Abundance: A Novel of Marie Antoinette (P.S.) (57 page)

I told her also, to kiss me, as a daughter would.

“And again,” I say, “as a son would do. You are their proxy, but I love you, too, for your own dear self.”

Between us, we contrive to stuff my bloody cloths into a crevice in the stone wall beside my bed.

I hear bells toll perhaps ten times. It is morning, and they crowd in, to read to me again the indictment, and that occupies its time and is over.

Here is the executioner, saying, “Hold out your hands.”

“Must my hands be bound?” Hopefully, I remind them, “The hands of Louis XVI were not bound.”

Executioner Sanson hesitates.

“Do your duty,” the judges say, and with ostentatious roughness, he obeys.

He removes my little bonnet to shear my hair. The blade passes against the nape of my neck, and in a single grainy slice, my hair is gone. I raise my head and have an odd urge to smile. There is that strange lightness one always feels after her hair is cut.

In the courtyard waits the small cart with two large wooden wheels. It is an open cart, and no one who loves me is to ride with me. They order me to sit with my back to the horses, but before I turn around, I notice their powerful tan haunches. They are draft horses, very heavily muscled. I have always admired the huge haunches of such horses. I will be a light burden for them.

When they start to move forward over the courtyard, I am jolted off balance and almost fall from my bench. Because my hands are bound behind me, I must sit on the edge of the plank, and I cannot steady myself with my hands, but I quickly extend a foot and regain my balance and my upright posture. I glance down at my plum shoes. They have lasted well, and I have always liked their shape and color, battered now though they are.

For a moment, I wonder what cobbler’s hand fashioned my shoes, little suspecting that I would wear them now. I smile a little at the whimsy of my thought.

I know that we move very slowly through a great throng of people, through the streets of Paris. What a crowd that day at Versailles when Montgolfier’s balloon ascended! That day, a sheep was made to fly. Montauciel did rise to the heavens. I hear the jeers and cries of derision, but my eyes and my ears are turned inward. Let them see a sacrificial lamb on its way to slaughter. Now is the time to think of those I have loved. Now is the time to meditate on God’s love for me and my faith in his mercy.

There it stands, in the center of the vast circle now known as the Place de la Révolution…crowded with soldiers and spectators: their guillotine is a framework like an open door, with the shiny blade overhead. Is light more silvery or gold? It is misty today, and no sunshine gleams off the blade.

All my body feels full of air. I seem to weigh nothing, and I move with great ease, almost as though I were dancing. I step down the little stair placed at the end of the cart. My balance is sure, and I forget that my hands are bound. I do not need them. Weightless, I mount the scaffold stairs. But on the platform, I tread upon a fleshy lump. I have stepped on the toe of Sanson, the executioner. Quickly, I beg pardon.

“I did not do it on purpose,” I say with simple sincerity.

One of their priests sanctioned by the revolution speaks to me, but I have not and will not turn to him for consolation. “This is the moment, Madame, to arm yourself with courage.”

Ah, he does not know my mother armed me with courage when I was a child at her knee. Thousands of eyes regard me.

“Courage!” I exclaim. “The moment when my ills are going to end is not the moment when courage is going to fail me.”

I kneel in order to lie upon their board, and they help my body to lie straight. So lay my noble husband nine months ago; I but follow. Through a crack between the planks—a man squats beneath on the balls of his feet. He has the dirty, upturned face of madness. Ah, he is waiting to bathe in my blood. I meet his wild eye. The sled slides forward—the basket—no need to hold on—I open my hands resting on the small of my back—the basket—I had friends, loving friends (I am not afraid)

For readers interested in the historical fates of those dear to the heart of Marie Antoinette, perhaps a few facts will suffice. Her young son Louis Charles (Louis XVII) died in prison on 8 June 1795, probably of tuberculosis, as had his older brother Louis Joseph. Her daughter Marie Thérèse was released from prison in an exchange of prisoners with Austria in 1795, when she was seventeen. She eventually married her cousin, the Duc d’Angoulême, the son of Artois. The unhappy marriage was not consummated, and she died in 1851, at the age of seventy-three.

Both of the ambitious brothers of Louis XVI became kings of France. The Comte de Provence became Louis XVIII in 1814 and died in 1824. The Comte d’Artois became Charles X and abdicated in 1830.

Tried on trumped-up charges as a British spy, the Comtesse du Barry was executed during the Terror, December 1793. Like Marie Antoinette, she was conveyed in a cart to the Place de la Révolution. In spite of her sobs, pleas, and resistance, she was carried up the steps to the guillotine.

Count Axel von Fersen died 20 June 1810, torn apart by an angry Swedish mob who believed he had poisoned the heir to the Swedish throne, Christian.

