The Hidden Diary of Marie Antoinette (35 page)

“She refuses. Write that down,” Amélie said to one of the men, who began looking around for a bottle of ink and writing paper. There was a brief commotion while these materials were found, and I took advantage of the distraction to slip Axel’s letter inside the linen pillowslip.

“Will you swear that you have had no contact with any foreign power whose aim is to destroy the revolution?” Amélie asked next.

“I have written letters to my sisters and brothers,” I said truthfully, omitting to mention the hundreds of other letters I have sent, in code, to a dozen foreign princes and governments. “They are not in sympathy with the revolution.”

“In fact your nephew Francis is at war with France.”

“If you say so, citizeness. I am not permitted to read any newspapers.”

“It matters little what you say,” Amélie snapped, walking in
a slow circle around me, the little metal guillotines in her ears sparkling in the candlelight. “We know everything you are doing. Every lie you are telling. It is only a matter of time before you are summoned before the Revolutionary Tribunal and condemned as a criminal.”

She came closer and looked at me knowingly. “Just as your great friend Loulou was.”

Her words sent a frisson of horror down my spine. I saw once again the ghastly head of my dear friend, the private parts, exposed for all the world to see, and imagined the awful fear and panic and suffering Loulou must have endured at the hands of the communards before she died.

“We took our time with her,” Amélie went on, speaking matter-of-factly and watching my reaction as she continued. “With her, it was not a quick slitting of the throat or stabbing in the gut, as with the others. No, your friend Loulou, the princess”—she gave the word a mocking emphasis—“deserved a long slow death.

“We woke her up very early, just as we did with you this morning. Then we dragged her outdoors, and made her stand in the cold between two stacks of dead bodies while we stripped off her clothes and Niko and Georges here”—she indicated the two men—“raped her, was it twice or three times?” She turned to the men as she asked this. The men shrugged. I could not help myself. I began to sob.

Amélie laughed and continued to circle me, partly walking, partly skipping.

“Let me see, then we cut off her breasts and threw them to the dogs, and I think we made a bonfire between her legs, and used one of her arms as a torch. Then we cut out her heart and roasted it and ate it. By that time she was dead, of course. So we cut off her head and her cunt (both of which we knew you would recognize) and put them on pikes and marched around with them for awhile.”

I was shaking and unnerved yet I held tightly onto my pillow and was careful not to let Axel’s letter slip out of the pillowcase. I have never, in the whole of my life, wanted to kill anyone as much as I wanted to kill Amélie at that moment.

She ordered her companions to search my room which they did, throwing the bedclothes and thin mattress onto the floor, opening the chest in which I kept my few remaining possessions and flinging the contents out, spilling the water from my washbasin onto the floor. Fortunately they did not examine the pewter candleholder very closely or they would have discovered its hollow center.

When they were finished Amélie addressed me once more.

“Citizeness, the Committee of Vigilance will recommend that you be kept on the list of suspects. You will be questioned again. Meanwhile, here is a souvenir, from your late friend.”

She reached into her pocket and pulled something out which she laid on the table in front of me. It was a shriveled human ear.

November 14, 1792

I am afraid for Louis.

Louis has been betrayed, and by a longtime friend. The locksmith Gamin, who taught him lockmaking and worked alongside him for so many years in his attic room at Versailles, has denounced him. Gamin told deputies of the new assembly about a secret hiding place for documents that he built in Louis’s rooms, with a large locked box inside. He took them to the palace and showed them the hidden niche in the wall.

The box was full of important papers, some of which proved that Louis had been sending and receiving messages from other sovereigns. The irony is that I am the one who sent and received nearly all the messages while we were at Versailles,
not Louis. Yet to the Committee of Vigilance and the Revolutionary Tribunal that would probably seem an unimportant detail.

I have heard nothing further about the progress of the Austrian army but it is too late in the year now for any large army to advance. Wherever they are, they will stay in their winter bivouac until spring.

