Confessions of Marie Antoinette (52 page)

At this, my advocate asks Tisset if he still stands by his testimony. The witness darts his eyes to and fro, from the Public Prosecutor to the jurors, his face becoming paler by the moment. I wonder who has paid him to lie.

Chauveau-Lagarde then asks the Revolutionary Tribunal if they can produce the evidence of these financial transactions. Fouquier-Tinville squirms in his chair. Eventually he admits that the tribunal can produce no documentation in support of these allegations. Nor do they have any proof that corroborates the next prosecution witness’s testimony that I sent the commanding officer of the Switzers a letter asking whether the monarchy could rely upon his men in the event of an uprising—presumably written sometime before the Tuileries was stormed either in June or August of last year.

“Where is this letter?” demands Chauveau-Lagarde, hooking his thumbs into the broad lapels of his coat, his habit, I have come to notice, when he grows confrontational. “Have you seen it with your own eyes?” The witness, the cousin of a former palace bootblack,
who claims to have overheard someone else averring that I had written to the Switzers’s commander, reddens and stammers his concession.

And on and on it goes throughout the long day, with each of the prosecution’s witnesses being set up like pins and my defenders bowling them down one by one. The Revolutionary Tribunal has not one shred of evidence with which to convict me. If only this were a real court and not a sham. If only the truth mattered.

Not a single spectator has quit the hall, despite the late hour. Deep into the evening I am questioned about the royal family’s flight to the frontier.

“Is it not true that you bent Louis Capet to your will and induced him to do whatever you wanted? You made use of his weak character to carry out your evil deeds.”

“I never knew my husband to have such a character as you describe. And in any case, to advise a course of action and to actually make it manifest are two different things,” I reply.

“That is not what your son told the Tribunal.”

I suppress a shudder, imagining my terrified little boy uttering whatever the menacing, angry, frightening, threatening men coerced him into admitting, heedless of the truth, fearful that he would be beaten, or worse. “It is easy, Monsieur Hermann, to make a child of eight say whatever you wish him to.”

“Who was the man who purchased the carriage you rode in?”

“It was a foreigner,” I reply. Truthful, but evasive.

“From what nation?”

“Sweden,” I say without hesitating, although my belly seizes with anxiety.

Hermann pounces like a cat upon a rolling ball of twine. “Was it not Count Axel von Fersen, who dwelled in Paris at the time?”

“
Oui
, monsieur.”

And that, to my complete amazement, is the end of his interrogation
on this subject. Nothing further at all! Not a single question on where the money came from to depart, nothing on my relationship with him. Perhaps they know nothing. I marvel how the Revolutionary Tribunal can haul me before a jury on countless charges, every one of which has been fabricated and for which they have no legal proof, and yet they are blind, deaf, and dumb to the facts of my life.

For a brief, pleasurable moment I feel as if I have just stepped into a hip bath and my fear is melting away into the warm scented water.

Finally, at eleven o’clock, Fouquier-Tinville’s gavel descends with a sharp crack. He announces that the remaining witnesses will be interrogated tomorrow, beginning at eight in the morning. It is after midnight by the time I am escorted back to my cell. Rosalie is waiting for me with a bowl of hot bouillon. “I have no appetite,” I say as she unlaces me.

“You hardly took any nourishment today, and you need to keep up your strength, madame,” she replies with sweet solicitousness, and for an instant I imagine that if she were highborn I would make her a duchesse and commit my children into her care.

“You are too kind to me, Mademoiselle Lamorlière,” I sigh.

A faint blush suffuses Rosalie’s broad cheeks. “Only as kind as you deserve, madame.”

Morning comes too quickly. As I make my toilette before the little mirror Rosalie had given me, I scarcely recognize the face I see in the glass. The eyelids are swollen with weeping; the lids are rimmed with red and shadowed with indigo demilunes of exhaustion and sleeplessness. My lips, even the famously protruding lower one, are cracked and colorless. My skin, which the court painter Madame Vigée-Lebrun once protested was impossible to duplicate in oils because of its unique translucence, has lost its luster. My hair is brittle and almost entirely white. I am not yet thirty-eight and I
surely look older than my mother did when she died at the age of sixty-three.

