Marie-Antoinette, Daughter of the Caesars

by Elena Maria Vidal

  By Passiontide of 1791 it became clear to the King that his only recourse was to escape from Paris. He was no longer a free man, as he discovered on Monday of Holy Week when, with his family, he tried to leave for Saint-Cloud, where he planned on privately receiving his Easter communion from a non-juring priest. A mob surrounded the coach and would not let it leave the courtyard of the Tuileries. They had to give up going anywhere that day, and returned to the palace. Plans for an escape were made. Why did the Royal Family flee Paris? Because the increasing violence undermined the authority of the King, who was being treated as a prisoner. Furthermore, Louis, having privately made his Vow to the Sacred Heart, could no longer tolerate the recent legislation passed by the Revolutionary government against the Catholic Church which nationalized church lands and made all priests swear an oath to the state. It was decided to escape to Montmédy near Metz where Louis had supporters and would be able to take a firm stand against the fanatics who had gained control of the government A few days after Trinity Sunday, the Royal Family slipped out of the Tuileries in the middle of the night, and fled to the countryside, with the help of Count Axel von Fersen. Fersen, with the aid of the Scotsman Quentin Crauford, supplied a huge berlin with enough room for the royal party, including Madame de Tourzel, who pretended to be the Russian aristocrat Madame de Korff. The real Madame de Korff provided the funds for the escape as well as her own passport, including papers for children and servants. Louis disguised himself as a steward, the Queen as a governess, and Madame Élisabeth as a maid. Madame Royale and the Dauphin were supposed to be Madame de Korff’s daughters, so Louis-Charles had to dress like a girl. When the Royal Family’s absence was discovered, the Parisians went wild, tearing the fleur-de-lys off of all public buildings. The King, however, had no intention of leaving France; believing the citizens of the provinces to be faithful, he planned to go to Montmédy near Metz, where he meant to rally all loyal troops and subjects in order to hold the revolutionary government at bay. Before he departed from the Tuileries with his family, Louis XVI left a message for the people of France. Here is an excerpt of the declaration:

  Frenchmen, and above all Parisians, you inhabitants of a city which his majesty’s ancestors were pleased to call the good city of Paris, disabuse yourselves of the suggestions and lies of your false friends; return to your king; he will always be your father, your best friend. What pleasure will he not have in forgetting all his personal injuries, and in being returned among you, while the Constitution, which he will have accepted freely, will cause our holy religion to be respected, the government to be established on a firm foundation and useful in its actions, the property and the status of each one no longer to be troubled, the laws no longer to be disobeyed with impunity, and finally liberty to be established on firm an immovable foundations. In Paris, 20 June 1791, Louis.9

  On June 21, 1791, Louis XVI, Antoinette, and their family were captured at the town of Varennes. The King begged the the grocer Sauce and his family not to hand them over to the authorities, saying:

  I am your King; this is the Queen and the royal family. Surrounded in the capital by daggers and bayonets, I have come to the country, into the midst of my faithful subjects, to seek the peace and liberty you all enjoy. I could not stay in Paris; it would have been death to myself and my family. I have come to live among you my children, whom I will not forsake....Save my wife, save my children.10

  His entreaties fell on deaf ears; the Royal Family were sent back to Paris where they all, except for young Madame Royale, met their deaths. Some people find it interesting how a quatrain in the prophecies of Nostradamus appears to allude to the capture of the Royal Family at Varennes.

  De nuict viendra par le forest de Reines,

  Deux pars, vaultorte, Herne la pierre blanche,

  Le moyne noir en gris dedans Varennes:

  Esleu Cap. cause tempeste, feu, sang, tranche.

  By night shall come through the forest of Reines

  Two parts, face about, the Queen a white stone,

  The black monk in gray within Varennes.

  Chosen Cap. causes tempest, fire, blood, slice.11

  Whether the prophecy genuinely refers to the night of Varennes or not, it was indeed the night that spelled the end of the monarchy. The unfortunate family was brought back on the Vigil of Corpus Christi surrounded by a bloodthirsty throng. The people viciously murdered an old nobleman, who had had the courage to salute the King. The berlin slowly creaked passed altars set up on the roadside, adorned with flowers, ready to receive the Saving Victim in the monstrances, borne in the Corpus Christi processions. Meanwhile, the men along the road kept their hats on, and soldiers reversed their arms, pointing the barrels of the muskets to the ground, as signs of disdain for the King and Queen. It was a miracle they were not all dragged from their coach and killed.

