The Queen's Lover (25 page)

But the effect of the king’s execution on the French population at
large was not at all what the Convention had hoped. Those who witnessed the event testify to the “mournful air” that hung over Paris. Most windows remained shuttered; citizens stayed inside their houses. I heard that there were many suicides that day: a woman threw herself into the Seine; a wig-maker cut his throat; a librarian went mad; a retired officer died of shock. A few days later, the Convention received a letter from a man who asked that he be given Louis’s corpse, so that he might bury him next to his own father. “The late king of this country died in a manner becoming his dignity,” Gouverneur Morris wrote to Thomas Jefferson. “The majority of Parisians mourn the fate of their unhappy prince. I have seen grief similar to that evoked by the untimely death of a beloved parent. Everything here wears an appearance of solemnity which is awfully distressing.”

Upon hearing that the king was to be executed, I kept fearing that Marie Antoinette might be guillotined alongside him. “My dread is unimaginable,” I wrote my sister Sophie on January 24, before I’d received any official news, in a series of letters in which I poured out my grief. “Poor, unfortunate family, poor queen! Why can’t I save her with my blood? It would be the greatest happiness for me, the sweetest joy for my soul. Ah!…think then how wretched I am and how dreadful my position is. Yes my dear Sophie, it’s almost unbearable…. I don’t know if I can tolerate my emotions.”

“I spent the whole day in uncertainty and in a dreadful state,” I wrote a few days later from Düsseldorf. “Ah, how much I loved
Her
, and how much I suffered! This evening the director of the imperial mail came to see me…. He had been told that the king was executed and the whole family massacred.”

A few days later, in a missive made barely coherent by grief: “My tender, kind Sophie. Ah, pity me! Only you can know the state I’m in. I’ve now lost everything in the world. You alone and Taube are left for me—ah, don’t abandon me!
She
who was my happiness, she whom I loved—yes, my
tender Sophie, because I have never stopped loving her, not for an instant, and I would have sacrificed absolutely everything for her, I fear that at this moment, she whom I loved so much and for whom I would have given a thousand lives, is no more…. She no longer lives! My grief is overwhelming and I don’t know how to stay alive. Nothing will ever efface my sorrow, she will always be present in my memory and I shall weep for her forever…. Ah why didn’t I die at her side and for her—for them—on June 20. I would have been happier than dragging out my miserable existence in eternal sorrows, in sorrows that will end only with my life, because her adored image never will be effaced from my memory….”

“We received the definitive news of the king’s execution,” I wrote Sophie a day later still. “My heart is so torn I haven’t the strength to tell you more. There is no word about the rest of the family, but I’m still in great dread. Ah my God! Save them and have mercy on me!”

Eleanore Sullivan and I wept much when Louis’s execution was officially confirmed, and my rage at the Jacobins grew apace. “Tigers, cannibals, savages!” I wrote Taube. “Oh, accursed nation! If there exists a God, this impious, sacrilegious, barbaric horde should be damned by him. It is to be annihilated, exterminated…. It should be overwhelmed by all evils: starvation, disease, misery.” I knew that the French monarch had been obsessed with the fate of his British counterpart, Charles I. But what a difference between the two men’s demise! Charles had been decapitated in a lordly manner, in the courtyard of his palace, surrounded by a few dignitaries; Louis had been slaughtered like a common criminal, before a crowd of tens of thousands. The lack of news concerning Marie Antoinette gave me hope that she and her children were still alive. But for how long? “Alas, my dear Axel,” Sophie wrote me in mid-February, “she is not yet dead, but destined for fresh sufferings…. How it grieves me…. There are no words to describe the horror of her situation and my fears and my griefs.”

Another rumor tormented me the following month: the dauphin, it was said, would be declared a bastard; the queen would have her head shaved and be shut up in the Salpetrière prison. “My soul is so tormented and rent…by the loss I have just suffered and my fears for the future, that I can hardly think about anything else,” I wrote Sophie. “In vain I try to console myself, in vain I want to hope….”

A fortnight later I was calmer: “I’m beginning to have a little hope about the fate of the queen and her family; there is no talk of either her or her trial.”