By abandoning her belongings and disguising herself and her young daughter, Julie, as commoners, Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, Marie Antoinette’s friend and portrait painter, escaped the French Revolution. Resuming her work as an artist, Vigée-Lebrun traveled throughout Europe and reestablished herself as a painter in Turin, Florence, Rome, Vienna, St. Petersburg (where she painted Catherine II), Berlin, and London, eventually returning to Paris and settling in a pleasant home in Louveciennes, where she lived until she was almost eighty-seven.

The friendship, encouragement, and guiding wisdom of both Joy Harris, my literary agent, and Marjorie Braman, my editor, make possible my work as a writer.

Abundance, A Novel of Marie Antoinette
is dedicated to my daughter Flora, who has given me much joy and inspiration. John C. Morrison, my husband, translated material concerning Axel von Fersen from the Swedish; both John and Flora continually supported me with their loving encouragement throughout the writing of this novel. To my family and friends who traveled with me on research trips to France, Austria, and Sweden, I owe a happy debt of gratitude: John Morrison, Flora Naslund, Amanda Jeter, John Sims Jeter, Derelene Jeter, Lynn Greenberg, Nancy Brooks Moore, and Marcia Woodruff Dalton. I offer profound thanks to those writer-friends/ family who read the typescript of this novel and generously gave me their professional advice: Nancy Bowden, Julie Brickman, Lucinda Dixon Sullivan, John Morrison, John Sims Jeter, Marcia Woodruff Dalton, Katy Yocom, and Karen Mann. I thank Kelly Creagh, graduate assistant in the Spalding University MFA in Writing, for help with typescript preparation.

To other friends and family who gave me their invaluable heartfelt support—Ralph d’Neville-Raby, Frank Richmond, Nana Lampton, Kay Callaghan, Mary Welp, Alan Naslund, Robin Lippincott, Neela Vaswani, Thelma Wyland, Pam Cox, Debbie Grubbs, Pam and Bob Sexton, Deborah and David Stewart, Suzette Henke and Jim Rooney, Annette Allen and Osgood Wiggins, Patricia and Charles Gaines, Elaine and Bobby Hughes, Loretta and Bill Cobb, Norman and Joan MacMillan, Sandra and John Lott; David Morrison, Marvin “Bubba” Jeter and Charlotte Copeland, Sara, Michael, and Ashley MacQuilling—a very special thank-you. I thank Leslie Townsend for an illuminating conversation on the concept of
abundance.

F
OR A NOVEL
based on the published research of others, I need to acknowledge, with admiration and gratitude, particular nonfiction authors and their works that provided the foundation for my imaginative recreation of Marie Antoinette and her times: Antonia Fraser,
Marie Antoinette: The Journey
(2001); Evelyne Lever, translated from the French by Catherine Temerson,
Marie Antoinette, The Last Queen of France
(2000); Ian Dunlop,
Marie-Antoinette, A Portrait
(1993); Stefan Zweig, translated from the German by Eden and Cedar Paul,
Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman
(1933); Olivier Bernier,
The Secrets of Marie Antoinette
(1985); Olivier Bernier,
The Eighteenth-Century Woman
(1982); Chantal Thomas, translated from the French by Julie Rose,
The Wicked Queen: The Origins of the Myth of Marie-Antoinette
(2001); Madame Campan,
Memoirs of the Court of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France;
Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, translated from the French by Lionel Strachey,
Memoirs of Madame Vigée Lebrun
(1903); Mary D. Sheriff,
The Exceptional Woman: Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and the Cultural Politics of Art
(1996); Gita May,
Elisabeth Vigée LeBrun: The Odyssey of an Artist in an Age of Revolution
(2005); Amanda Foreman,
Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire
(1998); Simon Schama,
Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution
(1989).

For their administrative support of me as Writer in Residence at the University of Louisville, I express my profound gratitude to James Ramsey, president, and to Blaine Hudson, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and to my colleagues of the Departments of English, Humanities, and Modern Languages; I thank as well President Jo Ann Rooney and Vice Presidents L. Randy Strickland and Tori Murden McClure of Spalding University, and the staff, faculty, and students of the brief-residency Master of Fine Arts in Writing Program, which I serve as program director.

A special note of gratitude is due the J. B. Speed Art Museum, Louisville, for sponsoring an enlightening lecture tour to Paris and Versailles, “The Art and Architecture of the Age of Marie Antoinette,” and to the tour leaders, Barbara Castleman and John Martin, and to my fellow travelers.

—
SJN,
Louisville, 2006

Jacket design by Richard L. Aquan

Jacket collage: painting of woman courtesy of Château de Versailles, France, Giraudon/Bridgeman Art Library; brisé lacquered fan from the Royal Collection © 2006 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II