To the scaffold (49 page)

She was Marie Antoinette de Lorraine d'Autriche, also known as the Widow Capet, prisoner number 280, accused of having conspired against France.

She was shown into her cell, an airless dark room twelve feet square, with an uneven brick floor, a single low barred window and a few miserable pieces of furniture. The prisoner looked around at the narrow cot and cheap straw mattress, the stained screen, the cane chairs and old oaken table. She took in the rotting wallpaper falling off its wooden frames, and the ancient stone walls behind it, she smelled the mold that gathered on the stones and the musty odor of age and decay.

"Her eyes contemplated with astonishment the dreadful stark-ness of the room," wrote the maid Rosalie Lamorli^re, who saw Antoinette for the first time when she entered her cell that night. She seemed more concerned with her surroundings than with Rosalie or the prison concierge, who was seated at the small table entering her name in his register. He took from Antoinette the small bundle of her belongings, later to be itemized: packets con-

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taining locks of hair from her dead and living children and from her late husband, an arithmetical table she had used during Louis-Charles's lessons, a sewing purse with scissors, needles and thread, a mirror, a gold ring with a lock of hair, miniature portraits of the Princesse de Lamballe and of two Austrian women, Mesdames Mecklembourg and Hesse, who had been her childhood companions, a scapular, and a sheet of paper with prayers to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and to the Immaculate Conception. These things, and the clothes she had on, were all she had left, except for the three rings she wore and the gold watch she took out and hung from a nail in the wall, standing on a low stool to reach it.

When the concierge, Richard, completed his entry and left, taking her things with him, Antoinette began to take off her dress. Rosalie tried to help her.

"Thank you, my girl, but since I have had no one to help me, I take care of myself." The voice was sweet and warm, "without any ill humor or pride."

She laid the black dress aside and lay down on the cot, which earlier Rosalie had made up with fine linen sheets and a bolster. *

She was numb with weariness, worn down by grief and sorrow and frustration and the daily struggle to endure. She was determined to remain self-possessed and polite, no matter what insults were directed at her, no matter how degrading her circumstances. This was her protection, this well bred persona behind which the angry, proud, wounded former Queen took refuge. No matter how she was treated, she was determined not to lower herself to the brutal level of those who victimized her. But maintaining the persona took enormous self-control and energy, and though her will remained strong her energy was failing. Her body suffered under the strain, her nerves, never strong, had given way; she bled profusely and often, and had to beg linen rags from Rosalie to staunch the excessive flow. 2 For years she had had what Madame Campan called "hysterical disorders"—a euphemism for menstrual irregularities and accompanying irritability and mood swings. Now this syndrome became more pronounced, and often it prostrated her.

The illness and weakness were made worse by anguish. A month before she was removed from the Temple to the Con-ciergerie Antoinette had been forcibly separated from her son.

Four guards officers came to take him away, on instructions from the Committee of PubHc Safety, in order to place him in a more democratic environment. Horrified, Antoinette had defended him for an hour or more, refusing to let the officers come near him, enduring their insults and threats and reduced, in the end, to pleading with the men not to take away what was dearest to her in the world. She knew that once Louis-Charles was gone his captors would never let him see his mother again, for their entire purpose in taking him away was to sever him from his past life of privilege. She could not bear to part from him, she wept and prayed and defended his bed until the officers lost patience with her and told her bluntly that they would kill both her children unless she let the boy go. This defeated her. She and Elisabeth dressed Louis-Charles, kissed him, and told him he had to do as the men asked, though he too wept piteously and clung to his mother.

The sequel to this heart-wrenching scene was even worse. Louis-Charles was given into the care of one of the Temple commissioners, Antoine Simon, an elderly cobbler whose vulgarity and crude oaths had been offensive to Antoinette from the start of her confinement in the Temple. The child's screams and cries went on for several days, and his mother, imagining the worst, must have thought that Simon was beating him into submission. Eventually she found a scrap of consolation in being able to watch the cobbler and his charge pass by a certain window on their way to walk in the Tower garden. Antoinette stood at the window for hours, waiting to catch a glimpse of her son, to reassure herself that he was well, if not happy. She blanched, though, when she heard him singing the revolutionary songs Simon taught him—the Marseillaise, the Carmagnole—and listened to him "blaspheme God and curse his family and the aristocrats" at the top of his lungs.

