Marie Antoinette (67 page)

The wretched boy was then induced to make a series of highly damaging allegations. Some of these were to do with a conspiracy to escape, supposedly organized by Commissioner Toulan. But it was the charge of sexual abuse on the part of his mother and aunt that was the nub of his story; how the two women together had taught him these “very pernicious practices,” making him lie in bed between them, and how the injury he had in his groin (a swollen testicle actually caused, as has been noted, by playing with a stick) was a result of this abuse. Such charges, apart from anything else involving the pious spinster Madame Elisabeth, would have been, in any other circumstances, ludicrous. But Louis Charles was an eight-year-old boy. He was now intent on pleasing the rough captors who had him helpless, plying him with drink when necessary, where once he had loved to please his mother and father. He therefore refused to retract his accusations even when confronted with his sister. Marie Thérèse was torn between shock and outrage. She did not absolutely understand what was being suggested, but knew enough to deny angrily that her brother had touched her “where she should not be touched” in the course of their play. She signed her statement “Thérèse Capet.”

Stubbornly, Louis Charles persisted in his story even when his aunt was produced. Madame Elisabeth cried out in indignation that both his mother and herself had constantly tried to stop him in his habit, when the boy interrupted her, protesting that he had told the truth. But he became curiously vague about the details of the abuse beyond the fact that it had been done by “the two of them together.” Had it happened by day or by night? At first he replied that he could not remember, then suggested that it had been in the morning. The consequence for Louis Charles was a breach with his sister, as well as his aunt, that would never be healed. It remained to be seen what the consequence would be for the mother he had been obliged to traduce.

Marie Antoinette underwent a secret preliminary interrogation on 12 October. Two hours after she had gone to bed, on a night so cold that she had asked in vain for an extra blanket, she was roused. She was taken before the president of the Revolutionary Tribunal, Armand Martial Herman, a young ally of Robespierre, in the presence of Fouquier-Tinville, the public prosecutor. The idea was obviously to secure valuable material for the actual trial; in fact all the old canards were trotted out. She had given money to her brother the Emperor, taking part in nocturnal meetings with the Duchesse de Polignac in order to organize it. She had participated in that legendary orgy on 1 October 1789 at the royal bodyguards’ dinner. Marie Antoinette denied all these charges, and when she was asked yet again whether she believed that monarchy was necessary to the happiness of France, she replied with circumspection that it was not up to an individual to decide about these things; she regretted nothing for her son so long as France prospered.

The most significant exchange—for the future—occurred when Marie Antoinette was accused of being the chief instigator of the “treason of Louis XVI” in causing him to flee in 1791, as well as teaching him “the arts of dissimulation.” Naturally she rebutted both charges. At the end of her interrogation Marie Antoinette was asked whether she wished to have counsel for the defence appointed. The answer was yes, she would like that. So she was taken back to her cell.
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Louis XVI had been allowed to work with his lawyers over a considerable period of time “as though I could win.” No such privilege was accorded to Marie Antoinette. In fact the late appearance of her lawyers marked the first of many steps by which the female consort was treated a great deal more severely than the male sovereign. The distaste of the Revolution for the female sex in general—in ungrateful contrast to the role that women, intellectuals as well as market-women, had played in it earlier—did not bode well for the Widow Capet.

Women were at once inferior and dangerous, as witness the death of Marat at the hands of a young woman called Charlotte Corday in July. A supporter of the Girondins, Charlotte Corday had secured admittance to Marat’s presence because her “weaker” sex made it difficult to believe she constituted a threat; she had then proceeded to demonstrate her savagery by stabbing Marat in his bath, as Judith had executed Holofernes. She met the “swift, humane” death of the guillotine four days later. Robespierre for one believed that the safest place for women was in the home, performing their traditional nurturing role. (In this he was in agreement with Rousseau, who thought that woman’s “glory” should reside “in the esteem of her husband.”) Within a few weeks the various women’s clubs that had urged on the Revolution would be officially suppressed. Since pre-revolutionary history was chequered with stories of cruel female rulers—to whom Marie Antoinette was regularly compared—it has been suggested that the misogyny of the Jacobin Revolution was inspired by the idea that powerful women belonged to the era of despotism. The domesticated apolitical Queen Charlotte of England was on a much more satisfactory course (from the male point of view) when she wrote that women could do much more good by staying out of public affairs and leading “retired lives.” This developing line of thought made the Widow Capet even more suspect.

