CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“I have promised the head of Antoinette. I will go and cut it off myself if there is any delay in giving it to me.”
HÉBERT TO THE COMMITTEE OF PUBLIC SAFETY, 2 SEPTEMBER 1793
With touching faith in the family whose interests she had tried for so long to serve, Marie Antoinette herself continued to keep up the hope that her relations would “reclaim” her. She told this to Rosalie Lamorlière, Madame Richard’s maid who had greeted her on arrival at the Conciergerie and who now became the former Queen’s devoted servant. Rosalie’s previous employer, a Madame Beaulieu, had been a royalist and it was her son, an actor at the theatre close by the Conciergerie, who had recommended the maid to the Richards. Rosalie overcame her repugnance at working in a prison when she found that the jailer and his wife did not try to check her compassionate activities. Not only tender-hearted but naturally quick, despite being virtually illiterate, Rosalie would in old age dictate her memoirs of the Queen’s prison-time, showing a retentive memory for touching details. She described the Queen in a reverie passing her two diamond rings endlessly from finger to finger and back again, or looking up at the sound of a harp, so poignantly reminiscent of her past life, and asking whether some woman prisoner was playing (it was the daughter of one of the glaziers currently working on her windows).1
Marie Antoinette’s immediate need on arrival at the Conciergerie in the early hours of the morning was clothing. She had the black dress that she wore on her departure from the Temple and acquired another white dress. Supplies of lingerie were brought, handkerchiefs and black silk stockings. She had fichus of crepe and muslin and a petticoat made of Indian cotton. It was not much but it could be made sufficient with the aid of Rosalie, a laundress and, for a while, old Madame Larivière, mother of the turnkey, who had worked for the Duc de Penthièvre for thirty years and therefore knew how things should be done. It was Madame Larivière who skilfully patched the black dress with muslin beneath the arms and at the hem where it had become worn by the stones of the Temple, so that her subsequent replacement by a Madame Harel was regretted. At the Conciergerie the Queen’s plum-coloured (prunelle) slippers with their little heels à la Saint Huberty would become so coated with rust that at one point a friendly guard scraped them down with his sword.2
Another regret, felt keenly at the time according to Rosalie, was the loss of the gold watch given to Marie Antoinette by her mother, the good luck symbol that she had hung up herself so carefully that first night. It was confiscated five days later. The weather outside was boiling, the atmosphere in the Conciergerie hot, humid and stinking; Marie Antoinette asked Rosalie to burn juniper in her cell to cover up the smell of the primitive sanitation. Yet in general the Queen showed that familiar spirit of resignation towards her altered conditions that had marked each step in the downward spiral of her fortunes. A white ribbon was bought to dress her hair in the morning, an art at which Rosalie became expert. It was Rosalie who brought in a little cheap mirror with a red border and an oriental pattern on its back. These few possessions came to be stored in a cardboard box supplied by the maid, who was thanked by the Queen with as much enthusiasm as if she had imported one of Riesener’s masterpieces.
Marie Antoinette was allowed Ville d’Avray mineral water, from the Temple; the water from the Seine that was drunk by the rest of the prisoners would no doubt have provided that “natural death” that her desperate sister Maria Carolina was beginning to think might be her happiest fate. She was given coffee for breakfast. The food—chicken, which she cut up extremely carefully and made last, and vegetables served on pewter—was the sort she liked; it was supplemented by the nourishing clear soup known as bouillon, on which Rosalie prided herself and which was the contemporary panacea for every ner-vous ill. The concierge and his wife, the Richards, were also well disposed towards their prisoner. Madame Richard had once sold haberdashery; she understood the need for comfort in small things. With her connivance (she was given the code name “Sensible”), Hüe himself got into the Conciergerie and managed to pass on news of the royal children to the Queen. A flush of emotion was produced in Marie Antoinette by the sight of the Richards’ blond, blue-eyed child, Fanfan, introduced when she had been talking at length about her own missing family. She trembled, covered the boy with kisses and began to cry, so that Madame Richard judged it a mistake to introduce Fanfan again.3
It was Madame Richard who confided to Hüe that her daily shopping was made easy by invoking the distinguished prisoner’s name. When a fine melon was said to be destined for “our unhappy Queen,” the shopkeeper waived all charges. “There are those among us who weep for her,” he told the concierge’s wife. Rosalie had a similar experience buying peaches. The maid also put little bouquets on Marie Antoinette’s small table from time to time, which led the Queen to confide in her sadly how she had had a “real passion” for flowers in the past. This practice was later forbidden.
