Another regret, felt keenly at the time according to Rosalie, was the loss of the gold watch given to Marie Antoinette by her mother, the good luck symbol that she had hung up herself so carefully that first night. It was confiscated five days later. The weather outside was boiling, the atmosphere in the Conciergerie hot, humid and stinking; Marie Antoinette asked Rosalie to burn juniper in her cell to cover up the smell of the primitive sanitation. Yet in general the Queen showed that familiar spirit of resignation towards her altered conditions that had marked each step in the downward spiral of her fortunes. A white ribbon was bought to dress her hair in the morning, an art at which Rosalie became expert. It was Rosalie who brought in a little cheap mirror with a red border and an oriental pattern on its back. These few possessions came to be stored in a cardboard box supplied by the maid, who was thanked by the Queen with as much enthusiasm as if she had imported one of Riesener’s masterpieces.
Marie Antoinette was allowed Ville d’Avray mineral water, from the Temple; the water from the Seine that was drunk by the rest of the prisoners would no doubt have provided that “natural death” that her desperate sister Maria Carolina was beginning to think might be her happiest fate. She was given coffee for breakfast. The food—chicken, which she cut up extremely carefully and made last, and vegetables served on pewter—was the sort she liked; it was supplemented by the nourishing clear soup known as bouillon, on which Rosalie prided herself and which was the contemporary panacea for every ner-vous ill. The concierge and his wife, the Richards, were also well disposed towards their prisoner. Madame Richard had once sold haberdashery; she understood the need for comfort in small things. With her connivance (she was given the code name “Sensible”), Hüe himself got into the Conciergerie and managed to pass on news of the royal children to the Queen. A flush of emotion was produced in Marie Antoinette by the sight of the Richards’ blond, blue-eyed child, Fanfan, introduced when she had been talking at length about her own missing family. She trembled, covered the boy with kisses and began to cry, so that Madame Richard judged it a mistake to introduce Fanfan again.3
It was Madame Richard who confided to Hüe that her daily shopping was made easy by invoking the distinguished prisoner’s name. When a fine melon was said to be destined for “our unhappy Queen,” the shopkeeper waived all charges. “There are those among us who weep for her,” he told the concierge’s wife. Rosalie had a similar experience buying peaches. The maid also put little bouquets on Marie Antoinette’s small table from time to time, which led the Queen to confide in her sadly how she had had a “real passion” for flowers in the past. This practice was later forbidden.
Marie Antoinette found solace from the aching boredom that is every prisoner’s lot by watching the guards at their eternal card games. She had sent for her knitting-box from the Temple to continue making stockings for her son; the royal ladies, left behind, knowing “how fond she was of this occupation,” had hastily packed up all the silk and worsted they could find. But this was not permitted. Nor was she allowed needles for embroidery, so she began to pull out threads from the remains of the toile on the walls, and weave them into garters. And then there was reading. There is something touching about the fact that in confinement her taste turned to foreign adventures; The Travels of Captain Cook, lent to her by a subsequent jailer, became a favourite. Un Voyage à Venise amused Marie Antoinette because it contained references to people she had known in her youth.4
This form of existence, extremely confined but not completely intolerable, was brought to an end officially by the discovery of the Carnation Plot in early September. The indulgent Richards were taken away to be imprisoned themselves. They were replaced by the Baults, who were far more circumspect in their behaviour, given what had happened to their predecessors. Even if Bault was not a bad man at heart, according to Rosalie, Madame Bault did not have the elegant skills of Madame Richard, the former haberdasher. Marie Antoinette drew back from having her hair done by her when the concierge suggested it, declaring that henceforward she would dress it herself.*1105
On 11 September the Queen was moved to another cell, the former pharmacy.*111 Although it too had a window on to the Women’s Courtyard, this was to be semi-blocked. The inner and outer doors of the cell, which was divided between “the widow Capet” and her gendarmes, were to be made much more secure.
