The Queen's Lover (14 page)

But as soon as the crowd, many of whom were bivouacked in the place d’Armes, saw the carriages being led out of the stables, they were enraged. “The king is leaving!” the cry rang out. A mob assaulted the carriages, cut the harnesses, and led the horses away. Panicked, the king and queen decided not to leave after all. By then it was 10 p.m. Marie Antoinette conferred with Madame de Tourzel. They decided that if there were to be any cause for alarm, the dauphin and Madame Royale should seek refuge in the king’s apartments. The royal family was somewhat reassured when General de Lafayette arrived on his great white horse, splattered with mud. He reassured the king that Parisians would not turn violent. The king and his friends were relieved by his words, and entrusted him with the security of Versailles; Louis decided to retire, and urged the queen that she do the same. I left the palace shortly after 1 a.m., along with the rest of the courtiers. By two in the morning, everyone at Versailles had gone to bed.

Meanwhile some of the Parisian invaders had found shelter in stables, churches, and taverns; but most of them camped out on the Place d’Armes in front of the château. Groups of men and women sat around bonfires, eating, drinking, and singing. But shortly before dawn there
were drumbeats, signifying a call to action. Several women had noticed that the gates into the chapel courtyard were open. The crowd started for the palace, some assembling under the king’s window, while others ran up the queen’s stairway. They massacred one of the queen’s bodyguards on the way; another was killed at the entrance to the queen’s apartment.

The queen had been awakened shortly before six by a noise coming from the terrace. Her chambermaid reassured her that some of the Parisian women were probably assembled there. But suddenly a voice called out from the guardroom, “Save the queen!” Marie Antoinette jumped out of bed, put on a dressing gown, and ran down the stairs to the king’s bedroom, which was empty. The king, in fact, had put on his robe and rushed to the queen’s quarters. His guards reassured him that their paths must have crossed. The king next set out to the dauphin’s quarters and returned to his apartments, the child wrapped in his arms. It was still totally dark, his candle went out, and he told his attendants to hold on to his robe. Finding their way through the dark as best they could, his retinue reached the dining hall, where the queen had just arrived. She was worried about her daughter and rushed down an interior stairway to get her; within moments the entire family was reunited, joined by Madame Elisabeth, the king’s sister, and the king’s aunts,
Mesdames Tantes
. Soon General de Lafayette reappeared, having just saved some thirty of the king’s body guards who had fallen to the mob.

As the gang of women approached the royal apartments the queen stood in front of a desk, between her daughter, Madame Royale, and Madame Elisabeth, the king’s sister. The four-year-old dauphin—the former Duc de Normandie, whom I cherished—stood in front of her, tugging at his sister’s hair and repeatedly saying, “Maman, I’m hungry.” Louis XVI was still consulting with his ministers in a neighboring room, but Lafayette returned and convinced the sovereigns to step out onto the balcony. So the royal family came out and faced thousands of
their citizens, the queen holding her daughter by the hand and clutching the dauphin in her arms. I was standing with the shouting mob, a few hundred feet away from my cherished friend; how I wish I could have given her a sign of reassurance! “No children!” a voice suddenly shouted. Marie Antoinette took the children back into the king’s room and faced the crowd all alone. She made a deep curtsy, her hands crossed on her chest. It is to this moment that I trace the emergence of the great latent strength in the queen’s character that had remained muted during the sovereigns’ years of prosperity. Those in the crowd who had been jeering her moments earlier seemed to be awed by her simplicity and dignity. For the first time in years Marie Antoinette heard shouts of “Long live the queen!”

But there were even louder shouts of “To Paris, to Paris!” For by this time the mob’s original objective of securing food had been replaced by the determination to transfer the royal family to the French capital. The queen walked back into the palace. “They’re going to force us to go to Paris,” she said tearfully, “the king and me, preceded by the heads of our bodyguards on pikes.” The clamor outside grew increasingly menacing. After a few more minutes of discussions with his ministers, the king, the queen, and Lafayette went out together onto the balcony. “My friends,” said the king in his loudest, most assertive voice, “I shall go to Paris with my family; I entrust what is most precious to me to the love of my good and loyal subjects.” Great applause followed as the royal family went inside.

After returning to her quarters, the queen assembled her jewels to bring them to Paris, while the king, in his study, hastily gathered his most important papers. Lafayette had the carriages readied again and prepared all details for the family’s departure. They began to leave at one o’clock. Most of the crowd had dispersed; the palace precincts were more or less tranquil. The queen and king, their children, Madame Elisabeth, and Madame de Tourzel got into the same coach and set off
toward the capital; they were surrounded by a mob made tumultuous by yet more wine, some of whom carried pikes surmounted by the decapitated heads of the queen’s bodyguards. The queen’s face showed signs, Madame Elisabeth reported, of “violent grief.” From time to time the king covered his face with his handkerchief to hide his tears. At the front and rear of the immense cortege was the National Guard. The royal carriage was escorted by Lafayette and followed by hundreds of coaches filled with delegates to the National Assembly and whatever members of the court of France who had remained in Versailles and not fled abroad. Behind them was a train of wagons and carts filled with flour from the royal bins. I traveled in a carriage a few hundred feet in back of the royal family. Trying to avert my gaze from the sight of the slain bodyguards’ mutilated heads, I hoped against hope that someone in the queen’s carriage would keep her from seeing the same horrifying vision. “We’re bringing back the baker, the baker’s wife, and the baker’s little boy!” the mob walking alongside the royal coach shouted loudly throughout the twelve miles that separate Versailles from Paris.

