Marie Antoinette (97 page)
Authors: Antonia Fraser
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There is a replica of a cell at the Conciergerie today. It shows the back of a black-clad figure, in a veil, reading a book, watched by a guard standing extremely close and peering over the screen. Tourists flock in and there is a susurration of the name in many languages and accents: “Maree Antoinette . . . Maria Antonietta . . . Maria Antonia . . . Marie.” Relics include a small beflowered water jug and a white linen napkin. The official notice, printed in French, English and German, refers to Marie Antoinette as “a brilliant but carefree and extravagant personality,” an image singularly at variance with the sight of the hunched widow.
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*109
The English royal family bought some of the belongings of the former King and Queen of France. As tends to happen when new regimes need money—Cromwell’s Commonwealth and the Soviet Government come to mind—other more stable royal families benefited.
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But Madame Bault, interviewed in old age by an early biographer of Marie Antoinette, Lafont d’Aussone, struck him not only with her good memory but also with her grand manner: “You would have thought you were dealing with a grand old countess, not a concierge’s widow.”
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This move has been doubted, but there are two good reasons to suppose it did take place; first, the records remain in the National Archives of the work that was done, together with the police order to do it. Second, Rosalie stated that the Queen remained only “forty days” in the former Council Chamber, which fits this scenario.
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It was believed by some after the Restoration that the Abbé Cholet gave the Queen a final Communion on the night of 12 October (the Abbé Magnin being ill) and that this was something permitted by Bault.
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This seems a great deal more improbable than accounts of Masses and Communions under the Richards’ regime, since security in the new cell was so much greater, with Marie Antoinette on the verge of trial. However, with this pious story, as with the romantic one of Fersen’s last love-making in the Tuileries, one cannot help hoping that it was true.
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Meaning, literally, no more than the
former
regime, although the words
ancien régime
have come to have a weightier meaning.
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But the “last letter” never reached Madame Elisabeth. It was intercepted and given to Robespierre; it was unknown until 1816. It is now in the Archives Nationales showing the countersignature of Fouquier-Tinville, with three other signatures later. A note validates Marie Antoinette’s handwriting (“conforme à l’autographe”).
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The French Bourbon pretenders to the throne today, headed by the Comte de Paris, are thus descended from Maria Carolina via Queen Amélie, not Marie Antoinette.
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DNA testing in 1993 had already showed that the most celebrated claimant, Karl Wilhelm Naundorf, who died in 1845, was extremely unlikely to be descended from Marie Antoinette.
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In 1993 the title
The Ghosts of Versailles
was used as an opera composed by John Corigliano and with a libretto by William M. Hoffman, in which Marie Antoinette is the ghost and Beaumarchais falls in love with her, planning to revise history by rescuing her. This is not the only opera to touch on the life of the Queen, for
Marie Antoinette and Fersen,
composed by Daniel Börtz with a libretto by its director Claes Fellborn, was first performed in Stockholm by the Swedish Folk Opera in 1997. There have also been films and historical novels in abundance.
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Born a Princess of Hesse-Darmstadt and thus descended from Marie Antoinette’s friend Princess Louise, Alexandra was a fourth cousin, four generations removed, of the French Queen; both traced descent back to the Landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt, George II, whose granddaughter married the Emperor Leopold I.
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Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE • A SMALL ARCHDUCHESS
CHAPTER FOUR • SENDING AN ANGEL
CHAPTER FIVE • FRANCE’S HAPPINESS
CHAPTER SIX • IN FRONT OF THE WHOLE WORLD
CHAPTER SEVEN • STRANGE BEHAVIOUR
CHAPTER EIGHT • LOVE OF A PEOPLE
CHAPTER NINE • IN TRUTH A GODDESS
CHAPTER TEN • AN UNHAPPY WOMAN?
CHAPTER ELEVEN • YOU SHALL BE MINE . . .
CHAPTER TWELVE • FULFILLING THEIR WISHES
CHAPTER THIRTEEN • THE FLOWERS OF THE CROWN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN • ACQUISITIONS
CHAPTER FIFTEEN • ARREST THE CARDINAL!
CHAPTER SIXTEEN • MADAME DEFICIT
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN • CLOSE TO SHIPWRECK
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN • HATED, HUMBLED, MORTIFIED
PART FIVE • THE AUSTRIAN WOMAN
CHAPTER NINETEEN • HER MAJESTY THE PRISONER
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE • DEPARTURE AT MIDNIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO • UP TO THE EMPEROR
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE • VIOLENCE AND RAGE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR • THE TOWER
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE • UNFORTUNATE PRINCESS
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX • THE HEAD OF ANTOINETTE
