The Queen's Lover (13 page)

In the following days the bourgeois militia recently formed to protect the Estates-General from royalist attack—it was being called the National Guard and was led by Lafayette—would be further reinforced
by defecting government troops. On the morning of July 14 a crowd decided to march on that symbol of royal despotism, the Bastille, where the troops guarding the fortress consisted of 110 men, 80 of them retired invalids. Shortly after noon, upon amiably inviting a delegation of demonstrators to visit the prison, the Bastille’s governor, Marquis de Launay, promised not to attack any rioters unless his soldiers were fired on first. But the band of rebels lingered in the fortress; the crowd grew impatient, suspecting a trap. When a second group of citizens entered one of the fortress’s interior courtyards, seeking news of their comrades, de Launay thought he was being attacked and ordered his men to shoot. Ninety-eight persons were killed, and seventy wounded. News of the carnage spread swiftly through the city, and from then on there was no way of stopping a bloodbath. Several detachments of Lafayette’s National Guard marched on the Bastille with cannons it had seized from the government. In midafternoon, de Launay surrendered his fortress to the mob, which rushed into the bastion to liberate its seven remaining inmates: they consisted of four forgers, a libertine nobleman, and two lunatics, one of whom was an aged man with a waist-length beard who called himself the Major of Immensity and asked for news of Louis XV’s health. De Launay had been promised safe passage to the Hotel de Ville but was killed on the way, at place de Grève, where a young pastry cook hacked off his head with a pocket knife and placed it on a pike. By the evening of July 14 the capture of the ancien régime’s most formidable emblem had spread terror among France’s privileged classes. Most princes of the blood, including Artois, made plans to leave Paris in the following days to seek refuge abroad, as did many of the nation’s most powerful nobles. (The queen’s friend, Duchesse de Polignac, governess of the royal children, was among the first to leave the country.)

As for the king and queen, safely sheltered in the spectral routine of Versailles, throughout the day of July 14 they had remained totally ignorant of what was happening in the capital. It was an aristocrat of
liberal sympathies, Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, who woke Louis XVI a bit after midnight to break the news to him.

“Is it a revolt?” the king asked Liancourt upon being told of the seizure of the Bastille.

“No, sire, it is a revolution,” Liancourt replied.

M
UCH HAS BEEN
said about the king and queen’s decision to remain at Versailles after July 14, and not travel, as most of their friends and relatives had, to some more secure site. The most popular of suggested cities was Metz, in northwestern France: close to the border of the Austrian Netherlands, it was one of Europe’s most powerfully fortified towns. Marie Antoinette had approved of the idea of moving there, and had even begun to pack. But the king, at first undecided, eventually heeded the advice of his brother Comte de Provence, who had stayed put in the Parisian area, and had advised him to do the same. Some years later the king told me that he greatly regretted not having left Versailles on July 14. “I should have gone then and I wanted to; but what could I do when Monsieur himself [Provence] begged me not to go, and the Marshal de Broglie, commander of my troops, told me: ‘Yes, we can go to Metz, but what shall we do when we get there?’” The king then repeated sadly: “I missed my opportunity, and it never came again.”

I remained in Paris throughout much of that year. Within a week of the capture of the Bastille there developed paranoid rumors in France that hordes of homeless brigands sympathetic to the Revolution were roaming throughout the country, pillaging property and murdering members of the more privileged classes. My family’s panic concerning “the Great Fear,” as it came to be called throughout Europe, was acute. Since they were concerned that as one of the royal family’s closest friends I might come to harm, I wrote more often than usual, in the following months, to my father, and also to my king. I told them that all
carriages were stopped in Paris, and everyone was forced to go on foot. All was confusion, disorder, consternation. The Comte d’Artois and his children, and the Princes de Condé, Conti, and Bourbon, among many others, had fled under assumed names to protect themselves from the mob. Every day numerous citizens were leaving the city, and unless quiet was restored, by winter it would be deserted.

O
N AUGUST 4
another uprising began. Stones were thrown at the windows of the archbishop of Paris. A few nobles considered particularly hostile to the Revolution were shot and hung up on streetlamps. In order to quell the disarray that ensued in the Assembly, the king, with extreme reluctance, signed the Declaration of the Rights of Man drafted by Lafayette (it goes without saying that it had been written with the American model in mind—the American ambassador, Thomas Jefferson, had even added to it a few grace notes of his own). To the queen’s despair, Louis XVI also acceded to having the blue, white, and red cockade that was the revolutionaries’ principal symbol attached to his hat. As for
many members of the nobility and the more privileged bourgeoisie, they embarked on an orgy of dispossession. My former comrade in arms Vicomte de Noailles suggested the abolition of all feudal dues. The Vicomte de Beauharnais decreed that all citizens would have equal rights of admission to any military or civil office. To the horror of much of the clergy, the Duc du Chatelet proposed the abolition of church tithes. The Marquis de Saint-Fargeau propounded the extinction of all exclusive rights to game—henceforth peasants could kill any animals interfering with their crops, or needed for their own nourishment. The customers of my favorite café, the Procope, also frequented by Danton, were equally inflamed with this passion for altruistic giving: they filled a tub with silver buckles from their shoes and carried them to the Assembly. In the following weeks, a delegation of painters’ wives, including Mesdames David, Vernet, and Fragonard, appeared before the Assembly to offer it their jewels, one of them saying that they “would blush to wear these baubles when patriotism incited all citizens to self-sacrifice.” After a vote of gratitude, the ladies were given a torchlight procession to the Louvre with an honor guard from the Academy of Painting, while a band played an old tune, much fancied by my mother, that was becoming a cult song of the Revolution, “Where Better Could One Be Than in the Bosom of One’s Family?” Meanwhile disorder was increasing throughout the country. Paris was the focus of trouble, and everyone was in haste to leave it. Numerous vagabonds and deserters were taking refuge there. They were being taken into the new militia—the National Guard—which was under the command of the Marquis de Lafayette.

