The Queen's Lover (18 page)

For while they were slumbering the king’s coaches had arrived in Varennes. To the royal party’s discomfiture, the sleeping town was empty. General Bouillé and his troops, who were supposed to accompany them to the second-to-last relay on the road to safety, were nowhere in sight. The passengers got out of their coaches and started walking through the town, looking for Bouillé. The search was futile; they returned to their carriage and tried to convince the postilion to take them to the next relay station, Stenay, where they suspected Bouillé might be waiting for them. The postilion, emphasizing his horses’ exhaustion, adamantly refused, turning down bribes and all possible modes of persuasion. By then an important citizen of Varennes, postmaster Jean-Baptiste Drouet, had been wakened by the din of coaches, and now he galloped up to the royal carriage. He had seen the queen at Versailles some years ago while serving in the Royal Cavalry, and he had no doubt whatsoever that the woman in the plain gray dress sitting in the carriage was Marie Antoinette. As for the big hulking man dressed as a valet by her side, Drouet furtively took a fifty-pound bill from his pocket and checked out the image of the king’s face printed on it: its similarity to the passenger’s face removed all possible doubt.

Arrives the deputy mayor of Varennes, a grocer named Jean-Baptiste Sauce. He asks to check the passengers’ documents, and finds them in order. But Drouet, dazzled by his epiphany, tries to convince Sauce that this is indeed the royal party. The town is now wide awake; armed guardsmen and angry crowds carrying torches fill the cobbled streets. Sauce, still apprehensive, not totally trusting Drouet but aware that he could be accused of treason for not stopping the royals, invites the family to rest at his house, where he sells candles and other provisions. He crowds the six passengers—the royal foursome, Madame Elisabeth, and governess de Tourzel—into a tiny second-floor room hung with sausages and hams; and he helps the queen, alias governess of Madame de Korff’s children, put the exhausted youngsters to sleep. Madame de Tourzel, alias Baronne de Korff, sits on a chair beside the sleeping children. The king, introducing himself as Durand, valet to Madame de Korff, paces the room, chatting with his habitual amiability with whatever citizens or officials wander into the room. But around midnight an elderly retired judge name Jacques Destez, who had once lived at Versailles, is led in and recognizes the monarch. Overwhelmed by the king’s presence, he falls to his knees, uttering the fatal words, “Oh, sire!”
“Eh bien,”
says Louis, “I am indeed your king.” Louis then goes about the room, tears in his eyes, embracing Destez, Drouet, Sauce, and whatever other local citizens surround him, most of whom are also awash in tears of emotion and awe.

This is the kind of scene that also makes me, Axel von Fersen, still weep. These were the people with whom Louis had always felt most at ease, with whom he would always be at his warmest and most outspoken…. Such public tenderness, however, was not Marie Antoinette’s style, and she sat more morosely than ever by her sleeping children as she watched her husband weeping in the arms of butchers, grocers, and candlestick makers.

How incongruous is it, I ask you, that the Capetian dynasty, the
royal descendants of Saint Louis, came to an end in a grocer’s shop in a small village in the Marne?

W
ITHIN AN HOUR
some 4,500 members of the National Guard arrived from the villages of the surrounding countryside. Choiseul, having finally found his way out of the Argonne Forest, clattered into Varennes and joined the royal family in the room hung with hams. Two couriers arrived, sent by the National Assembly in Paris, bearing a letter signed by Lafayette which stated that the king was not permitted to continue on his journey. Louis read the Assembly’s letter and let it fall upon the bed where his children were sleeping. “There’s no longer a king in France,” he whispered. Marie Antoinette swiftly picked the letter off the bed and threw it to the floor. “I will not have such an object taint my children!” she exclaimed. Meanwhile the crowds in the streets below were growing more inflamed. “The king to Paris!” they roared. “The king to Paris!” “We’ll drag them by their feet if need be!” a voice arose. “To Paris, or we’ll shoot them all!” another cried. The royal family was playing for time, hoping against hope that General de Bouillé and his troops would arrive to rescue them. But by 7 a.m., with no Bouillé in sight, they realized it was time to leave. In single file, they descended the stairs they’d ascended a few hours earlier. Princess Marie-Thérèse, although she never liked me, would much later admit to me that just before leaving the room her mother had taken Choiseul aside and asked: “Do you think Monsieur de Fersen is safe?” I had, in fact, fled to Belgium as soon as I heard of the disaster—that was what the queen had ordered me to do in case the escape failed.

In the chorus of accusations that arose after the Varennes debacle—Choiseul blamed Bouillé, Bouillé blamed Choiseul, both denounced Léonard, etc.—one voice alone was not heard: the king’s. In his habitually charitable manner, Louis tried, to the contrary, to allay the remorse
of those who might feel they had failed him. Nothing more clearly displays the king’s immense kindness than a letter he wrote to General de Bouillé a few weeks after his return to the capital, a letter that absolved him of all responsibility for the debacle. “You must stop accusing yourself, monsieur,” he wrote. “You risked everything for me and you did not succeed. Fate was against your plans and mine. Circumstances paralyzed my will, and your courage and all our preparations came to naught…. Accept my thanks, monsieur, I only wish it were in my power to offer you some token of my gratitude.”

