Marie-Antoinette, Daughter of the Caesars

by Elena Maria Vidal

  “I never knew him to have such a character as you describe,” she replied.

  Again, they brought up the painful matter of her son. “I point out to you that your testimony is in direct opposition to your son’s,” challenged Fouquier-Tinville.

  “It is easy to make a child of eight say whatever one wants.”

  “But he was made to repeat it several times and on several occasions,” claimed the lawyer. “And he always said the same thing.”

  “Well, I deny it.”

  Finally, around half-past four in the afternoon, there was a short recess, and the Queen, who had eaten nothing since morning, was given a little soup, sent to her from the prison by Rosalie. All too soon, the session began once more, and she heard herself accused of practically everything from forgery to treason.

  “At the time of your marriage to Louis Capet, did you not conceive the project of uniting Lorraine with Austria?”

  “No,” she replied.

  “You bear its name.”

  “Because one must bear the name of one’s country.”

  Around midnight, Fouquier-Tinville asked her if she had anything else to say for herself.

  She stood up. “Yesterday, I did not know the witnesses, and I did not know what they would testify. Well, no one has uttered anything positive against me. I end by saying that I was only the wife of Louis XVI, and bound to conform to his will.”

  Her lawyers gave a zealous defense, begging that her life be spared, on the grounds that it was enough punishment for her to have lost her husband. Afterwards, Hermann gave a long summary of her accusation. She had aided and abetted the “last tyrant” of France, who had already been found guilty and executed. While the jury deliberated, she asked for a glass of water. One of the gendarmes hastened to fetch it for her. When the verdict of guilty was announced she did not display the slightest flicker of emotion. It was two o’clock in the morning of October 16, traditionally the feast of the French priest St. Gall. On the revolutionary calendar it was the feast of the Ox, an animal of the ancient Hebrew

  holocaust.

  The same gendarme who gave her the water escorted her back to her cell, respectfully removing his hat in her presence, and putting it under his arm. He did not seem to care that the gesture was noticed by many, and led to his arrest. The tricoteuses were silent as the Queen wearily limped out of the Hall of Liberty. She was almost too exhausted to walk. Her eyesight was worsened by fatigue and the darkness of the hour. As they came to the black entrance of the Conciergerie she said, “I cannot see.” The young soldier took her arm. Nevertheless, she slipped on the rough staircase.

  Soon she was back in her bone-chilling cell, but she did not sleep. In the light of two candles, her quill began to scratch across the page as she wrote to Élisabeth. The beauty of Antoinette's soul are captured in the lines in which she expresses her steadfast adherence to the Catholic religion and her concern for her friends and family. Note the delicate manner in which she refers to her little son’s accusation of incest, wrested from him by his tormentors, showing more concern for Élisabeth's feelings than for her own agony. When she speaks of her children the words themselves fall like tears. Although it is known that she had previously received the ministrations of a priest faithful to the Holy See while in prison, in order to protect him she wonders aloud if there are any Catholic priests left in France. Also, in the last sentence she states her refusal to “speak,” that is, to confess, to a juring priest, one who had denied the Pope by swearing an oath to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Robespierre kept the letter; it never reached Élisabeth.

  16th October, 4.30 A.M.

  It is to you, my sister, that I write for the last time. I have just been condemned, not to a shameful death, for such is only for criminals, but to go and rejoin your brother. Innocent like him, I hope to show the same firmness in my last moments. I am calm, as one is when one’s conscience reproaches one with nothing. I feel profound sorrow in leaving my poor children: you know that I only lived for them and for you, my good and tender sister. You who out of love have sacrificed everything to be with us, in what a position do I leave you! I have learned from the proceedings at my trial that my daughter was separated from you. Alas! poor child; I do not venture to write to her; she would not receive my letter. I do not even know whether this will reach you. Do you receive my blessing for both of them. I hope that one day when they are older they may be able to rejoin you, and to enjoy to the full your tender care. Let them both think of the lesson which I have never ceased to impress upon them, that the principles and the exact performance of their duties are the chief foundation of life; and then mutual affection and confidence in one another will constitute its happiness. Let my daughter feel that at her age she ought always to aid her brother by the advice which her greater experience and her affection may inspire her to give him. And let my son in his turn render to his sister all the care and all the services which affection can inspire. Let them, in short, both feel that, in whatever positions they may be placed, they will never be truly happy but through their union. Let them follow our example. In our own misfortunes how much comfort has our affection for one another afforded us! And, in times of happiness, we have enjoyed that doubly from being able to share it with a friend; and where can one find friends more tender and more united than in one's own family? Let my son never forget the last words of his father, which I repeat emphatically; let him never seek to avenge our deaths.

