Abundance: A Novel of Marie Antoinette (P.S.) (52 page)

1 September

With a great deal
of irony, I think of us this way:
One afternoon during the Reign of Terror—that is, on 1 September 1792—the King and the Queen of France sat in the Tower, built as part of the palace of the old Knights Templar, in Paris, playing a game of backgammon.

Taking turns, we each scoop up the dice from the playing board, rattle the spotted cubes in their leather-covered cups, and toss the dice out among the triangular shapes painted on the game board, which have something of the appearance, at least to me, of a dragon’s mouth full of opposing, pointed teeth.

According to the numbers we have rolled, we move our pieces, his chocolate brown, mine cream, in opposite directions so that each little group of pieces has to face and pass through the defenses of the other in order to get home. Usually when we play, I try to keep each of my pieces safe from capture, while the King takes more risks to set up blocks in order to impede the movement of the Queen’s creamy troop.

We are playing for the sake of the children, for Marie Thérèse and Louis Charles, the Dauphin, so that they may think the Temple, as this palace and its towers are known, seems homelike and safe instead of like the prison it actually is. Because the Knights of Malta left a collection of some fifteen hundred books in the Tower, the King has a library here. He would rather have retired upstairs to read in the turret-study adjacent to his bedroom than to play backgammon. I muse and wonder for a moment about how the King has always been a man who enjoys the company of books, while I prefer active conversation with real minds. I wonder if my life would have been different had I liked to read, or his, if he had liked to converse.

In his turret, my husband reads twice a day, after breakfast and after dinner, for two or three hours at each sitting. Lately he has been studying an account of the English king Charles I, who left his head on the chopping block in the century before. Really, the King has studied this story since he was fifteen, and even before I came to France. Perhaps it has always been a cautionary tale for him.

The French, or rather Dr. Guillotine, have recently introduced a more humane means of execution than the hand-held, shoulder-swung ax of the seventeenth century. A high sharp blade is hoisted between two grooved struts that make the device resemble the skeleton of a tall door, with a slant of steel, something like a butcher’s meat cleaver, but more triangular and without a handle, positioned at the top. If the execution occurs on a bright day, I am told, the glint of the sun on the polished steel can be seen by even those far back in the crowd. Near the base and at a right angle to the upright business, on something like a wooden sled, the criminal is made to lie facedown with hands tied together behind his or her back. The sled with its human cargo is shoved forward so that the head of the person is positioned just beyond the open door, and the blade rattles down the grooved frame to fall straight down upon the neck, lopping off the criminal’s head, which falls neatly into a waiting basket. I suppose there must be a great deal of blood. Spectators have said, I am told, it all happens very quickly, mechanically, and one can hardly believe how brief that moment is between a living body…and what is left, that is, between life and death.

Because my hand starts to tremble, I quickly take up my dice cup and rattle it furiously, throwing out the “bones” onto the board. I rest my hand, hunched, on the table. The King is not deceived. He places his hand over mine for a moment, making a little shelter for me.

I breathe deeply, a long pull of air into my lungs, and resume my courage. “Your turn,” I say, and smile.

A
S WE PLAY,
both of us recall, though we speak nothing of it, that only a couple of weeks before this game of backgammon there was a great deal of brutal killing by revolutionaries at the Tuileries. They hoped to kill us, I believe, but the Swiss Guard stood between us and the mob, and the loyal guardsmen were massacred.

A
FTER THE CARNAGE,
the Tuileries was uninhabitable, and we were to be moved to the Convent of the Feuillants. The mob left the Tuileries smeared with blood and littered not only with shredded pieces of clothing—velvet and brocade—but also pieces of human flesh. It required only two carriages to carry away those of us of the court of Louis XVI who remained alive, including my most precious friend the Princesse de Lamballe. I have almost forgotten my other friends, such as the Duchesse de Polignac, who have fled, although I hear from Fersen that he had a touching reunion with her, someplace in Europe.

If I could, I would like to have a sensible conversation with the painter Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, but I do not know where she is, and if she is alive or dead. I wonder if the violence of the times we live in has affected her artistic style. I hope that she has lived to paint the royalty of some other more fortunate country.

