The Queen's Dollmaker (23 page)

Despite the troubles in France, Claudette still received orders from Marie Antoinette for dolls, but the orders were for simpler, less expensive versions. Still, the same care was taken with these orders, and each of the French queen’s dolls was ensconced in a velvet-lined box with a matching velvet bow around the outside of it.

October 2, 1789, Versailles
. Louis entered the queen’s apartments, roughly dismissing all but her closest attendants.

“Have you seen what that devil says now?” he asked, flourishing a newspaper before her as she sat at a beautifully gilded and painted desk.

By now used to journalistic diatribes, the queen waved him away without putting down her pen. The king insisted that she read it, and sat down across from her where she was in the midst of writing a letter to a creditor. He put the paper on top of her stationery, and stared at her insistently with his bulging eyes.

Not Marat again. She touched this latest edition of
L’Ami du Peuple
with distaste. As usual, he had twisted the previous evening’s events into something repulsive.

Marie Antoinette put down the paper. “Can they not leave us alone? Last night I thought perhaps we were regaining the affections of the people.”

The previous evening they had hosted a banquet in the theater of the palace for the Flanders regiment, brought from Douai to Versailles. Many others were in attendance, including Count Fersen. With the king by her side, she could do little but greet Alex formally, but her eyes followed him everywhere.

She was tightly corseted in her favorite color of pale blue, a voluminous gown with ropes of pea-sized pearls overlapping the bodice, and matching ropes twirled through her hair, which she wore modestly high for the occasion. The gown’s neckline was edged with a thin line of ermine, and the elbows dripped with layers of fine lace. The gown was cut low, to show off to advantage the stunning turquoise necklace adorning her translucent skin. She dared wear this latest gift under the king’s nose as he tended to be oblivious to her personal furnishings. Fersen’s gaze was appreciative as he looked up from bowing before her, and she could see the hint of a wink as he moved on to let another guest pay homage to the royals.

Later in the evening, the king and queen presented young Louis Charles, now the Dauphin since the death of his older brother in June, to the crowd of diners. The entire royal family stood together, clothed in blue and fine laces. Amid cheers and toasts, the band struck up a royalist air. In their enthusiasm for the royal family, the guests threw the new tricolor cockade of Paris on the floor and stamped on it as a mark of loyalty to their king and his consort. Even the musicians were so captivated by the show of patriotism and fervor that many of their wigs slipped or fell off in their zealous renditions of tunes praising the monarchs.

It had been so long since she had been cheered that it was all the queen could do not to break into grateful tears. In the early hours of the following morning, as she lay in Fersen’s arms in his secret but comfortable lodgings at the palace, she recounted to him her joy and gratitude at the acclamation of the banquet’s guests. He stroked her hair and let her chatter on happily, until finally the sun’s position outside told her that she needed to slip back to her own apartments before her ladies came to wake her.

The evening had been an outstanding success, a welcome relief from recent events. In September, a baker was half-hanged for allegedly giving his richer customers better loaves of bread than his more common patrons. The anger of the people was bewildering to the king and queen, who were isolated at Versailles, and relied on scheming and conniving ministers for much of their information. Fersen was a source of reliable information, but he was not always available. The king seemed to accept Fersen as a close friend of the family, without inquiring too deeply as to his relationship with the queen, and in turn Fersen stayed as reserved and inconspicuous as possible.

Despite the king’s acceptance of the count and his trustworthy reports, he could not bring himself to take advice from the Swede. Or from the queen. Or from any of his ministers, for that matter. Louis’s stubbornness was renowned at court, leading even his faithful ministers to despair. Regularly Marie Antoinette would plead with her husband to make concessions with the National Assembly, anything to keep peace, but he resolutely refused, considering his position one by divine right and not answerable to any government body. So the quarrel between king and government maintained itself in perfect form.

