Marie Antoinette: The Journey

by Antonia Fraser

  Marat signed an article in L’Ami du Peuple in which he hailed “The glorious day of the Tenth of August,” which could be decisive for “the triumph of liberty.” But he warned his readers not to give in to “the voice of false pity.” There was not much danger of that as the thirteen-strong party set out in two heavy-laden carriages, drawn by only two horses apiece, which made progress intolerably slow. Altogether it took two and a half hours to reach the Temple. Along the way they saw the equestrian statue of Louis XV, which had been toppled and smashed by the mob. One of the commissioners accompanying them, Pierre Manuel, Procurator-General of the Commune, remarked with satisfaction: “That is how the people treat their kings.”

  “It is pleasant that this rage is confined to inanimate objects,” commented the real-life King with a flash of acerbity.47

  In the meantime a wag had affixed a placard to the Tuileries, “House to Let,” and miles away in the east the army of the Duke of Brunswick was on the march.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  THE TOWER

  “You will see that they will put us into the Tower. They will make that a real prison for us.”

  MARIE ANTOINETTE TO THE MARQUISE DE TOURZEL, 13 AUGUST 1792

  Lanterns illuminated the walls of the Temple when the royal party arrived, as though for a public festival, and a great crowd of people chanted “Long live the nation!” That cry at least was a familiar one. More sinister was the gleeful Marseillais chant of the guards:

  Madame goes up into her Tower

  When will she come down again?

  It referred to the fact that the Temple was in fact two separate structures. There was the gracious seventeenth-century palace where the young Mozart had once played at the invitation of the Prince de Conti, its governor; more recently it had belonged to the Comte d’Artois. Then there was the Tower, sixty feet high, a frowning mediaeval edifice that had once been part of the old monastery of the Templar Order; this was divided into a Great Tower and a Small Tower, with various turrets attached. It lay in an ancient district not far from the Bastille and was not much known to Parisians from other districts; some of those who accompanied the royal family had never been there.

  Marie Antoinette had always had a horror of the Tower. Visiting her brother-in-law’s palace, she had tried to persuade him to have its grim adjunct knocked down.*97 One suspects that this was due more to dislike of a building so far from the pastoral spirit of the Petit Trianon than to some presentiment. Once at the Convent of the Feuillants, however, she had expressed genuine apprehension, exclaiming to the Marquise de Tourzel: “You will see that they will put us into the Tower. They will make that a real prison for us.” Yet the public dinner served to the royal family on their arrival, together with the commissioners of the Commune who had accompanied them, did take place in the palace. They were all exhausted and Louis Charles fell asleep. There was a move to take the King alone to the Great Tower and leave the rest of them in the palace. In the end, however, orders came that the whole family was to be moved, for the time being, to the Small Tower while work was done to render the Great Tower both habitable and secure.1

  The Small Tower itself, that evening, could scarcely be described as comfortable for the royal party. The eyes of the two valets, Chamilly and Hüe, met in silence over the uncurtained and verminous bedstead destined for Louis XVI.2 (In spite of this, their master, characteristically, had a good night’s sleep.) Indecent engravings in the room for Marie Thérèse were removed on her father’s orders. Madame Elisabeth, Pauline de Tourzel and the waiting-woman Madame Navarre all had to sleep together in the kitchen. So they began the process of adaptation to their new home—or prison, the “real prison” of Marie Antoinette’s fears.

  Security was, of course, immense. Four commissioners were in attendance at any one time, casting lots for the two who spent the night in the Tower. Twenty guards manned the gate. There were also elaborate precautions over the delivery of items such as books, linen and clothes. The lack of respect to the King—the suspended King—grieved Marie Thérèse. Instead of “Sire” or “Majesté,” he was now “Monsieur” or even “Louis,” this man whose own wife did not address him in public as “Louis.” One particular jailer, Rocher, was found particularly detestable by the girl since he specialized in petty humiliations such as taking to his bed early, thus obliging the royal family to file past him. He loved the fact that the wicket gate was so low that the Queen herself had to bow her head before him to enter it, and then there was his deliberate manipulation of his pipe. Madame Elisabeth even asked one of the commissioners why Rocher smoked so persistently in their faces. “No doubt because he likes it,” was the curt reply. Some of the commissioners also took pleasure in sitting down in the presence of the royal ladies and, as the weather grew colder, putting their feet on the firedogs to block the warmth.3

