Marie Antoinette: The Journey

by Antonia Fraser

  As to religion, Marie Antoinette declared herself dying in the Catholic, Apostolic and Roman faith of her forefathers, in which she had been brought up, and which she had always professed. Here in prison she could expect no spiritual consolation; she did not even know whether there were any true—that is, non-juror—priests in the prison, but she would not in any case expose them to danger. (Although these words have been cited as proof that Marie Antoinette did not receive Communion while in the Conciergerie, she would hardly have given details of available non-jurors in a document that would undoubtedly be read by the authorities.)

  “I ask God’s pardon for all the sins that I have committed,” the Queen went on, and she asked pardon from all those she knew, but especially Madame Elisabeth, for any pain she might unwittingly have caused them—it was the same Christian formula that Louis XVI had used. “I bid farewell to my aunts, and all my brothers and sisters. I had friends; the idea of being separated from them for ever, and their sufferings as a result, are one of the greatest regrets I take with me to my death; they should know that at the last moment I think of them.” Was it the Polignac? Was it Fersen? Both? Many others once part of her magic world? The Queen did not name them.

  “Adieu my good and tender sister; may this letter reach you! Think of me always; I embrace you with all my heart, as well as those poor beloved children. My God, it tears me to leave them for ever. Adieu, adieu, I now think only of my spiritual duties . . . They may bring me a [juror] priest here, but I solemnly declare here that I shall treat him as a total stranger.”*114 In due course the juror Abbé Girard was indeed imposed upon Marie Antoinette, being introduced into her cell, but she kept her word.

  Yet the absence of a priest of her own kind emphasized the marked difference in the treatment of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI at the last. Louis Capet had been allowed days to work with his lawyers for his defence, Marie Antoinette a few hours. The former King had his faithful valet and old friend Cléry with him up to the moment when he left the Temple. Almost too painful perhaps for Marie Antoinette to contemplate, she had been allowed to bring the children to him on the eve of execution for a final farewell. And he had been granted the services of the non-juror Abbé Edgeworth, not only the night before, but accompanying him right up to the scaffold. It was the Abbé Edgeworth, according to popular report, who told his royal master at the end: “Son of Saint Louis, ascend to heaven.”31 There were to be no such consoling words and no such company for Marie Antoinette.

  There was only Rosalie Lamorlière, who came to her timidly at seven o’clock in the morning to see if she wanted any food. The maid had been woken to hear the verdict earlier, when she felt “as if a sword had gone through her heart,” and she spent the next few hours sobbing secretly in her room. Bault too was sad, Rosalie remembered afterwards, although being a jailer he was accustomed to such things. It was Rosalie therefore who was the witness to the Queen’s despair. She found Marie Antoinette in her black dress lying on her bed, her head turned to the barred window, her hand against her cheek. Two lights were burning and the ever-present gendarmes were watching from the corner.32

  The Queen wept as she refused to take any nourishment: “My child, I need nothing. Everything is over for me.” Rosalie continued to offer the bouillon and some vermicelli that she had ready in her oven. Wearily the Queen agreed to the bouillon but took only a few mouthfuls before putting it aside. She had now eaten practically nothing for several days and was losing blood to an extent that Rosalie found frightening. At eight o’clock it was time to dress. Antoinette Capet was not allowed to wear her familiar black on the grounds that the crowd might insult the evil enchantress for daring to put on decent mourning. So she was left to wear her simple white dress of everyday; no one remembered that in the past white had been the mourning of the Queens of France.33

  It was Rosalie too who was witness to the planned humiliation that was to be the lot of the woman Antoinette, where that of Louis Capet had been dignity even in death. First, she was obliged, for example, to get ready under the gendarmes’ watchful eyes. When Marie Antoinette attempted to undress in a little niche between the wall and the bed, signing to Rosalie to shield her, one of the men came round and stood looking at her. Pulling her fichu round her shoulders, she pleaded with him: “Monsieur, for decency’s sake let me change my chemise in private.” The gendarme replied brusquely that his orders were to keep an eye on the prisoner at all times. The Queen sighed and changed as modestly as possible, stuffing the chemise, which was heavily bloodstained, into one of her loose sleeves, and hiding it in a crevice in the wall. To her white dress, she added a linen cap with pleated edges and two streamers that she took out of a box, which, with some black crepe, she made into an approximation of a widow’s bonnet. For the rest of her costume she had to make do with what was there: the black silk stockings and plum-coloured shoes.

