Confessions of Marie Antoinette (57 page)

The deaths of Robespierre, et al., effectively ended the Reign of Terror. Although the Revolution’s thirst for blood began during the summer of 1789, the “Terror” did not begin until September 1793, a month before the execution of Marie Antoinette. Nor was it confined to Paris. The Terror was responsible for some 25,000 summary executions across France, as well as the 2,639 people who were sent to the guillotine in Paris and the 16,594 who were beheaded with the “national razor” in other areas of the country. Charged with dictatorship and tyranny on July 26, the following day Robespierre attempted to avoid arrest by throwing himself out of a window. He succeeded in breaking both his legs, and, unable to flee, was subsequently arrested. He then tried to commit suicide by shooting himself, but the bullet lodged in his jaw and he was executed on July 28. It is said that the executioner
yanked off the bandage that was binding the accused’s bloody and swollen jaw, producing an agonized scream that was silenced only by the guillotine blade.

The Reign of Terror claimed approximately 50,000 victims. Of those who were condemned by Revolutionary Tribunals throughout France, only about 18 percent were aristocrats, 6 percent were clergymen (predominantly Roman Catholic), and 4 percent were bourgeoisie, or middle class. A whopping 72 percent were people from the lowest social strata: peasants or common laborers who were accused of petty crimes, hoarding, and issues related to military service such as desertion or evading the draft. This would put the lie to any assertions that the Reign of Terror was largely an act of class warfare against the aristocracy. Ironically, and tragically, a handful of demagogues perpetuating their new Cult of Reason to a populace that was predominantly impoverished, and too lazy, ignorant, or brainwashed to think for itself, managed to make an entire nation
lose
its reason entirely and descend into a civil war that benefited no one.

François Adrien Toulan
, the former music seller and ardent republican-turned-royalist sympathizer, was eventually guillotined after the discovery of his complicity in one of the plots to effect Marie Antoinette’s escape from the Temple. During the restoration of the monarchy, Marie Thérèse, Marie Antoinette’s only surviving child, granted Toulan’s widow a royal pension.

Jacques François Lepître
was arrested on October 8, 1793, and condemned by the Commune on November 19 for conspiring to aid the royal family. Lepître was subsequently denounced by Monsieur and Madame Tison, the nasty republican couple in charge of minding the royal family at the Temple, along with ten others suspected of being actively sympathetic to the royal family, including the commissioners
François Adrien Toulan, Claude-Antoine-François Moëlle
, and one of the architects of the infamous Carnation Plot, the counterrevolutionary
Alexandre Gonsse de Rougeville
. The self-styled Chevalier de Rougeville would survive the French Revolution only to be shot as a traitor for abetting the allied armies against Napoleon in 1814. Lepître also survived the Revolution, eventually becoming a professor of rhetoric in Rouen. He died in 1821.

After bringing the relics of Louis XVI to the comte de Provence, the
Chevalier de Jarjayes
was made an adjutant by the king of Sardinia and participated in the counterrevolutionary military campaign of 1793, fighting with the Sardinian army. He then became involved in the failed Carnation Plot to release Marie Antoinette from the Conciergerie. Jarjayes survived the Revolution and was awarded the rank of Lieutenant-General by Louis XVIII after the Bourbon restoration. He died in September 1822.

The
Baron de Batz
also survived the Revolution, although he was arrested following the 1795 coup d’état after he had fled to Auvergne and bought a castle there. However, the baron managed to elude his captors in the course of being transported to Lyon, fleeing to Switzerland. Eventually he settled in Auvergne and was awarded two distinguished honors—the rank of maréchal de camp and the Order of Saint Louis—for his prior service to the crown during the Bourbon restoration. He was also a distinguished military commander under Napoleon, although his command of the Cantal was revoked after the Hundred Days of the emperor’s resurgence. In January 1822, Baron de Batz died in seclusion at Chadieu.

After royally botching his assignment during the ill-fated flight to Montmédy, Marie Antoinette’s legendary coiffeur
Léonard Hautier
returned to Paris where he maintained a low profile throughout the rest of the Revolution.

