Confessions of Marie Antoinette (31 page)

I hear their insolent cries. I hear them only too well. They demand my head. And I am as terrified of them as I have ever been. For my ladies’ sakes I have endeavored to remain calm, but I have not been able to stop crying all afternoon. Poor Lamballe, always so skittish in the moment, and yet I have rarely known a woman as brave. She placed her own life at risk to join my family in our misfortune at the Tuileries and this is how the gentle soul’s courage is repaid.

Louis and I had secluded ourselves when it became clear that the incursion would reach the palace and that the rioters would storm the gates. Now, he insists that we face a greater danger if he refuses to meet with the rebels. Somehow he has retained his sangfroid while I have grown more hysterical by the hour.

“You did so in October ’89 and look where it got us,” I’d argued, throwing my hands in the air. “
Here
. Your honesty, your credulousness, your willingness to believe that the rioters’ word was as trustworthy as that of a king—landed us
here
, in the Tuileries. And now, once again we are at the mercy of wild beasts.”

“What will they think of me,” I ask the princesse, “if they believe that I have run and hidden from them? What sort of reputation
do you think I will gain from that?” I add rhetorically. “My place is beside the king.”

Madame Campan argues that my presence will only endanger my husband further. “Should anyone try to harm you, and you hear them baying for your blood, it is his nature to leap to your defense; and in so doing, you may both be wounded—or worse.” When she sees that even this argument will not dampen my resolve to remain by Louis’s side, she begs, “Remember, Your Majesty, you are a mother as well as a wife.”

I part from my husband with the greatest reluctance, ultimately swayed by her plea. But just as I have acquiesced, the Chevalier de Rougeville nearly skids to a halt before us, his powdered wig, a relic of the old days, askew. “Madame, do not go to the dauphin’s rooms,” he warns. “They have already broken down the door!” He frantically struggles to adjust his blue sash in my presence, making an absurd effort to appear more presentable before the Queen of France.

At his terrifying news my knees nearly buckle. “Where are—?” My mind floods with horrific images of what these monsters might have done to my son and daughter.

The chevalier divines my thought. “Madame Royale and monsieur le dauphin have been safely moved to the Council Chamber. They await you there, madame.”

My precious children are in one room, my devoted husband in another. My body feels too weak to support my weight and suddenly it seems as though I am standing in a bucket of quicksand, unable to move in any direction. My attendants quickly usher me into the Council Chamber, siuated on the opposite side of the king’s bedroom. There,
ma petite
Mousseline sits on a red brocade chair, staring into the middle distance and clutching the padded armrests with white knuckles. Although she is a princesse, Marie Thérèse
has witnessed much ugliness in her twelve years. The dauphin, now seven and always more demonstrative than his sister, rushes into my arms. I clutch Louis Charles to my bosom, embracing him so tightly as I bathe his soft brown curls with my tears that he frets, “Maman, you are
suffocating
me!”

“I’m sorry,
mon chou d’amour
,” I soothe, as the princesse de Lamballe hands me a handkerchief. “Your maman is so very worried about your papa, right now.” I sob anew at the thought of Louis left to face the armed insurgents alone.

And then, with a jolt of horror I realize that his sister is with him.

Amid the clamor a beautifully gowned woman enters the Oeil de Boeuf. Upon seeing the king backed up against the wall with only a table and an aged aristocrat wearing the medals and ribbons of the Maréchal of France to protect him from their fury, her pale face turns even whiter with distress and her light blue eyes dim with tears. Arms outstretched, she attempts to make her way through the throng in a desperate effort to reach the monarch.

“There she is! The queen!” some of the rioters cry. The men and women closest to the rear of the room, where the king sits, brandish their pikes and knives and try to reach her. Yet the woman bravely presses through the throng. She clasps the monarch by his coattails as if to attach herself there. Her soft features and despairing looks convey the warning that only violence could tear these two persons asunder.

“It is not the queen!” Louison finds her voice. She recalls her audience with the king that fateful October afternoon when she stood as near to the royal family as if they were her own relations. A sculptress remembers faces. Marie Antoinette has a haughty physiognomy; many have called it insolent. Her receding chin and protruding lower lip are legendary. This woman is clearly not the
consort. “It is Madame Élisabeth!” Louison cries. She is about to use the second-person plural but realizes that to say “you” might set her apart as a secret royalist. “We have no quarrel with the king’s sister,” Louison insists, hoping she will be heeded, for the eyes of all those who surround her with knives and cudgels have a wildness in them that terrifies her. She doesn’t know what a revolution is supposed to be like, but surely assassination, even regicide, cannot be their goal.

Others do not agree. Far behind her, someone standing in the hallway shouts, “Have you killed them yet?” and another demands, “Throw us their heads!”

As if to answer the challenge, a drunken farrier, his face as red as the wine that inebriated him, thrusts his weapon, a sharp iron spike affixed to a long pole, at the king. But his progress is halted by another man who flings himself between the monarch and the would-be murderer. A melee ensues and the Samaritan is knocked to the ground, trampled underfoot by the mob as they try to reach the king.

A woman whose apron is smeared with gore lunges toward the sovereign with a pike in her hand, and then laughs like a lunatic when Madame Élisabeth gasps and jumps away, backing herself against the windows. Impaled upon the pike is a bloody bull’s heart, with a placard dangling beneath it that reads heart of the aristocracy.

A booming voice is heard over the cacophony. “Twenty grenadiers to protect His Majesty!” A man stands in the doorway of the Oeil de Boeuf. “The Finance Minister,” Armand whispers in Louison’s ear. He knows all the names and faces of the king’s “evil ministers and minions” from reading the newspapers published by the great revolutionary leader Camille Desmoulins and the demagogue Jacques Hébert.

