The Hidden Diary of Marie Antoinette (34 page)

The utter savagery of the unspeakable scene was beyond anything I had ever witnessed or imagined. I felt nauseous and so did Madame de Tourzel, who turned her head away and clutched her stomach. Louis went to the window, which gaped open as the glass had been shot away, and threw up into the garden.

“Don’t look,” shouted one of the knights or guards. “Don’t think about what you see here. Follow us, and hurry!”

Blindly I did as they asked, as the sounds of musket fire and the loud booming of the cannon and shaking of the palace floors and walls intensified. From every room we passed came piercing screams and harsh shouting and through open doorways we caught brief glimpses of the savage invaders at their bloody work.

We ran down little-used hallways and through decayed and vacant rooms, finally climbing a dusty old staircase that led to
my apartments. The soldiers and knights went in first, swords and sabers and muskets out. They surprised a large group of Parisians who were looting my wardrobe chests and flinging gowns and chemises and petticoats onto the floor, ripping my beautiful furnishings to shreds. Some of the looters were shot where they stood, others cut down as they ran toward us, eyes wide and bloody pikes and knives raised in murderous attack.

Animal cries came from their throats as they rushed toward us, chilling and terrifying. I clutched the children to me, not wanting them to watch what I was seeing only too clearly. For the savages, who reeked of wine, were monstrous, and in their drunken mayhem they had made a shambles of the room.

I can hardly bear to write what I saw there. Bodies writhing on the floor, stabbed in the belly, bloody intestines in ropy strings, brains spattered across the parquet floor, satin gowns covered in blood and innards, bodies of uniformed servants and officials intertwined, caught in a grotesque embrace of death. Faces with ghoulish expressions of surprise, horror, anguish, pain. Groans of the dying, cruel laughter of the butchers, exultant in their atrocities. Men and women waving reddened knives, drunk on the royal wine from the cellars, drunk on revenge, unleashing a lifetime of grievances on their hapless victims.

And the blood, all the blood. Streams of it, torrents of it, pouring down the yellowing marble staircases, red blood, dark blood, the maroon stains of dried blood, blood that added the metallic reek of iron to the strong odors of smoke and gunpowder and wine in the stale air.

Flies buzzed in their thousands over the heaps of mutilated corpses, the flies of a hot August day, the feast day of St. Lawrence the Martyr. I was so overcome with the shocking sights around me that for a long time I became fascinated by the flies, and fixed my gaze on them, watching them land on the severed limbs and corpses and then rise up into the air. It
was as if, by watching the flies, I could somehow block out everything else in the room, everything I could not bear to see and hear.

Once again it was Lieutenant de la Tour who took my arm and shookme out of my trance. With a deft movement he pushed me and the children toward the doorway and stood in front of us, defending us against a fresh onslaught of attackers who were running at us with their pikes pointed at our chests, screaming “Death to the king!” and “Death to the Austrian bitch!”

I felt the jolt and clash of arms as the soldiers and knights met the oncoming pikes with their own weapons. The Parisians were so close I could smell their foul wine-sodden breath and see the hate in their eyes. We will die here, I thought. We will surely die here. Nothing can save us. I heard Louis cry out and could not tell whether it was a cry of fear or of pain. Had he been wounded? Was he dying?

With a groan one of the Knights of the Golden Dagger fell back against me and collapsed, then another and another. There was blood on the floor, my shoes were slipping in it. Louis-Charles, who had been very brave until that moment, began to sob.

Suddenly a huge man came up behind us and spoke to me. I turned and recognized the giant gardener I had been forced to dismiss some months earlier. He swung Louis-Charles up onto his broad shoulders and held Mousseline close to his side. Both children clung to him and Louis-Charles stopped crying.

“Come,” he said to me, “I know a way out.” I called out to Louis, who followed us, and to poor brave Madame de Tourzel who had picked up a knife from the hand of one of the fallen Parisians and was brandishing it with all her vigor. Lieutenant de la Tour brought up the rear, protecting us from attack from behind as we made our way through a narrow opening in the wainscoting into a dusty passageway that led us eventually to a
storage room and then to the looted kitchens. From there we quickly crossed through the gardens to the building where the Legislative Assembly was in session.

