At seven in the morning, Roederer insisted that they escape and take refuge in the Legislative Assembly, urging that “all of Paris was on the march.” The queen, bitterly frustrated at the prospect of fleeing to the lion’s den, held out against the idea. But the king would not risk bloodshed.
“Marchons!”
he said, raising his hand. “There’s nothing to be done here.”
There was no time for preparations, no time to gather together treasured possessions or mementos, even a change of clothes; the royal family fled with nothing from the palace. Marie-Antoinette followed Louis, holding her son and daughter by the hand, Louis-Charles disconsolately kicking out at leaves that had fallen early. The Princesse de Lamballe, Princess Élisabeth and the Marquise de Tourzel—in some agitation because she had been obliged to leave Pauline behind—followed, discreetly protected by a few Swiss guards. “The terrace … was full of wretches who assailed us with insults. One of them cried out, ‘No women or we will kill them all!’” recalled Marie-Thérèse, “At last we entered the passage to the Assembly. Before being
admitted we had to wait more than half an hour, a number of deputies opposing our entrance. We were kept in a narrow corridor, so dark that we could see nothing and hear nothing but the shouts of the furious mob … . I was held by a man whom I did not know. I have never thought myself so near death, not doubting that the decision was made to murder us all. In the darkness, I could not see my parents, and I feared everything for them. We were left to this mortal agony more than half an hour.”
Finally they were permitted to enter the hall of the Assembly. “I have come here,” the king declared, “to prevent the French nation from committing a great crime.” The royal family were hurriedly ushered into a journalist’s box, a small room, ten feet long, with a window with iron bars looking out onto the public gallery. Absolutely terrified, prisoners in this tiny hiding place, looking out through bars on their enemies debating their future, it was the end of hope. There was no chance of preserving even a semblance of royal dignity. Through the tiny window they could only watch helplessly, hour after hour, impassive witnesses to the end of the monarchy. “We had hardly entered this species of cage,” wrote Marie-Thérèse, “when we heard the cannon, musket-shots and the cries of those who were murdering in the Tuileries.”
Louis had assumed that by leaving the Tuileries he would stop an attack and help to prevent any bloodshed. However, the revolutionaries, armed with sabers and pikes, stormed the palace and attacked the red-uniformed Swiss guards. The Swiss fired back and the
sans-culottes
took casualties. Hearing of the slaughter, the king sent his last order, instructing his faithful Swiss guards to lay down their arms. They obeyed, only to be massacred as the “populace rushed from all quarters into the interior of the palace.” The Tuileries became a bloodbath, with guards and nobles chased up onto the parapets fighting to the last as they were stabbed, shot or sabered. The dead or dying were flung from windows, some grossly mutilated, others impaled on pikes as trophies. Madame Campan, trapped inside the palace, reported, “I felt a horrid hand thrust down my back to seize me by the clothes.” She had sunk to her knees and was aware of “the steel suspended over my head”
by a “terrible Marseillais,” when she heard another voice yelling, “We don’t kill women!” She escaped.
As people fled from the palace, anyone who had defended the king—or was even dressed like a noble—was mercilessly hunted down. One woman reported glimpsing through the blinds of a house “three
sans-culottes
holding a tall handsome man by the collar.” When they had “finished him off with the butt of a rifle,” at least “fifteen women, one after the other, climbed up on this victim’s cadaver, whose entrails were emerging from all sides, saying they took pleasure in trampling the aristocracy under their feet.” During the day, over nine hundred guards and three hundred citizens became victims of the hysterical slaughter. Sixty Swiss guards were taken prisoner, only to be led away to the Hôtel de Ville and brutally killed. A young Corsican by the name of Napoleon Bonaparte, who witnessed the events of that day, was filled with a sense of horror at the power of the mob. For Maximilien Robespierre, it was a “glorious event … the most beautiful revolution that has ever honored humanity.” By nightfall, the entire gruesome spectacle was illuminated by the orange glow of the Tuileries in flames.
Cowering at the Assembly, with murder and mayhem all around them, the royal family feared for their lives. Throughout the day their possessions, including the queen’s jewels, spoils from the Tuileries and the heads of the king’s supporters were paraded before them as patriots called for a republic and the death of the king and queen. Louis-Charles clung to his mother, whose dress was damp with perspiration. There was nothing to eat or drink, no way of leaving this confined space and no way of consoling his mother. “We witnessed horrors of all kinds that took place,” continued Marie-Thérèse. “Sometimes they assailed my father and all his family with the most atrocious insults, triumphing over him with cruel joy, sometimes they brought in gentlemen dying of their wounds; sometimes they brought in my father’s own servants, who with the utmost impudence, gave false testimony against him … . It was in the midst of these abominations that our entire day, from eight in the morning until midnight, passed, through all gradations of whatever was most terrible, most awful.”
