M
Y BROTHER
, still in Brussels, was cast into despair by the news that Marie Antoinette was about to go to trial. “All will be lost if this trial takes place,” he wrote Taube; “we can hope for nothing with these scoundrels who invent nonexistent evidence and condemn people on flimsy accusations and suspicions. No, my friend, let’s not hope for anything. Let’s resign ourselves to the Divine Will. Her death is already
decided and we must now prepare ourselves for it and gather enough strength to endure this terrible blow. I’ve been trying to do so for some time…. God alone can save her now. Let us pray for His mercy and submit to His decree.”
Mercy d’Argenteau, spurred on by my Axel, decided to make his own appeal to the allies. “Now that [the queen] has been handed over to a bloodthirsty tribunal it should be our duty to take any step that is capable of saving her,” the ambassador wrote the Austrian emperor. “Future generations will hardly believe that Austria’s armies did nothing to prevent so enormous a crime, which took place only a few steps away from them.”
“Is the emperor going to allow the queen to perish without even trying to snatch her from her executioners?” Mercy wrote Francis I soon afterward. “Aside from political considerations, are there not
private
intentions owed by Austria to Maria Theresa’s daughter, who is about to suffer her husband’s fate? Is it fitting to His Majesty’s dignity or interest to witness the fate with which his august aunt is menaced, and do nothing to save her from her executioners?” But Mercy received no reply to these pleas. The Austrian emperor and his advisers had been studying the French situation, and had decided to let the French destroy themselves; with shocking heartlessness, they saw Marie Antoinette as just another of the Revolution’s victims. “A great purge should be effected in France,” wrote the ruthless Austrian chancellor, a man appropriately named Thugut. “The human species must be looked on as a tree that is ceaselessly pruned with an invisible hand—blood is the fertilizer of that tree.”
Mercy easily resigned himself to the notion that his pleas were useless. Axel was deeply upset by Mercy’s apathy. “Mercy has always made it clear that he was only devoted to the queen because of her mother,” he wrote, “whereas he should have been devoted to her because of her generosity and her trust in him.”
Meanwhile, at the Convention, Fouquier-Tinville was hard-pressed
to find any documents that could be used against the queen beyond the transcripts of the interrogation that had followed the Carnation Plot. These interrogations had aimed to lure Marie Antoinette into expressing unpatriotic thoughts. But she did not fall into any traps, answering Fouquier’s questions with great skill.
“Were you pleased with the success of our enemies’ forces?” Fouquier asked the queen.
“I only sympathize with the success of my son’s country.”
“What is your son’s country?”
“Surely there can be no doubt. Is he not French?”
Fouquier had gotten so little from these exchanges that he decided to submit the queen to a preliminary examination on the two days that preceded her trial.
The examination took place in the Palais de Justice, that had once been the Grande Chambre of the Parlement of Paris; its vast, bare rooms were stripped of the exquisite fleur-de-lis tapestries and Dürer paintings that once decorated its walls, and were now hung with posters of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. The queen, who had suffered a particularly heavy hemorrhage that morning, had been wakened in the middle of the night, ordered to dress, and taken to the Palais de Justice by a group of guards. The questions asked of her there prefigured the four principal accusations that would be brought against her at her trial: that she had squandered French money on festivities and pleasures; that she had always sacrificed French interests to those of Austria and had sent huge sums of gold to her brother, the emperor; that she had been responsible for the decision to leave France that resulted in the flight to Varennes; that she had intrigued with foreign powers against France during the Revolution, and at home had “intrigued against liberty.” (In the following months, this same elastic accusation of “intriguing against liberty” would send to the scaffold most of Marie Antoinette’s worst enemies at the Convention, including Hébert and Robespierre.)
The queen answered such queries with poise and aplomb, and often caught her questioners’ mistakes. When the examining magistrate asked her why she did not keep her brother from making war on France, she reminded him that it was France, not Austria, that had declared war. At the end of this long, exhausting session, she was asked if she wished for counsels. She said she did. Two men—Citizens Doucoudray and Chauveau-Lagarde, the latter of whom had defended Charlotte Corday earlier that year—were appointed to be her lawyers. They had only some twenty hours to prepare their case.
