Abundance: A Novel of Marie Antoinette (P.S.) (45 page)

The King rises and comes to stand beside me. He holds up both his hands so that the thumbs form a square angle from the fingers. He is improvising a frame for the scene, and we both look through it at our friends.

For a moment, no one stirs.

I cannot resist seeking out the eyes of Fersen, and for one quick moment he gives back the gaze to me, his soul flickers like an ember through his eyes.

Ours is a cozy sadness. We are living through the end of an era, but we are together.

1 July

The so-called National Assembly has voted itself a new name: Constituent National Assembly with a license to create new laws.

Saint-Priest, our minister of the household, reports that the people are made nervous by the amassing of soldiers near the edges of the city, and he warns that if the military resorts to violence, such violence might be the spark to ignite a conflagration.

9 July

To appease the nobles (whose support we must win to survive), the King has made a firm decision, backed by myself and by his brothers, to dismiss Necker as minister of finance. The nobles reject Necker’s efforts to abridge their privileges in any way. Necker is to leave France as quietly as possible. Artois has been particularly firm about refusing compromise in his effort to conserve what people have begun calling the
Ancien Régime.

The King’s decisiveness about the minister makes me glow with happiness, and my soul sings as I walk through the Hall of Mirrors. I feel as immaterial and powerful as sunlight streaming through the windows and bouncing off the mirrors, filling the corridor with itself.

I do not know if this state of being is power or the illusion of power, but it has a wonderful and frightening ability to satisfy the soul.

12 July

The rioting in Paris, at the news of Necker’s dismissal, has caused the closing of the theaters and the opera. Seeking arms, the rioters were furious when they discovered that the swords and axes used dramatically onstage are nothing but cardboard. Yelling “These are real,” they picked up stones from the street and flung them at the Royal German Regiment. The Prince de Lambesc’s troops drew their real swords and retaliated.

When the prince was accused of excessive brutality, I privately took his side with both the King and Count Mercy: “How wrong that anyone should be punished for being loyal to the King and obeying orders!” The prince was acquitted.

14 July

When I see that new troops have arrived here at Versailles, I decide that we should make them welcome with wine and song, and I enlist my friends to help me. What fresh-faced young men they are. Soon they begin to toast us for our hospitality:
“Vive la Reine! Vive la Duchesse de Polignac! Vive le Comte d’Artois!”
Blessed words! My appreciation and gratitude are very easy to express.

When I go to sleep, they are singing under my windows. With such loyal good fellows, surely we shall prevail. I drift to sleep on a cloud of hope. An afternoon well spent!

B
EFORE DAWN HAS COME,
the King is speaking softly to me, but I am loath to give up my dreams.

After some moments, I hear what he is saying:

I am hearing that there has been an attack on the Bastille. How strange to hear the disembodied voice of my husband speaking new realities in the darkness.

“I was awakened at two in the morning by the Duc de Liancourt who gave me the news. When I said, ‘But this is revolt,’ he answered, ‘No, it is a revolution.’ I think I must prepare to go to Paris.”

I dress as quickly as I can and then see the King off to speak to the National Assembly. When he walks across the Marble Courtyard, he is accompanied only by his two brothers, and I experience the greatest anxiety for his safety. Quickly as the three pass below me, I memorize their dear and familiar faces, for I may never see them again: corpulent Provence of the square, well-cornered jaw; slender Artois, who wanted to race me when I first came here, with his narrow, sensitive face and luminous eyes like his grandfather’s; Louis Auguste, my husband, with a body and head like two boulders—solid in his affection, his eyelids always half lowered. He turns back and glances up over his shoulder, as though he too would memorize me.

I hurry to the chapel, which is empty, and hasten down the aisle, where I walked as a bride. I kneel at the golden altar and look at the long recumbent form of Christ crucified, how he died for us. With bowed head and closed eyes, I spend the hour on my knees, praying for my husband’s safety and that of my children. Long ago, my mother told me that I would find comfort in Jesus, when I turned to Him.

The King has said that the Bastille is destroyed, but it is an enormous fortress, and I do not see how that really could be possible.

F
INALLY
, I
HEAR
his footsteps on the marble floor. He has come to find me. I rise from the altar and fly to him, his arms open for me.

He tells me that he appealed to the group for their support. “For the first time,” he says sadly, “I addressed them as the National Assembly. I said, ‘Help me to ensure the salvation of the state. I expect as much from the National Assembly.’”

“But what has happened in Paris?”

We begin our walk to his apartments.

I ring for the King’s breakfast to be brought to him, and as he eats, he tells me what he has heard, that the populace went to the Invalides looking for arms. “The people of Paris are filled with inflammable gas, like a balloon lighter than air.” They were met, of course, by troops under Besenval. Besenval, my old friend, who entertained me at Trianon when I had the measles and my breasts were painful with unsucked milk, dared not order the charge because many of the troops were joining the populace, who helped themselves to forty thousand guns and cannons. Then they lacked only gunpowder, which they believed to be stored in the ancient fortress and prison, the Bastille.

The Bastille was attacked at the expense of one hundred lives. While the liberators found only seven prisoners incarcerated in the whole of the vast structure, the mob went wild with glee.

They took the gunpowder they found. They cut off the head of the governor of the Bastille, the Marquis de Launay, with a knife, as they did to the heads of several others who tried to stand against the mob. Their heads were mounted on pikes and paraded through the streets amid a terrible celebration in the name of liberty.

The Bastille was dismantled till not one stone lay atop another.

As the King tells me the horrifying story, I feel all the light in the room grow dim. In a terrifying grip, ice encases my heart. What can I do to save us? I remember the pleasant afternoon—only yesterday, July 14—with the young troops. Finally, the King says, “Perhaps you should gather your jewels and pack your trunks.”

