The Hidden Diary of Marie Antoinette (20 page)

I felt the coach rock slightly as something hit the door. A second jolt and a third soon followed. I realized that people were throwing clods of earth—I hoped they were not clods of filth—at the vehicle. Eric rode up alongside my open window, shielding the opening from the bystanders who were closing in around us, shouting and singing.

Bring them down
Haughty bastards
Bring them down
Every last one!

Drive them out
Damned aristos
Drive them out
Every last one!

“Stop that singing!” Eric rode into the crowd, shouting orders in his Austrian-accented French. But he, and the guardsmen and postilions, were all pelted with mud and at one point a dead dog was thrown through the window of our carriage, landing at my feet.

Louis, enraged, took the stinking thing by the tail and threw it back out the window.

“Whoreson pigs!” he shouted at the leering, singing demonstrators. “Poxy devils!”

The carriage began to speed up, the road obstruction had passed. I heard our driver shout to the horses and crack his whip, and the crowd parted, melting away in the path of our advance.

I was trembling. I wondered whether we would be able to reach the shrine of St.-Brolâdre in safety. We went on, through the narrow, dark streets, greeted by stares and the occasional shouted insult. I heard Louis swear under his breath.

Eventually we came out through an ancient portal into open country. Eric informed us that we were on the highroad to the vicinity of St.-Brolâdre. In a few moments I felt my anxiety recede somewhat. I turned to Louis.

“These crude Parisians have no idea who we are,” I said to him. “If they knew you were the king they would bow in reverence.”

“And have they no reverence for their betters? Does a nobleman have to be king to be treated with dignity, as he ought?”

“People say it is the Americans who are to blame. They are levelers. They despise crowns and titles. They have infected the Parisians with their ideas. Yolande says she doesn’t dare come into the capital at all any more.”

But it was not only the Parisians who gave us an unexpected reception. When we arrived at St.-Brolâdre some hours later the village appeared to be deserted. No smoke rose from the roofs of the cottages. No horses whinnied in the barns. No dogs barked. Not a single face peered from a window. The silence was unnerving.

I have heard of villages so devastated by cowpox or plague that no one is left alive there. St.-Brolâdre was like that, a place so empty it might have been swept by a lethal disease. Eric took us to the chapel built over the saint’s tomb and there we met the curate. When we asked him where everyone was he looked shamefaced. He said the villagers had gone to a festival in a nearby town, but I could tell he was lying. Besides, even at festival times there are some villagers who cannot travel to distant celebrations: new mothers, the very old and very sick, the dairymaids, the blind and the simple. Here in St.-Brolâdre there was absolutely no one at all except the curate—or so it seemed to us.

After we laid Louis-Joseph before the saint’s tomb and dipped him in the sacred spring flowing from a rock we went to see the house where Amélie’s family lived. Her cousin, the curate told us, had become crippled and could not walk, yet after praying to the saint she was restored to health and strength. Amélie’s aunt had suffered from a bloody flux and was also miraculously cured. Eric took us up to the door of the cottage and we knocked and peered in through a window. There was no response.

“They’ve all gone to the festival,” the curate told us. “They won’t be back for several days.”

Just then I saw the edge of a curtain twitch.

“There’s someone inside,” I said.

Eric knocked loudly on the door.

“Come out! It is your king and queen who have come to call on you. Come out at once!”

We waited, and presently a sheet of paper came sliding out from under the door.

Eric snatched it up and handed it to me.

“Grievances of the Village of St.-Brolâdre,” I read out loud.

“The inhabitants affirm and declare that they have no grazing for livestock, that they pay heavy taxes on the sale of their produce, that their land is dry, stony and infertile—”

“Enough!” Louis shouted. “Break down that door! Arrest everyone inside!”

The guardsmen kicked the door in and rushed into the cottage, swords at the ready. They found no one, only a few pieces of homemade furniture, some pots and pans hanging on the wall, bare cupboards and, on a table, a candle, a few books, some paper and some quills and a bottle of ink. It appeared that whoever had been sitting there had drawn up the statement of grievances. But he was gone now.

