Ambition and Desire: The Dangerous Life of Josephine Bonaparte (9 page)

No one was safe. The prince of Salm, a friend of both Marie-Josèphe and Alexandre, offered to take Eugène and Hortense to his country estate and then away from France. The children were told they were taking a brief summer holiday. Eugène, who was used to separation, was excited by travel, but nine-year-old Hortense missed her mother intensely. “I am touched by your regrets at being away from your mother; but my dear it is not for long,” Marie-Josèphe wrote. “I hope that the Princess [of Salm] will return in spring, or I will come and collect you.”
⁶

The rest of Europe gazed on France in horror. Catherine II of Russia was encouraging active intervention, and Austria, Spain, Prussia, Saxony, and Sweden were in favor. On April 20, France had declared war on Austria. Alexandre, serving with the army in Strasbourg, was furious when he heard that his children had been sent away, for he felt it was their duty to remain in Paris. He demanded the prince of Salm return
them. Alexandre then sent Eugène to school in Strasbourg and told Marie-Josèphe she could keep Hortense at home.

On December 26, 1792, the trial of Louis XVI began. On January 15, 1793, he was found guilty of collaboration with counterrevolutionary forces. At two
P.M.
on Sunday, January 20, thirty-eight-year-old Louis was told that he would die the next day. He begged for three days in order to prepare his soul, but was refused. Marie Antoinette asked that she and the children spend the night with him, but Louis told them he needed peace to ready himself. The children were so hysterical that he could persuade them to leave him only by saying he would see them in the morning. On the morning itself, he crept away silently because he could not bear to say goodbye.

At around the same time Louis was informed of his fate, a guillotine was set up in the Place de la Révolution (formerly Place Louis XV and now the Place de la Concorde). During the night, flakes of snow fell on the blade. By the morning, there was a great crowd around it, rubbing their ice-cold fingers and buying hot rolls from the sellers who wove through the throng. At ten-fifteen, the king arrived wearing gray breeches, a pink waistcoat, and a brown silk coat, elaborately neat, his hair as perfectly coiffed as if he were in Versailles. Refusing to allow the executioner to tie his hands, he climbed onto the platform, took off his coat and waistcoat, and began to speak: “My people, I die an innocent man,” he said, but his voice was swamped by the noise of the drums. He was compelled to kneel, the blade was brought down, and his head tumbled into the basket. Spectators dipped their handkerchiefs in the blood to keep as souvenirs.

Marie Antoinette waited in her cell, hoping she might see him one last time, until she heard the crowds below shout out that he was dead. One of the guards brought her a gift from him—his wedding ring engraved with “M.A.A.A., 19 Aprilis 1770,” from the days when she had been Marie Antoinette, Archduchess of Austria.

“A
GREAT NATION
had that day soiled its history with a crime for which the future would hold it guilty,” said Madame de Staël.
⁷

Starving dogs stalked the city. Left to their own devices after the death or flight of their masters, they drank the blood in the gutters and
threatened anyone who dared venture out. Soldiers were sent to kill them, and the people of Paris covered their ears at the sound of scattered shots. Three thousand canine carcasses lay around the streets until the authorities came to collect them—using the confiscated carriages of the aristocracy and piling them high with dead dogs.

At the beginning of March, the first pro-monarchy uprising took place in the Vendée area. The Committee of Public Safety was instituted as the government, and in July, Maximilien de Robespierre was elected to its ranks. With his installation, France careered toward disaster.

The National Convention had proposed that slaves be freed in the French dominions. A settler representative at the assembly declared that he and his fellow white islanders would “rather die than assent to this infamy!” He was uncompromising in his threats. “If France sends troops for the execution of this decree, it is likely that we will decide to abandon France.”
⁸
In 1793, the plantation owners of Martinique made a preemptive strike. Rather than submit to a France abolishing slavery, they gave up their island to Britain. Marie-Josèphe’s birthplace was now British. The change hit her finances hard. With the British fleet blocking the island traffic, there was no chance of receiving money from her family or the estates belonging to Alexandre. The kindness of men sufficed again; she borrowed from friends and admirers and engaged in black-market trading with a network selling Parisian goods to Belgium.

