Confessions of Marie Antoinette (30 page)

The Assembly no longer feigns a pretense of giving a fig for our welfare. “They are a cancer, destroying us from within,” I lament to Louis. He does more than agree. He dismisses every one of his Girondist ministers with the exception of Général Dumouriez. But on June 16, unable to convince my husband to accept the decrees—for our own safety—the
général
resigns his post. We are already unpopular, Louis concedes. But he will not allow the last shreds of power remaining to him to be stripped away. What good is a monarch if he cannot rule?

Three days after Dumouriez steps aside, the king continues to cross swords with the Assembly, formally banning their decrees. The Assembly’s dismissal of our constitutional guard is a compromise, however dangerous, that Louis can abide if absolutely necessary. But the attack on the nonjuring priests and the amassing of twenty thousand National Guardsmen is both intolerable and unacceptable.

Louis’s veto falls on a doubly inauspicious anniversary. It is June 19, the eve of the celebrations three years ago of the infamous oath taken by the delegates of the Estates General in the Jeu de Paume, the tennis court in Versailles. It is also nearly a year to the day of our disastrous flight to Montmédy. News of the king’s veto spreads across Paris like sewage from a ruptured pipe. By nightfall, the streets fill with protestors angrily demanding the suppression of the vetoes. Fearing riots, assemblies are declared illegal, but no one seems to heed the authorities. Outside our windows, the mob in the Jardin des Tuileries has grown more restless than usual. Their collective, unwashed stench wafting through the night air is enough to make one retch.

Jerôme Pétion de Villeneuve, one of our enforced companions during the long hot ride from Varennes to Paris a year ago, is now the city’s mayor. The crowds continue to gather through the night, growing ever more boisterous with the heavy consumption of wine
and propaganda. I wonder aloud as I step away from the window—where, from the gardens below, the threatening verses of the
Ça Ira
send shivers along my spine—when Pétion will dare to show his face and convince the people, if not outright order them, to peaceably disperse.

Splaying his hands, Louis shrugs, his shoulders rising with resignation and falling with defeat. “Pétion may be more afeared of them than you and I,
mon amour
.”

“Come—help me finish the lettering. Two artists can work faster than one.” Armand beckons Louison to leave the window, where she has been intrigued by the tumult below.

“Where did you get the brushes and pigments?” she asks her lover. She picks her way through the tiny overcrowded room they share in the rue de l’Ancienne Comédie above Le Procope, a café renowned for its famous clientele. The delicious aromas emanating from the kitchen tauntingly wend their way up the narrow air shafts, reminding the couple how empty their bellies are and how much money they would have to scrape together to afford a single bowl of soup from a cauldron bubbling only twenty feet below.

“The master gave them to me.”

“Monsieur David gave his own tools to an apprentice?” Louison picks up Armand’s other shirt from the floor. “It will get even dirtier if you don’t hang it on the hook,” she scolds.

“David is one of us!” Armand exclaims. He holds up the partially lettered sign for Louison to read.

“ ‘T
REMBLE
,
TYRANTS
,
THE PEOPLE ARE ARMED
!
À
BAS
…’
À bas quoi?
” she asks, trembling herself. “Down with
what
?”

“À bas le veto!”
replies Armand, holding the wooden handle of a narrow paintbrush between his teeth. “You will come with me, won’t you?”

Outside the small dormer window, stars are just becoming visible in the blue velvet sky. “Where?” asks Louison.

“To visit your friend,” he answers with a hint of mockery, pushing an errant lock of dark hair off his brow with his forearm. At her look of incomprehension, Armand cheerfully expounds. “The
king
. Several thousand of us are going to pay him a call at the Tuileries.” He brandishes the sign, missing only the word “veto” now. “Be a good girl and paint the final word.” He reaches affectionately for Louison’s thigh and brings her toppling to the floor beside him, her fall broken by a heap of dirty clothes and tattered rags spattered with paint and soaked with turpentine.