The Legislative Assembly held the royal family for two days while deliberating over a suitable residence for them. Meanwhile, the newly formed Paris Commune, to which Robespierre had been elected as a member, seized the initiative. Louis should no longer be treated as king, declared the Commune, but held in a jail as a common prisoner. Faced with the prospect of widespread rioting, the Legislative Assembly panicked and backed down. The king and his family was now entrusted, in the words of the Commune, “to the safekeeping and virtues of the citizens of Paris.” They were to be taken to a former medieval fortress known as the Temple, in the east of Paris, not far from the Bastille.
This was a temple in name only. A large twelfth-century tower overshadowed the complex of lodgings, which had been owned by the Comte d’Artois. The queen “shuddered when she heard the Temple proposed,” said the Marquise de Tourzel. “She said to me under her breath, ‘They will put us in the Tower, you will see, and they will make it a real prison for us. I have always had an absolute horror of that tower, which I have asked Monsieur le Comte d’Artois a thousand times to pull down.’”
Marie-Thérèse described the ordeal of crossing central Paris on the evening of the thirteenth of August, 1792. “Our drivers themselves feared the people so much that they would not let the carriage stop for a moment; yet it took two hours before we could reach the Temple through the immense crowds. On the way they had the cruelty to point out to my parents things that would distress them—the statues of the kings of France thrown down, even that of Henry IV … . . . We did not observe on our way any feeling souls touched by our condition, such terror was now inspired in those who still thought rightly.” As their carriage turned into the courtyard of the Temple, and the heavy gates slowly swung shut behind them, their remaining freedom—for so long a sham—was now finally and irrevocably taken away from them.
“GOD HIMSELF HAS FORSAKEN ME”
Madame mounts into her Tower
When will she come down again?
Mironton, Mironton, Mirontaine …
—SATIRICAL FRENCH SONG,
SUNG BY THE GUARDS
O
nce behind the Temple walls, as the clamor of the city streets receded, the royal family found themselves in a small city within a city, a complex of lodgings and passageways that had developed around an old medieval fortress. The first courtyard led to a magnificent seventeenth century palace, Comte d’Artois’s former Paris residence, where the elegant rooms were lavishly and fashionably appointed. These rooms opened out onto a second imposing courtyard surrounded by arcades on one side, and on the other, to a large garden planted with high trees. In marked contrast to the elegance of the palace and the charm of the garden there rose, behind some trees, a grim, square fortresslike tower that had about it an air of menace and foreboding, known as the Great Tower. Its solid, almost windowless walls, blackened over the centuries, overshadowed the surrounding buildings, rising more than sixty feet high, a daunting edifice of towers and turrets beneath a steeply pointed, dark slate roof. Through the north turret of the Great Tower it was possible to gain access to a second tower, a five-storied building known as the Little Tower.
To the king’s great relief, they were shown into his younger brother’s former palace, where extravagant preparations to greet the royal party were under way in the hall,
La Salle des Quatre Glaces.
The palace and courtyards were brightly lit with candles and torches as though for an important function, and the king became convinced they were to be held in the comfortable surroundings of his brother’s former home. All innocence, he asked to be shown around, allotting various rooms in the palace to members of his family as he went. He didn’t appear to notice the discomfort of the mayor, Pétion, who went hurrying back to the Commune to try to persuade deputies to change their minds. Nor were his suspicions aroused when the Marquise de Tourzel, inquiring repeatedly whether she could settle the exhausted Louis-Charles for the night, was told to wait. His room was not quite ready.
It was eleven before the Marquise de Tourzel was permitted to take him to his room. She followed the guards through an interminable series of vaulted corridors and passageways, up steep winding stone steps and then a wooden stairway until the door finally opened out onto a small, sparsely furnished room with a low ceiling. There were two folding beds and she carefully placed Louis-Charles in one, trying not to disturb his sleep.
Two hours later, the rest of the family was escorted through the same series of passageways. As they left the gracious rooms of the palace behind, it was clear that the queen’s earlier fearful apprehension about the Tower had been correct. They found themselves in small, dingy rooms where, as Marie-Thérèse observed, “nothing had been prepared for us … . The lodging was bare of everything.” The queen was to sleep in the room next to the dauphin, where a camp bed had been set up for Marie-Thérèse. The Princesse de Lamballe was in an antechamber and the king and his valets were led to a room on the third floor. In the cramped, overcrowded conditions, space was found for Madame Élisabeth, Pauline de Tourzel and other waiting women in the kitchen, where they were awake all night, hearing the guards in the room next door.