  The humiliation continued when Charles Henri Sanson, fourth generation of his family to act as executioner, came to hack off her thin white hair with his enormous professional scissors. It got worse when they told the former Queen that her hands were to be bound. “You did not bind the hands of Louis XVI,” Marie Antoinette protested at this point. But bound her hands were to be, and so tightly that her arms were dragged back behind her. The next humiliation occurred when the Queen was overcome with weakness. She asked to have her hands unbound in order to go and squat in the corner. That was grudgingly conceded. Having relieved herself, she meekly held out her hands to be bound again.34

  The nature of death by “Celestial Guillotine” or “Sainte Guillotine, protectress of patriots” as contemporaries nicknamed it, was that it was essentially theatrical, a slow procession followed by a quick death.35 In the case of Marie Antoinette, the procession that set off at eleven o’clock was also intended to be part of the ritual cruelty. She was installed in a cart rather than a carriage, drawn by the heavy horses known as rosinantes. When the former Queen instinctively went to sit in the back—her position in those magnificent carriages of Versailles—she was sharply corrected and told to sit with her back to the horses. A jolt of the cart nearly threw her down, and one of the gendarmes pointed out with satisfaction: “There are none of your fine Trianon cushions here.”

  The day was fine, slightly misty, and the deep cold of the night hours had gone. The huge crowds that lined the route to the guillotine at the Place du Carrousel listened to the cries of the escort: “Make way for the Austrian woman!” and “Long live the Republic!” The actor Grammont, ahead of the procession on horseback, stood up in his stirrups and waved his sword, shouting: “Here she is, the infamous Antoinette, she is foutue, my friends!” Mainly the crowd heard these cries with satisfaction. The painter David, watching the Austrian woman from a window, drew her on her final journey in order to illustrate once and for all the contempt of the Habsburg Archduchess with her haughty indifferent expression and her pouting lip. A woman outside the Church of Saint-Roch spat at the cortège. Outside the Church of the Oratory one woman did hold up her laughing child, who was about the same age as Louis Charles, in a gesture of support, but on the whole the ci-devant aristocrats were discreet in their silent sympathy even if the police recognized them by their tight lips and sad expressions.36

  Yet prolonged humiliation can in the end damage those who try to inflict it. Just as David’s celebrated drawing done from the life as the prisoner passed can be interpreted as a final image of disdain—or unalterable calm dignity, depending on the point of view. Every account, every eyewitness, agreed on the unassailable composure with which Marie Antoinette went to her death. “Audacious and insolent to the end,” wrote Hébert’s Le Père Duchesne while Le Moniteur admitted more pedestrianly that she showed “courage enough.” Virieu, the envoy of Parma, where her sister the Habsburg Amalia was the reigning Duchess, put it another way: Marie Antoinette never failed for a single instant either her great soul or the illustrious blood of the House of Austria. Only one moment did she falter and show some sudden
emotion. This was at the sight of the Tuileries, bringing memories of the past and of her children. Her eyes momentarily filled with tears.37

  By the time the cart reached the Place du Carrousel, she was sufficiently in command of herself to step easily down. Stepping lightly—“with bravado”—she sprang up the steps of the scaffold despite her bound hands, pausing only to apologize to Sanson for stepping on his foot—“I did not do it on purpose.” So she went willingly, even eagerly, to her death. And why should she not? Ten days earlier Maria Carolina had written of her sister: “Everything that ends her torture is good.” Now that torture was about to end. “This is the moment, Madame, to arm yourself with courage,” the juror Abbé Girard had said, still trying to press his spiritual services upon her in the face of her firm rejection. “Courage!” exclaimed Marie Antoinette. “The moment when my ills are going to end is not the moment when courage is going to fail me.”38

  So the head of Antoinette, desired by Hébert, was cut off cleanly at twelve-fifteen on Wednesday, 16 October 1793, and exhibited to a joyous public. An unhinged man, who got under the scaffold and tried to bathe his handkerchief in the royal blood, was quickly taken away by the gendarmes.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  EPILOGUE

  “This prison can now serve as the laboratory of a new experience; to look without passion at the symbols of murders long past.”