  I have to speak to you of one thing which is very painful to my heart, I know how much pain the child must have caused you. Forgive him, my dear sister; think of his age, and how easy it is to make a child say whatever one wishes, especially when he does not understand it. It will come to pass one day, I hope, that he will better feel the value of your kindness and of your tender affection for both of them. It remains to confide to you my last thoughts. I should have wished to write them at the beginning of my trial; but, besides that they did not leave me any means of writing, events have passed so rapidly that I really have not had time.

  I die in the Catholic Apostolic and Roman religion, that of my fathers, that in which I was brought up, and which I have always professed. Having no spiritual consolation to look for, not even knowing whether there are still in this place any priests of that religion (and indeed the place where I am would expose them to too much danger if they were to enter it but once), I sincerely implore pardon of God for all the faults which I may have committed during my life. I trust that, in His goodness, He will mercifully accept my last prayers, as well as those which I have for a long time addressed to Him, to receive my soul into His mercy. I beg pardon of all whom I know, and especially of you, my sister, for all the vexations which, without intending it, I may have caused you. I pardon all my enemies the evils that they have done me. I bid farewell to my aunts and to all my brothers and sisters. I had friends. The idea of being forever separated from them and from all their troubles is one of the greatest sorrows that I suffer in dying. Let them at least know that to my latest moment I thought of them.

  Farewell, my good and tender sister. May this letter reach you. Think always of me; I embrace you with all my heart, as I do my poor dear children. My God, how heart-rending it is to leave them forever! Farewell! Farewell! I must now occupy myself with my spiritual duties, as I am not free in my actions. Perhaps they will bring me a priest; but I here protest that I will not say a word to him, but that I will treat him as a total stranger.9 10

  Her letter finished, she lay down on her bed, still fully dressed, weeping, while ignoring the guard who stood in the shadows watching her, as her last morning dawned. When Rosalie entered the Queen’s dungeon, the Queen was still prone on her bed, weeping, with a small yellow glove pressed to her cheek. Antoinette could be seen fequently kissing the glove which belonged to Louis-Charles.

  “Madame, you had no supper last night, and ate so little during the day. What shall I bring you this morning?” asked Rosalie.

  “Nothin
g, my child, I need nothing. Everything is over for me.”

  “But Madame, I have been keeping some soup on the stove for you all night.”

  “Very well,” the Queen said, “bring me some of your soup, Rosalie.” Rosalie ran to fetch the soup. The Queen, with great effort, took a few spoonfuls, but it was obvious she had no appetite.

  “Please, Rosalie, leave me. Return at eight to help me dress.” Rosalie took the soup and left. She ran to a nearby café and bought a cup of chocolate. It was almost eight, and she went straight to the Queen, who was still prostrate, but much calmer. The little glove had disappeared. She sat up and drank the chocolate. “It is time for me to dress,” she said. She went into a corner by the bed and motioned to Rosalie, who came to stand between the Queen and the guard, making as much of a shield with her body as she could. But the man insisted on coming over to the bed, leaning over so he could watch. The Queen was bleeding due either to her period or to a serious health issue.

  “Please, Monsieur,” begged the Queen, “in the name of decency, allow me to change my linen without witnesses!”

  “I am ordered to observe your every movement,” he replied.

