Marie Antoinette (65 page)

Louis Charles was aged eight years and three months; he had spent nearly half his life in captivity of one sort or another. He had become unnaturally circumspect and, above all, anxious to please. The rude “peasant” health of which Marie Antoinette had once boasted to Princesse Louise was beginning to deteriorate in the confining conditions of the Tower. He had suffered from a fever in May and in June he was found to have a hernia in the groin. The celebrated truss-maker Hippoy Le Pipelet was allowed to bandage him. Pipelet noted that Louis Charles had also suffered an accident, which seemed insignificant at the time, if painful, but was to have grim consequences. He reported to the Temple authorities that Louis Charles, using a stick as a hobby-horse, had managed to bruise one of his testicles.

That night and for many nights to come, the family left behind listened to the boy’s sobbing, still audible from where he was kept. Marie Antoinette became obsessed with the prospect of having just one little glimpse of Louis Charles as he passed on his way to his exercise. There was one position in their apartments from where, by craning her neck, she could just see him as he passed. She spent whole days trying to do this. As Maria Carolina expressed it to her daughter, the wife of Francis II, just when “time and resignation” seemed to have formed “healing scars” following the King’s death, Marie Antoinette’s wounds had been “torn open again.”

Like all separations of children from parents in the name of ideology, this aim to retrain—or brainwash—the former Dauphin was heart-rending for his family. Mayor Chaumette had declared the previous year: “I wish to give him [Louis Charles] some education. I will take him from his family to make him lose the idea of his rank.” The carrying out of this policy meant that Marie Antoinette’s
chou d’amour
, petted, protected and loved in the way that few eighteenth-century children were, was given over to the altogether rougher care of the cobbler Simon. The new guardian was supposed to toughen up the little Capet and this he proceeded to do. The boy was beaten for crying so after a bit he ceased to cry. He was given wine, became tipsy and amused his jailers. He was taught their rough language, their obscenities, and, since it pleased them, took on such a way of talking as his own. This was simply the brutal way that the children of the people were tamed, and Louis Charles was thought to be a prime candidate for taming.

Marie Antoinette’s own turn came a month later. It was once again the direction of the war that provoked a new official move against her. Many of the French soldiers were distracted in the west with the rebels of the Vendée. On 23 July the Austrian alliance recaptured Mainz. Then three days later they took Valenciennes, a victory that meant that Paris itself, too easily reached down the valley of the Oise, was in danger. On 1 August, Barrère, president of the Convention and a member of the Committee of Public Safety, deliberately established the lethal connection. Was it “our over-long forgetfulness of the Austrian woman’s crimes . . . our strange indifference towards the Capet family” that had given the nation’s enemies a mistaken impression of its weakness? If so, that could be remedied, and remedied immediately.

The security for the transfer of Marie Antoinette to the prison known as the Conciergerie was prodigious. All the doors of the Temple were checked during the day and the guards were told to regard themselves as being in a state of siege. At eight o’clock in the evening, the artillery in the courtyard was instructed to hold itself in readiness. It was a very hot, stuffy night, almost exactly a year since that hot night preceding a red dawn when the Tuileries had been stormed.

As a further precaution, they came for Marie Antoinette at the dead hour when humanity’s resistance is at its lowest, two o’clock in the morning. The Queen had undressed. As a foretaste of what was to come, she was not allowed the luxury of dressing in private; the municipals, headed by the once compliant Michonis, insisted on being in attendance, as though this frail, unarmed, middle-aged woman could somehow elude them. Marie Antoinette listened to the decree of the Convention against her without any visible emotion. She was then permitted to make up a little bundle of necessities, including a handkerchief and some smelling-salts. Marie Antoinette’s last instruction to Marie Thérèse was to obey her aunt in all things and treat her as a second mother. On her passage downwards—Madame was finally coming down from her Tower—Marie Antoinette banged her head hard on the last and lowest beam. She was asked whether she was hurt. The former Queen replied blankly that she felt no pain at all.

So the heavily armed party crossed the silent Temple gardens and went back into the palace itself, where that uncomfortable dinner had taken place on the first night of their imprisonment on 13 August 1792, a moment when Marie Antoinette still believed this princely residence was to be their prison. At the steps of the palace, there were two or three ordinary hackney carriages waiting and a body of soldiers. Marie Antoinette was conveyed as part of a strongly guarded cortège through the sleeping city, over the Pont Notre-Dame into the Conciergerie itself, beside the Palais de Justice. Her guards knocked loudly on the door with their bayonets.

It was the turnkey Louis Larivière who answered. He was extremely sleepy but even so he recognized the former Queen, all in black and dramatically pale, since as a boy he had once worked at Versailles as a pastry-cook. The jailer-registrar either did not or would not perform a similar feat of recognition. It was his duty to admit “Prisoner no. 280,” accused of having conspired against France. When he asked the new inmate for her name, she simply replied, “Look at me.” One assumes that this answer sprang not so much from hauteur, as from the former Queen’s inability to frame a suitable reply. Was she to be Marie Antoinette d’Autriche et Lorraine?
Cidevant
Queen of France? Or Antoinette Capet? The first two answers would have been unacceptable to her jailers, the last to herself. The heat was growing as the dawn began to break and Marie Antoinette had to wipe the sweat from her face with her handkerchief.

Inside the prison her reception was more respectful. Madame Richard, the wife of the jailer, had been warned of her arrival during the previous day. After dinner she told her young maid Rosalie Lamorlière in a low voice: “Tonight, Rosalie, we shan’t go to bed. You will sleep on a chair. The Queen is going to be transferred from the Temple to this prison.” In order to prepare a suitable cell, General de Custine, who had commanded the French army in the Rhineland but was now accused of treachery, had to be turned out of the former Council Chamber. The two women did, however, manage to get hold of some good linen and a lace-edged pillow. With this they tried to soften the grim impression of the cell, brick-floored and quite damp, with its table and prison chairs; a warder had merely added from the prison store a canvas bed, two mattresses, a bolster, a light coverlet—and a bucket.