Marie Antoinette found solace from the aching boredom that is every prisoner’s lot by watching the guards at their eternal card games. She had sent for her knitting-box from the Temple to continue making stockings for her son; the royal ladies, left behind, knowing “how fond she was of this occupation,” had hastily packed up all the silk and worsted they could find. But this was not permitted. Nor was she allowed needles for embroidery, so she began to pull out threads from the remains of the toile on the walls, and weave them into garters. And then there was reading. There is something touching about the fact that in confinement her taste turned to foreign adventures; The Travels of Captain Cook, lent to her by a subsequent jailer, became a favourite. Un Voyage à Veniseamused Marie Antoinette because it contained references to people she had known in her youth.4
This form of existence, extremely confined but not completely intolerable, was brought to an end officially by the discovery of the Carnation Plot in early September. The indulgent Richards were taken away to be imprisoned themselves. They were replaced by the Baults, who were far more circumspect in their behaviour, given what had happened to their predecessors. Even if Bault was not a bad man at heart, according to Rosalie, Madame Bault did not have the elegant skills of Madame Richard, the former haberdasher. Marie Antoinette drew back from having her hair done by her when the concierge suggested it, declaring that henceforward she would dress it herself.*1105
On 11 September the Queen was moved to another cell, the former pharmacy.*111 Although it too had a window on to the Women’s Courtyard, this was to be semi-blocked. The inner and outer doors of the cell, which was divided between “the widow Capet” and her gendarmes, were to be made much more secure.
Two long days of interrogation followed the Carnation Plot. The Queen met all the questioning not only with fortitude but also with a new kind of spirit, which one might also term bravado, if she had not been careful to couch her answers in suitably discreet terms.8 There was no one to coach her, no tutor like Vermond, no parental-type ambassador like Mercy, yet Marie Antoinette showed both wit and cunning in her answers. That natural intelligence that the French had always doubted shone through, fortified by the resilience of character that she had had to develop—or go under. At her second interrogation, for example, she was cross-examined for nearly sixteen hours at a stretch—and yet at no point did she incriminate either herself or those who had (or had not) plotted to free her.
Marie Antoinette was particularly adroit at handling the delicate question of Louis Charles. When asked whether she had been interested in the military successes of France’s enemies, she replied that she was interested in the success of the nation to which her son belonged. Which was that nation? “Isn’t he French?” answered Marie Antoinette. The question of Louis Charles’s status came up and the privileges he might once have enjoyed that belonged to “the empty title of king.” Marie Antoinette refused to be drawn on the subject, giving several versions of the same answer; she wanted France to be great and to be happy, nothing else mattered. Did she personally wish that there was still a king on the throne? Marie Antoinette replied that if France was content to have a king, she would like that king to be her son, but she was equally happy if France was content to be without a king. As to supporting the enemies of France: “I regard as my enemies all those who would bring harm to my children.” She would not be more specific beyond repeating, “Any kind of harm . . . whatever might be harmful.”
All unknown to Marie Antoinette, the crucial meeting concerning her fate had taken place about the time of the alleged Carnation Plot and the decision had already taken place before its discovery. The subsequent revelation of the conspiracy was a coincidence—although it was a convenient one. This meeting of the Committee of Public Safety took place in secret and it lasted all night. By dawn the deaths of the Queen and the Girondins arrested at the end of May had been sealed.9
The leader in the call for the execution of “the woman Capet” was Hébert. His reason, quite simply, was the need to bind the sans-culottes to them in an act of communal violence by shedding the blood of the ci-devant Queen. The death of Louis Capet had been specifically the work of the Convention, but that of Antoinette should be the joint enterprise of the city of Paris, the Revolutionary Tribunal and the revolutionary army; the latter was in need of assurance since the French fleet at Toulon had gone over to the allies on 28 August. “I have promised the head of Antoinette,” thundered Hébert. “I will go and cut it off myself if there is any delay in giving it to me. I have promised it on your behalf to the sans-culottes who are asking for it, and without whom,” he emphasized, “you will cease to be.”