As the carriage rolled away from the Tuileries, I remember thinking how beautiful and strangely calm was the face of the Princesse de Lamballe. We have never been lovers, not in the sense of the obscene pamphlets, but my love for her knows no bounds. Of all my friends at court who successfully fled the country at the beginning of the revolution, when flight was relatively easy, only the Princesse de Lamballe, upon learning that I was alone, returned to France. In the past her sensitivity was so extreme that she sometimes burst into tears for fear of a mouse or over the touching beauty of a rose, but her love for me has given her the courage to return to a country increasingly dangerous for any aristocrat.

As the carriages transported us across Paris, from the blood-drenched Tuileries to the Convent of the Feuillants, she never flinched. The air in which we moved was filled with the snarl of snare drums and the thud of huge tympani, along with the ominous tolling of bells, not to mention the shouts of the people of “No more King.” She and I ignored those who called out as our carriage rattled over the humped stones shaped like loaves of bread. They shouted that Louis XVI is nothing but a fat porpoise. Through the coach window, I saw the huge heart of an ox, with a cuckold’s horns attached to it, displayed and labeled as that of the monarch. Placards and little models with dolls showed an image of a Queen being hung from a lantern post.

Once at the convent, all of us were happy to inhabit only four rooms, and those rooms had humble brick floors and whitewashed walls for the most part. We had plenty of food.

Despite the stress of the times, the King slept well and ate a dinner of eight appetizers balanced by eight desserts with four roasts in between. I could not eat at all, and my friend the Princesse de Lamballe joined me in my abstinence. Clothing being scarce at the convent, my fastidious friend the Princesse de Lamballe, who had not worn fresh underwear for two days, sent a note to a friend to borrow a chemise.

“W
E STAYED IN
the convent for only a few days,” I suddenly remark to my husband. He is about to win in this Tower game of backgammon, unless the dice go very much against him. Our eyes follow the dice and the movement of the tokens of the game, while our thoughts wander in the past.

E
ACH OF THE CARRIAGES
bound from the convent for the Temple was pulled by only two horses. Though we left the convent at six-thirty in the evening, it was nearly nine o’clock before the horses succeeded in pulling their heavy loads the short distance between these two locations within Paris. On the way, we passed our former abode, the Tuileries palace, where someone had placed a For Rent sign. We also passed through the old Place de Louis XV, where the people had pulled down the statue of the grandfather of Louis XVI. The mob not only had smashed its face and broken off the statue’s arms and legs but also had battered flat the head of the bronze horse he had been riding.

Inside the carriage the procurator-general of the Commune pointed to the mutilated statue and informed us, “That is how the people deal with kings.”

Not lacking in a sense of humor, Louis XVI replied, “How pleasant for us that their rage is focused on inanimate objects.”

I smile now to think of his wit and glance at him, but he is lost in his own thoughts.

As we approached the walls of the Temple, people were chanting, “Madame goes up into her Tower / When will she come down again?”

When we were taken to eat dinner into the portion of the Temple that remains a palace, I allowed myself to hope that perhaps we would remain there. The taller tower was not ready for us—I trembled only when I heard our keepers consider separating the King from the rest of the family—but in the long run, we went together to the small tower attached to the wall surrounding the palace.

T
HOUGH CLOTHING
has remained scarce, and there is a great deal of climbing up and down stairs, food is still plentiful in the Tower, and the King enjoys fare with which he is familiar—savory soups, fowls, and the pastries he loved so well when he was a big boy of fifteen and sixteen. He has Champagne and Bordeaux and sometimes a single sweet and potent after-dinner drink. Despite ugly rumors and many pamphlets blackening my reputation as one who often participated in drunken orgies, I never drink liquors or wine at all, not even now.

I do not know if there is any virtue in my abstinence. I enjoy the clarity of my thought, and I wish to respond to reality unclouded by alcohol. The princess Elisabeth sometimes takes a glass of wine with her brother.

After only a week in the small Tower, we are informed by the Commune that the Princesse de Lamballe is to be taken away to the prison known as La Force. We embrace, we weep, we part. My heart goes numb.

More indirectly, from the town criers outside the walls of the Temple, we hear that Lafayette, who fought for American independence and was considered a hero by the populace of France, has fled France and its mockery of the rule of law in the name of liberty. This revolution in France has not ushered in a better order; it has opened the gates of chaos and anarchy.

