The Queen's Lover (27 page)

“I implore Your Majesty to forgive me!” Madame Tison cried out. “I’m a miserable, unhappy woman, for I’m causing your death and that of Madame Elisabeth! Forgive me, I beg you!”

The former queen did all she could do to calm the woman, taking her by the waist and raising her to her feet. But Madame Tison continued to holler and rant accusations at herself, and again fell to the floor in convulsions. It took eight men to carry her away. Shortly afterward she was taken to the hospital of the Hôtel Dieu, where she was diagnosed as insane. She would never return to the Temple. For her remaining months Marie Antoinette displayed considerable concern for Madame Tison’s state. “Is Tison’s wife as mad as they say?” she would ask Turgy. “Are they taking good care of her?”

M
Y NEVER SEEN BUT BELOVED FRIEND
, my token sister-in-law, how fully I understand her suffering! When her son was taken from her Marie Antoinette sank into a depression far deeper than any she’d yet known. Her health was also very poor: she was suffering from severe uterine
hemorrhages, and was so weak from the loss of blood that she often could not stand without someone’s support. Her morale was so low that she did not even register any emotion when policemen came on August 2 to tell her that they were moving her to the Conciergerie on the Île de la Cité (it was Paris’s oldest prison and was known as “the Antechamber of Death,” being the temporary lodging for those awaiting execution). Helped by her daughter and Madame Elisabeth, she packed a little satchel of clothes. Once dressed she was requested to empty her pockets: the men allowed her to retain a bottle of smelling salts and one handkerchief. They missed seeing a little gold watch that she wore on a chain around her neck, a gift from her mother that she had brought from Austria twenty-three years earlier. After embracing her daughter and sister-in-law, she went slowly down the Tower stairs, accompanied by the police, her hand on the wall for support. As she finished descending the stairs, she hit her forehead against a lintel set over the door. One of the guards asked her if she’d hurt herself. “No,” she murmured, “now nothing can hurt me anymore.”

The coachman who drove Marie Antoinette to the Conciergerie later reported that the seat of his carriage was full of blood when she exited the vehicle. She was brought to her cell by the warden of the prison, a Monsieur Richard, and was briefly joined by Madame Richard and her maid, a young woman called Rosalie Larmorlière, whose compassion would henceforth be her only solace. They all departed, but left two guards who would be in the same cell with her, round the clock, for the following two and a half months.

The cell was some twelve feet square. Since it was half belowground and near the Seine its stone walls dripped with damp and slime. A camp bed with a filthy, worn blanket and dirty sheets, two chairs, and a small table, were its only furnishings. The guards never left the room, not even when the queen went about her bodily functions. The cell’s only amenity was a screen that Madame Richard, a kindly woman, had placed
beside the bed so that the queen could undress out of the guards’ sight. The two men, Sergeant Dufresne and Gendarme Gilbert, who were armed with sabers and muskets, spent most of their time playing backgammon, smoking, and drinking—each of them consumed a bottle of wine and a pint of brandy a day. They were amiable enough, and Gilbert even bought the queen flowers. To distract her, Madame Richard once brought her youngest child for a visit, a handsome little boy who was about the same age as the dauphin. The queen took the boy into her arms, covered him with kisses and caresses, and began to cry. She constantly spoke of her own son, whom she thought of day and night, Madame Richard later reported; she wore a portrait of him hidden in her bodice, along with a lock of his hair.

The fetid cell was intolerably hot for the next summer weeks. When autumn came it grew terribly cold, and the poor captive’s shoes soon grew moldy. Not allowed any needles or thread, she could not mend her old black dress. But one of the police commissioners, Michonis, who had already proved to be friendly to the royal family when he guarded them before the king’s death, brought her some belongings Madame Elisabeth had prepared for her at the Temple—a white wrapper, some stockings, a pair of shoes, a box of face powder. There was no chest of drawers in her cell, but the kind Rosalie brought her a cardboard box in which to keep these precious belongings. Rosalie later recalled that Marie Antoinette received this box “with as much satisfaction as if it were the world’s most beautiful treasure.”

