By the same decree of August 1, 1793, the Committee of Public Safety turned its anger on the royal “she-devil,” the “enemy within” who was conspiring to ensure that the Austrian invasion succeeded and the monarchy restored. The widow Capet was to be tried by the newly created Revolutionary Tribunal. She was to be removed from the Tower and taken to another prison where she would be held as a common criminal along with the rising number of political prisoners.
In the small hours of the night of the August 2, 1793, four officers came to Marie-Antoinette’s room. They read a decree of the Convention which ordered that she should be taken to the
Conciergerie
in the heart of Paris, in preparation for her trial. “She listened to the reading of the decree without emotion, and without saying a single word,” wrote her daughter. “My aunt and I asked immediately to go with my mother, but this mercy was not granted to us.” Marie-Antoinette wrapped up a small parcel of clothes and
was “obliged even to dress herself before the municipals.” The guards emptied her pockets. “They left her only a handkerchief and a smelling bottle in the fear that she might faint.”
“After tenderly embracing me and telling me to have courage … she then threw herself into my aunt’s arms as she commended her children to her,” wrote Marie-Thérèse, who found herself quite unable to speak as her mother left. “I could say nothing, so terrified was I at the idea that I saw her for the last time.” For her part, Marie-Antoinette “went away without casting her eyes upon us, fearing no doubt that her firmness might abandon her.” She was then escorted down the stone staircase of the Tower, passing the door to her son’s room, unable to see him and knowing full well she might never see him again. On her way out she accidentally struck her head on the last beam. “Did you hurt yourself?” asked one of the guards. “Oh, no,” she replied. “Nothing can hurt me anymore.”
The
Conciergerie,
a prison on the Île de la Cité, close to Notre Dame, had become a revolutionary prison. Balzac, in time, would describe its atmosphere of terror as “the antechamber to the scaffold.” The “widow Capet” was admitted at three o’clock in the morning as the 280th prisoner of the house, and taken to a small cell on the ground floor. The cell was divided into two equal parts by a simple screen—barely five feet high—over which she was subject to the constant surveillance of two gendarmes, who remained in her cell, drinking, smoking and playing cards. To further reduce any remote chance of a moment’s privacy, in the narrow space remaining on her side of the screen she could also be viewed from the main corridor through a small iron grill. For a fee, the prison authorities allowed visitors to observe the former queen in her squalid cell; people were only too eager to see for themselves the former queen’s precipitous downfall. From all angles, it seemed, hostile eyes were watching her.
Her part of the cell contained a canvas bed, a crude wooden table and chair, and a bucket. Set high in the wall was a window, which was covered by a thick iron grille, making the room gloomy and airless. This opened onto the
Cour des Femmes
, where other women prisoners could wash their clothes in the fountain; Marie-Antoinette herself was not permitted to leave
her cell. Fersen anxiously asked for details from a friend and wrote, “The cell was small, damp and fetid, without a stove or fireplace; there were three beds, one for the queen, another beside it for her woman attendant, the third for the two gendarmes who never left the cell, even when the queen had to satisfy the needs of nature.”
An abject political prisoner, a widow separated from her children and desperate for news of them, Marie-Antoinette found that trivial things assumed great significance for her: a bottle of dentifrice and a swansdown puff. A servant in the
Conciergerie,
Rosalie Lamorlière, later described her recollections of the queen’s circumstances. “The prison regime did not permit us to give her a mirror,” said Rosalie, although Marie-Antoinette requested one every morning. Eventually, the sympathetic concierge, Madame Richard, permitted Rosalie to give the prisoner her own mirror. “I blushed when I offered it to her. That mirror, bought on the quais, had cost me only twenty-five sous.” The emperor’s daughter who had once seen her reflection in the Hall of Mirrors, repeated endlessly in gleaming polished mirror, gilt and silver, was now presented with a crude object, a red-framed hand mirror with Chinese figures painted on each side. To Rosalie’s delight, “The queen accepted this little mirror as if it were something of importance and Her Majesty used it until the last day.” On another occasion, Rosalie successfully obtained permission to lend a simple cardboard box to the queen to hold her linens. “She received it with as much satisfaction as if she had been given the most beautiful treasure in the world.”
