Public Functionary!”

  “This enemy of the people, who has been conspiring to harm the people of France and their National Guard, has been ordered arrested by the National Assembly. We will carry out this order, and the Chief Public Functionary will be returned to the capital.”

  Loud cheering and applause erupted. Captain Romeuf and his deputy conferred briefly, then we heard them coming up the stairs to the room where we were, their boots thumping loudly and their swords banging against the walls of the narrow stairwell.

  Oh please, I prayed silently. Please, let General Bouillé come now!

  The door to the room burst open and the two men came in, with the official who had harangued us earlier behind them.

  “Chief Public Functionary!” the taller of the two officers said loudly, “I am here to arrest you and your wife by order of the National Assembly. You are to collect your possessions and come with us immediately.”

  “As the restorer of French liberty and true friend of my people, I will accompany you.” Louis moved to follow the men down the narrow stairs, and, unable to thinkof anything else to do, I gave a little cry and fell to the floor, pretending to faint.

  There was a small commotion. I was laid on a bed, Louis slapped my face in an effort to revive me, restorative drinks were brought and a very unpleasant doctor curled his lip in disgust as he examined me and pronounced me to be perfectly well.

  “She only fainted out of fear,” he remarked to the two messengers from Paris. “These aristocrats have no stamina. The least disturbance shatters them.”

  I wanted to strike him but restrained myself. Presently I sat up. I had succeeded in postponing our departure by perhaps half an hour or so. General Bouillé had not come. Either he was not coming, or he might pursue us and overtake us on our return journey to Paris. I tried to cling to that hope.

  Of our long, dispiriting, wearying tr
ip back to Paris I will write little. Angry, insulting villagers surrounded our slow carriage every mile of the way, even when it began to rain and they were soaked through. We were not allowed to raise the carriage windows but were obliged to keep them open, so that everything we did and said was witnessed and commented upon, by the National Guard who kept watch over us and by the hostile crowd around us.

  “Hang them all, fucking pigs!”

  “Dump them in the ditch!”

  “Long live the people’s assembly!”

  “Rot in hell, miserable fat hog, and your pig wife and your ugly piglets!”

  I put my hands over my ears but it did no good. The nasty chanting voices echoed in my head like a deafening wave of sound, so strong and intense it was almost a blow. I was so tired. I longed for sleep, but the voices, the hideous, jarring voices kept me awake.

  “Austrian bitch! Whore! Sow! Ugly hag!”

  I will never forget the sight of those dirty, leering faces staring at us through the open windows, grinning at us, waving their pitchforks and scythes, threatening us. Had the National Guard not been there I’m sure we would have been pulled out of the carriage and murdered.

  I will not write here of the worst humiliations of that endless hot, dusty journey, save to record that I was ill, and that my every act was watched and remarked on gleefully. In the end it was all I could do to keep my dignity, sitting back against the cushions in my dusty gown, desperately in need of a bath and a long night’s sleep. What had begun in hope was ending in a nightmare of shame and failure. My one shred of satisfaction was the knowledge that Axel was safe, across the border in Brussels, waiting for news of me.

  FIFTEEN

  July 28, 1791

  As usual in Paris in July, it is raining. I have moved to new quarters in the Tuileries, since the Parisians came in and ransacked my old apartments—a scene of horror I will forbear to describe. I sit now at an old desk in a small room on the third floor, a room that does not overlook the gardens where crowds continually gather.

  While writing this the rain has begun to fall harder and harder, driving against the windows and running in a great cascade off the roof. I long for a cup of hot tea as the room is chilly and my silk wrap is thin—but most of my servants have been arrested and taken away and there is no one I can call on.

  I try not to think too much about our future. Our one friend and ally in the assembly, Mirabeau, is dead and the new name on everyone’s lips is Robespierre, an odd little man from Arras.

  I hope that my new guardians will let me walk in the gardens on sunny days. My leg is weak again but I can walk quite a long way if I use a stick. Louis-Charles needs the sun, he has grown a little pale of late. A boy his age ought to be out-of-doors, riding his pony and running with his friends. As my brothers did at Schönbrunn all those years ago. I remember the warm, bright summers at Schönbrunn with such pleasure.

  Not at all like this afternoon, with the hard chill sheets of rain that beat down so savagely against the old windows, making everything a blur and leaving me lost in a hazy fog of thought.

  September 3, 1791

  Horror of horrors, Amélie has been placed in charge of me, as my jailer.

  “Eat your bread!” she shouts when I leave my small half-loaf uneaten on my plate. “It’s good for you.”

  “The pastrycook is a poisoner,” I tell her. “I won’t eat anything he bakes.” It is rumored in the palace that the pastrycook is an avid revolutionary who wants me dead.

  “Then starve, for all I care,” she says, strutting around the room, fingering the small chunk of gray stone she wears on a chain around her neck, a souvenir of the Bastille. “And from now on you are confined to this wing of the palace.”

  “But my husband and children—”

  “You must ask permission each time you wish to see them.”

  “I wish to see them daily.”

  “That will not be permitted.”

  All my old servants, except Sophie and Loulou (now demoted to a chambermaid), have been imprisoned or sent away. Amélie will not tell me what their fate is to be.

