Marie Antoinette (60 page)

All next day was spent listening to the debate, which would be summed up by the statement of the president, Vergniaud: “The French people are invited to form a National Convention. The Chief of the Executive Power [the King] is provisionally suspended from his functions.” In short, it was to be left to a National Convention, to be elected by the people, to decide the ultimate fate of the monarchy. The Queen had recovered her usual composure. That pleased no one, just as her misfortunes evoked no compassion. Doctor Moore attended the scene and remarked with surprise: “Her beauty is gone!” A Frenchman nearby was convinced that her expression indicated “rage and the most provoking arrogance.”

At least the old regime struggled to recreate the conditions of the court in the unpromising surroundings of the convent. The King still managed to have his hair dressed. Dinner on 12 August—a day so hot that it became hazy—was a magnificent affair by most standards, if not those of Louis XVI. It included two soups, eight entrées, four roasts and eight desserts. An equally lavish supper followed. The Queen hardly touched her food. The King on the other hand ate heartily, “as if he was in his own palace,” which upset his wife. Further surviving servitors managed to get into the convent. These included Pauline, to the general joy. “My dear Pauline, don’t let us ever be separated again!” cried Marie Thérèse. Pauline also had escaped from the Tuileries with nothing but the clothes she had on; the royal ladies hastily began to adapt one of Madame Elisabeth’s dresses for her.

Then there was Madame Campan to whom Marie Antoinette showed a less optimistic face. Stretching out her arms to the First Lady of the Bedchamber, she said: “It ends with us!” Madame Campan’s sister, Madame Auguié, presented her mistress with twenty-five louis; lack of money, essential equipment for a prisoner dealing with jailers, was likely to prove as awkward in the future as lack of linen. In fact, other royal servants tried to present their master with funds before they were dismissed, until the King said that their own need was the greater.

The whereabouts of an appropriate residence for the royal family was the new subject of debate in the Assembly. The original plan had been to use the Luxembourg Palace, former residence of the Comte de Provence. Then the revolutionary Paris Commune, which saw the guardianship of the royal family as its right—or perquisite—protested that the security there was not good enough; other places were dismissed on the same grounds. The Prince de Poix, who had accompanied the King on that progress to the Assembly, offered the family the Hôtel de Noailles. But the choice of the Commune was in fact the Temple, in the Marais district. The Assembly, to whom the King had so happily entrusted himself and his family, where he expected to be “never safer,” now cheerfully abandoned their responsibility and allowed the Commune to have its way.

Painful negotiations followed as to how many attendants were to be allowed to the royal party. At one point Louis XVI, the suspended King, observed that his role model Charles I had at least been allowed to keep his friends with him until the day he mounted the scaffold. In the end the party that set out for the Temple at six o’clock on the evening of Monday, 13 August, consisted of the following: the five royals, the Princesse de Lamballe, the Tourzels, mother and daughter, Mesdames Thibault, Saint Brice and Navarre, the valets Chamilly and Hüe.

Marat signed an article in
L’Ami du Peuple
in which he hailed “The glorious day of the Tenth of August,” which could be decisive for “the triumph of liberty.” But he warned his readers not to give in to “the voice of false pity.” There was not much danger of that as the thirteen-strong party set out in two heavy-laden carriages, drawn by only two horses apiece, which made progress intolerably slow. Altogether it took two and a half hours to reach the Temple. Along the way they saw the equestrian statue of Louis XV, which had been toppled and smashed by the mob. One of the commissioners accompanying them, Pierre Manuel, Procurator-General of the Commune, remarked with satisfaction: “That is how the people treat their kings.”

“It is pleasant that this rage is confined to inanimate objects,” commented the real-life King with a flash of acerbity.

In the meantime a wag had affixed a placard to the Tuileries, “House to Let,” and miles away in the east the army of the Duke of Brunswick was on the march.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

THE TOWER

“You will see that they will put us into the Tower. They will make that a real prison for us.”

M
ARIE
A
NTOINETTE TO THE
M
ARQUISE DE
T
OURZEL
, 13 A
UGUST
1792

Lanterns illuminated the walls of the Temple when the royal party arrived, as though for a public festival, and a great crowd of people chanted “Long live the nation!” That cry at least was a familiar one. More sinister was the gleeful Marseillais chant of the guards:

Madame goes up into her Tower

When will she come down again?

It referred to the fact that the Temple was in fact two separate structures. There was the gracious seventeenth-century palace where the young Mozart had once played at the invitation of the Prince de Conti, its governor; more recently it had belonged to the Comte d’Artois. Then there was the Tower, sixty feet high, a frowning mediaeval edifice that had once been part of the old monastery of the Templar Order; this was divided into a Great Tower and a Small Tower, with various turrets attached. It lay in an ancient district not far from the Bastille and was not much known to Parisians from other districts; some of those who accompanied the royal family had never been there.

