Eleanore, Craufurd, Simolin, and I left for Düsseldorf two days later. We did not reach our destination until the third week of December; it took us five weeks from Brussels because of the mayhem on the roads. We often made do with the humblest circumstances as we rode southward through Germany, sleeping on straw pallets on stable floors. The roads were dense with fleeing émigrés—merchants and aristocrats, the rich and the poor—walking toward freedom, carrying their possessions on poles slung over their shoulders. Once settled in Düsseldorf, we
began to hear of the horrors committed by revolutionary troops as they surged through France. The country’s treasures were being methodically plundered by Jacobin functionaries and by thieves.
Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité
, indeed! What a hypocritical slogan! The most shameful sacking took place in churches, where reliquaries and crucifixes were picked of their precious stones and melted down, and where masterpieces by such artists as Van Eyck and Van der Weyden were destroyed. Few leaders of the revolutionary troops were more outraged by this rampage than their commander in chief, General Dumouriez. Dumouriez, a Girondin by conviction, was already offended by the fact that the French war ministry had fallen to the extremists—the minister of war was now in the pay of the rabble-rousing Marat. When he learned that arms and ammunition that should have been directed to the French army in Belgium were being diverted to Marat’s private army, he made his own plans for the future: he would eventually defect to the Austrian side.
Upon our arrival I heard that the Convention was bringing Louis XVI to trial. I was in the deepest torment, all the more so because I initially feared that the queen was going on trial with him. My dear, gentle Louis! Writing to Thomas Jefferson, Gouverneur Morris, the American ambassador, gave an excellent estimate of the king. “It is strange that the mildest monarch who ever sat the French throne, one who was precipitated from it precisely because he would not adopt the harsh measures of his predecessors, a man whom one can not charge with one criminal or cruel act, should be prosecuted as one of the most nefarious tyrants who ever disgraced the annals of human nature.”
Once a large majority of its deputies found the king guilty, the Convention deliberated from the eighteenth to the twentieth of January concerning the nature of his punishment. The American-born deputy Tom Paine suggested that Louis be sent to the United States, where he might be rehabilitated as a good patriot. “Ah, citizens,” Paine cried out, “give not the tyrant of England the triumph of seeing the man perish on the
scaffold who aided my so much loved America to break its chains!” He was shouted down on the grounds that Paine’s religious sect—he was a Quaker—was notorious for its opposition to the death penalty. A few deputies voted for banishment, many for death with a reprieve, and a narrow majority of fifty-three for immediate death. The vote was cast on the twentieth of January 1793; and needless to say, that swine, that rotter the Duc d’Orléans, who had taken the nom de guerre of “Philippe-Égalité” upon being elected deputy to the Convention by his Paris district, voted for his own cousin’s demise. Even some of the hard-line revolutionaries were appalled by d’Orléans’s ballot. “Miserable wretch,” Danton muttered to Robespierre; “he of all people could have refused to vote.”
L
OUIS
XVI
HAD BEEN
separated from his family on December 11, a few weeks before his trial. This had been a fresh source of sorrow for the queen. In this gauche, ungainly man she had once derided with her frivolous friends she had recently discovered many precious qualities—his courage and fortitude, the gentleness, calm, and patience he maintained in the most perilous circumstances. I suspect that her tenderness for him had turned into love—no, more, into passion. She had made his bed herself, had sat by him round the clock whenever he fell ill. In the thrall of this new devotion, she announced that she wished to die with him, that she would henceforth refuse all nourishment. Soon after their separation one of the family’s guards took such pity on her that on one particular night he arranged for the royal family to have supper together. Marie-Thérèse reports that the queen displayed immense delight upon this prospect, weeping with joy and passionately embracing her children and her sister-in-law. Even their most ferocious guardian, the cobbler Simon, burst out: “In truth, I think these damned women are capable of making me cry!”