“Where shall we go?”

“We will convene our advisors and generals and discuss the decision.”

A
S THE DAY PASSES,
I sometimes listen to the debate, but again and again I envision the head of the Marquis de Launay being pulled backward and his throat exposed to the edge of a knife. Perhaps they will kill us if we stay—our own heads brutally taken from our bodies. Would our absence from Versailles not signal our defeat? While I supervise the packing, I wonder if it is wise to leave. Surely at least the King and Queen should remain. And I could not bear to be parted from my children.

But I do not want my friends to endanger themselves. Yolande is almost as hated as I am, because of her love for me. I consult with the King about our friends, and we decide they should be asked to leave. None of them wish to desert us. Finally the King makes it his command to Artois to leave.

I ask if we might flee to Metz, still in France but comfortingly close to the Netherlands controlled by Austria, the territory governed by my sister Marie Christine and her husband. The faithful Maréchal de Broglie hesitates; it has cost him much of his pride to have to admit that his troops could not be trusted to try to recapture Paris. Finally, he looks up; his eyes are red, and he seems to have aged another ten years, his face is so wrinkled. “Yes,” he replies, “we could get to Metz. But what will we do once we have arrived?”

I take Yolande aside and regard her with all the force of my affection. “I am terrified of what may come.” While her gaze mirrors my own, she reaches out to touch my shoulder, but I continue: “Now is the time for you to escape the wrath of those who hate me.”

The King, who is almost as fond of Yolande as I am, tells her that if she does not agree to leave, he will order her to do so, as he has with his younger brother.

Finally the King calls for a vote of the ministers present as to what we should do. The vote goes for the royal family to remain at Versailles.

By midnight, I am too exhausted to remain upright. I sit at my
secrétaire
, close to my bed, and write a few lines of farewell to my dearest friend. The word
Adieu
is a terrible word to write, and almost, the point of my pen trips over itself. But finally, fearing that I may never see her again, I pen the word and thus commit her to the care of God:
Adieu
. And I make her a gift of five hundred louis.

I shall not be able to help her anymore, my Yolande, fresh and sweet as a berry.

Then I stand up and straighten my back. I will face my fate here in France, though I will not consign my friends to the unspeakable possibilities. I envision the head of Launay upon a pike.

They say a bounty has been set on my head, and on that of Artois and the Polignacs. At least they will be safe in Switzerland. I will keep my place beside the King.

When the coaches roll away in the morning, toward Belgium, I note that all my friends wear disguises so that they will not be recognized by the grandeur of their clothes. Yolande is dressed to resemble a serving girl. It seems a strange thing to do. How can I play my role—that is to say—how can one maintain her identity, without the proper costume?

17 July

I beg the King not to go into Paris.

He merely says that it is required: he himself must tell the people of Paris that Necker will be restored to his position as minister of finance. He must display his loyalty to their cause, that of the Third Estate.

“If you are to die in Paris,” I say, “let me accompany you.”

He gently denies my request and reminds me that I must guard the children.

Again, I go to the chapel; I pray all morning, and then I request a chair so that I may sit comfortably with my head tilted back and contemplate the image of God the Father who flies across the ceiling with his white beard, his bare foot penetrating a cloud.

Sometimes I think of my friends on the road and wonder how they are, in their disguises, traveling and traveling inside their coaches. And what of my husband this day, in Paris?

In the middle of the afternoon, I return to kneel before the altar. I know that the King has his own courage; he has never been a coward. Still, I pray that his heart will be strengthened.

At one point, I hear the voice of my son. He is running, and his dear valet Hüe is chasing him. Both of them are completely merry, and the cheeks of Louis Charles are pink from the summer heat. I think of the golden frieze of playing children that encircles the King’s anteroom, the Oeil-de-Boeuf. Some of the games of the gilded cherubs are peaceful; but some of the boys are playing at war. Suddenly I desire to see the room again and that largely peaceable kingdom of childhood that it depicts. I want to see the seesaw. The children are displayed against a garden lattice of gold, and it reminds me of the playrooms at Schönbrunn, with their tropical and colorful pictures of vegetation and birds. To my surprise, I find that I am thinking in the German language.

It is in his antechamber, where we waited together those long hours when Louis XV was dying, that the King finds me. I have not heard his horses arrive. Since my friends left the court, there is a stillness at Versailles. I do not run to him but glide as silently to him as a ghost.

“So you have returned. It is you.”

The King gives a startled laugh. “Ah, that will be for you to judge—whether it is yet I.”

“You have something colorful in your hand.” I can see the colors blue and white, and then red.

“It is the tricolor cockade. Mayor Bailly, whom I installed, says it is the emblem of the French nation. I think that we would consider it the emblem of the revolution that has now taken place.”

I
CANNOT BELIEVE
that the King is correct in thinking that a revolution has occurred. I had not thought it possible that the people would want to revolt against a good king—kind, moral, rational—such as my husband. The insane George III of England and the American colonies were quite another matter. The physical barrier of the ocean between the two countries made it much more logical that they should exist as separate states.

Yet in the last century, even within the boundaries of England, the church was challenged and the countryside erupted in bloody revolution. We had thought ourselves much more civilized, in this more advanced century, than the seventeenth-century English.

When I write to inquire of Count Mercy, fled now to the country and protected by guards, he confirms my husband’s words. Written in his own elegant handwriting, Count Mercy’s reply to me reads, “Most certainly there has been such a diminution of the power of the crown that one must acknowledge a revolution has occurred, however unbelievable that may appear.”

W
HEN THE
R
USSIAN MINISTER
in Paris comes out to visit us, I hear him remark in a very respectful fashion that “the Revolution in France has been carried out, and the royal authority annihilated. I mean of course in the form to which we are accustomed.”