Once Madame Richard, the concierge, was accompanied by her own youngest son, who was an attractive child, “well above his station,” said Rosalie, with blond hair and blue eyes. As they went into the queen’s cell, the young boy’s presence was such a forceful reminder of her own son left behind in the Tower that Marie-Antoinette was overwhelmed. “She took him in her arms, covered him with kisses and caresses, and began to cry as she spoke to us of Monsieur le Dauphin,” says Rosalie. “Her own son was about the same age, and she said that she thought of him night and day.” Perhaps shocked to have evoked such an emotional response, Madame Richard did not bring her son again.
Madame Richard was anxious not to show any favoritism to her royal prisoner. Even though, Rosalie says, when they went shopping, some merchants pointedly gave the most tender chickens and best fruits “for our Queen” it is doubtful that these reached her. Back in the Temple, Marie-Thérèse and Aunt Élisabeth also made valiant efforts to find ways of sustaining her spirits. Knowing that Marie-Antoinette could not drink the water of the Seine, they begged the municipals to send her that of Ville d’Avray. They also tried to gather any silks and wools “for we knew how she liked to be busy,” wrote her daughter. At the Temple, she had just started a pair of stockings for her son. “We collected all we could, but we learned afterwards that nothing had been given to her, fearing, they said, that she might do herself harm with knitting needles.” So the queen unpicked the cloth that was draped over the stone walls, so she could continue to weave with the thread.
One day in late August, among the visitors who paid to see the spectacle of the former queen in prison was a royalist sympathizer, the Marquis de Rougeville. While the guards were distracted, he signalled to her and threw a carnation into her cell. As she looked into the petals, there was a secret message hidden, raising the possibility of escape. Marie-Antoinette was able to make her reply by tracing letters with pinpricks: “I am watched. I speak to no one. I trust you. I shall come.” However, as arrangements were being made for her escape, one of the guards who had been let in on the secret suddenly lost his nerve. He raised the alarm and foiled the “Carnation Conspiracy.”
While Rougeville managed to escape from Paris, following this abortive attempt to flee on September 3, 1793, Marie-Antoinette was interrogated. Over the course of two days she was challenged at enormous length about any possible treasonable activity: her escape plans, loyalty to France, even her knowledge of the news came under scrutiny in the hope she might accidentally incriminate some secret contact. However, she proved remarkably adept under pressure. When she was pushed on whether she was interested in the success of enemy troops, she insisted, “I am interested in the success of the troops of my son’s nation; when one is a mother, that is the
primary relationship.” When pressed still further on her support for the enemy, she answered skillfully that she only regarded as her enemies “all those who would bring harm to my children.”
Meanwhile, Madame Richard, her husband, and her oldest son, were imprisoned, and under the tougher regime established by the new concierge the queen was taken to a smaller, more secure cell further from the prison entrance. During this time, she was suffering from chronic hemorrhages and was growing steadily weaker, which Rosalie attributed to “her sorrows, the bad air, and the lack of exercise.” When the queen asked Rosalie secretly for some linen, “I immediately cut up one of my chemises and put those strips of cloth under her bolster.” Rosalie tried to help her in other ways, such as extending her evening chores so that the queen spent less time alone in the dark of night.
Marie-Antoinette, perhaps partly influenced by the months of captivity with her pious sister-in-law, drew strength from religion. One night, the guards permitted her to see a priest who had not sworn the oath of loyalty to the revolution, the Abbé Magnin. Improvising an altar and chalice in her cell, he held Mass and heard her confession. She received great comfort from this and it helped her prepare for the terrible ordeal that lay ahead, for which, for the sake of her son, she was determined to find the strength to survive.
However, at a secret, all-night meeting of the Committee of Public Safety on September 2, 1793, Marie-Antoinette’s enemies had already plotted her death. Hébert was most vociferous in pushing for the queen’s head “to be shaved by the national razor,” in the words of
Le Père Duchesne
. “I have promised my supporters Antoinette’s head. If there is any further delay in giving it to me, I shall go and cut it off myself,” he raged. When some equivocated, not out of concern for justice at her trial but for fear that the jury might not find her guilty, or that she was better kept alive as a hostage to bargain with their enemies, Hébert was dismissive. “The
sans-culottes
will kill all our enemies, but their zeal must be kept on the boil,” he stormed, “and you can only do that by putting Antoinette to death.” After a heated session, it was decided to bring her before the Revolutionary Tribunal.
