The Queen's Lover (26 page)

Lepitre acceded, at first, to the queen’s request for his help; but over time he grew worried about what would happen to his wife if the venture failed, and only agreed to participate in it in exchange for a sizable
sum—the contemporary equivalent of twenty thousand dollars, to be paid in advance. Rather than raise suspicions by borrowing the money from a bank, Jarjayes, at the risk of depleting his entire fortune, paid Lepitre out of his own funds.

Once Lepitre had been purchased, the details of the evasion were planned: the Tison couple, who used a great deal of snuff, would be drugged by a narcotic put into their tobacco. The young king would be carried out by Turgy in the bottom of a laundry basket. Marie Antoinette and Madame Elisabeth would leave the Temple in male disguise, dressed as municipal officers. Marie-Thérèse, also in masculine costume, would impersonate the son of the lamplighter, who often came to the Temple with his father. Once they had left the Temple dungeon the four prisoners would enter three small carriages waiting for them a block away. In the company of Lepitre and Toulan, they would travel to Le Havre, where a friend of Jarjayes had provided a boat that would take them to England.

But Lepitre, whatever his devotion to the queen, grew increasingly worried about the plot’s possible failure. It was his appointed task to acquire passports for her from the Convention, which would have been easy for him, since he was president of its Passport Committee. But he was terrified of taking this crucial step. He would daily arrive at the Temple with yet another excuse for not having gotten the documents. Marie Antoinette grew desperate and bribed him with a lock of the late king’s hair; Madame Elisabeth knitted him a bonnet. He still demurred. The day set for the evasion slipped by. And shortly afterward France suffered a serious setback when General Dumouriez, commander of the French Republic’s army (described by my brother as “a typical Frenchman, vain, gullible, and fickle”), defected to the Prussian-Austrian side. Faced with many additional problems—rebellions in the Vendée, Brittany, and Normandy, a worse shortage of bread than any Parisians had
ever experienced under the monarchy—the Convention decided to close the capital’s gates and to stop issuing any further passports.

Undaunted, Toulan, Jarjayes, and Madame Elisabeth persuaded the queen, against all odds, to flee alone, arguing that it would benefit her children to have her free. But she changed her mind in a matter of hours. As the mother of three, how well I understand her emotions! Looking at her son sleeping in his bed, she exclaimed to her sister-in-law: “It’s impossible! I can’t leave!” Feeling guilty toward the two men who had risked so much for her, she wrote Jarjayes a short note that ended with these phrases: “I’m very moved by all the emotions that have attached you to my fate…but were I to leave my children I would enjoy nothing in life.” So Jarjayes left France as he had earlier planned, having promised to do a few favors for the queen: to bring the king’s seal to the Comte de Provence, and the king’s wedding ring to Artois. There was another important errand she asked him to do: concealed in her jail cell was a signet ring that had some personal association with my brother Axel, which he might even have given her. Inscribed on it was the image of a dove bearing an olive branch, and the motto
“Tutto a te mi guida
,” “Everything leads me to thee.” She made a wax impression of the ring on a piece of paper, and asked Jarjayes to bring it to Axel, and to tell him that “this motto has never been more true.”

A
LTHOUGH THE NUMBER
of French troops that followed Dumouriez was negligible, his treason considerably helped the allied side. By July allied troops were again marching across the border onto French soil. My brother, who often displayed unwarranted optimism, had one such moment of preposterously unfounded hope. “I’ve heard on good authority,” Axel wrote my dear friend Taube, “that at this very moment they’re heating the apartments of the royal family at Versailles.” “I
consider the whole business closed and am delirious with joy,” he wrote a few weeks later. “According to all reports there’s nothing to fear for the royal family…. Don’t be surprised if in a short while I tell you that they’re being carried in triumph through the Paris streets.” As Axel was writing this, the Convention was making secret proposals to Austria for an armistice, intimating that it would consider releasing the royal family in exchange for peace. But now that France was on the run Austria had no desire for an armistice. So in that summer of 1793 all diplomatic possibilities for the release of the queen and her children ceased to exist.

