by Jean Plaidy
Elisabeth tried to comfort her, as did her daughter; but during those days there was no comfort which life could offer Antoinette.
Madame Tison, coming into her cell, would jeer at her. ‘This is a bit different from Versailles, eh? This is a bit different from that Trianon!’
But one day when Madame Tison jeered at her something in the dejected attitude of the Queen brought a catch to the woman’s voice which sounded odd and unlike her. Madame Tison turned angrily away, put a startled hand to her cheek and found a tear there.
She tried to excuse herself.
‘It’s that child,’ she murmured under her breath. ‘It’s taking him from her … seems a bit cruel. That Hébert, it’s his doings. Who does he think he is? He gives himself the airs of an aristocrat.’
Madame Tison continued to jeer at the Queen, but now there did not seem to be much point in those jeers. The Queen was indifferent to them and Madame Tison no longer uttered them with the same enthusiasm.
Then she ceased to jeer; and oddly enough she discovered new feelings in herself. She would lie awake at night, and sometimes she would awaken out of dreams sobbing, and the Queen always figured in those dreams.
‘You going crazy?’ asked Tison.
Madame Tison would shiver and stare into the darkness.
The Dauphin lay sobbing in his new apartment.
Simon bent over him, shaking him. Simon shook the boy with relish. This was the child who one day might have been King of France. Who would have thought that he, Simon, who had known such dire poverty, would have the opportunity of boxing the ears of the future King of France?
Simon was filled with ecstasy at the thought. It showed what the revolution could do for a poor man. This boy who had had everything he could want – luxury, food, fine garments, people bowing wherever he went – was now the prisoner of Simon.
Citizen Hébert had spoken earnestly to Simon. ‘We want to make Louis Charles Capet a son of the people, you understand. He is but a boy. We want to make him a true son of the revolution. We want to make a man of him … you understand me? A man of the people.’
Simon was illiterate. He had once had a low-class eating-house in the rue de Seine, but he had not made a success of it. He had lived in utter poverty. He had done all sorts of things besides being a cobbler, in the hope of getting a living, but he had always been a failure until the revolution came. He was crude; he spoke the language of the faubourgs; he had lived with the lowest. He was the sort of man who Hébert needed for the task which lay ahead.
Now he leaned over the Dauphin and shook him roughly.
The child looked up at him, too wretched to care about anything but his own misery.
‘Here, what’s the matter with you, eh?’
‘I want my mother,’ said the boy.
Simon bandaged his wound for him.
‘How did you get this?’
‘I was riding on a stick.’
‘That’s a queer thing to do … ride on a stick. What do you want to do that for?’
‘Pretending it was a horse.’
Simon spat over his shoulder in disbelief.
The boy was uncomfortable to be exposed before the eyes of this crude man.
‘Here,’ said Simon, ‘you don’t need to be so particular. We’re all alike, you know. Some of us knows a bit more than others. I reckon I could show you a thing or two.’
‘What?’ said the boy.
Simon winked.
He then taught the boy how to masturbate. It was all part of the duties outlined to him by Hébert.
‘Who taught you that?’ demanded Simon.
‘You did,’ said the boy.
‘That’s a lie.’
‘But you … you did … You know you did!’
A blow sent the Dauphin reeling across the room. He was startled. He had never been treated in such a way before. He stared in astonishment at Simon.
‘Now, not so many lies,’ said Simon. ‘You’ve got to tell the truth like a patriot.’
‘I was telling the truth.’
Simon caught the boy by his ear.
‘When I say who taught you that, you give me the truth. You say, my mother.’
The boy flushed scarlet. ‘My mother … But … she … she must not know of this. She … she would be … very angry. She would be ashamed of it.’ His lips trembled. ‘Please let me go back to my mother.’
Simon shook the boy’s head to and fro, still gripping his ear violently. ‘Didn’t I tell you I wanted the truth?’
The boy looked bewildered.
‘Listen here,’ said Simon. ‘Your mother taught you that. When you slept in the bed with her.’
The boy was silent, the pain in his ear made him want to scream.
‘Yes, you used to lie between her and your aunt, and they used to say, do that … and they laughed at you, while you did it.’
The boy shook his head. It was too fantastic. His mother to do such a thing! His saintly aunt! He longed to be with them; he longed to return to sanity.
‘And I’ll tell you something else your mother did, shall I? She used to hold you tight against her …’ Simon released the boy’s ear and put his foul mouth against it.
His whispering words made the boy feel that he had stepped into some fantastically horrible world which was quite outside his comprehension.
Simon finished by saying: ‘Now that’s what really happened. Is it not so?’
‘It … it couldn’t,’ said the Dauphin.
Simon shook him until his teeth chattered and the room swung round him.
‘I tell you it did.’
‘It didn’t … it didn’t … it didn’t!’ sobbed the Dauphin.
Simon’s foul face was close to the boy’s. He said: ‘I’m going to teach you to speak the truth … no matter what I have to do to you.’
The Dauphin stared at him with horrified eyes. This was like one of his nightmares coming true. He shook his head dumbly.
