To the scaffold (48 page)

Paris responded with a convulsion of violence. Having convinced themselves that unnamed "royalist conspirators" were about to betray the city to the enemy, officials of the Commune decided to turn over the occupants of the prisons to the citizens of Paris for judgment, rather than waiting for the law courts to act. Over the next five days there was an orgy of indiscriminate slaughter. "People's courts" passed sununary judgment on the occupants of the prisons, while hastily appointed executioners stood by with knives and swords to carry out the sentences immediately. Hundreds of nonjuring priests, imprisoned for their disobedience to the law requiring them to take the oath of loyalty, were butchered. Most of the remnant of the Swiss Guards, who had been taken prisoner on August 10, were murdered. The women's prison of the Salpetri^re was emptied. Madame de Tour-zel managed to save herself, with the help of some sympathetic guards, but the Princesse de Lamballe was not so lucky. She was summarily tried, judged guilty, and hacked to pieces; her severed head and genitals, displayed on pikes, were brought to the Temple and held up outside the Queen's window. When Antoinette saw the grisly display she fainted, and the terrible image of her mutilated friend must have stayed with her, tormenting her, for a very long time.^

The September Massacres brought a fresh wave of hatred for the imprisoned King and Queen, and savage crowds gathered outside the Temple as they had outside the Tuileries. The enfeebled Legislative Assembly gave way, on September 20, to the new gov-

eming body, the Convention, which promptly declared that September 22, 1792, would mark the first day of an entirely new calendar. Year I of the French Republic had begun.

And Year I began auspiciously, with a surprising victory of French troops over Brunswick's army at Valmy. Suddenly the tide of war was turning. The once demoralized revolutionary army found its heart, and the allied forces retreated. Over the next six weeks victory followed victory and the French invaded Belgium, forcing Antoinette's sister Archduchess Marie Christine and thousands of French emigres to leave.

It was no longer possible for Antoinette to hope for foreign aid. She had no political allies, her friends and confidantes were scattered or dead. Her husband, though he possessed, in her words, "an abundance of passive courage," was resigned to the apparently hopeless situation. She still could take command, or so she thought. "As for myself, I could do anything," she told Madame Campan, "and would appear on horseback, if necessary. But if I was really to begin to act, that would be furnishing arms to the King's enemies." The outcry against her, a hated woman and an Austrian, would only worsen Lx)uis's position in the eyes of his subjects. Under the circumstances she had no choice but to "remain passive, and prepare to die."^

She stood by Louis, defending him, refusing to criticize him, never allowing herself to be overtaken by bitterness or blame. She nursed him when he fell ill in November, suffering for ten days with a terrible fever, and caught the fever from him afterwards. She was patient with his moods, she understood only too well his passivity and shyness and it did not surprise her that, having discovered that the Temple contained a library, he spent hours reading Montesquieu and Buffon, Tacitus and Plutarch, The Imitation of Christ and the Lives of the Saints,

Lx)uis devoured several hundred books within a few months, and when he was not reading he was tutoring his son in the Latin classics. His apartment in the Great Tower, to which he was moved at the end of September, was sparsely furnished with a bed that had once belonged to Artois's Captain of the Guards, a small bureau, four straight chairs and an armchair, a table, and a mirror hanging from the chimney. The stone walls were covered with handpainted wallpaper depicting the inside of a prison. The fireplace was welcome, for the autunm nights were very cold, but

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there were revolutionary slogans everywhere, and these galled Louis. The full text of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen had been painted in large letters in his antechamber, surrounded by a border of red, white and blue.^

Though he never entirely lost his gluttonous appetite, Louis lost weight in the Temple. His porcine face grew thinner, his shadowed, defeated eyes became more deep set. There were lines of sorrow and disappointment around his mouth, and his expression was full of melancholy and reserve. Bertrand de Molleville, who saw the King often during the summer of 1792, was convinced that he had made up his mind to die, preferably by assassination. The memory of Varennes and its humiliations soured him on making another escape attempt, and he dreaded that unless a murderer carried him off he would suffer the unbearable ignominy of a judicial murder at the hands of his subjects, just as Charles I had. "He wished to die by the hand of an assassin," Molleville recalled, "that his murder might be considered as the crime of a few individuals, and not a national act." Yet now, imprisoned as he was and under heavy guard, no assassin could come near him, and many in the Convention were calling for his death. "I am not lucky," Louis told Molleville in a terse understatement. His political enemies had taken to referring to him as "Louis the Last."

