The Queen's Lover (30 page)

There were many other indignities imposed on the queen that had not been inflicted upon her husband. When she was led into the courtyard of the Palais de Justice she saw the manure cart in which she was to be taken to what was known as the place de la Révolution. She had probably expected to be taken there in a closed carriage, as her husband had been! The vision of the open tumbrel drawn by two farm horses seemed to startle her terribly. She asked the executioner to untie her hands so that she could relieve herself. This she did, squatting in a corner of the prison wall. Then she offered her hands to Sanson so that he might tie them again. Once in the tumbrel, she tried to sit facing the horses, the way passengers in a carriage habitually do, but her guards made her sit with her back to the animals. Abbé Girard sat next to her, holding a small ivory crucifix, but she did not say a word to him.

Thirty thousand troops were lined up along the route. For a moment the cart stopped. A smiling child, held up by its mother, blew her a kiss. Her eyes filled with tears. But there were also yells of hatred. “Make way for the Austrian!” “Long live the Republic!” As the cart jolted and the queen almost lost her balance a derisive voice shouted, “Ah, those aren’t your Trianon cushions!” After her brief bout of tears the queen remained impassive, expressionless. “The slut was audacious and insolent to the end,” Hébert would write, furious about the dignity and courage she displayed throughout.

The cart turned onto the rue Saint-Honoré. How many times had
she gone down that street on the way to the opera in her glittering finery and flashy Léonard headdress, sitting in a gold-and-silver carriage drawn by eight white horses! “Death to the Austrian!” a voice shouted.

The place Louis XV—I refuse to use its new name—was filled with a huge, noisy crowd by the time the tumbrel came lumbering in from the rue Saint-Honoré. When she looked to her left, the queen could see the Tuileries, where she had lived happy days with her family, where Axel had held her in his arms, in whose gardens she had played with her children.

The cart stopped in front of the scaffold. Not accepting any help, Marie Antoinette hurriedly climbed its stairs, with that same light, lilting step that had once so enchanted her peers. She climbed it so speedily, in fact, that she lost one of the little purple shoes Madame Elisabeth had sent her a few weeks earlier from the Temple. Limping a little, upon reaching the platform she trod on the executioner’s foot.

“I beg your pardon, monsieur, I didn’t do it on purpose.”

Those were her last words. It was 12:15, a quarter past noon. According to witnesses, she shut her eyes as she was tied to the upright wooden plank. The plank was then tipped horizontally, and the heavy wooden collar was fixed around her bare neck. Another few seconds passed; one heard the guillotine’s whistling whir and click; then the executioner’s assistant held up her head by its white hair, carrying it around the scaffold to great applause.

Suddenly the gendarmes in the front row rushed forward and arrested a man who had crawled out from beneath the scaffold. He held a white handkerchief in his bloodstained hands and held a flower in his teeth.

While the deranged intruder was taken away, the crowd parted to make way for the cart that would carry Marie Antoinette’s body to the Madeleine cemetery. There the executioners, noticing that no coffin or grave had yet been prepared, are said to have thrown her body on the
grass, the head between the legs. No one knows how long her corpse remained lying there. It was not until November 1 that the grave digger sent in his bill for the burial: “The Widow Capet, for the coffin: 6 livres. For the grave and grave diggers: 15 livres, 35 sous.”

Requiescat in pace,
Maria Antonia Josefa Johanna of Austria-Lorraine.
Requiescat in pace,
my beloved, unseen friend.

Axel:

LOVE AND GRIEF

I
READ THE
news of her death in a newspaper. What a dreadful way to have one’s life transformed! As I sat at my club in Brussels, a valet brought me
Le Standard de Bruxelles,
along with the glass of port I take every evening before supper. And there it was, the banner headline,
“La Reine de France Éxécutée
.” I dropped the paper and let my head fall to my knees. A few acquaintances passed by, touched my shoulder to see if I was ill. I would raise my head, tell them fibs about a migraine, and let it fall again.