Many other prisoners at the Conciergerie were allowed far greater privileges than the queen was. They were permitted to walk about the corridors and courtyards chatting with each other. Women wore full toilette in the mornings, and changed into chic evening gowns in the late afternoon. Small luxuries such as warm blankets, fresh linen, and plentiful candles were readily available to them. But the queen was not offered such freedom or amenities. The worst aspect of her last months
was her solitude and lack of occupation. At first she was allowed some travel books—
The Travels of Captain Cook, A Voyage to Venice, A History of Famous Shipwrecks
(she confided to the prison warden that she “read of the most terrifying adventures with pleasure”). But later she was denied access to books, and was not permitted pen or paper; the only thing she could do in daytime was to watch the guards playing backgammon, a game at which she had been very skilled. Her days’ main events were the meals, which I admit were simple but excellent—dinner offered soup, a ragout of beef, chicken, or duck (her favorite), a plate of vegetables, and a dessert. The food was of the highest quality. For upon being told for whom it was intended, market women offered the best they had; and although she had always been a picky eater the queen seldom left any vegetables on her plate. When she grew weary of watching the guards’ backgammon games she played with the two rings she still wore on her fingers, and which had not yet been confiscated by her guards—she would take them off, put them on again, and pass them from one hand to the other several times in one minute. She had wept terribly when her mother’s little gold watch had been taken from her—it was her last link with her mother and her youth.

One wonders whether the stream of visitors allowed into Marie Antoinette’s cell—there were several a week, mostly persons of royalist beliefs, and a majority of them British—annoyed her or gently allayed the terrible tedium of her days. The visits were made possible by heavy bribes and the cooperation of Michonis, whose income was thus nicely supplemented. My brother, who was still in Brussels, was offered a description of one of these visits that he found most painful. It was from an Englishman who claimed to have paid twenty-five louis to enter the queen’s prison. “He found the queen seated with her head lowered and covered by her hands and extremely poorly dressed. She did not even look up.”

Upon hearing accounts of her life at the Conciergerie, Axel wrote me
the following letter from Brussels: “I no longer live, because…suffering all the pain I suffer is not living…. To be incapable of doing anything for her is dreadful for me…. I would give my life to save her and I can’t. My greatest happiness would be to die for her and to rescue her. I would have this happiness if cowards and villains had not deprived us of the best of masters [Gustavus]. He alone would have been capable of liberating her…. He would have dared everything and conquered all.”

“I even reproach myself for the air I breathe when I think she is shut up in a dreadful prison,” he wrote a few days later. “This notion is breaking my heart and poisoning my life, and I’m constantly torn with grief and rage.” A few days later still: “Why did I have to lose all means of serving her?”

O
N A PARTICULARLY
hot late August day, as Michonis entered the queen’s cell on his usual rounds, he was accompanied by a rather short man in his midthirties with a round, pockmarked face who wore two carnations in his buttonhole. Marie Antoinette startled, trying not to show her surprise. It was the Chevalier de Rougeville, the man who had saved her life in June of the previous year by persuading her to stay away from the mob when it invaded the Tuileries. Rougeville himself was amazed by the sight of this old woman who now looked like “a deformed specter.” As described later by Michonis—fortunately for hapless scriveners such as I, all these men wrote memoirs—Rougeville, a consummate actor, betrayed no emotion. He took the carnations from his buttonhole and threw them behind the screen that stood in the queen’s cell. Having found a subterfuge to be alone for a minute without her visitors or guards, she saw that the flowers contained notes, which she quickly perused. “I’ll always seek to show you my devotion,” one note read. “If you need three or four hundred louis to give to the men about you I’ll bring them.” The other note mapped out a well-thought-out
plan for her escape. She summoned the two visitors back, on the pretext that she wished to complain to Michonis about the prison food. And while Michonis diverted her guards she spoke to Rougeville.

“You’re risking too much for me,” she said.

“Don’t worry about me,” Rougeville answered. “I have money, men, and the means to get you out of here.”

“I’m not concerned about myself. I’m only anxious about my children.”

“Is your courage low?”

“If I’m weak and downcast,” the queen answered, placing her hand on her heart,
“this
is not.”

