Marie Antoinette (49 page)

A debate on the Regency took place in the National Assembly on 22 March, in the wake of the King’s serious illness. Women, including of course the boy’s mother, were specifically excluded, with cries at one point of “Males only!” Yet it was notable that Marie Antoinette was not eliminated altogether from the care of her son in these circumstances; if the possibility of the Regency was stripped from her in the new Constitution, she was still envisaged as his Guardian, given the strength of the mother’s traditional role. The boy’s closest male relative was in fact to be chosen—but only so long as he was still in France, and provided he was not the heir to another throne. The former provision excluded Artois (but not, for the time being, Provence) while the latter carefully ruled out Louis Charles’s Austrian relatives. The order of regency would therefore be: Provence, then Orléans . . . and after that a Regent was to be elected.

These dark clouds gathering over the head of her son did not convince Marie Antoinette to change her mind and escape with Louis Charles alone. As she told Comte Louis de Bouillé, the royal family had sworn to stay together after the events of 6 October and she intended to honour that promise. This was a woman who was fully capable of courage; ruthlessness was another matter.

The commissioning of a large and durable travelling coach, a
berline de voyage
, on 22 December 1790 was a significant moment in the Queen’s escape plans. The berlin stood for several things. One was the large size of the party to which Marie Antoinette was inexorably committed, for it could transport six adults inside. Another was the intimate participation of Count Fersen in all the practical details. Ostensibly the berlin was commissioned by one of Fersen’s friends, the Franco-Russian “Baronne de Korff,” in order to travel to Russia—one of those endless trans-European journeys common at the time among a cosmopolitan aristocracy with which Fersen himself was so familiar. In fact the man who paid the 5000-odd livres for the berlin was Fersen himself. At all events, this was a carriage “unknown” to belong to the King and Queen, whose official carriages were highly recognizable.

Afterwards, the nature of the coach, apparently both cumbersome and awesomely opulent, was the subject of much ill-informed comment; it was seen as some kind of doomed symbol. But there was in fact “nothing extraordinary” about it, in the words of the Marquise de Tourzel, given the purpose for which it was designed: a long, long traverse of roads that would at best be unreliable. Such a berlin, apart from being well sprung, had to be strong, which inevitably made it slow. Sometimes described as bright yellow, the berlin was actually green and black, with a white velvet interior, the only flashes of yellow being on the wheels and undercarriage as was customary at the time.

Hospitality along such a notional route would be quite as unreliable as the roads, so the voyagers would expect to be virtually self-sufficient. In the case of the real journey that was projected, such containment was of course equally vital. So the berlin was to be “a little house on wheels,” with a larder, a cooker for heating meat or soup, a canteen big enough for eight bottles, a table that could be raised for eating, concealed beneath the cushions, as well as leather
pots de chambres
: all “very convenient” as the Governess noted.
^*78
The same practical convenience applied to the Queen’s
nécessaire
, a kind of superior picnic basket made of beautiful smooth walnut with a silver basin, tiny candlesticks and a teapot, which doubled as a dressing-case, whose furnishings included little tortoiseshell picks as well as a mirror. She actually had two made, one going as a blind to Marie Christine in Brussels: “I’ll be delighted if she uses it since I have another just the same for my own use.”
^*79

Such elaborate arrangements underlined another important aspect of the projected journey. If the royal party set out as fugitives, they certainly did not intend to arrive as such. It was as the King and Queen of France, with all the appurtenances of majesty, that Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette intended to disembark. The King’s crown and royal robes were therefore to be included in the baggage. The loyal crowds who were confidently expected to flock to their ill-used sovereign had, after all, to be able to recognize him when they saw him. Where kings were concerned, appearance and ceremony made the monarch. In short, Louis XVI was to remain within the frontiers of France itself.

In Marie Antoinette’s lengthy correspondence throughout the spring, via couriers since she no longer trusted the posts, she was quite as inflexible on this subject as she was over the nature of their joint escape. Precisely what “the Austrian woman” did not actually want was for the King to be seen to flee to Austria or its dominions; these included Belgium and its capital, which already housed many of their supporters. Even if things went badly inside France, Marie Antoinette preferred to head for Switzerland, via Alsace, rather than Austria.

On the other hand, the Queen did expect assistance from her homeland, as she always called it, and many of her letters to Count Mercy, himself in Brussels, concerned her attempts to secure it. What was wanted was a massing of Austrian troops on the north-west frontier. This would in turn give the Marquis de Bouillé at Metz an excuse to move his own troops in order to combat the imperial menace. In reality these troops were intended to act in support of the King when he arrived.

The real trouble with this plan was that Emperor Leopold was not only the brother of the Queen of France but he was also the head of a great power with an ambiguous attitude towards France, alliance or no alliance. As the Comte de La Marck saw for himself, the Emperor was by no means displeased by France’s weakened state, due to its inner turmoils. The requested Austrian troops would cost money to move, and that would need subsidizing: a difficult task for the French King (or in fact the Queen) who were so short of finance. More money had to be borrowed—from bankers in Belgium and from Fersen, Fersen’s mistress Eléanore Sullivan and her protector, Quentin Craufurd.

