Confessions of Marie Antoinette (51 page)

The lawyer looks stricken. “Your trial is scheduled to commence
tomorrow morning. And with regard to every one of these allegations there are sheaves of papers, mountains to be sorted and reviewed in order for me and my colleague, Tronson Docoudray, to mount your defense. Monsieur Docoudray is also a Parisian
avocat
, very well respected, but to prepare our case overnight is a Herculean task. There are so many different charges to refute and these documents—it would take weeks just to sift through them.” Chauveau-Lagarde rakes his hand through his lightly powdered brown hair. “I urge you, madame, to demand an adjournment of three days. It would give me the bare minimum of time I will need to comb through all the documents and exhibits and prepare an adequate speech on your behalf.”

“To whom would I make such a request?”

“To the Convention.”

“No, never!” This I cannot do. These men already hold all the cards; I will not grovel before them.

“It must not be a point of pride, madame.” He watches me struggling with my conscience. “If not for your own sake, then you must think of your son and daughter.”

It has not taken him long to find my Achilles’ heel. I am not permitted quill and ink but my advocate carries a portable writing desk, and so I put pen to paper, saying that I owe it to my children to allow my attorneys, who received their assignment only hours ago, to do everything in their power to justify their mother’s conduct.

The appeal is delivered to Robespierre. But in the event that no reply is forthcoming, my defenders continue to prepare my case all through the night. It is fortunate for me that they have done so, for indeed, my plea goes unanswered; and at eight in the morning on the fourteenth of October, I am returned to the Grand Chambre.

Rosalie had helped me dress in the long black mourning gown that Mademoiselle Bertin had made for me, so lovingly patched by Madame Larivière. My white locks were tucked beneath a freshly starched white linen cap, over which Rosalie affixed my black crepe mourning veil. “You are so pale, madame,” she murmured.

“I am bleeding quite a lot this morning.” I confided. “For the past four days it has not stopped.”

“Do you need more strips? I can rip up another chemise.” She lowered her voice even further. “You do not know how long they will keep you and even though your gown and petticoat are black, you do not wish of course, to have”—she lowered her gaze and blushed—“any accidents.” I could see she was mortified to discuss something so intimate, so humiliating, with the former Queen of France.

“How much time do I have? They took my watch, you know.”

“I will be quick,” she assured me.

And so my purse was stuffed with the sacrifice of Rosalie’s own garments, to render me the slightest bit more comfortable during what was certain to be the most excruciating day of my life since the death of my husband.

I am escorted into the Grand Chambre by my two defenders. Chauveau-Lagarde wears a royal blue coat. Tronson’s coat is green. I wonder whether their sartorial choices were made consciously; the blue is obvious, but green has become the color of counterrevolution.

The five judges and dozen members of the jury are dwarfed by the majesty of the room with its gilded Gothic vaulting. The revolutionaries have not bothered to paint over the gold fleurs-de-lis on the red and blue columns. Much of the décor is obscured, however, by the enormous crowd seated shoulder to shoulder, completely filling the two galleries of benches. I have never seen so many
bonnets rouge
in one room. The
tricoteuses
barely have room to spread their elbows; do they expect to knit throughout my trial the way they do during a full day of executions in the Place de la Révolution? A plain wooden balustrade is all that separates the area delineated for the trial from the lowest row of the gallery.

I am conducted to the witness seat, a hard wooden armchair. Louis had been permitted an upholstered chair with padded arms during his trial. I am keenly aware of the distinctions between the treatment they afforded to my husband (inasmuch as the perpetrators of the Revolution sought to eliminate him as the embodiment of the monarchy they believed had for centuries enslaved the people of France), and to me, whom they consider the scourge of the nation.