Now, in the Conciergerie, even the occasional glimpse of Louis-Charles was denied her. She languished in a "state of extreme weakness," crying whenever she thought of her children, clutching the pitiful relics of her son that she wore under her dress—a miniature portrait, a lock of hair and a small yellow glove—and trembling with fear. The prison apothecary prescribed a potion of lime-flower water, orange-flower water, maidenhair syrup and Hofman's liquor, and told Richard to have more medicinal soup made up for the prisoner, to include lean veal, chicken and herbs.

The dark, musty cell with its wretched furniture was part of Antoinette's punishment, intended to dampen her hauteur and to teach her about the sufferings of the poor who were now her equals. Like the poorest of the Parisians she lacked light, space, privacy; the two guards who slept on cots in her cell and watched her every move during the day did not even allow her to relieve herself unwatched. She squatted behind a half-curtain on a chamber pot, relying on Rosalie to freshen the air by burning juniper berries whenever a ruffian named Barassin came in to empty it. Rosalie thought that Antoinette was "of an excessive propriety, an excessive delicacy" when it came to modesty and cleanliness. Clearly she hated having her every act, even the intimate process of changing her bloodstained linen, exposed to view.

After a day or two in the tiny cell she longed for a bath, fresh air, a change of underwear. She asked Madame Richard, the concierge's wife, to supply her with clean linen but the woman, though kindhearted, did not dare to help the august prisoner out of fear of the Convention. After ten days one of the jailors went to the Temple to get some of Antoinette's things and came back with a large package. Antoinette opened it eagerly, no doubt hoping that it might contain a secret message. It did contain some delicate batiste chemises, lace-trimmed handkerchiefs, two pairs of black silk stockings and a white wrapper or morning gown, along with several nightcaps, some lengths of ribbon, fichus to cover the neck and a lawn headdress and black crepe sash.

"I see the hand of my poor sister Elisabeth in all this, her careful attention to things," Antoinette said as she went through the clothes. There was even a swansdown powder puff and a small tin box which held pomade for her hair. The cell contained no wardrobe, but eventually Antoinette was provided with a flimsy cardboard box to hold her things. Every day she dressed in either the black gown or the white wrapper, arranging her long white-gray hair in a plain chignon with pomade at her forehead and temples to hold back the wisps. Each morning the cook brushed the dirt of the cell floor off Antoinette's shoes—they were as dirty, the woman said, as if the prisoner had been walking in the rue St.-Honors. Prisoners from other wings of the Con-ciergerie, most of them royalists, made a point of stopping by the kitchen during their morning exercise to kiss the Queen's shoes.'

The Conciergerie was a noisy center of constant activity. Its three hundred prisoners came and went throughout the day and

jjS CAROLLY ERICKSON

half the night, leaving to attend their trials, returning under sentence of death, going to their executions. Visitors were received, caterers brought in food, peddlers supplied necessities. Priests who served the revolutionary government heard the prisoners' confessions and gave the last rites to those who were about to die. Lawyers and police came to question the prisoners and confer with them, and officers of the court brought in new prisoners to take the place of those who had been eliminated. Nearly every night there were macabre last suppers given by those condemned to die the following day; the jailers were indulgent, they allowed condemned men and women to entertain their friends, to stuff themselves with rich food and to get drunk on fine wine on the final night of their lives.

All this went on around Antoinette, yet she took part in none of it. She could not see out into the courtyard of the women's wing, to watch her fellow prisoners. There was no one to talk to, except for Rosalie and the soldiers who guarded her, and they were discouraged from making conversation with the former Queen. She was not allowed to do needlework, or to knit; her idle hands were restless, and Rosalie watched her sitting alone hour after hour, turning her rings around and around on her fingers, fretting and brooding. From time to time one of the jailers would bring in a sightseer to stare at her, having paid well for the privilege of seeing at close range the once glamorous inhabitant of Versailles and the Petit Trianon who had come to such a sorry end. But for the most part Antoinette was bereft both of congenial company and occupation, and she read the few books allowed her (A History of Famous Shipwrecks was her favorite, and she also liked A Voyage to Venice, which mentioned the names of people she had known as a child at her mother's court) many times. When her boredom was at its worst she tried to make the time pass by picking at the wallpaper, separating out some threads and using them to make very simple lace, using pins in place of needles.

