The Queen's Lover (29 page)
The queen had to submit to another painful experience that day: the packet of belongings seized at the Temple when she was transferred to the Conciergerie was opened before her. A clerk of the Tribunal, one Fabricius, read the inventory of the items aloud, asking her to identify them.
The clerk: “A packet of hair of various colors.”
The queen: “They come from my dead and living children and from my husband.”
The clerk: “A paper with figures on it.”
The queen: “It is a table for teaching my son how to count.”
The clerk: “A little wallet filled with scissors, needles, silk, thread, etc. A little mirror, a gold ring with some hair in it, a paper on which are
two gold hearts with initials, another paper on which is written ‘Prayer to the Sacred Heart of Jesus; prayer to the Immaculate Conception’; a portrait of a woman.”
Herman interrupted. “Whose portrait is that?” he asked.
“Madame de Lamballe’s,” the queen replied.
“A small piece of cloth on which there is the design of a flaming heart pierced by an arrow,” the clerk Fabricius continued.
Fouquier interrupted and announced that this item, a scapular (a symbol of Christian faith then considered to be counterrevolutionary), had been worn by most of the “conspirators with whom the law has justly dealt by striking them with its sword.” (It is a mark of his hypocrisy that Fouquier himself, according to his daughter’s later testimony, wore this religious emblem well hidden under his judge’s robes.)
The clerk carried away these mementos of Marie Antoinette’s loved ones. Soon thereafter, the examination shifted to the issue of the Trianon and of the Diamond Necklace Affair, as Herman tried to trap the queen into admitting that she had been a friend of Madame de La Motte, the villain who instigated the scandal.
“Where did you get the money to build and furnish the little Trianon, where you gave parties at which you were always the goddess?”
“There were funds especially for that purpose.”
“These funds must have been large, for the little Trianon must have cost immense sums?”
“It is possible that it did, perhaps more than I would have wished.”
“Was it not at the Trianon that you knew the woman La Motte?”
“I never once saw her.”
“Was she not your victim in the famous affair of the necklace?”
“She can not have been, since I did not know her.”
“Do you persist in denying that you knew her?”
“I have told the truth and will persist in telling it.”
When the defense lawyers had finished their presentation Herman questioned the queen about the fact that she had the dauphin sit at the head of the table after his father’s death, and had served him first.
“Why, when you had promised to bring up your children in the principles of the Revolution, did you instill errors in them, for example by treating your son with a deference which made it appear that you still thought that he would succeed the former king his father?”
“He was too young to understand all that. I had him sit at the head of the table and served him the food he needed.”
There was a recess. The second part of the hearing resumed after dark. The questioning went on for another seven hours, but at no time, so witnesses have told me, did the queen seem to weaken. Soon after midnight Fouquier turned to her and asked her if she had anything to add in her defense. “Well, no one has uttered anything against me,” she replied. “I conclude by observing that being the wife of Louis XVI, I was bound to conform to his will.”
Herman pronounced his indictment:
“Today a great example is given to the world and it will doubtless not be lost on the peoples inhabiting it. Nature and reason, so long outraged, are at last satisfied. Equality triumphs…. This trial, citizen jurors, is not one in which a single deed, a single crime, is submitted to your conscience…. You have to judge the accused’s entire political life since she came to rule beside the last king of the French. But above all you must consider the maneuvers that she has never for a moment ceased to employ to destroy liberty, either at home, by her intimate connections with base ministers and treacherous generals…or abroad, by negotiating that monstrous coalition of European despots that Europe will ridicule for its impotence, and by her correspondence with the former émigré French princes.”
After finishing his indictment Herman asked the jurors four questions:
- Was the accused involved in intrigues and secret dealings with foreign powers that aimed at giving them monetary assistance, enabling them to enter French territory and facilitating the progress of their armies there?
- Is Marie Antoinette d’Autriche, widow of Louis Capet, convicted of having cooperated with these intrigues and of having had these secret dealings?
- Is it established that there was a plot and conspiracy to start a civil war within the Republic?
- Is Marie Antoinette d’Autriche, widow of Louis Capet, convicted of having taken part in this plot and conspiracy?
