To the scaffold (47 page)

Madame Campan was at her post in the Queen's apartments, and wrote afterwards of everything she saw and did. Antoinette and Elisabeth, she recalled, did not undress or go to bed but lay down to rest on a sofa in a little room whose windows overlooked the courtyard. Antoinette was, as always, worried. Louis had refused to put on his padded vest, even though the danger was greater than ever, because he thought it cowardly to wear such protection when the troops had none. The two women could not sleep, and instead sat together on the sofa, "conversing moum-ftiUy upon their situation." Suddenly a musket discharged in the courtyard. At this they decided to join Louis in his rooms, and stayed there several hours.

Shortly before dawn Antoinette told Madame Campan that the Guard commander Mandat had been killed, and replaced by the revolutionary Santerre. Later, news arrived of the formation of the insurrectionary commune. Louis, unusually quiet and haggard, decided to review the National Guard troops, though he must have done so with a sinking heart. Badly dressed in a suit of violet velvet, waddling clumsily and all but tripping over his sword, his sparsely powdered hair sadly in need of brushing, Louis did his best to look kingly as he led his family past the ranks of guardsmen. A few men called out ''Vive le Rail'' but Madame Campan, watching the review from a window, saw some of the gunners leave their posts, go up to Louis, and "thrust their fists in his face, insulting him in the most brutal language." Others booed him, and there were cries of "Fat pig!" The King, she saw, was as pale as a corpse, and after the review ended Antoinette confided to her that "all was lost, the King had shown no energy, and this sort of review had done more harm than good."

Madame Campan and her companions took refuge in the billiard room, standing on some high benches. Several hundred

courtiers were there, all armed only with ceremonial swords and pistols. A few carried nothing but fire-tongs, which led to some joking despite the grim situation. Meanwhile the bands of fighters from the faubourgs were coming into view, "the sanguinary Mar-seillais at their head," and pointing their cannon at the palace. The gunners of the National Guard at once abandoned and unloaded their guns, and joined the assailants. Louis sent a message to the Assembly in the nearby Man^e, to ask for whatever protection the deputies could provide. But the request was ignored. The deputies, knowing that their own authority had been swept away by the pre-dawn events at the H6tel de Ville, did not bestir themselves to try to help the court.

Meanwhile an enormous crowd surrounded the Tuileries and the entire neighborhood, shouting and chanting, and the cannon from the faubourgs began to fire on the palace. Each barrage brought cheers and huzzas from the crowd, and the clanging bells and drumroUs all but deafened the palace defenders and made communication difficult.

A departmental official named Roederer, unwilling to stand by and let the royal family be mobbed, persuaded the assailants to let him have half an hour to talk with the King. Louis received Roederer in his bedchamber, with Antoinette by his side. Briefly Roederer explained that the guard could not be relied on, that the palace was all but defenseless. The only hope of safety lay in the Man^e itself, with the Assembly. The royal family had no choice but to go there immediately.

Louis, sad-eyed and passive, did not protest. Antoinette did, and vigorously. The troops must be made to fight, she said. They must not give in. But Roederer, knowing how to appeal to her and where she was most vulnerable, told her that in advising resistance she was making herself responsible for the deaths of Louis and her children, not to mention all the courtiers and servants in the palace. Reluctandy she gave in and agreed to go to the Man^e.

"Come, gentlemen," Louis said to his ministers, "there is nothing more to be done here."

Even as he spoke the palace defense was crumbling. Entire regiments of National Guards joined the crowd from the faubourgs. In the end only some six hundred loyal guardsmen were left, plus the Swiss Guard, "drawn up like real walls," Madame Campan thought, and the Knights of the Dagger.

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Antoinette, mortified and defeated, could not imagine taking refuge in the Assembly chamber as anything other than a tactical retreat. "Wait in my apartments," she told the bedchamber woman as she left. "I will come to you, or I will send for you, and go I know not where."