The royal family had been advised that they would not be living at the Louvre, home of several ancestors of Louis XVI, but at the Tuileries, a huge 386-room building overlooking the Seine that had originally been built in the sixteenth century by Catherine de Médicis. They were met at the Chaillot tollgate by the mayor of Paris, Jean-Sylvain Bailly, who offered the king the keys to Paris on a velvet pillow. It was eight o’clock, already getting dark. However ardently the royal family wished to get to their new quarters at the Tuileries, they had to go first to the Hotel de Ville, where they again had to appear on a balcony, and were acclaimed by yet another excited crowd. How I would have wished to accompany my friends to their new home, and help them settle in as comfortably as possible! But it would have been madness on my part to thus compromise the queen. I left the royal procession a few minutes before it reached the Tuileries. And a few days later I wrote a brief note
to my father about the day’s dreadful events, the news of which, I was sure, had spread throughout Europe.

Toward the end of the year 1789 I rejoined my regiment at Valenciennes. I quelled a rebellion that had arisen in its ranks, and punished its leaders. I then received orders from Gustavus to return to Paris and to remain there near the king of France in order to facilitate communication between the two sovereigns. For my monarch was clearly alarmed by the impact that the French Revolution might have on other European nations, and greatly feared similar uprisings. Although I myself was terrified of the Revolution’s impact on the French king and queen, I sought to allay his panic as best I could.

Axel:

AT THE TUILERIES

O
BEYING
G
USTAVUS’S ORDERS
, I returned to Paris at the end of January 1790 and remained there for another year and a half. So I witnessed the royal family’s adjustment to their new quarters at the Tuileries Palace, which had seldom been inhabited since Louis XIV (he had briefly lived there for a few months before moving to Versailles in 1682). Three decades later it would be occupied by Louis XV when he was still a minor, from 1715 to 1722. Since then the enormous building had been divided into apartments and assigned to courtiers, and to Parisian artisans and artists; they were all instantly evicted on October 6 to make room for the royal family. “Maman, it’s so ugly here!” the dauphin had exclaimed upon entering the Tuileries. But within a few weeks the edifice was made relatively comfortable. Furniture was moved from Versailles to make the place cozier. The queen had three rooms on the ground floor, and a little library upstairs next to her daughter’s bedroom. Louis XVI and the dauphin shared an apartment above the queen’s, connected to it by a small private staircase. Madame Elisabeth and the Princesse de Lamballe lived in the Pavillon de Flore, where they had a view of the Seine. The remaining rooms were distributed among Madame de Tourzel, the courtiers who had accompanied the royal family, and the domestic servants.

These close quarters, unusual for any royals, created a very close family life. Marie Antoinette spent the morning attending to her children’s lessons, and the king frequently joined them, making Marie-Thérèse and the dauphin recite what they had learned that day. The royal couple dined en famile with their daughter and Madame Elisabeth; Marie Antoinette then played billiards with her husband to give him a limited amount of exercise. In the afternoons she wrote letters or did needlework until supper, at which the royals were joined by the Comte and Comtesse de Provence. The Tuileries gardens remained open to the public, as most of the Versailles Palace had been, and Parisians flocked there, displaying immense curiosity toward the royal family. The king and queen, in turn, instructed their children to be unfailingly amiable toward visitors and to the National Guards, even though they did not trust the latter. The four-year-old dauphin tried hard to carry out his parents’ wishes, running to his mother and whispering, “Was that good?” when he spoke to one of the visitors.

Yet notwithstanding this new intimacy, most court rituals were maintained. Though etiquette was more relaxed than at Versailles, the monarchs still continued the ceremony of the
lever
and
coucher
, and the tradition of lunching in public a few days a week. However, balls and concerts were banned, and the sovereigns tried hard to dramatize their captive state. The king refused to go out of the palace, and for the first time since his adolescence abstained from riding and hunting. The queen also restricted herself to the Tuileries, never attending any operas or plays, and rarely showing herself in public. This reticence was interpreted as proof of her coldness and haughtiness; within a few months both monarchs grew aware of their subjects’ disapproval, and ended their isolation to a degree. They visited such institutions as foundling hospitals and glass manufacturers in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. The king reviewed the troops. Marie Antoinette took her children out for drives around the city again.

However, the queen did not trust her new guards, and at first was wary of receiving visitors in her new quarters. Although she maintained a cheerful front for the sake of her children, she was deeply unhappy in her new life, as she confided on December 29, 1789, in a letter to Madame de Polignac, who was exiled in Switzerland.

“Our troubles, those of our friends, and those of everyone around us, make a load too heavy to bear. And if my heart were not so bound to my children, and to you…I would often wish to die…. The
chou d’amour
is charming, and I love him to distraction…. He’s very well, growing strong, and no longer throws tantrums.” In a postscript to this missive the queen cryptically added: “I have seen him. After three months of grief and separation…the person and I managed to see each other safely once. You know us both, so you can imagine our happiness.”