Confessions of Marie Antoinette (35 page)

“Are you wounded, Alexandre?” I ask, blanching. He shakes his head. His eyes darken with tears. “Who, then?” I whisper.

“Monsieur le duc de Mailly,” he murmurs. At my gasp of horror, he tells me that he believes the courageous duc still lives. “He may yet outlive us all,
Majesté
,” Alexandre adds, referring to Mailly’s advanced age. “I stanched his wounds with this handkerchief. He begged me to leave him and escape with my life.”

With a rustle of silk taffeta, and the sound of stifled sobs, Madame Campan is ushered into the chamber, followed by my attendant Madame Auguié. Henriette looks a fright; her gown is torn and smeared with blood. I cannot tell if she has been wounded. She requests a basin and when none is forthcoming, the detainees back away, clearing a space so Madame Campan can vomit in a corner. Afterwards, mopping her mouth with a rag, she begins to tremble. I am unable to calm her for several minutes; finally she confides what she has witnessed.

“They came in from every door, slicing and hacking at everything and anyone in their wake. They derived as much pleasure from slashing tapestries, bed hangings, and bolsters and smashing
any piece of furniture they encountered as they did in murdering whoever they saw.” She describes the halls, littered with corpses, heads, and limbs. The rioters did not pause to ask whether a man or woman—or even a child—was a royalist or a Jacobin, loyal to the monarchy, or a clandestine spy. All were massacred with equal ferocity; the ruffians were not interested in explanations.

“Some of the decapitated heads they stuck on pikes as trophies. As I had no desire to be one of them, I ran for sanctuary, slipping in puddles of blood; finally I came to a room where several of your ladies were huddled together on chairs merely waiting to die. A band of Parisians burst into the room, intending, I am certain, to butcher us all. They approached us with such menace and malice in their eyes; we clung together in fear, expecting our next breath to be our last. Suddenly a wild-looking man with a long beard shouted at the men to stop. ‘We do not kill women!’ he said. ‘Spare them. Do not disgrace the nation.’

“To our surprise, the assassins heeded his words. I went off to find my sister, searching every room for her—
Majesté
, everywhere, there were bloody hand- and footprints, almost
proudly
smeared, all over the bedclothes and upholstery. Suddenly, I heard the sound of footsteps rushing toward me. I ducked into the very next chamber that I came to, where a dozen or more courtiers were hoping to wait out the invasion.” Madame Campan finally pauses for breath although she still trembles with panic.

“The monsters charged into the room and began to slaughter everyone, one by one, stabbing and decapitating innocent men. The women threw themselves to the floor, begging for mercy. I ran toward the staircase and just as I reached it, I felt someone grab me. My assailant thrust his hand down the back of my gown and clutched at my chemise. I fell to my knees and could not move.”

Madame Campan begins to cry anew. “All of a sudden, amid the mayhem, a voice from the foot of the stairs called up to my
molester, ‘What are you doing?’ To this the man made little reply. ‘We don’t kill women,’ the voice said. At this, my executioner released my chemise. He spat upon me and snarled, ‘Get up, jade, and be off. The Nation pardons you.’

“He spared my life, but not my dignity,
Majesté
. They made me stand on a bench facing the window and shout as loudly as I could into the courtyard below, ‘The Nation forever!’

“Hours later, my gown was torn and stained with blood, though not my own—these are the badges of numberless brave royalists.” Her trembling hands try to smooth her rumpled skirts. “I tried to leave the Tuileries. But was mistaken for a young Swiss Guard disguised as a woman, and for the second time in a single day, I was nearly killed.

“Finally, I was able to quit the palace, picking my way over countless corpses, some of which had been viciously dismembered.” Choking back sobs, Madame Campan lists the bodies she recalls seeing, so many of them innocent servants who took no part in the combat. “They said ‘We do not kill women,’
Majesté
, but I saw many dead and dying. Their sex did not save them.”

“They laid down their lives for the crown,” I say bitterly. “We can never repay their debt.”

As Henriette describes what she saw between the palace and the Salle du Manège—the bodies leeching blood into the verdant gardens, dismembered limbs and scraps of grenadier and Swiss Guard uniforms hanging from trees, and the hags from the marketplace picking over the corpses, stripping them naked, even disemboweling them with a bloodlust she had never thought possible for a female—I, too, feel the need to retch.