Taking with her Madame de Tourzel and the Princesse de Lamballe—who had come back from Brussels some months earlier to be with her kinswoman and old friend—Antoinette went with Louis, Elisabeth and the children through the corridors and chambers to the terrace of the Feuillants leading to the Man^e. The day was hot and humid, her face and neck were blotched with red. As she passed between lines of loyal guardsmen the crowd pressed in with such force that the soldiers could hardly restrain them. Hands reached out to snatch at her dress, unwashed bodies thrust close to her. When at last the group arrived in the Assembly hall, the Queen found that her watch and her purse were missing. She had been terrified when a giant of a man, "of great height and atrocious appearance," stepped out of the milling, shouting crowd and snatched her son as he walked along beside her, holding her hand. The man swung the little boy up into his arms. Antoinette screamed and looked as if she were about to faint.

"Don't be frightened," the huge Parisian told her. "I will not harm him." In fact he was protecting the dauphin by holding him above the crowd, out of reach. At the door of the Assembly chamber he lowered the boy and gave him back to his mother.

Roederer's half-hour had elapsed, and the Parisians resumed firing on the palace. The defenders, not realizing that the royal family had fled, resisted when some of the Marseillais attacked the Swiss. The entire battalion then fired into the mass of Parisians who were armed only with pikes and axes and knives. Hundreds fell dead and wounded, and the courtyard was briefly deserted. Then, however, an order arrived from the King; the Swiss were not to fire on the attackers. Louis did not want to spill French blood.

But it was too late. The conu*ades of the fallen Parisians, maddened with rage, rushed in to engulf the Swiss who were forced to fall back inside the palace. Hatchets broke down the doors, strong hands clawed at the windows. The Swiss held their ground, loyal to the King's order yet refusing to desert their post. "The populace rushed from all quarters into the interior of the palace,"

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Madame Campan wrote, "almost all the Swiss were massacred." The assailants stabbed and clubbed them to death, cutting off their heads and carrying them as trophies, tearing off pieces of their uniforms to keep as souvenirs.

Shouting "Treason! treason!" the invaders routed out the occupants of the palace and slaughtered them, chasing them from room to room like merciless hounds harrying fleeing rabbits. Nobles were stabbed and their bodies were flung through the windows. The Knights of the Dagger, some of them men in their seventies, were mown aside and beaten to death. Faithful servants died where they stood, attempting to defend their masters; many in Antoinette's household died, believing they were protecting her from the onrushing crowd of murderers. "It seemed as if the people were struck with a sort of madness," wrote a Scotsman who was witness to the events of August 10. "It was impossible to describe all the acts of wanton horror."^ Bodies were piling up in the courtyard, on the stairs, clogging the corridors. Those who could escape, taking refuge in secret passageways or hiding under the eaves, were the lucky ones. Many who jumped out of windows and tried to run away through the gardens were cut down in mid-flight, until the greenery ran red with blood.

So sudden and so brutal was the firestorm of slaughter that even the most dedicated Jacobins among the palace servants were killed. Spies, informers, revolutionaries were swept away along with page boys and aged laundry women, cooks and grooms and seamstresses. Furniture was broken and cushions ripped, tapestries hacked to pieces and paintings slashed.

Amid the maelstrom Madame Campan and several other women of the Queen's household cowered in the Queen's salon, waiting to die, when a band of Parisians burst in. Then a man in the long beard came up and put himself between the women and the butchers. "Spare the women!" he shouted. "Don't disgrace the nation!" The Parisians backed off. In the meantime Madame Campan, worried about her sister, went to look for her in another room where she thought she might be hiding. Several other servants of the Queen were there, among them a man "of great height and a perfectly martial physiognomy" who confessed to the bedchamber woman that he was "dying of fear." Footfalls were heard on the stairs outside, then a number of Parisians rushed in and began stabbing and decapitating everyone in the room,

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though the women threw themselves down on the floor and begged for mercy. Madame Campan ran towards the staircase, but as she reached it she "felt a horrid hand" thrust down her back and clutching at her clothes. Then a voice came from the bottom of the staircase.

"What are you doing above there?"

The man with the "horrid hand" loosened his grip, and answered only with a "hem!"

"We don't kill women," came the first voice.