On November 18 one of those who knew the King best, the locksmith Gamin, betrayed him.

For twenty years and more the locksmith had worked by the King's side, teaching him his craft, sharing his private smithy, coming to know him, one suspects, as no one else did. Gamin had seen Louis at his most relaxed, and at his happiest. He knew well the unshaven, sloppily dressed overgrown boy who retreated to his smithy to escape the responsibilities demanded of an elaborately coiffed, elaborately dressed king. Now Gamin revealed something which he knew would condemn his former master irredeemably in the eyes of the Commune. He said that while at the Tuileries Louis had ordered him to build a secret iron chest for storing documents he wished to conceal from the revolutionary authorities.

In the shambles of the palace the iron chest was found, and for two weeks a committee of delegates to the Convention sifted through the forty cartons of papers discovered inside. Most of the

documents were unobjectionable—requests for posts, bills, petitions, charity appeals—but others provided proof of treason. The minority Jacobin faction in the Convention, which had been calling for the King's death, was triumphant. The guards at the Temple drew a crude sketch of a guillotine and its victim on the wall where the King could see it, and wrote underneath, "Louis spitting in the sack." "The guillotine is permanent," read another of their graffiti, "it awaits the tyrant Louis XVL"

On December 11 the captives in the Temple were awakened before dawn by the noise of drums throughout the city calling the National Guard to arms. Into the Temple garden rode a troupe of cavalry escorting artillery. Nothing more happened for several hours, and Louis and his family ate their breakfast as usual. Toward noon, while the King was sitting with the dauphin going over his lesson, two municipal officials entered the room and announced that they were to take the boy to his mother, on orders of the Commune. The King questioned them, but they would tell him nothing more. Reluctantly, and with resignation, he kissed his son tenderly and sent him with the men. When the dauphin had left the room Louis was ftirther informed that the Mayor of Paris wanted to speak with him.

After several long hours the Mayor appeared, flanked by the Procurer of the Commune, the Secretary, Santerre, Commander of the National Guard, and several other officials.

"Louis Capet is to be brought to the bar of the National Convention," the Mayor said.

"Capet is not my name," the King remarked mildly, "it is the name of one of my ancestors. I would have liked. Monsieur, for the commissaires to have left my son here during the two hours I have passed in waiting for you."

None of the officials made any answer to this. The King went on.

"I will follow you, not because I am obeying the Convention, but because my enemies have the upper hand."^

With dignity Louis asked his valet to bring him his riding coat and hat, and put them on. Then without another word he followed the Mayor and the others out the thick oaken door of the Temple and into a waiting carriage to be driven to face his accusers.

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ISTY rain fell on the Place de la Revolution, and the hundred drummers had to blow into their hands to keep their fingers from freezing. For the moment, the drums were silent, and the huge crowd that had gathered in the square was silent as well, waiting uncomfortably for the morning's solenmities to begin.

It was the twenty-first of January 1793, the day the King was to die.