  In spite of all this, the royal family was able to develop its own way of life, as prisoners do.4 In luxury it was certainly a precipitate descent from the comparative ease of the Tuileries where they had spent the last two and three-quarter years. But as a regime it was not atrociously severe. The accommodation of the Small Tower was arranged to give the King a bedroom on the third floor and a little study in the turret. The Queen and others slept on the floor below him. On the first floor was an antechamber, a dining room and the unexpected asset of a book-lined turret. The King revelled in this library—1500 books that had been the archive of the Knights of Malta. He read something like one book a day, frowning over Voltaire and Rousseau who, he said, had been “the ruin of France.” The Queen had her beloved tapestry and at one point was able to send for her knitting needles from the Tuileries. The little dog Mignon was also brought in, since there were gardens for exercise.

  Nobody had any kind of wardrobe—the Queen seems to have arrived with two dresses, one blue, one dark pink—but orders for lingerie were allowed to be given to the celebrated Madame Éloffe on arrival, and again on 15 and 18 August. In the next two months 25,000 livres would be spent on assorted items such as sheets, stockings, laundry and hats (black beaver tricornes for the Queen and Madame Elisabeth). Sailor suits were ordered for Louis Charles, and the King could still get his shoes from his usual cobbler, Giot, in the rue du Bac. Louis generally wore one of his two coats of plain chestnut brown, with metal filigree buttons, and a white piqué waistcoat. Marie Antoinette’s outfits were similarly modest—loose pierrots of toile de Jouy, dresses of brown and white sprigged cotton and plain white dimity, worn with lace caps. She also practised the economy of making little changes to her costume with the aid of fichus and shawls. There was a payment of 600 livres to Rose Bertin for August and September; her business still flourished although the couturier herself had left the country in 1791. Much of this sum went on accessories and alterations.5

  Food was still served liberally. The royal servants, knowing no other way of attending to their master, continued to produce the soups, entrées, roasts, fowls and desserts with which he was familiar. Louis XVI continued to drink—bordeaux, champagne and, what was considered abstemious, a single liqueur in the evening. In fact, the provision of food quickly assumed an additional importance because its acquisition necessitated trips into the outside world. There were three men in the kitchen, Turgy, Chrétien and Marchand, who had managed to infiltrate the Tower by pretending that they came on the orders of the Commune. The sympathetic Turgy used his thrice-weekly expeditions outside to acquire news and to pass on messages. There was certainly news to impart. The Prussian armies under the Duke of Brunswick crossed the French frontier on 19 August; Longwy fell four days later.

  To Hüe, Marie Antoinette emphasized as before that “not one French fortress” must be given up to secure their liberty. If the royal family was freed, she said, they intended to go to Strasbourg in order to stop “this important city,” which “must be preserved for France,” becoming German once more. Hüe was happily convinced that the daughter of Maria Teresa, the sister of Joseph II and Leopold II, the aun
t of Francis II, had given way to “the consort of the King of France and the mother of the heir to the throne.”6 The fact was that for all her nationalistic words, the hopes of Marie Antoinette could hardly fail to rise as news of allied military successes percolated through to the prisoners.

  On 19 August, however, the day that these armies crossed the frontier, the little household in the Tower received a further devastating blow. The commissioners of the Commune announced that the surviving attendants, including the Princesse de Lamballe, the Marquise de Tourzel with Pauline, Chamilly, Hüe and the waiting-women, were to be removed for interrogation. This was in keeping with a new order, prompted by the Commune, which set up a special tribunal to try royalists for crimes allegedly committed during the overthrow of the monarchy. Marie Antoinette made desperate pleas to keep the Princesse de Lamballe beside her, on the grounds that she was a royal relative. She wished to protect the vulnerable friend whom she had introduced into this perilous situation, judging the Tower to be safer than an ordinary prison. When the Princesse was removed with the others, the Queen urged the Marquise de Tourzel in a low voice to look after her, and try to answer for her where possible.7 The Princesse and the Tourzels were now incarcerated in the La Force prison. Louis Charles, separated at last from his devoted Governess, shared the Queen’s room. It was Hüe who was, to the general pleasure and surprise, allowed to return after being interrogated about the flight to Varennes and (correctly) found to be innocent.

