Marie Antoinette (58 page)

Her real feelings, hardly surprisingly, were very different. Resentment was too mild a word for the panic she had experienced, for all the “calm nobility” of her outward demeanour. This was particularly true of the danger to her children: “Save my son,” the Queen had cried at one point. Madame Campan believed that it was as a result of the events of 20 June 1792 that Marie Antoinette turned to foreign aid as the only hope. In fact, as we have seen, her decision predated the invasion of the Tuileries. The experience of this day amply confirmed—and indeed justified—what she felt already.

With the approach of 14 July, another potentially devastating anniversary, it was feared that worse was to come. Should the royal family attempt another precipitate flight as being the least bad option? Count Mercy, influenced by the attack of the mob on 20 June, thought it was. Schemes were discussed. One possibility was to head for Compiègne with La Fayette protecting them. Château Gallon, near Rouen in Normandy, was also mentioned, where the Duc de Liancourt—he who had broken the news of the “revolution” to Louis XVI in 1789—offered some loyal Norman troops. But from the coast of Normandy they might end by having to take ship to England. According to Hüe, the Queen shuddered away from the fate of the Stuart King James II; in 1689 he had fled in a fishing boat to France, never to regain his realm. Bertrand de Molleville offered another explanation: the Queen disliked Liancourt’s previous democratic or constitutionalist views (just as she had never come to trust La Fayette).

The real explanation for the Queen’s reluctance to consider such schemes, leaving their plausibility aside, was different. For one thing, the capital might actually be safer than the French provinces, which were already the scene of revolutionary violence. Second and more importantly, Marie Antoinette believed that it was from Paris that the royal family would be rescued. Prussia entered the war in early July, and the joint Austro-Prussian army was now under the command of the Duke of Brunswick. She told Madame Campan that the Duke’s plan, “which he has communicated to us, is to come within these very walls to deliver us.”

The commemoration of the fall of the Bastille, on 14 July, was attended by a host of Confederate troops, thronging into Paris from the provinces. The King attended on horseback. After his experience of 20 June, he consented to wear a thickly quilted under-waistcoat as a guard against possible assassination. The Queen, the children and Madame Elisabeth, with the Princesse de Lamballe and the Marquise de Tourzel in official attendance, went by carriage. The Marquise wept as she witnessed what she called “the saddest ceremony”: the King taking the oath to the patriotic “Federation,” while the Queen watched him through a spyglass. It was, however, the cries accompanying the ritual that were the most depressing element, rather than the oath itself. “Down with the veto!” was frequently heard, along with acclamations for the Mayor: “Long live Pétion, good old Pétion!” Most strident of all were the cries of “Long live the
sans-culottes
!”
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People waved branches, while banners with the same anti-monarchical messages bobbed up and down among the heads.

In the following tense weeks, during the full heat of the Parisian summer, the quality of the royal family’s life at the Tuileries deteriorated. All this year the King had been allowed a surprising freedom in riding to the environs of the city, including Saint Cloud and Meudon, as well as to the Bois de Boulogne, as his
Journal
bore witness. But in July there were no rides. On 20 July the sentence against that stormy petrel, Jeanne Comtesse de Lamotte Valois, was officially quashed by the Paris court as a deliberate affront to the monarchy, although the Comtesse herself was already dead in London, under circumstances which were, like the rest of her life, both scandalous and mysterious. This was a signal for further demonstrations of hostility, if any were needed. The next day the Queen reported to Fersen that the insults were now so terrible that none of them, not the King, the Queen nor Madame Elisabeth, dared walk in the gardens.

It was a horrible, humid, brooding atmosphere as the nation—
la patrie
—was officially proclaimed in danger of invasion. Armed men paraded the streets singing the “Ça Ira,” that jaunty revolutionary song generally regarded as “the signal of sedition,” of which one key line ran: “We shall hang all the aristocrats.” There were renewed distressing rumours that the Dauphin would be removed from his parents, with the possibility of a Regency in his name; the Girondins were said to actively favour this. One story suggested that the King had gone mad and was roaming crazily around the Tuileries—which of course made a Regency a necessity. Marie Antoinette moved from her ground-floor apartment to one close to that of her husband and the Dauphin.

Into this world of suspicion and fear, the Brunswick Manifesto of 25 July came as a match to dry timber. The Duke of Brunswick himself was a veteran campaigner who had fought brilliantly for Prussia in the Seven Years’ War and later for Prussia in the cause of the Stadtholder in Holland against the Patriots; he was an enlightened man who had been close to many of the
philosophes
. The manifesto was, however, fatally permeated with émigré sentiments. The French people were openly invited to rise up against “the odious schemes of their oppressors”—that is to say, the existing government, for better or for worse. The Manifesto also threatened “an exemplary and ever-memorable vengeance” and the “total destruction” of Paris if the Tuileries was the subject of a further attack and if the King and royal family “suffered even the slightest violence.” The campaign was intended “to put an end to anarchy in the interior of France” as well as to deliver the royal family.

Where now was Marie Antoinette’s unreal dream of rescue by a force that would not interfere with the country’s internal affairs? Nothing could have been more helpful to the republican sentiments in the opposition than this manifesto. They now had the excuse they needed to discuss openly the imperative to depose the King—and the means by which it should be done. On 31 July, one of the forty-eight administrative
sections
into which Paris was now divided, that of Mauconseil, publicly pronounced Louis XVI to be “a despicable tyrant . . . Let us strike this colossus of despotism.” In a grim way the Mauconseil resolution stood the Brunswick Manifesto on its head. Yes, the French people must indeed turn against the odious schemes of their oppressors—in order to declare with one accord: “Louis XVI is no longer King of the French.”

