The Bourbon Kings of France

by Seward, Desmond

  On 6 October Hébert and a commission visited the Temple to obtain ‘evidence’ from ‘Capet’. Louis signed statements, obviously drafted by Hébert, accusing his mother of counter-revolutionary activities, and of deliberately teaching him to masturbate for her amusement. Madame Royale was brought down to confirm the statements, which her brother repeated—he even accused her of not telling the truth. Weeping with indignation, the girl was removed to make way for Mme Elisabeth, to whom poor Louis again repeated his ‘statements’. Her comment was ‘Oh! he monstre!’ But one of those present said that she was prompted by astonishment rather than revulsion, and that it was quite obvious that her nephew was repeating word for word a lesson which he did not understand.

  His poor, proud, silly mother, prematurely aged—white-haired and half-blind—died magnificently on 16 October 1793. At her trial—she was indicted as ‘the scourge and bloodsucker of France’—Hébert’s disgusting allegations prompted the fine reply, ‘I appeal to all mothers here today.’ Shouts of feminine support from the gallery so alarmed Robespierre that he muttered, ‘The fool. He will save the woman yet!’ Unlike her husband, the ‘Widow Capet’ was taken to the guillotine in an open tumbril like a dung-cart. On the scaffold her courage was sublime; although nearly fainting, she showed not the slightest trace of fear—she even apologized to the headsman for treading on his foot. Napoleon described Marie Antoinette’s killing as ‘something even worse than regicide’, and the splendour of her bearing throughout her trial and execution, and the countless humiliations which accompanied them, disenchanted many of her former enemies with their new masters. For reasons of policy or from sheer indifference—one cannot believe from humanity—her death was kept a secret from her son, who for the rest of his short life always believed that she was somewhere in the Temple.

  Thousands perished in the Terror, royalists like gallant old Malesherbes and his daughter and his grandchildren, together with republicans like André Chénier and Mme Roland—who had once proclaimed, ‘We can only be reborn through blood’—and even the maniac Hébert. Some of the worst excesses took place in the provinces—at Nantes 2,000 enemies of the state were systematically drowned. Other casualties were the regicide Philippe Egalité—characteristically, his speech from the scaffold was ‘one short, obscene word’—and Mme du Barry. On her way to the guillotine, jolting over the cobbles in her tumbril, la du Barry howled and shrieked, imploring a horrified crowd for mercy; observers thought that if the French aristocracy had behaved like her—instead of maintaining a silent, icy, dignity—the Terror could never have taken place. As it was, in May 1794 Louis’s aunt, Mme Elisabeth, was accused of ‘planning to massacre the people, to make away with freedom and restore tyranny’; after the execution her headless body was thrown naked into a common grave. Now only Louis’s sister remained in the Temple, though he never saw her again.

  Everything associated with the monarchy had been demolished. Street names had been changed, statues pulled down. Saint-Denis, the most sacred shrine of French royalty, had been sacked in August 1793; the tombs of the Kings were broken open and their remains dragged out and thrown into a limepit—their embalmed hearts were sold as curiosities (years later the painter Saint-Martin returned those of Louis XIII and Louis XIV, practically undamaged, to Louis XVIII). The phial containing the coronation chrism was smashed—nobody noticed a monk in plain clothes stealing away with several drops on a shard of the shattered sainte ampoule. But for all the tearing down, the Convention could never forget that there was still a King of France in the Temple.

  For the last months of 1793 Louis remained with the Simons, who seem to have grown quite fond of him; the old man had a pigeon loft built for him and even had a toy singing canary, which he had found, repaired and installed in the boy’s room. Some of the better-natured guards used to play draughts and bowls with him. When they were drunk, it was a different story; on one occasion they were found throwing ‘Capet’ round the room, and blowing smoke into his face, while Simon kept on pulling his long hair and threatening to kill him because he refused to sing yet another filthy song. Later, old Mme Simon too admitted that she had hit the child on a number of occasions. But in January 1794 the Simons decided that the job entailed too much responsibility and resigned their post.