December 18, 1792

Snow is falling. We huddle by our hearth fire, wrapped up in shawls and jackets because of the cold wind that blows in through the ancient chimney. The room is always smoky yet our guards do nothing about it and I know better than to ask for any help from the local Committee of Vigilance. They are not at all vigilant about our wellbeing.

Seven days ago Louis was tried before the new governing body, the Convention. Today he talked about it for the first time.

“It was nothing more than a formality, my trial,” he told me. “It lasted barely a quarter of an hour.” His tone was resigned yet dignified, with no trace of self-pity.

“They accused me of crimes against the revolution. Then they adjourned, and I was brought backhere. No one argued for or against me. I was not questioned. I merely stood there, feeling surprisingly calm, and listened to what the prosecutor said.

“It hasn’t happened since the days of Charles I, you know,” he went on after awhile. “Not for a hundred and fifty years. The judicial murder of a king.”

“No, Louis, surely they would not dare!”

“You saw what they scrawled on the wall here the other day, in blood-red letters: LOUIS THE LAST. It was an omen.”

“What’s an omen, papa?” Louis-Charles climbed up into his father’s lap.

“An omen is a sign that something is about to happen. Usually something we don’t want to happen.” I got up and went over to where Louis sat with Louis-Charles on his lap. I put my hand on my husband’s shoulder, and kept it there as he talked on.

“You remember the lessons I gave you about the English King Charles, the one who was killed by his subjects long ago.”

“Yes, papa. He had his head chopped off by an axe. Just like this mice-killer Robert gave me.” Robert was the son of one of the Republican Guards, a boy Louis-Charles’s age. Louis-Charles reached into the pocket of his trousers and brought out a miniature guillotine, a small blade with a weight attached to it.

“Oh no!” I said, snatching the awful thing from his grasp.

“But maman, all the boys have these. We execute mice with them. Birds too, when we can catch them.”

“You are not to have anything to do with such a terrible cruel machine,” I told my son. Louis went on with his history lesson.

“Of course the English were wrong to kill their king. And they soon realized it, and gave the throne to his son, another Charles, who was a very fine fellow, but a little too fond of the ladies.”

Louis-Charles laughed. He is a sunny child, with a cheerful good nature. Even here, in this prisonlike place, he always manages to amuse himself and retains his good humor.

“Now, this is what I want you to remember. Whatever happens to me, I am still the true king of France and you are the dauphin. The throne belongs to you and your children. If I should die, you will be King Louis XVII.”

“Yes, father. You have told me so many times. But you are not going to die.”

Louis stroked our son’s head affectionately. “Not quite yet, little king. Not quite yet.”

I try not to think of what may happen to us this winter. I say my prayers and read and reread Axel’s precious letter and wait impatiently for the lamplighter to come each night. Sometimes it is Lieutenant de la Tour, sometimes a different man. I never know. To calm my nerves I knit mittens and scarves and have begun embroidering a set of chair covers. Mousseline helps me. She is very good at embroidery and much more patient than I am. Tomorrow will be her fourteenth birthday. How I wish she could have known her grandmother and namesake, the great Maria Theresa.

January 20, 1793

The terrible terrible news has come. Louis is to die tomorrow.

He came to tell us, trying to be as dignified and as brave as he could, wearing his red sash of the Order of St. Louis and his prized gold medal inscribed “Restorer of French Liberty and True Friend of His People.”

He kissed us all tenderly and embraced us and we wept together, without shame even though the guards and the representative of the Commune were there in the room.

Louis-Charles and Mousseline called out “Father, father” again and again, until even the rough guards had to turn their heads away, for the sight made them cringe.

“Now I shall never complete my history of the flora and fauna of the forest of Compiègne,” Louis said wistfully. “I shall never see my beloved children grow up, or grow old with my beautiful wife, who has done her best to make me a better man.”

He told us again and again that he loved us, and I could tell how great a strain it was for him to bear up under the pain of parting. When at last the guards came to take him away he
held us close and then pulled me aside. He took off his wedding ring, kissed it, and put it in my hand.

“I release you,” he said quietly. “Axel is a fine man. Marry him, and be happy!”