We heard a crash and the sound of footfalls and rushed around to the back of the cottage. There was a barn and pigsty and beyond them, open fields, muddy and bare, their crops having been harvested months earlier. In the distance we could see, quite clearly, the retreating figure of a youngish woman, running as fast as she could across the dark stony ground. The white froth of her petticoats was visible with each nimble step she took. On her head was a bright crimson cap, of the kind the Parisians call a cap of liberty.

The guardsmen in our party gave chase, and ran across the fields shouting for the woman to stop. But she was fleet; she outran them. At the edge of the village, where the open fields gave way to a copse of trees, she paused, and turned to look back in our direction. It was in that frightening moment that I recognized her. It was Amélie.

June 4, 1783

I was up before dawn today, watching eagerly from the roof for Axel to come riding into the courtyard. He sent a message saying he would be in Versailles by midmorning, and just in case he came earlier I wanted to be the first to see him.

So many riders came and went that by nine o’clock I was very impatient. But then I saw the white horse and the fair-haired rider in his dusty white uniform—and I knew at once that it had to be Axel. I ran down the staircase and through the long corridors and nearly collided with Axel, who was hurrying along in the opposite direction, on his way to me.

“There she is!” he cried out. “There’s my little angel!” Three startled pages, sitting on a bench in the corridor near us, quickly got up and left. We were alone. We hugged and kissed and cried and laughed and hugged again, until my gown was covered in dust and Axel’s coat was stained with my rouge.

“How thin you are! And how brown!”

“You, my dearest one, are more lovely than ever. Motherhood becomes you.”

We spent the next hour together, secluded from curious and spying eyes, holding hands and kissing and talking. I saw Axel’s scars from the two wounds he received. His skin is not so soft as it was. All those nights sleeping on the hard snowy ground in cold tents, all those days with no shade from the hot
Virginia sun. He has lived an outdoor life, rough and unsparing, and it has toughened him.

What bliss it is to have Axel here. If such a thing is possible, I am more enraptured with him than ever.

June 22, 1783

I have begun a new fashion at court. Axel brought me a box of beautiful pale calfskin gloves scented with rose perfume. I wear a new pair each day. All the ladies of the court imitate me.

July 6, 1783

Louis talks to Axel for hours at a time about his years in America and his other travels. Louis has never been anywhere and he longs to go on long voyages—or so he says. In truth I think he is too timid to go very far. And how could he bear to be without his cooks and his daily feasts, the soft featherbeds we sleep on, his workshops and plant samples and library? He could never feel safe anywhere, except in his beloved forest of Compiègne, without the guardsmen who protect us.

The other afternoon at dinner, when we were all eating together in my apartments, Louis and I, Axel, Chambertin who occasionally joins us at Louis’s insistence, and the two children, Louis was telling Axel how he has drawn up charts and navigation routes for a voyage around the world.

“Do you imagine that you might lead such an expedition some day?” Axel asked politely.

“I’m no mariner. I get sick sailing up and down our canals. Have I told you about the canals I am helping to design?”

When he said this I thought, oh no, not the canals again. He does so love to go on and on about them. But Axel, patient,
kind Axel, did not betray any irritation even though he has heard about Louis’s canals many times.

“I am always intrigued by your majesty’s waterways.”

“One of them I am going to call ‘Canal La Reine.’ To honor my wife.” He reached over and patted me on the arm. “I owe you so much, my dear. Especially now that you have given France a dauphin.”

Little Louis-Joseph sat up at the table, his nurse beside him, his entire upper body twisted to one side, his head inclined toward his shoulder and his face contorted in pain. I confess that I cannot see him without tears coming to my eyes. He has learned to feed himself after a fashion, and he says a few words. But he is a sad child, and in constant pain. He is a Walking Sorrow. That is how I think of him, though I never say the words aloud. He walks unsteadily, holding onto things. I have not seen him walk more than a few feet without holding on to something or someone.