In short, the best way to keep the people “at white heat” was to grant them this sacrifice. “This head” was to be for them; those of the Girondins arrested on 31 May were for the Committee. It was decided that both parties should be granted their desire. Suggestions that the former Queen might be kept as a hostage were swept away with the argument that Louis Charles Capet—“Louis XVII” to the royalists—was hostage enough. The way was open for a Law of Suspects to be passed, in which all enemies of the people were to be tried immediately by a Revolutionary Tribunal.
Hébert’s brutal exposition was in direct contrast to the sympathy that the former Queen’s imagined condition in the Conciergerie was beginning to evoke in some generous hearts. In August, Germaine de Staël issued an impassioned plea, Réflexions sur le Procès de la Reine, whose author was simply described as “Une Femme.” Necker’s daughter, ten years younger than Marie Antoinette, was by now at Coppet in Switzerland, her father’s home, having fled France after the September massacres. With two baby sons of her own, born in 1790 and 1792 respectively, Germaine sprang with zeal into a Rousseau-esque defence of Marie Antoinette as a “tender mother.” The writer’s ardour justified the Baronne d’Oberkirch’s description of her: “She is a flame.”10
A passionate introduction conjured “you, women of all countries, all classes of society” to listen to her with the emotion that she herself felt. “The destiny of Marie Antoinette contains everything that might touch your heart: if you are happy, she has had happiness; if you suffer, for one year and longer, all the pains of her life have torn her apart.” The conclusion was, from the point of view of the revolutionaries, even more lethal: a little boy on his knees—Louis Charles—was said to be demanding “mercy for his mother.”11
This was the striking maternal image at one time put forward, with Marie Antoinette’s connivance, by Madame Vigée Le Brun, which had once called for respect and now called for compassion. It was a far cry from that of the Infamous Antoinette, who was now held responsible by the pamphleteers for her “savage spouse’s” crimes as well as her own, thanks to her “execrable counsels.” In contrast to the tender mother, how easy it was to suggest that this debauched creature should “perish ignominiously on the scaffold” so that true revolutionaries could “cement in blood” the liberty they had achieved. It might therefore become necessary to sully the maternal image and substitute for it something so vicious—even by the standards of the pamphlets so far—that there could be no question of letting such a monster live. In this connection a confidential piece of information supplied by the jailer Simon to Hébert at the end of September—that he had surprised young “Charles Capet” masturbating—provided an exciting opportunity.12
The wretched boy was then induced to make a series of highly damaging allegations. Some of these were to do with a conspiracy to escape, supposedly organized by Commissioner Toulan. But it was the charge of sexual abuse on the part of his mother and aunt that was the nub of his story; how the two women together had taught him these “very pernicious practices,” making him lie in bed between them, and how the injury he had in his groin (a swollen testicle actually caused, as has been noted, by playing with a stick) was a result of this abuse. Such charges, apart from anything else involving the pious spinster Madame Elisabeth, would have been, in any other circumstances, ludicrous. But Louis Charles was an eight-year-old boy. He was now intent on pleasing the rough captors who had him helpless, plying him with drink when necessary, where once he had loved to please his mother and father. He therefore refused to retract his accusations even when confronted with his sister. Marie Thérèse was torn between shock and outrage. She did not absolutely understand what was being suggested, but knew enough to deny angrily that her brother had touched her “where she should not be touched” in the course of their play. She signed her statement “Thérèse Capet.”13
Stubbornly, Louis Charles persisted in his story even when his aunt was produced. Madame Elisabeth cried out in indignation that both his mother and herself had constantly tried to stop him in his habit, when the boy interrupted her, protesting that he had told the truth. But he became curiously vague about the details of the abuse beyond the fact that it had been done by “the two of them together.” Had it happened by day or by night? At first he replied that he could not remember, then suggested that it had been in the morning. The consequence for Louis Charles was a breach with his sister, as well as his aunt, that would never be healed. It remained to be seen what the consequence would be for the mother he had been obliged to traduce.