By 2 September,
some four hundred throats on the other side of the wall surrounding the Tower are chanting “Strangle the little cubs and the fat pig” and “She shall dance from the lantern.” If my friend the princess were still here, we would pretend together that we do not hear these voices.

A letter blessedly arrives, delivered by one of our keepers, from the King’s aging aunts, who have escaped to Rome and are leading devout lives there as daughters of the Church. Both the King and Queen—my husband and myself—read it over and over, silently and then aloud to each other as reassurance that there are quiet, safe places in the world where people do not behave more cruelly than rabid animals.

T
HE ROYAL FAMILY
—I mean ourselves—are exercising within the garden walls on 3 September when suddenly their guards escort them inside. Drums sound, and they hear shouts and a confusing din in the distance. When a cannon is fired nearby, Marie Antoinette—called Toinette by her friends, but none of them are left and she does not know even what has become of the last of them, the beautiful princess Lamballe—cries out, “Save my husband!” As to what is going on in Paris, no one tells them.

Once inside the Tower again, the royal family dine, and then the King and Queen settle down to their board game upstairs, watched as always by four municipal officers, one of whom pities the royals and treats them with consideration. Madame Elisabeth (who is she, really? the younger sister of the King) reads aloud one of Aesop’s fables—possibly a cautionary tale—to the children. More like a picture than a mirror, the scene is one that the Queen views from a safe distance. There is perhaps some confusion about time in her mind—so great is her anxiety about the future of her children—for it seems that the King and Queen have been playing backgammon forever, and the game does not progress.

Suddenly the gruff and impassive keeper downstairs—Madame Tison—shrieks! A sound like a bright pick into the convolutions of the brain.

I hear savage cries from the streets surrounding the Tower: “Kiss the lips, kiss the lips!” Upstairs, the municipal officers hurry to close our shutters. We hear the sound of footsteps running up the stairs, and four unarmed revolutionaries burst in demanding that the King and Queen stand at the window.

“You must
not
go to the window,” one of their municipal guards, his young face radiant with anxiety, tells me, but the mob spokesman who has burst into our domain insists more vehemently that the King and Queen of the Tower expose themselves to the crowd by standing in a narrow window just yonder. We have done as much in the past—faced them.

“Why should we not address the people?” the King stoutly asks our familiar guard.

“If you must know,” the guard replies, “they only want to show you the head of the Princesse de Lamballe.”

The cry from below rings out, “Kiss the lips you’ve kissed before!”

The cry hits me with concussive force. I wilt into a chair, my mind vague as a cloud.

“The people have attacked the prisons, killing the aristocrats,” another guard explains.

Opening the shutter a crack, the hairdresser Cléry looks out and recoils in horror. He gasps, “The head of the Princesse de Lamballe is on a pike.” He begins to vomit, burying his mouth in the crook of his arm.

Another guard replaces him at the open window. He takes a step backward, while the cry below becomes a chant:
The Queen! The Queen! The Queen—must—see!

“Her Majesty must not see,” the guard insists.

“Tell me what you have seen, monsieur.” There is nothing between our world and theirs, except height. The window is open, and the air moves back and forth between the inside and the outside. I can hear them very clearly. From my seat, I see a narrow blue rectangle of sky. I ask, “What is out there, on the street?”

“On a second pike, is a dripping heart.” He begins to sob, for he has often been in this room with the princess. “On a third, her entrails.”

“Enough!” the King thunders. He goes to another unopened window, stands a step away from it, but peers through the latticework. “The men holding up these trophies are yelling with glee and fury. Not yet having obtained their goal,” the King says grimly, “they are carrying stones and boards to pile against the side of the tower.”

Numbly, I know their thoughts. They want the Queen to kiss the dead lips of her lover. It is to be the culminating act for their pornographic feast. I think of hunting dogs leaping against the side of a tree where their prey has taken refuge.

“They are trying to construct a means of raising the head higher,” I explain. “They wish to make Marie Antoinette kiss the lips of the gory head of her dearest friend.” Yes, I know they carry rubble to place against the wall of the Tower so that they might climb higher and raise the head of the princess up to the next level in the Tower, where they believe the Queen to be. They want to make the eyes of my dead friend appear at my window to look in at me.