It was three in the morning. I hear that some spectators were confident that the queen would be acquitted, seeing that the trial had in no way proven that she had obeyed orders from her mother and brother at the expense of France; that there had been little concrete evidence of her frivolity and extravagance; that there was no proof of her “double game” of 1791 and her “treachery” of 1792. One spectator even exclaimed, “She’ll get away with it. She gave her answers like an angel. They’ll only deport her!” This optimism was not totally unwarranted. Citizens had not yet realized that the Terror—the death machine crafted by Fouquier-Tinville—was just then beginning, with the queen’s trial. She was its first, its pioneering victim.
In a room adjoining the Grande Chambre Marie Antoinette waited in company with Lieutenant de Busne, the guard assigned to her. At 4 a.m. she heard the president’s bell tinkling in the distance. She could discern Herman’s voice, exhorting the crowd to remain calm. An usher came to fetch her. She took her place on the platform. Her lawyers had also been brought back into the hall.
“Antoinette,” Herman said with shocking familiarity, “here is the jury’s verdict: ‘Yes,’ on all the questions.”
She then heard Fouquier demand that “the accused be condemned to death, in accordance with Article 1 of the first section of the first chapter of the second part of the penal code, which reads: ‘All intrigue, all intelligence, with the enemies of France tending either to facilitate their entry into the territories of the French Empire, or to deliver up to them towns, fortresses, ports, vessels, or arsenals belonging to France, or to furnish them aid in soldiers, money, food, or munitions, or to favor in any manner whatever the progress of their armies on French territory, or against our forces by land or sea, or to undermine the loyalty of officers, soldiers, and other citizens toward the French nation, shall be punished by death.’”
Punished by death!
Those may have been the single words the queen could make out in that ponderous statement. As she sat on her chair, the only expression that she seemed to display was one of astonishment. “She did not give the least sign of fear or indignation,” her lawyer Chauveau-Lagarde would relate later, “but she seemed stunned by surprise.” After the verdict was spoken she rose and stepped down from the platform without a word or a gesture, crossing the Tribunal and raising her head with “very great dignity”—her lawyer’s words—when she passed the spectators’ gallery. As she went down the narrow stone stairway of the Palais’s tower, accompanied by the gendarme Busne, her steps began to falter, and she whispered, “I can hardly see to walk…. I can go no farther.” The gendarme offered her his arm, and helped her descend the last steps leading to the courtyard. On the grounds that he had offered her his arm, Busne, denounced by a fellow guard, would be arrested that same morning.
Upon reaching her cell, Marie Antoinette, however wearied by two days of trial, the second of which had lasted more than twenty hours, asked for pen and paper. And when these were brought her she wrote a letter to her sister-in-law. Dear reader, observe the thoughtfulness and poignancy of this letter, and consider the metamorphosis wrought by life’s tribulations upon the once giddy, frivolous dauphine.
The 16th of October at four thirty in the morning
It is to you, my dear sister, that I write for the last time. I have just been condemned, not to a shameful death—that is only for criminals—but to one in which I shall rejoin your brother. As innocent as he, I hope to show as much firmness as he showed in his last moments. I am at peace as one only can be when conscience holds no reproach. I regret deeply having to abandon my poor children; you know that I lived only for them. And you, my good, kind sister, you who in the goodness of your heart have sacrificed everything to be with us, what a situation I’m leaving you in! I learned during the trial that my daughter has been separated from you. Alas, poor child, I dare not write her…. I hope that one day when they’re older my children will be able to be with you again and enjoy your tender care, and that they will both remember the lesson I’ve always tried to teach them—that the carrying out of obligations should be the principal foundation of life, and that friendship and mutual trust should be its greatest happiness…. My son must not forget his father’s last words, which I expressly repeat to him now: he must never seek to avenge our deaths. I have to mention something that hurts me greatly: I know how much distress this child must have caused you. Forgive him, dearest sister. Remember his age and remember how easy it is to make a child say things he does not even understand. The day will come, I hope, when he will feel even more deeply the value of your tenderness….