Thus prostrated, I began to wonder why I was feeling so numb, so void of all emotion. It’s as if the grief were imbued with its own anesthetic. All I was experiencing was a deep sense of shock. I was surprised that I wasn’t more upset…. I felt nothing; I was upset that I wasn’t more upset. Yet I’d been thinking about her ceaselessly all day: of the dreadful circumstances of her last months; of her poor son—perhaps my own too!—and the torments to which he was probably being subjected; of her unhappiness at not seeing him in her last hours; of the doubts she may have had about my devotion to her.

Why were my emotions not even tinged with sorrow? I worried. Was I a monster? Apart from my grief at Gustavus’s death I had never
mourned before. My mother, my father, my beloved sister, were still alive; the whole process was quite new to me. Instead of sorrow I was beginning to feel great anger, rage. I was particularly indignant at the behavior of French émigrés in Brussels. The French were barely mourning a queen whom they should have adored. A typical brute, Monsieur de Courban, former page in the royal stables, wanted to give a play and a concert a few days after her death. What frivolity and insensitivity, I thought to myself, what a miserable, detestable nation! I was equally incensed about the lack of mourning on the part of the Viennese: Emperor Francis II held one memorial mass for his aunt at the Hofburg, and allowed the round of dinner parties and court theatricals to continue at their habitual pace.

As I received fresh details of her trial and execution, my anger grew. The fact that she was alone in her last moments without consolation, with no one to talk to, no one to whom she could transmit her last wishes, was horrifying. “The monsters from hell!” I wrote. “Without revenge, my heart will never be satisfied.”

Indeed my rage at these indignities incited an increasingly strong desire for revenge, revenge against all those wretches responsible for the queen’s death, for that of the saintly king, for the toppling of France’s sacred monarchy. This need for reprisal was the only emotion that sustained me. I fantasized with enthusiasm, with great appetite, about the deaths of everyone of my Toinette’s enemies. I imagined exquisitely dreadful tortures for Robespierre, Marat, Herman, even oafish, moneycrazed, relatively merciful Danton, even for her erstwhile friend Barnave, who was executed soon after her. In the first few days this lust for revenge was the only emotion that devoured me.

The week I received the dreadful news I went riding daily in the chill autumnal rain to be alone, to figure myself out. I rode, I rode for hours, going deep into the forests that surround Brussels, remembering those times when Toinette and I had ridden together in the woods of SaintCloud
and Fontainebleau, when we’d raced each other and she’d grown annoyed that I’d given her a large handicap, or that I’d slackened my pace in order to let her win. While riding, while waiting for my emotions to settle, I pondered the nature of love.

I’d recently reread Saint Augustine. “My love is my weight, where it goes I go,” he’d written.
“Amor meus, pondus meum: illo feror, quocumque feror
.” Ah, what wisdom, to focus on the gravity of love; this is why I was feeling so unmoored, so floating-in-a-void—I’d lost the love-weight that had anchored me for all those years!

Saint Teresa of Avila was also masterful on the theme of love: she distinguished lasting unions from the “falling-in-love” kind, and described them thus: “It is as if water were falling from the sky into a river…and the river water can no longer be divided or separated from the water which fell from the sky.”

There are two types of men: the kind who are happiest when they’re possessed by another, and those who are happiest when self-possessed. In my youth I was sure I was one of the latter. It turned out that I was wrong.

Ah, the recurring drama of eroticism! Eleanore entranced me physically, but I believe in something called the soul, and my beloved queen held mine totally in her sway.

I rode on, remembering those times when we’d dismounted our horses and sat on a park bench and first kissed each other; remembering the further embraces exchanged in the pavilions of the Petit Trianon, the consummation of our love in that small octagonal chamber above her apartments at Versailles.

As these memories returned, grief began to assault me at last, like a tidal wave.