For one evening, though, they had recaptured the glory of the early years of their reign. It would last mere hours, then the newspapers would once again pick up their poisoned pens, and more bread riots would follow.

On October 5, a crowd of women collected at the National Assembly after once again finding no bread on the bakers’ shelves.

“Why is it that banquets can be held at Versailles, while we go hungry?” they asked, echoing Marat’s demand.

The government could offer them no help, so the infuriated women broke into the Assembly hall, stealing several muskets and some of the city funds, then in an amazing moment of audacity, headed off en masse to Versailles, to “see what the king could do.” They collected fresh groups of marchers as they passed through the city, some joining to support their cause, some just curious, and others intrigued with the idea of profiting from the day’s adventure.

“Bring back the baker, the baker’s wife, and the baker’s boy!” they chanted, an analogy to their conviction that the king controlled the bread supply. “To Paris! To Paris!” As the crowd increased, it became more volatile and even began forcing onlookers to join them. As commandant of the National Guard, the Marquis de Lafayette needed to stop the march, but, ever concerned with his vanity over all else, he was afraid for his popularity if he were to use force against a horde of women. Eventually his own men insisted that they hurry to Versailles to protect its citizens and to bring the king back to Paris, primarily for his own protection.

At the palace, the king was out on one of his usual hunts, and Marie Antoinette was spending the day at Petit Trianon with Axel, playing cards, dining in her private salon, and walking through the manicured gardens which were quietly losing their summer blooms. They were admiring her new boudoir mirrors, which contained remarkable moving mechanisms, when a servant from the main palace ran up breathlessly.

“Your Majesty,” he bowed, red-faced from exertion. “Quickly, you must return to the palace. There is a mob headed here from Paris, and they mean to do you and the king harm.”

“What do you mean, do us harm?”

“Er, the fishwives are angry, and they say that they will…that they are going to…” The man stumbled for words.

“Fishwives! Fishwives have marched here from Paris? Truly?” Marie Antoinette was intrigued more than shocked.

“Yes, madame, and I’ve heard say they intend to…to…to cut off your head, Your Majesty.”

This startled the queen into action. After a quick argument with Alex—he insisted he would stay to protect her; she commanded that he leave the premises to remain safe himself—she instructed the servant to have a carriage brought around to take Fersen back to his rented lodgings in town. She picked up her skirts and dashed along the Grand Canal back to the main chateau building. The inside of the palace was in disarray, with servants scurrying up and down staircases in a panic, and some of her women weeping piteously in corners.

“Where is the king? And my children?” she demanded.

The Marquise de Tourzel entered the hall where the queen stood alone, hardly noticed by the rushing palace workers. “Your Majesty!
Mon Dieu
, you have returned. His Majesty is also on his way back from his hunt.”

“What about the Dauphin and the Princesse Royale?”

“They are in your apartment.”

The two women ran up the stairs into the
grand appartement de la reine
, passing through the queen’s guard room, the antechamber, the peers’ salon, and finally into the queen’s bedchamber. The children were huddled together on the queen’s enormous silk-draped poster bed, which was crowned with a mass of peacock feathers. They looked like quivering little mice, so small and scared were they in the middle of her vast sleeping chamber. Marie Antoinette scooped both children into her arms with hugs and reassurances that all would be well.

The king arrived back at the palace by three o’clock in the afternoon, sweaty and reeking of horse. Tense discussions ensued as to how to handle the impending invasion. The royal family was urged to flee the palace, but Louis, ever vacillating and deeply reluctant to become a fugitive, was unable to make up his mind. Several advisors recommended that at least the queen and children be removed to the palace of Rambouillet for safety, but this Marie Antoinette refused. Her place, she insisted, was with the king. The stalemate resulted in no action taken prior to the mob’s arrival.

A heavy downpour now soaking the marchers had not diminished their resolve at all. Their cries became more furious. “We’re going to put the queen’s head on a sword! We’re going to make cockades out of her entrails!”