  After returning to the Tuileries, the Royal Family was under a closer guard, with two gendarmes sleeping in the antechamber of the Queen’s bedroom. One needed a special pass in order to enter the royal apartments. It was with great difficulty that Abbé Edgeworth occasionally managed to see Madame Élisabeth in order to hear her confession. He found it easier to enter in the mornings, when many tradesmen were going in and out of the palace. Madame Élisabeth disagreed with the conciliatory policies of her brother Louis XVI and the political maneuverings of Antoinette. She saw the Revolution as pure evil, as an attack upon the Church and Christendom and thought that it should be stopped with fire and sword if necessary. There were many heated arguments at the Tuileries and as author Simone Bertière points out in L’Insoumise, Antoinette could hardly stand her sister-in-law at times.12 However, misfortune would bond the two women together as if they had been blood sisters. Meanwhile, the Pope had written to the King and Queen, imploring them to take refuge in his dominions. But they were now too closely watched to be able to escape together. They begged Madame Élisabeth to go, but she refused to leave them, not even with her brother Provence and his wife, who managed to get away. The King tried to get the Queen to leave, but she would not go without him. The moderate revolutionary Mirabeau and loyal Count Fersen then implored the King to flee with the Dauphin, but he did not want to leave the rest of his family alone at the hands of the mob. And so the summer of 1791 slipped away.

  In August, the King of Prussia and the Emperor of Austria declared that they were ready to help the King if his life was threatened, much to Madame Élisabeth’s joy, although they made it clear they were not eager to invest too many of their resources in restoring France to her former prestigious position. The emigrés, aristocrats who had fled abroad, snickered at Louis, calling him “King Log.” They did not think he was dealing energetically enough with the Revolution, but from a place of safety it was easy for them to criticize the King, who was left with only a handful of loyal supporters, and was for all practical purposes a prisoner in his own palace. On September 14, 1791, the Feast of Exaltation of the Holy Cross, the King was forced to sign the new constitution, in which he had very few powers, except that of the veto. Afterwards, he staggered into Antoinette’s room. Madame Campan describes the scene thus:

  ‘Ah! Madame,’ cried he, his voice choked by tears, ‘why were you present at this sitting? to witness–’ these words were interrupted by sobs. The Queen threw herself upon her knees before him, and pressed him in her arms. I remained with them, not from any blamable curiosity, but from a stupefaction which rendered me incapable of determining what I ought to do. The Queen said to me, ‘Oh! go, go!’ with an accent which expressed, ‘Do not remain to see the dejection and despair of your sovereign!’ I withdrew, struck with the contrast between the shouts of joy without the palace and the profound grief which oppressed the sovereigns withins. 13

  In the months that followed Louis sank into a silent stupor, so that he did not even recognize his own children; once he asked who Louis-Charles was.14 Eventually, he extracted himself from such a depressed state, and with renewed courage was able to face the fresh gale of tr
agedy that broke upon them in the months that followed. He unflinchingly used his right to veto on November 29, 1791, when the Assembly decreed that priests who had refused to take the oath were to be punished. The Jacobins, the radical party of the Revolution, so named because they congregated at the Dominican monastery of Saint Jacques, were livid. They increased the campaign of calumny and slander against the King and Queen, calling them Monsieur and Madame Veto, and worse. Especially vicious was the procurator Hébèrt’s gazette Père Duchesne, which urged the people to crime and violence while showing the Queen in obscene poses.

