Confessions of Marie Antoinette (56 page)

After the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy that followed Napoleon’s 1814 exile to Elba, an effort was made to accord the executed monarchs a proper burial. On January 15, 1815, Marie Antoinette’s bones were identified by scraps of her black filoselle stockings and the garters she customarily wore. The following day,
the remains of Louis XVI were found. On January 21 (not-so-ironically the twenty-second anniversary of his execution), the royal spouses’ remains were interred in the crypt at Saint-Denis, the traditional final resting place for France’s monarchs.

Readers might be interested to discover what happened to several of the historical figures in this novel after Marie Antoinette’s execution. Some survived the Revolution; others were not so fortunate.

Madame Royale,
Marie Thérèse
, the sole surviving daughter of Louis and Marie Antoinette, remained incarcerated for another three years, after which she was released in exchange for imprisoned commissaries of the Revolution. She eventually married her first cousin the duc d’Angoulême, the eldest son of Louis’s youngest brother, the comte d’Artois. After their marriage in 1799, the couple, who would always remain childless, moved to Buckinghamshire, England, returning to France only after the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1814, following the enforced abdication of Napoleon. Upon the death in 1824 of her uncle Louis XVIII (the former comte de Provence), her father-in-law Artois became King Charles X of France, which meant that Marie Thérèse was the dauphine. In 1830, during yet another revolution, Charles X abdicated in favor of his eldest son. But Marie Antoinette’s daughter was Queen of France for less than an hour, because her husband was urged to immediately abdicate in favor of his nephew, the duc de Bordeaux. Marie Thérèse spent the remainder of her life in exile, first in Edinburgh, then in Prague, and finally on the outskirts of Vienna. She died of pneumonia in 1851.

Louis Charles
, Marie Antoinette’s only surviving son, who technically became Louis XVII upon the death of his father, died in the Temple prison on or about June 8, 1795, at the age of ten. He had become fat from a poor diet, yet had not grown much taller. His jailers left him to stew in his own filth for weeks on end. His
sister described how his bed had remained unmade for six months, chamber pots went unemptied; and her brother, as well as the room’s meager furnishings, were covered with fleas and other bugs. Because the windows were never permitted to be opened, the stench in the room was unbearable.

For many years after Louis Charles’s death, it was suggested that he had been replaced with a hapless changeling and smuggled out of the Temple. Several young men came forth during the beginning of the nineteenth century to claim that they were the dauphin of France. Marie Thérèse refused to meet any of them. However, the boy’s heart was taken away by the doctor who performed the autopsy on his body, and it finally came to reside in a crystal urn in the Cathedral Saint-Denis in Paris. According to the duc d’Anjou, a representative of the Spanish Bourbon royal line, mitochondrial DNA testing on the organ in 2000 proved conclusively that the DNA sequences were “identical with those of Marie Antoinette, two of her sisters, and two living relatives on the maternal side.”

Madame Élisabeth
was executed on May 10, 1794, the last in a group of twenty-five to be guillotined that day. She was seated on a bench with the other victims, but was placed nearest the scaffold, compelled to witness the executions of the other twenty-four people before it was her turn. It is said that she kept repeating the
De profundis
throughout this ordeal. Unlike the executions of her brother and sister-in-law in 1793, the people did not burst into rousing cheers of
“Vive la Nation!”
after the blade descended. By this time, they were becoming not only desensitized to the carnage of the Terror, but disgusted by it. The execution of the late king’s thirty-year-old sister, a woman with no power or influence of her own, was, to many, an unnecessary afterthought. However, to the Committee of Public Safety Madame Élisabeth nonetheless represented a symbol of the monarchy and as such had to be eliminated.

Axel von Fersen
never ceased blaming himself for the failure of the royal flight to Montmédy in June 1791. Because he had been one of the escape plot’s masterminds and knew more about the plans and the route than anyone else connected with it, with the clearest hindsight he believed that if he had never left their party at Bondy as the king requested, and had instead insisted on remaining on the coachman’s box, the royal family might have safely reached the frontier.

Fersen was in Brussels and did not hear the news of Marie Antoinette’s October 16 execution until October 23. For a long while he felt utterly numb. He would see her face in his mind’s eye. “It follows me wherever I go. Her suffering and death and all my feelings never leave me for a moment. I can think of nothing else.… That she was alone in her last moments with no one to comfort her or talk to her, with no one to whom she could give her last wishes, fills me with horror.”