Matters went little better for Alexandre. In 1793, he was appointed commander in chief of the army, but his election coincided with terrible failures. On July 23, the Austrians recaptured Mainz, and the French general was forced to retreat, leaving behind twenty thousand troops to be killed. Alexandre offered his resignation, and it was promptly accepted on the basis that he had “neither the strength nor the moral energy necessary in a General of the Republican army.”
⁹
The previous day, the convention had decreed that no one of aristocratic birth could hold office.

The failures of the Austrian campaign reminded everyone of their former queen, still locked up in the Temple. On August 1, wearing a plain black gown, her belongings reduced to little more than a handkerchief and some smelling salts, Marie Antoinette was taken to a cell in the public prison of the Conciergerie. There the jailers showed off Prisoner
280 to the eager public for money. She held her head high, accepted favors from still-loyal shopkeepers, and hoped that her relations would come to rescue her. But the Committee of Public Safety believed the only way to bind the working classes to the Republic was to execute the queen.

On Monday, October 14, 1793, she was brought in front of the revolutionary tribunal. Gaunt, white-haired, and dressed in her threadbare black gown, thirty-eight-year-old Marie Antoinette was put on trial for treason—accused of giving money to her brother, the emperor of Austria, of engaging in orgies and other terrible acts. She denied everything. “If I have not replied, it is because Nature itself refuses to respond to such a charge laid against a mother,” she said when accused of incest with her son. Composed and dignified, she felt sure she would be exiled as a punishment. At nearly four in the morning, she was handed her verdict and forced to read it aloud. She was found guilty on every charge.

At seven
A.M.
on the sixteenth, her faithful maid came to her cell and tried to give the doomed queen some food. Marie Antoinette donned a plain white gown while the warders watched. Her hair was hacked off and her hands were bound, despite her protests that her husband had not suffered a similar humiliation. As she passed the Tuileries, her eyes filled with tears. At twelve-fifteen, the crowd jeered as her head fell into the basket. When her body arrived at the mass graveyard where her husband was buried, it received no special treatment. The gravediggers were having their lunch break, so the head and body of the queen were left lying on the damp grass.

The city had become a terrible, ghoulish place, as ravaged and sick as if it had been hit by the Black Death. People denounced employees, neighbors, friends, and lovers and were constantly afraid of being accused of treason, plotting, or antirepublican feeling. Almost the entire company of the Comédie Française was imprisoned for suspicious behavior. Mothers were dragged to the guillotine from childbed, while men and women were so eager to save their skins that they cheered the deaths of their loved ones.

The days of gay salons were over. Women dressed drably, all the better not to be noticed. Notre-Dame was renamed the Temple of Reason, the churches were destroyed, their statues of saints smashed into
pieces, bronzes stolen and melted down. A new republican calendar was instituted at the end of 1792, which had a rest day every ten rather than every seven days. Robespierre declared there would be a new religion: the cult of the Supreme Being. Streets called after saints would be renamed—after vegetables, agricultural implements, or patriots of the past. The convention voted in the “Law of Suspects,” ordering the arrest of all those who had by remarks—or even connections—shown themselves “the partisans of tyranny.” Anyone who had traveled in aristocratic circles was at risk of arrest. Marie-Josèphe quickly left the rue Saint-Dominique for Croissy, a quiet town near Paris, where she hoped to keep a low profile. She and Madame Hosten took the Maison Rossignol, an elegant house decorated in Louis XIV style, formerly the home of Madame Campan, who still lived nearby. Marie-Josèphe declared herself a
citoyenne
of the Republic and arranged for Eugène to train as an apprentice with a local carpenter and for Hortense to practice dressmaking.

Life at Croissy was calm and as safe as anywhere could be in the circumstances. When Marie-Josèphe gazed out her window, she could see a pretty château concealed by tall trees and parks. It was owned by local aristocrats, the Molays, and called Malmaison. She became close friends with Madame Campan, the former first lady of the bedchamber. She also met Jean-Lambert Tallien, the twenty-five-year-old radical deputy in the Committee of Public Safety, vulpine, clever, and always ready to change sides. Otherwise, Marie-Josèphe lived quietly.