Louison crouches over the placard and dips the brush into the dollop of red paint that Armand had mixed on his wooden palette. As she begins to carefully draw each letter, her lover comes up behind her, slipping his arms about her waist and brushing aside her curls to nuzzle the nape of her neck.
“Ouf!”
Startled, she loses her balance, smearing the crossbar of the
t
in “veto,” as the brush drags a jagged streak of carmine across the board. It looks like blood.

The clock in my bedchamber chimes eight times. It is unusual for people to bustle about the palace this early but I hear footsteps and voices outside my apartments. I tiptoe to the door of my salon and press my ear to the paneling. My husband is speaking to someone. I part the doors an inch to see that he is deep in conference with the Minister of the Interior, the marquis de Terrier de Montciel. “Do not be alarmed,
Majesté
,” Terrier insists. “Yes, there were uprisings during the night in some of the faubourgs, but it was nothing that could not be contained.”

“But are
we
safe here?” Louis asks. I know he must be thinking about what brought us to the Tuileries in the first place, the people’s storming of Versailles less than three years ago.

“Absolutely,” the minister assures my husband.

Yet only an hour later the minister sends a frantic message to the Assembly requesting a detachment of troops to defend the palace. Although the gates have been shut against their inevitable arrival, the rioters do not decide to go to bed after a night of unrest. They are on the march; their destination is the Tuileries Palace.

The narrow streets swarm with people; nearly everyone proudly wears a liberty cap. As the noisy crowd surges from one
rue
into another, Louison and Armand are swept along in a red tide of pulsing humanity, shouting, singing, waving their placards, and pumping the air with their fists, knives, pikes, cudgels, and hatchets. The weapons’ handles are gaily decorated with tricolor ribbons. It all feels eerily familiar to the young sculptress, except that on this final day of spring the sun is shining and men and women march together with no attempt to disguise the purpose of their errand.

It is nearly two
P.M
. as they near the vast area encompassing the Tuileries Palace and gardens. A knot of dread lodges itself in Louison’s bosom. The mood has changed; the taunts and jeers of the mob have grown more ominous, goaded by the rabble-rousing brewer Antoine Joseph Santerre. Blue-coated members of the National Guard, from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine regiment under Santerre’s command and from other units as well, join the vociferous mob. At first Louison fears the soldiers are going to fire upon them, or at the very least order their dispersal at the point of their bayonets. Then she realizes they have joined the uprising.

We are on the razor’s edge
, she realizes.
Anything can happen
. Louison clasps Armand’s arm and he places his hand over hers in a gesture of solidarity, the T
REMBLE, TYRANTS
placard briefly obscuring her view. She thinks,
He is too excited to notice my fear
.

Upon reaching the Tuileries the mob first tries to gain access to
the Salle du Manège, to bring their grievances to the Assembly. Shouts of
“À bas le veto!”
fill the air. At four o’clock, having decided that
au fond
, the monarchs are to blame for all the ills of France, the collective anger of twenty thousand hungry souls, many of them red-faced with inebriation, is redirected at the gates of the palace.

“
Vite!
Hurry along—I don’t want to lose you in the crowd.” Armand grasps Louison’s wrist and pulls her along like a toy on a string. Pressing forward as one, the mob moves so swiftly through the gardens, trampling the brightly colored blooms on the newly planted parterres, that she almost loses her footing, but David’s ambitious apprentice wishes to be near the front of the pack when the wolves storm the gates.

The angry clang of steel against iron reverberates through the late afternoon air as the mob hacks at the high bars that separate them from their prey. Louison jumps at the sound of pistol fire, but Armand assures her that the report only announces to the thousands of people who remain too far from the gates to glimpse the action, that those in the vanguard have gained entry. Like a swarm of deadly flies, the rioters rush the battered and broken bars in their haste to reach the Place du Carrousel and the main doors of the palace.

Santerre stands on the shallow steps in front of the Tuileries Palace holding his unsheathed saber aloft as if to lead a brigade into battle. Suddenly, a thundering rumble rends the air and the ground trembles beneath Louison’s feet. She glances about in a panic, fearful that the earth will open and swallow her where she stands; but no one else seems to be afraid. They are all rushing toward the palace doors, Armand among them, pressing his red Phrygian cap further down upon his head, so that it might not be knocked off and trampled in the mad crush to break down the portals.

