Confessions of Marie Antoinette (26 page)

Our family life is a hell, even though the three of us have the best intentions in the world
, I confide in a letter to my dear old comte de Mercy.

My beloved princesse de Lamballe wishes to return from exile in order to console me, but I refuse to jeopardize her safety.

Ma très chère amie
,

I beg of you, stay in the country with your father-in-law. You would weep too much over our misfortunes were you to come back to Paris. The tigers who abound here now would cruelly rejoice in our suffering. At least the acceptance of the Constitution will allow us a few moments of respite from the gathering storm.

It has been a most horrific summer. At the end of August, we receive word from London that finally teases a smile from my lips. On the twenty-third of the month, the so-called comtesse Jeanne de Lamotte-Valois, the villainess who had plotted to steal the ostentatious diamond necklace from the court jewelers and then implicated me in the scheme by claiming I had commissioned its purchase, fell to her death from her third-story hotel room in the city. The newspapers disagree about the details of her demise. Some claim she had been pushed, while others assert that she had accidentally fallen out of the window as she was endeavoring to evade a visiting creditor. Then another tale emerges, averring that the comtesse had been poisoned.

Regardless of the circumstances, one of my greatest nemeses is now gone forever. Gone, too, I hope, are the insidious editions of her outrageous “memoirs” that she continued to revise and peddle until her death, which depicted me not only as greedy and conniving and impervious to the plight of those less fortunate, but as her Sapphic lover.

I dream that night that she is in the pit of hell, flames licking at her limbs while Lucifer laughs. When day breaks, I am not at all shaken by my vision.
Au contraire
. For the first time in six years, ever since the scandal of
“l’affaire du collier”
caused my name and character to be dragged through the mud by nearly everyone in France, from the judges of the Paris Parlement to the demimondaines outside the Palais Royal, and a mockery was made of justice—now, finally, God has had the last word. Justice has been served. And I feel cleansed.

EIGHTEEN

Tribulation First Makes
One Realize What One Is

S
EPTEMBER
1791

In a masterstroke of understatement, Louis’s journal entry referring to the monstrous debacle surrounding our flight to Montmédy and our ignominious return to the capital had been a terse
Five nights spent outside Paris
. I wonder how he will describe the events of the fourteenth of September, when once again the world as we have always known it—as France has always known it, is upended?

Eleven days earlier we had been presented with the Constitution for him to review, although it would have mattered little to the Assembly delegates if he had asked for any alterations. The following day, the king’s acquiescence having been obtained, our restrictions at the Tuileries were lifted and the gardens were reopened to the public. Monsieur Barnave delivered a stirring speech in the
chamber of the Salle du Manège, convincing his fellow deputies to vote for the restoration of a measure of royal authority.

The citizens erupted into a holiday mood. Madame de Lamballe returned to the Tuileries to be my solace in this time of great upheaval, taking up residence in the Pavillon de Flore. Louis was permitted to go hunting for the first time in months, and I was cheered in the streets when, on the advice of Barnave, who urged me to show myself to the public, I took a carriage ride one evening with my children. The
rues
were illuminated with lanterns. Citizens strolled arm in arm along the avenues. Turning to Madame de Tourzel, I said, “It’s all so beautiful—but so sad, when one realizes that on the slightest provocation, they would all recommence the same atrocities.”

Perhaps it is fitting that, in the words of the Assembly, my husband is being forced “according to the wish of the great majority of the nation” to become a constitutional monarch in a former riding stable. Of course there is no throne in the Salle du Manège. Instead, Louis is presented with the Constitution while he sits in an armchair with a fleur-de-lis painted on the back of the seat. There is no chair for me; as he affixes his signature to the heinous document, I am relegated to the role of spectator, just as I had been at Louis’s coronation sixteen years ago.

Nor is there is a role for me in the Constitution. I am not even mentioned in it. Although the king’s actions are protected by immunity, this is not so for any other member of his family, even the dauphin, who the Triumvirs wish to retitle the “Prince Royal.” I am officially owed no respect as the king’s wife. And as Louis signed his name with a heavy hand and a mournful heart, the boisterous sound of carousing wafted through the windows from the direction of the Tuileries Palace gardens. Soldiers were singing vulgar songs about me. When we passed another detachment on our
way to the Salle du Manège, they did not even doff their hats. And to a man, the deputies of the Assemblée Nationale remained defiantly seated while Louis delivered his speech.

The Constitution, which also bears the heading “Declaration of the rights of man and of the citizen,” permits the king to choose his own ministers; and while it strips him of the authority to declare war, the Assembly will now have that right, but only after the monarch has requested them to make such a declaration. Most important, the king retains the power of the veto, a measure passed by a majority of three hundred of the one thousand deputies to the National Assembly. But the very fact that we must consider ourselves fortunate to cling to the slenderest threads of power and privilege galls beyond measure. After the deed had been done and the deputies filed out of the chamber, Louis, who had been standing while they departed, sank into an armchair, disconsolate with humiliation. What would his ancestor, who, legend says, declared,
“L’État, c’est moi,”
think to see Louis reduced to “Representative of the Nation”?