My brother and I had several other reasons to be apprehensive: the Comte de Provence, having announced himself to be the representative of the French Crown abroad, had appointed himself regent for his young nephew; and he was once more spreading all sorts of calumnies concerning Marie Antoinette to the courts of Europe. Worst of all, we heard it said that young Louis XVII had been separated from his mother, and that the queen was to be taken to the Conciergerie and tried by the Revolutionary Tribunal. “My soul is torn apart when I think of her grief and suffering,” Axel wrote me; “my inability to help her makes my situation all the more terrible.”

I would later hear, from Turgy, a detailed account of the queen’s terrible separation from her son. There had been no warnings to that effect. It was evening, and the princess was reading aloud to her mother and her aunt. The two women listened to her while mending the children’s clothes. The little king slept in his bed in the same room; his mother had draped a shawl over his eyes to dim the light. As the princess read on, her elders suddenly heard the sound of steps on the floor below. The door opened, and they saw a group of men whose presence they could not explain—one of them, a former lemonade vendor called Michonis, had been one of the guards who had shown sympathy to the royal family before the king’s death. Marie-Thérèse stopped reading; the women stared at the visitors. One of them stepped forward, saying, “We have
come, by order of the Convention, to tell you that it has voted to separate Capet’s son from his mother.”

The former queen lost all of the composure she had retained in her life’s earlier crises. She had often been petulant, raising her voice against citizens’ delegations, throwing the Tuileries’ keys at Lafayette’s face after the return from Varennes. But until her son was torn from her she had never lost command of herself. This time she stood by his bed and shrieked accusations, implorations, threats.

“Take my son away from me? Never! You can not do it!”

I call on all mothers: mightn’t some of us have been even more violent? Marie Antoinette’s daughter and Madame Elisabeth joined in the queen’s imprecations. The dauphin had gotten out of his bed and clung to his mother as for dear life, repeating, “Don’t let them take me, don’t let them….” She kissed him repeatedly and hung on to him as if no one could take him away without also taking her life. The men hesitated, standing at the door.

The scene, according to Turgy, lasted the better part of an hour. At last one of the deputies cried out to the queen, “Why do you make such trouble? No one wants to kill your son! Let him go freely, otherwise we’ll take him by force.”

Marie Antoinette, suddenly resigned, began dressing her child, lingering over him with repeated, prolonged benedictions. A few of the men, impatient, started murmuring threats. She herself loosened the boy’s little hands from her dress, saying, “Come, you must obey.” Then he was taken away. The women, trembling beside his bed, could hear his waning voice pleading with his captors, and then as the door clanged below all was silent again.

For three days Marie Antoinette could hear her son weeping in the room below hers, the same room that her husband had occupied. His crying eventually abated, but this did not diminish her suffering, for she heard that the dauphin’s keeper and “tutor” was the cobbler Simon, one
of the Temple’s roughest wardens. He had been directed by the Commune to “turn the Capet boy into a good
sans-culotte
”; “Citizens, it’s true that the wolf’s cub is insolent,” he had told the deputies, “but I’ll know how to tame him.” From then on, Marie Antoinette found her only solace in those occasions when, through a chink in her prison wall, she could see her son being taken to the platform at the top of the Conciergerie tower to get fresh air.

It is just as well that the queen never learned of the indoctrinations little Louis XVII underwent at the hand of his captors. After a few days of weeping and missing his doting female relatives, the boy had begun to enjoy his freedom from them; dressed in the loose clothing of a patriot, a red bonnet on his head, with no more women fussing over him, he came to relish roughhousing with the guards and learning their salty lingo. This singularly attractive and engaging child had always enjoyed making people laugh, and he soon found that the guards were vastly amused when he made republican remarks in blasphemous language. One day as he was playing checkers with a guard he heard the sound of chairs being moved upstairs in his family’s room. “Haven’t they guillotined those whores yet?” he asked impatiently. The guard himself was deeply shocked.