The great majority of European citizens reacted with horror, as Gouverneur Morris had, upon hearing of Louis XVI’s execution. Overlooking the regicide that his own compatriots had committed a century earlier, Prime Minister William Pitt referred to Louis’s beheading as “the foulest and most atrocious deed which the history of the world has yet had occasion to attest.”

Sophie:

LA REINE DE FRANCE

S
OPHIE
P
IPER HERE
, continuing to edit my brother’s memoirs. The task has been in turn joyful, painful, moving. Who else could have been capable of the kind of loyalty Axel offered the French monarchs? What steadfastness, what compassion! But there is a strange gap in Axel’s memoirs: it struck me as most curious that he left out the nine months that passed between the king’s execution and that of Marie Antoinette. What were the grounds for this omission? Might one perhaps see it as an act of self-protection? He who had so loved her could not tolerate the pain of describing her dreadful last months. So I’ve set out to chronicle them, with the help of any evidence I’ve been able to collect.

As the reader may have gathered, I had not initially appreciated the French queen, having heard much about her frivolity, her spendthrift ways, her disdain for that holy man, her husband. But as time went on I learned that she had a great heart; that she was capable of immense acts of thoughtfulness and generosity; that she was as remarkable a mother as one could hope to find in any walk of life. And I began to realize, as the reader might have, that there were three separate and distinct Marie Antoinettes: the first was the flighty, capricious girl called “Featherhead” by her own brother; the second was the woman who, especially after the Varennes debacle, became impassioned with European politics, and attempted to
play a role in them as conscientiously as she could; and last, there was the bereaved, imprisoned widow, “La Veuve Capet” as those barbaric revolutionaries called her, who became, in my eyes, a saint—in her fortitude, her gentleness, her largesse toward anyone who had even less than she.

Let’s start chronicling those last months of hers with the morning of the king’s death. Upon hearing the terrible cry that signaled his execution,
“Vive la République!,”
the queen, her daughter Marie-Thérèse, and Madame Elisabeth engaged in a traditional ritual of obeisance: they bowed deeply before the new king, seven-year-old Louis XVII, saluting him as France’s new monarch. From that day on little Louis-Charles would sit at his father’s place at the dinner table, and be served first—the only tribute his mother and aunt could offer him in their humble circumstances.

And from then on the boy’s health and happiness would become the central preoccupation of Marie Antoinette’s life. For after her husband’s death she sank into a terrible depression. She spent most of her days seated in a faded green chair, knitting, thinking, occasionally reading. She refused to go down the Temple’s familiar curving staircase to take air in the garden, for she feared that the sight of her late husband’s room would deepen her sorrow. Only her children’s company, especially that of the little king, could allay her torpor. She worried much about his character—the charming, unusually engaging boy had a lively imagination, and tended to gossip and exaggeration. As for the dauphin’s education, the queen tried to continue the teaching schedule—mathematics, the rudiments of Latin and history—Louis XVI had partaken in with the boy, but found herself sorely deficient in that task. She made sure that he engaged in as much outdoor exercise as possible, sending him out to the Temple garden to play ball with the friendlier guards. Above all she insisted he treat the Tison couple and the guards with unfailingly good manners, bidding him to say “Bonjour, monsieur,” “Bonjour, madame,” upon every one of his encounters with them.

On the day following Louis XVI’s execution a dressmaker came to Marie Antoinette’s quarters at the Temple, as she had requested, to fit her with the simplest of widow’s weeds: black stockings and shoes, a black dress with austere white trimming about the neck, even a black fan.

But notwithstanding her pitiful looks and threadbare clothes the Widow Capet, the emaciated gray-haired woman who looked decades older than her thirty-seven years, had retained much of that charm, that hypnotic graciousness of manner, that had captivated men since her youth. Months before Louis’s death, during the first weeks of the royal couple’s incarceration at the Temple, there had appeared a man—one of their guards—who seemed determined to save them. A fellow with rough manners and a wild, unruly appearance, he was a bookstore owner, originally from Toulouse, appropriately called Francis Andre Toulan. There had been few more ardent patriots in Paris. Toulan was most probably part of the mob that attacked the Tuileries on June 20. He led a battalion when the palace was stormed on August 10. It was to reward his valor that the Convention had appointed him to be one of the men to guard the royal family at the Temple.