Marie Antoinette’s lady in waiting
Henriette Campan
and Louis’s
premier valet de chambre
,
François Hüe
, both survived the Revolution and went on to write memoirs of their experiences in
the last days of the
Ancien Régime
. Madame Campan’s memoirs are often relied upon by biographers and taken as gospel, but many of the events she records took place before her time in service to the monarchs began and are also tinted with a rosy glow, intended to cast the sovereigns in a soft light that would rehabilitate their reputations in a post-Napoleonic world. For example, her famous attribution of the phrase “May God guide us and protect us, for we are much too young to reign,” which she places in Louis’s mouth at the moment he hears of his grandfather’s death, falling upon his knees in prayer, is more than likely a fictional embellishment. For one thing, Campan wasn’t there. For another, neither the emotion nor the expression is in keeping with the teenage Louis’s personality. But generations of biographers have included it in their academic tomes as fact.

Hüe accompanied Marie Thérèse to Vienna in 1795 and when her uncle Louis XVIII eventually ascended the throne, was made a baron as well as Treasurer General of his household. Hüe died in 1819 and is buried in Père Lachaise cemetery.

After the Revolution ended, Madame Campan, finding herself penniless, eventually opened a school, which was patronized by, among others, the future wife of Napoleon Bonaparte, Rose de Beauharnais. This led to a position as superintendent of a school in Écouen founded by Napoleon for the education of the daughters and sisters of Légion d’Honneur recipients. Henriette Campan retired to Mantes after the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1814 and died in 1822.

Louis’s other faithful valet,
Jean-Baptiste Hanet-Cléry
, was arrested and imprisoned more than once following his master’s execution. Finally sent to the horrific La Force prison on September 25, 1793, he was not released until the Terror ended, several days after the fall of Robespierre. He eventually ended up in Austria, where he joined Madame Royale’s household, and then that of the
comte de Provence, where he dwelled in exile in Verona. Cléry did not return to France until 1803. Though he was offered a position as Josephine’s chamberlain by Napoleon, he refused it and went into self-imposed exile instead, rejoining Marie Thérèse, first in Warsaw and then in Vienna.

Cléry suffered an attack of apoplexy in 1808 and died the following year on his estate in Austria. His tombstone reads
“Ci-gît le fidèle Cléry”
—here lies the faithful Cléry.

Claude Chauveau-Lagarde
, who defended Marie Antoinette at her trial, did survive the Revolution, dying in 1841. He also defended Madame Élisabeth as well as several of the moderate Girondins who were placed on trial during the Reign of Terror, including Madame Roland,
Jean-Sylvain Bailly
, and Jacques Pierre Brissot. He is buried in the Cimitière de Montparnasse in Paris.

During the September massacres the royal children’s governess
Madame de Tourzel
and her teenage daughter
Pauline
were smuggled out of La Force prison by a mysterious man, possibly an aristocrat. The two survived the Revolution, but from time to time over the next several years Louis Charles’s former
gouvernante
would be accosted by various impostors claiming to be Louis XVII. Madame de Tourzel was made a duchesse by King Charles X, the
ci-devant
comte d’Artois, and she eventually published her memoirs. In 1814, Pauline and Marie Antoinette’s daughter, then duchesse d’Angoulême, were reunited. Pauline served as a lady-in-waiting to the duchesse until the abdication of Marie Thérèse’s father-in-law Charles X in August 1830.

Florimond Claude, the comte de Mercy-Argenteau
, who had long served as Austria’s ambassador to the Bourbon court, and who in some ways was both a mentor and surrogate father to Marie Antoinette, was appointed ambassador to Great Britain in July 1794, another cushy posting. Unfortunately the sixty-seven-year-old diplomat died on August 25, a few days after arriving in London.

Rose Bertin
survived the Revolution, traveling to Germany and later fleeing to London to ride out the storm. There she reopened her business, attracting as posh a clientele as she had in Paris. She returned to the French capital in 1795, briefly numbering the soignée Josephine de Beauharnais among her new customers. In the early years of the nineteenth century, as fashion’s silhouettes became streamlined and simplified, Rose transferred the business to her nephews and retired from the fashion world. She died at her beloved country estate in Épinay-sur-Seine in 1813 at the age of sixty-six.

