The Hidden Diary of Marie Antoinette

by Carolly Erickson

  August 20, 1792

  I cannot sleep. If I try to sleep, the nightmares come. There is a doctor here in this dungeon where we are imprisoned but he is rude to me and will not give me any orange-flower water and ether to help me sleep.

  I dream red dreams. Headless bodies stagger toward me. Heads, open-mouthed, drift past. I am chased along dark corridors and I run as fast as I can but the hideous things that pursue me are faster. Just as they catch up to me I wake screaming.

  August 27, 1792

  We live now in the smallest tower of Charlot’s old mansion called the Temple. We are heavily guarded here, and surrounded by hostile people. When we were first brought here Chambertin, Sophie, Madame de Tourzel and Loulou were allowed to come with us. But they were soon sent away and imprisoned. I have tried very hard to find out where they are being held but no one will tell me.

  It is very hot in these rooms and there are rats everywhere. Louis-Charles likes to trap them and set them free in front of Mousseline who shrieks when they run over her feet.

  My thick taffeta corset was taken away from me but I still have the girdle of Ste. Radegunde that mother sent me to wear during my labor and I wear it now for protection. Since I have begun wearing it I am able to sleep though the terrible red dreams still come at times.

  Officially France has no king any longer, yet that is nonsense, and I don’t care who reads these words or hears me express myself on this subject. My husband is the anointed ruler of his people, crowned in a sacrament and chosen by acclamation. He is now and will always be a king, Commune or no Commune, Robespierre or no Robespierre.

  This arrogant little lawyer Robespierre claims to be the voice of the people yet anyone can tell at a glance that he is too strange and disturbed to be anyone’s voice. I watched him when he came to the assembly hall on that awful day when we were imprisoned there. He spoke loudly for such a small man and people did listen to him instead of ignoring him as they did most of the other speakers. He was very peculiar, however. He kept walking back and forth on his high-heeled shoes, like a nervous woman and not a strong or forceful man. He had a nervous tic in his cheek and the muscles there kept jumping convulsively. He kept biting his nails and pulling at his clothes and smoothing his collar, and his ugly skin was full of scars and looked like the color we used to call Goose-Droppings. Altogether he made me shudder.

  I cover these words with my hand, smearing the ink a little, because there is a representative of the Commune in the room with us and I suppose he might ask to see what I am writing. So far he has not.

  September 7, 1792

  My heart is pounding so fast I can hardly catch my breath. I have just seen something I almost can’t believe, yet I know I have seen it with my own two eyes and it is not a nightmare.

  A group of Parisians, chanting and waving banners, came into the open area in front of the guard barracks here and began parading noisily in front of our windows. They had a severed head impaled on a pike and brought it close enough so that we could see whose head it was.

  I felt my skin crawl. It was Loulou! My dearest friend, my confidante. Next to Sophie, the woman I trust most in the world. Her mouth was open, her eyes staring. Her hair floated out behind her.

  I cried out and covered my eyes, but not before I caught a glimpse of another lump of flesh impaled on a pike. It was a woman’s genitals.

  I ran from the window and flung myself down on my bed. I cried for a long time, then decided that I must leave a record of what was done to the loveliest, most faithful, dearest lady I have known. So I have set down here what happened to her. It is too hideous to think of. Once more I will write her name, a small memorial to one I loved very much:

  Marie-Thérèse de Savoie-Carignan,

  Princesse de Lamballe

  1749–1792

  Requiescat in pace.

  SEVENTEEN

  October 1, 1792

  Each night a lamplighter in a darkcloakand pointed hat comes through our apartments and fills our oil lamps and trims them, then lights them. Until tonight I had taken little notice of him. But tonight he nodded to me when he entered the room and placed a familiar-looking pewter candleholder on the table in front of where I was sitting, my knitting on my lap.

  I looked up into his face. It was Lieutenant de la Tour! I gasped but prevented myself from crying out. The Commune representative who always sits in our common room, overhearing all our conversations, had nodded off before the fire and so noticed nothing. Even Louis, who had Louis-Charles on his lap and was drawing a map of the French provinces for him, did not look up at the sound of my sudden intake of breath.

  The lamplighter completed his task, lighting a lamp in each of our rooms and leaving us candles for the night, then left. I waited until it was fully dark, then retired to prepare for the night, taking the candleholder with me. Once in my room I quickly turned it over and searched for a message inside, and found one—from Axel!

  I have not heard from him for months. Now he sends word that he is with the Austrian army and has been since July, though he was captured once and later wounded at Thionville. His wound is healing and he is once again with the army which is about to begin an assault on Lille. He says they have had some setbacks and he thought the Austrians would be in Paris long before now but he remains hopeful they will be here soon.

  “Take heart my dearest girl,” he writes, “my little angel, my love. With every breath I think of you.”

  I kiss his dear letter, and my tears fall. I know I should burn it but I can’t bear to destroy this precious paper he has held in his hands, these precious words he has written. I will sleep tonight with his message under my pillow, hoping to dream of him and praying that our liberation will come soon.