But however coarse his mien, Citizen Toulan was capable of compassion. Within a few weeks of guarding them, his original hatred for “the tyrants” changed into pity and concern. He was awed and moved by the patience and dignity with which the former king and queen bore their suffering and sorrow. While publicly continuing to fulminate against “the Austrian” and her consort, he began to give signs of his support for the royal family, who were at first distrustful. But Toulan soon found concrete ways of manifesting his sympathy for them. He was responsible, for instance, for setting up a newspaper vendor near enough to the tower that the family could hear him calling out reports of the day’s events. After Louis’s separation from his family, he made every attempt to carry messages between Louis and Marie Antoinette. The
wild-looking Toulan, whom Marie Antoinette called “Fidèle,” often displayed his devotion with great audacity. He managed to retrieve the king’s wedding ring and seal, which the king had given Cléry on the morning of his death, and which had ended up in a chest in the guardroom. Shortly afterward Toulan, on a day when he was alone in that room, smashed the chest, swiftly grabbed these mementos, and brought them to Marie Antoinette.

Some months later, after the king’s death, when he was out of the Tisons’ earshot, Toulan asked the queen whether she would be willing to attempt escaping from the Temple. The queen demurred, as I and any other devoted mother would, saying that she would never accede to any escape plan that did not include her children. Toulan replied that his scheme was equally safe for four people, but that he needed an accomplice to make it work. The queen thought a bit, and came up with just the right man: the chevalier de Jarjayes, who had been her private secretary during her years at the Tuileries. He was married to one of her former ladies-in-waiting, and the previous year, upon the tribulations of August 10, he had promised Louis XVI to remain in Paris in case his services might be needed by the royal family. Upon the king’s death, however, he felt liberated from that promise, and decided to emigrate. But shortly before his scheduled departure he received a visit from a mysterious, hirsute man—Toulan—who after identifying himself as a guard at the Temple declared that his conscience tortured him: the sorrow displayed by the queen had moved him greatly; he felt that he had been most unjust toward fine, innocent people; and he now wanted to make amends by helping the queen to escape.

In those days all of us royalists remained very suspicious of anyone displaying sympathy for the queen; as my brother put it, we had to remain constantly in dread of being duped. Toulan ultimately gained Jarjayes’s trust by handing him a note from the queen, whose handwriting Jarjayes knew all too well. “You can trust this man,” the queen had written; “…his
feelings are well known to me and they have not changed for months.”

Jarjayes, who like most members of her former entourage was devoted to Marie Antoinette, was so moved by the queen’s note that he was close to tears. After moments of considerable emotion he regained composure. Toulan convinced Jarjayes that Marie Antoinette’s life was in imminent danger, and the two men began to discuss escape plans with a great sense of urgency. But Jarjayes felt he could not join the project without first speaking with the queen, and they had to devise a scheme whereby Jarjayes could enter the Temple prison.

Toulan concocted another ruse to achieve that end. He decided that Jarjayes would impersonate the lamplighter who came to the Temple every night. Playing to the lamplighter’s patriotism, he told him that a patriot friend of his wished to visit the Temple Tower in order to see the Widow Capet in her humiliated state. The lamplighter, knowing of Toulan’s reputation as a committed revolutionary, agreed, and Jarjayes, dressed as the lamplighter, was able to visit the queen. They had little time to talk, but Marie Antoinette reassured Jarjayes that she would consent to any escape plan he might propose.

Jarjayes’s plan was auspicious, for in recent months the prison guards had grown far more relaxed about their duties, and the Convention had even diminished the amount of sentinels assigned to the dungeon. One more man was needed for the rescue plot to work, and the queen was asked to choose him. She decided on Lepitre, the professor of Latin who had guarded the royal family when Louis was still alive, and had signaled his sympathy for the royal couple by asking the king for his copy of Virgil. Many other clandestine signs of esteem had convinced the queen that Lepitre could be trusted.