For weeks people had been denouncing Louis, telling one another that he was a traitor and a liar, that he had been conspiring with the Austrians and Prussians and had masterminded a plot to massacre the citizens of Paris. On Epiphany they had refused to eat the traditional gateau des roiSy or "Kings' cake" and had re-christened the pastry "gateau Marat." Educated Parisians had bought accounts of the trial of the English King Charles I, executed on another raw January day one hundred and forty-four years earlier, from the booksellers outside the Convention hall. It was unpatriotic to think anything but ill of Lx)uis Capet. The Convention had condemned him to death—admittedly by the narrowest of margins, and after thirty hours of ferocious debate—and logic demanded that he be removed from the scene, for the good of the revolution. ^

Yet the stillness in the streets, the quiet of the crowd was in part the hush of awe. The King was sacred, an anointed icon, a once beloved father. A creature apart. And now that sacred being was to be destroyed. Who could say what dreadftil misfortunes his destruction might unleash.^

Dressed in a brown overcoat and a tricom hat with the revolutionary cockade of red, white and blue, Louis left the Temple in a coach lent for the occasion by the Finance Minister Clavi^re. It had been difficult to find a coach; at first no one in the government had been willing to lend his vehicle for the distasteful purpose of carrying the deposed King to his execution. Yet Louis faced his last hours with remarkable serenity. He had made peace with his fate. He had avoided saying a final good-bye to his family, he asked his valet Clery to apologize to Antoinette for that, to explain to her that he "wanted to spare her the pain of so cruel a separation." He gave Clery his wedding ring to return to her. "I part from it in grief," he said, then handed the valet another keepsake, a packet containing locks of hair from all his relatives. This too was for Antoinette. "Tell them farewell for me."

He got into the coach, and was relieved to see there, sitting opposite him, the Irish priest Henry Edgeworth. Louis had secretly sent a message to the nonjuring Edgeworth—who had been confessor to his sister Elisabeth, and who continued to offer spiritual comfort to his parishioners despite the danger he ran—asking him, "as a pledge of attachment, and as a favor" to attend him in his last hours. But he had not been certain that Exlgeworth would come, or that he would not be arrested if he did come. But the guards and prison officials had been lenient, they had allowed Citizen Capet his final request, to take a priest with him to the scaffold.

There were gendarmes in the carriage, and their presence prohibited Louis from speaking freely, or making his confession. But when Edgeworth handed Louis his breviary, he seemed pleased, and he and the priest read it together, reciting aloud the prayers for the dying and the penitential psalms.

While the gendarmes looked on, amazed at Louis's calm and piety, the carriage began to move. It was in the middle of a long procession, led by National Guards and Federates, pike-bearing citizens of the faubourgs, and two artillery brigades. After the royal carriage came more guardsmen and army troops in marching order. The solemn parade crept slowly through the wet, still streets, between ranks of guards standing four deep who watched it impassively. The cold was penetrating, from time to time a light rain fell from the dark skies. Louis, absorbed in his psalms, paid no attention to the rain or to the thousands of his subjects who

had come to watch him die. He was not aware of the few scattered shouts and cries rising from the onlookers: a plea for the King's blessing, a scream of anguish from a young woman near the St.-Martin gate, a muffled shout as a royalist tried to push his way to the royal coach and was cut down in the street by one of the guardsmen. Louis was oblivious to the sudden disturbance caused by a shouting, sword-waving monarchist named Batz who with four companions tried in vain to lead a charge against the National Guard and rescue him. No one in the crowd joined Batz—though many might have liked to—and he slipped away before he could be apprehended, leaving his companions to be harried by the soldiers.

After nearly two hours the carriage finally reached the Place de la Revolution (formerly known as the Place Louis XV) and lurched to a halt in the center of a large open space surrounding the scaffold.

Louis closed the breviary and handed it back to Edgeworth.

"We are arrived, if I mistake not," he whispered to the priest. One of the guards opened the carriage door, and the gendarmes were about to get out when Louis stopped them.

"Gentlemen," he said to them, resting his arm protectively on Edgeworth's knee, "I reconmiend to you this good man. Take care that after my death no insult be offered to him. I charge you to prevent it."