  NOTICE TODAY IN THE CONCIERGERIE

  The journey—that journey which had begun in an imperial palace in Vienna and finished in a squalid cell in Paris—was completed. The body of Marie Antoinette with its severed head was taken unceremoniously to the graveyard off the rue d’Anjou, where Louis XVI had been interred nine and a half months previously. The people who had been crushed to death in the fireworks episode following the Dauphine’s marriage had been buried there, as were, many years later, some of the Swiss Guards who died in the attack on the Tuileries. Now carts bearing fresh victims went to the rue d’Anjou every day.1

  The gravediggers took time off to have their lunch, leaving the head and body on the grass unattended. This meant that the future Madame Tussaud was able to sculpt the Queen’s lifeless face in wax; unlike her impression of the Princesse de Lamballe, however, this model was never exhibited. Two weeks later the bill for the interment came in: for the coffin six livres, for grave and gravediggers fifteen livres and thirty-five sous.2

  Back at the Conciergerie, the effects of “the Widow Capet” were listed. They were pitiful compared to the elaborate belongings that would be left by Philippe Égalité, ci-devant Duc d’Orléans, executed on 6 November. “I vote for death,” shouted the derisive crowd as he passed, imitating the words with which he had condemned Louis XVI. Égalité died as he had lived, a rich man, going to the scaffold “heavily powdered” and elegant, leaving behind waistcoats with silver buttons, breeches, cravats, dressing-gowns, sets of silver plate and a magnificent picnic basket. Everything that Marie Antoinette left was very plain: a few linen chemises and corsets in fine toile as well as some “linge à blanchir,” two pairs of black stockings, a lawn headdress, some black crepe, some batiste handkerchiefs, garters and two pairs of cotton “pockets” which she used to carry her belongings inside her dress. She also left a box of powder, a “big fine sponge” and a little box of pomade—the single last remnants of a toilette that in all its pomp had once preoccupied the whole of Versailles.3

  These remains were distributed, according to custom, among the women prisoners of the Salpêtrière prison. Four years later those other objects that had been seized at the Temple and produced for trial were put up for auction. They included a small green morocco case for sewing things, and three little portraits in green shagreen cases. They raised a total of ten francs, fifteen centimes; everything else had been stolen.4

  Public reaction in France to the death of the former Queen was ecstatic. Numerous congratulatory petitions were received by the Revolutionary Tribunal along these lines: “It is fallen at last, the head of the haughty Austrian woman gorged with the blood of the people . . .”; “the execrable head of the Messalina Marie Antoinette . . .”; “Here is the second royal monster laid low . . .”; “The soil of France is purged of this pestilential couple . . .” A note of variety was struck by the District of Josselin, Department of Morbihan, which mentioned Marie Thérèse as being her mother’s “living portrait” and in character too; as for the boy, the teeth of the wolf-cub should be pulled out as soon as possible.

  A Jacobin club in Angoulême made an outing to the foot of a so-called Tree of Liberty (these trees were popular symbols of the Revolution) “to give thanks to the divinity that has rid us of this fury.” A choir then sang “a sacred song”; it was the “Marsellaise.” Marie Antoinette au Diable expressed the general theme of the pamphlets, whose voices were not stilled by her death. The former Queen had now claimed her place in hell, where she expected to find her mother and her two Emperor brothers, but “as for my fat porpoise of a husband,” that crass drunkard, “I want to have nothing more to do with him.”5

  But as the news spread in the prisons of Marie Antoinette’s “greatness and courage” at the last, royalists there took comfort. Grace Elliott in Sainte Pélagie prison wrote of how they were all inspired by her example and hoped to follow it when the time came. Unfortunately the poor Comtesse Du Barry found herself unable to do so. The royal mistress, still beautiful at fifty, whiled her time away sitting on Grace Elliott’s bed and telling her anecdotes of Louis XV and his court.6 But when her time came to mount the scaffold, all composure deserted her. The Du Barry desperately but vainly tried to avoid her fate; she had, after all, been trained to give pleasure, not to die.

