In Brussels, thirty hours away by coach or horseback, I must have felt intimations of the disaster to come; for that very day I wrote Toinette in a tone far more pessimistic than my earlier letters. “I’m profoundly worried about you. I haven’t had a moment’s peace and my only comfort is to have my anxiety shared by M. Craufurd, who only thinks of you and of ways of helping you….” This was my last letter to Marie Antoinette, and she never received it. It survives in a copy I made of it.
Meanwhile, back in Paris: at 7:30 in the morning, even before any shot had been fired, Louis, alarmed by the night’s events, decided to abandon the Tuileries and to seek shelter with his family at the Manège, the nearby building where the Assembly met. Accompanied by an armed guard and their closest intimates—Madame de Tourzel and the devoted Princesse de Lamballe, who had left a comfortable exile abroad
to return to her friend’s side—the royal family walked down the main stairway into the garden, which they crossed on foot to reach the Manège. The king walked in front of the retinue, murmuring from time to time that the leaves had begun to fall very early that year. The dauphin, holding the queen’s hand, trotted by her side and amused himself by pushing away those same dead leaves with his feet, until he grew weary and one of the royal guards lifted him into his arms. Once at the Assembly they were taken to a small box, behind the president’s chair, which was habitually occupied by the Assembly’s stenographers. They would be confined in this hot and airless space—some ten feet square—for fifteen hours, without anything to eat or drink.
As Marie-Thérèse later related it to me, at last a compassionate guard brought them some biscuits and a bottle of wine bought with his own money, but all the queen would take was a glass of water. From inside their closet, the royal family could hear their fate being discussed by the deputies. From the direction of the garden, they heard the sound of cannon and musket fire heralding the attack on the Tuileries. The last order that Louis was to sign as king of France was a fateful one: thinking that further defense of the palace was useless and that the Swiss Guards could gain amnesty by laying down arms, the king hurriedly wrote them a note to cease firing. But in fact this dictate served as a death warrant for the Swiss Guards and for many of the palace’s inhabitants. For soon afterward the rebels invaded the Tuileries and began their carnage: the Swiss Guards and the entire domestic staff of the palace, to whom the invaders were particularly merciless, were slaughtered with the mob’s habitual sadism. Every man, from the head chefs to the humblest scullion, perished.
Louis and his family spent that night in a cell at the nearby Convent of the Feuillants. On the following day they again returned to the Manège, where they heard the deputies abolish the institution of kingship and dissolve the Assembly: the new body that replaced it was to be
called the National Convention, which would give Danton a higher number of votes than was received by any other deputy, and made him the most powerful man in France. The royal family also heard a long discussion about their future residence. Many deputies proposed the Luxembourg, but the Convention’s strong men—Danton and Robespierre—decided that the royal family should be sent to the Temple, a seventeenth-century building in the Marais, not far from the Bastille, that had once been the residence of the Knights Templar.
I had visited the Temple once, as a young man, on my grand tour. A vast, austerely elegant compound, it had many dependencies that had been built in earlier centuries, and one of these, at the far end of the Temple’s gardens, was a dungeon known as the Temple Tower. A square, turreted building some sixty feet high, of grim and foreboding appearance, with ten-foot-thick walls, its interior was composed of four identical floors connected by a narrow stairway. Having been entertained in the splendid rooms of the Temple by the Comte d’Artois, at dinner parties after the opera, Marie Antoinette was well acquainted with the Temple proper. (Shuddering at the sight of its bleak tower, she had often asked Artois to demolish it.)
Upon arriving in their new residence, the royal family were served an elaborate meal in the Salle des Quatre Glaces, where Artois had habitually received the queen. What they did not yet know as they sat down to dinner was that they were destined to be lodged in the tower of the Temple, not in the Temple proper. The mayor of Paris, Jerome Pétion, the same Pétion who had flirted with Madame Elisabeth on the way back from Varennes, was in charge of them that day; a man not devoid of compassion, he lacked the courage to tell the royals that their home would be in the dungeon. So he went to the Hotel de Ville that very evening and suggested to the deputies of the Commune that the prisoners be incarcerated in the Temple Palace rather than in its tower. But the rest of the deputies did not share Pétion’s empathy. The royal
family, the Commune insisted, must go to the dungeon. Madame de Tourzel and Madame de Lamballe were to be sent to the prison of La Force. Two of the king’s and dauphin’s valets, Hue and Cléry, were briefly detained but then released, and were allowed to accompany the royal family to the Temple dungeon.
