Marie Antoinette (63 page)

In the end, after many voting complications, the death penalty was passed on 16 January 1793 by a narrow majority. The newly named Philippe Égalité, Louis’ cousin and his closest adult male relative in France, was among those who voted for execution. In his own words Philippe Égalité was “convinced that all who have attacked or will attack the sovereignty of the people deserve death.” When Louis was told of the verdict on the following day, it was the behaviour of his cousin that visibly pained him. His suffering was understandable. Even Orléans’ own set was horrified by the vote, people weeping at his “dishonour” and his own ADC throwing his uniform in the fire.

There was still a question of a reprieve but that was rejected by a majority of seventy. It was not until 2 p.m. on Sunday, 20 January, that the former King was told that he was going to be put to death the following day, by the swift, humane guillotine. Louis asked for three days in which to prepare himself spiritually. This was denied him although a non-juror priest of Irish ancestry, the Abbé Edgeworth de Firmin, was admitted to the Tower. Otherwise Louis consoled himself with reading the account of the execution of Charles I. That evening it was the voices of the criers beneath the Tower that told the Queen and the rest of the royal family the fearful news. At this point the Convention relented. The family was allowed down to the King’s apartments at seven o’clock.

It was a piteous scene. They had not seen Louis XVI for six weeks and Marie Thérèse found her father “much changed.” But when Louis wept, it was not from fear, but for the sadness of parting from them and the tragedy of the situation into which he must perforce abandon them. Accepting his fate, Louis had asked the Convention to arrange for his family to be retired from the Tower “to a place it thinks proper.” But who knew when that would be achieved and what that place might be? Nevertheless the King urged on his son the need to forgive the enemies who were about to cause his death, and he gave his children his final blessing.

Marie Antoinette begged for them all to spend the night, this last night, together. Louis refused. He had much to do to prepare himself and needed peace. The scene as described by Cléry was heart-rending. The Queen huddled against the King, holding Louis Charles. The little boy clutched both his parents’ hands tight, kissing them and crying. Elisabeth too clung to her brother. Marie Thérèse shrieked aloud.

In the end Louis only persuaded his family to leave by promising to see them again the next morning for a final farewell. “I am not saying goodbye,” he said. “Be sure that I shall see you again at eight o’clock tomorrow morning.”

“Why not seven o’clock?” pursued the Queen.

“Seven o’clock then.”

“Do you promise?” cried the Queen.

“I promise,” replied the King. He tore himself away and went into his bedroom. The sobs of the departing children reached Cléry through the walls.

But Louis did not—could not—bring himself to keep his word. The three women lay sleepless upstairs, Marie Antoinette hardly having the strength to put her son to bed. But the man who came to see them at six o’clock the next morning wanted to fetch a prayer book, not conduct them to the King. There was an extraordinary silence over the city that morning, explained by the fact that the main gates had been locked and the usual bustle was therefore stilled. It was the sound of drumming shortly before half past ten, followed by loud “shouts of joy” from the frantic spectators, that told the listeners in the Tower that the King was dead.

Marie Antoinette could not speak. She was imprisoned in her own silent world of agony. But Elisabeth broke out, amid the piercing cries of the children: “The monsters! They are satisfied now.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

UNFORTUNATE PRINCESS

“Unfortunate Princess! My marriage promised her a throne; now, what prospect does it offer her?”

L
OUIS
XVI
ON THE EVE OF HIS DEATH
, 1793

From the moment of the King’s death onwards, Marie Antoinette remained bowed down with a grief that went too deep for words. It seems, according to the sympathetic Commissioner Lep"tre, that she had still had some hope of a reprieve for him; instead, they had “let the best of Kings” perish. “The Widow Capet” was now her official designation, varied more crudely with “the woman Capet” and the frankly contemptuous “Antoinette”; the traditional Habsburg prefix in honour of the Virgin Mary was not for revolutionaries.

The widow’s first wish was to see Cléry, who had attended Louis XVI’s last hours in the Temple and who might therefore be expected to bear some message from him to the stricken family. Madame Elisabeth and Marie Thérèse also privately believed that the shock of the encounter might provoke “a burst of sorrow” that would relieve the Queen from her state of silent, suppressed agony. In fact, Cléry had more than messages; he also had the King’s gold wedding ring, engraved
M.A.A.A. 19 Aprilis 1770
(for Marie Antoinette Archduchess of Austria, the date being that of the proxy wedding in Vienna). Louis had told Cléry to say that he only parted with it with his life. Then there was a little parcel containing locks of his family’s hair, “so precious to him” that the King had preserved them with great care in a silver seal that broke into three parts.

Permission for the visit was, however, refused. After a few weeks the faithful servant was released from the Temple without either giving or receiving the consolation of a visit. He left the keepsakes behind him in the Tower, sealed up. Nevertheless they reached the royal family in the course of time by a circuitous route. One of those responsible for the prisoners, François Adrian Toulan, a Jacobin from Toulouse in his early thirties, had been won over to their cause by the spectacle of their plight; Marie Antoinette, with her love of nicknames, called him “Fidèle.” It was Toulan who daringly broke open the seals and conveyed the keepsakes to their proper destination, leaving the municipal officers to think that a thief had been attracted to the royal arms on the silver.

