Marie Antoinette (66 page)

The plot took its name from the flower that a certain Alexandre de Rougeville dropped at the Queen’s feet in her cell. Rougeville had formerly been part of the Comte de Provence’s military establishment. He had plucked the carnation from the garden of his landlady Sophie Dutilleul. Rougeville had been introduced into the Conciergerie by the ever assiduous police administrator Michonis; the idea was for Marie Antoinette to be spirited away in a waiting carriage to the château of Madame de Jarjayes and so to Germany. Trembling, since she recognized a former Knight of the Order of Saint Louis, Marie Antoinette picked up the flower. Inside the petals was concealed a tiny note, which the Queen attempted to answer by pricking out a message with a pin. Hüe heard that her response was “negative.” But if she did indicate her readiness to escape, this plan foundered when Gilbert, one of the gendarmes who was in regular attendance in the Queen’s cell, gave the game away. Either he betrayed Marie Antoinette’s confidence, envisaging danger to himself if she escaped, or he simply deduced what was going on from Rougeville’s repeated visits and decided, for similarly self-preservative reasons, to have no part in it. Nevertheless one cannot help being sceptical as to how far the Queen really got on the path to freedom on this occasion.

The same sad scepticism must attend the Wigmakers’ Conspiracy a few weeks later, in which a group of Parisian professionals whose work had depended on the lifestyle of the old regime, including pastry-cooks and lace-workers and lemonade-makers as well as the eponymous wigmakers, paid touching tribute to the Queen who had been their patroness and plotted to free her. The wigmakers and their colleagues were, however, betrayed. Another plot, in which the Baron de Batz was once more involved, was discovered thanks to an informer in the prison, Jean Baptiste Carteron.

In later years, of course, it would be romantic to talk of trying and failing to free the tragic Queen of France. An example of this kind of enterprise (for which there is no independent corroboration) was provided by Charlotte Lady Atkyns, the pretty wife of an English baronet who had once been an actress at the Drury Lane Theatre. A friend of the Princesse de Tarante, she had formed a devotion to Marie Antoinette during her visits to France and conceived the idea of smuggling the Queen out of the Conciergerie. Putting both her thespian talents and her husband’s money to good use, Charlotte Atkyns bribed a National Guard with 1000 louis to let her in, wearing his uniform. She then tried in vain to persuade the Queen to change clothes with her. Madame Guyot, head nurse at a hospice, had a similar plan—and a similar failure. She wanted to get the Queen transferred to her care, on the grounds of her health, whereupon she would be smuggled away to freedom, disguised as a young pregnant woman, Madame de Blamont.

What is quite clear, however, is that these and other well-meaning private ventures were in marked contrast to the supine behaviour of Marie Antoinette’s Austrian relations. The little people could get in, thanks to their obscurity, but practically speaking they could not get the Queen out. The great people with their armies and their treasuries had a much better chance of success—but showed no real signs of making the attempt. Two of the Queen’s supporters in Brussels, Count Fersen and the Comte de La Marck, were both driven frantic by the caution—or was it sheer indifference?—with which any idea of liberating the Emperor’s aunt was greeted. Fersen, the man of action, suggested riding in from the Belgian frontier with a troop of gallant men and simply lifting the Queen from the Conciergerie. Mercy gave this idea a “freezing” reception. Mercy’s own notion, put to the allied commander, the Prince of Saxe-Coburg, was for some more measured military initiative. It was Coburg who poured cold water on this idea. The Queen might even be dead by now; besides, “To menace savage men when you cannot do anything about it, is to make them yet more ferocious.” But perhaps the key sentence in Coburg’s response was this: he had to think not only of the Queen, but of “the real interests of the [Austrian] monarchy.”

There was still the question of the four commissioners of the Convention brought over by Dumouriez. The Prince of Coburg did moot the possibility of an exchange with them in a postscript to a letter to Mercy in Brussels of 16 August. In his reply two days later, however, Mercy described such a plan as “very delicate and not to be undertaken lightly.” He proposed to reflect on it. And there the matter rested.