"I was on my knees," wrote Madame Campan. "My executioner quitted his hold of me, and said, 'Get up, you jade; the nation pardons you.'"

She was spared, but forced to stand on a bench near a window and call out "The nation for ever!" at the top of her lungs.^ Much later, after having witnessed the murders of her friends and fellow-servants, her gown bloodstained and her senses forever seared by all that she had seen and heard, she was permitted to leave the palace—only to be mistaken for a young Swiss guard in woman's dress, and threatened once again.

All day and into the night the horrors at the Tuileries continued. All the palace outbuildings were set on fire—except the Manage—including the barracks of the Swiss Guards, and the smoke from the burning buildings reached the Assembly hall where the King and Queen and their entourage were. To ensure their safety the royal family, along with Madame de Tourzel, the Princesse de Lamballe, and two or three others, were locked in a tiny room just behind the rostrum. From there they could see and hear the turmoil when angry Parisians stormed in to denounce the Swiss, and to report to the deputies that the palace was on fire. Louis and Antoinette were anguished by the knowledge that their servants were in mortal danger. "Each discharge of cannon made us tremble," Madame de Tourzel wrote, "the hearts of the King and Queen were lacerated, and we were plunged in profound sorrow as we thought of the fate that was, perhaps at that very moment, befalling those we had left in the Tuileries."^ The dauphin was in tears, Louis was stoic though grieving inwardly, Antoinette, "full of propriety and dignified composure," according to one observer, gazed out at the deputies with regal calm, though her heart was surely breaking.'*

Within hours of the first gunshots at the Tuileries the mon-

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archy was dissolved. By Assembly decree the "executive power" was withdrawn from the King, the civil list suspended, a new national convention called for September 20 to govern the republic. Louis Capet and his family, it was decided, would be removed to the Temple, a medievel tower fortress on the grounds of an estate which had belonged to Artois, and imprisoned there to await the further pleasure of the Commune.

There were in fact two towers on the estate, one smaller than the other, and it was the smaller of the two that at first housed the royal family. The cramped, airless rooms with their stone walls and low ceilings were full of vermin, there was no linen on the hard beds and the stink was terrible. But the tower was secure, with a huge heavy oak door strengthened with sheets of iron. The massive old walls were ten feet thick. Eight municipal officers guarded the ground floor, soldiers kept watch on each of the four floors and a representative from the Commune was in the room with Louis and Antoinette at all times. After a few days the royal attendants—the Princesse de Lamballe, Madame de Tourzel and her young daughter, the waiting women and valets—were taken away to imprisonment elsewhere, which made the quarters less cramped, and the Conmiune did allow the family a certain amount of luxury in the form of six- or eight-course meals and a generous budget for clothing and furnishings.

Antoinette's room in the little tower was eventually made quite livable, upholstered in sky blue and with a sofa and armchairs in blue and white cloth. She had a dog with her, a Scottish terrier that had been a gift from the Princesse de Lamballe. (She named him Odin after a dog of Fersen's.) All her clothes, along with her cherished keepsakes and ornaments, the lovely furniture, paintings, hangings and artworks that had been in her apartments, had been burned or stolen in the assault on the palace. But now she was allowed to order a new wardrobe, and several dozen dressmakers were kept occupied sewing gowns and wrappers, petticoats and sashes, and coats of Florence taffeta. New slippers, hats, handkerchiefs and lace trimmings were ordered in abundance. It may even have given Antoinette a small measure of satisfaction to spend the Commune's assignats on finery—over a

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hundred thousand francs were billed for perfumes alone—believing as she did that any day the Austrian and Prussian soldiers would be in Paris.

She possessed what she believed to be a reliable itinerary for the invasion, and often told Madame Campan how "on such a day they would be at Verdun, on another day at such a place, that Lille was about to be besieged," and so on. She pinned her hopes to this calendar, and stood at the windows of the tower listening for the cries of the newsboys outside to learn the progress of the allied armies. And she was not disappointed. In the last week of August the fortress of Longwy fell, and soon afterwards Verdun came under siege. On September 2 Verdun surrendered, and in the following days Brunswick and his army moved resolutely, if slowly, westward toward Paris.