Authors: Carolly Erickson
Now they were being forced to leave their home, to put themselves at the mercy of a horde of howling strangers who delighted in bloodletting. They were no longer King and Queen of France, they were merely the baker and the baker's wife, refugees from safety, on their way to the dangerous city where the merciless people ruled all.
^23^
^ VEN before the royals left Versailles a courier was des-
^ patched to Paris to warn the governor of the
^ Tuileries that the court was on its way. The courier
B^ ^ arrived, breathless and agitated, and delivered his
message. But there was little that the governor could do. The sprawling old palace was a shambles, its dingy corridors and smoke-blackened chambers far too dilapidated to be made ready at a few hours' notice for royal inhabitants. No King had inhabited the Tuileries in nearly seventy years—though Antoinette had kept a pied-^-terre there, earlier in the reign, for very occasional use after an evening spent at the theater. The present occupants were a down-at-heel rabble of aging retainers, retired officials and artists who had once done work for the court. The governor hastily chased them out, but not before the first of hundreds of carts and carriages began arriving from Versailles, filled with trunks and boxes and with the seven hundred-odd people who made up the royal household.
Six years earlier a report on the Tuileries had been compiled and sent to the King. It made dismal reading. The palace was little more than a "cluster of hovels." The royal apartments "no longer really exist," the compilers wrote, having been partitioned off to form smaller rooms which the occupants had sorely neglected. "Unless something is done about it they will not be able to offer His Majesty's family even a moment's shelter." Predictably, nothing had been done. And now, without warning, the cluster of hovels had to be made livable, food and fuel, furniture and lodgings had to be provided, a new court established.
The chaos of the first few days was unimaginable. There were no beds, no hangings, few candles and fewer fires. There was only one mirror—a small one used by the King. People slept where they could—on old warped billiard tables, on benches, on piles of clothes, on the floor. During the day they wandered, shivering, through the chilly rooms and along the dim corridors, trying to avoid drafts where the wind blew in through broken windows, snatching meals at odd moments and waiting for something like order to be reimposed. They were in a stupor, wrote the page Hez^cques in his memoirs, uprooted as they were and surrounded by inconveniences, frightened by the hooting, jeering crowds of people who filled the palace gardens and courtyards, calling ceaselessly for the King and Queen to show themselves.^
An English visitor to the Tuileries on October 8 watched Louis and Antoinette struggle to maintain their dignity as they received the foreign ministers. "The palace seemed in the utmost disorder," he wrote later, "was crowded with all sorts of people without distinction. . . . The King was much dejected and said little. Her majesty's voice faltered and the tears ran fast down her cheeks as she spoke, and all their attendants seemed impressed with the deepest melancholy and concern." Decorum was impossible amid the screams and shouts from outside, and it was clear to the Englishman that all the new inhabitants of the palace were deathly afraid that the Parisians would swarm in and threaten them, even murder them, as they had murdered the guardsmen at Versailles. All the gateways and doors were protected by Lafayette's militiamen, with artillery, yet no one felt safe inside. The Tuileries was "a prison disguised under the name of palace," as Hez^cques thought. The Parisians, not the soldiers, were the jailors. "The blind and headlong will of the populace directs all."^
Day after day more wagons and carts arrived from Versailles, bringing furnishings, bedding, porcelain and chandeliers. Workmen began to repair the walls, restore the crumbling masonry and the peeling paint. The smell of gilding was everywhere, as unpleasant as it was pervasive. The courtiers tripped on ladders and buckets as slowly, day after day, they resumed their duties. By the end of the month the interior of the Tuileries was beginning to take on, at least superficially, the appearance of Versailles. Fine paintings were hung on the walls of the state rooms, curtains sparkling with gold covered the warped window embrasures, crystal
chandeliers lit up the gloomy comers, where faded tapestries hung waiting to be cleaned. The King's smithy was brought in, piece by piece, and set up for him to use, and if his bedchamber at the Tuileries did not match the splendor of his state bedroom at Versailles, with its hangings of purple and gold brocade and its costly porcelain candelabra, at least he had his anvil and his locks to console him.