Marie Antoinette had always had a horror of the Tower. Visiting her brother-in-law’s palace, she had tried to persuade him to have its grim adjunct knocked down.
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One suspects that this was due more to dislike of a building so far from the pastoral spirit of the Petit Trianon than to some presentiment. Once at the Convent of the Feuillants, however, she had expressed genuine apprehension, exclaiming to the Marquise de Tourzel: “You will see that they will put us into the Tower. They will make that a real prison for us.” Yet the public dinner served to the royal family on their arrival, together with the commissioners of the Commune who had accompanied them, did take place in the palace. They were all exhausted and Louis Charles fell asleep. There was a move to take the King alone to the Great Tower and leave the rest of them in the palace. In the end, however, orders came that the whole family was to be moved, for the time being, to the Small Tower while work was done to render the Great Tower both habitable and secure.

The Small Tower itself, that evening, could scarcely be described as comfortable for the royal party. The eyes of the two valets, Chamilly and Hüe, met in silence over the uncurtained and verminous bedstead destined for Louis XVI. (In spite of this, their master, characteristically, had a good night’s sleep.) Indecent engravings in the room for Marie Thérèse were removed on her father’s orders. Madame Elisabeth, Pauline de Tourzel and the waiting-woman Madame Navarre all had to sleep together in the kitchen. So they began the process of adaptation to their new home—or prison, the “real prison” of Marie Antoinette’s fears.

Security was, of course, immense. Four commissioners were in attendance at any one time, casting lots for the two who spent the night in the Tower. Twenty guards manned the gate. There were also elaborate precautions over the delivery of items such as books, linen and clothes. The lack of respect to the King—the suspended King—grieved Marie Thérèse. Instead of “Sire” or “Majesté,” he was now “Monsieur” or even “Louis,” this man whose own wife did not address him in public as “Louis.” One particular jailer, Rocher, was found particularly detestable by the girl since he specialized in petty humiliations such as taking to his bed early, thus obliging the royal family to file past him. He loved the fact that the wicket gate was so low that the Queen herself had to bow her head before him to enter it, and then there was his deliberate manipulation of his pipe. Madame Elisabeth even asked one of the commissioners why Rocher smoked so persistently in their faces. “No doubt because he likes it,” was the curt reply. Some of the commissioners also took pleasure in sitting down in the presence of the royal ladies and, as the weather grew colder, putting their feet on the firedogs to block the warmth.

In spite of all this, the royal family was able to develop its own way of life, as prisoners do. In luxury it was certainly a precipitate descent from the comparative ease of the Tuileries where they had spent the last two and three-quarter years. But as a regime it was not atrociously severe. The accommodation of the Small Tower was arranged to give the King a bedroom on the third floor and a little study in the turret. The Queen and others slept on the floor below him. On the first floor was an antechamber, a dining room and the unexpected asset of a book-lined turret. The King revelled in this library—1500 books that had been the archive of the Knights of Malta. He read something like one book a day, frowning over Voltaire and Rousseau who, he said, had been “the ruin of France.” The Queen had her beloved tapestry and at one point was able to send for her knitting needles from the Tuileries. The little dog Mignon was also brought in, since there were gardens for exercise.

Nobody had any kind of wardrobe—the Queen seems to have arrived with two dresses, one blue, one dark pink—but orders for lingerie were allowed to be given to the celebrated Madame Éloffe on arrival, and again on 15 and 18 August. In the next two months 25,000 livres would be spent on assorted items such as sheets, stockings, laundry and hats (black beaver tricornes for the Queen and Madame Elisabeth). Sailor suits were ordered for Louis Charles, and the King could still get his shoes from his usual cobbler, Giot, in the rue du Bac. Louis generally wore one of his two coats of plain chestnut brown, with metal filigree buttons, and a white piqué waistcoat. Marie Antoinette’s outfits were similarly modest—loose pierrots of
toile de Jouy
, dresses of brown and white sprigged cotton and plain white dimity, worn with lace caps. She also practised the economy of making little changes to her costume with the aid of fichus and shawls. There was a payment of 600 livres to Rose Bertin for August and September; her business still flourished although the couturier herself had left the country in 1791. Much of this sum went on accessories and alterations.

Food was still served liberally. The royal servants, knowing no other way of attending to their master, continued to produce the soups, entrées, roasts, fowls and desserts with which he was familiar. Louis XVI continued to drink—bordeaux, champagne and, what was considered abstemious, a single liqueur in the evening. In fact, the provision of food quickly assumed an additional importance because its acquisition necessitated trips into the outside world. There were three men in the kitchen, Turgy, Chrétien and Marchand, who had managed to infiltrate the Tower by pretending that they came on the orders of the Commune. The sympathetic Turgy used his thrice-weekly expeditions outside to acquire news and to pass on messages. There was certainly news to impart. The Prussian armies under the Duke of Brunswick crossed the French frontier on 19 August; Longwy fell four days later.