I die in the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman religion, that of my fathers, in which I was raised and which I have always professed…. I sincerely beg pardon of God for all the wrongs I have done during my lifetime…. I ask pardon of all whom I know and of you in particular, sister, for all the distress that, without intent, I may have caused you…. I say farewell here to my aunts and to all my brothers and sisters. I had friends. The idea of being separated from them forever, and of their grief, is one of my greatest regrets in dying. May
they at least know that my thoughts were with them until the last moment.
Farewell, my good and loving sister. May this letter reach you!…I embrace you with all my heart, together with those poor, dear children. Oh, God, what an anguish it is to leave them forever.
Adieu! Adieu!
From this moment on I’ll solely devote myself to my spiritual duties.
“I
HAD FRIENDS.
The idea of being separated from them forever, and of their grief, is one of my greatest regrets….”
Thus she bade farewell to my brother Axel, the love of her life.
Predictably, this letter never reached Madame Elisabeth. The queen gave it to Bault, the Conciergerie’s warden, who in turn gave it to Fouquier-Tinville. Fouquier then passed it on to Robespierre, and after his death it was found under the Incorruptible’s mattress, along with the letter Marie Antoinette had written asking for a delay in her trial.
A
FTER FINISHING HER
letter the queen, still in her black dress, lay down on her bed. When Rosalie came into her cell at dawn she saw that she had moved her pillow to the foot of her bed to keep her feet warm, and that she was weeping. Rosalie offered her some broth, noting that she had eaten nothing the day before. “I need nothing, my child. Everything is now over for me,” the queen replied. But when she saw that Rosalie was also crying she accepted a few mouthfuls of soup, and then asked the girl to come back at eight to help her dress.
When Rosalie returned, the queen laid her clean chemise on the bed, slipped into the little passage between the bed and the wall, and started taking off her black dress. At her bidding, Rosalie came to stand before her, but the gendarme came forward and insisted on watching her undress. “Allow
me to change my linen without witnesses, monsieur,” the captive asked. But the guard curtly replied that he was ordered to keep an eye on her at all moments.
“With all precautions and modesty possible,” as Rosalie put it, the queen took off her chemise, which was drenched in blood, and put on a clean one. Over it she slipped on the white negligee she usually wore in the morning, and a large muslin fichu, which she folded under her chin. She also carefully arranged a white bonnet on her head. Then she rolled up her bloodstained chemise, tucked it into one of its own sleeves, and, in Rosalie’s own words, “looked anxiously about her.” With an air of “ineffable satisfaction,” she tucked the soiled linen into a crevice she had just noticed in the wall.
Soon thereafter Rosalie left her, and the Abbé Girard, a conforming priest sent by the Tribunal, came into her cell. He offered her confession and communion, which she refused.
“But, Madame,” said the priest, “what will people say when they hear that you refused the help of religion in your final moments?”
“You’ll tell them that God’s mercy provided for it.”
The priest asked if he might accompany her that morning. “If you wish,” she answered. A few moments later she asked the gendarme: “Do you think the people will let me go to the scaffold without tearing me to pieces on the way?”
Soon after the priest’s arrival Herman entered the cell with two judges. Marie Antoinette was kneeling by her bed, praying. “Pay attention,” Herman said. “I must read you your sentence.” The queen replied that this was useless, since she had already read it. “No matter,” one of the judges said. “It must be read to you a second time.”
The judge had just spoken the word “Republic,” the last word of the sentence, when a hugely tall, corpulent young man entered the queen’s cell. He was the executioner Henri Sanson, son of the recently retired executioner who had guillotined Louis XVI. “Hold out your hands,” he
ordered the queen. “To be bound?” she exclaimed. “Louis XVI’s hands were not bound!”
At these words, Sanson brutally seized the queen’s hands and manacled them very tightly behind her back. He then took off the bonnet she had put on a while ago and with a huge pair of scissors cut off her hair, which he put into his pocket. It was nearly eleven o’clock. Marie Antoinette and her grim visitors left the cell; the executioner held the end of the rope with which he had tied her hands, leading her like an animal.