The “Capets,” as the family was called after the institution of kingship was officially abolished (I’ve refused to use that name), soon began a routine that would not change in the following five months. Marie Antoinette and Madame Elisabeth spent the morning instructing Princess Marie-Thérèse, and after dinner they worked at their embroidery or read aloud to each other (the princess reported that Fanny Burney’s
Evelina
was one of the queen’s great favorites). As for the king, he knelt down for a long time to say his prayers early each morning, and then instructed his son—an unusually bright, receptive boy—in essentials such as Latin, history, and geography. Lessons finished at about two. Louis and the dauphin sat down for dinner with their family, after which the king and queen might play backgammon while the dauphin and his sister flew kites or played ball with Cléry in the garden. In his spare time the king read his breviary for several hours of the day and also read a great deal from the prison’s well-stocked library. The guards vigilantly surveying the royal family at every moment of the day were the only drawback to a not unpleasant existence.
After months spent at the Tuileries under perpetual threat of attack, at first the king and queen were relieved by this new mode of confinement. By the Commune’s order, they were cut off from all communication with the outside world. So they lost sense of the menace still posed by the Parisian mob. But the next uprisings, known as the September 3 massacres, reminded them all too brutally that the Revolution was still raging unabated. The immediate incentive for the September 3 massacres was an impulse to avenge those patriots who had died during the insurrection of August 10, three weeks earlier. The Parisians’ rage was
also prompted by new reports of the Prussian army’s success, particularly by the unexpected defeat of French troops at Longwy at August’s end. Moreover, there were rumors of plots being hatched within the prisons: it was feared that if enemy troops reached Paris, they would open the doors of these jails and, aided by the former convicts, cause an even greater massacre of patriots.
Early on the morning of September 3, Parisians learned that Verdun was about to fall to the Prussians. The Commune decreed a
levée en masse.
And soon thereafter the slaughter in the jails began. Among the first to be attacked was the prison of L’Abbaye, where scores of prisoners—prominent aristocrats, priests, judges, royal bodyguards—were killed by a group of some fifty neighborhood patriots that included jewelers, butchers, and café owners. There followed the onslaught on the prison of Bicêtre, where more than 1,700 beggars and other harmless castoffs were killed, among them thirty boys between the ages of twelve and fourteen. At the Salpetrière, girls of ten were murdered. At the Carmelite prison, more than two hundred priests were massacred by a crowd who sang the hymn “Dies Irae” as they went about their slaughter. The murderers moved on to the prisons of Saint-Firmin and La Force, where they killed Madame de Lamballe in a particularly sadistic manner. A total of more than two thousand innocent citizens thus met their demise.
On the afternoon of September 4, soon after the onslaught on La Force began, the king and queen had started their after-dinner game of backgammon when they heard a growing roar below their window. They then heard a terrible shriek. It was from the valet Cléry, who came rushing into the monarchs’ room to close its curtains: the head of Madame de Lamballe was being paraded in front of the queen’s window. Municipal guards next appeared in the room. One of them bluntly told Marie Antoinette the truth: “It is the head of Lamballe, which they have brought here to show you and to make you kiss,” he told the queen; “this
is how the people takes its revenge upon tyrants.” Upon hearing these words, Marie-Thérèse reported, Marie Antoinette fainted. All through the following night the princess could hear her mother’s sobs. The queen was lucky that the details of Madame de Lamballe’s death were never reported to her: she had been disemboweled, her heart devoured, and her intestines trailed through the streets of Paris to the palace of her brother-in-law, the Duc d’Orléans.