  In the months to come, Louis may even have missed the dirty old cobbler’s company. For the Committee of Public Safety decided that more extreme measures were necessary to guard against ‘Charles Capet’s’ escape—people among the Paris mob could be heard referring to ‘The King’ or to ‘Louis XVII’. Accordingly, a guard of four commissioners was appointed, to be relieved daily. There is no detailed account of what took place during the following months, but it seems that orders were given for the boy to be literally walled up on 19 January; apparently his door was nailed to the frame and further secured by great iron plates; his food was pushed in to him on a turn-box inserted in the door, while a small grating at the top of the door enabled the guards to peer in to see if he was still alive. No lamps or candles were allowed, a particularly cruel order as the one window was nailed and shuttered and the child was terrified of the dark—partly because of the rats which constantly scurried across the floor, and under, and sometimes over, his bed. Nobody entered that dark, airless room for six months, an eternity for an eight-year-old, and nobody spoke to him—except occasionally to shout at him through the grating.

  In May 1794 Robespierre came to inspect Madame Royale, and it is more than likely that he peered through the grating at the dim form of his rightful King. The Princess, a spirited fifteen-year-old, had obviously learnt something of her brother’s condition from the guards, and remembered that when she had last seen him the previous October he had seemed unhealthily fat; the man who passed him his food through the turn-box said that he had to shout through the grill to make the boy realize that it was there. She handed a note to ‘the Sea-Green Incorruptible’, demanding that a doctor should see her brother. Naturally, the enemy of tyrants ignored her request.

  On 27 July 1794 Robespierre was deposed, to be beheaded shortly afterwards in circumstances of great agony and humiliation. (He fell because practically the entire Convention went in fear of their lives.) Next day the ci-devant Vicomte de Barras, who had organized the coup, visited Louis at the Temple. We know what he found from a report by later visitors. The room was almost unimaginably filthy and foul-smelling; the King of France had had no means of washing and lay in his excrement on a urine-soaked invalid’s cradle, covered with bugs and lice, surrounded by the rotting remains of uneaten food which the rats gnawed at will. At first Barras thought that the nightmare apparition with matted hair and huge finger-nails was asleep, but then he saw that it had woken and was watching him. Attempts to make Louis get up from his bed of filth failed—if picked up he collapsed as soon as he was released. In response to questions, he said he had no complaints about his guards. The guards told Barras that the child ate nothing and did not even seem to sleep much.

  Barras, horrified, gave orders that Louis should receive medical attention at once and that the revolting room should be washed down immediately. He also recommended that he should be allowed to play in the garden with his sister, and that two women should be appointed to look after him. The Convention ignored his recommendations. Admittedly a new guardian, a young Creole ‘democrat’ from Martinique called Christophe Laurent, was appointed. But for a further two months, during the heat of summer, the child remained immured with his filth and his misery.

  At last, on 1 September 1794, Laurent and two assistants unbarred the door. Asked why he had not eaten—there was an untouched meal on the table—Louis replied simply that he wanted to die. He was carried out and brought into another room, where he was bathed and deloused, and then a doctor saw him. He realized at once that the child was seriously ill, covered in sores and tumours—a skin condition made it torment for him to remove his breeches.

  Louis’s room was cleaned out and he was given toys, cards and writ
ing materials, and taken each day to the top of the Tower for a breath of fresh air. One day he picked some flowers growing on the battlements and dropped them outside a door on the way down; it was the door of his mother’s old room and he may have remembered how he had once brought her flowers from his own garden at the Tuileries—obviously he thought she was still there.

  But the improvement was very slight. He was still not allowed to play in the garden, not to see his sister and not to have a light at night (although the guards managed to kill the rats in his bedroom, with arsenic). However, in November Laurent acquired a more agreeable, if somewhat ineffectual assistant, one Gomin, who was timid but imaginative. He brought Louis flowers and even a lamp, and took him into another room. It was some weeks before the child trusted him sufficiently to speak. Suddenly Louis said, ‘You’re the man who gave me the flowers—I haven’t forgotten.’