A few days earlier, a public dinner had been held in the ruins of the Bastille, at which calls were made for the fall of the monarchy, while petitions to that effect flooded into the Assembly. By 3 August, Pétion was able to ask for an end to monarchical government in the name of forty-six out of the forty-eight
sections
. The importation of further Confederate troops from the provinces, especially from Marseilles, described to Fersen by Marie Antoinette as “the arrival of a great quantity of extremely suspicious strangers,” signified the armed fist by which this message might shortly be struck home.

The day of the Mauconseil resolution, 31 July, was also the day of the King’s last entry in his
Journal
; predictably it read “Rien.” Louis XVI now took refuge in “incessant” reading of the history of Charles I. He told his wife that everything that was happening in France was an exact imitation of what had happened during the English Revolution, and he hoped that his studies would enable him to do better than that monarch (from whom he was descended) in the coming crisis—for no one was in any doubt by now, whether revolutionary or monarchist, that the Tuileries was going to be attacked. On Sunday, 5 August, the King held his usual
lever
at the Tuileries. It was well attended by members of the current administration, which was rapidly losing its grip on power in the city. There was respect—of a sort—and Bertrand de Molleville even thought the occasion “brilliant.” An English doctor, John Moore, recently arrived in Paris, reported a very different scene at the Palais-Royal. Adrenalin was flowing—republican adrenalin, any mention of the name of the King being generally received with hoots of derisive laughter. Moore’s experience was more prescient than that of Molleville.

The day of 9 August, hot as before, began with a delusive calm inside the Tuileries. The King, Queen, Madame Elisabeth and Marie Thérèse attended Mass as usual although one person present noted how the royal ladies never raised their eyes from their prayer books.
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Outside, the news that the attack was planned for that night began to flow through the city. The young Comte de La Rochefoucauld, son of the Duc de Liancourt, was at a matinée at the Comédie Française when he heard the rumours that the crowds were beginning to assemble in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Immediately he returned to the Tuileries. The drums of the National Guard were sounded and a body of them arrived at the palace, saying they were “voluntary soldiers in the service of the King.” Some members of the National Guard were, however, less reliable politically and there were already cries of “No more King!” from among their number. There was another armed force of volunteer aristocrats, about 300 of them, some of whose weapons were rudimentary if heroic. The main defence of the King was expected to be provided by his ultra-loyal Swiss Guards.

The Cent-Suisses du Roi constituted an impressive body of crack troops. They led somewhat segregated lives in their barracks, preserving their own language and customs, although they had been in the service of the French King since the late fifteenth century and had a French colonel-in-chief, the Duc de Brissac. On ceremonial occasions, they still wore the ancient uniform of the liberators of Switzerland, but were otherwise dressed in blue uniforms braided in gold, with red breeches. When the Guards were drawn up in formation to the roll of their huge drums, wrote the Comte d’Hezecques, you would still think you saw “the elite of a Swiss canton” marching against the oppressor.

Tough and dedicated, the Swiss Guards were easily interpreted as symbols of the monarchy by its enemies. On 1 August one Swiss had written back to his homeland: “The Confederates from Marseilles have announced that their objective is the disarmament of the Swiss Guards but we have all decided to surrender our arms only with our lives.” As the attack was expected, the Swiss Guards at the Tuileries were drawn up like “real walls,” their soldier-like silence in marked contrast to the perpetual din made by the much less professional National Guards.

An extraordinary concession to the impending crisis was now made: the King’s
coucher
was omitted. This ceremony had even taken place on the evening on 20 June, following the King’s humiliation at the hands of the
sans-culottes
. Nothing could have made clearer the sense of a regime—a way of life—coming to an end. Instead, as the night wore on, the scene in the King’s bedchamber was one of chaos, with people crowding in and sitting everywhere, on the ground, on chairs, on console tables. Even so, with an obstinate maintenance of standards, some minor members of the royal household tried to prevent anyone sitting down in the presence of the King. Louis XVI himself, having not undressed (or been undressed), was still wearing his purple coat and the wreckage of his formal powdered hairstyle. Camille Durand, of the National Guard volunteers, noticed how flushed the King was, his eyes extremely red.

The Queen, Madame Elisabeth and their ladies did not undress either; only the children went to sleep. At one o’clock Marie Antoinette and her sister-in-law lay down together on a sofa in one of the little rooms of the mezzanine floor. All of the adults were still awake when the raucous tocsins began sounding, summoning revolutionaries all over Paris to the long-anticipated assault. Durand in the Tuileries heard one tocsin at midnight, taking over as the clock’s bell ceased to toll, as did John Moore. But the streets were still clear and Moore was not awakened again until two o’clock when his landlord informed him that the Tuileries was about to be attacked. La Rochefoucauld, sleeping at the Tuileries, was not awakened until 3 a.m. when he went down to the King. At four o’clock the Queen went to the King’s bedchamber. When she came back, she informed Madame Elisabeth that the King refused to don his quilted waistcoat. He had done so on 20 June when he might have been the solitary target of an assassin. Now he was determined to share in the general fate on equal terms.