Later that day Louis was able to see his family for the first time in six weeks. “We heard the sentence pronounced upon my father on that Sunday, January 20, from the news criers who came to shout it under our windows,” said Marie-Thérèse. “At seven in the evening we were permitted to go down to my father. We hurried there and found him greatly changed.”
The king was waiting in the small antechamber. He had been pacing up and down, “returning several times to the entrance-door, with signs of the deepest emotion,” wrote Cléry. “The queen appeared first, holding her son by the hand; then Madame Royale and Madame Élisabeth; they ran into the arms of the king. A gloomy silence reigned for several minutes, interrupted only by sobs.” The queen made a movement to draw the king into his private room, but he explained that he was ordered to see them in the dining room, where they could be watched by the guards through a glazed door. He led them in and closed the door.
Through the glass, Cléry could see that “they were all bending toward him and held him half-embraced. This scene of sorrow lasted almost two hours during which it was impossible to hear anything; we could only see that after each sentence of the king, the sobs of the princesses redoubled, lasting some minutes; then the king would resume what he was saying. It
was easy to judge from their motions that the king himself was the first to tell them of his condemnation.”
“He wept for our grief, but not for his death,” Marie Thérèse wrote later. “He told my mother about his trial, excusing the scoundrels who were bringing about his death.” Speaking directly to Louis-Charles, he “told him above all to pardon those who were putting him to death.” As if to emphasize the Christian oath that the dauphin was being asked to take, Louis held his son’s hand above his head as he repeated the words. He urged him and Marie-Thérèse always to be close friends, to support each other and be obedient to their mother. “He gave his blessing to my brother and myself. My mother desperately wanted us to spend the night with my father. He refused, having need of tranquillity.”
As they came out of the dining room, the queen, already thin and weak from months of anxiety, “could barely stand.” Louis-Charles was clinging onto both his parents, “in his little hands he clasped the king’s right hand and the queen’s left, which he kisses and waters with his tears.” Marie-Thérèse was “filling the room with the most heartrending cries.” The king promised to see them again in the morning at eight. The queen feared that this might be too late and begged to see him earlier. “At seven, then,” he agreed.
But as the king said
“adieu
—” he “uttered this in so expressive a manner that their sobs redoubled,” wrote Cléry. Marie-Thérèse suddenly collapsed in a faint at his feet. Cléry and Princess Élisabeth tried to help her up and support her. “The king had the strength to tear himself from their arms. ‘Adieu—Adieu,’ he said, and reentered his chamber.” The guards would not let Cléry help Marie-Thérèse up the stairs. “Though the two doors were shut,” he wrote, “we continued to hear the cries and sobs of the princesses on the staircase.”
When they returned to their rooms the queen did not have the strength to undress her son and put him to bed. “She threw herself, dressed as she was, upon her bed and we heard her through the night trembling with cold and sorrow,” said Marie-Thérèse. The next morning they rose at six and waited in Marie-Antoinette’s room, hoping desperately for their last chance
to see him. They heard the distant sound of drums and then they realized there were soldiers in the forecourt. Commands were shouted out. They could hear someone approach the door. Louis-Charles was shaking with fear and had his face buried in his mother’s lap as the door opened and an official approached. “We thought we were to go with him,” said Marie-Thérèse, but he had not come to take them to Louis. Instead, he asked for Madame Tison’s prayer book, which was required for Mass in the king’s apartment. As he was leaving, Louis-Charles tried to rush past to get to the stairs. The guard restrained him in a rough manner and asked what he was doing. “I’m going to speak to the people,” cried the little boy. “I’m going to beg them not to have my father killed. For heaven’s sakes do not prevent me from speaking to the people.”
It was a cold, foggy winter’s morning. The hours passed so slowly time seemed to have stopped. No one came to take them to the king. Doors were opened and slammed shut around the Tower. Raised voices were heard and the shuffling of feet up and down the stairs, followed by the sound of departing horses and carriages. An eerie silence fell on the Temple.