  On April 20, 1792, the violent feelings were somewhat pacified when the Assembly voted to have the King declare war on Austria. It showed, at least, that he was not in league with his wife’s relatives. France was in no condition to fight, but the Assembly was eager to spread the principles of the Revolution to other lands. Madame Élisabeth hoped that now the Austrians and the French émigrés would come to rescue them. But the King feared that with war, all was lost for them, because if anything went wrong for the French, the Queen would be accused of sending military secrets to her nephew the Emperor. The past spring, they had lost their staunchest supporter, King Gustavus III of Sweden, stabbed to death at a masked ball. On Good Friday, 1792, the Assembly passed a decree forbidding priests to wear clerical dress, and prohibiting Christian emblems. The worldly, juring clergy had long abandoned priestly garb; while the devout had already gone underground.

  There was an article published not long ago entitled “Ciphers of Marie-Antoinette and Fersen” by S. Tomokiyo15 which sheds light upon the royal family's desperate years of virtual imprisonment at the Tuileries palace between October 6, 1789 and August 19, 1792. Author Jean Chalon in his biography Chère Marie-Antoinette dubs the Queen la Sévigné des Tuileries after the famous Madame de Sévigné, known for her prodigious letter writing.16 In her determination to save the lives of her family, restore the royal authority, and preserve the throne for her son, Antoinette wrote hundreds of letters, not only to Count Fersen, the representative of King Gustavus III of Sweden who was trying to save them, but to her relatives and friends, to Comte Mercy the Austrian ambassador, to fellow monarchs such as the Queens of Spain and Portugal, and to moderate revolutionaries, the Girondins, such as Barnave.17 One must remember that from any careful study of her correspondence it appears that the Queen was balancing precipitously between opposing parties as she attempted to persuade Fersen, Barnave, and Mercy into doing what she needed them to do. Many of the letters were written in cipher, that is, in a secret code, which could be broken only by using certain key words. The complexity of the ciphers should destroy forever the myth that Antoinette was not intelligent; indeed, she must have had a very high I.Q. in order to adroitly master so many puzzles. Writing in code could be challenging. As Antoinette wrote to the Comte de Provence: “At length I have succeeded in deciphering your letter, my dear Brother, but it was not without difficulty. There were so many mistakes [in the use of the cipher]. Still, it is not surprising, seeing that you are a beginner and that your letter was a long one....”18 Sometimes white or invisible ink was also used, about which the Queen complained, saying: “Little accustomed to writing in this manner, my writing will be indecipherable.”19 The Queen burned most of the letters she received but many of those she sent to others have been preserved. The relatives of Axel von Fersen saved some original manuscripts of the letters from the Queen to Fersen, although not always in her hand-writing but in Fersen’s after he had decoded it. S. Tomokiyo quotes extensively from a 2009 paper by Jacques Patarin and Valérie Nachef based upon a study of the cipher used by Marie-Antoinette and Count Fersen for French television.20 According to Tomokiyo:

  Patarin and Nachef found in the French National Archives some encrypted letters with the keyword written on it. The manuscript letters were edited and published in 1877 by Baron von Klinckowström, a grandson of an elder sister of Fersen. The manuscript letters, long believed to have been destroyed, were auctioned by descendants of Baron von Klinckowström in 1982 and purchased by the French National Archives. Two exemplary manuscript sheets are reproduced in the paper of Patarin and Nachef.

  The first one is from a letter dated 8 July 1791 from Marie-Antoinette to Fersen. The keyword courage is written below the ciphertext and deciphered plaintext is written above the ciphertext. This letter is printed in, e.g., Klinckowstrom p.147, according to which the deciphering is in the hand of Fersen. (In this manuscript, Fersen writes keyword letters below the ciphertext, contrary to the above example, in which we wrote keyword letters above the ciphertext.)

  The second one is from a letter dated 10 October 1791 from Fersen to Marie-Antoinette. This shows the plaintext and keyword letters below it. Probably, this sheet was used by Fersen for enciphering. This letter is printed in, e.g., Klinckowstrom p.193, according to which this is a minute in the hand of Fersen. (The actual letter received by Marie-Antoinette was probably lost during the French Revolution.)21

  The paper by Patarin and Nachef is focused totally on the correspondence of the Queen and Count Fersen. While some of their interpretations are questionable, they include pictures of the original manuscripts which make one realize the complexity of discerning the hidden meaning of the letters. There is no question that Patarin and Nachef's treatise “I will love you to the death” is like something right out of a romance novel. I do think that the passages written to Fersen have suffered from extrapolation while undergoing decryption. In the words of the authors:

