The Man who Killed the King

by Dennis Wheatley

  Although old Antoine knew Amanda only as Madame Godfrey, having been in M. de Talleyrand’s service for twenty years he did not expect to be given detailed instructions on how to prepare for such an occasion. When Roger arrived he found the room adjacent to Amanda’s arranged for his reception, one of the gallant Bishop’s most elegant brocaded chamber-robes laid out for him to change into, and everything else made ready to ensure a gentleman at least a couple of hours’ pleasure before returning to Paris, even if he did not intend to remain all night.

  Madame Velot had done her share by providing just the right kind of supper, with light but well-spiced dishes; and when Amanda and Roger had eaten, to the accompaniment of Montrachet, Champagne and several glasses of Imperial Tokay, he knew quite well what was going to happen next.

  To jump up and make sudden excuses about urgent affairs requiring his immediate presence in Paris was impossible; it could only have been interpreted by Amanda as a declaration that he had an assignation for that night with another woman. To tell her the truth would have been an act of no less wanton cruelty, and he was certainly not prepared to ease his own mind at such a price. Besides, passionately as he was attracted to Athénaïs, he found that Amanda had lost nothing of her capacity to stir him. Therefore, as he peeled a peach for her, he decided that to fake some reason for depriving both her and himself of the natural conclusion to their evening—simply because they happened to be in Passy, France, instead of in Richmond, England—would be the height of unkind and hypocritical idiocy.

  A few hours later, as he lay in the Bishop’s broad, comfortable bed with Amanda now curled up happily asleep beside him, he went over in his mind all that she had told him about the prisoners in the Temple.

  Apparently the dolt-like King, happy at last to have been relieved of all responsibility, and the saintly Madame Elizabeth, whose temperament suited her better for life in a nunnery than in a palace, had both settled down quite contentedly to prison routine; but this was far from being the case with Marie Antoinette. From the very beginning her lively, courageous mind had rejected all thought of finality and surrender. Forced against her sunny nature to hate, she now did so with all her might. No longer compelled, out of deference to the King’s muddled thinking, to make herself agreeable to woolly-headed Liberals and treacherous place-seekers, she prayed that her nephew’s Austrian legions would swiftly descend on Paris and wipe out in blood the humiliations she had suffered at the hands of the French Revolutionaries. With the hope of rescue ever present in her mind, her worst torment had been lack of news, as the Commune forbade all tidings of events in the outside world being given to the prisoners.

  To appease her craving, she had at first turned to the valets, Hue and Cléry, and both, until their dismissal, had done their best for her; but the real genius at this dangerous game had proved to be one François Turgy, an ex-waiter from the Tuileries, who, out of loyalty to the Royal Family, had followed them to the Temple and managed to have himself taken on for similar duties there.

  Between them they had derived a sign language, and daily, as Turgy waited at table, he scratched his left or right ear, fumbled a fork, filled a glass overfull, dropped his napkin, brushed an imaginary speck of dust off his coat, and by a score of other natural movements conveyed to his Royal mistress, under the eyes of the watching Commissars, the principal news of Paris and the battle fronts. Then this intrepid man began to smuggle notes to the Queen, engaged a paper-seller to cry out the news aloud every evening under her window, and was soon acting as her messenger on many dangerous commissions.

  Through him, loyalists outside had sent in proposals for attempts to escape; but here, as ever, the addlepated King proved the stumbling-block. He was fully resigned to death himself, but did not believe that “his beloved people” would ever harm his family; so he could not be persuaded even to consider any project which, if it went wrong, might lead to a more rigorous captivity; and with phlegmatic unconcern he spent his time reading and praying. On a hundred occasions he had heard the mob screaming for his wife’s blood; to her he was kind, affectionate and considerate, but with the irresolution and cowardice that had marked his whole life he deliberately shut his eyes to the peril which she would have to face alone once he had been taken from her. And she had loyally refused to leave without him.