“Like Messalina, Brunehaut, Frenegonde, once called queens of France, whose names are forever odious,”
*
so began the indictment which the lawyers would study that day, “Marie Antoinette, widow of Louis Capet, since her arrival in France has been the curse and the leech of the French people.” Comparing her to a “vampire” who had fed on French blood, the indictment elaborated on her “criminal intrigues” and “abnormal pleasures.”
Having less than a day to prepare their defense, the queen’s lawyers persuaded her to ask the Convention for a three-day delay. She wrote a letter to that effect, and asked that it be brought to the prosecutor Fouquier-Tinville so that he might deliver it to deputies of the Convention. In fact, this missive was never delivered to the Convention.
Gode Gud!
The following detail makes me despair of the male gender: having consulted the queen’s doctors, Fouquier did not wish the queen’s trial to be delayed, wanting it to be held during her menstrual period, when she was at her weakest. He kept Marie Antoinette’s missive, and after her death gave it to Robespierre, who hid it under his mattress, where it was discovered after his own execution the following year.
As Axel kept pointing out to me, Marie Antoinette’s trial was a most unusual event in European history: it marked only the second time that a monarch’s wife was brought to court and executed (I have Anne Boleyn in mind—Mary Queen of Scots was herself a ruler). Equally unusual, almost every charge against the queen could be traced to the slander that her own peers, and particularly her in-laws, had spread about her when she had first arrived at Versailles. It was not the French people, but her husband’s odious aunts, “Mesdames,” who had first referred to her as
“L’Autrichienne
” and thus branded her as a potentially hostile foreigner. It was her perfidious brother-in-law Artois who had started the gossip about her being a lesbian. It was the despicable Comte de Provence who had invented tales about her “lovers,” and had spread rumors about the orgies and debaucheries held at the Trianon, in revenge for the fact that he was never invited there.
The jurors chosen by Fouquier-Tinville included a wig-maker, a cobbler, a surgeon, a café owner, a hatter, and two carpenters. The trial, as the queen’s lawyers reported it to me, proceeded uneventfully through the morning of its first day. At one point the
tricoteuses
(lower-class women who took a sadistic pleasure in attending trials and executions, and worked at their knitting while watching the proceedings) shouted to Marie Antoinette that she should stand while answering the questions posed to her, so that they could hear her better. “Will the people ever be weary of my hardships?” she murmured. Drama came to the courtroom in the afternoon, when Hébert created a sensation by announcing that the guard Simon had “surprised the young Capet in indecent self-defilements, bad for his constitution.” When Simon asked him who had taught him such bad habits, Hébert related, young Capet replied, as he had a few weeks earlier when interrogated in the Temple, that he had learned them from his mother and his aunt. According to Hébert, the boy further revealed that the two women often made him lie between them, and that there then took place acts of “the most uncontrolled debauchery.” “According
to what the young Capet said,” Hébert ended his testimony, “there is no doubt that there was an incestuous relationship between mother and son.”
This is where I, Sophie Piper, grow so enraged that I need to draw a breath and pause, and collect myself again. I ask the following question to all mothers who might read these pages: What worse suffering could those ruffians have imposed on the queen than they did through these scabrous accusations? What villainy, and above all, what sadism! Upon hearing about these moments of the trial, my brother Axel stood up and beat his fists against the wall, shouting, “The swine! The scoundrels!”
One is left to imagine how the queen herself must have felt when she heard Hébert invent these lies about her
chou d’amour
. According to witnesses, she withheld any show of emotion. There was no telling gesture on her part, no change of gaze. She sat as if in a trance.
“There is reason to believe,” Hébert continued, “that this criminal intercourse was not dictated by pleasure but in the calculated hope of dominating the child, whom they still thought as destined to be a king. As a result of the efforts he was forced to make, the boy suffered a hernia, for which a bandage was needed. But since the child has been taken from his mother his constitution has become robust.”
The queen might well have replied that her son was already suffering from a hernia when her whole family was at the Temple, and that it had been caused by his using a stick as a hobbyhorse, which put too much pressure on one of his testicles. But she may have been too shocked, and too weak, to compose such a reply.
“I have no knowledge of the incidents Hébert speaks of,” she quietly said.
Fouquier-Tinville seems to have been troubled by Hébert’s accusations, for he tried to change the thrust of the examination. But one of the jurors stood up and complained that the queen “had not answered the
charge made by Citizen Hébert on the subject of what had passed between her and her son.”