Moments later, the red-coated soldiers appear, forcibly entering
the chamber as the rioters shout “Down with the veto!” and “Ratify the decrees!” Pushing back the crowd the grenadiers march to the rear of the room and form an armed guard about the monarch to a jeering chorus of
“Vive la Nation!”
Yet—astonishingly—although the grenadiers protectively stand their ground, the monarch appears to be waving them away.

As calm as if he were at a
grand couvert
, one of his famous public meals, the king says, “A man who has nothing with which he may reproach himself knows neither fear nor dread.” The mob grows suddenly quiet, as if he has cast an enchantment over them.
“Et voilà!”
Louis says, seizing a nearby ruffian by the wrist and placing the man’s filthy palm beneath the breast of his gold embroidered waistcoat. “See if my heart beats any faster, even in the face of my enemies.”

But the answer is drowned out by another round of taunts and accusations. The mob begins to chant
“À bas le veto!”

The king raises a little silver bell that had been resting on the table in front of him and rings it, in an effort to quiet the rabble. They do indeed pause at the delicate tinkling sound, its very incongruity in such a contentious atmosphere gaining their attention. A number of aristocrats wave their walking sticks in the air, urging the people, with all due politesse, to respect the law. Louison finds the scene rather comical until the angry protests are renewed and the monarch is accused of trying to deceive the people. Surely calling the king of France a liar to his face cannot be the way to win redress. He rings the silly little bell once more and assures the mob that he is no foe of the Constitution and that he will quietly listen to their grievances if they will present them in a reasonable manner. The sculptress knows from her own experience that in this, at any rate, he is a man of his word.

“Prove to us, then, that you support the Revolution!” The demand comes from a
sans-culotte
with brown teeth. He yanks the
red liberty cap from his head and, sticking it on the end of a pike, thrusts it at the king. “Put it on, monsieur.”

Louison grimaces. If she were made to wear the man’s
bonnet rouge
, she would fear it was crawling with lice. What will the king do? Like a single organ, the mob holds its breath. But the sovereign claims the Phrygian cap from the menacing spike and without complaint or remonstrance places it gingerly upon his head. The room resounds with derisive laughter—cackles and guffaws, hollers and snickers—for the cap is far too small. It looks like a child’s chapeau atop the monarch’s enormous head. His Majesty raises his hands and tries to adjust the cap by tugging it over his brow. But it will never fit, which only emphasizes how ludicrously inappropriate it appears—at least to Louison.

But not everyone shares her secret opinion. Cries of
“Vive le roi!”
echo throughout the Oeil de Boeuf, and with so many people shouting at once she cannot tell whether they are cheers of mockery or approval. A wineskin is shoved into the king’s hands and the owner demands that he drink a toast to the health of his people.

Then a man bearing a beribboned hatchet steps forward. “You believe that we are your enemies, Sire, but you are mistaken. Your adversaries are not in Paris, but amassing in Coblenz.” Armand explains, whispering into Louison’s ear, that the man in the gray blouson and striped
sans-culottes
refers to the Austrian forces. “The people, on the other hand, only desire to see you cheerfully abiding by the tenets of the Constitution.” The
sans-culotte
looks about the room, and his words receive applause.

“I will lay odds that he is a lawyer,” Armand murmurs. “No matter how meanly attired. Fishmongers don’t speak like that.”

“If you embrace the Constitution in good faith,
Majesté
, the people will love you all the more. Don’t you see—they
want
to love you.”

I do not know whether my husband is alive or dead. Frozen with fear, my children, my attendants, and I sit like statues in the Council Chamber awaiting word of Louis’s welfare, but we have heard nothing.

Suddenly, we are startled by the sounds of a scuffle directly outside the room. “Where is the vile bitch? We have searched everywhere for her; she is not in her apartments—believe me, not a stick of furniture remains intact!”

I discover who the madmen—
mon Dieu
, my rooms!—are arguing with, when the heavy oaken doors to the Council Chamber burst open and a half-dozen grenadiers rush inside, ahead of the mob. “Get behind this table, madame, with the children of France!” one of them orders me, as they drag a heavy table, gilded and topped with marble, into place, forming a barricade against the surging mob, positioning themselves in front of it like a row of sentries.

The villainous Général Santerre is at the head of the pack. “Stand aside,
citoyens
!” he snarls, nearly decapitating a woman with his saber as he orders the grenadiers to divide and fall back, “so the people can see for themselves the object of their hatred.” His voice drips with derision for the crown. But the people are just as vicious.

“
À la lanterne!
String her up by the lamppost!”

“Put that long neck to good use!”

An old crone levels a bony accusatory finger at me. I believe that if she had gotten close enough to poke me through the eye, she would have done so without another thought. “You’re a vile woman!” she shrieks.

Fighting to keep my manner poised and regal and my voice quiet and calm in the face of such scorn, I ask her: “Have I ever done you any harm, madame?” To this she has no ready reply. But
her confederates remain undaunted in the presence of the queen. One manages to dash around the table just long enough to place one of the disgusting red liberty caps upon my head before the grenadiers apprehend him. I immediately snatch the offending bonnet from my person and am about to say something when an ominous glare from Santerre changes my mind. Instead, I diplomatically place the cap upon the dauphin’s head, saying, “I am only a king’s consort. But
he
is your future king.” My seven-year-old son, terrified by this sea of angry people in front of him, is dwarfed by the
bonnet rouge
. The cap falls down over his forehead and eyes. He cannot see a thing, which is probably all for the best. At the sight of a little boy in a blue satin suit who better resembles a broomstick with a liberty cap for a head, the rabble hoots with laughter. It is at our expense, I know. It is embarrassing and ignominious. But at least we are alive. Beneath the cap, my son’s shoulders are heaving involuntarily. My heart is breaking.