Simon had decreed that the seven-year-old be given plenty of wine and brandy to drink, and the boy seemed to enjoy that too. Simon had another perfidious plan in mind. He remembered the little king’s hernia, which had caused doctors to visit him in past weeks, and decided that the ailment might help the Convention extract false confessions from the child. On October 6, a committee composed of the mayor of Paris and a few other officials, looking for new evidence that might be used in the queen’s trial, came to the Temple to cross-examine Louis XVII, his sister, and his aunt. Seated in a big armchair, swinging his little legs, which did not even touch the floor, upon being questioned the child
asserted that he had been taught to masturbate by his mother and aunt. He obligingly declared that “several times they had amused themselves watching him repeat these practices in their presence,” so went the report filed by the officials, “and that very often this took place when they made him go to bed between them.” “He made it clear,” the report added, “that his mother once made him come close to her; that this resulted in copulation and a swelling in one of his testicles, for which he wears a bandage, and that his mother advised him never to speak of it; that this act took place several times.”

On the following day, Marie-Thérèse was questioned by the same officials, who were now joined by the painter David, a member of the Committee of General Security. The princess adamantly denied that her mother and aunt had ever lain in bed with the boy between them. Madame Elisabeth was next summoned, and was read her nephew’s statement concerning the indecencies he had mentioned. Elisabeth was appalled. She insisted that masturbation was a habit the child had indulged in for some time, and that he must surely recall the occasions upon which she and his mother had scolded him for it. The little king was pressed to reply to his aunt’s statements, and insisted that both women had initiated him into this practice. Hapless, ill-starred child! His testimony would have a crucial impact on his mother’s life.

W
HERE WAS MY BROTHER
all this time? He had returned to Brussels, obsessed by the problem of how to liberate Marie Antoinette and her son. Since the French Republican forces were fully engaged in their effort to stop the allies, Axel wished to raise an army of volunteers who could march directly on Paris and free the queen and the dauphin. But Ambassador Mercy talked him out of it. Unlike Axel, he was a pessimist. “It is with regret that I say this,” so Axel reported Mercy’s words, “but
if the queen of France was climbing the scaffold that atrocity would not move the allies in the slightest.” Axel then devised a ransom plan to liberate the Queen. But shamefully, the Austrian emperor would not even contribute any money to a venture that might have bought his aunt’s freedom. This refusal was particularly reprehensible because the money would have come from a large sum that Louis XVI had sent to Austria just before the flight to Varennes. Mercy had brought these funds to the Austrian emperor, whereupon it was pocketed by the Austrian treasury.

Axel’s scheme to ransom the queen had been fairly promising, since it was based on his plan to approach Danton. Danton was eminently purchasable, and he was capable of compassion. Unlike most of his peers at the Convention, he had no particularly wrathful feelings toward the Widow Capet; he had recently married, and his young wife often talked with commiseration about the widow imprisoned in the Temple. Moreover, Danton hoped to sign peace treaties with England, Prussia, and Austria, and knew that it would be essential to liberate the royal captives to pursue such diplomatic goals. But because of his relative moderation, Danton had many enemies at the Convention. He aroused their ire, for instance, when he sent two agents to Italy to secure the neutrality of Naples, Florence, and Venice in exchange for the queen’s release. On their way south the agents were captured by Austrian forces and jailed. When Danton’s involvement in this covert mission became known he was expelled from the Committee of Public Safety. He would be beheaded some six months after Marie Antoinette.

It was at this time that the Tison couple, who had been guarding the royal family since their arrival at the Temple, started to play a role in the queen’s fate. The Convention had begun to suspect Toulan and Lepitre of being sympathetic to her, and sent two delegates to question the Tisons. The Tisons, at this time, were furious because their only child, a winsome fourteen-year-old whom they adored, and who was allowed
to call on her parents daily, had suddenly been forbidden by the Convention to visit them. Upon talking to the mayor of Paris, Pétion, during one of his visits to the Temple, the Tisons accused Toulan and Lepitre of bringing letters to Marie Antoinette. Having signed a paper officially corroborating their denunciation, they were allowed to see their daughter.

But even borderline monsters such as the Tisons can occasionally feel remorse. Such was the case with Madame Tison. After weeks of suffering deep feelings of guilt—as a devoted mother she strongly identified with the queen’s sorrow at being separated from her child—she burst into Marie Antoinette’s cell and flung herself at the prisoner’s feet. The scene was witnessed by Turgy, upon whose account my retelling is based.