Confessions of Marie Antoinette (9 page)

The princesse shivered. “What is happening nowadays?” she murmured, her hands clasped so tightly in her lap that her knuckles grew pale.

We no longer go to the Opéra or the Comédie-Française, where actors speaking lines that can be interpreted as “royalist” are drowned out by catcalls and forced to retreat from the stage, often under a hail of edible projectiles. But at the Tuileries we still cling to our routines:
Grand couverts
—public dinners—on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and cards on Sundays. I smile to think that I’d so detested dining in public when we began our reign fifteen years ago that I urged Louis to change the ancient etiquette and hold private
soupers
instead. And when I had yet to see my twentieth year I had derided the most popular pastime at court, a dreary lotto game called cavagnole, the delight of the prudish
collets-montés
who were north of the age of thirty. Nowadays, I am happy to reclaim these silly rituals, embracing them with a fervor equal to my prior disdain. Scorn has become the purview of the Revolution.

Louis has expected his ministers to remain in place as well, or at least to be part of the new government, and we have counted upon the support of the comte de Mirabeau in the National Assembly to assure this. Mirabeau proposed a number of names to us, illustrious men who were Assembly delegates, including Lafayette, Talleyrand, the duc de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, and Monsieur Target, the lawyer who so successfully defended the Cardinal de Rohan in the notorious
affaire du collier
three years ago, when His
Eminence had been swindled into purchasing a massive diamond necklace in my name. Jacques Necker, our popular Minister of Finance, has been suggested for Premier or Chief Minister, primarily, Louis believes, as a sop to everyone. Necker’s liberal beliefs would please the Assembly and the people, yet he is a man who is already intimately familiar with my husband’s government.

But on the seventh of November, Mirabeau’s fragile house of cards collapses when Necker refuses to cooperate with him, and the National Assembly ultimately issues a decree that no member of the legislature may become a minister in His Majesty’s government. I do not comprehend Necker’s motives. From our thrones in the king’s formal bedchamber, all hope of compromise, of working with the revolutionaries, of maintaining a powerful executive by virtue of gaining a more cooperative Assembly, crumble in a tense struggle for political dominance. Louis has already seen his powers reduced. In September, when we still resided at Versailles, he was permitted to retain only a suspensive veto. All French monarchs had always been given the authority to override the realm’s judicial bodies, the Parlements, when they refused to ratify the king’s edicts. My husband is gradually being reduced to a cipher.

The comte de Mercy-Argenteau, who has remained Imperial Austria’s ambassador to the Bourbon court since my childhood, arrives at the Tuileries. He is doing his best, he assures me, to convince my brother Joseph to put the Hapsburg might behind us. Were Maman still alive I would feel more secure in Mercy’s efforts. But Joseph has always been a reformer with progressive ideas. I recollect now the emperor’s words after his visit to Versailles in 1777 when he urged me to curtail my frivolities and expenditures:
The revolution will be a cruel one, and perhaps of your own making
. Their sting is just as painful as it was a dozen years ago.

The sixty-two-year-old diplomat is finally beginning to wear his age. Beneath Mercy’s wig his temples no longer require powder
to make them silver-gray. Wrinkles fan out like spiders’ legs from the corners of his eyes. I can see that events in Paris are making him nearly as anxious as I am. My papa, Francis of Lorraine, Holy Roman Emperor and Grand Duke of Tuscany, died of an apoplectic fit when I was nine years old. Since then, the suave and elegant comte is the closest I have known to a father. We have had our tussles, and over the years, particularly when I was dauphine, I teased him mercilessly for being such a scold.

How easy it is for a child to believe that the fun will last forever, I tell the comte now, when he asks how the king and I are faring. “As far as we are concerned personally, the notion of happiness belongs to the past—whatever the future may bring. We have seen too much horror and too much bloodshed ever to be happy again.”

“Is there even some small thing that you take comfort in, nowadays?” Mercy asks.

“So that you can tell my brother that I am well and hale?” I reply, my words tinged with asperity. “You may inform Joseph that I am still permitted to enjoy long walks in the Tuileries Gardens, when I am not harangued by insults from the market women of Les Halles. That my greatest pleasure is my two children, from whom only God will induce me to separate. But we are far from well, though we do our best to conceal our opinions and our constraints and go on as before. I know that it is the duty for one king to suffer on behalf of all the others, and we are doing our duty well.”

“From a gadabout, you have become a cynic,” the comte observes.

“A mob that attempts to murder you in your bed will have that effect,” I remind him quietly. And then, I dissolve into tears, missing my maman, her knowledge, her wisdom, her strength—for the comte is my final connection to her and to my vanished childhood, the youth I tried in vain to recapture with the building of the
pastoral
hameau
in the gardens of le Petit Trianon. For that perceived extravagance, too, I am being made to suffer now.

I urge the comte de Mercy to extract a promise from my brother to come to our aid, whether it is in the form of money, mercenaries, or Austrian soldiers.

“You know His Imperial Majesty is not well,” Mercy tells me.

“That is not an answer.” At least, it is not the answer I seek. And all the more reason I need the ambassador’s guarantee. Finally, the comte acquiesces to my request. But his eyes betray Joseph’s lack of enthusiasm even as his lips agree.