I descended from the box where I had witnessed this public disgrace, of which I, too, have been a victim. Louis’s eyes met mine with a watery gaze. “Ah, madame, why were you there?” he gulped wetly. “You came into France only to have to see—” He broke off, sobbing.

I draped my arms about his neck and chest, gently kissing the top of his head. A tear fell into his wig. When I looked up, I spied Madame Campan standing several feet away as if a sorcerer had turned her to stone. This whole time she has borne witness to our private mortification. “Go—for God’s sake, go!” I cried, and suddenly, as if she had been struck with an electric current, she fled, as ashamed as we to have participated in such a sorrowful disgrace.

The young sculptress Louison Chabry finds herself among the thousands of patriots who have turned out to hear the proclamation of the new Constitution in front of the Hôtel de Ville. Tricolor buntings hang in triumphant swags from every window and wine flows freely from casks set up in the streets. Anyone with a goblet, tankard, or tin cup may fill it to the rim as often as they wish. Louison has a lover now, a handsome revolutionary who tells her that the Constitution is only the first step in ridding France of a despot.

Already drunk on Burgundy, and lustily bellowing snatches of Revolutionary songs—although he gets the words all wrong—as they pass a group of soldiers carousing around one of the overflowing spigots of wine, Armand assures her, “The tyrant will be brought low. This is the new world, now.” Louison shudders.

One of the grenadiers tries to shock her by telling a popular vulgar joke. “What is the difference between the queen’s vagina and the Jardin du Luxembourg?” Louison shakes her head, unable to think of a parallel between the vast public park and Her Majesty’s genitalia. “Nothing!” the soldier exclaims, slapping his thigh. “They are both always open!”

Louison tugs Armand’s sleeve. “Let’s go.” On their way to witness the fireworks celebration in the Place Louis XV, they pass a slogan crudely painted on the wall outside a cobbler’s shop.
LONG LIVE THE KING—IF HE IS HONEST
!
“Je crois que oui,”
the sculptress whispers into her beau’s ear. “That day at Versailles—when he promised us bread—I believed him.”

Armand and Louison join the thousands of revelers in the Place Louis XV as the periwinkle dusk deepens into evening violet. Fairy lights have been strung about the square, twinkling the way Louison imagines the queen’s private gardens at le Petit Trianon
must have glittered when she fêted the young tsar of Russia and the handsome king of Sweden.

People are dancing in the street to cries of
“Vive la Nation!”
and several sympathetic shouts of
“Vive le roi!”
Louison even hears a few brave souls exclaim
“Vive la reine!”
and the revelers seem too happy to begin a brawl over it. “Does this means the Revolution is over?” Louison asks Armand, shouting into his ear to be heard above the cacophonous explosions of the fireworks. High above their heads the sky shimmers with cascading showers of red, white, and blue sparks.

Armand laughs. “Silly girl!” He pulls her into a delirious, drunken embrace and kisses her on the mouth, hard. “It is only the beginning of a new one!”

Throughout the autumn of 1791, the radicals shout the loudest. Their propaganda drowns out the voices of reason, intimidating a populace that had not personally despised their monarch into aping those who would mock him. The streets are paved with sedition. Revolutionary newspapers and broadsheets compete with each other for an audience. Camille Desmoulins prints
Les Révolutions de France et de Brabant
. Jean-Paul Marat churns out
l’Ami du Peuple
. Choderlos de Laclos, who nine years ago authored the provocative epistolary novel
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
, eviscerating the icy hedonism of the aristocracy, has turned his pen to politics as the editor of
Le Journal des Jacobins
, the most fanatical of the revolutionary factions. To keep abreast of the current events I force myself to read everything, no matter how unpleasant or vulgar. Louis is depicted by the caricaturists with the body of a hog and the head of a ram, an allusion to a pair of cuckold’s horns. Desmoulins, who spares no praise for Lafayette, calls the latter the “Don Quixote of Capet”—never mind that we are the House of Bourbon and the Capetian dynasty ended four centuries ago—and Louis “our
crowned Sancho Panza.” To the stammering zealot, they are figures of fun, straw men to be torn apart with the strokes of a pen.

I know we are despised, but have the citizens lost all reason? The papers print nothing but lies and the people swallow them like cool water on a sultry summer day. They say the king is planning to place himself at the head of his army, intending to mow down his enemies—his own subjects who dare to desire revolution. The broadsheets publish false and malicious reports that Louis erupts into frightful tantrums, smashing everything about him—crystal goblets, and priceless porcelain vases—flinging three-legged stools into mirrors, breaking them into shards. Laclos should return to fiction.