At this point the queen rose from her chair. The stenographer recorded that she appeared “very moved.” “If I did not reply,” she said, “it is because nature recoils from such an accusation against a mother.” She then turned toward the public gallery where the
tricoteuses
and other women visitors sat. “I appeal to all the mothers in this room!” she exclaimed.
Upon this pandemonium broke out in the visitors’ gallery. How I wish I’d been there! Many of the
tricoteuses
broke out into applause. Others shouted that the proceedings should be stopped. Several women fainted. For a few minutes the meeting had to be suspended.
M.-J.-A. Herman, the presiding judge, a protégé of Robespierre brought up in Arras, the same town as the Incorruptible, rang his bell and demanded order. Trying to redress the balance in favor of the court, he asked the queen a series of questions about Varennes. Who had provided her with a carriage in which she had gone away with her family? “It was a foreigner.” Of what nation, Herman asked. “Swedish.” Was it not Fersen, who was living in Paris on the rue du Bac? “Yes,” the queen quietly replied. A few whispers were heard in the spectators’ gallery. My brother’s liaison with the queen had by this time become common knowledge.
The trial’s first day ended with various absurd charges, among which was the accusation that wine bottles had been found under the queen’s bed on the night of August 10, evidence that she had enticed her guards to get drunk. She was also accused of having intended to murder the Duc d’Orléans: having learned of the plot, so went the demented tale, Louis XVI ordered that his wife be searched, upon which two pistols were found on her; he punished her by confining her to her
apartments for a fortnight. “It may be that my husband ordered me to remain in my apartments for a fortnight,” the queen responded disdainfully, “but it was not for any such reason.”
That very evening, Robespierre, upon hearing, over dinner, of Hébert’s charges concerning the queen’s incestuous relations with her son, and of the
tricoteuses
’ support of her, grew furious. “The fool!” he shouted, slamming his fork on his plate. “Can’t he be satisfied with the Capet woman being a Messalina, instead of giving her a public triumph?”
T
UESDAY
, O
CTOBER 15
, a rainy, windy day, the second and last day of Marie Antoinette’s trial, was the birth date of Saint Teresa, the feast day of Marie Antoinette’s mother, and also of her daughter. She woke early, paid special tribute to the saint during the long time she spent in prayer, and was brought to the Tribunal at nine in the morning. One of the first witnesses, who caused a sensation in the courtroom, was the Marquis de La Tour du Pin, who had been a minister of war under Louis XVI, and who, the prosecutor hoped, might help him prove that the queen had meddled in affairs of state. When asked whether he knew the witness he bowed deeply to the queen and replied, “I have indeed the honor to know madame.” La Tour du Pin denied that Marie Antoinette had engaged in any significant politicking. For that bow and for his respectful approach to her, he was to lose his own head a few months later after his own appearance at the Revolutionary Tribunal.
The sitting was suspended after seven and a half hours, and during the recess Rosalie tried to bring Marie Antoinette some soup. “I went up to find the queen,” Rosalie later recalled, “and was about to enter the room when a police superintendent snatched the bowl from me and gave it to his mistress, who was young and covered with finery. ‘This young woman is very eager to see the Widow Capet,’ he said. ‘This is a
charming
opportunity for her.’
Whereupon the woman carried it away, spilling half the soup.”
After the recess the queen’s lawyer, Chauveau-Lagarde, gave a two-hour defense of the accused, emphasizing the lack of any evidence against her. When he was finished Marie Antoinette, who was sitting next to him, whispered: “How tired you must be, monsieur…. I so appreciate all the trouble you’ve taken.” But Chauveau’s vigorous defense enraged Fouquier, who had the lawyer arrested then and there. After the queen’s second attorney, Doucoudray, made his own plea, he was also arrested. It is a marvel that they should have lived to tell the tale; for the following accusation against them appeared the following day in Hébert’s hugely popular periodical,
Le Père Duschene
, couched in his inimitably scurrilous prose: “Is it possible that there should exist scoundrels bold enough to defend her? And yet two babblers from the law courts have had that audacity…. Those two devil’s advocates not only danced like cats on hot bricks to prove the slut’s innocence, but actually dared…to say to the judges that it was enough to have punished the fat hog, and that his whore of a wife should be pardoned.”