Виктория Холт - Flaunting, Extravagant Queen

When Antoinette returned to the Conciergerie she knew that there were but a few hours left to her.

* * *

In her cell she wrote to Elisabeth.

‘It is to you, dear sister, that I write for the last time. I have been sentenced to death, but not to shameful death, since this death is only shameful to criminals, whereas I shall rejoin your brother. I hope to be firm as he was in his last moments. My conscience is clear although I feel great grief because I must forsake my children. Through you, I send to them my blessing, in the hope that some day, when they are older, they will be with you once more and able to enjoy your tender care …

‘I have to speak to you of a matter which is extremely painful. I know how much my little boy has made you suffer. Forgive him, my dear sister; remember how young he is, and how easy it is to make a child say whatever one wants, to put words he does not understand into his mouth … I hope a day will come when he will grasp the full value of your kindness and of the affection you have shown to both my children … ’

She stopped and buried her face in her hands. She could not go on.

But after a while she picked up her pen and resolutely continued to write.

* * *

Rosalie came into the cell.

She brought a bowl of soup with her.

The Queen was lying fully dressed on her bed.

‘It is seven o’clock, Madame,’ said the girl. ‘Will you not take a little soup?’

‘I am not hungry, Rosalie.’

‘Madame, you ate nothing yesterday. You will be so weak. To please me … ’

The Queen smiled. ‘You have been good to me, Rosalie,’ she said. She took the bowl and tried a spoonful; she looked apologetically at the girl, for she could manage no more.

Rosalie turned away because she was crying.

After a while she said: ‘Madame, there are orders that you should not wear black.’

‘Do they care then what I wear?’ She laughed. ‘They have always been interested in what I wore. Is this interest to continue then … right to the end?’

‘You are to wear your white dress, Madame.’

‘I will change. I need new linen.’

‘Has the haemorrhage been bad, Madame?’

The Queen nodded.

‘I have a clean chemise here now. I washed it.’

The gendarme, stationed at the door, advanced into the room as the Queen slipped behind her bed to change.

He stood watching her insolently.

‘Cannot I have this little bit of privacy?’ asked Antoinette.

Rosalie cried: ‘Stand back awhile.’

‘My orders are not to let the widow out of my sight,’ said the man.

Rosalie stood in front of him and lifted her blazing eyes to his face.

He was a little man, and Rosalie’s face was on a level with his. He was abashed by the scorn and contempt he saw there; even as Hébert had been made to feel by the women in the gallery of the court.

He did not attempt to advance, and so the Queen changed her clothes and put on the white dress.

* * *

She was praying when, an hour later, her cell was invaded by the judges, the executioner and a priest.

Her sentence was read again; then Henri Samson, the executioner, cut off her hair and tied her hands behind her back.

‘Is that necessary?’ she asked.

‘Those are my orders,’ said Samson.

* * *

The tocsins were ringing. The people were lining the streets. The troops were on guard, and many of the streets were barred to other traffic.

This was the day for which so many had longed. They would stand in safety and see the Queen ride by to her death.

It was a little past eleven o’clock when the tumbril drew up outside the gates of the Conciergerie. The Queen took her place in the rough cart; there was merely a bare board on which to sit, yet she, in her white cap with her ragged hair showing beneath it, sat as though this were the glass coach in which she had made her entry into France.

Samson stood behind her guarding her on her ride through the streets.

It must not be too quick, that ride. All the people of Paris wanted to see her during her last hour on Earth. In the crowd pamphlets were being sold: La Vie Scandaleuse de Marie Antoinette. Most of these had been composed by Jeanne de Lamotte.

Many had come out to shout their scorn at her; but it was not easy to do this, for the woman in the tumbril, sitting so erect, her hands tied behind her back, rode as though she were still a Queen.

As the tumbril passed the church of Saint-Roch, someone cried out: ‘Death to the wicked woman who tried to ruin France! Death to the Austrian whore!’ But no one took up the cry, and the Queen did not seem to hear it.

The tumbril had crossed the river and was rumbling along the rue Saint-Honoré. There a man raised his sword and shouted: ‘There she is, the infamous Antoinette. She’s finished at last, my friends.’ But no one responded.

* * *

Into the Place de la Révolution. Here the crowds were thickest. Two objects dominated the grim place; one the statue of the Goddess of Liberty, the Phrygian cap on her head, and the sword of justice in her hand; and the other that grim instrument of death – the guillotine.

Beside this last the tumbril had come to a halt. Antoinette stepped down almost eagerly.

She mounted the steps looking neither to right nor left; she showed no sign of fear. As Louis had done before her, she was ready and, it seemed, fearless.

For a moment she looked at the Tuileries and thought she saw instead the glorious Palace of Versailles, and herself coming there as a young girl to the shy husband who had seemed afraid of her. She thought of Trianon – her own beloved Petit Trianon – and of the days and nights she had spent there with Axel de Fersen. All so unimportant now – of such small significance; for this was the end. The end of sorrow; the end of pain.

The executioner and his men had seized her and forced her into a kneeling position, so that her throat was resting on the lower half of the circular hole; the board was fitted over her neck, imprisoning her.

She closed her eyes. ‘Farewell, my love,’ she murmured. ‘Try to find some happiness in this life, for you have long to live, I trust. Farewell, my little ones, and do not grieve, my dearest, for what you have done … I know they made you do it; and when you are old enough to understand, I want you to forget …’

‘Farewell, life … Farewell, France … Farewell …’

The great knife had descended.

Then the executioner lifted that bloody and once lovely head.

‘Long live the Republic!’ he cried; and those who had been unable to see because the press of people was so great knew that the moment had come. Marie Antoinette of Austria and Lorraine, widow of Louis, one time King of France, was dead.

Few people maintain an attitude of impartiality towards Marie Antoinette. At the time of her death she was compared with Messalina and Agrippina. Later, on the return of the Monarchy, she became the ‘martyred Queen’, and was spoken of almost as a saint. Neither extreme is, of course, the true picture.

When I set out to find this, at first it seemed to me that there emerged from my research a not very intelligent woman, concerned chiefly with glorifying her own dainty charms in which she delighted, careless, light-hearted, pleasure-loving, almost stupid in her failure to see the looming shadow of revolution, yet generous and good-hearted – a very ordinary human being.

But the fascination of Marie Antoinette is the sudden emergence of the brave and noble woman who took the place of the frivolous one almost overnight. It is difficult to believe that the butterfly of the Trianon is the same woman who endured so stoically her sufferings in the Temple and the Conciergerie, whose thoughts were mainly for her husband and children, and who was in such deep mental and physical agony as she rode so bravely and so royally in her tumbril to the Place de la Révolution.

It has been an absorbing pleasure to try to understand this woman of dual personality, and I have been greatly helped in this by the following:M. Guizot. The History of France.G. Lenôtre. Translated by H. Noel Williams. Paris in the Revolution.Thomas Carlyle. The French Revolution.Iain D. B. Pilkington. Queen of the Trianon.Stefan Zweig. Marie Antoinette.Louis Adolphe Thiers. Translated, with notes, by Frederick Shoberl. The History of the French Revolution.Catherine Charlotte, Lady Jackson. Old Paris, Its Courts and Literary Salons.Hilaire Belloc. Marie Antoinette.J. B. Morton. The Dauphin.Nesta H. Webster. Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette Before the Revolution.Frédéric Barbey. A Friend of Marie Antoinette.Nesta H. Webster. The French Revolution.

JP.