During the evening, the acrid smell of smoke wafts toward us. “The Tuileries is burning,” observes the comte de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt. But soon, an unfamiliar stench settles heavily in our already fetid chamber. The sickening smell awakens Madame
Royale, who, along with her brother, had finally dropped off to sleep. Louis’s eyes droop heavily and his head lolls against his chest.

“What is that?” my daughter whispers, pinching her nose closed.

“Bonfires,” the comte answers. “They are burning the bodies.”

Madame Campan begins to weep afresh.

Near midnight, the deputies vote to convey us for the night to the Couvent des Feuillants, disused ever since the Assembly declared the suppression of the monasteries and convents.

But it is another hour or more before we are permitted to leave. When we finally quit the recorders’ box, Monsieur Barnave crosses the hall to speak with me. “As I am very sure of paying one day with my head for the interest your misfortunes have inspired in me,
je vous prie
, madame, as my only recompense, the honor of kissing your hand,” he murmurs.

I nod my head, almost imperceptibly, raise my hand, and Barnave bends over to claim his reward. Over his shoulder I spy Robespierre watching us. He has witnessed everything.

We do not depart the Salle du Manège until two
A.M
. on August 11, our party shuttled to the Feuillants inside two royal carriages. The convent is not far from the Assembly hall, but the coachmen have been instructed to take a deliberately circuitous route, driving as slowly as possible, and we have been ordered to keep the curtains parted so that the carousing mob, still celebrating their hideous victory with wine and song, can jeer at us as we pass. Henriette Campan had warned me that the gutters of Paris were running with blood. Until now I confess I had thought it hyperbole. But she had not lied.

Our carriage takes a detour through the Place Vendôme, separated from the Convent des Feuillants by the broad rue Saint-Honoré. Louis stares numbly in horror and disbelief. His statue has been toppled from its pedestal and desecrated, sawed off at the
knees. Citizens dance joyfully about the rubble, lobbing insults at our coach as we rumble past, accusing me of being a whore, “the infamous Antoinette who wants to bathe the citizens of France in blood.” They demand the entrails of the king and queen even as their garments are steeped in gore and they play macabre games of catch with gobbets of dead flesh. Every man sports the tricolor cockade on his hat, an accessory that was declared compulsory in July. In solidarity, many women and children wear the red, white, and blue cockade.

The interior of the convent smells of mold. The last time I spent the night in a nunnery, I was fourteen years old. Maman had insisted on a pilgrimage to Marizell to pay tribute to the Blessed Virgin, the patron saint of Austria, before I left my homeland forever to become a bride of France. But this is not the country I wed: the violence, the vitriol, the dolls like voodoo poppets from the Antilles that hang me in effigy. These people loved me once.

I am shown to a narrow cell boasting a truckle bed, a wooden stool, and a basin. The walls, like those of the other cells in which the royal family will lay their heads tonight, are covered with a dark green paper that only enhances the gloom. Our garments reek and we have no fresh clothes to don. Everything we owned was in the Tuileries. My purse is gone and I have nothing to offer as a
pourboire
for anyone who does us a favor.

Shortly after our arrival, we are given a parcel wrapped in a bedsheet. It bears a sympathetic note from Lady Sutherland, the wife of the British ambassador. She has sent clean linen for me and my children. The women’s accoutrements will be too large for Madame Royale, but I accept the gift gratefully. For the dauphin, Lady Sutherland sent a suit that had belonged to her own son, a boy of the same age. Monsieur d’Aubier, a former minister as portly as the king, dispatched linen and a silk suit for Louis.

For the first time since our installation in the Salle du Manège,
I allow myself to weep. My handkerchief becomes so wet with tears that I am compelled to accept one from Monsieur d’Aubier. He presses the cloth into my hands along with a purse that contains twenty-five louis. When I have nothing to offer in return except a grateful smile, he turns away, as though his own heart is about to crack.

In the cell adjacent to mine, Madame Élisabeth is sobbing quietly over her rosary.

“Oh, God, they are going to kill me!” I exclaim, struck with the harsh reality of our straits.

