Confessions of Marie Antoinette (10 page)

“I die innocent. I pray God for me,” he cries, just as the trap drops open beneath his feet. The last two words die on his lips as his neck snaps. The rabble roars their approval. And as the fresh corpse does indeed skip, Mademoiselle Chabry is shocked to discover that the mob’s thirst for vengeance is not slaked. “Encore!” they cry, as if to demand another execution. Illuminated by their lanterns, their faces, contorted by a sick mixture of anger and glee, resemble the gargoyles of Notre-Dame. Louison shivers. If justice has been served this night and a guilty counterrevolutionary punished, that was one thing. But to bay for more blood as if the nobleman’s
execution had been a sporting event, no different from a stag hunt or a boxing match—this was a fever the sculptress feared.

She forces herself to look upon the hanging man. Her eyes travel the length of his trim and elegant form as it twists in the dark and frosty night, noting the pallor of his skin, the blood already draining from his body, down to his—the sculptress claps an icy hand to her mouth. It has never occurred to her what happens to a man’s nether anatomy after he is hanged. But there it is, bulging against his satin breeches. Louison blushes, embarrassed for the corpse. If the marquis de Favras had not secured her sympathy in life, this ignominious and unfortunate occurrence of nature has made her a momentary royalist.

It has been a devastating month, for the monarchy and for our family. On February 20, 1790, the day after the marquis de Favras—a man I had never met, nor did I know of his plot to spirit the royal family out of Paris—is hanged in the Place de Grève, my eldest brother, Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor and Emperor of Austria, takes
his
final breath. No well is deep enough to contain my sorrow.

SIX

And So We Must Dissemble

My brother and I often had a contentious relationship after I became queen, but I knew that I was his favorite sister and as a sibling, though he enjoyed the elder brother’s prerogative to scold, being fifteen years my senior, he had also been very indulgent and fond of me, even across the great distance between Vienna and Versailles. I go into mourning, ordering a wardrobe of black garments, and grieve deeply for Joseph but life at the Tuileries goes on. A few days later an agitated Madame Campan finds me in my sitting room with Madame Élisabeth; I am writing a letter to my brother Leopold, the new Emperor of Austria. When I was nine, he became Grand Duke of Tuscany upon our father’s death. I did not know Leopold the way I had known Joseph, who had been Maman’s co-ruler since Papa’s demise. Leopold no longer resided in Vienna during the remainder of my childhood, before I left Austria for France. “He only remembers a little girl,” I fret, “holding a wooden doll, immortalized in a painting made by our sister Marianne. I fear that he will not help us purely on the basis of ties
of blood.” And yet I would willingly and immediately aid any of my siblings in a time of crisis, especially if their thrones were in danger.

Should we wait for Leopold to ask me if there is anything he can do? Or do I throw myself like a beggar at his feet?

Madame Campan offers no solution. Instead, she looks to me to resolve a difficult issue of etiquette. “Monsieur le marquis de la Villeurnoy wishes to invite the widow and son of the marquis de Favras to the
grand couvert
on Thursday.”

“You must permit it, sister,” Élisabeth pleads, her eyes suddenly brimming with tears. I have never seen her more incensed about something than the execution of the marquis, killed, she believes, solely because he was a monarchist, dying, Christlike, for our perceived sins.

I agree to host the family but the dinner is a frightening test. Behind my chair for the entire duration of the meal stands Antoine Joseph Santerre, the commander of a battalion of the Garde Nationale and a demagogue of the worst order. I hear him wheezing through his broken nose, making his presence felt so strongly that although I wish to express my heartfelt condolences, I dare not utter a single word to the widowed marquise and her little boy, who arrive halfway through the meal. I am afraid even to meet her gaze and I am certain she expects some show of sympathy from me. Instead, I fiddle with my fork, too troubled to eat a morsel. At the end of the meal, the grieving Madame de Favras and her son, garbed from head to toe in black mourning, are escorted from the royal antechamber with an utter absence of fanfare. I cannot wait to leave the table and find myself gazing at the clock on the mantel at the far end of the salon, desperate to be liberated from Santerre’s hawkeyed surveillance.

After the
grand couvert
is over, I retreat to the solace of Madame Campan’s room. I fling myself, sobbing, into an armchair. “We
have come to weep with you,” I say. “If I had been free to do as I truly wished, I would have accorded the son of this martyred marquis a place of honor at the right hand of the king. The son of a man who had sacrificed his life for us would have dined beside his sovereigns. And yet—surrounded by the executioners who condemned and murdered his papa, I could not even bring myself to look him in the eye!”

I fumble for my handkerchief. Madame Élisabeth gives me hers, embroidered with her cipher. “No matter what I do, I will be censured for it,” I say, unable to control my tears. “The royalists will blame me for not recognizing the presence of the marquise and her little son. And the revolutionaries will vilify me for entertaining them in the first place.”

My
belle-soeur
sits slumped over Madame Campan’s worktable, her head in her hands. “Is this what will happen to anyone who tries to aid my brother?” Élisabeth murmurs.

At least I can help the
veuve
de Favras and her son. They will need money. “I am too carefully watched,” I say to Campan, “but tomorrow you will see that the marquise receives this.” I write a number on a slip of paper that corresponds to a certain amount of money—several rolls of fifty-louis coins that I keep locked in a chest beneath my bed. I desire the marquise to know that her sovereigns are sorry, that we are grateful, that I wish to have been able to give her a kind word, to hug her fatherless boy. But she may now be as closely observed as we. And so my gift must be given anonymously.