Monsieur Chauveau-Lagarde hands me a slip of paper upon which he has written the professions of the jurors, men of the people, just as they are in the American system of justice. A jury of one’s peers, they call it in that new nation. Yet the members of this panel are hardly the social equals of an archduchess of Austria and queen of France. I glance at the paper while Fouquier-Tinville, the Public Prosecutor, reads the indictment. To a man, including the marquis d’Antonelle, a former representative in the Legislative Assembly and an early supporter of the Revolution, every juror is a devoted follower of Fouquier-Tinville and Robespierre. The other eleven jurors are comprised of members of the bourgeoisie as well as the laboring class: a surgeon, a bookseller, a wigmaker, a clog-maker, the proprietor of a café, a hatter, an auctioneer, a carpenter, a former prosecutor, and a journalist. In scanning the Grand Chambre for a friendly face, I am disappointed. I do spy a familiar one, however: the young sculptress who came to gawk at me in the Conciergerie. She peers at me intently as if she wants to draw my portrait.

I pocket the scrap of paper bearing the jurors’ names. Pince-nez
perched on his long hooked nose, Fouquier-Tinville is still reading the indictment. I sit rigidly, my expression impassive, while the charges against me, ludicrous and insidious, are announced to a bloodthirsty crowd. I catch Chauveau-Lagarde casting a surreptitious glance at my right hand and I realize I have been absentmindedly running my fingers along the arm of the chair like it was the keyboard of a
clavecin
.

A hush falls over the hall as Nicolas Hermann, the examining magistrate, opens the interrogation. “Will the accused state her name, age, and occupation.”

I speak clearly, but not loudly, and without emotion. I am cold and my lips are dry and chapped. “I was Maria Antonia of Austria and Lorraine, called Marie Antoinette when I came to France to wed. I am the widow of the former King of the French, the man you call Louis Capet. I am at present thirty-seven years old.” Dare I hope that they will allow me to awaken on the morning of my thirty-eighth birthday on the second of November?

But before any more questions are put to me, the prosecution begins to present its case. Chauveau-Lagarde informs me that they intend to present forty-one witnesses against me and one by one we will have the opportunity to rebut their testimony. The interrogations and cross-examinations will undoubtedly last for hours. I can feel how heavily I am bleeding and am aware how weak and pale the loss of blood makes me, but I am determined not to appear frail or sickly during the trial. It is a Hapsburg, a Bourbon, who is in the defendant’s chair, and at all costs I will maintain my dignity.

If it is some consolation to my defense, Fouquier-Tinville’s case is surprisingly disorganized, with no regard to chronology, and his witnesses, who have not been vetted for credibility, testify to all sorts of nonsense, from hearsay at best, to utter fictions.

They depose a former serving maid from Versailles named Reine (“queen,” of all things!) Milliot, a girl I barely remember,
who tells the jurors that in 1788 she heard the duc de Coigny tell someone else—whose name she cannot recall—that I had sent my brother, the emperor Joseph, two hundred million louis. Two more witnesses swear under oath that they saw remittances for the money.

“When and where did you see them?” challenges Chauveau-Lagarde. Each witness mumbles that they cannot remember. My defender then demands that the remittances themselves or other tangible proofs be produced, to which Fouquier-Tinville admits that the prosecution has no such documents in its possession, nor, in reply to my advocate’s next question, knows of any.

The Public Prosecutor then asks me directly, “Since your marriage, has it not been one of your chief aims to reunite Lorraine—which has been in the possession of France since before you were born—with Austria?”

“No, monsieur, it has not.”

“But you are
Marie Antoinette d’Autriche-Lorraine
,” Fouquier-Tinville says emphatically, as if I don’t know my own name.

Does the man know nothing about royalty? “Because, monsieur,” I say patiently, “one has to bear the name of one’s country.”

Another lackey, a man I have never before seen, testifies that before the Revolution began, during the late 1780s, I carried a pair of pistols night and day with the intention of murdering the duc d’Orléans.

Fouquier-Tinville then commences a line of questioning about my purported extravagances. “Where did the money come from to build and furnish le Petit Trianon, the place where you hosted such lavish parties and where you played the goddess?”