Rosalie Lamorlière
, Marie Antoinette’s devoted servant in the Temple, continued to serve the Richards at least until 1799. Twenty-five years old at the time she knew Marie Antoinette, she never married although she did bear a daughter to a man whose name appears lost to history. Rosalie’s daughter erected a tomb in her honor in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

As for
Louison Chabry
, although she is the “everywoman” of
Confessions of Marie Antoinette
, she is not a fictional creation. In 1789, she was a twenty-year-old sculptress who did in fact participate in the
poissardes’
October 5 march from Paris to Versailles, and she was indeed one of the half-dozen women chosen to form the little delegation that would present the people’s grievances to the king in a civilized manner. Louison’s fifteen minutes of fame came on that day when she met with the king and fainted in his presence, whether from hunger, exhaustion, awe, or some combination of all three. She witnessed Louis’s kindness and solicitousness firsthand and I used that event as a springboard for the rest of her character, especially when it comes to her ambivalence about certain aspects of the Revolution, in contrast with her wholly fictional boyfriend Armand, whose beliefs are more in keeping with those of the young revolutionaries of the day. Nothing much is known about Louison Chabry. Her name is even spelled “Chabray” on occasion
and some biographies refer to her as a seventeen-year-old flower seller rather than a twenty-year-old sculptress. My own research, as well as my gut hunches after living, eating, breathing, and sleeping Marie Antoinette’s life for the past five years, have me leaning toward the latter age and vocation.

Having Louison as my alternate narrator allowed me the best of both worlds. She really existed, so I could keep the novel “honest” by not suddenly introducing a fictional narrator into the trilogy; but little enough is known about her that I could plausibly place her in a number of locations and at seminal events populated by hundreds or thousands of Parisians—Revolutionary events that Marie Antoinette would either not have been aware of at the time, or would never have attended, but which I felt my readers needed to know about in order to have a more complete picture of the age. Because Marie Antoinette was so insulated, her scope was more circumscribed, and this became even truer during the royal family’s various incarcerations and their increased deprivations. The character of Louison also afforded me the opportunity as an author to create a more nuanced world. France was not either Bourbon white or revolutionary tricolor at the time, although the voices of the Revolution were doing their best to convince the people “if you’re not for us, you’re against us.” Human beings wouldn’t be what they are if there were not shades of ambivalence, doubt, and confusion. As a simple example, one could deplore the fact that the clergy paid no taxes and still be horrified by the National Convention’s orders to massacre priests.

Readers always ask how much of this novel really happened. The Marie Antoinette trilogy is extensively researched and heavily based on the historical record. It’s the novelist’s prerogative to fill in the gaps with her imagination. It’s my personal philosophy with historical fiction that if an event could plausibly have happened, then it’s fair game to include it in the narrative, but if it plays fast
and loose with dates or moves battles around (or invents them), those are lines I will not cross. Nor could I invent happy endings that simply did not take place just to satisfy some unwritten rule of commercial fiction. Any historical figure who lived more than two hundred years ago is dead by now. Sometimes gruesomely. Grab a Kleenex and get over it. I won’t have Marie Antoinette survive the French Revolution and live happily ever after with Axel and the kids in Stockholm just because you don’t want to cry at the end of the novel.

On the other hand, some things are so wonderful that even a novelist can’t make them up. I am a proud history geek and a research junkie. I love discovering those little snippets of information that humanize a single moment in a distant time, those sparkling gems that make you gasp or cry, or laugh or shout, “I’ve got to use this!” I’ll leave you with just a few examples of my favorite “wow” moments from my Marie Antoinette research.

Madame du Barry really did write to the queen after the October 6, 1789, storming of Versailles, placing her château, Louveciennes, at the royal family’s disposal and offering them sanctuary there at any time. This heartfelt offer makes an exceptionally touching coda to the story line of the women’s rivalry that began in the first novel of the trilogy,
Becoming Marie Antoinette
. Despite her humble origins, Jeanne du Barry, Louis XV’s last mistress, was a royalist with every fiber of her being. Not only did she fund the escape of émigrés, but she allowed her home to be used for secret royalist meetings. Although she was genuinely touched by it, Marie Antoinette never answered her former rival’s letter and the royal family would never know the extent of the comtesse’s loyalty to the couple she once derided at court. Unfortunately, Madame du Barry survived the queen by less than two months. A victim of the Terror, she was guillotined on December 8, 1793.