The Hidden Diary of Marie Antoinette (25 page)

July 18, 1789

All is confusion. People rush from room to room, packing, clutching each other, the women weeping, the men cursing and quarreling. Everyone forgets to eat, sleeps in odd snatches. We are awakened at all hours by ringing bells and firing muskets.

I have lost my battle to convince Louis to leave and go to the eastern fortress of Metz, across the border, where I’m certain we would be safe. Charlot has gone there, on his way to Italy, and so have many others. The foolish ministers want Louis to stay and go to Paris to face the rioters and lawbreakers there who have formed an illegal government.

“If you will not go, sire, at least send your wife and children to safety,” Axel told Louis. “The Swedish government will guarantee their protection. I will escort them myself.”

Louis appealed to the ministers, who pointed out that Louis-Charles, as heir to the throne, could not leave France without appearing to abdicate his rights, any more than the king himself could.

To me their arguments seemed foolish and self-serving, and I told them so.

Louis could not make up his mind. In the end he listened to the ministers and to Stanny, who has not yet made up his own mind to leave.

“Is this what you want then?” I shouted at them, “that I and the children should become targets for the drunken angry mob in the courtyard? Where is your honor, gentlemen? Where is your chivalry? Shame on you all!”

I left them open-mouthed, and a good thing too.

July 21, 1789

Sophie came to me today and brought me word of the strange and unexplained things happening in the country districts. In Nantes, dragoons were seen approaching the town but none ever actually arrived. The citizens were up in arms to defend themselves. In Ste.-Maixent bandits were seen, hundreds of them, on the far horizon. Many people saw them, yet the bandits either passed by very swiftly or they were an illusion. Reports of the same kind are coming in from all over, Besançon and Vervins and even faraway Marseilles and the villages nearby.

Adding to the panic are attacks on castles and murders of landlords by their peasant tenants. Is there no restraint, no decency left anywhere?

I have appointed a sensible and trustworthy woman, Madame de Tourzel, to be the children’s governess. She will not panic, she is loyal and levelheaded. She will remain prepared to take the children to safety on very short notice. Sophie has packed my trunk and I am ready to go. Chambertin has secretly made preparations for Louis to leave in a hurry if need be, though Louis has not authorized him to.

August 11, 1789

We wait here from day to day, never going out, receiving bad news hourly. My sister Christina sent me a long letter and the messenger who brought it committed it to memory and burned it before crossing the border into France. He knew he would be killed if the new government of the National Assembly discovered the letter in his possession. Christina says what Joseph and Carlotta both say: leave France at once, while you still can.

August 25, 1789

Louis insisted that I stand with him and receive the Parisians who always come to Versailles on this day, his Name Day, the feast day of St. Louis, to celebrate with him. I am surprised that this feast day is still observed by the Parisians, given all the traditions that they have discarded in the past few months, but I agreed.

Louis asked me to dress in my simplest clothes and to wear the tricolor cockade, the symbol of the National Assembly, in my hair. He always wears the cockade in his hat as a gesture of benevolence. Since I do not honor the National Assembly or the Parisians, who have, in effect, become the governors of France for the time being, I refused to pander to them.

I wore a fine silk dress in a color I call Frozen Tears and I also wore around my neck the false Hapsburg Sun, which twinkled almost as brilliantly as the real one used to do.

It was the first time I had formally received the Parisians since the convening of the Estates-General so I told Loulou to have the ushers bring them into the Green Salon, next to my bedchamber. The Green Salon has furnishings of silver and gold and the special gilding called “green gold” which is unique to Versailles. Woven hangings of hunting scenes adorn the walls, the colors brilliant, the figures and animals lifesize and almost living and breathing in their intensity. Pilasters of gold stand at the corners of the room. It is altogether quite magnificent.

The twenty or so shabbily dressed Parisians who were admitted stared at me, and at the decoration of the room, quite rudely before the mayor bowed to me (he should have knelt, his bow was disrespectful) and said a few words.