The Comte de La Marck supported what was, frankly, always the most promising approach. Marie Antoinette’s freedom should literally be bought—and at a high price. The finances of the revolutionary government were in no better state than those of the former regime, thanks in both cases to the dangerous extravagance of financing foreign wars. By a law of 10 June, the contents of the royal palaces—“the sumptuous furniture of the last tyrants of France” and “the vast possessions which they reserved to their pleasure”—were now being sold off in aid of “the defence of liberty.” This was often done at a loss: for example, a commode, two corner cupboards and a desk that had belonged to Louis XVI went for 5000 livres, whereas the desk alone had cost nearly 6000 in 1787. Urgency did not lead to good business practice. At the two-day August sale at the Petit Trianon of the former belongings of “the woman Capet,” including “suites of furniture . . . escritoires, consoles with marble tops, chairs with stools covered in damask and silk velvet . . . glass and china for both pantry and parlour use,” it was made clear that these objects could be transported to “foreign parts” without any duty being paid. In a gesture that seemed to indicate that time now stood still at a deserted Versailles, all the Queen’s clocks there were sold.
^*109

Like the precious objects with which she had once surrounded herself, “the woman Capet” might have had considerable value to the Revolution as a hostage to be ransomed. La Marck reported to Mercy that a banker called Ribbes who had lent him 600,000 livres had contacts, including a brother, in Paris. He was prepared to go to the frontier and negotiate, possibly with Danton. For a moment, Mercy hesitated . . . Then at the last moment he decided that the offer of money was unnecessary; it would be enough to offer a free pardon to the revolutionaries in the name of the Emperor once victory was achieved. In vain La Marck beseeched the diplomat “not to wait for a response [from Austria] which may be too late,” but to despatch another courier. His letter of 14 September was full of despair: “They must understand in Vienna how painful, I might even say how amazing, it would be for the imperial government if history could say one day that forty leagues away from formidable and victorious Austrian armies, the august daughter of Maria Teresa has perished upon the scaffold without any attempt being made to save her.” But nothing happened.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

THE HEAD OF ANTOINETTE

“I have promised the head of Antoinette. I will go and cut it off myself if there is any delay in giving it to me.”

H
ÉBERT TO THE
C
OMMITTEE OF
P
UBLIC
S
AFETY
, 2 S
EPTEMBER
1793

With touching faith in the family whose interests she had tried for so long to serve, Marie Antoinette herself continued to keep up the hope that her relations would “reclaim” her. She told this to Rosalie Lamorlière, Madame Richard’s maid who had greeted her on arrival at the Conciergerie and who now became the former Queen’s devoted servant. Rosalie’s previous employer, a Madame Beaulieu, had been a royalist and it was her son, an actor at the theatre close by the Conciergerie, who had recommended the maid to the Richards. Rosalie overcame her repugnance at working in a prison when she found that the jailer and his wife did not try to check her compassionate activities. Not only tender-hearted but naturally quick, despite being virtually illiterate, Rosalie would in old age dictate her memoirs of the Queen’s prison-time, showing a retentive memory for touching details. She described the Queen in a reverie passing her two diamond rings endlessly from finger to finger and back again, or looking up at the sound of a harp, so poignantly reminiscent of her past life, and asking whether some woman prisoner was playing (it was the daughter of one of the glaziers currently working on her windows).

Marie Antoinette’s immediate need on arrival at the Conciergerie in the early hours of the morning was clothing. She had the black dress that she wore on her departure from the Temple and acquired another white dress. Supplies of lingerie were brought, handkerchiefs and black silk stockings. She had fichus of crepe and muslin and a petticoat made of Indian cotton. It was not much but it could be made sufficient with the aid of Rosalie, a laundress and, for a while, old Madame Larivière, mother of the turnkey, who had worked for the Duc de Penthièvre for thirty years and therefore knew how things should be done. It was Madame Larivière who skilfully patched the black dress with muslin beneath the arms and at the hem where it had become worn by the stones of the Temple, so that her subsequent replacement by a Madame Harel was regretted. At the Conciergerie the Queen’s plum-coloured (
prunelle
) slippers with their little heels
à la Saint Huberty
would become so coated with rust that at one point a friendly guard scraped them down with his sword.