The public prosecutor, the notorious Antoine Fouquier-Tinville, expressed doubts as to whether there was enough evidence to be sure of the death penalty. Hébert, determined that Marie-Antoinette must be condemned at her trial, hatched an outrageous plan. The French public had grown accustomed to hearing the lurid, pornographic rumors that had circulated about Marie-Antoinette. She was, according to reports, a sexual she-devil whose natural desires were only satisfied in an orgy of sexual encounters in which no boundaries, no moral values contained her lust. Hébert realized that the way to overcome the shortage of hard evidence against her would be to provide “proof” of what was already common currency; that Marie-Antoinette was sexually incontinent. Her son, now a frightened, confused boy surrounded by unfamiliar, hostile men, would become the means by which Hébert’s plan would be delivered. A trap was to be set for the boy that would ensnare him and help to destroy his mother.
In the first few weeks of Louis-Charles’s “reeducation,” he was made to sing revolutionary songs loudly at the window so the guards could hear, much to the despair of his sister and aunt upstairs. “We could hear him every day, singing with Simon, the
Carmagnole,
the air of the
Marseillaise
and other horrors,” wrote Marie-Thérèse. “Simon taught him to swear dreadful oaths against God, his family and aristocrats. My mother, happily, did not hear these horrors. Oh! My God, what harm they would have done her!” Marie-Thérèse also heard that “Simon made him eat horribly and forced him to drink much wine, which he detested. All this gave him a fever … and his health became totally out of order.”
Apart from singing like a revolutionary, he also had to look like one. Simon removed the child’s mourning clothes and replaced them with the revolutionary uniform. Louis-Charles had a red jacket made in the
carmagnole
shape—a typical revolutionary-style jacket—trousers and a red cap. To complete the effect, Madame Simon cut off his blond curls, which were deemed to give him an aristocratic air. Just at this point, one of the kitchen staff, Meunier, came in with the dinner. “Oh, why have you hacked off his hair, which so became him,” he protested. “Don’t you see, we are playing the
game of the shaved king!” laughed Madame Simon. Louis-Charles “remained sad,” but Simon was well satisfied. “Finally, Capet, you are a
sans-culotte
!” he said with delight to see the red cap on the royal heir.
There were no lessons in this unusual educational regime. Instead, his “tutor” encouraged him to lose his aristocratic demeanor and to sing bawdy songs and use bad language. For Simon and the guards it was amusing to see the son of the deceased king behaving in a common way. Coaxed on with wine, and sometimes even brandy, he was taught to refer to his aunt and sister upstairs as “common whores.” This would make the guards roar with laughter. Applauded and encouraged, the confused child, who had always learned to be obedient, would repeat the remarks time and time again. After a while, if he refused to play along, he could be beaten or subdued with a slap. He was also sometimes the defenseless object of his tutor’s fury for other reasons. When Simon heard of the defeat of the French at the border town of Condé by the Austrian army, “he threw himself upon him, crying out in his fury: ‘D—d wolf cub. You are
half
Austrian, and therefore you deserve to be
half
beaten!’”
Hébert kept a close eye on Simon’s progress. According to a report from a spy who was trying to gather information for a royalist, the Comte d’Antraigues, “Hébert and his soldiers … only taught him filthy language and blasphemy. He was permitted just the most unspeakable books and every effort was made to corrupt him.” Hébert could strike terror into the child’s heart even more successfully than Simon. The report continues: “Several times Hébert threatened him with the guillotine and this threat frightened him so horribly that he [Simon] has often seen the child faint from shock.” Hébert was not the only one who played on the child’s fears of the guillotine. On August 2, Anaxagoras Chaumette sent the child some toys, which included a little model of a guillotine. Fortunately for Louis-Charles, there happened to be a commissioner on duty who recognized how alarming it would be to give him such a potent symbol of his father’s death, and the “plaything” never reached him.