But Simon was not perturbed. A few beatings … a few days all alone … on black bread and lentils … then they would see.
Simon would not disappoint Hébert. They would make the boy admit anything they wanted him to. After all, he was only eight years old.
Madame Tison dreamed terrible dreams. She dreamed that her bedroom was filled with headless corpses which marched towards her, getting nearer and nearer. They carried their heads before them, and the eyes in their heads accused her while the lips chanted: ‘Madame Tison, your turn will come.’
Often she dreamed of the Queen, the Queen with her arms outstretched, the Queen crying for her son.
When she saw the Queen standing at the window hoping for a glimpse of the Dauphin, she shared her misery.
Her husband was brutal to her; he struck her once or twice. ‘What’s come over you? Do you want to lose us our job? We’re in clover here. Do you want to get us turned out of the prison?’
She was sent for that she might be questioned.
‘Go on,’ said Tison. ‘What are you waiting for?’
‘I do not want to tell them,’ she said. ‘I do not want to be their spy.’
Her husband advanced, his arm lifted to strike her. ‘You’ll go,’ he said, ‘and you’ll tell them about that new guard we saw talking to Elisabeth.’
So she went and, as though under a spell, she told.
When she returned to the prison she burst into the Queen’s quarters. Madame Royal was sitting at the table staring ahead of her; Madame Elisabeth was praying; and the Queen was at the window, hoping for a glimpse of the Dauphin.
Madame Tison ran to the Queen and threw herself at her feet; she took the hem of her dress and looked imploringly up at Antoinette.
‘Madame, forgive me,’ she cried. ‘I am going mad. I am a miserable sinner. I have spied on you … They are watching you all the time, because they want to murder you as they murdered the King … Madame, I beg your forgiveness for what I have done.’
The Queen’s face softened immedi
ately. ‘You must not be distressed. What have you done you have been made to do. And you have lately been very kind.’
‘I am going mad … mad, Madame. These terrible dreams. … I cannot live with them. They haunt me … they will not leave me …’
The guards came in. They seized her and took her away.
That night the news went round the Temple: ‘Madame Tison has gone mad.’
The Queen was at the barred window. He could not see her but she could catch a glimpse of him now and then. How he had changed! He no longer seemed like her little boy. His clothes were stained and greasy; his hair was unkempt.
He shouted as he ran about the courtyard. That gross man, Simon, played games with him … rough games.
They sang together. Antoinette recognised the revolutionary song ‘Ça ira’. It was strange to hear those words on the lips of a son of the royal house.
But was he well? Was he happy?
If only she might speak to him, have his own assurance that all was well with him.
‘My darling boy …’ she murmured.
Then she heard the thin reedy voice of her son singing in the courtyard below.
‘Allons, enfants de la patrie …’
‘They have taken him from me completely,’ she told herself. ‘What does anything matter now? Surely I have touched the nadir of all my sorrows.’
But she was wrong. A greater sorrow awaited her.
It was decided that the time had come for the Queen to stand her trial.
One August morning a carriage came to the door of the Temple. With resignation Antoinette said good-bye to Madame Elisabeth and Madame Royale.
She seemed dazed as she walked out of the Temple; and as she passed under the low porch she forgot to stoop, and knocked her head on the hard stone.
‘You have hurt yourself,’ said one of the guards, overcome by compassion.
‘Nothing can hurt me now,’ she answered.
She stepped into the carriage and was taken to the Conciergerie.
Chapter XVII
THE LAST RIDE
There was little comfort in the Conciergerie.
She was taken to a small room with barred windows recently vacated by an old General who had left that day in a tumbril for the Place de la Revolution.
Moisture trickled down the walls of the cell and it was impossible to keep the mattress dry.
The Conciergerie was known throughout Paris as the prison of doom. Few left it nowadays except for that last journey to the guillotine.
Hébert was inflaming the people against the Queen. It was time, he said, that she tried on Samson’s necktie. It was time the executioner should play ball with the she-wolf’s head. She should be chopped into mincemeat to pay for the blood she had on her conscience.
But the military commanders were not eager for the death of Antoinette. The war was going less satisfactorily, and it was felt that alive she could be used to bargain with the Austrian enemy.
Fersen was in despair when he heard of her removal to the Conciergerie, and at the root of his fear was his feeling of helplessness.
He wrote to his sister: ‘Since I have heard that the Queen is in the Conciergerie, I have no longer felt that I am alive, for it is not life to exist as I do and to suffer the pains which I now endure. If I could do something to bring about her release my agony would be less. It is terrible that all I can do is to go about imploring others to act. I would give my life to save her. My greatest happiness would be to die that she might live. I reproach myself for breathing this pure air while she is in that loathsome place. My life is poisoned, so that I veer from pain to wrath and from wrath back to pain.’
But Fersen was powerless. He could only mourn.
There was more kindness in the Conciergerie than there had been in the Temple. Was this because the place was known as the ‘ante-room of death’?