We were allowed in but were told to remain in a small room with barred windows where the secretaries customarily sat to record the proceedings. Even with the secretaries gone and their desks removed, it was too small a room for us all, and we had to stand. I felt like an animal in a cage, on display. Through the iron bars I frowned at the deputies, who hardly took any notice of us, they were so worried about their chamber being invaded by the armies of Parisians who were rampaging through the palace.

For hours we stood there, trapped in our little boxlike room, relieved to be alive but so desperately uncomfortable and tired and wishing the horrible day would end. We were given water and some cheese and fruit which we shared out among us all while outside the uproar from the palace continued and the deputies quarreled, shaking their fists and shouting vociferously.

The whole world has gone mad today, I thought. And I am at the center of all the madness.

I am too tired to write at length about the rest of our endless day. Finally we were permitted to go to a safe location and were given food and basins of water to wash in. I feel as though I can never wash away the stains of this terrible day, the Feast Day of St. Lawrence the Martyr. I remember the story of St. Lawrence, burned by the Romans on a grill, and I cannot help but think of the many butchered martyrs I saw this day in the palace. Had we not been protected by the guardsmen and knights, we might well have been martyrs ourselves, piled up among the other corpses in a gruesome heap, to be thrown into carts and burned in a lime pit until, like St. Lawrence, there was nothing left of us but ashes.

August 20, 1792

I cannot sleep. If I try to sleep, the nightmares come. There is a doctor here in this dungeon where we are imprisoned but he is rude to me and will not give me any orange-flower water and ether to help me sleep.

I dream red dreams. Headless bodies stagger toward me. Heads, open-mouthed, drift past. I am chased along dark corridors and I run as fast as I can but the hideous things that pursue me are faster. Just as they catch up to me I wake screaming.

August 27, 1792

We live now in the smallest tower of Charlot’s old mansion called the Temple. We are heavily guarded here, and surrounded by hostile people. When we were first brought here Chambertin, Sophie, Madame de Tourzel and Loulou were allowed to come with us. But they were soon sent away and imprisoned. I have tried very hard to find out where they are being held but no one will tell me.

It is very hot in these rooms and there are rats everywhere. Louis-Charles likes to trap them and set them free in front of Mousseline who shrieks when they run over her feet.

My thick taffeta corset was taken away from me but I still have the girdle of Ste. Radegunde that mother sent me to wear during my labor and I wear it now for protection. Since I have begun wearing it I am able to sleep though the terrible red dreams still come at times.

Officially France has no king any longer, yet that is nonsense, and I don’t care who reads these words or hears me express myself on this subject. My husband is the anointed ruler of his people, crowned in a sacrament and chosen by acclamation.
He is now and will always be a king, Commune or no Commune, Robespierre or no Robespierre.

This arrogant little lawyer Robespierre claims to be the voice of the people yet anyone can tell at a glance that he is too strange and disturbed to be anyone’s voice. I watched him when he came to the assembly hall on that awful day when we were imprisoned there. He spoke loudly for such a small man and people did listen to him instead of ignoring him as they did most of the other speakers. He was very peculiar, however. He kept walking back and forth on his high-heeled shoes, like a nervous woman and not a strong or forceful man. He had a nervous tic in his cheek and the muscles there kept jumping convulsively. He kept biting his nails and pulling at his clothes and smoothing his collar, and his ugly skin was full of scars and looked like the color we used to call Goose-Droppings. Altogether he made me shudder.

I cover these words with my hand, smearing the ink a little, because there is a representative of the Commune in the room with us and I suppose he might ask to see what I am writing. So far he has not.

September 7, 1792

My heart is pounding so fast I can hardly catch my breath. I have just seen something I almost can’t believe, yet I know I have seen it with my own two eyes and it is not a nightmare.

A group of Parisians, chanting and waving banners, came into the open area in front of the guard barracks here and began parading noisily in front of our windows. They had a severed head impaled on a pike and brought it close enough so that we could see whose head it was.