  Towards the end of January, Louis XVI’s execution had relieved the Queen of this self-imposed but most formidable barrier to attempting an escape, and after she had recovered from the first shock of her clod-like husband’s death, she showed a more eager interest than ever in such projects. It was then that a new ally had appeared upon the scene.

  Very sensibly, Marie Antoinette reserved her hatred for the woolly-minded intellectuals whose policies had led to anarchy and for the criminal maniacs who had murdered her friends. To all members of the Temple staff—guards, servants, soldiers and Commissars—who treated her with even reasonable respect, she continued to show her natural affability. Two of the turnkeys delighted to puff foul tobacco smoke in her face every time she went downstairs to take a little exercise in the strip of garden; some of the Commissars who took turns at duty, like the ex-priest Jacques Roux, sang filthy songs all night outside her bedroom door, while others got drunk and spewed upon the floors. But the majority of the Revolutionary officials were fundamentally decent men, who had for years heard the most frightful stories of “the Austrian whore”; yet, when they came into actual contact with her, were quick to realise that they had been completely misled about her character.

  Even now, prematurely-aged and grey-haired as she had become through anxieties and sorrows, with no particle of the former glamour that had surrounded her left to dazzle new acquaintances, she still retained much of that devastating sweetness and charm that had enslaved cultured, famous and brilliant men of all nations. To a number of the Commissars it now proved irresistible; they could not find it in their hearts to hate her, and showed her such little kindnesses as they could.

  Among them was a bookseller named Toulan, a scruffy-looking little fellow who, as one of the “men of the 10th of August”, was regarded as above suspicion by his colleagues. He was shrewd, daring and intelligent and had, after a few turns of duty at the Temple, conceived a chivalrous desire to serve the Queen. As a means of making this known to her he had done her a signal service. Before leaving prison for the scaffold, Louis XVI had given his signet-ring and a packet containing lockets of hair of his children to Cléry, his faithful valet, for transmission to the Queen; but the Municipals had refused to allow them to be given to her, and locked them up under seal. Toulan had broken the seal and taken the things, then put it about that they must have been stolen by some souvenir hunter; but a few days later he had secretly passed them on to the widow.

  Having won her confidence, he proposed that he should arrange her escape, but told her that to do so he would require the help of another Commissioner. He had sounded a colleague named Lepître who was willing to co-operate; but he was the head of a prosperous school and, since he would have to abandon it as a result of participation in the enterprise, he required compensation. Toulan asked nothing for himself, but Lepître would have to be indemnified by a payment of 200,000 francs. Could the Queen raise such a sum?

  She had sent him with a letter to General de Jarjayes, who, out of devotion for her, had remained on in Paris at the War Office; Toulan had then, on two occasions, smuggled de Jarjayes into the Temple disguised as the lamplighter who visited all the rooms every evening, and at these secret conferences the Queen and the General had agreed that Toulan’s proposals for escape were perfectly practical. But de Jarjayes could procure only half the money needed to satisfy Lepître; so the Queen had put him in touch with the Baron de Batz, who, before the Revolution, had acted as her personal banker.

  De Batz possessed brains, ability and extraordinary daring, and was a millionaire. Although he was known to be a fanatical loyalist his immense riches enabled him to bribe scores of corrupt officials, and he conti
nued to move freely about Paris under a dozen different aliases. He was secretly fighting the Revolution tooth and nail, and had already made an abortive attempt to rescue Louis XVI on the way to execution. Considerable time had been lost in these negotiations, but as soon as De Batz was informed of the plot he immediately put up the money.

  After the death of the King, the number of Commissioners appointed daily for duty at the Temple had been reduced from four to three; but the conspirators still had to eliminate the third man. Toulan, however, had hit upon an ingenious method for doing this. The custom was for the three newcomers to draw lots out of a hat on their arrival, two of the lots being marked “night” and the third “day”; he simply wrote “day” on all three pieces of paper and offered the hat first to the Commissioner who was not in the plot. The dupe, pleased at having got off night duty, never bothered to notice that Toulan then threw the other two papers into the fire unopened. In this manner Toulan and Lepître were, on numerous occasions, able to confer at night at their leisure with the Queen.