But Marie-Josèphe was too confident. The committee’s attentions had turned to the Beauharnais family, and it ordered the arrest of Alexandre’s intensely royalist elder brother, François. Marie-Josèphe wrote begging for clemency for François’s estranged wife, Marie—and, by extension, for herself and Alexandre. As she knew, once one family member was taken, the rest would usually follow. She proposed her revolutionary credentials. “If he [Alexandre] was not a republican, he would have neither my esteem nor my affection. I am an American and I know only him of his family … my household is a republican household; before the Revolution, my children could not be distinguished from
sans-culottes
and I hope they will be worthy of the Republic.”
¹⁰

Marie-Josèphe’s description of herself as an American rather than a
slave-owning Creole was almost ludicrous. “I write to you frankly as a genuine
sans culotte
,” she wrote from her fine villa, her jewels stowed in boxes upstairs. Eugène and Hortense might have been plainly dressed, but they, like their mother, were a long way from
sans-culottes
—the often ragged people of the revolutionary mob. She received no reply to her letter. By March 1794, Alexandre had been arrested on suspicions of intending to undermine the state. He was taken to prison at the Luxembourg, then Les Carmes. Jacques-Louis David, painter and archrevolutionary, signed the warrant for his arrest. “Every day I was brought hundreds of them to sign and in the heat of the moment, I did not even read everything I signed,” he later said.

Marie-Josèphe busied herself writing to various people trying to free her husband. By doing so, she secured her own fate. The Committee of Public Safety received a letter denouncing Marie-Josèphe and Madame Hosten for running a “gathering place for suspected persons.” The writer told the committee: “Beware of the former Vicomtesse de Beauharnais, who has secret dealings and connections with government offices.”
¹¹
On Easter Sunday 1794, late at night,
citoyens
Lacombe and George arrived to search the home of Marie-Josèphe and Madame Hosten. The men conducted their mission with care. “After the most scrupulous search,” they reported, “we have found nothing contrary to the interests of the Republic; on the contrary, a multitude of patriotic letters which can only commend the citoyenne.”
¹²
But their fair treatment was immaterial. The next day the women were arrested. Marie-Josèphe could not bring herself to wake her children. “I could not bear to see them cry,” she told their governess, Mademoiselle de Lannoy.
¹³
She and Madame Hosten were taken to Les Carmes, the most infamous prison in Paris. Alexandre was already there, desperate and ill. At thirty, Marie-Josèphe was doomed. No one expected to get out of Les Carmes alive.

Once an orderly convent, Les Carmes had quickly become dirty and infested with rats and lice. The walls were still spattered with blood from the September Massacres. Three hundred inmates waited there to die. Marie-Josèphe shared a cell on the first floor with several other women, including the Duchesse d’Aiguillon, and hundreds of mice. The windows overlooked the garden, but they were barred, and the
prisoners saw little daylight. The fetid mess from the latrine buckets overflowed in the corridors, and the place reeked of human misery. Many prisoners had given up hope and sat barely dressed, hardly able to wash themselves or care about their surroundings. Outside, as they knew, the streets around the guillotine ran red with blood. Marie-Josèphe longed for her children. She wrote to Hortense, “I embrace you both from the bottom of my heart.”
¹⁴

The prisoners were suffering, but at least there was food. At mealtimes in the refectory—first the men and then the women—each prisoner was given a half bottle of wine and as much stale bread as they could manage. In the afternoon husbands and wives, mothers and sons could snatch a few hours together as the prisoners were sent out into the courtyard for fresh air. Marie-Josèphe had many friends there, including the prince of Salm, who had been captured after he came to the city to return Hortense and Eugène.

In the afternoons, the prisoners would chat, walk, and play cards in the recreation area. The Revolutionary Tribunal usually came to collect those chosen to be guillotined in the morning, although the carts sometimes came back for others in the afternoon. The prisoners were brave: It was convention that they should simply wave goodbye to their companions with a sanguine air. After all, every man and woman who watched a victim being taken away knew that he or she might be taken tomorrow. The end of the recreation period was a momentary relief, since the tribunal tended not to come at night.