The king had risen at five to dress and hear his last Mass with the Abbé Edgeworth. He had wanted to see his family once more, but the Abbé warned against it, advising “this additional agony” would be too much of a shock for the queen. Solemnly Louis turned to Cléry and entrusted him with his last few treasured mementos to give to Marie-Antoinette after his death. There was his wedding ring. “Tell her that I part from it with pain, and only at the very last moment,” he said. There was also a royal seal for Louis-Charles and a little packet on which the king had written, “Hair of my wife, sister and children.” “Give her that also,” he asked Cléry. He cried as he continued, “say to the queen, to my dear children, to my sister, that although I promised to see them this morning, I wish to spare them the pain of so cruel a separation—how much it costs me to go without receiving their last embraces!” He wiped away his tears. “I charge you to take them my farewell,” he said and then immediately turned and reentered his room.
At eight o’clock officials arrived to take the prisoner. Surrounded by over
a thousand guards, his closed carriage moved very slowly through the streets. It took nearly two hours to reach the Place de la Révolution. Abbé Edgeworth accompanied him; an unexpected comfort, since Louis thought he would have to endure this alone. He asked the priest for psalms for the dying and the two were absorbed in prayer together all the way to the execution site.
Louis stepped out of the carriage. The square was crammed with twenty thousand people whose minds had only one thought: to see his death and the hated royal mystique crushed utterly. The guillotine, mounted on a platform, dominated the scene. Its two wooden posts rose fifteen feet high, at the top of which hung the steel blade, twelve inches wide. Charles Sanson, the executioner, was waiting.
Louis’s arms were tied and his hair roughly cut to reveal his neck. He took the Abbé’s arm to mount the steep steps to the scaffold, and then tried to address the crowd. “I die innocent of all the crimes of which I have been charged. I pardon those who have occasioned my death; and I pray to God that the blood that you are about to shed may never be visited on France.”
His speech remained unfinished, his voice drowned out by fifteen drummers who were ordered to start up their beat. Louis was seized and strapped to the upright plank, which was swung over, pinning his neck firmly in the wooden brace. As the blade came down, because the king’s neck was so large, it took time to slice through before his head fell. A stupendous silence hung in the still, gray air.
One of the guards lifted up his head and strutted around the platform triumphantly showing the crowds their trophy. The stunned silence continued, then, slowly at first, the cries began and were soon resounding almost hysterically around the square and across Paris:
“Vive la Répub/ique! Vive la Nation!”
The king’s body was put in a basket, his head between his legs, and taken to the cemetery of the Madeleine. It was transferred to a plain pauper’s coffin, scattered with quicklime to aid decomposition, and buried ten feet deep.
Inside the Tower, shortly after 10:20 in the morning, Marie-Antoinette and her children heard the sound of the firing of guns. They had still dared to hope that there was a chance to see the king, wrote Marie-Thérèse, “until the cries of joy of a frenzied populace came to inform us that the crime was consummated.” Nearby, the drums of the Temple garrison were beating.
“Nothing was able to calm the anguish of my mother. We could make no hope of any sort enter her heart,” said Marie-Thérèse. “She was indifferent to whether she lived or died,” almost as if her own lifeblood had drained away. The queen was on the brink of nervous collapse and began to suffer from recurring convulsions. Impassive in her chair in the small, cold room in the Tower, she had aged rapidly; her hair was grey, her skin colorless, her body painfully thin, almost emaciated. She could not even bring herself to leave her prison to sit in the garden. “This obliged her to pass the door of my father’s room, and that caused her too much pain.”
Over the last months Marie-Antoinette had lived through some terrifying, life-threatening experiences. Friends had been with her then, friendly Swiss guards, her husband. There had always been some small seed of hope. Now there was no hope. All the glory of the royal past had come to this. Everything had been taken from her. Her two remaining children were all that was left in her life of human warmth and goodness. “She looked at us sometimes with a pity that made us shudder,” wrote her daughter. Marie-Thérèse herself became severely ill after her father’s death. “Happily,” said Marie-Thérèse, “grief increased my illness, and that occupied her.”