He got out, and barely had time to take in the impressive scene—the ring of cannon surrounding the scaffold, the thousands of blue-jacketed guardsmen standing at attention rank on rank, the cavalry and the spectators, stretching away on all sides as far as could be seen, the inhuman quiet—before three guardsmen seized him and tried to take off his coat. According to Edgeworth, Louis "repulsed them with haughtiness," and proceeded to undress himself, laying his coat aside, untying his white neckcloth, removing his collar and opening the neck of his linen shirt. His tricom hat was handed to one of the guards who, having been for the moment disconcerted by Louis's imperious manner, now attempted to seize his hands.

"What are you trying to do?" Louis demanded, snatching his hands back.

"To bind you."

"To bind meV Louis answered indignantly. "No! I shall never

consent to that. Do what you have been ordered to do, but you shall never bind me."

Edgeworth steadied Louis, who leaned on his arm, as together they climbed the rough wooden steps leading upward to the platform where the guillotine awaited. Beside the machine stood the public executioner, Charles-Henri Sanson, who stood ready to perform his task; he had executed many a nobleman, and not a few clerics, but never a king.

The drums were beating thunderously, trumpeters blew a fanfare. Louis seemed to climb the steps haltingly, Edgeworth worried that his courage might be failing him. But when they reached the top step, Louis let go of the priest's arm and crossed the breadth of the scaffold "with a firm foot," his face "very flushed."

Sanson moved toward him with a knife to cut his hair, but Louis tried to wave him away. "It is not necessary," he said gravely, but the executioner paid no attention, and cut off his queue. Then he took his hands and began binding them behind his back.

Louis shouted to the drummers. "Stop!" Briefly they halted the drumroU, and into the silence the former King's last words rang out.

"I die innocent of all the crimes laid to my charge! I pardon those who have occasioned my death, and I pray to God that the bloo—"

Unwilling to let Louis go on any longer. General Berruyer, in charge of the detachment of troops, gave the order for the drum-roll to resume. The final words were lost. Swiftly the gendarmes seized Louis and violently flung him face down under the suspended knife-blade of the guillotine. They "were in such haste," eyewitnesses said afterwards, "as to let fall the axe before his neck was properly placed in so that he was mangled." An agonized cry came from the victim, a cry to chill the blood.

"All this passed in a moment," Edgeworth recalled, "The youngest of the guards, who seemed about eighteen, immediately seized the head, and showed it to the people as he walked around the scaffold, and he accompanied this monstrous ceremony with the most atrocious and indecent gestures."

This broke the solenmity. After two hours and more of standing silently in the rain and cold, dreading the moment of horror, the Parisians were ready to burst into macabre joy. ''Vive la re-

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publiquef' someone shouted, and echoing shouts filled the square. Hats were thrown into the air, songs were sung, people ran up to catch drops of the blood that gushed from the headless corpse. In the frenzied chaos, the Marseillaise was heard, and some of the spectators formed themselves into a chain and danced around the scaffold.

Sanson, the hero of the hour, was auctioning off the dead man's hat and selling locks of his hair and his hair ribbon. The plain brown coat was cut into pieces and given out to whoever wanted it, and people fought for scraps of the cloth.

Edgeworth, unmolested, moved off into the crowd, no doubt saying his prayers. The gendarmes put the dead body and head into a wicker basket, loaded the basket into a waiting cart and drove off to the Madeleine Cemetery where a deep pit had been dug to receive the remains of "Louis the Shortened." The remains were transferred to an uncovered wooden coffin and lowered into the earth. There was no ceremony, no words were pronounced over the grave. A thick layer of quicklime was shoveled in. Louis XVI was no more.

In the Temple, his widow languished. She was thinner than ever, weak and somewhat frail. Her clothes hung loosely on her, and had to be taken in, and the officials charged with looking after her authorized a "medicinal soup" to be fed to her every day. She was in mourning, her appearance that of a respectable widow, "aged and in decrepitude," dressed in mourning black. Her husband's death made her moody and depressed, and for weeks she stayed in her room, knitting and brooding, her little terrier at her side. Her room in the Great Tower—into which she had moved several months earlier—was not without its comforts. She had upholstered furniture and linen sheets, a clavichord and even a bath, expressly installed for her by the Commune. She was only the Widow Capet, no longer Queen of France, but her surroundings were clean and decent, and she was often cold but not miserably so.