Marie Antoinette’s other request met with more immediate success. She wanted suitable mourning clothes to which, as the widow of a King of France, she attached much symbolic importance; she could at least make this appropriate sign of respect for her late husband as she would have done during the previous regime. Marie Antoinette asked for a black taffeta cloak, fichu, skirt and gloves, all to be made up in “the simplest possible way,” as she told the municipal officer Goret; and she supplied the name and address of the right person. This was agreed although a request for black curtains and a black coverlet was refused. A dressmaker, Mademoiselle Pion, was allowed to come to the Temple and fit the mourning, also for the other ladies, over two days. A municipal officer had to be present at all times as she worked, but Louis Charles sprang about and with his childish play provided cover for some conversation.

Otherwise the widow could not eat and would not even take the air because the route to the gardens meant passing the King’s door. Seeing her pitiable state, her pallor and her emaciation, Goret remonstrated with Marie Antoinette in a kindly way on her duties to her children. He also arranged for seats in the circular gallery of the Tower so that Marie Antoinette could get some fresh air without making that traumatic journey. Nevertheless Marie Antoinette’s condition was summed up by her daughter: “She no longer had any hope left in her heart or distinguished between life and death; sometimes she looked at us with a kind of compassion which was quite frightening.” In the midst of her own suffering, Marie Thérèse was even relieved to have to report a cut foot on 25 January because it gave her mother the need to care for her. Rejecting the prison doctor, Marie Antoinette managed to secure Brunier, the established doctor to the Children of France, along with the surgeon La Caze. After a month the girl was cured.

This explicit description of Marie Antoinette’s original near-catatonic state by her daughter makes it unlikely that the Queen ceremonially hailed her son as King Louis XVII immediately on the morning of his father’s death. Marie Thérèse, the prime witness, does not mention it.
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Goret and Turgy, whose recollections were published after the Restoration in a newly joyful royalist atmosphere, referred more plausibly to Louis Charles being given in time “the rank and the pre-eminence which the King had had” and his sitting on a special seat with a cushion and table—although that of course may have been due to his small size. Open recognition of the boy as King would have been an astonishingly dangerous act on his behalf by Marie Antoinette on 21 January 1793 in a country where the monarchy had been abolished and his father had just been killed.

The title of Louis XVII, “the little King,” was of course accepted instantly abroad in royalist circles. At the same time the Comte de Provence seized the opportunity for which he had long been angling. This was the moment, as he saw it, to proclaim himself unilaterally as Regent of France for his seven-year-old nephew. He did so “by right of birth” and according to the fundamental laws of the kingdom. Nevertheless the move aroused angry controversy. Some of the émigrés were shocked and the Austrians similarly frowned on it, believing that the claim neglected the superior one of Marie Antoinette, whatever her current situation. Other foreign powers followed Austria’s lead in refusing to recognize his new status. Count Mercy d’Argenteau was certainly quick to point out that the new Regent’s rights were in fact much less well founded than those of Marie Antoinette. It was, after all, only the Civil Constitution of 1791 (now suspended) that had divided the roles of Regent and Guardian; the ancient practice of France would have united them both in the person of the Queen Mother.

Ironically enough, existence in the Tower actually grew easier now that Louis was dead. “The fury of the regicides was assuaged for the moment,” wrote Turgy. The municipal officers gave up their frequent visits, conversation among the Princesses was unsupervised, and they were able to give Turgy orders without indulging in subterfuge. Via Turgy, Hüe managed once more to contact them. The truth was that the guards at least believed that their prisoners would soon be exchanged with Austria for prominent French captives and so were correspondingly gentle.

Lep"tre gives an account of a musical evening on 7 February in which the “young King” sang a lament on the death of his father, called “La Piété Familiale,” for which Lep"tre provided the simple words and Madame Cléry, an accomplished musician, composed the music. The municipal officers listened in silence, tears in their eyes, to the boy’s voice accompanied by his sister on the harpsichord:

Tout est fini pour moi sur la terre

Mais je suis auprès de ma mère.

(Everything is fled from me on earth

But I am still at my mother’s side.)

To his aunt Louis Charles also addressed a verse saluting her as his second mother.

Such Temple servants as the Simons, husband and wife, were, at this juncture, no more than uncouth. Antoine Simon, a prominent member of the Commune, was despatched to be a general factotum at the Temple. A brusque uneducated cobbler whose business had failed, Simon was in his fifties, heavily built and already rather deaf. But the Municipal Goret bore witness that Simon took some trouble to fulfil the wants of the royal ladies, going from one to the other in his deliberate way: “What is it that you need, Madame?” His wife Marie Jeanne, a cleaning woman, was no more cultivated, but she did have nursing skills, having gained prominence on 10 August by the “rush of patriotism” with which she attended to the wounded.