For the first month of her confinement at the Conciergerie, Antoinette continued to believe that her relatives would find a way to rescue her—and presumably her children—from the revolutionaries. The coalition against France had widened during the summer to include virtually all the continental powers. In command of the Austrian troops was the Prince of Coburg, a more able and more aggressive general than Brunswick, who was ad-

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vancing on the north and retaking the Belgian Netherlands. Though she was no longer able to follow the war news, as she had in the Temple, Antoinette knew that the revolutionary armies were outmanned. Only a miracle could turn back the allied forces, provided they pursued the war vigorously. And the Convention could not be so foolish as to subject her to trial—not while she could be used as a valuable hostage.

So she reasoned. But she was wrong.

True enough, the allied armies were advancing, the British navy was welcomed in Toulon and in the Vendee, peasant armies were on the march. The Committee of Public Safety, quite aware of Antoinette's potential value, was engaged in negotiations with the Austrian and Prussian courts over her fate, with some members hoping to win a general amnesty in exchange for her freedom in the event the allied armies besieged Paris. Yet the Parisians were clamoring for her death. They harangued the Revolutionary Tribunal, insisting that the Austrian bitch be guillotined. The newspapers joined the general cry for her blood, demagogues on the left shouted for vengeance. At one point the Tribunal's judges were all for having the former Queen poisoned in her cell, in order to rid themselves of the burden of dealing with her.

She was a much hated nuisance, yet the more sensible members of the Committee of Public Safety knew that they could not afford to dispatch her—that is, not until she once again proved how treacherous she could be. A group of conspirators, supplied with plenty of funds to bribe the prison concierge, several municipal officials and the gendarmes, arranged for Antoinette to escape on the night of September 2. One of the jailers, who was in on the plot, was to take the prisoner out of her cell, saying that he had orders from the Commune to return her to the Temple. Once she was outside, she would be spirited away in the darkness, and conveyed by swift posts to the Belgian border. The evening of September 2 came, the prisoner was brought out through the various doors and gates, almost to the main gate of the prison. But at the last minute one of the bribed gendarmes announced flatly that he could not look the other way and let the former Queen escape. He threatened to summon the guard if she was not returned to her cell. Realizing that the man's silence was essential to the success of the plot, the jailer took Antoinette back. The next day the gen-

darme denounced his colleagues and several of them were arrested.

After this there could be no question of permitting Antoinette to escape retribution, and she sensed it. She became much more uneasy, the maid Rosalie said, "much more alarmed." She paced up and down in her cell, sighing anxiously, her expression grave. She was moved to a smaller and more secure cell with two thick, nail-studded doors, each with several bolts and locks. The tiny room's three windows were completely blocked off, no light was permitted to enter from any source. A trusted gendarme stood at attention in the corridor, guarding the doors, and another was stationed in the courtyard to ensure that no one tried to reach the prisoner through one of the barred windows. Eventually a third man, an officer of the gendarmerie, was placed in the cell with her.

Meanwhile the most vocal of Antoinette's enemies redoubled their calls for her death. The "Austrian tigress" ought to be "chopped up like mincemeat," cried the journalist Hubert in his earthy, obscene paper Le Pere Duchesne. The Convention and the Tribunal were deluged with letters and petitions from Paris and many of the provinces asking why "the shameless and despotic woman" had not yet been made to suffer for her crimes. Members of the Convention decided it was high time "the woman Capet" was punished, and demanded that the Revolutionary Tribunal accuse her formally. Fouquier-Tinville was provided with access to any papers he might need by the Committee of Public Safety, which had at last come to a decision concerning Antoinette. With the war news improving—the revolutionary army had turned back Coburg at Hondschoote, and by the first week of October the allies had won no further victories—it was determined that she was expendable. The vengeance of the people could at last be carried out.