  The Queen turned her back to him, and with the greatest delicacy possible changed her soiled linen and undergarments. She put on a clean chemise, and a black petticoat. Then she put on the white piqué gown that she usually used as a wrapper in the mornings. Around her neck and shoulders she wrapped a large, muslin fichu. Rosalie arranged the Queen’s hair in a chignon, over which she placed a simple white cap, without the mourning veil. The authorities had forbidden her to wear black so she was to go to her death all in white. They had forgotten that white was the color of mourning for queens of France. The Queen gave Rosalie a white ribbon she had once used in her hair. “Keep it as a little remembrance of me.”

  The doors opened and a man in black clothes entered. It was a constitutional priest, Abbé Girard, the Curé of the parish of Saint-Landry. He was dressed as a layman. He asked the Queen if she wished for the services of his ministry. The Queen declined.

  “What will people say when they hear that you refused the consolations of religion?”

  Antoinette replied, “You will tell anyone who inquires that God in His Mercy provided for me.”

  “May I accompany you to the scaffold?” asked the clergyman.

  “If you wish,” replied the Queen. “But do you think the people will allow me to go to the scaffold without tearing me to pieces?” The Queen turned away and kneeling by her bed, began to silently pray. Abbé Girard sat in a chair. The doors opened again, and Hermann entered, attired in his black suit and black plumed hat, with two other judges, and a clerk. The Queen was still kneeling by her bed. At the sound of their entrance, she slowly rose to her feet, and faced them.

  “Attention!” announced Hermann. “Widow Capet, your sentence will be read to you!”

  “It is not necessary,” replied the Queen. “I know fully well what my sentence is.”

  “You must hear it again. It is the law.”

  The clerk read off the list of slanders. As he finished, Sanson the executioner strode in.

  “Put out your hands,” he ordered the Queen, who stepped away from him.

  “Are you going to bind me?” she asked. “Louis XVI was not bound!” No one had told her of her husband’s last moments.

  “Do your duty, man,” ordered Hermann.

  Sanson roughly grabbed the Queen’s arms, and lashed her hands and wrists together very tightly with cords, almost up to the elbow. She suppressed a small cry of pain. The executioner snatched off her little cap, and with a pair of huge shears roughly destroyed the neat, braided chignon, so that the Queen’s hair resembled the ragged straw of a scarecrow. He replaced the cap, under which hung the frayed, uneven tendrils. When Abbé Girard offered her words of consolation, “Your death will expiate—”

  She interrupted him, exclaiming, “Ah, faults! but no crime.” 11

  Then the executioner pushed her out of the cell, and she walked ahead of him as if on a leash. They walked to the entrance of the Conciergerie. Out of the arched, gothic portals could be seen the courtyard, and the vehicle in which Antoinette was to ride to her death, a rickety garbage cart. It would have been easy for violent hands to reach up and drag her into the street to be bludgeoned and hacked to death. Antoinette, seeing the cart, begged the executioner to loosen her hands, which he did, and she ran into a dark corner of the prison office where she squatted in order to relieve herself. Then Sanson bound her again. She straightened her back, lifted up her head, and walked towards the cart. Abbé Girard was at her side: “This is the moment, Madame, to arm yourself with courage.”

  “Courage?” she replied. “I have so long served an apprenticeship in it that it is not likely to fail me today.” The priest continued his exhortations but the Queen silenced him by saying with firmness that “she was not of his religion, that she died professing that of her husband, and that she should never forget the principles so oft instilled in her.”12

  Thus the Queen of France rode to her death, sitting in the garbage cart, behind the horses’ tails to show the people that she was nothing but dung, in her white wrapper and cropped hair, hands tightly tied behind her back. Two prostitutes were guillotined, one before and one after Antoinette, for in the eyes of the Revolution the Queen was just one more harlot. At the scaffold, she climbed the steps with her usual dignity and grace.