  October 2, 1792

  This morning before dawn I was awakened roughly by someone shaking me and shouting in my face. In the dim lamplight I could see that it was Amélie, dressed in a new, well-made red and white gown in the current Parisian fashion and with the chunk of gray stone from the Bastille on a chain around her neck. From her ears hung earrings made like miniature guillotines—a fashion I had been told about but could hardly imagine to be real.

  “Get up, citizeness,” she said briskly. “You are to be examined by the Committee of Vigilance.”

  I clutched my pillow, feeling for the letter that lay beneath it and trying to think, how can I destroy it, where can I hide it?

  “Will the Committee allow me time to dress?”

  “Dress quickly then.” She made no move to leave, to allow me any privacy.

  “If the Committee will permit me, I would like to change my linen—” I began.

  “Do you really think anybody cares about looking at your bony old body?” Amélie said impatiently. “All we care about is that you are under suspicion as an enemy of the revolution. Never mind getting dressed. Stand in the center of the room.”

  I did as she asked, holding my pillow and the letter, concealed behind my hand.

  Amélie motioned to companions in the adjoining room. “We’ll talk to the old bitch in here.” Two women and two men came into my small bedroom, bringing a lamp which they set down on a low table. They were young, younger than Amélie whom I knew to be around my age of thirty-six or a little older. The men I judged to be perhaps twenty-five, the women closer to twenty. They stared at me.

  “Citizeness Capet, the Committee of Vigilance for the Commune, the Temple section, demands that you answer the following questions. Have you any valuables?”

  “Only my wedding ring.”

  “Will you take an oath to defend the revolution?”

  “I took an oath to obey my king and husband, at his coronation. I could hardly forswear that oath now.”

  “She refuses. Write that down,” Amélie said to one of the men, who began looking around for a bottle of ink and writing paper. There was a brief commotion while these materials were found, and I took advantage of the distraction to slip Axel’s letter inside the linen pillowslip.
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  “Will you swear that you have had no contact with any foreign power whose aim is to destroy the revolution?” Amélie asked next.

  “I have written letters to my sisters and brothers,” I said truthfully, omitting to mention the hundreds of other letters I have sent, in code, to a dozen foreign princes and governments. “They are not in sympathy with the revolution.”

  “In fact your nephew Francis is at war with France.”

  “If you say so, citizeness. I am not permitted to read any newspapers.”

  “It matters little what you say,” Amélie snapped, walking in a slow circle around me, the little metal guillotines in her ears sparkling in the candlelight. “We know everything you are doing. Every lie you are telling. It is only a matter of time before you are summoned before the Revolutionary Tribunal and condemned as a criminal.”

  She came closer and looked at me knowingly. “Just as your great friend Loulou was.”

  Her words sent a frisson of horror down my spine. I saw once again the ghastly head of my dear friend, the private parts, exposed for all the world to see, and imagined the awful fear and panic and suffering Loulou must have endured at the hands of the communards before she died.

  “We took our time with her,” Amélie went on, speaking matter-of-factly and watching my reaction as she continued. “With her, it was not a quick slitting of the throat or stabbing in the gut, as with the others. No, your friend Loulou, the princess”—she gave the word a mocking emphasis—“deserved a long slow death.

  “We woke her up very early, just as we did with you this morning. Then we dragged her outdoors, and made her stand in the cold between two stacks of dead bodies while we stripped off her clothes and Niko and Georges here”—she indicated the two men—“raped her, was it twice or three times?” She turned to the men as she asked this. The men shrugged. I could not help myself. I began to sob.

  Amélie laughed and continued to circle me, partly walking, partly skipping.

  “Let me see, then we cut off her breasts and threw them to the dogs, and I think we made a bonfire between her legs, and used one of her arms as a torch. Then we cut out her heart and roasted it and ate it. By that time she was dead, of course. So we cut off her head and her cunt (both of which we knew you would recognize) and put them on pikes and marched around with them for awhile.”

  I was shaking and unnerved yet I held tightly onto my pillow and was careful not to let Axel’s letter slip out of the pillowcase. I have never, in the whole of my life, wanted to kill anyone as much as I wanted to kill Amélie at that moment.

  She ordered her companions to search my room which they did, throwing the bedclothes and thin mattress onto the floor, opening the chest in which I kept my few remaining possessions and flinging the contents out, spilling the water from my washbasin onto the floor. Fortunately they did not examine the pewter candleholder very closely or they would have discovered its hollow center.

  When they were finished Amélie addressed me once more.

  “Citizeness, the Committee of Vigilance will recommend that you be kept on the list of suspects. You will be questioned again. Meanwhile, here is a souvenir, from your late friend.”

  She reached into her pocket and pulled something out which she laid on the table in front of me. It was a shriveled human ear.

  November 14, 1792

  I am afraid for Louis.

  Louis has been betrayed, and by a longtime friend. The locksmith Gamin, who taught him lockmaking and worked alongside him for so many years in his attic room at Versailles, has denounced him. Gamin told deputies of the new assembly about a secret hiding place for documents that he built in Louis’s rooms, with a large locked box inside. He took them to the palace and showed them the hidden niche in the wall.