How he wrenches my heart! I have changed, I know it. When I look into a mirror I no longer see the girl I was, a very pretty girl, always ready to laugh. Now the mirror shows me a woman, much filled out in figure (though far from being fat like Carlotta or hugely fat like Louis), with eyes that still hold ready laughter but also greater knowledge of the world and its temptations. There are lines at the corners of my mouth and eyes, small lines as yet. Sophie calls them wisdom lines.

She says her mother began to get her wisdom lines at about the age I am now, nearly twenty-eight, after she lost three babies in a row. One was born dead, another one died of the cow-pox and the third one, the one she loved the most, fell into the street from a window and was struck by a butcher’s wagon. After that happened she came to my mother’s court and went to work in the kitchens. Eventually all her children became royal servants. Sophie was appointed to my nursery, and in time she became my principal dresser.

I am glad Sophie has told me her mother’s story. Servants, even when one strives to be kind to them, as I do, always seem as though they are part of the palace, as though they had always been there and always will be there. It is good to be reminded that of course they have lives of their own, and sorrows and losses like those we all must bear. Sophie understands my sadness over Louis-Joseph and often comforts me.

July 17, 1783

Louis is going to take Axel and some of the ministers to see the new Canal La Reine he is building in my honor. No one really wants to go of course.

I am reading the book everyone is talking about, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s
Confessions.
It is like the
Confessions
of St. Augustine which Abbé Vermond has read me portions of, only Jean-Jacques’s confessions are more real and more believable. Reading this book has made me cry. Or it may be that I am always ready to cry these days, because of my overflowing sorrow about Louis-Joseph. He has gotten very thin and coughs a lot.

August 2, 1783

By good fortune our route to the Canal La Reine passes near Ermenonville, where Jean-Jacques is buried. I told Louis I want to visit his grave. I feel close to him after reading his beautiful honest
Confessions.

Poor man! What a strange sad life he had. But reading his
Confessions,
I truly felt as if he understood me, especially my feelings. He claimed that he was unique, that no one like him
had ever lived before. He made me realize that I too am unique, that no one else could ever fully understand what I am living through. Especially not my terrible anguish over Louis-Joseph, and over why God gave me such an afflicted son.

I cannot possibly write all the thoughts and emotions Jean-Jacques has stirred up in me, but he has affected me deeply. I feel in a curious way almost as if he were my friend, someone I know well. So I want to go to his grave and mourn.

August 29, 1783

Our journey to visit the Canal La Reine was very dull, all except for one afternoon when I went to Ermenonville where Jean-Jacques is buried and at Louis’s request Axel went along as my escort.

There at Ermenonville, having sent the carriage away and needing no guards or servants, Axel and I were alone as we were in Sweden long ago, able to talk freely and affectionately without any fear of being spied on or overheard.

It felt so very good to be with him, as if we had never been apart and no time at all had passed. We walked hand in hand along the winding path that leads to the grave, the tomb set in a copse of trees on a small island in a lake. We met no one and were aware of the silence that surrounded us, heat rising from the warm stones under our feet and clouds drifting slowly overhead.

I sat by the tomb and put my hand on the chiseled marble. I said a sort of prayer, not for Jean-Jacques but to him, as if he were still on earth. I can’t explain it.

Axel sat under a nearby tree looking thoughtful. After a time I joined him, not caring whether the grass stained my pale gauze gown or my pink slippers.

“I admire him too, you know,” Axel said. “He treasured simplicity, as I do. He struck through all the needless complexity, to find the truth.”

I nodded, at a loss for words. We sat quietly, and I rested my head on Axel’s strong shoulder.

“One simple thing I know for certain,” I said at length. “I love you.”

He kissed my forehead. “And I love you, little angel. Always.”

Since that sweet afternoon I have been thinking, especially during the long nights when I sit beside Louis-Joseph’s little bed, trying to soothe his broken sleep. It seems to me that there are really only a few things in life that truly matter. Love. Nature. Hope. To love those around us. To seek comfort amid nature. To live in constant hope.

Wouldn’t Jean-Jacques agree?

October 7, 1783

My household has grown smaller by one. Yesterday Amélie was taken away to be imprisoned in the Bastille. Her crime was rousing the villagers of St.-Brolâdre against the king and compiling a list of grievances on their behalf.