  Just before Christmas 1794 commissioners again came to inspect the prisoner, whom certain members of the Convention had recently been referring to as ‘a rallying point for aristocrats’—and also as ‘the Capet foetus’. The commissioners’ leader, Harmand, described the visit twenty years later (some months before he himself died of want and starvation). They found the King in a bare, scantily-furnished, but clean, set of rooms, playing with a pack of cards. Louis, dressed in a neat, slate-coloured sailor suit, looked extraordinary, with thin elongated limbs, a disproportionately small torso and chest, and curiously rounded shoulders, though ‘the head was very handsome, with long fine hair which was well kept and light brown in colour’. Harmand found livid swellings on his arms and legs, which he attributed to rickets. What struck him most, however, was the child’s refusal to speak or to answer questions, almost as though deaf and dumb; he did not even respond to offers of toys and sweets. Harmand was also shocked by the royal diet—a coarse bowl of blackish soup, some equally black beef, a platter of lentils, half a dozen burnt chestnuts, and no wine. He ordered grapes for the prisoner, who ate them without saying a word.

  In January 1795 ‘Capet’ had the honour of being the subject of a debate by the Convention, who discussed whether he and his sister should be exiled or remain in prison. A lawyer called Cambacères argued that ‘the exile of a tyrant has always been the first step in his return to power’, and cited the case of Tarquin and the Romans. The Convention voted to keep the children in prison. The only power which tried to save them was Spain; to his eternal honour, Charles IV—otherwise a pitiful degenerate, and immortalized as such by Goya—insisted on the release of his young cousins as a pre-requisite condition for any peace between the two countries.

  Gomin knew something of what the ‘tyrant’ suffered. When the guard told yet another commissioner that Louis was ill, the man replied, ‘There are many children worth just as much as he, who are far iller—and many of the ones who die are worth a good deal more.’ Gomin remembered that the prisoner repeated the words to himself. Another commissioner told Gomin in front of Louis, ‘In six weeks time that child will either be an idiot or dead.’

  His health worsened—tumours appeared on his knees and elbows which made any movement an agony. Ironically he was suffering from the King’s Evil, a tuberculosis which sometimes attacks the bones as well as the lymph glands. Gomin did his best, bringing the child toys, playing draughts with him and fetching books from the Temple library for him to read. One evening he looked beseechingly at Gomin, whom he obviously thought understood him, and then looked at the door. ‘Let me see her once before I die,’ he begged. Gomin had not the heart to tell him that his mother was dead; he said awkwardly that it was impossible, whereupon the prisoner cried piteously.

  Indeed by now there was no hope for King Louis XVII. On 16 March 1795 a royalist agent, M de Frotté, wrote to an adventurous Irishwoman, Lady Atkyns (who had wild dreams of rescuing ‘the King’) to tell her what he had heard from a member of the Convention: ‘Under Robespierre they so debased the unfortunate child, physically and morally, that he cannot live … you have no idea of the degeneration and brutishness of the little creature.’ If Louis was far from brutish, it was none the less true that his health was broken—he was increasingly attacked by fevers.

  Laurent left the Temple that March, to be replaced by Etienne Lasne, a house-painter who had once been a soldier and had seen Louis at the Tuileries. A tough but kind-hearted character, the old soldier tried to make the boy as comfortable as possible, cleaning out his room meticulously. Accompanied by Gomin on the violin, he sang to him—sometimes marching songs of the royal guard, which they hoped the boy might remember—played cards with him and read to him. When Louis grew too weak to climb the stairs, Lasne would carry him to the top of the Tower where he could breathe fresher air.

  At the beginning of May 1795, a tradesman managed to catch a glimpse of Louis XVII at the Temple, his face covered with ulcers and pimples, his body weirdly deformed—‘the most pitiable creature that ever was seen’—and barely able to sit up. It was plain that he was seriously ill and from 6 May doctors, supervised by commissioners, made regular visits, prescribing medicine and diet. Once, when the doctor was about to leave, Louis clung to him and—referring to the commissioners—begged, ‘Don’t leave me alone with those wicked men!’