  It was arranged that Toulan should smuggle two Municipal officers’ uniforms up to the Queen’s room, and that she and Madame Elizabeth should walk out dressed in them; while the Dauphin and his sister were to leave disguised as the lamplighter’s two children, whom he often brought with him in the evening when making his rounds. De Jarjayes was to have three light carriages waiting outside the prison to carry off the whole party, and a number of Royalists with pistols were to be stationed in the street near the outer gate, ready to overcome the guard, should the escapers have the misfortune to be held up at this final barrier.

  The plan had been wrecked at the last minute by Lepître’s suffering a fit of nerves and refusing further co-operation unless it was modified. The reverses of the Republican armies had led to a stricter supervision of suspects attempting to leave Paris, and the Commune had issued an order that in future all vehicles were to be searched at the gates of the city. Lepître maintained that three carriages could not possibly pass through without something going wrong, therefore the risk must be minimised to smuggling out the Queen alone. On hearing this, despite the utmost efforts of Toulan and de Jarjayes to persuade her, Marie Antoinette had refused to proceed further with the matter. She wrote to the General, thanking him for all he had done, but saying that nothing would induce her to abandon her children, and requesting him to now place himself out of danger by leaving Paris at once.

  De Jarjayes had lingered for a while, still hoping that he might help to save her; but anxiety for this devoted friend had caused her to deprive herself of him by a commission which he could not refuse. She sent him the late King’s ring, the packet of hair he had always carried, and a wax impression of a signet-ring that she herself always wore, with the request that he would take the first two items to the late King’s brothers, and the last to Count Axel Fersan; for it was his crest upon her ring, and although she had played the part of a most devoted wife, few who knew her intimately had ever doubted that it was the Swedish nobleman to whom she had given her heart.

  The General departed, but there remained others ready to run all risks; and now that the resourceful Baron de Batz had taken a hand in the game, he at once began to concert measures with Toulan for a new attempt to rescue the whole Royal Family. Through his underground channels, he let it be known among the corrupt Revolutionary officials that he was offering a million to be divided among those who would help him save the Queen and her children. Tempted by the idea of earning a major share of this huge reward, that same Michonis who had arranged Amanda’s release had offered to play a leading rôle. This ex-lemonade seller, as Inspector of Prisons, could enter or leave the Temple at any hour of the day or night he liked, so his aid promised to be invaluable; and in the meantime de Batz had been working with cautious energy on a project of his own. He had had the same idea as occurred to Roger the preceding summer, when he had set Dan to form a squad of secretly loyal National Guards; but gone about it in a more ambitious manner. In a few weeks he had succeeded in enrolling thirty reliable men and a Captain Cortey, who on certain nights commanded the garrison of the Temple.

  Everything was proceeding well when an unforeseen misfortune prevented matters being brought to a head. The Tison couple, who lived on the Queen’s floor of the tower and did the rough work there, were one day arbitrarily refused permission by an officious Municipal to receive their daughter up in their room on a visit. Tison promptly flew into a rage and declared that if the prisoners could receive visitors he did not see why he should be forbidden them.

  On being formally questioned, he asserted that when certain Commissars thought themselves unobserved they showed great friendliness to the Queen, and allowed her friends to come in various disguises to see her. He then made his wife confirm his statement and add that she knew such forbidden articles as pencils and sealing-wax were in the possession of the prisoners. Among the six Commissars that they denounced were Lepître and Toulan.

  The result was a midnight raid led by the terrorist Hébert; the prisoners were hauled out of bed and six Commissioners spent five hours searching the rooms from floor to ceiling. Fortunately only a few wafers for sealing letters were found, which, together with all lack of evidence supporting the Tisons’ statements, saved the accused Commissars from arrest; but it had been touch and go, and the conspirators decided that they must postpone further operations until a period of complete inactivity had again lulled suspicions that a plot might be afoot.