The two lawyers permitted to Marie Antoinette were both at the Parisian bar: Chauveau-Lagarde (who had defended Charlotte Corday) and Tronson Doucoudray. Chauveau-Lagarde published an account of his experiences in 1816, describing how he had been in the country when he was summoned—he did not hesitate to accept—and therefore did not reach the Tuileries to inspect the mass of prosecution papers, to say nothing of the eight-page act of accusation itself, until the next day, 13 October. To visit their client, the counsels passed through the various wicket-gates of the Conciergerie to reach the divided cell with its iron-barred windows; on the left were the armed gendarmes, on the right Marie Antoinette in a plain white dress; the furniture consisted of a bed, a table and two chairs. Chauveau-Lagarde’s knees trembled.

Their first task was to persuade the Queen to write to the Revolutionary Tribunal and seek a delay so that the paperwork could be properly considered. She was extremely reluctant to do so, since it meant acknowledging the authority of the men who had killed Louis XVI, but in the end, with a sigh, the Queen picked up her pen. Addressing Herman as “Citizen President,” she asked for three days’ respite: “I owe it to my children to omit nothing that may be necessary to the justification of their mother.”

The letter was not answered. The next day, Monday, 14 October, Marie Antoinette was collected shortly before eight o’clock in the morning and taken through the prison to the great chamber where Louis XVI had once held his
lits de justice
and which was now the seat of the Revolutionary Tribunal.

Marie Antoinette’s appearance caused an immediate sensation in the crowded courtroom, thronged with cheerful spectators such as the inevitable market-women, as well as the necessary concomitants of justice, the president, Herman, the prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville, and the jurors. The latter incidentally were not likely to give trouble to the Tribunal, just as the president would scarcely venture to cross the prosecutor. Some jurors were cronies of Robespierre, others came from humble professions, a cobbler, two carpenters and a hat-maker being among their number.

The
ci-devant
Queen looked ghastly. Here was a white-haired woman with sunken features whose extreme pallor was due as much to her persistent loss of blood as to her nine weeks’ incarceration in the humid, airless Conciergerie. (Rosalie ascribed Marie Antoinette’s condition to her lack of exercise, and tried to help her by cutting up her own chemises as cloths, but as has been discussed, it probably had a deeper cause.) Her haggard appearance contrasted bizarrely with the mental image that most of the spectators had of the accused. Marie Antoinette had, after all, been immured for over a year, and in the last months of her stay in the Tuileries had ventured out little in public for fear of hostility. If she was not the Austrian she-wolf, the ostrich with the harpy’s face of the caricatures, then she was the glittering Queen with her diamonds and her nodding plumes, last seen properly in the glory days of the court at Versailles over four years before. As
Le Moniteur
admitted, Antoinette Capet was “prodigiously changed.”

She was nevertheless entirely composed as she stood in her widow’s weeds, the worn black dress patched by Madame Larivière, and took the oath in the name of Marie Antoinette of Lorraine and Austria, widow of the King of France, born in Vienna. She described her age as being “about thirty-eight” (the Queen was in fact two and a half weeks away from her birthday). She then looked about her at the courtroom, with what a hostile newspaper,
L’Anti-Fédéraliste
, called “the serenity that habitual crime gives” but which was in fact the natural dignity in public inculcated since childhood. From time to time the Queen moved her fingers over the arm of her chair “as though over the keyboard of her piano”; the diamond rings that she used to play with had been confiscated in the course of the searches following the Carnation Plot.