The king, in turn, living in unprecedentedly close quarters with his wife, came to esteem her own brand of courage, and treasure as he never
had before her extraordinary familial devotion. Their parting may have been all the more painful because each of them had just begun to cherish qualities they had never perceived in each other during their twenty years of marriage. On the eve of his death, the king seemed to have finally experienced, after all these years, the sweet certainty of knowing he was loved. “Alas,” he said to his confessor in his last hours, “it shall be worse because I love so deeply, and am so tenderly loved in return!”
On Christmas Day, the king would compose his last will and testament. I have read that extraordinary document many times, have marveled at its generosity and clemency, have been increasingly touched, over the years, by those words that relate to Marie Antoinette: “I beg my wife,” he wrote, “to forgive me all the pain which she may have suffered for me and the sorrows that I may have caused her during our union.” And then there comes that enigmatic phrase: “Should she have anything with which to reproach herself, may she feel sure that I hold nothing against her.” Reproach herself for what? For those froths and follies of her youth that had led her to be calumniated as no previous consort in French history, and had played a part in leading her husband to the Temple? Or did the words allude to a more specific issue—Marie Antoinette’s liaison with me?
“Poor woman!” Louis said to one of his counsels during his last weeks. “She was promised a throne, and it has come to this.” Talking to his lawyers, he often referred to the ill will the French people had borne Marie Antoinette, to the pernicious influence of a recklessly hedonistic court, to the fact that she had been only fourteen when she arrived in its midst. They minded his words, for few persons who met the king during his solitary confinement—National Guardsmen, municipal officers, even members of the Commune—did not come to esteem and pity him. We have it on Cléry’s word—I know his memoirs by heart—that a local citizen from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine had a keen desire to meet the monarch. Cléry managed to arrange a visit. “What, sir, is this the king?” the citizen said to Cléry after the meeting. “How good he is!
How he loves his children!”…“Ah,” he went on to say, striking his chest, “never could I believe that he has done us any evil!” For the king, affable as ever in his captivity, conversed at length with every one of his visitors and guardians, asking them about their childhoods, their work, their families, their children. Family was that focal point upon which these men, coming from radically opposite circumstances, found a common ground. Those citizens who came to know Louis, moreover, could not see the sense of his being separated from his nearest and dearest. What harm could have been brought by merely familial talk? Each time the king spoke of his wife and children his guards were very moved. “Today is my daughter’s birthday,” he said to them on December 19. “It’s her birthday, and I can’t even see her!” A few of these men broke into tears. Those who did not might well have repressed them.
The king would not be allowed to see his family until the night before his execution. But the queen could hear his steps as he left the Temple daily for the Convention hearings, and every evening she would hear him return accompanied by his lawyers and armed guards.
During the weeks of the king’s solitary imprisonment, the queen’s health began to fail. Always a picky eater, she now ate next to nothing, and her request for a dressmaker who could take in her clothes was granted.
On the twentieth of January, the eve of his scheduled execution, the king asked for a three-day reprieve during which he might better prepare to meet his God. His request was refused, and his execution remained fixed for the next morning. On the queen’s floor that same evening, a guard came in at eight o’clock and told the royal family that they could go down and see the king one last time.
They stayed in Louis’s quarters for almost two hours. The king, seated with his emaciated wife on his left and his sister on his right, drew his son toward him and made him stand between his knees. In one of his
last instructions to him, he asked the child to never avenge his death; and since the boy had never pledged an oath before, the king took up his little hand and made him vow that he would keep his promise. He then pressed his wife to his shoulder while his daughter, who passionately loved her father, clung to him and gave way to bitter tears. Marie Antoinette knew that Louis desired them to leave, and said, “Promise that you will see us again.”
“I promise,” he said, “at eight tomorrow morning, before I go.”
“Please come earlier,” she begged.
“All right, half an hour earlier.”
“Promise me.”
He repeated his promise. The two women and two children left through the great nail-studded oak door, and walked up the winding stairs. The queen threw herself fully dressed on her bed after she had put her boy to sleep, and Marie-Thérèse could hear her weeping for the following many hours.