“I did not build le Petit Trianon, monsieur. It was built by my husband’s predecessor, King Louis Quinze, when I was a little girl, long before I came to France.”

“But
you
spent massive amounts to renovate it,” he sneers. “Where did you get that money?”

I notice the juror who I have decided must be the journalist scribbling down my answers in a little notebook. “The money came from a separate fund that was set aside for that purpose alone.”

“It must have been quite a large fund, then, because the renovations for your little pleasure palace were both costly and extensive.”

“I agree with you, Monsieur Fouquier-Tinville.” The room inhales a collective gasp. “
C’est possible
that the Trianon cost immense sums—more than I would have wished. The expenditures were made incrementally. And no one would be more pleased than I to see the matter of the overages clarified and cleared up.”

Out of the corner of my eye I see a glimmer of a smile on one or two of the jurors’ faces. Or perhaps, buoyed by hope, I only imagine it. Nonetheless, the truth is on my side; all I need to do is utter it. If I do not dissemble, the Public Prosecutor cannot unsettle me. The calmer I remain, confident in honesty, the more frustrated Fouquier-Tinville becomes, conflating the allegations against me into a foul bouillabaisse.

“Is it not at le Petit Trianon where you first met the comtesse de Lamotte-Valois and where you subsequently trysted with her?”

“I never in my life met the Lamotte woman, monsieur.”

“Wasn’t she your unwitting victim in the notorious
affaire du collier
?”

“She could not have been, because I never met her.”

“You
persist
upon denying that you knew her, madame?”

“I am not persisting upon denying anything,
monsieur le procureur
. I am only persisting upon speaking the truth.”

Fouquier-Tinville gets nowhere with the charge that I wrote and publicized the comtesse’s memoirs. I can see that the jurors do
not believe him. Nor has he any tangible proofs of such an allegation; and the same holds true for the charge that I was responsible for writing, publishing, and disseminating the thousands upon thousands of
libelles
that slandered me for so many years. The people may believe the pamphlets themselves, but they are not quite so foolish as to think that I
wrote
them.

The day drags on. Owing to the vast crowd in the Great Hall and the lack of ventilation, I grow hot and thirsty; finally Tronson, my other defender, requests a glass of lemon water for me. Today is the Feast of Saint Theresa, the name day of both my mother and my daughter, and as such it is a day of fasting for me, but the court takes a brief recess during the mid-afternoon so the jurors can eat dinner. When I was a girl, the day was given over to celebrating and rejoicing. What would Maman think to see me now? And what of my poor, innocent Mousseline?

When the trial resumes, more witnesses are brought forward. They attest to vast sums I am alleged to have paid to the duchesse de Polignac and her family, including the furnishing of vouchers that enabled her to draw upon the Civil List, which is funded by the people’s taxes. Under oath I state that I have had no correspondence with Madame de Polignac since my imprisonment. In reply to the questions of the examining magistrate, Citoyen Hermann, I clarify that “the wealth amassed by the Polignacs was due to the positions they held at court. Should not people be paid a salary for the work they do?”

Yet another witness, François Tisset, maintains that he had seen my signature on vouchers authorizing sums to Gabrielle de Polignac for as much as 80,000 livres, as well as vouchers signed by the king for payments to various ministers.

“What was the date on those documents?” Chauveau-Lagarde asks Tisset.

“August the tenth, 1792,” the man replies confidently, smirking at the jurors. I realize I am holding my breath to avoid revealing my anger.

“All of them were dated August tenth, 1792?” my defender inquires.

“One was,” Tisset amends. “I do not recall the other dates.”

Chauveau-Largarde turns to me for a rebuttal. “I could hardly have dated anything on the tenth of August, 1792, nor could my husband, because that was the date the Tuileries was attacked and that morning we were taken into the protection of the National Assembly and incarcerated in the reporters’ box behind the Great Hall for the remainder of the day. From there we were taken to the Couvent des Feuillants.”