I have the rest of the night to spend with my terror; as exhausted as I am, there is no hope of sleep. Outside the grilles that separate us from the street, the citizens gather, singing choruses of the
Marseillaise
and hurling a continuous stream of abusive language at the convent walls. I suppose I eventually drop off into a fitful sleep because in a few hours, when the morning light seeps through the grille, I awaken with a start. I bolt upright in the narrow bed and look about me, confused by my unfamiliar surroundings. Memories of yesterday’s nightmare come flooding back. With a shudder, I murmur to myself, “I had hoped it was all a dream.”

Madame Campan and the princesse de Lamballe enter my cell. At the sight of me, Lamballe bursts into tears and kneels at my feet. To soothe her, I stroke her hair with sisterly affection, but her sadness is infectious. “I weep for you more than I do for myself,” I blubber unregally, “for it is I who have brought this misfortune upon you—upon everyone who comes near me. It is me they blame for every ill. I am the one they despise.”

At seven o’clock the royal family and our attendants are led to the refectory, where we are served an inedible
petit déjeuner
of stale toast and weak coffee. Even Louis lacks the stomach for it. At ten, we are conveyed back to the cramped reporters’ box in the Salle du Manège, sentenced for another suffocating day to witness the deputies
argue over our fate. One by one they rise to pontificate, condemning the monarchy and praising the new republic and the courageous revolutionaries, congratulating them on murdering some six hundred of the 950 Swiss Guards who valiantly defended the Tuileries. Sixty more have been taken prisoner.

Above our heads a heated discussion rages regarding where the royal family will reside, the Couvent des Feuillants being only a temporary solution. Yesterday’s proposal of the Luxembourg Palais is rejected today, for fear that we can escape from it too easily. Rejected, too, is the pledge to retain a tutor for my son. Instead, they vote to send us to the Temple, so named because it is the Parisian fortress that in medieval days was the headquarters of the Knights Templar. Only in the Temple, Santerre argues, will it be possible to ensure the safety of the
“détenus.”
By referring to us as detainees, it is abundantly apparent that we are truly prisoners of the state, entrusted from now on to the deputies of the Paris Commune who promise to conduct the royal family to the Temple “with all the respect due their misfortune.” If they gave a fig for our “misfortune,” they would not treat us so ill.

As the Temple needs to be prepared against our arrival, we are returned to the Feuillants to endure for another night the taunts outside our windows. But at least we will eat well. Louis’s
valet de chambre
, Monsieur Thiéri, arranges for meals cooked in his own kitchen to be brought in to the convent. The king tucks into his food even more voraciously than usual. He is so often derided for caring more about his stomach than his subjects, but his detractors do not know the man I married twenty-two years ago. Louis’s ravenous appetite is the result of the stress and strains of kingship, just as I once danced and gambled into the wee hours of the morning to stave off my unhappiness at our childless, celibate state. He eats—
comme un grand cochon
, they grumble—because he cares so
much
for his people.

Late that night a man named Dufour begs admission to the Feuillants. He asks to see the queen. Every nerve stills; surely this is the moment the citizens of France have been howling for like wolves. He has come to murder me. It would be an absurdly simple thing to do: one well-placed thrust of a poignard and Louis becomes a widower. The princesse de Lamballe bravely pretends to be me and allows Monsieur Dufour to approach, but he tells her, “You are not the queen.” At her protestations he insists, “I have seen Her Majesty. You are not her.”

“Why are you so sure, monsieur?” la Lamballe asks him, feigning my natural hauteur.

“Because I have her picture,” Dufour replies. He reaches for something within his dark brown coat and I gasp, imagining the knife he will withdraw from the pocket. The princess turns ashen.

Monsieur Dufour reveals his hand. He is clasping my purse.

I look inside and every sou is there. So, too, is the miniature of me with my children. The man refuses a reward. He begs just one favor: “Don’t tell anyone else I was here,” he says, and disappears into the inky night.

We spend another full day cooped up like hens in the cramped chamber within the Salle du Manège and a third night at the convent. Finally, at six in the evening on August 13, the royal family and our attendants begin a two-hour journey through the narrow streets of Paris. The coachmen take many detours, providing us with a good look at the wreckage of the Tuileries Palace. Every window has been shattered, and in several places the façade is charred around the gaping holes. Three nights after the carnage, the courtyard is still ablaze with bonfires, tended by drunken Reds, mercenaries from Marseille who have not tired of singing their anthem. Our nostrils are assailed by the pungent stench of decaying flesh. Outside the ruins of the palace, someone has posted an enormous, crudely lettered placard that reads
HOUSE TO LET
.