  The box was full of important papers, some of which proved that Louis had been sending and receiving messages from other sovereigns. The irony is that I am the one who sent and received nearly all the messages while we were at Versailles, not Louis. Yet to the Committee of Vigilance and the Revolutionary Tribunal that would probably seem an unimportant detail.

  I have heard nothing further about the progress of the Austrian army but it is too late in the year now for any large army to advance. Wherever they are, they will stay in their winter bivouac until spring.

  December 18, 1792

  Snow is falling. We huddle by our hearth fire, wrapped up in shawls and jackets because of the cold wind that blows in through the ancient chimney. The room is always smoky yet our guards do nothing about it and I know better than to ask for any help from the local Committee of Vigilance. They are not at all vigilant about our wellbeing.

  Seven days ago Louis was tried before the new governing body, the Convention. Today he talked about it for the first time.

  “It was nothing more than a formality, my trial,” he told me. “It lasted barely a quarter of an hour.” His tone was resigned yet dignified, with no trace of self-pity.

  “They accused me of crimes against the revolution. Then they adjourned, and I was brought backhere. No one argued for or against me. I was not questioned. I merely stood there, feeling surprisingly calm, and listened to what the prosecutor said.

  “It hasn’t happened since the days of Charles I, you know,” he went on after awhile. “Not for a hundred and fifty years. The judicial murder of a king.”

  “No, Louis, surely they would not dare!”

  “You saw what they scrawled on the wall here the other day, in blood-red letters: LOUIS THE LAST. It was an omen.”

  “What’s an omen, papa?” Louis-Charles climbed up into his father’s lap.

  “An omen is a sign that something is about to happen. Usually something we don’t want to happen.” I got up and went over to where Louis sat with Louis-Charles on his lap. I put my hand on my husband’s shoulder, and kept it there as he talked on.

  “You remember the lessons I gave you about the English King Charles, the one who was killed by his subjects long ago.”

  “Yes, papa. He had his head chopped off by an axe. Just like this mice-killer Robert gave me.” Robert was the son of one of the Republican Guards, a boy Louis-Charles’s age. Louis-Charles reached into the pocket of his trousers and brought out a miniature guillotine, a small blade with a weight attached to it.

  “Oh no!” I said, snatching the awful thing from his grasp.

  “But maman, all the boys have these. We execute mice with them. Birds too, when we can catch them.”

  “You are not to have anything to do with such a terrible cruel machine,” I told my son. Louis went on with his history lesson.

  “Of course the English were wrong to kill their king. And they soon realized it, and gave the throne to his son, another Charles, who was a very fine fellow, but a little too fond of the ladies.”

  Louis-Charles laughed. He is a sunny child, with a cheerful good nature. Even here, in this prisonlike place, he always manages to amuse himself and retains his good humor.

  “Now, this is what I want you to remember. Whatever happens to me, I am still the true king of France and you are the dauphin. The throne belongs to you and your children. If I should die, you will be King Louis XVII.”

  “Yes, father. You have told me so many times. But you are not going to die.”

  Louis stroked our son’s head affectionately. “Not quite yet, little king. Not quite yet.”

  I try not to think of what may happen to us this winter. I say my prayers and read and reread Axel’s precious letter and wait impatiently for the lamplighter to come each night. Sometimes it is Lieutenant de la Tour, sometimes a different man. I never know. To calm my nerves I knit mittens and scarves and have begun embroidering a set of chair covers. Mousseline helps me. She is very good at embroidery and much more patient than I am. Tomorrow will be her fourteenth birthday. How I wish she could have known her grandmother and namesake, the great Maria Theresa.

  January 20, 1793

  The terrible terrible news has come. Louis is to die t
omorrow.

  He came to tell us, trying to be as dignified and as brave as he could, wearing his red sash of the Order of St. Louis and his prized gold medal inscribed “Restorer of French Liberty and True Friend of His People.”

  He kissed us all tenderly and embraced us and we wept together, without shame even though the guards and the representative of the Commune were there in the room.

  Louis-Charles and Mousseline called out “Father, father” again and again, until even the rough guards had to turn their heads away, for the sight made them cringe.

  “Now I shall never complete my history of the flora and fauna of the forest of Compiègne,” Louis said wistfully. “I shall never see my beloved children grow up, or grow old with my beautiful wife, who has done her best to make me a better man.”

  He told us again and again that he loved us, and I could tell how great a strain it was for him to bear up under the pain of parting. When at last the guards came to take him away he held us close and then pulled me aside. He took off his wedding ring, kissed it, and put it in my hand.

  “I release you,” he said quietly. “Axel is a fine man. Marry him, and be happy!”

  Tears blurred my sight as I watched him being led away, my noble, foolish, well-meaning, exasperating husband and old friend. I had always been at his side when trouble came. Now, in his final hours, I will not be near him. I cannot bear the thought.

  January 21, 1793

  I heard the drums beat early this morning and knew that Louis was being led to the scaffold. I hoped the children were still sleeping, and were spared the realization that their beloved father was about to die.