If it is possible, the Hall of Freedom, France’s greatest contradiction, is more packed with humanity—another incongruity—than it was yesterday. My nostrils are assaulted as soon as I am escorted back to the unforgiving wooden chair; the Grand Chambre reeks of hundreds of malodorous armpits, unwashed garments, and all manner of rubbish from the
rues
clinging to the wooden soles of countless sabots.

The examining magistrate opens the second day of my trial by ordering a bailiff to empty the contents of the bag of “contraband” I had brought from the Temple to the Conciergerie. These are what remain of the personal effects they had not previously confiscated. Among the items tossed upon a table before the jurors are the locks of my children’s hair as well as one of Louis’s; two miniatures—one, a portrait of the princesse de Lamballe and the other of a childhood friend from Vienna, now the Landgravine of Hesse-Darmstadt; a notebook containing the names and addresses of Dr. Brunier and a laundress; and a piece of paper with “mysterious calculations” written upon it.

“That is my son’s mathematics exercise,” I tell the prosecutors. “Nothing more. It was the first time he solved every equation correctly. Proud mother that I am, I preserved it. I, myself, was an indifferent student at his age.”

Jacques Hébert is then called to the witness box and sworn to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. He begins his testimony by boldly stating, “The accused is much more than a proud mother.” His eyes glitter with malice. First, he claims that the Sacred Heart relic found among my possessions is a well-known counterrevolutionary symbol, proof alone of my perfidious, unwavering royalism. He adds that after the death of my husband I continued
to adhere to royalist customs by placing my son at the head of the table to be served first as king.

“Did you see this yourself?” I demand.

Caught off guard, Hébert admits he was not an eyewitness. I am incensed, but I cannot show it. “We had no servants at the Temple after the king was executed,” I say. “In fact, my son was seated at the foot of the table and I served him myself.”

Hébert glares at me. “The prisoner and her defenders keep asking for proofs of each of the allegations against her. And on each occasion, the prosecution has had nothing to offer. I have provided to the Public Prosecutor and the examining magistrate a document signed by the accused’s own son, Louis Charles Capet. It attests to the lewd and shameful
pollution indécentes
that his mother and his aunt, the
ci-devant
princesse Élisabeth, taught him to practice upon himself, and which they performed upon him, individually and collectively. This confession states that the child’s own mother, and his aunt, made him lie down between them and on such occasions they forced him to pleasure them in unspeakable acts of debauchery.” Hébert takes a document from his coat, unfolds and brandishes it. At the bottom of a few paragraphs written in a clearly adult hand is my son’s signature in his childish looping scrawl, Louis Charles Capet.

The entire hall falls silent, rapt. I am literally made sick by this charge, the most heinous accusation anyone can level at a mother. But Hébert is not finished. “It is my belief that the accused wished to gain complete control over her son’s mind because her plan was to one day regain the throne for him and become a regent as powerful as Catherine de Medici was in her day. To that purpose, she sought to gain control over the boy’s body so that he could deny her nothing.”

I need to vomit. I notice that even the demonic Fouquier-Tinville
is horrified at his deputy’s allegation, because he, too, can read the shock on the jurors’ faces. His famous eyebrows meet with worry. Hébert has gone too far. The men in the jury box are afraid for their lives if they do not render a guilty verdict—but they are not credulous fools.

Finally, Citoyen Hermann speaks. “What reply does the prisoner make to this accusation?”

I am trembling with rage and emotion. “I have no knowledge of the incidents Monsieur Hébert refers to.”

This reply seems to be enough for the examining magistrate. I surmise from the look on his face that if he pursues it any further, things will only go hard for the prosecution. But then one of the jurors rises. “Citoyen President, I must ask you to draw the accused’s attention to the fact that she has not answered Citoyen Hébert’s allegation about what transpired between her and her son.”

The examining magistrate glances down at his clasped hands and presses his lips into a grimace. A juror has demanded my response. He has no choice but to compel it.

