To the scaffold (50 page)

It was a cold, rainy October and water trickled in rivulets down the worn stone walls of Antoinette's dark cell. Puddles formed on the brick floor, her shoes were constantly wet and covered in mildew. She had no warm clothing, only the one black dress, shiny at the elbows, patched once by a kindly elderly servant but badly in need of patching once again. There was no fireplace in the cell, and on frosty nights she suffered. The new concierge hung an old carpet around her bed, hoping to give her some shred of comfort, and Rosalie warmed Antoinette's night-

gown in front of her own fire each night before taking it to her. But the orders of the Committee of Public Safety were stern. The Widow Capet was not to be allowed any indulgences, not even a cotton coverlet or a candle to light her cell at night.

Broken and fragile, her pains and hemorrhages leaving her exhausted, Antoinette was in a "state of extreme weakness" and "complained sweetly" to her captors. Though often in tears, the compassionate Rosalie was powerless to alleviate the misery of prisoner number 280, the former Queen of France. And the jailers and gendarmes did not dare to risk their own lives by trying to soften the rigors of Antoinette's confinement. During the long, cold nights she tossed on her narrow cot, weeping for her children, cursing her deprivation, her mind no doubt casting up a jumble of images and memories—of Fersen, of her stolid, pockmarked husband, of her mother and father, her sunlit childhood at Schonbrunn, her happy afternoons at the miniature village in the gardens of Versailles. And there must have been images of horror as well: of the screaming, cursing crowds outside the Tuileries, of bloody heads carried on pikes, of ugly, grinning faces and dirty hands reaching through carriage windows to snatch at her.

The cavernous room that had once housed the Paris Parlement and now held the Revolutionary Tribunal was in shadows when Antoinette was brought in on the night of October 12 for her interrogation. The marble walls were dark, the prisoner could barely make out the faces of the spectators or those of the judges sitting behind a long table covered with a green cloth. Two candles burning before the court clerk flickered as his quill pen scratched over the sheet in front of him, recording the accusations made by the examining magistrate.

"Before the Revolution you held a political dialogue with the King of Bohemia and Hungary, a dialogue injurious to the well-being of France, whose benefits you enjoyed.

"Since the Revolution you have continued your intrigues with foreign powers and your plots against liberty.

"You were the principal instigator of Louis Capet's treachery. It was on your advice, and perhaps because of your goading, that he desired to leave France, and to make himself leader of those madmen who wanted to destroy their country."

"My husband never desired to leave France. I followed him

everywhere, but if he had wanted to leave his fatherland, I would have tried to persuade him not to. But he never wanted to leave."

"You have never ceased to desire the destruction of liberty. You wished to reign no matter what the cost, to regain the throne by climbing over the corpses of patriots."

"We did not need to regain the throne. We had never lost it. We never wanted anything but that France should be happy. We were content so long as France was content."

Antoinette's answers were simple and unarguable, her tone reasonable and frank. Her apparent lack of guile was disconcerting, as was the fact that the judges had no actual proof of her alleged crimes, no secret cache of incriminating documents. And despite her evident poor health and pallor, she was alert and clever.

"Do you believe that Kings are necessary for a people's happiness?"

"An individual cannot make such a decision."

"No doubt you regret your son's loss of the throne which the people, finally aware of their rights, have destroyed.^"

"I shall regret nothing for my son when his country is happy."

The interrogation went on through the small hours of the night, the questions ranging over a wide field from Antoinette's extravagance as dauphine through her opposition to the revolution to her involvement in the flight to Varennes and in the escape attempts at the Temple and the Conciergerie. At last the magistrate reached the end of his notes.

"Have you any counsel?"

"No. I know no one."

"Would you like the Tribunal to appoint one for you?"

"Willingly."

Two men were named, and then the prisoner was escorted back to her cell, where she paced the wet floor in great agitation. Two days later the trial began. Antoinette's lawyers had hardly been given time to prepare her defense against an indictment that accused her of bankrupting the country, starving its people, betraying its security and plotting, through her mythical "Austrian Cabinet" to massacre the Parisians. They did their best, and Antoinette herself, facing her accusers in her mourning gown and widow's cap, maintained an "imposing dignity" and calm throughout her ordeal.