The real key to the Emperor’s behaviour was expressed by Count Mercy himself in a long and embarrassed letter of 7 March 1791. He told the Queen—who touchingly but unwisely still imagined that he had her best interests at heart—that she should not count on exterior help. Nor should she have any illusions about the general behaviour of great powers who famously “do nothing for nothing.” However humiliating this truth might be, the Queen should try to come to terms with it. She should concentrate on how they might be propitiated—or in other words how they might be bribed to help the royal family. The King of Sardinia, for example, wanted Geneva and the King of France would lose little by supporting this claim. Spain was interested in the territorial limits of Navarre. The German feudal princes with lands in Alsace, anxious about their privileges, could be won over. Although Mercy claimed that the Emperor himself was above all this, he did touch on Austria’s interests with regard to Prussia, which must be borne in mind.

Writing to the Queen himself a few days later, the Emperor was similarly negative as well as circular in argument. The foreign powers could not think of interfering while the King and Queen were not in a state of safety. Although their only method of achieving that state was obviously to flee, the Emperor went on to say that the King and Queen should not be encouraged to do that, since the foreign powers were in no position to help them. Leopold could not even fix a date for an escape while his Austro-Turkish war—a legacy from Joseph II—went on. So the Emperor advised his sister and brother-in-law to wait until such time as they had developed their own resources—or were in pressing danger.

Against this self-interested caution the Queen cried out with increasing desperation. Surely the other powers would help them? It was, after all, “the cause of Kings, not simply a matter of politics.” Furthermore “the cause of Kings” in France received an additional blow with the death of Mirabeau on 2 April. The Jacobins, including their newly elected president Robespierre, were secretly delighted, although the eight-day public mourning, plus a grandiose funeral cortège and a public burial, paid ostentatious tribute to the great man. Mirabeau had at least envisaged the continued need for a sovereign, or, as the Duc de Lévis put it, Mirabeau loved “liberty through emotion, the monarchy through reason and the nobility through vanity.”

On 14 April, still lacking a positive response from Vienna, Marie Antoinette wrote asking whether they could count on Austrian help,
Yes
or
No
? (Her italics.)

It was Louis XVI’s determination to perform his Easter duties at the hands of a non-juror priest that brought about a cathartic resolution to the drama of delay. In spite of the advice of various counsellors to yield to duress, the King could not bring himself to take Communion at the hands of a juror at the parish church of the Tuileries, Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois. He therefore turned to the expedient that had been so successful the previous summer, when it was a question of fresh air rather than spiritual sustenance. He decided to make an expedition to Saint Cloud where, of course, it would be far easier for a non-juror to be slipped in.

Departure was scheduled to take place on the Monday of Easter Week, 18 April. It was now that the ugly consequences of the flight of Mesdames Tantes were seen. Rumours that the King was to follow suit had already led to demonstrations at the Tuileries. In this case, no sooner were the royal party and servants installed in their coaches in the Grand Carrousel courtyard of the palace than the cry went up that the King was trying to escape. A jeering mob surrounded the King’s own carriage, where he sat with his wife, sister and children, and prevented their progress. One courtier, the First Gentleman of the Bedchamber, was beaten, leaving the Dauphin to shout, “Save him! Save him!” before the Queen was able to take her son back inside the Tuileries. Even worse for the future was the fact that the National Guards refused to force the King’s passage. They announced that they too were committed to detaining the King, despite the best efforts of Mayor Bailly and La Fayette, their commander, to dissuade them. So the King sat immobilized for nearly two hours listening to the howls of abuse.

Louis XVI remained outwardly calm, putting his head out of the carriage to remark that it was strange that he who had granted the nation liberty was not allowed it himself. Inwardly, however, the scene, with the mob in control of the guards, left a profound impression on him. Having disembarked, the King celebrated Easter at Saint-Germain and took the Sacrament from “the new curé” who was, of course, a juror. The Queen wore her court dress, garnished with Alençon lace and especially ordered for Easter from Rose Bertin, but at the Tuileries and not at Saint Cloud. She also purchased a length of ribbon
à la nation
(that is, tricoloured) to put in her hat. The
Journal de Paris
gave an emollient version of events: how numerous “citizens” had “pleaded with the King to remain.” The King in his
Journal
put it more succinctly: “They stopped us.” This incident meant that Louis XVI had at last joined his wife in realizing the necessity of escape.

The Queen told Mercy at the beginning of May: “Our situation here is frightful, in a way that those who do not have to endure it cannot hope to understand.” The religious split was emphasized by the fact that an effigy of the Pope was burnt in the gardens of the Palais-Royal. The “pressing danger” that was demanded by the Emperor to justify their flight had arrived. It was only when the King was free to show himself in some “strong city” that the people would, she believed, flock to him in astonishing numbers.

It was now a question as to where that “strong city” might be. Metz was unreliable; although only a few of the officers were said to be “infected,” the whole of the infantry was “detestable” in its revolutionary sympathies, as was the municipality with its local Jacobin Club. Of the various possibilities, Montmédy, thirty-five miles from Metz, near the border of the Habsburg-led Empire (but inside it) and possessed of good communications, was the most popular choice. Montmédy was in Lorraine; hopefully the King’s “faithful Lorrainers” who had been pointed out to him at the Fête de la Fédération by Marie Antoinette would justify their reputation. The troops of the Royal German Regiment at Stenay on the Meuse, ten miles west of Montmédy, between Sedan and Verdun, were also supposed to be reliable.