Before retiring, Marie-Antoinette checked on her son, watching him for a few moments while he slept. It was as she had suspected all along: They were indeed to be held as prisoners in the Great Tower. Since this was unfit
for habitation, the Commune had found temporary rooms in the Little Tower, while the main tower was converted into a secure prison. It was now painfully evident that she was powerless to provide even the most basic freedoms for her beloved son, sleeping so peacefully, unaware of how precarious his fate might be. The Commune’s choice of location was all too clear. In a palace, Louis would still be a king. In the Tower at the bottom of the palace’s garden, which had the appearance of some grim feudal jail, the king and queen were most certainly prisoners. The royal family began their first night of imprisonment behind no less than eight locked iron doors.
They had arrived at the Temple virtually destitute, but the Assembly made available a financial allowance and they were able to buy some linen, bedclothes, kitchen equipment and other necessities. Their barren and confined surroundings were in stark contrast to the palatial splendour of Versailles or even the Tuileries, and in the first few days they tried to brighten up their rooms. Additional furniture was found, along with some hangings of a white cretonne patterned with pink roses. New clothes were ordered, and toys for Louis-Charles: a set of ninepins, rackets, kites, draughts and dominoes.
Less than a week after the royal family arrived at the Little Tower, at around midnight on August 19, guards entered the rooms with a decree from the Commune. All friends and attendants of the royal family were to be removed for interrogation. “They ordered Madame de Lamballe to rise,” wrote Marie-Thérèse. “My mother tried to oppose it by urging that she was a relative, but in vain. They replied that they had orders to take her away.” The Marquise de Tourzel and her daughter Pauline were also ordered to leave. “Obliged to submit, we all rose with death in our hearts to bid these ladies farewell,” said Marie-Thérèse. In the king’s room, his valet, Monsieur Hue, and other staff were taken. Since the dauphin was now alone, he was carried into his mother’s room. Inevitably he could not get back to sleep and they stayed awake all night, fearing the worst. They soon heard the worrying news that the Princesse de Lamballe, the Marquise de Tourzel and her daughter had been taken to the prison of
La Force.
Two new members of staff were to be appointed to serve the royal family. By chance, the dauphin’s former valet de chambre, the loyal Hanet Cléry,
heard of this and was determined to resume his place “at the service of the young prince.” Cléry had escaped the massacre at the Tuileries on August 10. In his plain clothes he had been mistaken for a revolutionary; one eager
sans-culottes
had even offered him a weapon. With his customary resourcefulness, Cléry soon obtained permission to serve the royal family and on August 26, he entered the Tower of the Temple. Many of the details of this period of their captivity come from Cléry’s account, written ten years later. “As the sole and continual witness of the injurious treatment the king and his family were made to endure,” he wrote, “I alone can write it down and affirm the exact truth.”
Cléry almost betrayed his concern for the royal family on his very first day. The princesses, who had been a week without staff, asked if he could help with their hair. “I replied that I would do whatever they desired of me,” said Cléry, only to find that a guard immediately warned him to be much more circumspect. He was to show no sign of attachment for his former masters. “I felt frightened at such a beginning,” wrote Cléry. Four municipal guards appointed by the Commune watched the king obsessively night and day. Full of suspicion, one guard even insisted on peaches being cut in half and their stone opened to check that they concealed no illicit correspondence. Nonetheless, Cléry and the king’s loyal chef, Louis François Turgy, developed ways of getting messages and news to the royal family. Secret notes were passed around, sign languages developed and codes worked up. “I kept on my guard to avoid any imprudence,” wrote Cléry, “which would most certainly have ruined me.”
The royal family’s hopes of any rescue were centered on the Prussian and Austrian alliance. Prussian forces invaded France on August 19 and made rapid progress, approaching Verdun, in Lorraine, an important stronghold before Paris, by the end of the month. As the news of the Prussian army’s success reached Paris early in September, a wave of terror gripped France. People panicked at the prospect of terrible retribution from foreign armies and were convinced that the royal family was in league with France’s enemies. Recriminations and counterrecriminations began with rousing talk of saving
la patrie
and death to all “traitors within,” as Paris succumbed to
the urgent beat of the
Marseillaise.
The Commune called people to arms and
sans-culottes
roamed around the city, breaking into the overcrowded prisons, seeking out all “enemies of France”—royalists, aristocrats, nonjuring priests—to mete out brutal justice with their pickaxes and knives. Revolutionary leaders such as Georges Danton, the Minister of Justice, and Maximilien Robespierre, leader of the Jacobins, simply ignored the savage massacre that followed. “What do I care about the prisoners!” declared Danton. “Let them fend for themselves.” In five dark days, one thousand four hundred helpless inmates, almost half the prison population of Paris, were slaughtered in cold blood.