"One saw sadness in the faces of the honest spectators," wrote an eyewitness sympathetic to the former Queen, "and madness in the eyes of a crowd of men and women placed in the room by design—madness which, more than once, gave way to emotions of pity and admiration. The accusers and judges did not succeed in hiding their anger, or the involuntary confusion they felt at the Queen's noble firmness."'*

Antoinette won over the hostile crowd when she showed herself "much moved" by the ugliest of the accusations. Hebert claimed that the boy Louis-Charles, or "little Capet," had confessed to "acts of the most licentious debauchery" with his mother and aunt, including "an act of incest between the mother and son." When forced to respond to this outrageous calumny Antoinette became indignant, and stood up.

"I appeal to the conscience and feelings of every mother present, to declare if there be one amongst you who does not shudder at the idea of such horrors."

A wave of electricity swept the vast room. Women cried out, the judges had to call for order. Even the bloodthirsty tricoteuseSy the group of women who sat knitting through all the trials and executions, were brought to the point of applauding—but they held back, remembering all that they had heard over the years about the former Queen's vice-ridden life.

For two very long days the trial continued. Dozens of witnesses were brought forward to blacken Antoinette, accusing her of an array of crimes ranging from assassination plots to counterfeiting assignats to making treasonous revelations to France's enemies. In the end the president of the court concluded that "all the political events of the last five years testify against her."

The outcome of the trial had never been in doubt. The members of the jury—among them two carpenters, a musician, a hatter, a cafe-keeper, a wig-maker and a printer—were hardly inclined to show mercy. They condemned her, and her sentence of death was read.

She heard it "with a calm air," one of her lawyers wrote later. "She gave not the least sign, neither of fear, or indignation, or weakness. She was as if numbed by overwhelming surprise." Without a word or a gesture she crossed the room, holding her head proudly when she passed the spectators, and let one of the gendarmes lead her back to her cell.

It was by this time nearly five o'clock on the morning of October 16, and the death sentence was to be carried out at midday. She wrote a final letter to Elisabeth, full of tenderness and feeling, asking her to care for Louis-Charles and Th^r^se as if they were her own children. In her prayer book she wrote, "My God have pity on me! My eyes have no more tears to shed for you, my poor children. Adieu, adieu!"

When Rosalie came in, red-eyed with weeping, at seven o'clock to ask Antoinette if she wanted any breakfast she found the prisoner stretched out on her cot, fully dressed. She was lost in thought, her head on her hand, her face toward the one window which let in a few inches of light.

"My girl, I don't need anything," Antoinette said, her voice choked with sobs. "It's all over for me."

When Rosalie brought her some bouillon she could eat only a few mouthfuls, though she was obviously in need of nourishment, having eaten almost nothing the day before. Her face was white, and she was bleeding so heavily that the maid thought there was no more blood in her. She needed to change her clothes, and brought out a clean chemise that someone had given her, asking Rosalie to stand in front of the bed to block the gendarme's view while she undressed. But the guard was stubborn. He had his orders, and dared not take his eyes off the prisoner.

"The gendarme came up to us at once," Rosalie recalled, "and, standing by the headrest, watched her change. She put her fichu up to cover her shoulders, and Vith great sweetness,' said to the young man, *In the name of decency, monsieur, let me change my linen in private.'"

"I cannot permit it," he said brusquely. "My orders are that I am to watch all your movements."

Sighing, Antoinette took off her stained petticoat with as much modesty as she could manage, and put on the clean chemise and over it the white wrapper, adding the muslin fichu at the neck. Rosalie noticed that she carefully rolled up the bloody petticoat and stuffed it into a chink in the wall. With the addition of her plain linen bonnet, her black stockings and worn but sturdy shoes, she was ready for her final appearance before the people of Paris.

When the judges entered her cell some time later they found her on her knees, praying. They read her her sentence, then stood

aside while the executioner, the tall Henri Sanson—son of the man who had killed Louis XVI—came in to tie her hands and cut her hair. She had hoped to escape the humiliation of having her hands bound, and had hoped too to be carried to the Place de la Revolution in a coach. But as soon as she left the prison she saw that it was not a coach that awaited her, but a cart such as criminals rode in. She felt her bowels loosen, and asked Sanson to untie her hands so that she could relieve herself by the prison wall.