And she was not without hope. One of her guards, Toulon, became her champion at this time, just after Louis's execution. Formerly the most committed of revolutionaries, he reversed his loyalties and began conspiring to effect the escape of Antoinette,

Elisabeth and the two children. To prove that the prison was not impenetrable by outsiders Toulon smuggled in the monarchist General de Jarjayes, who had helped Antoinette earlier in her secret correspondence with Barnave. Jarjayes entered the Temple dressed in the clothes of the lamplighter who came every day to look after the lights, and none of the gendarmes took any particular notice of him.

Having demonstrated what he could do, Toulan told Antoinette his plan. He and another man, a venal municipal officer named Lepitre, would arrange to be on guard on the night of the escape. Lepitre, a classics teacher who had become head of the passport committee of the Commune, would forge passports and identity cards for all four of the royals—for a large fee—which would enable them, once out of the Temple, to escape to the Normandy coast and from there by boat to England. The two warders. Citizen and Citizeness Tison, would be given drugged snuff.

As in 1791, the family would rely on disguise to make their escape from the Temple. Antoinette and Elisabeth would be dressed in the trousers, jackets and hats of municipal officers; the sentries would not question them, Toulon felt sure, and would not even bother to examine their papers. They could merely walk out and get into one of the waiting cabriolets. Then Ther^se would go out, dressed in rags, her face blackened with soot, looking exactly like one of the lamplighter's assistants. Last of all would come the dauphin, concealed in a basket of dirty linen carried by a trusted servant.

Every detail was calculated. The conspirators felt certain that they would not be missed for four or five hours, and that even then it would take another hour or more to search the prison, inform the Commune, and send for the Mayor. Ample funds were at hand to pay for the cabriolets and to pay Lepitre's high fee. But weeks went by and still the passports were not ready. The war was widening, and once again going badly for the French. In February the revolutionary government had declared war on Britain—provoked into the declaration by the British Prime Minister William Pitt—and Pitt was galvanizing the continental powers into a firm coalition against the regicide French. (Pitt called the killing of Louis XVI "the foulest and most atrocious deed which the history of the world has yet had occasion to attest.") At the same time, a serious counter-revolutionary rebellion broke out in

Western France, in the Vendee region, where the malnourished and overtaxed peasants rose in protest against the Convention's decree conscripting three hundred thousand men into the army. Besieged on all sides by powerful enemies, and menaced from within by the Western rebellion, the Commune took protective measures. No more passports were to be issued by the Passport Committee. Without the forged passports, the fleeing royals would have a slim chance of avoiding capture as they passed through the string of towns and villages on the way to the coast, even if they succeeded in leaving the Temple. The plan was abandoned.

Or almost abandoned. There was still a chance that Antoinette could get away on her own, Jarjayes thought. But Antoinette refused to leave without her children. Nothing, not even freedom, could compensate for the guilt she would feel if she abandoned them, she told the General. Escape was only a lovely dream, a chimera that faded in the harsh light of day. She would never get free now. She told Jarjayes to emigrate while he still could, and gave him Louis' watch seal and wedding ring to take to Provence at Coblentz. She also gave him a memento for Fersen, a wax impression of her own seal which bore Fersen's crest—a homing pigeon with the words ^'Tutto a te mi guida,^' "Everything guides me to thee." It was Fersen that she mourned, not Louis; in her darker hours she dreaded that she might never see him again. She told Jarjayes to assure Fersen that the inscription on the seal "has never been more true."