  The three royal ladies were now without any female attendants. A couple called Tison with a daughter, another Pauline, were brought in to do the rough work of the establishment. No one liked the Tisons; the husband, in his late fifties, was gruff and unpleasant, the wife a hysteric more worried about her own comforts than those of the royal family she was supposed to serve. The next import permitted by the Commune was of a very different calibre. This was a valet named Hanet Cléry, who was intended to help Hüe in his work, but when the latter was finally removed for good in early September, he became the effective manager of the tiny household. Cléry had been in Louis Charles’s household since the boy’s birth; he had escaped from the Tuileries on 10 August by jumping out of a window. (Seeing that Cléry wore a plain coat and carried no sword, a helpful Marseillais had offered him one of his own, in case Cléry wanted to participate in the killing.) Not only loyal and part of the inner network of royal servants, Cléry was also intelligent and resourceful. “The faithful Cléry” would turn out to be an important witness to conditions in the Tower. Furthermore, additional joy, he had trained as a barber. Cléry could do the King’s hair in the morning, and he could also move on to perform the same functions for the ladies whose hair had not been properly dressed for eight days. Hairdressing as ever being central to court life, even in this, the most modest of versions, Cléry used his sessions with the comb to pass on information discreetly.8

  From time to time harsh sounds did penetrate the Temple. There was the monotonous daily chanting of that song “Madame goes up into her Tower” by the guards. There were the insults shouted by the public—up to 400 of them—who had taken to behaving like tourists outside this new sight of Paris. “We will strangle the little cubs and the fat pig” was one cry, “Madame Veto shall dance from the lantern” another. On 25 August, the Feast of St. Louis, which had been so splendidly celebrated with multiple illuminations in days gone by, Marie Thérèse heard the dreaded sound of the “Ça ira” at seven o’clock in the morning. Later the royal family learnt from the Procurator Manuel, one of the commissioners, that La Fayette had fled France. Manuel also handed over a letter from Mesdames Tantes, leading their pious lives in Rome. This was the last letter that the family received officially from outside, according to Marie Thérèse. The family was, however, unaware that in the evening Durosoy, the publisher of the royalist Gazette de Paris, was executed by a newfangled instrument called the guillotine.*989

  From the point of view of the inhabitants of the Tower, therefore, the day of 2 September began like any other. The King was actually with Commissioner Daujon, watching a house being demolished outside the walls of the Tower in the interests of greater security, when the noise of cannon was heard. The King’s great shout of laughter at the fall of a big stone was interrupted. According to Daujon he turned pale, began to tremble, and in his cowardice “forgot he was a man.” Marie Antoinette cried out: “Save my husband!” This was echoed by Madame Elisabeth with: “Have pity on my brother!”11 Even if Daujon’s charges were true, Louis XVI, who had been the subject of two apparently murderous assaults within the last six weeks, can hardly be blamed for his reaction. But indecisive and incapable of rising to an occasion as the King might be, he was not a coward as the events of 20 June had shown. It is far more likely that he feared for the safety of his family.

  Marie Thérèse bore witness to their general bewilderment at this point: “We didn’t know what was happening.” Perhaps it was just as well. What was happening was a maniacal assault on the inhabitants of the Paris prisons, with some of the royal family’s most beloved attendants still incarcerated in the La Force. These included the Marquise de Tourzel and Pauline—and that hate figure featured so often in obscene popular publications, the lesbian paramour of the “Infamous Antoinette,” the Princesse de Lamballe.