A
DISAGREEABLE,
irascible couple called the Tisons had been assigned to watch over, and serve, the royal family during their incarceration at the Temple. In addition to their domestic chores—keeping house, overseeing the family’s meals—they were ordered by the Commune to spy on the prisoners. The queen, according to her daughter, immediately realized that the Tisons were probably incapable of pity or compassion, and that she could never mollify them by any friendly deed or gesture. But there was another member of the Temple staff—twenty-nine-year-old Francois Turgy—who turned out to be more than kindly disposed to them, who was, in fact, an ardent royalist and a passionate admirer of the queen. Turgy, who had been employed as a scullery boy at the kitchens of Versailles, had moved on with much of the domestic staff to the Tuileries. Not having lived at the palace, he was spared the massacre of the servants that occurred there on August 10. A highly resourceful fellow, Turgy managed to get himself designated to the Temple kitchen through a series of subterfuges, telling Commune members that he had been sent there by the Assembly, and telling his section leaders at the Assembly that the Commune had appointed him there. Turgy’s job was to set the table and serve the royal family their meals. And despite the vigilance with which the king and queen were surveyed by their guards—roast meats and even rolls were torn into pieces to make sure that they did not contain messages—Turgy managed to communicate
with them. As he mounted the winding stairwell toward their floor, for instance, he might insert a note in the stopper of a bottle. Moreover, when out of earshot of the Tison couple he was occasionally able to whisper a few words to Madame Elisabeth or the queen, and eventually he established a code of finger signals with which he could transmit to them news of the outside world. “If the Austrians are successful on the Belgian frontier,” so Turgy later described details of his sign language to me, “place the second finger of the right hand on the right eye…. When they are within fifteen leagues of Paris…place it on the mouth.”
Another potential champion of the royal family’s was Citizen Lepitre, the owner of a small boarding school who was a skilled Latinist; he had only joined the revolutionary forces for reasons of personal survival, and soon made it clear to the former king and queen that he sympathized with them. Upon one occasion, seeing Louis reading his copy of Virgil’s
Aeneid,
he asked the king if he could borrow the book, and addressed the request in perfect Latin. Louis, amazed that one of the guards was so familiar with the classics, gave it to him with great pleasure; Lepitre would eventually engage in the rescue efforts that would attempt to liberate Marie Antoinette.
At first the news communicated by Turgy was heartening. Brunswick met with no resistance as his troops advanced toward Paris. From Verdun they marched into the Argonne and captured Stenay, where a year beforehand, in June 1791, the royal family had hoped to be rescued by Bouillé. But a bit farther on, at Valmy, a few miles off the road I’d planned for the royal family to take to Varennes, the course of the war was abruptly reversed: the allied armies were resoundingly defeated by the French revolutionary forces. Valmy, one of the world’s most decisive battles, was commented on by Goethe, who witnessed the event, as the beginning of “a new era in the world’s history.”
The ragtag army of the penniless French Republic defeating the well-drilled
regiments of several wealthy European countries, and sealing the fate of my beloved royal family? I never would have thought it possible, and I doubt if historians will ever explain it. I was in Brussels with Eleanore Sullivan, Craufurd, and the Comte de Mercy when I learned of Brunswick’s rout. We were not only horrified but totally puzzled by the news: his defeat seemed inexplicable. It was attributed to a variety of causes: a violent outbreak of dysentery among his forces was one; another, more ideological reason, was that patriotism instilled into the newborn French Republican army an esprit de corps, a savage valor, that was mightier than any physical force. Rumors also spread that Brunswick, who was known to be greedy and corruptible, had been bribed with five million francs by a wealthy republican to lose the battle. His retreat, unlike his leisurely advance, was very hurried. On November 6 Eleanore Sullivan and I, accompanied by the Russian minister, Monsient de Simolin, were taking a walk in the forest outside Brussels. Suddenly, coming from the west, we heard the faint sound of artillery fire. Over dinner that night at Craufurd’s, the Comte de Mercy assured us that the sound was nothing more than a celebration of Saint Charles’s Day. But in the middle of the meal a courier arrived with an urgent message for Mercy to report to the palace of Archduchess Maria Cristina, Marie Antoinette’s sister. She informed him that the Austrian army had suffered a crushing defeat and that the French were arriving in Brussels in a matter of days.