Some time after three o’clock in the morning, Madame Richard hastily aroused Rosalie in her chair: “Hurry, hurry, wake up, Rosalie,” she said, pulling at her arm. Trembling, the girl went down the long dark corridor and at the far end found the Queen already in Custine’s cell. She was looking round at its spartan contents and then transferred her gaze in turn to Madame Richard and Rosalie. The latter had brought a stool from her own room. Marie Antoinette proceeded to climb on it and with the help of a convenient nail already in the wall, hung up her gold watch—a watch that Maria Teresa had given her.

The Queen then proceeded to undress. Rosalie offered to help. “Thank you, my child,” replied Marie Antoinette. “But since I no longer have anyone [of my household] with me, I will look after myself.” She spoke pleasantly and without any undue arrogance, according to Rosalie. Daylight grew stronger. The two women extinguished their torches and left. Marie Antoinette lay down alone on the bed, which the sympathetic Rosalie at least thought “unworthy of her.”

The Conciergerie was now the vast antechamber to the Revolutionary Tribunal, a warren full of people of all sorts who had incurred the suspicion of the state. On the Quai d’Horloge of the Seine, it had once been a sumptuous royal palace hailed as more beautiful than any yet seen in France, taking its name from the concierge or keeper in charge of the King’s residence. Since the late fourteenth century it had, however, been a much less comfortable prison. The Conciergerie’s proximity to the river meant that most of its cells were damp, and given the age of the predominantly Gothic structure, most of them were also dark.

With the constant arrival and departure of prisoners, lawyers, hopeful or disappointed visitors, the general commotion of the Conciergerie was in complete contrast to the seclusion of the Temple with its tiny band of prized captives. In the case of Marie Antoinette, she was no longer a grand lady in Madame’s Tower but an ordinary prisoner who would, like the rest of the occupants, soon be brought to judgement. But, of course, the widowed
ci-devant
Queen was also a figure of tragic celebrity—or notoriety, according to the point of view. With the connivance of good-natured jailers, intent on pleasing the public where possible (for money), Marie Antoinette now became one of the sights of the Conciergerie. Asked later whether she had recognized any particular individual, she was able to shrug and say with some plausibility: “There were so many . . .”

The Tower, before the King’s death, had brought a kind of private family life of which most royal parents only dreamt; now the Conciergerie, in another reversal of expectations, removed all Marie Antoinette’s privacy. The gendarmes were in the outer section of her cell day and night.
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There was a half-curtain four feet high, which enabled her to wash, perform her natural functions and carry out her very limited
toilette
, for all of which the guards allowed her “no liberty.” But, of course, the public access, whether based on sympathy or ghoulish curiosity, together with the existence of fellow prisoners nearby, brought certain advantages undreamt of at the Temple.

It was relevant, for example, that there were many former nuns in the Conciergerie, imprisoned for their faith. Marie Antoinette saw one stretching up her hands, evidently in prayer on her behalf, out of the low barred window that looked on to the Women’s Courtyard. Then there were non-juror priests inside the Conciergerie, and other clandestine priests who were still at liberty might be able to visit the former Queen in disguise. Saying the Mass required very little in the way of equipment; the forbidden pastors, as in all countries where a religion is proscribed, were becoming expert at organizing it. The presentation of an already consecrated Communion wafer was an even simpler matter. The eminent Abbé Emery was one of those known to have done this. The former Superior of the Seminary of Saint-Sulpice was imprisoned at the beginning of August, and, with the help of loyal clergy who brought him hosts wrapped in white handkerchiefs, continued his mission.

In this context the story of a certain Mademoiselle Fouché—that she brought the non-juror Abbé Magnin into the prison to solace the Queen—is perfectly plausible. Mademoiselle Fouché was a young woman from a respectable family in Orléans; Magnin was the former Superior of the Little Seminary at Autun, now living in Paris disguised as a Fouché uncle under the name of “Monsieur Charles.” Mademoiselle Fouché told of smuggling him in on several occasions; at one point Magnin spent an hour and a half with the Queen, courtesy of Richard and his “good gendarmes”—plenty of time for confession and Communion.

Marie Antoinette’s religion had become increasingly important to her over the years as her ordeal intensified. The laughing girl, who had protested to the Abbé de Vermond that nothing would make of her a
dévote
, had developed into a woman who was markedly pious, much as her mother had been. At Easter 1792, still in the Tuileries, the Queen had got up at five o’clock in the morning to attend a secret Mass celebrated by a non-juror cousin of Madame Campan. Her close relationship with her sister-in-law, ending in months of exclusive companionship, was also significant; political differences were forgotten, and at the Temple it had been back to the affectionate intimacy that the two had enjoyed when Marie Antoinette first arrived at Versailles, and Elisabeth became her little protégée—except that, where religion was concerned, Madame Elisabeth was now the leader.

The other possibility that this semi-public access presented was not so much spiritual nourishment as physical escape. It is difficult to estimate the seriousness of the various private attempts made to free the Queen while she was in the Conciergerie. However, unlike the 1791 flight, which might have been achieved but failed for extraneous reasons, one suspects that none of them had any real practical chance of success. In the case of the best-known attempt, the so-called Carnation Plot of late August and early September, the issue is clouded rather than clarified by the arrest of the conspirators and the subsequent testimonies, where everyone concerned tried to exonerate or protect themselves.