Marie Antoinette underwent a secret preliminary interrogation on 12 October.14 Two hours after she had gone to bed, on a night so cold that she had asked in vain for an extra blanket, she was roused. She was taken before the president of the Revolutionary Tribunal, Armand Martial Herman, a young ally of Robespierre, in the presence of Fouquier-Tinville, the public prosecutor. The idea was obviously to secure valuable material for the actual trial; in fact all the old canards were trotted out. She had given money to her brother the Emperor, taking part in nocturnal meetings with the Duchesse de Polignac in order to organize it. She had participated in that legendary orgy on 1 October 1789 at the royal bodyguards’ dinner. Marie Antoinette denied all these charges, and when she was asked yet again whether she believed that monarchy was necessary to the happiness of France, she replied with circumspection that it was not up to an individual to decide about these things; she regretted nothing for her son so long as France prospered.
The most significant exchange—for the future—occurred when Marie Antoinette was accused of being the chief instigator of the “treason of Louis XVI” in causing him to flee in 1791, as well as teaching him “the arts of dissimulation.” Naturally she rebutted both charges. At the end of her interrogation Marie Antoinette was asked whether she wished to have counsel for the defence appointed. The answer was yes, she would like that. So she was taken back to her cell.*112
Louis XVI had been allowed to work with his lawyers over a considerable period of time “as though I could win.” No such privilege was accorded to Marie Antoinette. In fact the late appearance of her lawyers marked the first of many steps by which the female consort was treated a great deal more severely than the male sovereign. The distaste of the Revolution for the female sex in general—in ungrateful contrast to the role that women, intellectuals as well as market-women, had played in it earlier—did not bode well for the Widow Capet.
Women were at once inferior and dangerous, as witness the death of Marat at the hands of a young woman called Charlotte Corday in July. A supporter of the Girondins, Charlotte Corday had secured admittance to Marat’s presence because her “weaker” sex made it difficult to believe she constituted a threat; she had then proceeded to demonstrate her savagery by stabbing Marat in his bath, as Judith had executed Holofernes. She met the “swift, humane” death of the guillotine four days later. Robespierre for one believed that the safest place for women was in the home, performing their traditional nurturing role. (In this he was in agreement with Rousseau, who thought that woman’s “glory” should reside “in the esteem of her husband.”) Within a few weeks the various women’s clubs that had urged on the Revolution would be officially suppressed. Since pre-revolutionary history was chequered with stories of cruel female rulers—to whom Marie Antoinette was regularly compared—it has been suggested that the misogyny of the Jacobin Revolution was inspired by the idea that powerful women belonged to the era of despotism. The domesticated apolitical Queen Charlotte of England was on a much more satisfactory course (from the male point of view) when she wrote that women could do much more good by staying out of public affairs and leading “retired lives.”16 This developing line of thought made the Widow Capet even more suspect.
The two lawyers permitted to Marie Antoinette were both at the Parisian bar: Chauveau-Lagarde (who had defended Charlotte Corday) and Tronson Doucoudray. Chauveau-Lagarde published an account of his experiences in 1816, describing how he had been in the country when he was summoned—he did not hesitate to accept—and therefore did not reach the Tuileries to inspect the mass of prosecution papers, to say nothing of the eight-page act of accusation itself, until the next day, 13 October. To visit their client, the counsels passed through the various wicket-gates of the Conciergerie to reach the divided cell with its iron-barred windows; on the left were the armed gendarmes, on the right Marie Antoinette in a plain white dress; the furniture consisted of a bed, a table and two chairs. Chauveau-Lagarde’s knees trembled.17
Their first task was to persuade the Queen to write to the Revolutionary Tribunal and seek a delay so that the paperwork could be properly considered. She was extremely reluctant to do so, since it meant acknowledging the authority of the men who had killed Louis XVI, but in the end, with a sigh, the Queen picked up her pen. Addressing Herman as “Citizen President,” she asked for three days’ respite: “I owe it to my children to omit nothing that may be necessary to the justification of their mother.”18
The letter was not answered. The next day, Monday, 14 October, Marie Antoinette was collected shortly before eight o’clock in the morning and taken through the prison to the great chamber where Louis XVI had once held his lits de justice and which was now the seat of the Revolutionary Tribunal.