I am hemorrhaging profusely. I have scarcely slept. But for the first time in two days of testimony, of absurd charges, calumnies, and abominations, I rise to my feet to refute the most lurid and pernicious of them all. “If I have not answered, it was because Nature herself refuses to answer such a charge against a mother,” I reply, my voice filled with passion, with wrath, and with unimaginable pain. I turn to face the spectators—the
sans-culottes
, the
tricoteuses
who have paused mid-stitch, the young sculptress, the marketwomen and
poissardes
, nameless faces who hang upon my every word, and look them in the eyes, my own beginning to well with tears. “I appeal to all the mothers in this room.”

For the second time today the Grand Chambre grows utterly silent. The hall crackles with tension. And then, as if a conductor
has lowered his baton, the murmurs begin, most of them approving, but one voice carries above the others. “See how
proud
she is!”

I do not know whether this is a compliment or a criticism. “Was there too much dignity in my answer?” I whisper to Chauveau-Lagarde.

“Be yourself, and you will always do right, madame,” he assures me. And before a livid Fouquier-Tinville can recall Hébert from the witness box, he cross-examines him. “From a review of the documents provided to me by the prosecution prior to trial, I understand that both the sister of Louis Charles Capet and his aunt were interrogated with regard to these allegations of incest between the accused and her son. Is that correct?”

“
Oui
, Monsieur Chauveau-Lagarde,” Hébert concedes.

“And did they sign depositions?”

“They did.”

“Do you have them and will you produce them now for public examination?”

Scowling, Jacques Hébert reaches into his coat. He hands two papers to my defender as if he desires the very touch of them to burn Chauveau-Lagarde’s hand. My advocate unfolds the first paper. “Is this the deposition of Marie Thérèse, the older sister of Louis Charles Capet?” Hébert nods, his upper lip curling into a snarl. My defender asks him to peruse it, then says, “Doesn’t Marie Thérèse state that she has no knowledge of any of the incidents you speak of? That she was never in the room when any such thing took place? That her brother never told her of any such events?” He shows Hébert the other document. “And is this not the testimony of Madame Élisabeth?” Once again the deputy prosecutor nods. “And does she not completely deny your allegations of incest, attesting that they are an utter fiction and never took place? That is the testimony above her signature—am I correct?”

Hébert has been beaten. Hermann and Fouquier-Tinville could
not appear more exasperated. I can see them wondering how they will regain the upper hand even as
I
comprehend that a guilty verdict is a foregone conclusion. Still, with the way things have gone for the past two interminably long days I continue to pray for a sentence of banishment with my children. The public thirst for a trial has been quenched. What more do they want?

Midnight has passed by the time the prosecution finishes presenting the last of their 141 witnesses. Finally, Fouquier-Tinville asks me if I have anything further to say in my defense.

I rise to my feet again. My legs wobble and I grasp the arm of the chair to steady myself. As soon as I stand I can feel the blood again. Seeping. I will myself to maintain my dignity for only a few minutes more. I cannot collapse now. Not here. After taking a moment to compose my thoughts, I say, in a clear, steady voice, “Yesterday, I did not know who the witnesses would be who would testify against me, or what they would say. Well, none of them has uttered anything positive against me. I will conclude by stating that I was only the wife of Louis Seize and I was bound to conform to his wishes by the ties of holy matrimony and the etiquette of the Bourbon court.”

With this, the defense rests its case.

“You look tired,” I whisper to Chauveau-Lagarde. He is afforded no time to respond to my solicitude. Fouquier-Tinville immediately orders his arrest as well as that of his colleague, my co-defender Tronson Docoudray. My hands fly helplessly to my face. Their death warrants may just as well have been written by my own hand.

I am not permitted to remain present while the examining magistrate reads his summation to the jury. Instead I remain in an antechamber, supervised by Lieutenant de Busne of the Garde Nationale while Citoyen Hermann puts four questions to the jurors, all of them related to a single charge of treason against the Republic
of France, alleging that I conspired with foreign powers, France’s enemies, despite the Revolutionary Tribunal’s complete lack of documentary proof. Jacques Hébert’s allegation of incest, as well as every other charge against me, has been dismissed.