It was her worst moment. From then on, her hands bound once again, riding backwards in the cart as it rolled along between the lines of shouting, jeering Parisians, she did not weaken or give in to panic or tears.

^^Vive la r^ublique! Vive la nation!'^

There were monarchists in the crowd, and even a few pathetic conspirators who had hoped to cause a disturbance and rescue the former Queen. Aristocrats, their discomfiture evident in their faces, watched the cart pass in silence. In the square where the guillotine stood, peddlers sold wine and fruit to the eager onlookers, who pressed around the scaffold to get a good view. They saw the cart approach, come to a halt, and give up its victim, an old woman in a white dress whose lined face wore a sour expression. She mounted the steps rapidly, and, without pausing to attempt to speak, put herself into the hands of Sanson and his assistants. In her haste she stepped on Sanson's foot.

"Pardon, monsieur. I did not mean to do it."

They tied her down and snapped the wooden collar in place around her neck. The drums thundered, the blade fell. A soldier held up the dripping head by the lank white hair, and applause filled the square.

In the cemetery of the Madeleine, gravediggers cursed the cold and prepared a hole in the earth to receive the frail remains of another prisoner, as a harsh autumn wind blew up around the gravestones and bent the branches of the leafless trees.

^ Notes ^

Chapter 1

\ Aus der Zeit Maria Tberesias. Tagebucb des Fursten Jobann Josef Kbevenbiiller-Metscb, 1742-1776, ed. Rudolf Graf Khevenhuller-Metsch und Harms Schlitter (Vienna and Leipzig, 1911), III, 170ff.

2 Constance Lily Morris, Maria Tberesa: Tbe Last Conservative (New York and London, 1939), pp. 164-5.

3 Ibid., 164.

4 Aus der Zeit Maria Tberesiasy ed. Khevenhuller-Metsch, V, 131.

5 Ibid., 237.

Chapter 2

1 Nicholas Wraxall, cited in Mary Maxwell Moffat, Maria Tberesa (London, 1911), p. 200.

2 Moffat, pp. 198-9.

3 Morris, pp. 87, 85.

4 J. Alexander Mahan, Maria Tberesa of Austria (New York, 1932), p. 262.

5 Ibid., 240.

6 Ibid., 242.

Chapter 3

1 Morris, p. 196.

2 Mahan, p. 287.

3 Ibid.y 284-5. Maria Theresa's arithmetic was shaky, but her affection was pure.

4 Morris, pp. 284, 286-7.

5 The Marquise de La Tour du Pin, who was a member of Antoinette's court in France, recalled in her memoirs the stiff "grand corps" she had to wear at Versailles, "a specially made bodice, without shoulders, laced in the back, but so narrow that the lacing, about four inches wide at the bottom, showed a chemise of the finest batiste through which one could easily have noticed an insufficiently white skin. The chemise had sleeves that were only three inches high, without a shoulder, to leave the neckline bare. The top of the arm was covered with three or four rows of lace, which fell to the elbow. The chest was entirely exposed." The Eighteenth-Century Woman. An exhibition at the Costume Institute, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, 1981), p. 25.

6 Helen Augusta, Lady Younghusband, Marie Antoinette: Her Early Youth (1770-1774) (London, 1912), p. 100.

7 Ibid., 126.

8 Ibid., 132.

Chapter 4

1 Saul K. Padover, The Life and Death of Louis XVI (New York and London, 1939), p. 28. In fairness to Louis Auguste, it should be pointed out that he inherited many of his more undesirable traits from his father. Had the elder Louis lived, he would most likely have been a mediocre, if well-intentioned, king. The memoirist D'Argenson, minister to Louis XV and an acute judge of men, wrote that the King's son was "an enemy of all movement and exercise, without passion, even without taste; everything stifles him, nothing stimulates him. If there is still some spark in him, it is a dying one, extinguished by fat and bigotry." Padover, p. 6.

As might have been predicted, Louis XV's son was puritannical where his father was sexually profligate, and became an advocate of limited monarchy out of reaction against his father's unenlightened absolutism. But there was an appealing humanity in the doomed dauphin, and he passed this on to his eldest son as well. He loved his children, and the people he would have ruled, had he lived. He once gave up plans for a trip throughout France because, he said, "my whole person is not worth what it could cost the poor people in taxes."