Tears blurred my sight as I watched him being led away, my noble, foolish, well-meaning, exasperating husband and old friend. I had always been at his side when trouble came. Now, in his final hours, I will not be near him. I cannot bear the thought.

January 21, 1793

I heard the drums beat early this morning and knew that Louis was being led to the scaffold. I hoped the children were still sleeping, and were spared the realization that their beloved father was about to die.

I knelt beside the bed and said a prayer for his soul.

This evening when the lamplighter came, he was Lieutenant de la Tour. We were able to exchange a few words without being overheard and he told me that he and other Knights of the Golden Dagger had been present in the crowd that came to watch Louis’s execution. At one point several of the Knights attempted to rescue Louis but the Republican Guard prevented it.

“He died bravely and well,” the lieutenant told me. “He had no bitterness. He would not let them bind his hands, or restrain him in any way. He was willing to die.”

“There was one odd thing, however. He insisted on wearing a torn old black coat, an antique. It made him look like a vagrant and not a king.”

“Ah, of course. That was his father’s coat. He treasured it.”

“They made him take it off before they executed him. It was tossed into the crowd. People tore it to bits. He forgave
them—for that and for everything else. He said, ‘I forgive those who are guilty of my death.’ ”

“Yes. He would say that.”

After the lieutenant left I stood for a long time listening for the sound of the newsboys in the street calling out the events of the day.

“Louis Capet Executed!” they cried. “Former King Dead!” “Madame Guillotine Marries Citizen Capet!”

March 2, 1793

They bring me a special soup every day now, because I am so thin. After Louis died I could not eat, and soon my black clothes hung on me like rags hung from a pole.

My leg has started to hurt again and the prison doctor lets me have laudanum drops to take when the pain becomes too hard to bear. The laudanum makes my nightmares worse, and Mousseline, who is so good to me and watches over me almost like a mother, says she is sure my moodiness and sadness are made worse by the laudanum drops and urges me not to take them.

We all stay together at night in one room now, the two children and I. It comforts me so much to have them near me. I seldom leave this room except when our meals are served and we sit at the table in front of the hearth in the common room. Being there makes me sad, remembering Louis sitting in his large chair giving Louis-Charles his lessons. I prefer to sit on my bed, knitting, while Mousseline reads to me from novels or stories of shipwrecks or pirates.

When I comb my hair it comes out in clumps. It is all white now.

One of the guards amuses himself making sketches of us with pastels. He captures the children’s likenesses very well. Louis-Charles is there on the page, plump-cheeked and with a
lookof liveliness and mischief in his blue eyes. Mousseline he draws very much to the life, making her look delicate and fair, pretty though not beautiful, her even gaze tinged with sorrow. But when he draws me, the image is that of a sour-faced, pinch-cheeked old woman, with dark circles beneath her eyes and deep lines etched into her skin. How could that possibly be me?

March 24, 1793

I fear they are trying to poison Louis-Charles. He is ill so often, his forehead is hot with fever and he cries and holds his side where it hurts him. Sometimes he has a bad cough and chokes if he tries to lie down, so I hold him in my lap and he sleeps leaning against me. I try to sleep too, but often my nightmares come and then I cry out and wake up and wake him up too.

I have a small supply of oil of sweet almonds that Dr. Concarneau gave me. I keep it nearby in case Louis-Charles becomes severely ill.

Louis-Charles, my precious boy, is now King Louis XVII. Of course the revolutionaries want to eliminate him. They are so heartless, so ruthless, they would not hesitate to kill a child. And if they can do it by slowly poisoning him, making it appear that he is dying of an illness rather than being murdered, then they will avoid any appearance of cruelty.

Only a few weeks ago he was fine. Now he is pale and in pain so often. How can it be anything but poison?

May 10, 1793

Louis-Charles seems better and I am puzzled. Are they putting poison in his food or not?

I have new messages from Axel but I don’t dare write here what he tells me. My spirits are lifted by his news, and by the warm mild weather and the pink and yellow roses I can see from my window.

Is it the warm weather that makes me feel so tired? I am still living mostly on medicinal soup, and a little bread.