Another regret, felt keenly at the time according to Rosalie, was the loss of the gold watch given to Marie Antoinette by her mother, the good luck symbol that she had hung up herself so carefully that first night. It was confiscated five days later. The weather outside was boiling, the atmosphere in the Conciergerie hot, humid and stinking; Marie Antoinette asked Rosalie to burn juniper in her cell to cover up the smell of the primitive sanitation. Yet in general the Queen showed that familiar spirit of resignation towards her altered conditions that had marked each step in the downward spiral of her fortunes. A white ribbon was bought to dress her hair in the morning, an art at which Rosalie became expert. It was Rosalie who brought in a little cheap mirror with a red border and an oriental pattern on its back. These few possessions came to be stored in a cardboard box supplied by the maid, who was thanked by the Queen with as much enthusiasm as if she had imported one of Riesener’s masterpieces.

Marie Antoinette was allowed Ville d’Avray mineral water, from the Temple; the water from the Seine that was drunk by the rest of the prisoners would no doubt have provided that “natural death” that her desperate sister Maria Carolina was beginning to think might be her happiest fate. She was given coffee for breakfast. The food—chicken, which she cut up extremely carefully and made last, and vegetables served on pewter—was the sort she liked; it was supplemented by the nourishing clear soup known as bouillon, on which Rosalie prided herself and which was the contemporary panacea for every ner-vous ill. The concierge and his wife, the Richards, were also well disposed towards their prisoner. Madame Richard had once sold haberdashery; she understood the need for comfort in small things. With her connivance (she was given the code name “Sensible”), Hüe himself got into the Conciergerie and managed to pass on news of the royal children to the Queen. A flush of emotion was produced in Marie Antoinette by the sight of the Richards’ blond, blue-eyed child, Fanfan, introduced when she had been talking at length about her own missing family. She trembled, covered the boy with kisses and began to cry, so that Madame Richard judged it a mistake to introduce Fanfan again.

It was Madame Richard who confided to Hüe that her daily shopping was made easy by invoking the distinguished prisoner’s name. When a fine melon was said to be destined for “our unhappy Queen,” the shopkeeper waived all charges. “There are those among us who weep for her,” he told the concierge’s wife. Rosalie had a similar experience buying peaches. The maid also put little bouquets on Marie Antoinette’s small table from time to time, which led the Queen to confide in her sadly how she had had a “real passion” for flowers in the past. This practice was later forbidden.

Marie Antoinette found solace from the aching boredom that is every prisoner’s lot by watching the guards at their eternal card games. She had sent for her knitting-box from the Temple to continue making stockings for her son; the royal ladies, left behind, knowing “how fond she was of this occupation,” had hastily packed up all the silk and worsted they could find. But this was not permitted. Nor was she allowed needles for embroidery, so she began to pull out threads from the remains of the toile on the walls, and weave them into garters. And then there was reading. There is something touching about the fact that in confinement her taste turned to foreign adventures;
The Travels of Captain Cook
, lent to her by a subsequent jailer, became a favourite.
Un Voyage à Venise
amused Marie Antoinette because it contained references to people she had known in her youth.

This form of existence, extremely confined but not completely intolerable, was brought to an end officially by the discovery of the Carnation Plot in early September. The indulgent Richards were taken away to be imprisoned themselves. They were replaced by the Baults, who were far more circumspect in their behaviour, given what had happened to their predecessors. Even if Bault was not a bad man at heart, according to Rosalie, Madame Bault did not have the elegant skills of Madame Richard, the former haberdasher. Marie Antoinette drew back from having her hair done by her when the concierge suggested it, declaring that henceforward she would dress it herself.
^*110

On 11 September the Queen was moved to another cell, the former pharmacy.
^*111
Although it too had a window on to the Women’s Courtyard, this was to be semi-blocked. The inner and outer doors of the cell, which was divided between “the widow Capet” and her gendarmes, were to be made much more secure.

Two long days of interrogation followed the Carnation Plot. The Queen met all the questioning not only with fortitude but also with a new kind of spirit, which one might also term bravado, if she had not been careful to couch her answers in suitably discreet terms. There was no one to coach her, no tutor like Vermond, no parental-type ambassador like Mercy, yet Marie Antoinette showed both wit and cunning in her answers. That natural intelligence that the French had always doubted shone through, fortified by the resilience of character that she had had to develop—or go under. At her second interrogation, for example, she was cross-examined for nearly sixteen hours at a stretch—and yet at no point did she incriminate either herself or those who had (or had not) plotted to free her.