Soon the women stood before the gates of Versailles, dripping wet and shouting epithets at the royal family members they knew were hidden inside. Any original notion of asking the king what he could do about the bread shortage had been completely supplanted by a plan to take him bodily back to Paris.

The royal family went to bed uneasily that night, with Lafayette’s National Guard standing watch. As always, observing court customs, the king and queen each slept in their own apartments, the king’s above hers. Their individual lodgings were connected by a hidden staircase Louis had had installed years earlier to make his conjugal visits more private. The mob remained outside the gates, burning torches and brandishing whatever weapons they had—stolen muskets, pikes, broomsticks, and an occasional pistol and gun carriage. At four o’clock in the morning on October 6, the sleepers were rudely awakened by a din in the palace.

“What is happening?” asked the queen, disheveled from an uneven night of sleep. She sat up in bed and arranged her nightgown around her. One of her ladies, a Madame Auguié, ran quickly to the hallway to investigate and returned minutes later in a panic.

“Your Majesty! It is some of the market women. They have entered the palace through an unlocked gate and are looking for you. Quickly, you must get dressed.”

Getting dressed swiftly was nearly impossible in the French court, and no monarch could possibly dress herself, even if she wished to do so. Dressing entailed hours of preparation, with dozens of buttons to be secured and laces to be tied, not to mention corsets, petticoats, hosiery, and other garments to be put on. The queen’s nervous ladies fumbled with her attire while trying to clothe themselves at the same time. They could hear voices coming up the staircase to the apartment and within moments there was pounding and shouting at the door of the guard room. Madame Auguié now ran out to the outermost room to bar the door for as long as possible. The queen and the rest of her entourage slipped through a secret door next to her canopied bed and fled up the staircase behind the wall to the king’s apartment, the queen’s petticoat only partially tied and various fastenings undone.

The secret door had barely closed when the mob of women stampeded into the queen’s private bedroom. They had already killed two royal bodyguards, and now howled in rage that they could not find the primary object of their hatred. In a fury, they drove their pikes into the queen’s luxurious bed, claiming they wanted to make sure she was not hiding in it. The de Lamballe doll had been on a slipper chair next to the bed, and tumbled unharmed onto the floor under the immense mattress, while the women carried out their vicious task. After destroying the bed, they hacked away at the walls’ gilt panels, and splintered whatever doors they could find. With their violent energy expended on the queen’s room, they made their way back outside to join the rest of the mob, which was now assembled in the courtyard outside the balcony leading to the king’s apartment.

Inside the king’s rooms, Marie Antoinette found her children already gathered with their father and Lafayette. The king was, for once, behaving with remarkable clarity and purpose, and they had a rapid discussion as to what to do next. Louis had been awakened in the night and requested to meet a deputation of the women. To mollify this group of angry Parisians gathered around him, he agreed that he would consider returning to Paris to reign from there. They had been satisfied—even pleased—by the king’s commitment, but the rest of the mob, still thirsty for revenge, had continued on its rant through the palace.

Marie Antoinette was horrified to hear that her husband had acquiesced to the women’s demand that he go to Paris, insisting that it was unsafe to leave Versailles under any circumstances. In the meantime, they needed to deal with the crowd outside.

By agreement, first the king went out to the balcony to greet the people, and from inside the queen could hear them cheering. “
Vive le roi!
” they shouted. Feeling a little more confident, she took her children by the hands and went to join her husband, but the furious crowd shouted, “No children! No children!”

Louis Charles and Marie-Thérèse, already terrified from their ordeal thus far, were quickly taken away by servants. Marie Antoinette, though pale and very frightened of assassination, stood steadfastly next to her husband and even made a pretty curtsy to the throng. Lafayette, ever popular with the people, came out and kissed the queen’s hand as a symbol of his dedication to her and to demonstrate that she was under his personal protection. It was all to no avail. The people were determined now to bring the baker’s family back to their capital city.