Marie Antoinette’s appearance caused an immediate sensation in the crowded courtroom, thronged with cheerful spectators such as the inevitable market-women, as well as the necessary concomitants of justice, the president, Herman, the prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville, and the jurors. The latter incidentally were not likely to give trouble to the Tribunal, just as the president would scarcely venture to cross the prosecutor. Some jurors were cronies of Robespierre, others came from humble professions, a cobbler, two carpenters and a hat-maker being among their number.
The ci-devant Queen looked ghastly. Here was a white-haired woman with sunken features whose extreme pallor was due as much to her persistent loss of blood as to her nine weeks’ incarceration in the humid, airless Conciergerie. (Rosalie ascribed Marie Antoinette’s condition to her lack of exercise, and tried to help her by cutting up her own chemises as cloths, but as has been discussed, it probably had a deeper cause.) Her haggard appearance contrasted bizarrely with the mental image that most of the spectators had of the accused. Marie Antoinette had, after all, been immured for over a year, and in the last months of her stay in the Tuileries had ventured out little in public for fear of hostility. If she was not the Austrian she-wolf, the ostrich with the harpy’s face of the caricatures, then she was the glittering Queen with her diamonds and her nodding plumes, last seen properly in the glory days of the court at Versailles over four years before. As Le Moniteur admitted, Antoinette Capet was “prodigiously changed.”19
She was nevertheless entirely composed as she stood in her widow’s weeds, the worn black dress patched by Madame Larivière, and took the oath in the name of Marie Antoinette of Lorraine and Austria, widow of the King of France, born in Vienna. She described her age as being “about thirty-eight” (the Queen was in fact two and a half weeks away from her birthday). She then looked about her at the courtroom, with what a hostile newspaper, L’Anti-Fédéraliste, called “the serenity that habitual crime gives” but which was in fact the natural dignity in public inculcated since childhood. From time to time the Queen moved her fingers over the arm of her chair “as though over the keyboard of her piano”; the diamond rings that she used to play with had been confiscated in the course of the searches following the Carnation Plot.20
The accused was allowed to sit down in an armchair on a little platform that put her on view, although the market-women, behind the balustrades, protested vociferously that the Woman Capet ought to remain standing so that they could see her. The Tribunal’s motive in granting this mercy was more prudent than kind; it would not have done for the prisoner to faint or collapse during the long hours of cross-examination that lay ahead, thus invoking unnecessary sympathy. Marie Antoinette merely murmured: “Surely people will soon tire of hearing about my weaknesses.”
The first witness of the forty who would be called set the tone for much of what was to follow.21 Laurent Lecointre was a former draper who had been second in command of the National Guard at Versailles during the events of October 1789. In his prolonged evidence Lecointre described feasts and orgies that had taken place at Versailles over a period of ten years, culminating in the notorious banquet of 1 October 1789—at none of which, of course, he had been present. Cross-examined by Herman, Marie Antoinette gave a series of short, non-committal replies which equally set the tone for her responses: “I do not believe so,” “I don’t remember,” “I have nothing to say in reply.” With regard to those nocturnal meetings with “the Polignac” at which the passing of money to the Emperor was planned: “I have never been present at such meetings. The wealth amassed by the Polignacs was due to the paid positions they held at court.”
When Herman pressed her on the subject of Louis Capet’s séance of 23 June 1789 and accused her of masterminding his speech, she was more explicit. It had become clear from her preliminary interrogation that the link between her evil counsels and the King’s evil actions was one that the prosecution intended to demonstrate. “My husband had great trust in me,” replied Marie Antoinette, “so that he read me his speech but I did not allow myself to make any comment.” As to the idea of assassinating the majority of the people’s representatives at this period with bayonets—a fantasy of the prosecution: “I never heard talk of anything like that.”
Many of the witnesses who followed failed to rise above the level of scurrilous gossip or hearsay, when they were not purely inconsequential. The alleged discovery of wine bottles under the Queen’s bed after she left the Tuileries on 10 August 1792 was supposed to prove that she had deliberately made the Swiss Guards drunk in order to provoke a massacre of the French people. A maid called Reine Milliot reported a chat with the Comte (actually Duc) de Coigny in 1788 when he bemoaned the amount of gold that the Emperor was receiving because it would ruin France; she also testified that the Queen had planned to kill the Duc d’Orléans and had been reprimanded by the King. One Pierre Joseph Terrasson, employed at the Ministry of Justice, described how the Queen had cast “the most vindictive look” upon the National Guards who escorted her back from Varennes, which proved to him that she was determined on vengeance.