The queen did ask to see Cléry, hoping to learn of any final message that her husband might have left with his loyal valet. Yet Cléry was detained in the Tower and forbidden to see “the widow Capet,” as she was now known. They soon learned that Cléry “was in a dreadful state,” since he was unable to carry out the king’s last wishes. He entrusted the king’s treasured mementos, the wedding ring, hair and seal, to one of the officials, in the hope that they would be given to Marie-Antoinette. However, they were taken to the commissioner’s room on the ground floor and locked away.
Louis-Charles became the focal point of Marie Antoinette’s wretched life. She made a huge effort to rally to console the children after their father’s death and to do the things that Louis would have wished. Knowing that the king would have given his son lessons in math, history and geography, she now took on this task. She also encouraged her son to pray, although he told her, “When I pray to God, it’s always my father that appears to me.” Early in February they held a small ceremony in their room to mourn the king, at which Louis-Charles sang specially composed verses:
“Everything is fled for me on this earth
But I am still by my mother’s side.
Later that month, fearing that the lack of air in the Tower might be harmful to her children’s health, she asked if they could go up on the roof of the Great Tower to walk around the battlements. Louis-Charles, still playful, liked to be lifted up so he could see outside through the gaps in the parapets. Since Marie-Antoinette was thin and weak, a sympathetic guard arranged seating for her in the top turret, so she could watch.
With the death of Louis XVI, for royalists and many émigrés, this lively seven-year-old boy was now the acknowledged king, “Louis XVII,” who could still reign with his mother or uncle, Provence, as regent. In early 1793, plots to help the prisoners escape were hatching in Paris, the provinces and overseas. Count Axel Fersen, concerned at news of the queen’s desperate situation and failing health, told his sister, “In my social circle we do nothing but grieve and cry over her fate … . We speak only of ways of saving her.” He devised countless schemes; the difficulty was trying to organize an escape, without taking any steps, which if discovered, could precipitate her trial. He was bold enough to bribe officials in Paris; however, they reneged on any agreement and merely took his money.
Inside the Temple, two of the queen’s jailors were also moved to action by her pitiful plight. The once-fanatical François-Adrian Toulan, a hardened veteran of the storming of the Tuileries, put himself at risk by secretly bringing her the king’s last mementos. Toulan surreptitiously broke into
Cléry’s sealed package in the commissioner’s room and arranged his theft to look like a real burglary. Soon he went much further and began to devise an escape plan. He enlisted the help of another guard, Jacques Lepître, who was in charge of passports and passes, and a royalist outside the Temple, the Chevalier de Jarjayes. Their daring idea was simplicity itself: the royal women, disguised as commissioners and with the appropriate passes, would walk straight out through the main gate. Certain guards would be doped with doctored tobacco; Marie-Thérèse and Louis-Charles were to be dressed as lamplighter’s children, their faces blackened with oil.
As they planned their escape, fears were growing of royalist counterrevolution, and the control of passports and security at the Temple was stepped up. It became too dangerous to attempt a rescue of the whole family. The Chevalier de Jarjayes was still keen to help the queen escape—without her children. She refused. “We had a beautiful dream, and that is all,” she wrote to Jarjayes. “The best interests of my son are my only guide. However happy I might have been to be out of here, I cannot agree to be separated from him. It would be impossible for me to take pleasure in anything if I left my children behind, and I have no regrets about this.”
So many people were sympathetic to the plight of the queen that one conspiracy after another was taking shape that spring of 1793. In England, the wealthy aristocrat Charlotte Lady Atkyns, who had lived for a while in France prior to the revolution and was horrified at the queen’s downfall, began to contact royalist supporters within France to organize an escape. Meanwhile, the French general François Dumouriez conceived a daring plan to march on Paris and proclaim Louis XVII as king. Jacques-René Hébert fumed in
Le Père Duchesne,
there would be no rest until “the widow Caper … and her foul progeny … have been destroyed. Little fish grow big,” he warned. “Liberty is hanging by only a hair.”