The king’s authority remained null. Paris trembled before forty to fifty thousand bandits and vagrants established at Montmartre or in the Palais-Royal. Members of the urban bourgeoisie were intoxicated with the notion, long expounded by the philosophes, that all men are equal; and the abolition of feudal rights (voted so glibly by the National Assembly in a three-hour session) had persuaded citizens that they had
nothing to pay anymore. I wrote my father that summer, from my army post at Valenciennes, to sum up these events.

Less than three months after the capture of the Bastille—on October 5, 1789—another dreadful rebellion took place. Angered by the king’s continued defiance of the National Assembly and above all incited by the high price of bread, Parisian working women organized a march on Versailles that within a few hours would turn as violent as the fall of the Bastille.

The queen had been at the Petit Trianon the earlier part of that day. I had arrived at Versailles a week earlier, to spend the winter in a house I’d acquired in town. We had spent the morning in one of the bowers she so loved, reading to each other from Rousseau’s
La nouvelle Héloise
. The king was shooting in the woods above Meudon. I returned to Versailles with the queen in time for dinner; but a half hour after we’d sat down the Comte and Comtesse de Provence rushed into her quarters in a state of great agitation, followed by an emissary from the Comte de Saint Priest. Several thousand Parisians, they announced, were marching on Versailles. The queen immediately demanded that guardsmen be sent to find the king, and bring him home.

The band of women, most of whom came from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, the same festering Parisian area in which the events of July 14 had taken place, had gathered at the Hotel de Ville and headed for Versailles before noon. Armed with pikes, sickles, and guns, they were undaunted by the pouring rain and the muddy roads. Versailles, as one can imagine, was in turmoil. We courtiers were unarmed that day, for at
the palace none of us were allowed to carry more than a decorative sword. However, the Versailles National Guard and the Flanders regiment stood with their backs to the gates of the royal courtyard, ready for battle. Upon being brought news of the women’s march the king immediately left for home, galloping all the way up Versailles’s Grande Avenue; he arrived at three, and cloistered himself in the Council Room with the queen and his ministers. A series of agitated discussions, the queen told me later, took place concerning the royal family’s preparation for the expected invasion. Would it be more secure to decamp to Rambouillet, twice the distance of Versailles from Paris and far more secure? The king was determined to stay. Marie Antoinette also rejected the idea of leaving, wishing to remain at her husband’s side, as she had during the July uprising. A message that Lafayette and his National Guard were on the way relieved the royal family. But no decision on how to deal with the protests had yet been made by the time the market women arrived.

The first of them reached Versailles at about four o’clock. Drenched to the bone by rain, most of them took refuge at the Assembly, while a delegation of them—half a dozen women—hastened to find the king. When they reached the antechamber of Louis’s quarters, the Oeil-de-Boeuf, he was still conferring with his ministers. Exhausted by the long, wet march and dazzled by the splendor of the palace, many of the women were overcome by timidity when confronted with their monarch. One of them, the king later reported, fainted. Another, bolder one, who had been assigned to do the speaking, harangued the king concerning Parisians’ need for bread. The king told her that he would order the directors of two granaries to release all possible stores, and gave her a copy of the order in writing. The women left, some satisfied, some still murmuring angrily, some threatening that they had worn their aprons in order to carry the queen’s entrails, with which they intended to make cockades.

An additional mob of women arrived at 8 p.m., after nightfall, and all of us heard them howling, “Bread, bread, bread!” The king was still conferring with his advisers. A group of courtiers—I was among them—joined him in his study. There were more pleas on our part that the royal family leave for Rambouillet, or Normandy. Paralyzed, as usual, by indecision, Louis kept repeating, “A fugitive king! A fugitive king!” He asked to speak privately to the queen, and after a few minutes recalled his advisers and ordered that his carriages be prepared. Marie Antoinette hastened toward her children’s quarters. “We’re leaving in a quarter of an hour, hurry,” she told their new governess, Madame de Tourzel, the kind, calm widow who had been appointed to take care of the royal children when Madame de Polignac had left for exile abroad.