The testimony of Hébert was more serious.22 He, after all, had the evidence taken from “young Capet” at his command. The products of his searches of the Temple were scarcely impressive—a picture of a pierced heart inscribed with the words Jesus miserere nobis or a hat in the room of Madame Elisabeth which had belonged to her dead brother. But the words of Louis Charles about La Fayette’s involvement in Varennes (fabricated) and the gathering of outside intelligence while they were all in the Tower had more potential. Then he moved in for the kill. The physical condition of young Capet had noticeably deteriorated and Hébert was able to supply the reason: his mother and his aunt had taught him pollutions indécentes. Details followed, as a result of which there could be no doubt that there had been an incestuous relationship between mother and son.
After that Hébert stressed the deference with which young Capet had been treated after his father’s death, when he was seated at the head of the table and served first. “Did you witness it?” asked Marie Antoinette, making no comment on the shocking substance of Hébert’s speech. Hébert agreed that he had not, but all the municipal officers certified that it had taken place. An examination concerning the Carnation Plot and Michonis’s role in it all followed. It was in the course of this that one of the jurors intervened. “Citizen President,” he said, “I ask you to point out to the accused that she has not responded to the facts related by Citizen Hébert, regarding what took place between her and her son.” So Herman put the question.
It was a dramatic moment, as all contemporary accounts, however hostile, agreed. Marie Antoinette’s marble composure deserted her. “If I have not replied,” she said in a tone quite changed from the politely indifferent one she had been using, “it is because Nature itself refuses to respond to such a charge laid against a mother.” The court record noted that here the accused appeared to be deeply moved. “I appeal to all mothers who may be present,” she went on. A frisson went through the courtroom—a frisson of sympathy. As for the fickle market-women, some of them cried out in outrage that the proceedings ought to be stopped.
“Did I do well?” Marie Antoinette asked Chauveau-Lagarde in a low voice. He soothed her; she only had to be herself and she would always do well. But why the question? “Because I heard one woman say to her neighbour: ’See how arrogant she is.’” The Queen’s spirit in the face of such an intolerable slur was all too easily mistaken for disdain. And there was one juror, Doctor Souberbielle, who murmured scornfully: “A mother like you . . .”23
The rest of the day and evening—the first two sessions lasted until 11 p.m. with a short break between them—produced less startling revelations. In fact very little in the way of tangible evidence was produced, with the Queen steadfastly refuting anything and everything that was put to her. Over Varennes, for example, she continued to deny the involvement of La Fayette, whose coincidental departure from the Tuileries after the King’s coucher was thought to be highly suspicious. She answered all the other detailed questions laconically. For example, one query concerned the escape: “How were you yourself dressed?” She replied: “In the same dress I wore at my return.”
There was one intriguing moment when the name of the man who had purchased “the famous carriage” was raised.
“It was a foreigner,” said Marie Antoinette.
“Of which nation?”
“Swedish.”
“Wasn’t it Fersen who lived in Paris . . . ?”
“Yes.”
Interestingly, no more was made of Fersen’s involvement in the escape, suggesting that his relationship to the ci-devant Queen had not reached a wide audience.24 The day ended with the examination of the two Richards and the gendarme Gilbert about the Carnation Plot, but once again no actual evidence was produced of Marie Antoinette’s intent to escape and once again she admitted nothing.
The second session began at eight o’clock the following morning before Rosalie could bring the Queen her breakfast. It was 15 October, the Feast of St. Teresa; a day of rejoicing in her childhood, it had been the name-day of her mother and in her adult life, that of her daughter. Now she was to spend her time in the courtroom, fasting until the late-afternoon break when Rosalie Lamorlière, aware that Marie Antoinette had had nothing to eat, brought in some of her special bouillon. Even then the maid’s gesture was only partially successful. On a whim a girlfriend of one of the gendarmes, who wanted to boast of having met the former Queen, decided to serve her herself; in transporting the bouillon, she managed to spill half of it.25
The first witness was Charles Henri d’Estaing, once Governor of Touraine and a distinguished admiral who had spent much of his later life at Versailles.26 He was pressed on the question of another putative royal flight—that of 5 October 1789, which had been stopped by the National Guard. Actually he bore witness that the Queen had refused to go, saying “avec un grand caractère” (determination) that if the Parisians came to assassinate her, she would die at the feet of the King. Marie Antoinette interrupted at this point. It was true. They had wanted the Queen to go, on the grounds that she was the only one in danger, but she had given the response quoted by d’Estaing.