It pains me to be false, to sham my own moods and feelings. Confiding about this
grand couvert
, I write with a heavy heart to Mercy that as a rule I consider myself too wellborn to stoop to deception, yet “my current position is so delicate and so unique that for everyone’s sake, especially that of my children, I have to change my frank and independent nature—the very character that was
once so harshly criticized for being too ‘Austrian’—and learn how to dissimulate.”

It pains me to live a lie, but I also tell myself every day at Mass when I seek forgiveness for my transgressions that at least we live. We play our enemies’ game, but do so in our own way, so that we don’t seem transparently false by appearing overzealous to adopt an ideology we cannot possibly accept or believe in. Instead, measure by small measure, we do what we can to show that we are listening. My tricolored wardrobe, constructed from the same fabrics in the same hues as the garments worn by the highborn women who espouse the tenets of the Revolution, displays the patriotism of the Queen of France. Young as he is, the dauphin has learned to drill like a soldier. It gives me chills every time I watch my child crisscross the Tuileries gardens imitating the guardsmen’s march, but whenever the people see my son, whether he is in my arms, or taking a stroll in the gardens with his
gouvernante
or hand in hand with his papa, a smile broadens their mouths. The people detest me. They are still willing to believe the king is a good man who has been misled. But the next king of France is an innocent little boy, so guileless that the heart of even the most hardened revolutionary is thawed by the mere sight of him.

Louis Charles cannot wait for the spring because I have promised him his own little plot in the corner of the gardens where he can plant and cultivate whatever he wishes. It has become the popular thing, to return to tilling the soil, especially for the intelligentsia, the citizens of the cities who are more accustomed to soiling their hands exchanging money at the
bourse
or turning the cheaply inked pages of the latest broadsheet at a nearby coffeehouse.

The dauphin will now be raised with a greater awareness of the needs of his people. His father has promised the Assembly to work more closely and directly with them. With Louis’s characteristic dread of conflict and bloodshed, he has pledged to work for the
good of all of his people. He speaks of the common need to establish the new social and governmental order calmly and with cool heads. And he has pledged, too, to defend his subjects’ freedom, announcing, “I will do more than that, messieurs: in agreement with Her Majesty the Queen, who shares my sentiments, I will educate my son in the new principles of constitutional monarchy and freedom with justice.”

His speech was met with cheers on one side and skepticism on the other. No matter what my husband says, he cannot please everyone. I am convinced that if the Assembly were to demand that the king concede the sky is green instead of blue, a cadre of hotheads would spring to their feet and throw their tricorns in the air denouncing him for a liar, insisting instead that the firmament is fiery orange—or red—or violet—any color other than what the king declares it to be.

What, I muse, does the notion of
Liberté
mean? Who will be free? The royal family is certainly not free to be as we were. The revolutionaries have three broad concepts they wish to foist upon their new vision of France. And
Égalité
? I do not believe that even a man such as the duc d’Orléans believes that he, with his breeding, wealth, and education, is equal to the laborer who digs ditches or the man who shovels away the manure after the carriages have passed in front of the Palais Royal. The same argument can be made for
Fraternité
. To hear Lafayette speak of the daily squabbles among the representatives in the National Assembly, they are not even willing to call
one another
“brother,” let alone demonstrate that fellow feeling for every man within the new nation they envision. They are however, one step closer. On the thirteenth of February, the Assembly suppresses all religious orders. Monastic vows now carry the same credibility as fairy tales. Church properties are to be confiscated and appropriated by the nation as
biens nationaux,
national goods. The bankrupt government is printing paper money called
assignats
that are intended to represent the value of these confiscated church properties and is using them as currency, to finance the overwhelming national debt. How could a responsible man like Necker, who made his fortune and his reputation as a banker, see this as anything but fiscal and moral chaos? My husband has lost the courage and the will to stand up to the Assembly. Every day seems to bring a new capitulation. I am sick over it. I have never seen Louis more despondent.

And yet whatever he concedes is still not enough. Twenty-four hours in a day, sixty minutes in an hour, is insufficient for the new breed of revolutionaries. They have already ousted their predecessors for moving too slowly toward a constitutional monarchy, or perhaps no monarchy at all. In my view, what they desire will only lead to utter anarchy. Men whom my husband had finally convinced himself he might have been able to work with toward an acceptable compromise are gone, replaced with hardheaded ideologues, unwilling to budge from their own vision of France’s future. The Assembly is literally divided, according to where the delegates sit inside the Salle du Manège, on the left or the right sides of the Great Hall.

The men of moderate revolutionary ideals who just a few months ago were planting trees of liberty in the public
places
, and encouraging every “citizen,” as our subjects are now to be called, to demonstrate his or her patriotism to the Nation, the Law, and then the King, have been replaced by more radical thinkers who do not want Louis’s words of compromise. Even his conciliation to their proposals is not enough. This second iteration of firebrands who call themselves lawmakers will stop at nothing short of complete capitulation by the sovereign of the realm—a man whose powers are God-given—to their atheistic new world order.

I pray daily for deliverance. The Almighty was surely in France when He took my two babies before they had the chance to grow old. He witnessed our eviction at the point of pickaxes, pitchforks, and bayonets from our beautiful home, the residence of the Bourbons since 1682. But where is He now, when His faithful and devoted acolyte is in such desperate need of His love?

SEVEN

Saint-Cloud

S
PRING
1790