As soon as his family had left, the king told his guards that in spite of his promise, his family should not be told of his departure for the scaffold the next morning, for it would make them suffer all the more. He then ate a substantial supper, which included half a chicken, a beef roast, and a bottle of champagne, and slept very soundly. He woke at 5 a.m., and heard Mass said by the priest permitted him by the Convention, a half-French, half-Irish curate called Abbé Edgeworth de Firmont, who had been educated in a Jesuit seminary in Toulouse. Louis received communion from the abbé, and proceeded to dress. At 8 a.m., a group of delegates from the Convention arrived. He asked them if Cléry might cut his hair to spare him the indignity of having it cropped on the scaffold, but permission was denied. Noticing that the deputies all wore their hats, he asked for his. He then took off his wedding ring and gave it to Cléry, saying, “You will give this to my wife, and tell her that our separation causes me much sorrow.” He also handed Cléry, to give to his
son, the dauphin, the seal of France, thus transmitting to him the principal symbol of kingship.
Louis was offered his coat. He said he did not need it. He was wearing a brown jacket, black trousers, white stockings. As the delegates, who were led by the brewer Santerre, a leader of the June 20, 1792, attack on the Tuileries, continued to shuffle around him, Louis gave the definitive order.
“Partons!”
he said. Accompanied by his captors, he walked from the dungeon to the palace of the Temple, turning several times to look back at the prison where his family still waited for him.
It had been barely six in the morning, in the January dark, when the queen had heard steps coming from the king’s room. Her hopes for Louis’s visit had risen…but it had been merely a guard who had come to fetch the king’s missal. She had waited until eight, at first light, and still the king had not made his promised appearance. Some moments later she had heard the sound of many men walking toward the Temple’s first floor; she then knew that they were coming to fetch him.
In front of the Temple palace Louis XVI got into his coach, which was of the same dark green color as the one he had ridden out of Paris on his way to Varennes. It was to take him to the place Louis XV—odiously renamed the place de la Révolution—along the widest streets, which even on this bitterly cold morning were lined with citizens and troops. According to Abbé Edgeworth, during this trip of over two hours he never looked out of the coach’s window, keeping his eyes fixed on his breviary.
It was ten minutes past ten when the king arrived at the place Louis XV. There was a total silence on the part of the crowd, which was some twenty thousand strong; all one could hear was the continual roll of drums. The king warmly thanked his confessor, and took off his hat and jacket himself. All of a sudden, he grew agitated. The noise of the drums seemed to anger him. “Silence, silence!” he cried out. And then, as the drums quieted down, “I am lost! I am lost!”
The executioner, Sanson, wanted to tie his hands. He resisted him, glancing at his confessor as if to ask his counsel. “Sire,” Abbé Edgeworth said, “this last outrage is yet one more trait in common between Your Majesty and your God, Who will be your recompense.” The king lifted his eyes to the sky and ceased resisting. “Do whatever you wish,” he told his executioners. “I will drink the chalice down to the dregs.”
The steps to the scaffold were very steep, and the king leaned on his confessor. Having reached the last step, he freed himself from the abbé and ran to the other side of the scaffold. “Frenchmen,” he shouted at the crowd, “I die innocent of all the crimes of which I am charged. I pardon those who have brought about my death.”
The drums rolled again. “Do your duty!” citizens were yelling at the executioners.
Louis’s last words were interrupted by the guillotine itself. “May my blood strengthen the happiness of the Fr—”
“Son of Saint Louis, ascend to heaven!” Edgeworth cried out as the twelve-inch blade came crashing down. The king’s dripping head was held up to the crowd by the executioner. A few seconds passed; then came loud shouts of
“Vive la République!”
Louis’s body, placed in a basket, was taken to the cemetery of the Madeleine. There it was put into a plain wooden coffin of the kind that was used for the poorest citizens; it was buried ten feet deep, and covered with lime. As soon as his body was carried away a huge crowd rushed to the site of execution to dip their kerchiefs, linen, and swords in puddles of the king’s blood. A group of British citizens stood at the bottom of the scaffold, shouting that they wished to purchase relics of this new martyr. Among revolutionaries there would be an immediate effort to make regicide look commonplace, so much so that the Sèvres industry produced demitasses with an image of the king’s severed head rendered in dainty gold paint.