To the scaffold (32 page)

Suddenly a group of shabbily dressed women, catching sight of the Queen in her elegant carriage, dressed in her gown of silver tissue, her hair sparkling with diamonds and nodding plumes, cried out loudly "The Due d'Orleans forever!"

The brazen cry shattered the silence. Antoinette, startled,

gasped and nearly fainted. "She was obliged to be supported," Madame Campan wrote, "and those about her were afraid it would be necessary to stop the procession." No doubt orange-flower water and ether were produced. But the bad moment passed. The Queen recovered herself, "and much regretted that she had not been able to command more presence of mind."^

The procession went forward as if nothing had happened, the drummers continued to keep the cadence and the military bands played. Most of the spectators knew nothing of the slight incident in the Queen's carriage, their attention was elsewhere. When the procession at last reached the cathedral, Antoinette took her place with the other members of the royal family under the purple velvet canopy, looking serene and dignified. But during the long Mass, one observer thought he detected "on the Queen's mouth an expression of anger," despite her poise and "intrepid assurance." The King, largely oblivious to what his wife was going through, sat on his velvet chair and dozed. ^^

On the following day, the deputies assembled in the morning in a hall behind the Hotel des Menus Plaisirs, in the rue des Chantiers. It was a vast room, with a vaulted ceiling, intricate plasterwork moldings, and huge Doric columns lining a broad center aisle. On both sides, tiered balconies overlooked the expanse below. At one end was a raised stage, where a throne had been placed for the King, under a high baldaquin of purple and gold.

The deputies arranged themselves by order, with the clergy to the right of the throne, the nobles to the left, and the Third Estate at the back of the hall, facing the throne. The balconies quickly filled with spectators, eager to witness the spectacle, eager to hear the King's address to the deputies and Necker's. The work of redesigning the French government was about to begin.

But first there would have to be a roll call. It took several hours for the names of all twelve hundred deputies to be called and inscribed, but finally it was done, and at noon the King made his entrance, followed by the other members of the royal family. Louis's rotund body was encased in the robes of the Order of the Holy Ghost, richly embroidered and thickly encrusted with diamonds. Beside him, Antoinette was a splendid figure in a silver spangled gown and violet mantle, a fillet of diamonds in her hair. As soon as the royals entered the deputies stood, and shouted

''Vive le Roir and they listened attentively as the King began his speech.

He had discarded his wife's draft, and spoke, loudly though gracelessly, of his deepest feelings. "The day my heart had been awaiting has finally come," he said, "and I am amid the representatives of the nation I take pride in ruling." The deputies had come together to address the financial condition of the kingdom, he said, and to reestablish order. His own power was great, yet his concern for his subjects was equally great. "Everything you may expect of the most loving interest in the public happiness, all that can be asked from a sovereign who is also his people's best friend, you may, you must expect from my feelings." His intentions were of the best, his love for his people unbounded. His voice, the deputy Adrien Duquesnoy thought, was "harsh and brusque," but his sentiments were tender and noble, and his brief speech was interrupted by applause several times. ("I tried to see why," Duquesnoy wrote, "for certainly there were no grounds for it.") 11

The King sat down, and Necker began to speak. The deputies leaned forward to hear his words—and soon realized that they were to be disappointed. The wonder-working financier, the vaunted savior of the state, had nothing to say about reform, nothing about a constitution, only platitudes in praise of the King and his kind condescension in allowing the Estates General to meet. Necker's voice gave out, and one of his assistants read the rest of the interminable speech, which seemed to many of the onlookers to last two or three hours and to consist chiefly of bookkeeping details. Clearly, Necker had not wrestled with the complex problem of the finances and had no specific policies to recommend. Or he had—and the King had forbidden him to present them.

Antoinette sat below the King, her countenance a mask of gravity and, some thought, hauteur. Yet she was ill at ease. "The Queen's great dignity was much commented on," wrote Madame La Tour du Pin, who was present at the opening session, "but it was plain from the almost convulsive way in which she used her fan that she was very agitated. She often looked towards that part of the Chamber where the Third Estate was sitting and seemed to be trying to seek out a face in the ranks of that mass of men among whom she already had so many enemies."*2

Whose face the Queen may have been seeking is unknown. She may not have been looking for anyone at all, only trying to distract herself from the tedium of Necker's endless speech. Or she may, more likely, have been thinking about her son, and about how, as soon as the session was over, she would rid herself of her finery and hurry to Meudon to be with him.

=^20^

^HE dauphin was dying. His eyes were dull in his thin face, his legs were so weak he could not walk without being supported on both sides. He was in the hands of his governors and valets, who kept him isolated at Meudon, hoping that the fresh country air would revive him. With his increasing weakness and iistlessness had come a change in his attitude toward his mother. He turned away from her, refusing to speak when she was in the room—and to make the situation infinitely worse for the sorrowful Antoinette, she was not allowed near him except for very limited periods of time.

Spiteful servants and courtiers whispered that she preferred her younger son, the sanguine, rosy-cheeked Due de Normandie, which wounded her. "She is very much altered," an English traveler thought who saw her in mid-May of 1789, "and has lost all her brilliancy of look." He had last seen her less than a year earlier, and the change was remarkable. She was "more gracious than ever," he found, but "the whole tenor of her conversation was melancholy." She told the Englishman that she "had much on her heart," and he understood.*

Both parents went often to Meudon, the King interrupting his hunts to visit his son. The meeting of the Elstates General was not going well. Instead of engaging with the serious matters of finance and administration the deputies were in dispute over procedural questions. But the grave illness of the heir to the throne took precedence over this, and as the boy languished, his deformed ribs crushing his lungs and vital organs to virtually choke the life out of him, Louis and Antoinette gave him most of their attention.