Two long days of interrogation followed the Carnation Plot. The Queen met all the questioning not only with fortitude but also with a new kind of spirit, which one might also term bravado, if she had not been careful to couch her answers in suitably discreet terms.8 There was no one to coach her, no tutor like Vermond, no parental-type ambassador like Mercy, yet Marie Antoinette showed both wit and cunning in her answers. That natural intelligence that the French had always doubted shone through, fortified by the resilience of character that she had had to develop—or go under. At her second interrogation, for example, she was cross-examined for nearly sixteen hours at a stretch—and yet at no point did she incriminate either herself or those who had (or had not) plotted to free her.
Marie Antoinette was particularly adroit at handling the delicate question of Louis Charles. When asked whether she had been interested in the military successes of France’s enemies, she replied that she was interested in the success of the nation to which her son belonged. Which was that nation? “Isn’t he French?” answered Marie Antoinette. The question of Louis Charles’s status came up and the privileges he might once have enjoyed that belonged to “the empty title of king.” Marie Antoinette refused to be drawn on the subject, giving several versions of the same answer; she wanted France to be great and to be happy, nothing else mattered. Did she personally wish that there was still a king on the throne? Marie Antoinette replied that if France was content to have a king, she would like that king to be her son, but she was equally happy if France was content to be without a king. As to supporting the enemies of France: “I regard as my enemies all those who would bring harm to my children.” She would not be more specific beyond repeating, “Any kind of harm . . . whatever might be harmful.”
All unknown to Marie Antoinette, the crucial meeting concerning her fate had taken place about the time of the alleged Carnation Plot and the decision had already taken place before its discovery. The subsequent revelation of the conspiracy was a coincidence—although it was a convenient one. This meeting of the Committee of Public Safety took place in secret and it lasted all night. By dawn the deaths of the Queen and the Girondins arrested at the end of May had been sealed.9
The leader in the call for the execution of “the woman Capet” was Hébert. His reason, quite simply, was the need to bind the sans-culottes to them in an act of communal violence by shedding the blood of the ci-devant Queen. The death of Louis Capet had been specifically the work of the Convention, but that of Antoinette should be the joint enterprise of the city of Paris, the Revolutionary Tribunal and the revolutionary army; the latter was in need of assurance since the French fleet at Toulon had gone over to the allies on 28 August. “I have promised the head of Antoinette,” thundered Hébert. “I will go and cut it off myself if there is any delay in giving it to me. I have promised it on your behalf to the sans-culottes who are asking for it, and without whom,” he emphasized, “you will cease to be.”
In short, the best way to keep the people “at white heat” was to grant them this sacrifice. “This head” was to be for them; those of the Girondins arrested on 31 May were for the Committee. It was decided that both parties should be granted their desire. Suggestions that the former Queen might be kept as a hostage were swept away with the argument that Louis Charles Capet—“Louis XVII” to the royalists—was hostage enough. The way was open for a Law of Suspects to be passed, in which all enemies of the people were to be tried immediately by a Revolutionary Tribunal.