  Most of the time, these letters show that Marie-Antoinette is trying to find alliances with foreign countries in order to restore the Monarchy in France. But some parts of her letters are devoted to expressing her love for the count. A French TV channel asked us to explain Marie-Antoinette’s encryption algorithm. This led us to the study of some letters. There are very few letters written by the queen which are still available. Most of them were destroyed. Fersen kept the letters he received and deciphered, and also the letters he wrote himself to Marie-Antoinette. These archives were kept by his nephews and great-nephews. In 1877, Baron von Klinckowstrom published all the letters, but some parts were missing or crossed out. In 1982, some descendants of Baron von Klinckowstrom auctioned letters that were supposedly destroyed, and the French Historical Archives bought them. It is surprising to notice that on one hand, historians who published Marie-Antoinette's letters always chose the deciphered version published by Baron von Klinckowstrom....22

  When the letters of the Queen and Count Fersen were published by his great nephew Baron de Klinckowström in the late nineteenth century, they proved the nature of the Queen and Fersen’s relationship to be principally a diplomatic one, especially on the part of the Count, whose letters are coldly businesslike. In certain of the letters, mainly those from the Queen to Fersen, passages have been erased and are indicated by rows of dots in the printed text. The Coursacs, Webster, and Delorme believe that Fersen erased certain passages himself. The erasures of Fersen were most likely sensitive diplomatic issues, not declarations of love, as some authors have claimed. They concealed allusions to the Queen’s disagreements with her brothers-in-law Artois and Provence, or references to the Duc d’Orléans and other revolutionaries, or even mentions of spies or persons whose families would have been compromised had the letters fallen into the wrong hands. Also, it must be noted that most letters from the era, all handwritten of course, have sentences scribbled out or erased; it does not mean that every scribbled out or erased passage were words of forbidden love.

  In 1907 a certain Monsieur Lucien Maury published in Revue Bleue what he claimed to be a fragment of a love letter of the Queen to Fersen. Some collections of Antoinette’s letters include it although it has never been verified to actually be from the Queen:

  July 29, 1791

  I can tell you that I love you and indeed that is all I have time for. I am well. Do not worry about me. I hope you to be well too. Write me cipher letters and send them by mail to Mrs Brown’s addre
ss, in a double envelope to Mr. de Gougens. Send the letters by your manservant. Tell me to whom I should send the letters I could write you. I cannot live without that. Farewell, the most loved and the most loving of men. I kiss you with all my heart.23

  The letter had no signature, was not in the Queen’s handwriting, only in the cipher she used, jotted down by Fersen in cipher, as Maury himself admitted. There is no proof it was from the Queen but could have been from one of the many ladies with whom Fersen dallied over the years. Patarin and Nachef also include the same dubious letter in their study although they admit that Maury did not give any details about the decryption and that there is no corresponding cipher text in existence. I also question the reliability of the claims of Patarin and Nachef that the hidden phrases they have discovered are sweet words from the Queen to the Count. For instance, the letter of June 18, 1791 is supposed to be a letter to Fersen with a request to send a letter to...Fersen? Its decryption reads thus:

  Do not worry about us. It seems that the chiefs of the Assembly want to behave more softly. Talk to my parents about foreign approaches (6 encrypted letters). If they are afraid it is necessary to come to compromise with them. Burn all that is (10 encrypted letters) and send the remainder of the letter to M. von Fersen. He is with the king of Sweden. 24

  Therefore I take the “love letter” from Marie-Antoinette which Patarin and Nachef have “discovered” with a grain of salt. Even if the romantic words were absolutely proved to be genuinely penned by the Queen, it must be remembered that she also wrote loving words to many of her friends of both sexes, calling them “mon cher coeur” that is “my dear heart” and saying such things as “je vous embrasse très fort” which means “I kiss you hard.”25 Such was her manner of expression with those of whom she was fond. It must also be kept in mind that Antoinette absolutely needed the help for the royal cause that only Fersen could give in the outside world; it should not be surprising if her words to him were especially tender, if we are going to believe Patarin and Nachef's interpretation.