Confessions of Marie Antoinette (24 page)

“Twenty-nine,” he tells me. “But this afternoon I feel much older. I have grown up quickly in these past few days.”

He is young. But he is smart. And he is ambitious.

That evening our party beds down at an inn in Meaux, but now the deputies will not permit my family to open our trunks so that we may change clothes. The king of France is compelled to borrow a night shirt from Citoyen Pétion, the larger and stouter of the two delegates who accompany us. Louis looks absurd, his girth straining the seams. I lie awake wondering what awaits us in Paris upon our arrival tomorrow.

Yet we may be lucky to make it that far. At Bondy, when we stop to change horses, a mob assaults our carriage, pounding on the exterior, clinging to the wheels, and endeavoring to open the doors. Only through the intervention of a regiment of grenadiers—who are waiting there to escort us into the capital, not to protect us from harm—are we not torn limb from limb. To thank him, and because I thought he might be hungry and ill-provisioned, I had offered one of the soldiers a piece of meat from one of our hampers. “Don’t touch it! The whore has probably poisoned it!” a woman screeches.

The grenadier, who was about to accept the beef, rejects it and turns on his heel. In full view of our tormentors I give the morsel to the dauphin, who eats it happily and without intestinal incident.

But the crowd’s appetite for violence has not been sated. Drunk on bravado and revolutionary ideals, a vicious throng assaults a
curé
who is merely making his way toward our carriage to offer us a blessing.

Horrified, Citoyen Barnave unlatches the window and shouts, “Frenchmen! You who consider yourselves so brave, do you wish to degenerate into a nation of assassins?”

At his words, the clamor miraculously dulls to a hush and the
curé
is able to approach us without further violence. He hands Madame Élisabeth a rosary, which she accepts and clutches to her breast. There are tears on the old priest’s cheeks. I pray the mob permits him to depart in peace. I begin to regard young Citizen Barnave with fresh eyes. There is more mettle—and more good—in him than I had taken him for.

“I fear there is an even greater risk of assassination,” he murmurs, as the coachman attempts to extricate us from the mob. For the next eight miles, all the way into Paris, the grenadiers will ride on either side of the berline.

We have been instructed to keep the curtains open so that the royal family may be on display, every expression on our exhausted, beleaguered, unwashed faces read and discussed by a disgruntled populace that detests us.

We do not take the most direct route into the capital, but circle the northern outskirts, finally entering Paris via the Champs-Élysées. Here, the crowd that lines the
rue
is frighteningly silent. Every man keeps his hat most insolently planted on his head. “They have been instructed not to remove them, on pain of punishment,” Barnave whispers to me.

Soldiers from the National Guard flank the route, their muskets upturned, in the manner of funeral processions. The berline lumbers along the street at such a protracted pace that I can easily read the placards and handbills plastered to the walls. WHOEVER APPLAUDS THE KING WILL BE BEATEN. WHOEVER INSULTS HIM WILL BE HANGED.

But is not this dreadful silence insult enough? As we near the Tuileries Palace, the only cries we hear are
Vive la Nation!
Frightened by the spectacle, the dauphin, nestled in my lap, begins to cry. I bury my face in his hair so that I do not have to meet our subjects’ angry, mocking faces.

It is eight in the evening by the time we arrive at the palace. As
we approach the gates I spy a familiar silhouette: His expression radiant as a conqueror, Lafayette awaits us, accompanied by two noblemen who are now adherents to his democratic ideals, his brother-in-law the vicomte de Noailles, and the son of the toadlike duc d’Aiguillon, one of my old enemies during my days as dauphine. I shudder to think of their fathers’ mortification—two courtiers who lived and breathed for every nuance of the Bourbons’ rigidly prescribed etiquette.

The courtyard is thronged with citizens. Our family must run the gauntlet past them into the palace. But I fear they wish us all ill. Those who have accompanied us back to Paris may be misperceived by the rabble as royalist collaborators. “Save our bodyguard before everything, Monsieur de Lafayette,” I urge the
général
. “They have done nothing but obey your orders.”

We are surrounded on all sides and the grenadiers use their sabers to ward off the crowd so that we may quit our carriage. The folding steps are unfurled and Louis descends first. He is exhausted, his face and clothes streaked with perspiration and grit, but otherwise, he manages to assume the air of a man who has just returned from a particularly grueling hunt.

That is what makes a king
, I think, just as a deputy from the National Assembly is shouted down by the crowd for daring to insult the sovereign. What a mad world we live in when I cannot be sure what anyone’s opinion is from one moment to the next!

To my immense relief, the children are welcomed with good cheer and hastily ushered inside the palace. It is a long walk for the dauphin, however, and when one of the deputies scoops my son into his arms, I panic that he is being abducted and rush after them.

But a mob follows me through the courtyard, raining curses upon my head, blaming
me
for our ill-starred flight. The public warnings to neither cheer nor denigrate the monarch applied to the
king, not to
me
. One woman manages to seize my shawl, pulling me up short. A band of men, every face menacing, surrounds me. Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye I spy a flash of steel. The duc d’Aiguillon’s son has drawn his sword. With a
swish
of his blade he draws a wide swath across his body which frightens the rabble enough to keep them at bay. Satisfied they will no longer try to harm me, like a cavalier of old he sweeps me into his arms and carries me across the entire breadth of the courtyard and up the steps into the palace.