Antoinette's apartments were transformed from a state of near ruin to something like splendor. Fersen was surprised, when he saw them, at how luxurious they were, given the dirt and disorder everywhere else. He moved into a hotel in the rue Matignon, near the palace, in order to be on hand when Louis and Antoinette needed him, and gave up his commission in order to devote himself fully to their service. Whether he and Antoinette continued to maintain a romantic liaison is impossible to say, though contemporaries assumed they did.^ She was clearly distraught, he, to judge from his letters, busy and concerned, above all, about the restless populace and its growing appetite for violence. He foresaw disaster for the monarchy, he could not imagine how the misguided King or his maligned Queen (whom he called "an angel of goodness") could escape the popular lust for mayhem.
Merely to be abroad in Paris was to fear for one's life in October of 1789. No one could predict with certainty what the aroused crowds might do. Each day brought fresh alarms, news of conspirators arrested, of rioting and plundering in various parts of the city, of additional guardsmen brought in to protect the palace. For several nights in a row ominous chalkmarks were discovered on houses, and the occupants, fearing that they had been singled out for massacre, spread panic in their districts. "We are living in the midst of constant fear," wrote one German diplomat. "The populace is not yet satisfied." Vengeful acts continued: on October 21, a crowd formed outside the shop of a baker, blaming him for the shortage of bread though he had in fact been up all night making as many loaves as he could. The shop was destroyed, the baker seized and taken out to the Place de Gr^ve where he was hanged, then decapitated. The head was stuck on the end of a pike, and the trophy paraded through the streets in what was coming to be a grotesque ritual.
All Paris was under arms, the police and guard, overwhelmed, kept up their pursuit of agitators and lawbreakers. The day after
the murder of the baker two of his murderers were hanged, and on the following day at least two others were brought to justice. Antoinette, full of sympathy for the baker^s widow, and finding that, contrary to rumor, the poor woman had not died of fright on being shown her husband's severed head, sent her six thousand francs out of pity.
"I am all right, on the outside," Antoinette told a correspondent soon after taking up residence at the Tuileries, "but my heart is wounded as never before.""^ She was in constant anguish, frightened for her husband and children, distrustful of the Assembly, in despair over her ftiture. She tried to keep up a show of courage—or at least of brittle hauteur—but often her fears were too much for her. Her voice broke, the slightest disturbance made her weep. "We are lost," she had told Madame Campan just before leaving Versailles, "dragged away, perhaps to death: when Kings become prisoners, they have not long to live."^ A prisoner she certainly was, though in a gilded cell, her casket of diamonds still secure in her possession, her finery brought intact to the new residence. She understood the reason for her captivity. The Assembly, Lafayette, the Parisians all expected that the royals would try to leave the country, and this they were determined to prevent. Many of the nobles, however, believed that the King's escape was only a matter of time, and that once he left, as one highborn lady told the American Gouvemeur Morris, "it would set Paris in a flame. "^
Antoinette wanted desperately to leave, if a way could be found to circumvent the vigilance of their captors. It was suggested to her that she and the dauphin might be smuggled out of the palace in disguise, to make their escape on their own, but she was reluctant to leave Louis. Besides, there was talk of a counterrevolution, of troops being massed to overturn the Assembly and the municipal government in Paris. Louis was secretly in contact with the other European sovereigns, assuring them that, despite his public show of cordiality toward the Assembly, he had no intention of conceding any of his powers to its members. He asked his cousin. King Charles IV of Spain, for money and made the same request of Antoinette's brother Emperor Joseph. With their aid, order might yet be restored, and the monarchy returned to authority. If this happened, some argued, it would be best for Louis and Antoinette to stay in France—though their lives would clearly be in peril in the early hours or days of a counter-coup.
In any event, it was advisable to keep up appearances. Court ritual must go on unperturbed by the alarming scenes just outside the palace windows. The ceremony of the King's lever and coucber were celebrated, the Queen presided over her evenings of card games, and entertained guests in her small if luxuriously appointed apartments. Both monarchs dined in public just as they had at Versailles, surrounded by their servants in splendid livery, the King overeating more prodigiously than ever, the Queen nibbling at her chicken and sipping nervously from her water glass.