The return to Paris—this was best described to me by the queen—was the most frightening aspect of the entire Varennes episode. At the beginning of the three-day journey, a terrible heat wave was plaguing northeastern France. The horses dragging the royal coaches were foundering on the road. In every hamlet and town crowds of vociferous citizens jeered at the sight of the carriage. In one pathetic display of royalist devotion, a Comte Val de Dampierre, whose estate was nearby, attempted to ride up to the coach and salute the king. He was dragged away by a group of National Guardsmen and hacked to death. At another stop a man leaned into the carriage window and spat at the king, whose hand trembled visibly as he wiped away this evidence of his citizens’ rancor. When the royal family stopped at an inn to refresh themselves, Marie Antoinette’s dress was badly ripped by the savage crowd, many of whom were drunk. The women were particularly hostile. “Stop, pretty little lady,” one cried out, shoving the queen as she was stepping back into the coach. “Your life’s on the line!”

When two deputies sent by the Assembly to accompany the royals back to Paris arrived, the king and queen welcomed them with joy, hoping they would protect them. One of the deputies, Jérôme Pétion, who would soon become the mayor of Paris, was a dour, militant republican and an outspoken enemy of the king and queen. The other was twenty-eight-year-old Antoine Barnave, known as “the Tiger” because of his
ferocious diatribes against the royal couple. He was a notably eloquent speaker, a soulful, idealistic man with chiseled features and beautiful blue eyes who in 1789 had been among the deputies elected to represent his province, Grenoble, at the Estates-General. To make room for the two men in the crowded
berline,
the queen, who sat between Barnave and her husband, took the dauphin on her lap, while Marie-Thérèse sat on her aunt Elisabeth’s. And within a few hours both republican deputies were conquered by the friendliness and warm simplicity of the royal passengers. The king called his sister “Babette.” The six-year-old dauphin asked his father for his chamber pot, which the king handed him without the least embarrassment. Then my cherished little prince noticed the revolutionary motto on the brass buttons of Barnave’s coat—
“Vivre Libre ou Mourir
,” “Live Free or Die”—and, showing off his reading skills, pronounced the words. Barnave was impressed, and complimented the royal couple on their son’s precociousness. This pleased the queen no end. Pulling up her veil, she started talking with Barnave about children’s education, and they were soon having an animated conversation. Barnave was awed by the royal prisoners’ familial, unpretentious manners, which appeared to be absolutely similar to those of his own bourgeois milieu. Instead of the aloof, domineering Catherine de Médicis kind of woman Marie Antoinette’s detractors alleged her to be, so Barnave would later write, he found “a pale, shattered woman,” a remarkably gracious human being who was bearing her difficult plight with admirable dignity. Despite her increasingly wasted features, my Marie Antoinette still had a charm, a grace of bearing, that sensitive men such as Barnave and I could find irresistible…. As for Pétion, he started flirting shamelessly with Madame Elisabeth, amusing himself with the notion that she might grow enamored of him; her gaze having softened after an hour of conversation, he would later boast to his colleagues that she had fallen passionately in love with him.

Outside the
berline,
however, the crowds grew increasingly malevolent
as the royals approached Paris. Many women howled for “the queen’s head” and asked for her intestines to be distributed among them. To appease them Marie Antoinette tried to lift the dauphin to the window, but one woman shouted, “Take him away! We know that fat hog isn’t his father!” In suburban streets bands of enraged citizens defaced or smashed shops and inns that bore the king’s name. Terrified of the mobs’ ire, Barnave ordered the National Guardsmen to better protect his passengers from such insults.

The royal coaches lumbered into Paris on June 25, three days after their departure, through the Champs-Elysées. Here the avenue was lined by huge, eerily silent crowds. The Assembly had warned Paris citizens that “whoever insults the royal family will be beaten; whoever applauds them will be shot.” This excommunication of silence—the city’s stillness—was broken only by the slow beat of muffled drums. National Guardsmen crossed their rifles in the air as a show of defiance. Citizens had been ordered by the Jacobin Clubs to keep their hats on their heads as a show of disrespect for the royal family. At the Assembly, that very day, the militant thirty-five-year-old deputy Georges-Jacques Danton had described Louis XVI as “a traitor or an imbecile” for having engaged in the escape attempt. But he received little support for his proposal to replace the king with an executive council. Even the Assembly’s most militant figure, Maximilien Robespierre, argued that the new constitution had already given France the best of both worlds, “a republic with a monarch.” Revolutionary leaders were also anxious about the probability that deposing Louis XVI might lead to war with Austria, which most members of the Assembly were still eager to avoid. But it was clear that the king had become an utterly powerless member of the body politic. As the royal family drove up to the Tuileries they saw huge placards placed against its gates that read
“Maison à Louer
,” “House for Rent.”

As for Marie Antoinette, when she had rested a bit and had had time
to ponder the Varennes catastrophe, she sent for her principal chambermaid, Madame Campan, the first person to whom she would relate details of the piteous voyage. It was Madame Campan who told me that during the three-day ordeal Marie Antoinette’s golden hair had turned snow white, “like that of a woman of seventy.”

“All is lost, dearest father,” I wrote my beloved parent when the news of the debacle reached me in Brussels, “and I am in despair. Just imagine my grief, and pity me.”

A few days after her return the queen wrote me two hurried notes, which I received in Belgium.

“I exist,” she wrote, “but how worried I’ve been about you; I know you must be suffering much not to have heard from us! Will Providence allow this to reach you? You must not write me, for that would endanger us. Above all, do not come back here on any pretext. They know it was you who got us out of here and you would be doomed if you were to return. We are watched night and day. But you mustn’t worry. Nothing will harm me. The Assembly wishes to treat us leniently. Adieu…I can write you no more.”

“I can only tell you that I love you and I barely have the time to do that,” she wrote me a few hours later. “Don’t worry about me…. Send me letters through your valet. Advise me as to whom I should send the few letters I’ll be able to write you, for I can’t live without writing you. Adieu, the most beloved and loving of men. I kiss you with all my heart.”