I thank him for his chivalry, then make my way to my apartments, where my first desire is to take a bath. On the Great Staircase I encounter Barnave speaking to Louis, and manage a feeble jest from ultimate royalist to confirmed revolutionary. “I confess, monsieur, I had never expected to spend three days confined in a carriage with you.” The smile I give him is the last one that may ever cross my lips.

I ask Madame Campan to see that a tub is prepared, filled with lavender and bergamot, and for the next half hour I cleanse myself of the filth and sweat of four days on the road. It took three times as long to return to our gilded prison as it did to flee it.

Now, what?
I wonder, as I stare at my reflection in a glass for the first time since our departure. I tug the dirty cotton cap off my head and my mouth gapes in horror at the sight. A loose curl tumbles over my shoulder. Shocked, I slowly raise my hand to touch it. Then, pin by pin, I dismantle my coiffure until I am crowned by a mane of white hair.

I remove a pair of golden shears from my toiletry case and snip off a single lock. That evening before retiring, I enclose the curl inside a letter to my beloved princesse de Lamballe.
“Blanchis par malheur,”
I tell her. “Turned white from misfortune.”

SEVENTEEN

Entrances and Exits

S
UMMER 1791

Mon coeur
,

I exist. How frightfully anxious I have been about you and how I pity you, knowing how much you must suffer, not having heard a word from me until now. Since our return our every move is watched and noted. Sentries are posted in every corridor, inside every room, and at every door. They even enter my bedchamber once a night to make sure I have not fled again. My privacy is a thing of the past; the door must remain open.

Four officers follow me from room to room and announce “the Queen” at each door, even when I go to visit my son. The dauphin had
un cauchemar
on our first night back from Varennes. He dreamt that he was surrounded by tigers and wolves and other wild beasts who threatened to devour him.

Our minders have even pitched tents in the courtyard. But you must not write to me, for that would only endanger us, and above all do not try to visit because the National Assembly has us guarded day and night. They know that it was you who spirited us out of here and you would be utterly lost if you were to appear; the Assembly has already recast our flight as an “abduction,” absolving the king of any culpatory conduct.

I beg of you not to worry about me; the Assembly wishes to treat us leniently. Louis has promised not only to remain in Paris, but to countenance the Constitution. I shall not be able to write to you again.

Will Heaven permit this letter to reach you?

~Antoinette

I hold the spoon of red wax over the flame and seal the letter to Axel. Madame de Campan will see that it is posted to the Swedish embassy in Brussels.

But I cannot keep my own word and the following day I risk sending another missive to Count von Fersen.

Tell me you are safe. I cannot sleep at night without the answer I crave. Write to me in cipher with your address, for I cannot live without writing to you and I despair over who might open our correspondence at the embassy. I can only tell you that I love you, though really I have not even time for that. I am well. Do not be uneasy about me.

Adieu, most loved and loving of men. All my heart goes out to you.

Antoine Barnave has become my secret tutor in revolutionary matters. I had been genuinely impressed by the intelligence of this handsome young man as we grew to know each other during the
hot and dusty ride home from Varennes. And I discovered, too, that a few well-chosen words of flattery could turn the head of a committed revolutionary idealist as much as that of any other man, when my pious
belle-soeur
Madame Élisabeth, offered a spirited defense of her brother even as she endeavored to bend the deputy’s mind to royalist ways. “You are too wise, Monsieur Barnave, not to appreciate the love the king has for his people and his genuine desire to make them happy. He has always felt this way. And as for the ‘liberty’ which you profess to love to such an extreme, you have not taken into account the disorder that comes in its wake. I was just a child when the queen of Denmark and her lover seized the reins of power from King Christian. They instituted all manner of freedoms. However, Monsieur Barnave, Caroline Mathilde and Herr Struensee could not control the demons they unleashed when a free society was at liberty to roundly criticize the architects of their newfound liberty.”

Barnave had been listening to the princesse Élisabeth, but he had been watching me. He saw that I was no monster. And I saw that he was no zealot.

I had no idea how many revolutionary factions there are; when Barnave visits me at the Tuileries a few days after the royal family’s return he explains the distinctions between them, and, like the dear abbé Vermond of my youth, catechizes me on the names and affinities of each of the deputies and their adherents so that I learn whose views are moderate, who may secretly be royalists, and who are so radical that none of their colleagues is a fervent enough anti-monarchist. Those who are members of the two prominent political clubs: the Jacobins, that includes Pétion de Villeneuve’s protégé Maximilien Robespierre; and the Cordeliers, such as the scientist Jean-Paul Marat, the stammering journalist Camille Desmoulins, and the lawyer Georges Danton—who in innocent, happier days
walked
across the kingdom to attend my husband’s coronation—are
calling for the king to be deposed or tried like a criminal. Robespierre has declared himself to be neither monarchist nor republican, and Pétion himself had told me that the notion of a republic was largely unpopular; but many others, Barnave informs me, are indeed calling for a republic, modeled on the democracy of the infant United States. I cannot hear America mentioned without recalling that the former English colonists would not have gained their political freedom without French soldiers, sailors, and sous.