I felt my skin crawl. It was Loulou! My dearest friend, my
confidante. Next to Sophie, the woman I trust most in the world. Her mouth was open, her eyes staring. Her hair floated out behind her.

I cried out and covered my eyes, but not before I caught a glimpse of another lump of flesh impaled on a pike. It was a woman’s genitals.

I ran from the window and flung myself down on my bed. I cried for a long time, then decided that I must leave a record of what was done to the loveliest, most faithful, dearest lady I have known. So I have set down here what happened to her. It is too hideous to think of. Once more I will write her name, a small memorial to one I loved very much:

Marie-Thérèse de Savoie-Carignan,
           Princesse de Lamballe
                   1749–1792
             Requiescat in pace.

October 1, 1792

Each night a lamplighter in a darkcloakand pointed hat comes through our apartments and fills our oil lamps and trims them, then lights them. Until tonight I had taken little notice of him. But tonight he nodded to me when he entered the room and placed a familiar-looking pewter candleholder on the table in front of where I was sitting, my knitting on my lap.

I looked up into his face. It was Lieutenant de la Tour! I gasped but prevented myself from crying out. The Commune representative who always sits in our common room, overhearing all our conversations, had nodded off before the fire and so noticed nothing. Even Louis, who had Louis-Charles on his lap and was drawing a map of the French provinces for him, did not look up at the sound of my sudden intake of breath.

The lamplighter completed his task, lighting a lamp in each of our rooms and leaving us candles for the night, then left. I waited until it was fully dark, then retired to prepare for the night, taking the candleholder with me. Once in my room I quickly turned it over and searched for a message inside, and found one—from Axel!

I have not heard from him for months. Now he sends word that he is with the Austrian army and has been since July, though he was captured once and later wounded at Thionville. His wound is healing and he is once again
with the army which is about to begin an assault on Lille. He says they have had some setbacks and he thought the Austrians would be in Paris long before now but he remains hopeful they will be here soon.

“Take heart my dearest girl,” he writes, “my little angel, my love. With every breath I think of you.”

I kiss his dear letter, and my tears fall. I know I should burn it but I can’t bear to destroy this precious paper he has held in his hands, these precious words he has written. I will sleep tonight with his message under my pillow, hoping to dream of him and praying that our liberation will come soon.

October 2, 1792

This morning before dawn I was awakened roughly by someone shaking me and shouting in my face. In the dim lamplight I could see that it was Amélie, dressed in a new, well-made red and white gown in the current Parisian fashion and with the chunk of gray stone from the Bastille on a chain around her neck. From her ears hung earrings made like miniature guillotines—a fashion I had been told about but could hardly imagine to be real.

“Get up, citizeness,” she said briskly. “You are to be examined by the Committee of Vigilance.”

I clutched my pillow, feeling for the letter that lay beneath it and trying to think, how can I destroy it, where can I hide it?

“Will the Committee allow me time to dress?”

“Dress quickly then.” She made no move to leave, to allow me any privacy.

“If the Committee will permit me, I would like to change my linen—” I began.

“Do you really think anybody cares about looking at your bony old body?” Amélie said impatiently. “All we care about is
that you are under suspicion as an enemy of the revolution. Never mind getting dressed. Stand in the center of the room.”

I did as she asked, holding my pillow and the letter, concealed behind my hand.

Amélie motioned to companions in the adjoining room. “We’ll talk to the old bitch in here.” Two women and two men came into my small bedroom, bringing a lamp which they set down on a low table. They were young, younger than Amélie whom I knew to be around my age of thirty-six or a little older. The men I judged to be perhaps twenty-five, the women closer to twenty. They stared at me.

“Citizeness Capet, the Committee of Vigilance for the Commune, the Temple section, demands that you answer the following questions. Have you any valuables?”

“Only my wedding ring.”

“Will you take an oath to defend the revolution?”

“I took an oath to obey my king and husband, at his coronation. I could hardly forswear that oath now.”