  “The People’s Chamberwomen will provide what service is appropriate for you,” Amélie says. It is the People’s Chamberwomen who bring me my small bowl of boiled meat and halfloaf of coarse bread and small carafe of wine at each meal. Sometimes, when they bring in my food or change the linen on my bed, they dress in my gowns and put my fine feathers in their greasy hair. They strut from one end of the room to the other, imitating me, calling out obscene remarks.

  “We know you have thousands of diamonds,” they say, coming close to me and hissing like snakes in my ear. “Where are they? Where have you hidden them? Those jewels don’t belong to you, Citizeness Capet. They belong to the people of France.”

  I do my best to ignore the chorus of ugly voices and the ugly words they say, confident that my jewels are in good hands. I sent my jewel case to safety with André my old hairdresser when he emigrated. He tookit to Stanny, who now has it, in Coblenz. Stanny and his wife made it to the border on the night we were arrested in Varennes and sent backto Paris. They crossed with an escort and are now with Charlot, raising an army.

  Irritating and hostile as the People’s Chamberwomen are, Amélie is far worse, especially when she deliberately wounds me with reminders of Eric.

  “His body was never found, you know,” she remarked to me. “My husband’s body I mean. There were so many corpses in the palace that day he was killed—and most of them were without heads—or clothes. How could anyone tell one man from another?”

  At this the People’s Chamberwomen burst out laughing.

  “Would you have recognized Eric’s naked body without his head, citizeness?” Amélie asked me.

  “Of course not.”

  “I wonder. He wasn’t faithful to me, you know. He had several mistresses, in addition to you.”

  “Eric and I were never lovers.”

  The People’s Chamberwomen hooted and jeered, and began singing the latest awful song about me.

  So many lovers

  So many men

  She wants to bed them

  Again and again.

  She is voracious

  Not hard to get

  All the men love her

  Marie Antoinette!

  I do my best to remain above it all—the restrictions and punishments, the cruel taunts and painful talk of the man who was dear to me. I have nothing but contempt for Amélie, and all the more contempt because I know she does not mourn for Eric, who was a good man and died heroically in my defense. But then, she never was worthy of him.

  October 4, 1791

  I spend so many hours writing letters that I have little time or energy left to write in this journal. I write to my brother Emperor Leopold, and Louis’s cousin King Charles, and to Stanny and Charlot, and to Count Mercy. I urge them to send an army as swiftly as possible. I tell them frankly that only force can save us now. We have no political allies. Louis has lost nearly all of his authority and I believe it is only a matter of time until we are eliminated entirely.

  They will not kill us, of that I am certain. To kill us would bring on a terrible revenge. More likely they will imprison us more narrowly than at present. The Tuileries palace is our prison now. In the future we might be shut up in an old chateau in some provincial place, and all but forgotten. Louis feels abandoned and forgotten now. He is inactive and leaves all the work of corresponding with our friends and allies to me.

  October 12, 1791

  I am still allowed to receive visits from my dressmaker Madame Rondelet (my former dressmaker Rose Bertin emigrated long ago), and this morning she came with her workbasket full of gifts for the People’s Chamberwomen and Amélie.

  She passed out the presents as soon as she arrived: warm red, white and blue woolen scarves, red aprons, blue and white striped petticoats. The gifts provided a distraction. Madame Rondelet handed me a petticoat she had made for me and my guards did not bother to examine it,
as they were so busy admiring themselves in their new clothes. The petticoat has secret pouches sewn under the ruffles. Letters are concealed there.

  When Dr. Concarneau comes to treat me he brings bread and cakes (made by a pro-monarchist pastrycook) and messages are often hidden in the false bottom of my bread plate.

  Recently he came and delivered a basket of muffins. “From a well-wisher in Brittany,” he said. I bit into one of the muffins and nearly broke my tooth. Something hard had been baked into it. I spat out the object and discovered that it was a diamond ring. Quickly I put the ring back into my mouth, then told the doctor I had some pain in my gums and asked him to examine me. (I am not allowed visits from a dentist.)

  With great presence of mind he saw the ring in my mouth, palmed it, and then rubbed my gums with a medicinal salve until he had a chance to conceal the ring in the bread plate.

  “Send it to Stanny,” I whispered. “To help raise money for the army.”

  November 18, 1791

  My leg has become ulcerated. Dr. Concarneau comes twice a day to apply salve to the wound and put on new bandages. He brings letters hidden in his medical bag and takes mine away. I know he takes great risks and I am very grateful to him. I have confided to him that I no longer have my monthly flow and he says it is a result of all the worry I experience and also my lack of sleep. I stay up at night, often until past midnight, writing my letters. Sophie helps me. When I look out of the window at that hour I occasionally see the eerie lights in the sky, the aurora. White, green, sometimes violet lights.

  “The end of the world is coming,” Sophie says. “These lights are an omen.”

  I wonder if she could possibly be right.

  December 31, 1791

  Tonight the old year ends. Such an atrocious year for us all! If only we had managed to reach the border in safety, we would be in Coblenz now, living in hope. I would see my beloved Axel again, most beloved and most loving of men, and most self-sacrificing. Once again I would be in the shelter of his arms, surrounded by the protective circle of his love.

  I am so glad he is safe. I feel his love even from far away. Troubled as I am, the thought of him brings me joy and warms my heart on this cold night.