  It will never be known for sure how many prisoners died, and there were similar massacres at Versailles and Rheims. Recent estimates make the Paris figure about 1300, the rates of killing varying from prison to prison. Were these assassins all foreigners to the city imported specially for the task? “Greeks and Corsicans” with red caps and bare arms were mentioned, as well as southerners. Were they all drunk? Or was it, perhaps, the kind of wild blood-lust helped on by drink that can seize a whole mob, blotting out the sense of morality possessed by the individual? The ad hoc tribunals formed at the prisons certainly took pleasure in despatching most of those who were dragged before them to their deaths. The killings at the Bicêtre and the Salpêtrière prisons were especially frightful since these traditionally housed beggars and prostitutes, as well as boys and girls. Children as young as eight died, being found strangely hard to finish off: “At that age it is hard to let go of life.” These totally apolitical figures fell victim to murderers, most of whom were in a kind of bloodthirsty delirium throughout the whole horrible proceedings. John Moore wrote in his diary: “It is now past twelve at midnight and the bloody work goes on! Almighty God!”12

  Yet the Paris theatres and restaurants did not close. A curious indifference to the whole matter gripped the city. A bourgeois family passing the prison of the Carmes, from which the most piteous cries were heard, was merely told by the father to quicken its steps. It was distressing, of course; nevertheless there were “implacable enemies” of the nation who were being eliminated, in order that their own lives might be more secure.13 This indifference found a parallel in the reaction of the political leaders. Robespierre took the convenient line that the will of the people was being expressed. Danton, if he did not inspire the killings, shrugged his shoulders and dismissed the fate of the prisoners with a coarse expletive. At the end of the day, the Girondins, who would have been in prison if Robespierre and Marat had had their way, were still safe, but the Jacobins were now in control.

  At ten o’clock Commissioner Manuel told the royal family that the Princesse de Lamballe had survived. He was wrong. It was the Marquise de Tourzel who was miraculously acquitted in front of the tribunal of revolutionaries, while Pauline was spirited away to safety by a mysterious English Good Samaritan. A different destiny was reserved for the Princesse. Brought before the tribunal, she refused to denounce the King and Queen. The Princesse, who had once been too sensitive to bear the tribulations of ordinary life, found in herself the strength to answer with awesome composure: “I have nothing to reply, dying a little earlier or a little later is a matter of indifference to me. I am prepared to make the sacrifice of my life.” So she was directed to the exit for the Abbaye prison—actually a cod
e for execution. Once outside, in the courtyard of La Force, according to the testimony of a Madame Bault who worked there, “several blows of a hammer on the head laid her low and then they fell on her.”14

  Afterwards terrible stories were told of the fate of the Princesse de Lamballe; that she had been violated, alive or dead,*99 that her breasts and private parts had been hacked off or, in another variant of savagery, her heart had been cooked and eaten. These stories were heard by many people in Paris at the time, the frequent use of the words “fearful indignities . . . of a nature not to be related” and “private infamies” as well as “disembowelment” covering many possibilities.15

  Unquestionably the Princesse’s head was cut off and mounted on a pike. Her naked body was also ripped right open and her innards taken out, to be mounted on another pike. The corpse and the two grisly trophies were then paraded through Paris. The young Comte de Beaujolais, son of the Duc d’Orléans, who was doing his lessons at the Palais-Royal, was horrified to see the head of “Tante” pass by, accompanied by her lacerated body. Along the way the head was thrust into the lap of the apprentice wax modeller Marie Grosholz. She was obliged to make a cast with “the savage murderers” standing over her although, having been art teacher to Madame Elisabeth, Marie had known the Princesse and her hands trembled almost too much for her to work.16

  It was now the firm intention of the crowd, fired up with wine and more wine, to take the head of the Princesse de Lamballe to the Temple so that the “Infamous Antoinette” could bestow a last kiss on those sweet lips she had loved. This makes another story plausible: that a visit was paid to a barber along the way for the Princesse’s hair to be dressed. For the Princesse’s original coiffure could hardly have survived the assault of the hammers outside La Force, even if she had managed to preserve it during her fortnight inside. By the time the head on its pike appeared bobbing up and down outside the windows of the dining room of the Tower, the famous blonde curls were floating prettily as they had done in life, even if the face was waxen white. As a result the head was instantly recognizable.17