Hébert’s brutal exposition was in direct contrast to the sympathy that the former Queen’s imagined condition in the Conciergerie was beginning to evoke in some genero
us hearts. In August, Germaine de Staël issued an impassioned plea, Réflexions sur le Procès de la Reine, whose author was simply described as “Une Femme.” Necker’s daughter, ten years younger than Marie Antoinette, was by now at Coppet in Switzerland, her father’s home, having fled France after the September massacres. With two baby sons of her own, born in 1790 and 1792 respectively, Germaine sprang with zeal into a Rousseau-esque defence of Marie Antoinette as a “tender mother.” The writer’s ardour justified the Baronne d’Oberkirch’s description of her: “She is a flame.”10
A passionate introduction conjured “you, women of all countries, all classes of society” to listen to her with the emotion that she herself felt. “The destiny of Marie Antoinette contains everything that might touch your heart: if you are happy, she has had happiness; if you suffer, for one year and longer, all the pains of her life have torn her apart.” The conclusion was, from the point of view of the revolutionaries, even more lethal: a little boy on his knees—Louis Charles—was said to be demanding “mercy for his mother.”11
This was the striking maternal image at one time put forward, with Marie Antoinette’s connivance, by Madame Vigée Le Brun, which had once called for respect and now called for compassion. It was a far cry from that of the Infamous Antoinette, who was now held responsible by the pamphleteers for her “savage spouse’s” crimes as well as her own, thanks to her “execrable counsels.” In contrast to the tender mother, how easy it was to suggest that this debauched creature should “perish ignominiously on the scaffold” so that true revolutionaries could “cement in blood” the liberty they had achieved. It might therefore become necessary to sully the maternal image and substitute for it something so vicious—even by the standards of the pamphlets so far—that there could be no question of letting such a monster live. In this connection a confidential piece of information supplied by the jailer Simon to Hébert at the end of September—that he had surprised young “Charles Capet” masturbating—provided an exciting opportunity.12
The wretched boy was then induced to make a series of highly damaging allegations. Some of these were to do with a conspiracy to escape, supposedly organized by Commissioner Toulan. But it was the charge of sexual abuse on the part of his mother and aunt that was the nub of his story; how the two women together had taught him these “very pernicious practices,” making him lie in bed between them, and how the injury he had in his groin (a swollen testicle actually caused, as has been noted, by playing with a stick) was a result of this abuse. Such charges, apart from anything else involving the pious spinster Madame Elisabeth, would have been, in any other circumstances, ludicrous. But Louis Charles was an eight-year-old boy. He was now intent on pleasing the rough captors who had him helpless, plying him with drink when necessary, where once he had loved to please his mother and father. He therefore refused to retract his accusations even when confronted with his sister. Marie Thérèse was torn between shock and outrage. She did not absolutely understand what was being suggested, but knew enough to deny angrily that her brother had touched her “where she should not be touched” in the course of their play. She signed her statement “Thérèse Capet.”13
Stubbornly, Louis Charles persisted in his story even when his aunt was produced. Madame Elisabeth cried out in indignation that both his mother and herself had constantly tried to stop him in his habit, when the boy interrupted her, protesting that he had told the truth. But he became curiously vague about the details of the abuse beyond the fact that it had been done by “the two of them together.” Had it happened by day or by night? At first he replied that he could not remember, then suggested that it had been in the morning. The consequence for Louis Charles was a breach with his sister, as well as his aunt, that would never be healed. It remained to be seen what the consequence would be for the mother he had been obliged to traduce.
Marie Antoinette underwent a secret preliminary interrogation on 12 October.14 Two hours after she had gone to bed, on a night so cold that she had asked in vain for an extra blanket, she was roused. She was taken before the president of the Revolutionary Tribunal, Armand Martial Herman, a young ally of Robespierre, in the presence of Fouquier-Tinville, the public prosecutor. The idea was obviously to secure valuable material for the actual trial; in fact all the old canards were trotted out. She had given money to her brother the Emperor, taking part in nocturnal meetings with the Duchesse de Polignac in order to organize it. She had participated in that legendary orgy on 1 October 1789 at the royal bodyguards’ dinner. Marie Antoinette denied all these charges, and when she was asked yet again whether she believed that monarchy was necessary to the happiness of France, she replied with circumspection that it was not up to an individual to decide about these things; she regretted nothing for her son so long as France prospered.
The most significant exchange—for the future—occurred when Marie Antoinette was accused of being the chief instigator of the “treason of Louis XVI” in causing him to flee in 1791, as well as teaching him “the arts of dissimulation.” Naturally she rebutted both charges. At the end of her interrogation Marie Antoinette was asked whether she wished to have counsel for the defence appointed. The answer was yes, she would like that. So she was taken back to her cell.*112
Louis XVI had been allowed to work with his lawyers over a considerable period of time “as though I could win.” No such privilege was accorded to Marie Antoinette. In fact the late appearance of her lawyers marked the first of many steps by which the female consort was treated a great deal more severely than the male sovereign. The distaste of the Revolution for the female sex in general—in ungrateful contrast to the role that women, intellectuals as well as market-women, had played in it earlier—did not bode well for the Widow Capet.