“Take courage, we’ll save you. I’ll come back the day after tomorrow, and bring you the money you need for your keepers.”

“Look at me, look at my bed,” she added in parting, “and tell my family and my friends about my condition.”

Michonis’s scheme might well have been successful, for his reputation as a good patriot was impeccable, and he had a fairly high-standing rank in the police. His plan was to get to the Conciergerie late in the evening, wave some official-looking documents at the concierge, Richard, and say that upon orders of the Convention he had come to escort Marie Antoinette back to the Temple. Guards would then take them to the carriage in which Rougeville would be waiting for them. They would be whisked to Madame de Jarjayes’s secluded country château near Paris and hence, some days later, to Germany. The keystone of the plan, however, was to obtain the help of the queen’s two principal guards, Gilbert and Dufresne, both of whom seemed to respect her, and also might be amenable to bribes.

The queen approached Gilbert and offered him an immediate reward of fifty livres, which, she promised, would later be increased by larger sums. She also gave him a note written in pinpricks—some friendly soul must have loaned her a needle—which she asked him to give to
Michonis and Rougeville. It asserted her trust in Rougeville, and agreed to the escape plan.

The first steps of the rescue strategy, engaged in on the night of September 2, went according to schedule. The queen and Michonis passed through a number of prison gates without any problem. But as they were about to walk through the door that led onto the street, one of the queen’s two guards, Gilbert, prevented the prisoner and her friends from going any farther. The rescue plan was thus sabotaged: Gilbert’s patriotism had prevailed over his greed. The following day, when Michonis returned to the Convention, which was investigating reports of the plot, he denied any complicity, but was arrested. Rougeville, in order to avoid retribution, instantly fled Paris for Belgium.

As a consequence of this pitiful attempt Marie Antoinette was moved to an even smaller and darker cell. The Richard couple was dismissed and replaced by one Monsieur Bault and his wife, who were threatened with the guillotine in case the prisoner tried to escape again. My heart breaks at the details of the queen’s last weeks of captivity. She was no more allowed a screen behind which she could change her clothes; she was not permitted a lamp or candle; and no one, neither the guards nor the Baults, was authorized to speak to her. Rosalie’s gentleness and silent respectfulness were her only solaces. “I prolonged the various preparations for the night so that the solitude and darkness imposed on my mistress might be delayed as long as possible,” Rosalie would write in her reminiscences. “She noticed these little attentions, which were the natural outcome of my loyalty and respect, and she thanked me for them with a friendly glance as if I had done more than my simple duty.”

There was another solace in Marie Antoinette’s last weeks: she received a visit from a Mademoiselle Fouché, about whom little is known aside from the fact that she had arranged for a nonjuring priest, Abbé Magnin, to visit the queen. The queen received him with joy, and upon his third visit the prison warden allowed him to remain with the queen
for an hour and a half. Abbé Magnin would later relate that he twice heard Marie Antoinette’s confession and brought her communion at the Conciergerie.

According to my brother, who wrote me almost daily from Brussels, there were a few men on the Committee of Public Safety who still hoped to use the former queen as a bargaining chip with the allies. One of them was Cambon, after whom one of Paris’s most elegant streets was later named. But as it grew clear that Marie Antoinette’s nephew, the Austrian emperor, took no interest in saving his aunt’s life, the
enragés’
demands for the queen’s trial grew more strident. The most violent of these men was one Jacques-René Hébert, a particularly brutal instigator of the Reign of Terror. He had a pathological hatred for Marie Antoinette, and was the editor of a guttersnipe publication called
Le Père Duchesne,
which promulgated some of the most scabrous pornographic lies about the chaste queen. Upon the denouement of the Carnation Plot, he demanded that she be brought to trial by the Revolutionary Tribunal as soon as possible. “I’ve promised the head of Marie Antoinette to my readers,” he shouted at a meeting of patriots. “I’ll go off and cut it off myself if there’s any delay in giving it to me.” This time his wishes were fulfilled. When the public prosecutor Fouquier-Tinville was sent for, he demanded to fill the Tribunal’s rank of jurors and judges with men of his own choice. On October 3, Fouquier-Tinville was officially ordered to prepare a case against the Widow Capet.