  Outside, the royalist world tried to accommodate itself to the tragedy. The Duchesse de Polignac died shortly afterwards of what was generally believed to be a broken heart but was probably cancer accelerated by suffering. Her health had given way when the King was killed, her daughter had told Madame Vigée Le Brun, but at the news about the Queen, “her charming face became quite altered and one could see death written there.” To Count Mercy d’Argenteau, however, in Brussels, the horrifying death was inevitably linked to the name of the Empress he had once served; his first reaction was nothing to do with Marie Antoinette but simple shock at seeing “the blood of the great Maria Teresa shed upon the scaffold.”7

  Fersen, also in Brussels, received the news on 20 October. For a while he felt quite numb, while Brussels society regarded him with silent and respectful pity. After that he kept 16 October—“this atrocious day”—as a day of mourning for the rest of his life, for her who had been, as he told Lady Elizabeth Foster on 22 October, “the model of queens and of women.” He was left with an ideal in his heart; memories of her sweetness, tenderness, goodness, her loving nature, her sensibility flooded over him in his correspondence with his sister. He told Sophie that Eléanore Sullivan could never replace Marie Antoinette—“Elle”—in his heart.8

  He did not know that his end, seventeen years after that of his heroine, was to be equally, if not more, violent than hers. The Count incurred the enmity of the Swedish crowd who were incited to believe that he had poisoned Christian, the heir to the throne of Denmark. At the funeral procession on 20 June 1810—an ill-omened date—Fersen was set upon and torn to pieces, a fate that had been so often predicted for Marie Antoinette. He had never been repaid the prodigious sums that he had dispensed trying to save the King and Queen, his claim being shunted from royal to royal despite clear letters of proof.9

  Maria Carolina, in Naples, was devastated in spite of her premonitions of disaster. Amélie, one of her string of daughters (like her mother, Maria Carolina had a vast family), always remembered being told of her aunt’s death. The Queen took them all into the chapel to attend Mass and pray for Marie Antoinette. Amélie was then eleven and had already shed a few tears for the death of the first Dauphin whom she had fancied she might marry—they were of an age—and thus become Queen of France. Many years later, the unma
rried Amélie fastened her affections on Louis Philippe, Duc d’Orléans since the death of Philippe Égalité. Maria Carolina had even tried to stop herself speaking French, so great was her horror of the people who had caused her sister’s death, although in fact the habit turned out to be too strong.10 Now she had to grit her teeth and accept that the twenty-eight-year-old Amélie would marry the son of the man who had voted for Louis XVI’s death warrant—or no one.

  In the end she accepted the suitor, by now stout and “very Bourbon-looking,” on condition that he spoke frankly to her about the past: “I forgive you everything on condition that I know everything.” In this way Amélie became Queen of the French after 1830 when Louis Philippe displaced the Comte d’Artois, Louis XVI’s last surviving brother, as monarch and took this title. As an old lady Queen Amélie would say that she believed it had always been her destiny to occupy the throne of France. Maria Carolina was left with the consolation that everyone recognized the deep affection that Marie Antoinette had borne her. “My mother often spoke of you,” wrote Marie Thérèse. “She loved you more than all her other sisters.”*11511

  There were many others for whom October would always be the month of “sad memories,” in the words of the Princesse de Tarante, and the 16th a day of solemn mourning “when I cannot speak of anything but Her.”12 Two people, however, who did not know of the Queen’s death—they did not believe the criers outside the Temple—were her daughter Marie Thérèse and her sister-in-law Madame Elisabeth. The latter only discovered shortly before her own execution in May 1794. Marie Thérèse, by now quite alone in the secluded prison, lived on in ignorance, a sad, abandoned and as it seemed, a forgotten figure.