In the privacy of his diary he compared his devotion to Marie Antoinette to his passion for his longtime mistress Eléanore Sullivan (who was, at the time, the live-in love of a Scotsman named Quentin Craufurd, both of whom helped finance the royal flight that ended at Varennes). “Oh, how I reproach myself for the wrongs I did Her and how deeply I now realize how much I loved Her. What kindness, what sweetness, and tenderness, what a fine and loving, sensitive and delicate heart! The other [Eléanore Sullivan] isn’t like that, although I love her and she is my only comfort and without her I should be very unhappy.” In
Confessions of Marie Antoinette
I chose not to devote any page time to Axel’s romance with Eléanore Sullivan as there was no place for it in my story line. Marie Antoinette, who narrates most of the novel, never seemed to have learned of this relationship, although others knew of it and warned Axel not to flaunt his affair with Eléanore in order to keep the queen in the dark about it.

Axel kept the date of October 16, “this atrocious day,” as a day of mourning for “the model of queens and women.” Marie Antoinette represented an ideal in his heart, and he was flooded with memories of her goodness and sweetness, her tenderness, sensibility, and loving nature. He confided to his sister Sophie that Eléanore Sullivan could never replace Marie Antoinette—
“Elle”
—in his heart, although he eventually asked Eléanore to marry him. But when it came to choosing between Fersen and Craufurd, Eléanore wed the man who for all intents and purposes had been her common-law husband for years, and settled down to a life of so-called respectability.

In the years after Marie Antoinette’s execution, Axel von Fersen was heaped with honors in his homeland. He was created a Knight of the Order of the Seraphim, Grand Marshal of the Court of Sweden, and Chancellor of Uppsala University, and he was made Lieutenant Governor of the kingdom in 1800, 1803, 1808, and 1809. Yet he remained haunted by the events of the failed escape of June 20, 1791, and by the death of the Queen of France, commemorating the tragic anniversaries with heartrending entries in his
Journal intime
.

Seventeen years to the day after the ill-starred flight to Montmédy, Count Axel von Fersen, then Sweden’s highest-ranking official after the king, was torn to pieces by a Swedish mob that believed he had poisoned Crown Prince Christian, the heir to the Danish throne. At Christian’s funeral procession on June 20, 1810, to cries of “Traitor!” and “Murderer!” Fersen was kicked, stomped, and savagely beaten with sticks and stones while a battalion of the royal guard idly stood by. They would later claim that they hadn’t acted because they’d received no orders to stop the attack. Severely battered, Fersen was helped to a nearby house, where he was allowed refuge in a small room. But the building’s second story housed a restaurant whose patrons mercilessly attacked him again,
ripping the ribbon with the Order of the Seraphim from around his neck and tossing it out of the window. A suggestion was made to similarly eject Fersen. Men began to beat him about the head with their walking sticks, and he lay on the floor of the small chamber, bleeding profusely, until General Silfversparre, no friend of his, arrived on the scene and established order. Silfversparre convinced Fersen that his only hope lay in placing himself under arrest and allowing himself to be imprisoned for his own security in Stockholm’s Town Hall.

But the rabble followed Fersen and his escort inside the municipal building and dragged the count back outdoors, where the vicious pummeling continued. The fatal blow was delivered when a young man jumped on his chest, crushing his ribs.

Louis Stanislas Xavier, the
comte de Provence
, who, during the reign of Louis XVI was formally known as Monsieur (the title given to the king’s next youngest brother), moved to the Palais de Luxembourg after the royal family was compelled to leave Versailles on October 6, 1789. But as part of the fateful flight to the frontier of June 20–21, 1791, Monsieur and his wife fled in their own coach for the Austrian Netherlands. They made it safely across the border and remained in exile for twenty-three years. Technically, the comte de Provence succeeded his nephew when Louis Charles died in the Temple in June 1795, becoming Louis XVIII, but at that time, the French Revolution remained in full swing. He was compelled to wait out both the Revolution and the Napoleonic era before the Bourbon monarchy was restored. Provence did return to France in 1814 after Napoleon was exiled to Elba, but had to slip back into exile himself in 1815 when the deposed emperor returned to reclaim his imperial throne.

