Sex with the Queen (44 page)

Worst of all, the queen refused to leave until her hairdresser from happier days, Monsieur Leonard, dressed her hair for the voyage. The little man was kidnapped for this purpose, taken to the palace in his bedroom slippers, forced to dress her hair, and returned to his home. For this, he was later guillotined.

Fersen intended to accompany the royal family, but Louis re-fused to have his wife’s lover along on the ride. On May 29

Fersen wrote sadly to a friend aware of the plot, “I shall not ac-company the King, he didn’t want me to.”31 The Swede would leave France via another route.

On the evening of June 20, Fersen, dressed as a coachman, waited next to his coach outside the palace, chatting to other coachmen and offering them snuff. One by one the members of the royal family arrived. Early in the morning of June 21 he drove them to a staging post outside of Paris, where he took his leave and set off alone. Traveling lightly and swiftly, Fersen soon arrived in safety.

But the heavy coach of the royal family broke down, and re-pairs went so slowly that the troops waiting for them at the border assumed the escape had been abandoned and left. In need of fresh horses, lost on the country roads, the coach finally reached a staging post where a cavalryman named Drouet looked into the carriage and recognized the king. In hot pursuit, revolutionary soldiers captured the royal family at the town of Varennes and took them back to Paris as prisoners. When Madame Campan e i g h t e e n t h - c e n t u r y e u r o p e 2 0 1

saw the queen two days later, “She took off her nightcap and told me to see the effect grief had had on her hair. In a single night it had turned as white as that of a woman of seventy.”32

On June 23 Fersen wrote in his diary, “Learned that the King was captured. Details not very clear; the troops didn’t do their duty, the King lacked firmness and will.” That night he wrote his father, “Everything is lost, my dear father, and I am desperate.

The King was arrested at Varennes, 16 leagues from the frontier.

Think of my misery and pity me. . . .”33

Because of their flight, members of the royal family had lost all their privileges. Guards remained in their rooms day and night, even when the queen was on the chamber pot. On July 4

she sent a coded letter to Fersen. “I can tell you I love you and I have only time for that,” she scribbled. “Adieu, most loved and loving of men. I embrace you with all my heart.”34

In April 1792 the guillotine was set up in the Place de Grève, its first victim a thief. But soon afterward enemies of the state and aristocrats were forced to kneel before this altar to a blood-thirsty new god. The courtiers of Versailles remained haughty to the end. One day when entering the cart that would take them to the guillotine, an aristocrat bowed and allowed a lady to pass be-fore him. The jailer yelled at him for wasting time. “You can kill us when you like,” replied the nobleman disdainfully, “but you cannot make us forget our manners.”35

Puffed up with pride in her political genius despite the prison cell where her genius had landed her, Marie Antoinette was up to her elbows in intrigue, sending secret letters to foreign courts asking for forces to invade France. Contemptuous of her cap-tors, she wrote letters in code and in invisible ink, then handed them to helpful friends or servants who smuggled them out of prison. But Louis refused to ask foreign governments to cross French frontiers and shed French blood. “God’s will be done,”

he often sighed. “I would rather pass for weak than for wicked.”36

It was Marie Antoinette’s misfortune that her powerful mother, Empress Maria Theresa, had died in 1780 and her fa-vorite brother, Emperor Joseph II, in 1790. If her mother or Joseph had still been alive, they would have used horrifying 2 0 2

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threats, backed by the substantial firepower of the Austro- Hungarian Empire, to rescue her. But now her younger brother, Leopold, who had never been close to her, was emperor. More ambitious than loyal, Leopold hoped to use the chaos in France to his political advantage, perhaps taking chunks of France for himself. Fersen was aware of this, writing her, “He is deceiving you. He will do nothing for you . . . he will abandon you to your fate and let the whole kingdom fall to complete ruin.”37

The European powers had already begun to devour Poland, and they now turned to fresh meat—France, historically the strongest, richest, and most populated country in Europe. Now France was weak and fractured; now was the time to circle in for the kill. Britain, salivating at the thought of grabbing the French colonies in North America, demanded that France be flattened to “a veritable political nonentity.” Leopold, baring his fangs and snarling, claimed Flanders, Artois, and Picardy for Austria, and, indifferent to his sister’s fate, insisted that France be

“crushed by terror.” Frederick William II of Prussia claimed Al-sace Lorraine, and Catherine the Great of Russia complacently advised everyone to take what they wanted, leaving France “a second-class power which need no longer be feared by any-body.”38

It is ironic that European nations tied to France by centuries of marriages and treaties were so eager for its destruction and unconcerned about the welfare of the royal family, and the one country truly interested in a rescue attempt was the United States. Perhaps the new nation wanted to express its gratitude to the king and queen for providing invaluable aid in the war for independence.