But her stubborn will to survive did not desert her. She did her best to monitor the course of the war, relying on the few loyal servants who brought her news and conveyed it by secret hand signals. She counted the days until the allied armies could be expected to reach Paris, hoping that the Convention would let her and her children live, perhaps as hostages they could trade to the Austrians. As always, she worried less about herself than about her children, chiefly the dauphin, whom she now regarded as Louis XVn. He was chronically ill with pains in his side, high fevers and headaches. At times he could not lie down because if he did he began to choke. Having lost his beloved father to the guillotine, surrounded by frightened women, teased and taunted by the guardsmen who resented Antoinette's respectful treatment of her son as King of France, the little boy's constitution suffered.

His fourteen-year-old sister Ther^se moved her bed into her mother's room in order to be at hand in case either her brother or her mother became ill during the night. ^

The revolutionary government was evolving to meet the challenge of a Europe-wide war. Committees of Vigilance in each of the Paris sections rooted out "enemies of the revolution" and turned them over to the Commune to be imprisoned. A Revolutionary Tribunal was established, consisting of a jury of twelve and a public prosecutor—the soon to be notorious Fouquier-Tinville—to try the imprisoned suspects. And a Conmiittee of Public Safety was instituted to oversee the war effort. Day after day the Revolutionary Tribunal went about its grim work, under pressure from the Committee of Public Safety to dispense justice at top speed. Suspects were tried, convicted and summarily dispatched. The blade of the guillotine fell with chilling regularity, sometimes four times a day, sometimes six or eight or a dozen times, cutting short the lives of aristocrats, wig-makers, barbers and servants—a melange of unfortunates whose most outstanding common characteristic was that they had belonged to the old social order or had served those who did.^

Even so the most hotheaded of the popular orators were unsatisfied. They denounced the Tribunal's judges for taking too long with their deliberations, and for acquitting too many suspects."* The wheels of public vengeance ground too slowly, they insisted; there ought to be a daily quota of executions. More guillotines were constructed, and sent out into the provinces on "patriotic tours" to purge the countryside of traitors and suspected traitors. Men, women, even children of fourteen and fifteen fell beneath their heavy blades. Anyone who spoke against the local Revolutionary Tribunal, or who wore a white cockade, or who harbored a nonjuring priest or opposed conscription was liable to be imprisoned and killed. And as the massive revolt in the Vendee spread, and smaller rebellions broke out in Bordeaux, Lyon and Marseille, thousands of people were engulfed in the tide of bloodshed.^ Executioners were censured for inefficiency, for allowing the razor-sharp edges of their guillotines to become dulled or their mechanisms rusty. Crowds of provincial spectators grew restive if heads were not severed neatly, on the first try; at times, when the executioner was unfit or lazy, it took three or four attempts to slice the blade through bone, cartilage and flesh.

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In the waking nightmare that was Paris, among a population habituated to gore, the guillotine became an object of fascination. Women wore jeweled miniature guillotines in their ears or around their necks. Men wore their hair short and shaved their necks, ''d. la victime,'' and women tied thin red ribbons around their throats as unsubtle reminders of what they might soon suffer. Songs were sung to Madame la Guillotine, or Saint Guillotine, or to the executioner Sanson. Children constructed little engines of decapitation out of twigs, bits of string and pocketknives and used them to cut the heads off birds and mice.

Like a ghoulish plague the killing madness raged, through the summer of 1793, as the armies of the European powers and the British navy closed in on renegade France. On August 2, at two o'clock in the morning, four officers of the Paris police came to the Temple to arrest the Widow Capet. She was suspected of being an enemy of the revolution. She was to face the Revolutionary Tribunal, and to be housed, until her trial began, at the prison of the Conciergerie.

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HE tall, gaunt woman who was led by torchlight along the dark corridors of the prison on the He de la Cite wore a torn black dress and walked with the stiff gait of the elderly. She looked, one of the prison servants thought, like a magpie; another man called her "a deformed specter." But the skin of her sunken cheeks was still dazzlingly white, and she wore her one shabby dress with the indefinable but unmistakable air of a gentlewoman.