Goret overheard the Queen saying: “We are very happy with our good Monsieur Simon who gets us whatever we ask for,” and this must have been at least partially true in early 1793. Marie Antoinette had, of course, a tradition of gracious behaviour towards her servants and the manners of the former regime did not die away so easily. In the high summer Madame Tison, always highly strung, would break down altogether, weeping and screaming and accusing herself of dreadful crimes towards the Queen and Madame Elisabeth. Needing eight men to hold her down, Madame Tison was carted off to the hospital, the Hôtel Dieu. Even then, at a time of great personal unhappiness, Marie Antoinette continued to send messages of enquiry about the welfare of “poor Madame Tison.”

As to the Queen’s future, an exchange of prisoners was a practice with a historical precedent. So was the reclamation of foreign princesses by their native country. In December, Count Mercy had recalled the case of the English Princess Caroline Matilda, divorced by the Danish King for adultery, who was reclaimed by her brother George III. For a short while Mercy played with the idea. Fearing for Marie Antoinette’s assassination either in public or private, he believed that “her august family” should apply to retrieve the former Archduchess of Austria from “the vile brigands.” There was, after all, that marriage contract, which Mercy had investigated as long ago as October 1789, giving her the right to stay or go after her husband’s death. But by 2 February 1793, Mercy had relapsed into the view that “we should remain passive in this horrible crisis,” for fear of making things worse, as he told the Comte de La Marck.

Certainly there was no foregone conclusion about the fate of Marie Antoinette. There was no tradition of queen consorts, the weaker royal vessels, being tried and executed in history, whatever the tribulations of their male counterparts. (Mary Queen of Scots, executed in the late sixteenth century, was a queen in her own right.) The extremist Stanislas Fréron, a member of the “Mountain” and editor of the outrageous
L’Orateur du Peuple
, had suggested before Louis’ death that Antoinette should be dragged through the streets of Paris at the tail of a galloping horse, the fate of the seventh-century Brunhilde at the orders of the Frankish King. Or perhaps she should be torn to pieces by dogs like Jezebel? Such suggestions belonged to the culture of demagogic violence rather than political statesmanship. At the end of January, Fersen, harrowed by reports of the Queen’s “much altered” physical state, held a conference with Quentin Craufurd, the Comte de La Marck and the veteran Russian Minister Jean Simolin, a keen admirer of the royal family. Should not the Emperor Francis II be persuaded to seek his aunt’s release “as a private individual”? In the end they held back for fear of provoking the Queen’s trial. But by 9 February these apprehensions appeared to be groundless: “I am beginning to hope a little,” Fersen wrote.

So what did the “villains” propose to do with their widowed captive? In one of his final conversations with his counsel Malesherbes, Louis XVI had pondered aloud on the same problem: “Unfortunate Princess! My marriage promised her a throne; now, what prospect does it offer her?” There had been frequent rumours that Marie Antoinette would be put on trial ever since the return from Varennes; for example, the English royal family heard that “the poor unhappy Queen” rather than Louis XVI was in danger of death from “that tiger nation,” and Earl Gower, the departing English ambassador, reported that the Queen would “immediately be tried” after the attack on the prisons of 2 September. But these gloomy predictions had not been carried out.

During the trial of Louis XVI, Robespierre had invoked Marie Antoinette’s name only to make the point that she had no special status: “As for his [Louis’] wife, you will send her before the courts, like all other persons charged with similar crimes.” Jean Baptiste Mailhe, a lawyer from Toulouse and part of the more moderate “Plain” group in the Convention, as opposed to the radical “Mountain,” put across the same point: “Of Antoinette we have said nothing.” The
ci-devant
(former) Queen of France was no more sacred or inviolable than any other rebel or conspirator, and if there was a case to be made against her, it must be sent to an ordinary tribunal. Of this process, however, in the tense weeks following the King’s execution, there was no sign. Meanwhile it was relevant that one of the options considered at length during Louis’ trial had been banishment, including Paine’s enterprising suggestion of exile to the United States. “The banishment of all the Bourbons” was a revolutionary proposal, the reclamation of the former Archduchess a dynastic one, but they amounted to the same practical step: the departure of Marie Antoinette from France.

In short, there seemed a real possibility that this humane procedure would take place. When Louis XVI, shortly before his death, had asked what would happen to those he left behind, he was told, reassuringly, that “the nation, always great and always just” would concern itself with the future of his family. In the first week of February, Claude Antoine Moëlle, a member of the Paris Commune who was one of the Temple’s commissioners, escorted Marie Antoinette up to her airing at the top of the Tower. She took the opportunity to ask him what the Convention intended to do with her. She would probably be reclaimed by the Emperor her nephew, replied Moëlle: “any new excess”—he meant her death—would be “a gratuitous horror” and contrary to policy. The execution of the King had provided the Convention with closure in its need for purging bloodshed. This conversation, at which Marie Thérèse was also present, allowed for hopes to rise, not only that there would be no trial but that the Queen would be freed.