As he spoke, talking chiefly of the hunger in Paris, I found myself looking at a woman standing near him. She was dressed in a dirty white petticoat and ragged cloth jacket, and her thin arms and legs poked out from the sleeves and from beneath
the skirt. A scarf covered her hair and partly hid her face, which she kept averted from me as the mayor talked on. Unlike the others she did not gaze at the tapestries and furnishings of the room, but kept her eyes on the mayor’s back, or on the red, white and blue cockade she held, twisting it between her fingers.

At last the mayor concluded his remarks and Louis thanked him graciously. As the delegation prepared to leave the woman I had been curious about tore off her scarf and looked me full in the face.

It was Amélie!

She approached me. “Your highness,” she said, inclining her head ever so slightly, not really nodding, “perhaps you recall one who served you for many years in this very room, one whose firstborn is your godchild?”

Shock constricted my throat, but I managed to say, “Of course I remember you, Amélie. I remember that you were taken to the Bastille, and imprisoned for treason.”

At the mention of the Bastille all the Parisians burst out in exclamations of amazement, and stared at Amélie with something like reverence. Ever since the day the angry crowd from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine seized the ancient fortress and began to tear it to pieces anyone associated with the Bastille has been treated as a saint or a mystical being.

“She is a heroine!” someone shouted. “She deserves honor!”

Amélie smiled, approaching me more closely and holding out the cockade she held. “I have been liberated, thanks to my fellow Parisians.”

Everyone in the room, even Louis, cheered—except me. Several of the people shouted “Down with tyranny!” and shook their fists.

As the shouting began to die down the mayor, visibly nervous, said “Our business here is concluded. We are needed at the Hotel de Ville.”

“One moment, your honor.” Amélie kept her steely gaze fixed on me. “I’m certain that before we leave, the queen would be pleased to receive this cockade to wear in her hair.” She held out the hated red, white and blue thing to me and I did not take it.

“Take it, take it,” Louis whispered loudly to me. I stood still, and returned Amélie’s gaze with a look of disdain. After what seemed like a long tense minute or two Louis reached over and took the cockade from Amélie.

“I am glad to accept this on my wife’s behalf,” he said, squinting at the entire shabby group. “And I thank you all for coming.”

They began to file out, and I heard murmurs of “Haughty Austrian bitch!” and snatches of a song about “Madame Deficit.”

Amélie was the last to leave. As she sauntered toward the door, rudely turning her backon us, she said a few parting words.

“Thank you, your majesties, for all those pleasant months in the dungeons. And if I were you, Austrian, I would sell that damned jewel you wear and buy bread for your people!”

The ushers grabbed Amélie but Louis signaled for them to release her. She smirked and chuckled as she left the grand room, running her nails down the gilded molding of the doorway and leaving a long deep gash in its burnished façade.

September 19, 1789

Louis still refuses to leave and will not listen to any of us who try our best to persuade him. However, he is strengthening the defenses here at Versailles and will bring in more troops to defend us if need be. Axel has gone to report to King Gustavus in Stockholm and will bring back more Swedish troops when he returns.

I hear the tramp of the soldiers of the Flanders Regiment outside my window and feel a little less anxious. A detachment of the Gardes du Corps is always in the corridors outside my apartments. Eric too stays close to me. I told him about Amélie’s insolence and he said she had never attempted to contact him or the children since her liberation from prison. He has sent the children to safety, to live with his parents in Vienna. But he refuses to go himself, saying his place is with me. I am very touched and tell him so.

September 23, 1789

We have harvested the last of the fruit and grain at the Petit Trianon hamlet and I sent it to the Mayor of Paris personally, to be distributed to the hungry people. We were very short-handed in the harvest, as all but one of the peasant families living in the cottages have left. The animals are not being tended and I have told Chambertin to arrange for them to be sold. I said goodbye with sorrow to my two dear cows Brunette and Blanchette. Blanchette is pregnant. I fear I will never see her calf.

September 26, 1789

I am worried because the Marquis de la Tour du Pin has made the rounds of the sentry posts that guard the palace and says that we must be absolutely certain that all the gateways to the palace courtyards are locked at all times. Our security depends on this.