Louis XVIII finally ascended the French throne on April 11, 1814, and again (after a hiatus due to Napoleon’s return), on July 18, 1815, ruling until September 16, 1824, during an era known as the
Bourbon Restoration; but, for the first time in French history, his was a constitutional monarchy and not an autocratic one. Louis XVIII and his wife Marie Joséphine of Savoy never had children, and on his death the crown passed to the youngest Bourbon brother, Charles Philippe, the
comte d’Artois
.

Artois and his wife Marie Thérèse of Savoy, the younger sister of Provence’s wife, fled France on July 17, 1789, three days after the storming of the Bastille. At the time, Artois was one of the most hated men in the nation. His extravagant lifestyle rivaled Marie Antoinette’s; he had a cavalier attitude toward his staggering debts and was universally caricatured (although it was untrue) as the queen’s lover. During the Revolution, Artois and his wife enjoyed a peripatetic existence. Émigrés had been declared traitors by the National Assembly, their titles forfeit and their lands confiscated. However, Artois eventually landed on both feet in England, where George III awarded him a generous allowance. After Napoleon’s abdication, when the Senate declared Louis XVIII restored to the Bourbon throne, Artois arrived in France ahead of his older brother and acted as his regent, creating a secret-police force that reported directly to him. It was so secret that the king didn’t even know about it! On September 16, 1824, Louis XVIII died and Artois succeeded him, reigning as Charles X. As a monarch he was as unpopular with the people as he had been during his verdant days at Versailles. A revolution during the summer of 1830 left him with no alternative but to abdicate. Another scandal erupted when Charles insisted on bypassing his oldest son the duc d’Angoulême, husband of Marie Antoinette’s daughter Marie Thérèse, in favor of his grandson, the dauphin’s nephew. After relinquishing his throne, Charles resumed his peripatetic ways, moving several times to various locales on the Continent and within the United Kingdom. He died on November 6, 1836.

In August 1792, the
marquis de Lafayette
, who kept shifting
allegiances when the going got tough during the French Revolution, tried to escape to America via the Dutch Republic as the more radical factions gained ascendance. He remained an Austrian prisoner of war for five years. Although Napoleon negotiated his release, Lafayette refused to serve in his government. But as the governmental model shifted to a constitutional one, in 1815 Lafayette was elected to the Chamber of Deputies during the emperor’s Hundred Days and served as a Liberal member of the legislative body during the Bourbon Restoration. During the Revolution of 1830, he was invited to become France’s dictator. He declined, supporting instead Louis Philippe d’Orléans’s bid to become France’s next constitutional monarch.

In Lafayette’s final years he was fêted as a hero in the United States for his contributions to the American War of Independence; and many parks, streets, and monuments still bear his name. Lafayette was made an American citizen during his lifetime (his honorary citizenship was reiterated in 2002), and when he died in May 1834, the soil that comprised his Paris grave came from George Washington’s grave at Mount Vernon.

Antoine Barnave
, the deputy of the Assembly who began as an enemy of Marie Antoinette but became an active sympathizer, was arrested on suspicion of being a clandestine royalist on August 19, 1792. Charged with treason he remained in prison for more than a year and was guillotined on November 29, 1793 at the age of thirty-two.

The vicious Jacobin extremist
“enragé,”
Jacques Hébert
who attacked the Girondins as well as the more moderate voices of the Revolution, had his date with Madame Guillotine on March 24, 1794, as the Revolution continued to eat its own, bringing down the brief Hébertist regime eleven days earlier. One of the first wave of revolutionaries,
Georges Danton
, considered a moderate
“indulgent”
by the time the Terror was in full swing, was denounced by
the more radical factions and went to the guillotine himself on April 5, 1794.

The architects of the bloody Reign of Terror, including
Maximilien Robespierre
and
Louis-Antoine de Saint-Just
, were executed in the Place de la Révolution (now the Place de la Concorde) on July 28, 1794, in an event known as the “coup of 9 Thermidor, year II,” for the date of the uprising, per the new French Republican Calendar.
Antoine Simon
, the former shoemaker assigned to reeducate and care for Marie Antoinette’s son, was also guillotined on July 28. He and his wife had been removed from their jobs at the Temple in January 1794. While many history books depict Simon as an illiterate alcoholic brute (a portrayal I was taught in school as well, just a few decades ago), this characterization has never been conclusively proven and may have been exaggerated in accounts left by royalist sympathizers. In any event, it is true that Simon was no rocket scientist. Nor was he the sort of guy you’d want to entertain for dinner (at least I wouldn’t). But it’s entirely possible that he was not a caricature of an archvillain either.