To Hüe, Marie Antoinette emphasized as before that “not one French fortress” must be given up to secure their liberty. If the royal family was freed, she said, they intended to go to Strasbourg in order to stop “this important city,” which “must be preserved for France,” becoming German once more. Hüe was happily convinced that the daughter of Maria Teresa, the sister of Joseph II and Leopold II, the aunt of Francis II, had given way to “the consort of the King of France and the mother of the heir to the throne.” The fact was that for all her nationalistic words, the hopes of Marie Antoinette could hardly fail to rise as news of allied military successes percolated through to the prisoners.

On 19 August, however, the day that these armies crossed the frontier, the little household in the Tower received a further devastating blow. The commissioners of the Commune announced that the surviving attendants, including the Princesse de Lamballe, the Marquise de Tourzel with Pauline, Chamilly, Hüe and the waiting-women, were to be removed for interrogation. This was in keeping with a new order, prompted by the Commune, which set up a special tribunal to try royalists for crimes allegedly committed during the overthrow of the monarchy. Marie Antoinette made desperate pleas to keep the Princesse de Lamballe beside her, on the grounds that she was a royal relative. She wished to protect the vulnerable friend whom she had introduced into this perilous situation, judging the Tower to be safer than an ordinary prison. When the Princesse was removed with the others, the Queen urged the Marquise de Tourzel in a low voice to look after her, and try to answer for her where possible. The Princesse and the Tourzels were now incarcerated in the La Force prison. Louis Charles, separated at last from his devoted Governess, shared the Queen’s room. It was Hüe who was, to the general pleasure and surprise, allowed to return after being interrogated about the flight to Varennes and (correctly) found to be innocent.

The three royal ladies were now without any female attendants. A couple called Tison with a daughter, another Pauline, were brought in to do the rough work of the establishment. No one liked the Tisons; the husband, in his late fifties, was gruff and unpleasant, the wife a hysteric more worried about her own comforts than those of the royal family she was supposed to serve. The next import permitted by the Commune was of a very different calibre. This was a valet named Hanet Cléry, who was intended to help Hüe in his work, but when the latter was finally removed for good in early September, he became the effective manager of the tiny household. Cléry had been in Louis Charles’s household since the boy’s birth; he had escaped from the Tuileries on 10 August by jumping out of a window. (Seeing that Cléry wore a plain coat and carried no sword, a helpful Marseillais had offered him one of his own, in case Cléry wanted to participate in the killing.) Not only loyal and part of the inner network of royal servants, Cléry was also intelligent and resourceful. “The faithful Cléry” would turn out to be an important witness to conditions in the Tower. Furthermore, additional joy, he had trained as a barber. Cléry could do the King’s hair in the morning, and he could also move on to perform the same functions for the ladies whose hair had not been properly dressed for eight days. Hairdressing as ever being central to court life, even in this, the most modest of versions, Cléry used his sessions with the comb to pass on information discreetly.

From time to time harsh sounds did penetrate the Temple. There was the monotonous daily chanting of that song “Madame goes up into her Tower” by the guards. There were the insults shouted by the public—up to 400 of them—who had taken to behaving like tourists outside this new sight of Paris. “We will strangle the little cubs and the fat pig” was one cry, “Madame Veto shall dance from the lantern” another. On 25 August, the Feast of St. Louis, which had been so splendidly celebrated with multiple illuminations in days gone by, Marie Thérèse heard the dreaded sound of the “Ça ira” at seven o’clock in the morning. Later the royal family learnt from the Procurator Manuel, one of the commissioners, that La Fayette had fled France. Manuel also handed over a letter from Mesdames Tantes, leading their pious lives in Rome. This was the last letter that the family received officially from outside, according to Marie Thérèse. The family was, however, unaware that in the evening Durosoy, the publisher of the royalist
Gazette de Paris
, was executed by a newfangled instrument called the guillotine.
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From the point of view of the inhabitants of the Tower, therefore, the day of 2 September began like any other. The King was actually with Commissioner Daujon, watching a house being demolished outside the walls of the Tower in the interests of greater security, when the noise of cannon was heard. The King’s great shout of laughter at the fall of a big stone was interrupted. According to Daujon he turned pale, began to tremble, and in his cowardice “forgot he was a man.” Marie Antoinette cried out: “Save my husband!” This was echoed by Madame Elisabeth with: “Have pity on my brother!” Even if Daujon’s charges were true, Louis XVI, who had been the subject of two apparently murderous assaults within the last six weeks, can hardly be blamed for his reaction. But indecisive and incapable of rising to an occasion as the King might be, he was not a coward as the events of 20 June had shown. It is far more likely that he feared for the safety of his family.