“Her suffering, her death, and my love can never leave my mind,” I wrote in my journal eight days after her execution. “Oh my God, why did I have to lose Her and what will become of me?”

And two days later: “Every day my grief increases. Every day I realize all the more how much I have lost—I have lost all.”

In early December: “I would have been much happier if I’d died on June 21, the night of Varennes. It would be cowardice not to admit how much I suffer.”

On Christmas Eve I wrote to Sophie: “Losing
Her
is the greatest grief of my entire life, and my sorrows will only leave me when I die. Never have I felt so deeply the value of all that I possessed, and never have I loved Her so much….”

In the first months of 1794 I began traveling all over Europe to find objects that had belonged to my Toinette—by that time antiquarians and collectors had snapped up every one of her possessions, even the few chairs and teacups she had been allowed to bring to the Temple. I found my principal consolation in touching things that her hands, her lips, had lingered on.

In Vienna I bought a marquetry cabinet by Boulle of gold brass and pear wood embossed with mother-of-pearl; a painting by Van Meytens showing my love at the age of nine, dancing with two of her brothers in a pantomime ballet,
The Triumph of Love
.

In Florence I purchased a four-foot-high jewel chest of ebony and gilded rosewood, with inlays of flowered Sèvres porcelain, an armchair upholstered in green flowered silk…oh the joy of sitting in the same seat she’d once used!

In London I discovered a Riesner table of mother-of-pearl and gilt brass, and andirons in the shape of large gilt bronze camels; I had noticed both of these treasures many times in her rooms while holding Her in my arms.

In Düsseldorf I bought a white porcelain bowl in the form of an overturned breast, its luscious pink nipple pointing downward, reminding me of my love for her breasts, the pleasure I took in fondling them.

In Naples I obtained Her harp! It was made for Her in 1774, the year
we first met—nineteen-year-old kids—at the opera ball. How clearly I remember Her playing that harp…. She was playing it on that day in 1783 when I’d just come back from America, and surprised Her in her apartments.

I spent the first months of 1794 in an agony of sorrow and remembrance, acquiring and beginning to live with these objects. They would help me greatly in learning to live with my grief. Grief! After it had finally exploded in me, a few weeks after her death, it had continually grown deeper. I was startled, astounded by its turbulence. I began to take notes on what I was discovering about grief, hoping that writing about it could help bring me a measure of peace.

I was learning that it is slow, patient work, a meticulous process that must be carried out over a far vaster amount of time than society usually allots us; that it is crucial to retain links with the places, the belongings, once shared with the departed; that it is a slow, long, gradual process of severance. What happens if we don’t allow the work of mourning to proceed on this stately course? Like those spirits of the dead in Greek literature who went to riot if improperly mourned—devastating crops, destroying whole cities—the psychic energies reserved for mourning, if suppressed, can cause grievous harm.

At some time in my first months of mourning I also reread Homer’s
Iliad
. Here we are in books 5, 6, and 7, looking in on the clamorous terror of Homeric battle. Lances are being driven clear through eye sockets, livers, and genitals, brains pour out of mouths and severed heads, limbless torsos spin like marbles about the black-blooded earth, men catch their gushing bowels in their hands, crashing “thunderously as towering oaks” onto the blood-soaked ground, and throughout this mayhem there remains on both sides one obsession, one concern: to call an occasional truce that will allow each side to properly bury and commemorate their dead. By mutual consent and for this purpose only, all fighting stops, and on both sides the night is spent in lamentations, in
washing and anointing the treasured corpses, in adorning funeral pyres with flowers and drenching them with wine, in honoring with cleansing fire the bones that will eventually be carried back to the warriors’ homes. Mourning rites, Homer tells us, serve in great part to protect survivors from the excesses of their pain. Quite as treasurable as wealth and fame, he reminds us, is the honor of a proper funeral; and life’s principal terror, to the Greeks, was the disgrace of being improperly mourned.