F
EBRUARY
1790

Louison Chabry had laid aside her chisel and come to the Place de Grève because the ragged boys in Saint-Germain who cry the
nouvelles
and sell the latest broadsheets for a sou had announced that this execution across from the Hôtel de Ville will make history. So that afternoon she’d opened her reticule, fished for a coin, and purchased one of their newspapers.

She has never heard of Thomas de Mahy, the forty-four-year-old marquis de Favras, but the paper, published by one of the radicals from the Palais Royal coffeehouses, is written to inflame the heart of even the most phlegmatic citizen. For a start, Louison read, the accused was guilty of being a member of the nobility, not only by virtue of his title but because his wife was the daughter of some minor German prince.
This
detail the publisher connected, whether true or not, to
l’Autrichienne
, the German bitch who had stained the throne of France with her traitor’s blood. The marquis had been the instigator of a counterrevolutionary plot to liberate the sovereigns from the Tuileries, where, according to the paper, they resided happily, grateful for the love and kindness of the good
Parisians. After carrying off the monarchs to the town of Péronne in Picardie, the marquis de Favras intended to have Général Lafayette and Monsieur Necker arrested. Thousands of mercenaries were alleged to have been at Monsieur de Favras’s disposal—“twenty thousand Sardinians and twelve thousand Germans, and thousands of Swiss and Piedmontese!” Louison read, as well as twelve thousand cavalry in Paris alone. The sculptress had wondered how much of the report was true. It was clear, though, that it didn’t matter. The people’s thirst for revenge against the nobility had been denied when the baron de Besenval, one of the queen’s old lovers, according to the broadsheet, was acquitted of any guilt in urging the regiment under his command to halt the insurrection of July 14.

Several hundred people have assembled on a frigid February night to see the marquis hanged, a most democratic form of execution, Louison’s broadsheet proclaimed, as the rope is used to dispatch criminals of all classes. Before the Revolution, a nobleman would have gone to his reward with the swift stroke of an axe or the flash of a sword.

Below the gallows, which is illuminated on all sides with lanterns and torches, the people stamp their feet, less from impatience than to ward off the bitter cold. Those who have garnered the choicest views have been standing for hours on the hard ground, which since dawn has been covered with a layer of frost. The sight of so many people huddled in the shadow of the scaffold, their features lit now and again by the flickering flames, makes the night’s proceedings appear even more macabre. Louison tugs her brown woolen cloak more tightly about her shoulders and blows upon her fingers. Her hands are her livelihood and she can’t afford to freeze them off for the sake of an execution. And yet, her curiosity has drawn her to the Place de Grève precisely because she has never before seen one.

A shout goes up as the oxcart transporting the condemned man clatters into the square. He is impeccably dressed in a green silk coat. “The same color as the livery worn by the attendants of the comte d’Artois—another one of the queen’s lovers,” says the man standing next to Louison. His breath reeks of brandy. The man reminds her that the king’s youngest brother was exiled in July, just days after the fall of the Bastille. “For treason,” he adds.

Although the marquis de Favras has come directly from prison, he is clean shaven, having groomed himself for the occasion of his death as though he were going to church. In a way, thinks Louison, he is indeed about to have a conversation with his maker. On his black felt tricorn, the marquis wears without shame the ink-colored cockade of the aristocracy. His diamond shoe buckles wink in the torchlight as he climbs the wooden steps to the scaffold.

His judges hand him the writ of execution, smugly inviting the nobleman to peruse it. Below him, the crowd is in a holiday mood. Flasks pass from hand to hand, lip to lip. The noose has been illuminated with a hanging lantern, and the marquis de Favras steps toward it to read the writ. After a few moments of scanning the document, his brow furrows and his lips curl into a frown. He thrusts the paper at the judges. “I see that you made three spelling mistakes,” he says. The crowd nods and murmurs among themselves. They have expected this sort of arrogance from a man of his lofty social stratum. Given the opportunity to offer his last words he avers his innocence, declaring, “Citizens, if the simple testimony of two men is enough to make you condemn a man to the gibbet, I pity you.” He then turns to the hangman and says, “Do your duty,
mon ami
!”

The crowd responds with uproarious laughter and tremendous applause, but not because they are impressed by the aristocrat’s bravado. Rather, they are cheering his imminent demise. “Skip, marquis!”
they begin to chant, anxious to witness his silk stockinged legs writhing and wriggling above the scaffold’s floorboards.
“Sautez, marquis, sautez!”

The nobleman’s wig is removed by the executioner, revealing a pale scalp that shines in the moonlight and resembles a plucked chicken.
Not so aristocratic now
, Louison thinks. The noose is placed about the marquis de Favras’s neck and the
bourreau
adjusts the knot. Offered a blindfold, the marquis refuses it. His audience is all the more delighted by this, eager to watch the condemned man’s eyes pop in his moment of extremis. The young sculptress considers raising her arm to shield her face. It suddenly seems so indecent, all of them standing for hours in the frosty air to watch a fellow citizen die. Louison had seen enough of death during the riots of October 6 at Versailles. But something makes her leave her arms folded across her chest to watch the marquis’s execution with dry eyes. Perhaps she has convinced herself that she will someday sculpt the head of a hanged man. Or maybe it is morbid curiosity. Everyone about her is so certain that the marquis de Favras is a traitor to the Revolution and deserves to hang. Louison doesn’t know whether the broadsheet she had stuffed into her pocket told the truth about his crime, had embellished it, or had fabricated bold-faced lies. It is clear that the accused has his own opinion.