The Tuileries became the social mecca of Paris. At Antoinette's evening card parties were to be found not only aristocrats but commanders of the Bourgeois Guard, Assembly deputies, prominent citizens and obscure soldiers; she had "obliging things" to say to them all. Her courteousness was oil spread on troubled waters, in her small way she created an oasis of harmony amid discord. Yet the Tuileries inevitably became a social battleground, where all the nobles who had not emigrated came to demonstrate their loyalty to the monarchy and their opposition to the Assembly. They made an exaggerated show of reverence to the King and Queen, provoking the republicans by wearing white cockades (instead of the red, white and blue revolutionary cockades sold on every Parisian street comer), the women sporting huge bouquets of white lilies or bunches of white ribbon in their hair. To wear the Bourbon white was to invite a brawl, or at the very least a challenge to a duel, even within the walls of the palace. Outside in the streets, sentinels stopped anyone not wearing the tricolor, and an offender with a white cockade was lucky to escape with only a severe reprimand.
And if the social elite wanted to come face to face with the royals, ordinary Parisians were even more curious to see them in the flesh. The Tuileries, like Versailles, were open in the afternoons to anyone who could afford an entrance ticket; on Sundays, when entrance was free, the crowds were so huge that the palace servants could hardly enter and leave the rooms or go up and down the staircases to perform their duties.^ Initially, H6z^cques recalled, the King was treated with some degree of respect and was not mobbed. But as the months passed, what respect there was melted away. "No royal could appear at a window without being insulted," he wrote, and whenever they went to Mass, which meant walking across the terrace and exposing themselves to the noisy throng waiting in the gardens, people clapped, booed
and shouted themselves hoarse. Most of the shouting was derisive, angry or obscene, but not all; there were invariably some partisans of monarchy, some shouts of ''Vive le Roif' and even, on occasion, ''Vive la Reined
Madame Campan described how a crowd of women gathered under Antoinette's windows and demanded that she come out and show herself to them. With her usual bravery, she faced them, and "engaged in a dialogue with them." One of the women tried speaking to her in German, and when the Queen said she didn't understand it, the entire group broke into applause and yelled, "Bravo!"
They grew more daring, and began asking for the ribbons and flowers she was wearing in her hat. Obligingly she unfastened the ornaments and passed them out. The women seized them eagerly, snatching them out of each other's hands as trophies and beginning a new chant.
"Marie Antoinette for ever! Our good Queen for ever!" they shouted, keeping up their cheering for half an hour, long after the Queen had left them and gone back inside.^
They were not so much pleased at Antoinette's affability and generosity as astonished at it, for everything that they heard and read about her made her seem a monster of depravity and cruelty. For years Antoinette had been slandered by pamphleteers and rumormongers, but in the summer and fall of 1789 her detractors grew more vicious than ever, emboldened by the Assembly's decree in late August granting freedom of the press. Caricaturists drew her as a winged harpy with a forked tail and long curved talons, with diamond earrings dangling from its ears. Orators denounced her as the enemy of the French people, who had asked her brother to send his army against France and who had vowed in secret to bum Paris to the ground.
Hateful images of the Queen were to be found all over the capital, her long nose and sharp dark eyebrows, fat chin and cheeks were a familiar sight. Every ugly impulse was ascribed to her. Faithless to her husband, cruel to her people, she was consumed by lust and devoured by greed. One anonymous pamphlet called her "the Iscariot of France." "This Persephone wears the redoubtable head-dress of the Fourteenth Apostle," the pamphleteer insisted, "of the same character as Judas. Like him, she dips her claws into the plate to steal and squander the treasure of
France: her hard eyes, traitorous and blazing, breathe only flame and carnage. . . . Her nose and cheeks are pimply and empurpled by the tainted blood which is discharged between her flesh and her leaden hide, and her fetid and infected mouth harbors a cruel tongue."*^