The jailer’s wife, Madame Richard, was a kindly woman. She was charmed by the Queen’s graciousness and did all she could for her comfort. She made her husband fit a piece of carpet over that part of the ceiling through which the water dripped onto the bed. And when Madame Richard’s little boy came into the cell, the Queen embraced him because he was as fair-haired as the Dauphin was, and of the same age.
‘You see, Madame Richard,’ she said, ‘he reminds me of my own son.’
Madame Richard turned away to hide her tears, and after that she asked the police commissioner, Michonis, who had been a lemonade-seller before the revolution and was now an inspector of prisoners, if he would discover and bring news of the Queen’s children. ‘For what harm can that do to the Republic?’ she asked. ‘And look what good it can do to a poor mother!’
So Michonis, who was a good-hearted man, brought little bits of news about Madame Elisabeth and Madame Royale. The Dauphin was well and not unhappy, he said. ‘These young children,’ he added, ‘they are resilient. They recover from griefs more quickly than we do.’
Then there was Rosalie, the young servant girl, who adored her mistress, and who cleaned the cell as she cleaned no others; she brought in a box so that the few clothes the Queen possessed might be folded carefully and kept as well as possible. Every morning she would scrape the mildew from the Queen’s shoes, for it would gather during the night in that damp cell.
The Queen had aged considerably. Her hair was white now; there were rheumatic pains in her legs so that some days she found it difficult to stand. She was suffering from haemorrhages which made her very weak.
These good people took it upon themselves to smuggle comforts into the cell – some warm blankets to keep out the damp, some new sheets, a new mourning cap. Madame Richard and Rosalie did little jobs for her when they could, such as washing and mending her clothes.
One day Michonis came to inspect her cell, and with him was a stranger, a man who, he explained, wished to see what the inside of a prison was like.
Antoinette looked at this man and believed she recognised him. He was carrying a nosegay such as was generally carried by visitors to prisons and such places where the foul air might provoke disease.
He threw this nosegay behind the Queen’s stove, and when he had gone the Queen picked it up and found a note inside it. On this was written: ‘I shall try to find some means of showing my zeal for your service.’
She remembered the man now. He was the Chevalier de Rougeville, and she guessed that he had been inspired in this by Fersen.
Thoughts of the man she loved gave her new hope. Fersen! He had seemed invincible. She had believed in the old days that he would save her and take her to happiness. She found that belief revived.
She must answer the note. How? She had no pens, but she had a scrap of paper, and she had a needle, for since she had come to the Conciergerie her good friends there had provided her with one.
She pricked out an answer. Now, how to get it to the Chevalier? She could ask Madame Richard or Rosalie to pass it on, but she remembered then what had happened to poor Toulan. No. If anything went wrong they would be the first to be suspected.
She dared not involve those who were so close to her and who were already suspected of being too friendly.
At length she decided to give it to Gilbert, one of the gendarmes who seemed a trustworthy fellow.
She could give him nothing, she said, but the gentleman to whom he delivered the note would reward him with 400 louis.
The gendarme was tempted – both by his desire for the money and his desire to help the Queen; but when heads were being severed in the Place de la Revolution every day it made a man wary.
He showed the note to Madame Richard, who was terrified and asked Michonis’ advice.
It was one thing to have sympathy for the Queen; it was another to work against the Republic.
Michonis took the paper from Madame Richard and told her to say no more about it.
But the gendarme could not forget it. He mentioned it to his superior officer, with the result that an inquiry was immediately set in motion.
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br /> Michonis was terrified. He knew that the note would be demanded of him, and he dared not destroy it. In a brave attempt to save the Queen he added more pinpricks to it, so that it did not make sense.
He was brought before the tribunal and produced the note.
The Queen, when questioned, determined to save Madame Richard and Michonis. She did not tell them that Michonis had brought the Chevalier into her cell.
But after this the Commune determined to take greater care of their prisoner and to bring her to speedy trial. Michonis was dismissed from his post; the Richards were imprisoned; the Queen had a new jailer and was removed to a smaller room. But the new jailer and his wife were as sympathetic as the Richards had been, and they brought comforts into her cell. They brought her books and, for the first time in her life, she found great pleasure in reading; thus only could she cut herself off from the unendurable present and live in a world of her imagination. She found pleasure in the adventures of Captain Cook; she could imagine herself on voyages of exploration, and thus passed the long days and nights.
And on the 12th October 1793 she was summoned to the council chamber to face her trial.
In the Temple the Dauphin was sitting on a chair by the table. His feet did not quite reach the floor.
With him were three men: Chaumette, the syndic, Hébert and Simon. They had brought his sister, Madame Royale, into the room.
She flew to him and embraced him, and as the Dauphin returned her embrace, he saw a look of disgust pass over her face. That was because he was not clean. He felt uneasy.
The men began to ask Madame Royale questions; they concerned herself and her brother. What games had they played when they had been together? Did her brother ever handle her improperly?
Madame Royale did not even know what they meant. She and her brother had always been good friends, she said.
They they began to ask questions about her mother. Madame Royale did not understand exactly what they meant, but she had an inkling and, as she listened to them, a slow flush crept up over her face.