  He was growing weaker every day. Moved to a room which overlooked the Temple garden, he was barely able to look out of the window at the summer. Lasne and Gomin, who were really a very decent pair, did their best to cheer him, and Gomin brought him flowers assiduously. Then, on 6 June, Louis fainted and his guards suspected that he was failing. On the evening of 7 June, Gomin found him crying; asked if he was in pain, the prisoner sobbed, ‘Toujours seul—ma mère est restée dans l’autre tour.’ He died during the night of 7–8 June 1795, with his arms round Lasne’s neck. He was ten years old. He was buried secretly, by night, in a common grave at the cemetery of the church of Sainte-Marguerite; it is probable that the sexton later re-buried his remains nearer the church wall.

  Many attempts were made to show that Louis XVII did not die in the Temple, and more than thirty claimants have tried to prove that they were Louis, or one of his descendants. Admittedly, the silent, rickety little wreck of 1795 bore small resemblance to the talkative, charming, intelligent child of 1793; and there may well have been a plot to rescue him, to substitute a deaf and dumb inmate of the Invalides hospital in his place. But all the evidence supports the traditional—and generally accepted—belief that the boy who died in the Temple was indeed Louis XVII.

  Few will disagree with the Comte d’Hézecques’s opinion that the little King had been given ‘a course of poison more horrible and protracted than any dose of laudanum’. The Count adds, ‘The saddest thing for France is that every member of the Convention was responsible for the infamy of his long martyrdom.’

  ‘Tartuffe’

  LOUIS XVIII (1795–1824)

  _____________

  ‘Unite—and forget’

  The Bourbons did not die with the Ancien Régime. One of the least known of French Kings, Louis XVIII was also one of the ablest. Had he succeeded to the throne before his elder brother, Louis XVI, this unpleasant but interesting man might well have saved the monarchy.

  Louis-Stanislas was born at Versailles on 17 November 1755, the fourth son of the Dauphin Louis, and given the ancient title of Comte de Provence. Like his brothers, his education was entrusted to the pious Duc de Vauguyon, whose repressive regime may have been responsible for his lukewarm attitude towards religion. From a very early age he showed unusual intelligence, aided by a phenomenal memory. Delicate, with deformed hips which made it difficult for him to ride a horse, he was studious and developed a taste for history and literature which lasted throughout his life. He particularly enjoyed Voltaire, and the writings of the Encyclopédistes. Naturally malicious, he was apt to sneer at his clumsy brother, Berry (the future Louis XVI), who was only a year older, mocking his bad grammar—‘A Prince should at least know his own language.’

  Berry gave him a reveali
ng nickname—Tartuffe. This is the title-role of one of Molière’s greatest plays, a study of a sanctimonious hypocrite who covets both his benefactor’s wife and his benefactor’s goods. As a Voltairean, Louis-Stanislas was not exactly sanctimonious, while he was to be a very restrained adulterer (at any rate by the standards of his brother Artois, or of his grandfather). But in secret he always coveted his brother’s crown, and undoubtedly he resembled Tartuffe in his cynicism and cunning, in his cruel wit and in his icy selfishness. Probably the quality which most of all prompted his unenviable nickname was his false bonhommie.

  When Berry ascended the throne in 1774, Louis-Stanislas was given the traditional style of Monsieur Frère du Roi. He was Heir Presumptive until the birth of the Dauphin Louis-Joseph in 1781, and no one was ever more conscious of the majesty of the French monarchy than Monsieur. Although only eighteen, he remonstrated angrily with his brother when he brought back the Parlements in 1774; ‘France will soon have republican senators like those in Genoa, Venice or Berne and the King will be nothing more than a Doge.’ But his brother told him that they were both too young to rely on their own judgement. Indeed, as a young man Monsieur was a thorough-going reactionary in every way. He voted against Turgot’s Six Edicts and, while delighting in them himself, urged the King to suppress any works of the Encyclopédistes which might encourage sedition. He regarded the American Revolution as ‘a punishable rebellion’.