“Jackals! Jackals!” the King mutters, his eyes wet with grief. “Is it certainly the princess?” he asks Cléry.

His face streaming with tears, holding his soiled arm out from his body, Cléry says, “Her golden curls float around her face as though she were alive. Someone has dressed her hair.”

With terrifying glee the men who have invaded our rooms recount that, indeed, the head had been taken to a hairdresser and also to an apprentice wax modeler, Marie Grosholz. At her name, I am startled into reality, for in earlier days this girl came to the palace to instruct Madame Elisabeth in art. She would surely have recognized the princess.

One of the rough boys from the mob adds, “She didn’t want to touch it, but we made her hold the head between her knees and cover it with molding wax. For an impression.”

A
S THE FURY
and frustration of the mob mounts, they call not just for the grisly kiss but for the head of the Queen “to parade beside the tribade Lamballe.”

One of our commissioners goes downstairs to confront the rioters. I can hear him shouting at them.

“You shall not have the head of Antoinette,” he yells. “I hold up the tricolor ribbon. See it! I speak with the authority of the revolution. The head of the Antoinette does not belong to you.”

I expect to hear the rush of their feet mounting the steps. I fix my eyes on my son and rise so as to move as far from him as possible.

But the room below falls only into muttering. When we hear movement, it is for them to go outside again, among their own constituents.

The King takes me by the hand to lead me higher in the Tower. Among the books, he puts me on a small sofa in the turret. Here there is a heavy velvet curtain, and he draws it across the only window. As he moves the curtain, its brass rings rattle.

Rigid with sorrow, I lie awake all night, thinking of the soft, kind body of my friend, my first real friend in France, the Princesse de Lamballe. I recall the day when we, with Elisabeth, still a little girl, sat beside the fountain of the dragon and watched the spume from its mouth tower into the sky. My sobs, like a child’s, are automatic convulsions I cannot end.

Sitting beside me, the King says with calm sadness, “The fiends have finished with us, for tonight.” All around the Tower is the silence of ordinary noises.

“Did others die?” I ask. “In the prison.” We would have known many of the people in La Force.

“After they broke into La Force, they stormed the prisons of Salpêtrière and Bicêtre—”

“At the Bastille, at least they liberated the prisoners. There were only seven.”

“These prisons, Salpêtrière and Bicêtre, were full of beggars, pauper children, prostitutes. They all have been raped and murdered, even the young children, though God knows what crimes against the people they were supposed to have committed.”

Despite my sobs, I feel I must speak. “Then they only want”—yes, I will say the simple truth, despite the horror of it—“to drink blood. These revolutionaries.”

“They have no concern about guilt or innocence. They feel only rage and the need to release their rage.”

Far below, the wheels of a cart are turning slowly and carefully over the cobblestones.

For a moment, I lie so still and silent that the King fears I may have died. My sobs have suddenly ceased.

“The princess was not alive,” he murmurs, “when they mutilated her body. The blow of a hammer had already killed her.”

Slowly, with many tears of his own, my husband tells her story: “When the Princesse de Lamballe was brought before the revolutionary court, she was asked to denounce us as conspirators against the happiness of France. ‘I have nothing to say,’ she answered. And to show she would not be intimidated by their threats, she added, ‘Dying a little earlier or a little later makes no difference to me.’”

The King pauses in his narrative. “Locked here in the Tower,” he muses, “just think—we knew nothing of her brave refusal to incriminate us.

“They told her to go through a certain door, one that led to the courtyard where the mob waited. They fell upon anyone who came through the door. One of that number stood beside the door to deliver a blow to the head with his giant hammer as soon as a person emerged. The princess fell dead to the cobblestones.”

I begin to breathe; I jerk the air slowly into my nostrils, and then heart-broken words squeeze out. “All the same—they did those things—
to her.
”

Making no effort to lift my hand to wipe my eyes, the sobs break out of me again, till dawn.

In a quiet moment, the King picks up a pen and tears a blank page from one of his library books upon which to write. “I will fashion a dignified and official statement,” he says.

At dawn, I sit up, my eyes so swollen that I can see only through a narrow slit.

He reads to me, “The loyalty and devotion the Princesse de Lamballe has shown to us during our misfortunes validates many times over the Queen’s initial choice of her as a close friend.”