Then Simon was called, to confirm revelations made by Louis Charles: how the Commissioner Dangé had taken him in his arms and in the presence of his mother declared: “I wish you were King in place of your father.” Furthermore the boy had been treated as the King at table.
Finally, and more importantly, because for a moment it seemed that some documentary proof was about to be offered, the Queen was questioned about “the Polignac”: had she corresponded with her since her detention? “No.” Had she signed vouchers to enable her to draw on funds from the Civil List? “No.” It was Fouquier-Tinville’s turn to interrupt. Her denial was useless, for the vouchers signed by her would shortly be produced. Or rather, since they had been temporarily mislaid, evidence would shortly be heard from someone who had seen them.
This witness—François Tisset, who had gone through the Civil List papers after the sack of the Tuileries—deposed that he had seen the Queen’s signature for sums of 80,000 livres, as well as other papers relating to large sums signed by the King, payments for Favras, Bouillé and others. Marie Antoinette pounced. What date was on the documents? One was 10 August 1792 and Tisset could not remember the other one. She could hardly have dated anything 10 August, replied the Queen scornfully, since, following the attack on the palace, she had been at the National Assembly since eight o’clock that morning.
Some of the evidence produced was more pathetic than treacherous. A little packet was shown to Marie Antoinette which she had brought from the Temple to the Conciergerie: “Those are locks of hair of my children, the living and the dead, and of my husband.” A paper with figures written on it was to teach her son maths. Portraits were shown; one was of “Madame de Lamballe,” said Marie Antoinette. No one commented. Others proved to be of the Princesses (of Hesse) “with whom I was brought up in Vienna.” Over the expenses of the Petit Trianon—which, incidentally, she was accused of building as well as decorating although it had been built in the previous reign—the former Queen did at last give a little ground. “Perhaps more was spent than I would have wished.” Payments had mounted, little by little, and no one wished more than her to understand how it came about.
On one subject, however, Marie Antoinette was absolutely resolute. She had never met Jeanne Lamotte.
“You persist in denying that you knew her?”
“My intention is not to make a denial, but to tell the truth; that is what I persist in stating.”
When she sat for Kucharski’s pastel portrait in the Temple, had she used the opportunity to receive news of what was going on in the Convention? “No. He was simply a Polish painter who had lived in Paris for twenty years.” Other replies were equally staunch. As to Louis Capet’s allegations that La Fayette (and Bailly) had been involved in Varennes: “It is extremely easy to make a child of eight say anything you want,” replied Marie Antoinette significantly, no doubt having in mind the incestuous “revelations” of the previous day.
Not all the witnesses exhibited the same spirit. While Doctor Brunier denied that he had exhibited all the “servilities” of the ancien régime in treating the royal children,*113 Commissioner Dangé was more cautious. After he had denied making that fatal royalist whisper into the ear of Louis Charles, he was asked his opinion of the accused. If she was guilty, he replied, she must be judged. Was she a patriot? No. Did she want there to be a Republic? No.
The fortieth witness was followed by a final cross-examination of the prisoner. It was now getting on for midnight. Yet further charges of subverting the royal bodyguards and congratulating the Marquis de Bouillé on the “massacre” at Nancy in 1790 were followed by a strange, almost nostalgic reference to her past. Since her marriage, had not Marie Antoinette conceived the project of reuniting (French) Lorraine and Austria? She had not.
“But you bear the name.”
“Because one has to bear the name of one’s country,” replied Marie Antoinette.
Accused once again of teaching her son royalist precepts and putting him at the head of the table, to be served as King, she answered that he had been at the bottom of the table and she had served him herself.