Women were at once inferior and dangerous, as witness the death of Marat at the hands of a young woman called Charlotte Corday in July. A supporter of the Girondins, Charlotte Corday had secured admittance to Marat’s presence because her “weaker” sex made it difficult to believe she constituted a threat; she had then proceeded to demonstrate her savagery by stabbing Marat in his bath, as Judith had executed Holofernes. She met the “swift, humane” death of the guillotine four days later. Robespierre for one believed that the safest place for women was in the home, performing their traditional nurturing role. (In this he was in agreement with Rousseau, who thought that woman’s “glory” should reside “in the esteem of her husband.”) Within a few weeks the various women’s clubs that had urged on the Revolution would be officially suppressed. Since pre-revolutionary history was chequered with stories of cruel female rulers—to whom Marie Antoinette was regularly compared—it has been suggested that the misogyny of the Jacobin Revolution was inspired by the idea that powerful women belonged to the era of despotism. The domesticated apolitical Queen Charlotte of England was on a much more satisfactory course (from the male point of view) when she wrote that women could do much more good by staying out of public affairs and leading “retired lives.”16 This developing line of thought made the Widow Capet even more suspect.
The two lawyers permitted to Marie Antoinette were both at the Parisian bar: Chauveau-Lagarde (who had defended Charlotte Corday) and Tronson Doucoudray. Chauveau-Lagarde published an account of his experiences in 1816, describing how he had been in the country when he was summoned—he did not hesitate to accept—and therefore did not reach the Tuileries to inspect the mass of prosecution papers, to say nothing of the eight-page act of accusation itself, until the next day, 13 October. To visit their client, the counsels passed through the various wicket-gates of the Conciergerie to reach the divided cell with its iron-barred windows; on the left were the armed gendarmes, on the right Marie Antoinette in a plain white dress; the furniture consisted of a bed, a table and two chairs. Chauveau-Lagarde’s knees trembled.17
Their first task was to persuade the Queen to write to the Revolutionary Tribunal and seek a delay so that the paperwork could be properly considered. She was extremely reluctant
to do so, since it meant acknowledging the authority of the men who had killed Louis XVI, but in the end, with a sigh, the Queen picked up her pen. Addressing Herman as “Citizen President,” she asked for three days’ respite: “I owe it to my children to omit nothing that may be necessary to the justification of their mother.”18
The letter was not answered. The next day, Monday, 14 October, Marie Antoinette was collected shortly before eight o’clock in the morning and taken through the prison to the great chamber where Louis XVI had once held his lits de justice and which was now the seat of the Revolutionary Tribunal.
Marie Antoinette’s appearance caused an immediate sensation in the crowded courtroom, thronged with cheerful spectators such as the inevitable market-women, as well as the necessary concomitants of justice, the president, Herman, the prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville, and the jurors. The latter incidentally were not likely to give trouble to the Tribunal, just as the president would scarcely venture to cross the prosecutor. Some jurors were cronies of Robespierre, others came from humble professions, a cobbler, two carpenters and a hat-maker being among their number.
The ci-devant Queen looked ghastly. Here was a white-haired woman with sunken features whose extreme pallor was due as much to her persistent loss of blood as to her nine weeks’ incarceration in the humid, airless Conciergerie. (Rosalie ascribed Marie Antoinette’s condition to her lack of exercise, and tried to help her by cutting up her own chemises as cloths, but as has been discussed, it probably had a deeper cause.) Her haggard appearance contrasted bizarrely with the mental image that most of the spectators had of the accused. Marie Antoinette had, after all, been immured for over a year, and in the last months of her stay in the Tuileries had ventured out little in public for fear of hostility. If she was not the Austrian she-wolf, the ostrich with the harpy’s face of the caricatures, then she was the glittering Queen with her diamonds and her nodding plumes, last seen properly in the glory days of the court at Versailles over four years before. As Le Moniteur admitted, Antoinette Capet was “prodigiously changed.”19
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