The American ambassador to France, Gouverneur Morris, carefully arranged an escape attempt. But Louis, who had given his word of honor to his captors that he would not try to escape again, hesitated. Morris later explained, “The measures were so well arranged that success was almost certain, but the King (for reasons which it is pointless to detail here) gave up the plan on the very morning fixed for his departure, when the Swiss Guards had already left Courbevoie to cover his retreat. His ministers, e i g h t e e n t h - c e n t u r y e u r o p e 2 0 3

who found themselves gravely compromised, all tendered their resignation.”39

It was Louis’s last chance. In December 1792 he was on trial for his life. The American ambassador wrote to Thomas Jeffer-son, “It is strange that the mildest monarch who ever filled the French throne, one who is precipitated from it precisely because he would not adopt the harsh measures of his predecessors, a man whom none can charge with a criminal or cruel act, should be prosecuted as one of the most nefarious tyrants who ever dis-graced the annals of human nature.”40

Knowing the king would be condemned and executed, Fersen wrote Sophie, “Poor, unfortunate family, poor Queen—why can’t I save her with my blood! It would be the greatest happiness for me, the sweetest joy for my soul.”41

As expected, Louis XVI was condemned to die on the guillo-tine for crimes against the people of France. On the evening of January 20, 1793, he was allowed to spend ninety minutes with his family and broke the news. As his wife and children sobbed uncontrollably, Louis remained strong. He sat the dauphin on his lap and made him promise not to seek revenge on those who had condemned him. To blunt the pain of the final parting, Louis promised he would return to say good-bye at seven a.m.

the next day, knowing full well that he would not come.

The next morning, before he left the prison, he said, “Crimes have been imputed to me, but I am innocent, and I shall die without fear. I desire that my death may bring happiness to the people of France, and may preserve them from the misfortunes that I foresee.”42

Accompanied by sixteen hundred soldiers, Louis was rolled through Paris on a cart to what is now the Place de la Concorde.

The crowds were strangely quiet. Most doors were closed, the windows shuttered. The king who could not rule well at least in-sisted upon dying well and, as he approached the scaffold, re-fused the indignity of having his hands bound. The executioner argued and Louis finally allowed him to use his own handker-chief instead of the rope. He next had to climb a six-foot ladder without the use of his hands and wobbled unsteadily. Some spec-2 0 4

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tators, ashamed for him, believed it was out of fear, but the king, despite the rigors of prison, still had an ungainly bulk. Fat Louis. Louis the Pig. Once on the scaffold he marched resolutely to the front and began to speak, but the drummers intensified their staccato beat, drowning out the king’s last words.

He took his place, laying his head on the guillotine. With the noise of gathering thunder the heavy blade came hurtling down and severed it. There was some cheering but also much grief among the French for the murder of their king. In her prison Marie Antoinette heard the cheers and held her son closer to her.

Days later Fersen wrote that he was haunted by “the image of Louis XVI mounting the scaffold. . . . Often I curse the day I left Sweden, that I ever knew anything but our rocks and our firs.

I would not have had, it is true, so many joys, but I’m paying dearly for them at the moment, and I would have spared myself many pains. I cry often all alone, my dear Sophie. . . .”43

In March 1793 Marie Antoinette had a last chance at escape—the commissioner in charge of the royal prisoners was prepared to smuggle her to the coast and put her in a boat for England.

But as it was impossible to rescue her children at the same time, the queen refused to leave them behind. “I could enjoy nothing if I left my children,” she wrote, “and this idea leaves me without even a single regret.”44

Because France had become too dangerous for him, Fersen moved to Brussels, 210 miles away from Paris, hoping to make another rescue attempt. No Scarlet Pimpernel, Fersen was frus-trated at every turn. Moreover, his generosity in paying for the earlier escape was catching up with him, and he found himself living on very little money. “Never mind, it was for
Her
,” he wrote, “I had to.”45

The eight-year-old dauphin, now called Louis XVII by royal-ists, was taken from his mother and given to a cobbler who beat him, plied him with alcohol, and tried to get him to masturbate to provide evidence against the queen’s incestuous proclivities.

Having lost her son, Marie Antoinette was also separated from her daughter and taken to a different prison. Waiting at the e i g h t e e n t h - c e n t u r y e u r o p e 2 0 5