The end was prolonged. Day after day the grieving parents arrived, conferred with the doctors—who could do little beyond numbing the pain of their royal patient with sleeping draughts— sat for a while by the boy's bedside, and then left again for Versailles. On June 2, with the dauphin clearly in extremis, special prayers were ordered in all the churches. The following day the King spent six hours at his son's bedside and when he left, at ten o'clock at night, Antoinette stayed on. The death vigil ended at one o'clock the next morning. The Prince was dead—and immediately the Queen was sent out of his bedchamber so that the physicians could perform the requisite autopsy on his deformed body.

Etiquette dictated all: that the King and Queen be kept away from the corpse, that the body, once opened (the vertebrae were found to be "decayed, bulging and displaced, the ribs curving and the lungs attached to them"), be displayed in its velvet-lined coffin draped with silver cloth, that the heart be carried to Val-de-Grace by the Due d'Orleans's son for separate interment, that the boy once destined to become Louis XVII be conveyed to St.-Denis for burial. First, however, he lay in state for several days, surrounded by banks of wax candles and by monks chanting prayers day and night. His crown, his sword, his knightly orders were laid on the coffin. On June 8 the funeral was held, with several dozen prelates and as many court gentlemen in attendance, along with twenty-eight deputies from the Estates General, all of them members of the Third Estate.

The urgent business of the Estates General was imposing itself on the royals' private grief. On the day the dauphin died, Sylvain Bailly, the Paris deputy who had been chosen as spokesman for the Third Estate, came to Versailles to deliver a message to the King. Bailly was polite. He expressed the sympathy of the deputies on the dauphin's death. But, he added, he and others needed to arrange an audience with the King as soon as possible. Through his servants, Louis made known his acquiescence. He would speak to the deputies in two days. When Bailly and the others returned to Versailles on June 6 for their audience, they found the King in low spirits, dressed in mourning. "Are there no fathers in the Assembly of the Third Estate?" he asked sadly.

The Estates, Bailly explained, were deadlocked, they could not reach a consensus on how to undertake the first task facing

them—namely, how to verify the deputies' credentials. Necker had ordered each of the three Estates to meet as a unit to carry out the verification of its own members. The nobility had complied, the clergy wanted more discussion before agreeing to comply. But the Third Estate refused on principle to meet as a separate entity; if they did so, it was felt, they would be setting an undesirable precedent for future voting. Fearing to be outvoted two to one if the three Estates voted en bloCy the Third Estate held out for voting "by head"— i.e., with each deputy allotted one vote, and all twelve hundred deputies polled as a group. The verification should also be carried out by the entire body of the Estates.

Since May 28 discussions between the three Estates had been proceeding, with the royal ministers present. But after a week no progress had been made, and Bailly and the others looked to the King for leadership. Necker, ill and ineffectual, was losing the confidence of the deputies, though Parisians continued to idolize him. The Third Estate—which began calling itself "the commons," after the English House of Commons—was becoming restless and worried. Some of its members feared that the nobles were not acting in good faith, but were planning to subvert the Estates General and entrench their own privileges still further. Meanwhile the hungry Parisians were rioting, the price of bread was rising and famine threatened. Public order had become a chimera. Everywhere Bailly and his colleagues looked, the country was out of control, while the King persisted in his hesitant, benign apathy. As soon as his son's funeral was held, he and Antoinette retired for a week of seclusion at Marly.

While the Estates General wrestled with its internal problems, the Parisians' patience with the deputies was waning, and their denunciations of the privileged classes were growing more and more shrill. At the Palais-Royal, where new political pamphlets appeared every hour—or so it seemed—orators preached violence against the government, and were met with thunderous applause.

"Down with the rich!" "Liberty!" "Democracy!" The shouts were exultant—and urgent. Though the King held back from taking decisive action, Necker was not hesitant, merely prudent. He knew that, beyond the uncoordinated groups making up the Paris police, the only guarantors of order were the soldiers, yet he was

receiving reports that the soldiers might not obey their commanders if called upon to fire on rioting citizens.

Much was being asked of France's soldiery in this time of turmoil. They were guarding grain convoys, standing guard on market days, quelling disturbances. They were becoming tired and dispirited, and like their civilian brethren they were impatient and angry at the lack of leadership emanating from Versailles. Many were loyal, but many others were wavering in their loyalty, sensing, as they were in a unique position to do, that the government faced imminent collapse. ^ The regiment of French Guards stationed in Paris, some thirty-six hundred men, might under other circumstances have been able to preserve order, with the support of the police and of other regiments brought in from nearby towns. But as it was, many guardsmen were rapidly becoming infected with republican fervor. With each passing day their obedience was eroding, and their commanders cautioned the chief minister that the men could not be counted on in an emergency.

The emergency was upon them, or so the deputies concluded. On June 10 the Third Estate urged the nobles and clergy to put aside their separate identities and unite with the majority in confronting the danger presented by a turbulent citizenry and an unresponsive government. Five days later most of the clerical deputies had joined the commons; two days after that, the swollen Third Estate proclaimed itself the National Assembly, and marked the beginning of its daring claim to sovereignty by declaring that all existing taxes were illegal.

There had been a vacuum at the center of power. The bolder and more active of the deputies had taken steps to fill it. But the King, goaded out of his passivity at last by Antoinette, Artois and others (Mercy thought that Louis should disband the Estates General immediately and advised that "violence may be the only possible way to save the monarchy"), finally decided to assert himself. On June 18 he decided to hold a special royal session of the Estates General five days hence, on the twenty-third, when he would propose a reform program. Because the meeting hall required special preparation for this Royal Session, the deputies could not meet there, and were told on the morning of June 20 that their scheduled meeting could not take place. Troops guarded the door of the hall and, because it was raining, the deputies took shelter in a nearby indoor tennis court.