  After a time it was considered safe to go ahead again. Michonis and Toulan had got themselves appointed for duty on a night when Captain Cortey would be in charge of the guard. The plan was that uniforms should be smuggled in for the Queen, Madame Elizabeth and Madame Royal. Dressed in them, and shouldering muskets, they were to march out with a squad of loyal troops for whom Cortey would have the gates opened at midnight, and under cover of darkness the little King was to be smuggled out in their midst. De Batz, dressed in the ragged uniform of a National Guard, was to go in himself to supervise the operation; and he had made all preparations to convey the prisoners swiftly to a small château he owned at Neuilly just outside Paris.

  The great night came; but the ill-starred Queen was doomed to suffer yet another bitter disappointment, and it was brought about by the evil genius of the Temple. All the conspirators were at their posts, Cortey had placed loyal men as sentinels in all the key positions, Michonis had smuggled the uniforms up to the prisoners, Toulan was keeping watch with him, and de Batz was counting the minutes until he could give the signal. Then, well after eleven o’clock, there came a loud knocking on the outer gates. It was Simon, the ex-cobbler, the stupid, brutish but incorruptible man whom Chaumette and Hébert, the responsible officials of the Commune, had given access to the prisoners at all hours so that he might act as watchdog.

  Late that night he had received an anonymous message saying that Michonis intended to betray the Revolution and release the Queen. He had run to the Commune, where he had been laughed at as the victim of a hoax; but, owing to his fanatical zeal, he had succeeded in obtaining authority to replace Michonis for that night.

  On seeing Cortey he had expressed great relief, thinking all to be well; and while they were talking de Batz had hurried off to warn Michonis.

  There were 280 National Guards in the Temple, only a small proportion of whom were in the plot. To have killed Simon might have saved the situation, but had he first succeeded in raising an alarm the conspirators would have been overwhelmed, and the prisoners, through their anxiety to escape, been held responsible for Simon’s murder. It was hurriedly decided that the attempt must be abandoned. Michonis succeeded in disposing of the disguises and showed remarkable calm in dealing with Simon, but he could not ignore the Commune’s order to hand over his duty to him; Cortey meanwhile smuggled de Batz out into the street, and the routine returned to normal.

  In the enquiry that followed, the Commune continued to maintain its view that Simon had been hoaxed; so Michonis g
ot out of the affair without suspicion attaching to him. But it was noted that Toulan, who had already been denounced by Tison, was on duty on this night, and had in recent weeks volunteered for duty at the Temple with exceptional frequency; so, as a precautionary measure, he was suspended from his functions.

  Disappointed but undismayed, de Batz had determined on a further attempt as soon as things had settled down again; but the loss of Toulan was a serious blow to the conspirators. By this time Lady Atkyns and Amanda had come on the scene, and their rôles had been to receive the Royal Family at de Batz’s house at Neuilly. As nothing further could be attempted until Toulan had been replaced by another trustworthy inside man, it had been decided to find out from the Queen which of the other Commissioners she considered best disposed towards her, and therefore most amenable to de Batz’s bribes or persuasion, and Amanda had volunteered for this task. The letter with which she had been caught had made no mention of this all-important question, which she was to ask verbally, and had contained only an enquiry as to whether, could matters be arranged on more or less the same lines as before, the Queen was still willing to place herself in the hands of the conspirators.

  Most unfortunately, as Roger knew, Amanda’s capture had excited considerable alarm in the Commune. They had suppressed all public mention of the affair, just as they had suppressed Simon’s suspicions of Michonis and the Tisons’ denunciations, because, as a matter of policy, they were most strongly averse to putting the idea into people’s heads that it was even remotely possible to rescue the Royal prisoners. Luckily, too, the majority believed that the Tisons were liars, that Simon had been fooled, and that the contents of Amanda’s letter were fantastic to a degree which suggested her to be a crazy romanticist without serious backing. But the more suspicious-minded had insisted that precautions against an escape from the Temple should be redoubled. As a result, on the 3rd of July, the little King had been separated from his female relatives and taken to live in the late King’s apartments with the watchful and incorruptible Simon as his jailer.