The accused was allowed to sit down in an armchair on a little platform that put her on view, although the market-women, behind the balustrades, protested vociferously that the Woman Capet ought to remain standing so that they could see her. The Tribunal’s motive in granting this mercy was more prudent than kind; it would not have done for the prisoner to faint or collapse during the long hours of cross-examination that lay ahead, thus invoking unnecessary sympathy. Marie Antoinette merely murmured: “Surely people will soon tire of hearing about my weaknesses.”

The first witness of the forty who would be called set the tone for much of what was to follow. Laurent Lecointre was a former draper who had been second in command of the National Guard at Versailles during the events of October 1789. In his prolonged evidence Lecointre described feasts and orgies that had taken place at Versailles over a period of ten years, culminating in the notorious banquet of 1 October 1789—at none of which, of course, he had been present. Cross-examined by Herman, Marie Antoinette gave a series of short, non-committal replies which equally set the tone for her responses: “I do not believe so,” “I don’t remember,” “I have nothing to say in reply.” With regard to those nocturnal meetings with “the Polignac” at which the passing of money to the Emperor was planned: “I have never been present at such meetings. The wealth amassed by the Polignacs was due to the paid positions they held at court.”

When Herman pressed her on the subject of Louis Capet’s
séance
of 23 June 1789 and accused her of masterminding his speech, she was more explicit. It had become clear from her preliminary interrogation that the link between her evil counsels and the King’s evil actions was one that the prosecution intended to demonstrate. “My husband had great trust in me,” replied Marie Antoinette, “so that he read me his speech but I did not allow myself to make any comment.” As to the idea of assassinating the majority of the people’s representatives at this period with bayonets—a fantasy of the prosecution: “I never heard talk of anything like that.”

Many of the witnesses who followed failed to rise above the level of scurrilous gossip or hearsay, when they were not purely inconsequential. The alleged discovery of wine bottles under the Queen’s bed after she left the Tuileries on 10 August 1792 was supposed to prove that she had deliberately made the Swiss Guards drunk in order to provoke a massacre of the French people. A maid called Reine Milliot reported a chat with the Comte (actually Duc) de Coigny in 1788 when he bemoaned the amount of gold that the Emperor was receiving because it would ruin France; she also testified that the Queen had planned to kill the Duc d’Orléans and had been reprimanded by the King. One Pierre Joseph Terrasson, employed at the Ministry of Justice, described how the Queen had cast “the most vindictive look” upon the National Guards who escorted her back from Varennes, which proved to him that she was determined on vengeance.

The testimony of Hébert was more serious. He, after all, had the evidence taken from “young Capet” at his command. The products of his searches of the Temple were scarcely impressive—a picture of a pierced heart inscribed with the words
Jesus miserere nobis
or a hat in the room of Madame Elisabeth which had belonged to her dead brother. But the words of Louis Charles about La Fayette’s involvement in Varennes (fabricated) and the gathering of outside intelligence while they were all in the Tower had more potential. Then he moved in for the kill. The physical condition of young Capet had noticeably deteriorated and Hébert was able to supply the reason: his mother and his aunt had taught him
pollutions indécentes
. Details followed, as a result of which there could be no doubt that there had been an incestuous relationship between mother and son.

After that Hébert stressed the deference with which young Capet had been treated after his father’s death, when he was seated at the head of the table and served first. “Did you witness it?” asked Marie Antoinette, making no comment on the shocking substance of Hébert’s speech. Hébert agreed that he had not, but all the municipal officers certified that it had taken place. An examination concerning the Carnation Plot and Michonis’s role in it all followed. It was in the course of this that one of the jurors intervened. “Citizen President,” he said, “I ask you to point out to the accused that she has not responded to the facts related by Citizen Hébert, regarding what took place between her and her son.” So Herman put the question.