At the very last, she was asked if she had anything further to say in her defence. “Yesterday I did not know who the witnesses were to be,” answered Marie Antoinette. “I was ignorant of what they would say. Well, no one has articulated anything positive against me. I finish by observing that I was only the wife of Louis XVI and I had to conform to his wishes.” These were her last words to the court. Marie Antoinette, a woman in terrible health, had been in the courtroom something like sixteen hours, with only a few sips of bouillon to sustain her, having spent fifteen hours there the day before. Nevertheless these words focused on the real issue.
During the proceedings, it had been the constant harping on Marie Antoinette’s “evil ascendancy” over the “feeble character” of Louis Capet that more than anything else revealed the insubstantiality of the judicial case against her. The traditional image of female weakness, a queen consort, devoid of responsibility and thus presumably of guilt for state actions, had to be replaced by that of a viciously powerful and dominating Messalina. Naturally the Queen herself denied Louis’ feebleness: “I never knew him to have such a character.” But the prosecution, by insisting to the contrary, could transfer the culpability of the former King entirely to the former Queen, and since the King’s guilt had been proved in court, logically there was no need to prove that of the Queen further. The fact that nothing, as she herself said, had really been proved against her—there were charges of foreign correspondence and intrigues, but no evidence to support them—then became irrelevant.
Fouquier-Tinville now spoke at some length to a silent courtroom, followed by Chauveau-Lagarde. The prisoner was then taken out to an ante-room while the president of the Tribunal summed up for the jurors.27 Marie Antoinette was therefore not in a position to listen to Herman’s summation to the jurors. The key passage occurred halfway through. Her chief crimes were listed as follows: her secret agreements with foreign powers, including her brothers, émigré Princes and treacherous generals; her shipping of money abroad to help them; and lastly her conspiring with these powers against the security of the French state, both at home and abroad. “If verbal proof was required,” declared Herman, “then let the accused be paraded before the people of France; but if it was a question of material proof, that would be found among the papers seized from Louis Capet, listed already to the Convention.” These papers were, however, not produced.
Ignorant of what was being said, ignorant too of Hébert’s secret command to the Convention—“I must have the head of Antoinette”—the former Queen allowed herself to be buoyed up with the adrenalin that a bold performance, given against the odds, bestows. We have Chauveau-Lagarde’s word for it that she was convinced she would be ransomed and sent abroad because nothing had been proved against her. There were others present of the same opinion; Madame Bault heard someone say: “Marie Antoinette will get away with it; she answered like an angel. She will be deported.”28 None of these people had experience of revolutionary justice or what was in effect a show trial, with the verdict predetermined. When she was brought back, she was handed the verdict of the jury, and told to read it. She was found guilty on all counts. Fouquier-Tinville then asked for, and was granted, the death penalty.
Asked if she had anything to say Marie Antoinette simply shook her head. It showed true courage, according to Chauveau-Lagarde, not to admit for a moment the shock she felt. Her head—the forfeit head of Antoinette—was held majestically high in a final display of dignity (or disdain) as she passed the barriers where the people were. To the sympathetic, the former Queen appeared to be in some kind of trance, so that she no longer saw or heard anything to do with her surroundings. She had to be prevented from slipping in the yard on the way back to her cell. It was past four o’clock in the morning and bitterly cold.
Marie Antoinette was now officially allowed writing materials. She used them to address a “last letter” to Madame Elisabeth, heading it “October 16. 4:30 in the morning.”
“I have just been condemned to death, not to a shameful death, that can only be for criminals, but in order to rejoin your brother. Innocent like him, I hope to demonstrate the same firmness as he did at the end. I am calm, as people are whose conscience is clear. My deepest regret is at having to abandon our poor children; you know that I only lived on for them and for you, my good and tender sister.”29
Believing (wrongly) that Marie Thérèse had been separated from her aunt, her mother dared do no more than send her blessing. There were instructions to both children to care for each other, and the elder in particular to look after the younger. As for Louis Charles: “Let my son never forget his father’s last words . . . never try to avenge our deaths.” Marie Antoinette then raised the anguishing matter of the boy’s allegations. “I know how much pain this child must have given you. Forgive him, my dear sister; think of his age and how easy it is to make a child say what one wants, even things he doesn’t understand.” It was the same point about Louis Charles’s impressionable nature that she had made to the incoming Governess, the Marquise de Tourzel, and again at her trial.
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.