“I must help them!” Armand shouts as he thrusts the placard into Louison’s hands, briefly deserting his lover to assist a dozen or
more men who are straining every muscle to push an ironclad cannon through the splintered doors.
What the devil do they mean to do with such a piece of artillery inside the palace?
Louison wonders. Armand is helping to heave the twelve-pounder, named not for its own weight but for that of the individual cannonballs, up the steps and onto the first floor of the palace. There it is left in an opulent antechamber with the gun barrel facing the door that, according to Santerre, leads to the throne room. The Garde Nationale makes no effort to halt the intrusion. Indeed, many of their number have already joined the uprising. And those charged with protecting the palace display their partisanship by shaking out the priming from their muskets, as if to alert the rioters that they need not fear reprisals or retaliation for their actions. In fact, the soldiers train their artillery
against
the palace, on anyone who would seek to halt the momentum of the protestors.

As one massive body teeming with myriad red-bonneted heads and limbs, the rioters surge up the stairs, demanding with a thousand voices to see the monarchs. But the vast marble halls are nearly empty. Everyone they spy, whether soldier or courtier, chambermaid or lackey, disappears behind closed doors, scurrying to escape the approaching onslaught. Louison is helplessly buoyed along by the mob like a cork bobbing in a raging stream, as dismayed as she was that awful October morning at the willful destruction of so much beauty and majesty. Oriental vases are removed from their pedestals and viciously dashed to the floor, shattering into hundreds of razor-sharp shards. Some of the fragments are scooped up by the rioters: you never know when you might need to slit an aristocrat’s throat, and a fragment of Sèvres will do as well as a dagger. Portraits, still lifes, and dozens of scenic and allegorical tableaux are slashed; Louison feels heartbroken at the jagged sound of ripping canvas. She looks for Armand and wonders if he, a revolutionary to the core, would nonetheless endorse the destruction of
an artist’s handiwork, regardless of who may own it. And if the people believe
they
now own the palaces of France, isn’t that all the more reason to cherish, rather than destroy, their priceless treasures—to save them for the Nation?

The men and women running alongside the young sculptress—
they aren’t like me
, she thinks. Their armpits and breath are foul. They don’t want to change things; they want to destroy them. Are they truly interested in voicing their complaints to the king? Or do they wish—she shudders—to assassinate him?

“Where is the fat pig!” shouts a man, no slenderer than the sovereign himself.

“To the Oeil de Boeuf!” cries Santerre, pointing with his naked saber to the room now housing the cannon. “We will draw him out of his comfortable sty!”

The halls resound with the tread of thousands of footsteps as the rioters hunt down their prey, pausing at every sealed chamber to batter down the doors, splintering them into sawdust with hatchet blows, the colored ribbons on the ax handles twirling and looping as if they danced around a hundred handheld maypoles. Locks are smashed apart. Golden hinges, hacked and pried from the doorposts, fly into the crowd; and a cry goes up each time someone is lucky enough to catch one of them—to be cherished as a souvenir of the day the rioter changed the course of history.

Ivory-colored paneling and gilded boiseries are reduced to rubble, priceless chandeliers dripping with thousands of crystal pendants are poked to pieces by pikestaffs; candles and any objets d’art small enough to fit in the palm of a man’s hand are pocketed during the patriots’ rage to seek and destroy.

As the leaders return to the Oeil de Boeuf in search of the king, they are nonetheless startled to find themselves confronting the tyrant himself. But for some, it is not enough. Cries of
“Où est l’Autrichienne?”
“Where is the bitch?” “Where is Madame Veto?”
pierce the air. An unshaven man taunts the sovereign with a gruesome prop: a stained rag doll suspended by her neck from a gibbet. A placard hangs about her throat like a macabre necklace, demanding
“À la lanterne avec Marie Antoinette.”

“Louis—non!”
I clutch my husband’s sleeve to prevent him from confronting the rabble.

“
Majesté
, you must come with me now—do you not hear their cries?” The princesse de Lamballe slips her hand into mine. “Madame Campan is right; we must retreat to the dauphin’s rooms. The ruffians have not yet found their way there.”