On September 2, the royal family was in the Temple compound for their daily walk, but they were hurriedly ushered back inside as the threatening sounds of the uprising grew nearer. One of the municipal officers, named Matthieu, turned on the king, “with all that fury could suggest,” wrote Marie-Thérèse. The country was in mortal danger, Matthieu said angrily. “We know that we and our wives and children will perish. But the people will have their revenge. You will die before we do!” He spoke with such vengeance that “my brother was so terrified he burst into tears and ran into the next room,” continued Marie-Thérèse. “I did my best to console him, but in vain, he imagined he saw my father dead.”
That night, it was difficult for the captives to sleep. They could hear drums beating immediately outside the Temple throughout the small hours; the massacre of that day was soon under way. Later they heard the most bloodthirsty cries of an angry rabble at the gates of the Temple, clamoring to be let in. As the noises drew ever nearer, it was apparent that the crowds had overwhelmed the sentries and burst in, crossing the forecourt in a great mass and making their way to the Tower. Cléry was dining downstairs with two servants and saw the full horror of the scene. “We were hardly seated before a head at the end of a pike was presented at the window,” he wrote. “It was that of the Princesse de Lamballe.” He immediately recognized her beautiful face, her rather soft and gentle features looking so incongruous in that situation. “Though bloody, it was not disfigured; her blond hair, still curling, floated around the pike.” One of the servants screamed. Immediately
they “heard the frantic laughs of the barbarians,” who thought it was the queen screaming.
Cléry ran at once to warn the king, yet “terror had so changed my face that the queen noticed it.” Before he had a chance to whisper discreetly to the king, a guard entered the room. Acting with unusual concern for the royal family, he closed the window and drew the curtains, so that they would see nothing; to no avail. The terrifying cries of the crowd with their gruesome trophies were soon immediately below their rooms. Officers of the National Guard suddenly burst in and ordered the king to show himself to the crowd, which prompted Louis to ask whatever was happening outside.
“Well, if you want to know,” said a young officer in the “coarsest tone”—according to Cléry—“it is the head of Madame de Lamballe they want to show you, for you to see how the people avenge themselves on tyrants.” Marie-Antoinette was “seized with horror; it was the sole moment when her firmness abandoned her,” said her daughter. She then fainted. Such was her shock and incomprehension, even as she came round, she “remained motionless, seeing nothing that took place in the room.”
The crowd outside started shrieking for Marie-Antoinette’s head as well, and summoned her to kiss her dead friend’s head. Louis-Charles and Marie-Thérèse were now sobbing hysterically. Cléry heard one of the municipal officers haranguing the crowd. “The head of Marie-Antoinette does not belong to you … . France has entrusted its great offenders to the City of Paris; it is your business to help guard them until the justice of the nation avenges its people.” For several hours the royal family’s lives hung by a thread, apparently at the mercy of madmen bent on vengeance; they waited, never knowing if this was to be the moment when the unstoppable fury of the mob finally turned on them. It was evening before “all was quiet in the neighborhood of the Tower,” wrote Cléry, “although across Paris massacres continued for four of five days.”
The unfortunate Princesse de Lamballe, as a close friend of the queen trapped in
La Force
at the height of the slaughter, had been spared nothing. Dragged from her cell and hauled before a kangaroo court, when she refused to swear an oath against the queen she had been sentenced to death. There
are differing accounts of her horrendous murder. According to some, she was raped before she was hacked to death, and then mutilated, with her genitalia and heart cut out and mounted on pikes. In other versions she was—mercifully—knocked unconscious before her death. Her head was twisted onto a pike and taken to the Tower; her naked body was dragged through the streets. The crowd had wanted to force the door to make the king and queen see the fate of their friend. The officials were only able to prevent them by permitting them to make a tour of the Tower with Madame de Lamballe’s head, on the condition that they left her body at the gates.
The Marquise de Tourzel and Pauline had also been held at
La Force.
In an astonishing display of chivalry, a stranger, who may have inspired the stories of the Scarlet Pimpernel, rescued Pauline. “We had scarcely gone to sleep when we heard someone drawing the bolts on our door,” Madame de Tourzel wrote in her memoirs. “We saw a man come in, well dressed and mild of aspect, who went up to Pauline’s bed and said, ‘Mademoiselle de Tourzel, get ready quickly and come with me.’ I was in such a state of distress on seeing my daughter taken from me that I remained frozen without the power to move … . My poor Pauline came to my bed and took my hand, but the man, seeing that she was dressed, took hold of her arm and dragged her toward the door. I heard the bolts fastened again. I cried after her, ‘God help you and protect you, dear Pauline!’”