Marie Antoinette was particularly adroit at handling the delicate question of Louis Charles. When asked whether she had been interested in the military successes of France’s enemies, she replied that she was interested in the success of the nation to which her son belonged. Which was that nation? “Isn’t he French?” answered Marie Antoinette. The question of Louis Charles’s status came up and the privileges he might once have enjoyed that belonged to “the empty title of king.” Marie Antoinette refused to be drawn on the subject, giving several versions of the same answer; she wanted France to be great and to be happy, nothing else mattered. Did she personally wish that there was still a king on the throne? Marie Antoinette replied that if France was content to have a king, she would like that king to be her son, but she was equally happy if France was content to be without a king. As to supporting the enemies of France: “I regard as my enemies all those who would bring harm to my children.” She would not be more specific beyond repeating, “Any kind of harm . . . whatever might be harmful.”

All unknown to Marie Antoinette, the crucial meeting concerning her fate had taken place about the time of the alleged Carnation Plot and the decision had already taken place before its discovery. The subsequent revelation of the conspiracy was a coincidence—although it was a convenient one. This meeting of the Committee of Public Safety took place in secret and it lasted all night. By dawn the deaths of the Queen and the Girondins arrested at the end of May had been sealed.

The leader in the call for the execution of “the woman Capet” was Hébert. His reason, quite simply, was the need to bind the
sans-culottes
to them in an act of communal violence by shedding the blood of the
ci-devant
Queen. The death of Louis Capet had been specifically the work of the Convention, but that of Antoinette should be the joint enterprise of the city of Paris, the Revolutionary Tribunal and the revolutionary army; the latter was in need of assurance since the French fleet at Toulon had gone over to the allies on 28 August. “I have promised the head of Antoinette,” thundered Hébert. “I will go and cut it off myself if there is any delay in giving it to me. I have promised it on your behalf to the
sans-culottes
who are asking for it, and without whom,” he emphasized, “you will cease to be.”

In short, the best way to keep the people “at white heat” was to grant them this sacrifice. “This head” was to be for them; those of the Girondins arrested on 31 May were for the Committee. It was decided that both parties should be granted their desire. Suggestions that the former Queen might be kept as a hostage were swept away with the argument that Louis Charles Capet—“Louis XVII” to the royalists—was hostage enough. The way was open for a Law of Suspects to be passed, in which all enemies of the people were to be tried immediately by a Revolutionary Tribunal.

Hébert’s brutal exposition was in direct contrast to the sympathy that the former Queen’s imagined condition in the Conciergerie was beginning to evoke in some generous hearts. In August, Germaine de Staël issued an impassioned plea,
Réflexions sur le Procès de la Reine
, whose author was simply described as “Une Femme.” Necker’s daughter, ten years younger than Marie Antoinette, was by now at Coppet in Switzerland, her father’s home, having fled France after the September massacres. With two baby sons of her own, born in 1790 and 1792 respectively, Germaine sprang with zeal into a Rousseau-esque defence of Marie Antoinette as a “tender mother.” The writer’s ardour justified the Baronne d’Oberkirch’s description of her: “She is a flame.”

A passionate introduction conjured “you, women of all countries, all classes of society” to listen to her with the emotion that she herself felt. “The destiny of Marie Antoinette contains everything that might touch your heart: if you are happy, she has had happiness; if you suffer, for one year and longer, all the pains of her life have torn her apart.” The conclusion was, from the point of view of the revolutionaries, even more lethal: a little boy on his knees—Louis Charles—was said to be demanding “mercy for his mother.”

This was the striking maternal image at one time put forward, with Marie Antoinette’s connivance, by Madame Vigée Le Brun, which had once called for respect and now called for compassion. It was a far cry from that of the Infamous Antoinette, who was now held responsible by the pamphleteers for her “savage spouse’s” crimes as well as her own, thanks to her “execrable counsels.” In contrast to the tender mother, how easy it was to suggest that this debauched creature should “perish ignominiously on the scaffold” so that true revolutionaries could “cement in blood” the liberty they had achieved. It might therefore become necessary to sully the maternal image and substitute for it something so vicious—even by the standards of the pamphlets so far—that there could be no question of letting such a monster live. In this connection a confidential piece of information supplied by the jailer Simon to Hébert at the end of September—that he had surprised young “Charles Capet” masturbating—provided an exciting opportunity.