  “I beg your pardon, Monsieur. I did not do it on purpose,” she said to the executioner when she accidentally stepped on his hand. On the scaffold, Antoinette knelt down quickly and murmured a prayer. Standing, she glanced towards the towers of the Temple, saying, “Adieu, once again, my children. I go to rejoin your father.” Then she was placed beneath the blade of the guillotine and it fell upon her. Sanson held up her head for the people to see. The Marseillaise played and many cheered, but some wept. Three individuals had rushed forward to dip their handkerchiefs in her blood, and were promptly arrested by the authorities. The Queen’s body was tossed into a mass grave with other victims of the Revolution, head between the legs. Indeed, mass graves of multiple victims would become a part of the new world order, and would grow to mass proportions in other parts of the world in the wars and revolutions which would follow.

  “Sketch by J-L. David of Marie-Antoinette on her way to be executed”

  “Madame Royale in the Temple prison”

  24 The Orphans

  “Marie-Thérèse is the most unhappy creature in the world. She can obtain no news of her mother; nor be reunited to her, though she has asked it a thousand times. Live, my good mother! whom I love well, but of whom I can hear no tidings. O my father! watch over me from heaven above. O my God! forgive those who have made my family die.”—Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte of France, 1794 (scratched on the wall of the Temple prison)

  Throughout the family’s ordeals, there had been a steady stream of royalist plots to liberate them, beginning with the Favras plot as early as 1789. The Marquis de Favras raised a large sum of money to spirit the King, Queen and their children out of the country while making the Comte de Provence regent. The plot included starving the Parisans into submission in addition to the assassination of the mayor of Paris, Monsieur Bailly, as well as the assassinations of Necker and Lafayette. The plot was betrayed and Favras was captured and executed. Provence denied knowing anything about it. The plot of Rougeville and Michonis almost succeeded in delivering Antoinette from the Conciergerie. There were other plots as well, and houses prepared in America to receive the Queen and her children, one in Edgecomb, Maine and another in Asilum, Pennsylvania. There was also a plot to spirit her away to Ireland.

  Lady Charlotte Atkyns (1757–1836), a former actress of the London stage who had married an English knight, Sir Edward Atkyns. She was known before her marriage as “Mrs. Walpole” and she specialized in playing the part of boys. She became a spy for the British government, known as “the Little Sailor” because it was disgui
sed as one that she traveled back and forth across the channel. The French police knew her as “Mrs. Williams of Liverpool” but they were never able to capture her. She claimed that she infiltrated both the Temple prison and the Conciergerie, dressed in the uniform of the National Guard, and twice spoke with the Queen, who begged her to rescue her son Louis XVII. After her husband’s death in 1794, Lady Atkyns began to expend a great deal of money in an attempt to deliver the young King from his captors. A journalist in London put her in touch with a circle of French émigrés, who furnished her with contacts in Paris. She became entangled in such a web of espionage and counter-espionage, beyond anything she had ever imagined, all with the little King at the center. In 1794 Lady Atkyns and her agents became deeply involved in trying to rescue Louis-Charles from the Temple tower. Among her agents were many scoundrels, with the exception of the Comte de Frotté, a dedicated royalist. In her capacity as a spy, Lady Atkyns uncovered several royalist plots. Meanwhile, Lady Atkyns’ agent, Monsieur de Frotté, wrote to her that he was convinced that Louis XVII had been replaced by another boy, and that the French government wished to do away with the replacement, who was becoming an embarrassment. Both the Spanish government and Charette, the leader of the Royal and Catholic army of the Vendée, were demanding the release and safe delivery of Madame Royale and Louis XVII, in exchange for peace. The Directoire of Barras badly needed peace from both its external and internal foes, but would not surrender Madame Royale until the child in the room below had died on June 8, 1795. Lady Atkyns did not believe that the boy who died on June 8 was Louis XVII. Her agents believed that Louis XVII was murdered by Robespierre’s henchmen, possibly by Simon, and then replaced by another boy. Lady Atkyns merely says “a higher power than mine took possession of him.” Lady Atkyns exhausted her fortune trying to rescue Louis XVII and later, during the Restoration, applied to Louis XVIII for money. He gave her a little. She spent the remaining years of her life persuing the various claimants to the identity of Louis XVII. She died in poverty in 1836.1