He has detected a vulnerable spot between the Cour des Princes and the Cour Royale where only one man stands guard. The guard must be doubled or tripled there, and the
loyalty of the sentries must be checked and double-checked.

The marquis suggests that Louis and I and the children withdraw to Rambouillet which is much easier to defend. Louis says he will consider it. The marquis cautions me that many of the palace servants are compromised and have been won over by the disloyal Parisians. They stay on at Versailles because they hope to receive their back wages but once they are paid they will leave. Meanwhile they are not to be trusted.

September 29, 1789

Last night I persuaded Louis that we all should go to Rambouillet and the wagons were loaded so that we could leave this morning. But when we awoke Madame de Tourzel told us that Mousseline was ill and we decided to wait a few days until she recovered.

October 5, 1789

I wish we had gone to Rambouillet. I have a very uneasy feeling. This afternoon I went with Louis-Charles to the Petit Trianon and he was playing in the grotto. Eric called up to me and said, come quickly, there is a message from the palace. I picked up Louis-Charles, who has gotten quite heavy now that he is four and a half, and went slipping down the moss to where a valet in livery stood waiting with two horses.

The valet knelt in the mud—it had begun to rain quite hard.

“Your highness,” he said in a high, frightened voice, “the palace is under assault. I have been sent by the Marquis de la Tour du Pin to tell you that you must come quickly. They are closing the gates against the attackers.”

We mounted the horses, the valet taking Louis-Charles, and galloped off through the rain toward the huge bulk of the palace, veiled by the mist of rain. Soldiers of the Flanders Regiment surrounded the walls.

I thought as we drew closer, how will they be able to fire their muskets and their cannon when everything is so sodden and wet? Axel had told me what difficulties he and his men had in the American War, trying to fire their weapons when the weather was bad.

We dismounted and I hurried inside, carrying Louis-Charles who was protesting and squirming. The soldiers quickly surrounded us and led us along in the direction of Louis’s apartments. As soon as we entered the palace we heard an uproar. People were shouting, running, colliding with one another in their haste. No one was in charge. The ushers who normally kept order were rushing here and there in as helter-skelter a fashion as the others. People stood in knots of three and four on the landings of the staircases, exchanging news. Some dragged half-empty satchels or baskets along the corridors, bound for hiding places or exits. A few managed to drop to their knees as I passed, but many were so intent on their own business that they ignored me, their eyes never meeting mine.

And I too was intent on reaching safety, and on finding out what was happening. I had seen the angry crowds massed in front of the main gates leading to the Court of the Ministers but there was nothing unusual in that, they were there every day, milling and complaining, waiting for the food we distributed and then demonstrating in their noisy disruptive way. Where were the attackers? Clutching Louis-Charles, and with four of the soldiers of the Flanders Regiment escorting me, I hurried along the winding corridors and up the old staircases to Louis’s apartments, which were crowded with people, all talking at once.

Louis was not there, he had gone hunting and was not expected to return for several hours. I handed Louis-Charles to Madame de Tourzel who had brought Mousseline up to Louis’s private study and was doing her best to comfort her. I hugged her and told her not to cry, that there were many soldiers to protect us and that we would be kept safe no matter what happened. I sent a valet to the kitchens to get as many baskets of food as he could, for us and the others, and after an hour he returned with bread and fruit and cold chicken and wine.

A breathless, red-faced messenger arrived and the clamor grew louder. He had ridden hard to bring us news. He shouted that a mob of women was marching toward Versailles, armed with pikes and swords and scythes, demanding bread and threatening to kill the king and queen.

“I have just come from Sèvres,” the man said. “They passed through there like a cloud of locusts. They took all the bread from the shops and most of the other food too. And I tell you, some of those women were not really women. There were plenty of men among them.”

“How many? What arms did they have? Why did the National Guard not stop them?” The messenger was questioned ceaselessly, but all he knew was that the crowd was loud, wet and angry, and that they were only a few kilometers away.