Confessions of Marie Antoinette (54 page)

I remove the black crepe streamers from my pleated linen bonnet and secure it upon my head, then Rosalie slides my feet into the plum satin shoes, the very pair that officer Gilbert had one day so kindly cleansed of mold and rust, using his sword to scrape away the filth and dampness. Rosalie drapes a pristine fichu of white muslin about my shoulders. “You look like I imagine an angel does,” she murmurs.

I notice Thisbe nosing about the crevice where I hid my bloodstained chemise. “When I am gone, I want you to take her,” I whisper to Rosalie. “She will need someone to look after her. Someone who will love her.”

“Madame, you could give me no greater honor.”

Someone thinks to send a
mignonette
from a nearby café to my cell. Closing my eyes I sip the bittersweet brew, inhaling its fragrant aroma, remembering how often I had begun the morning at Versailles with just such a cup of chocolate. My eyes sting with tears.

I am kneeling in prayer on the threadbare carpet by my bed when Monsieur Larivière, the turnkey, enters with Monsieur Bault, to inform me that it is now ten in the morning and the court clerk and two of the judges will be arriving momentarily to read me my sentence.

“I already know it. It is unnecessary to read it,” I say, rising to my feet when I see Citoyen Hermann leading the delegation into my cramped cell. Rosalie slips past them as they enter, pressing her
handkerchief to her lips. I will never reproach her for not being able to say good-bye.

“N’importe,”
replies one of the judges. “It does not matter what you wish. The sentence must be read to you again. It is the law.”

“Monsieur Larivière, please convey my thanks to your mother for her kindly care, and ask her to pray for me,” I murmur to the turnkey.

The cell is suddenly thrown into shadow. The door has been darkened by Henri Sanson, the
bourreau
, a man well over six feet tall and as broad as the doorway. The post of Royal Executioner of France is the family sinecure. His father Charles Henri executed Louis. Henri has held the office since July.

“I am here to bind your hands,” Sanson says, his voice as deep and rumbling as a bassoon.

So they intend to send me like a little white lamb to the slaughter. “Must you?” I ask, more plaintively than I had intended. “Louis Seize did not have his hands bound when he left the Temple. They were not bound until he reached the foot of the scaffold, I was told.”

“I have my orders” is Sanson’s succinct reply. He secures my hands tightly behind my back. I wince and blink at the pain. I did not imagine the shackles would fit so snugly, slicing into the tender flesh of my wrists. The
bourreau
then takes out his enormous pair of shears and with no acquiescence to vanity, removes my bonnet and lops off my snowy tresses in thick uneven hanks so the guillotine’s blade—that “humane” instrument of death, that “social equalizer”—will strike true when it falls. If the knife is impeded, my demise could be a painful one indeed. Sanson pockets the hair he has shorn. I know it will later be burned. Secret royalists will be denied this relic of my martyrdom to the monarchy of France.

I don’t dare glance at my reflection in Rosalie’s red lacquered
mirror. Perhaps my locks are not so different now from when Léonard restyled them after the first dauphin was born. I had lost so much hair then and the
friseur
transformed me from an unhealthy new mother into a fashionable woman once again.

Mon Dieu!
My fear has suddenly gotten the better of me. “
Monsieur le bourreau
, would you kindly unbind my hands? I must attend immediately to a call of nature.” I plead with the executioner to assist me before I have an embarrassing accident. Sanson looks to the guard for permission. He nods his head and I am released to the humiliation of lifting my skirts to relieve myself, emptying my bowels in the corner of the cell like a streetwalker in the shadows of the Palais Royal.

After I have smoothed out my skirts I request permission to redon my bonnet as well, then present my hands to Citoyen Sanson and once again he jerks them roughly behind my back. When I consider that he is the seventh generation of his family to perform the duties of official executioner and that the office was bestowed upon the Sansons by Louis XV, I would have hoped for a modicum of gentleness.

The
bourreau
attaches a rope to the shackles and I am paraded through the Conciergerie and into the courtyard. I blink several times. I have been confined so long in the dim recesses of my cell and the torchlit cavern of the Gothic Grand Chambre that my eyes are unused to the daylight. It is a misty morning, but the autumnal chill of the previous night has passed. I expect the sunlight to emerge by afternoon, but I will not be here to see it.

“Where is the coach?” I ask, expecting to see a closed unmarked carriage of the sort that conveyed Louis to the Place de la Révolution.

“You were not a king,” Citoyen Hermann remarks. Instead, what awaits, drawn by a pair of
rosinantes
, sturdy drays, is a wooden
tumbrel, one of the open-railed carts that conveys common criminals to the guillotine. The victims are usually seated shoulder to shoulder, facing each other around the inside perimeter of the wagon. Sanson instructs me to sit upon the hard plank with my back to the coachman, rather than face forward, the way the highest-ranking person sits in a carriage. I cannot see the direction in which we are going, which disorients me. I am not to face the future, but to look upon the past and what has led me to this jostling wagon ride toward eternity. A constitutional priest garbed in beige
sans-culottes
and a long brown vest climbs up and sits beside me but I remain determined to ignore him. He does not even remove his hat. Facing sideways is Sanson; his assistants take their places on the opposite bench.

The actor from the Théâtre Français, Grammont, mounted on horseback, holding aloft a naked saber as though he is leading a charge into battle, heads the macabre procession that conveys me from the Conciergerie through the crowded
rues
to the Place de la Révolution. Grammont rises in his stirrups, brandishing his sword and inciting the rabble to insult me as I pass. “Make way for the Austrian bitch!
Et voilà!
The infamous Antoinette!
Elle est foutoue, mes amis!
She is done for!” Shouts of
“À bas l’Autrichienne!”
and
“Vive la République!”
rend the air.

A sudden jolt nearly knocks me off the unforgiving wooden board, a mishap noticed by one of the gendarmes who make up my escort to the scaffold. “Those are not your silken cushions at Trianon!” he sneers at me as the tumbrel clatters past, spattering dozens of citizens with mud. Nonetheless, ecstatic at my humiliation, they toss their liberty caps in the air.

I am determined to maintain my dignity and hold my head high. I will die a daughter of Austria, a wife and mother of France. Soldiers with their bayoneted muskets balanced on their shoulders are everywhere I look. I have never seen so many guardsmen. Sanson
tells me that thirty thousand reinforcements have been called into Paris today. Why? To keep the peace? Do they think the people will foment a riot after the embodiment of their hatred is dispatched? Do they think I will attempt an escape? That Count von Fersen will ride into the capital on a white charger and sweep me off the scaffold and out of the cold cruel arms of Madame Guillotine?

Axel, wherever he is now, could not get past the city gates even if he were to attempt it. They have been barricaded; cannon are mounted on every bridge and in every public square.

The tumbrel rolls into the rue Saint-Honoré, once the site of Rose Bertin’s opulent emporium Le Grand Mogol. My memory flashes upon the first time I stepped across the threshold in the company of my friend Louise, the duchess de Chartres, who in those innocent days never could have imagined her husband would—as the duc d’Orléans-turned-Philippe Égalité—betray his kinsman and vote to kill a king. As the cart passes the Oratory, I catch sight of a mother struggling to lift her chubby infant high enough so that he can see above the crush of people clamoring for a glance at the former queen’s final journey. Always drawn to the sight of babies, I cast a melting glance in the direction of mother and child and for the fraction of an instant the faintest smile crosses my lips. And then—as the baby brings his moist little fingers to his lips and blows me a kiss, a single tear courses down my cheek, despite my vow to show no weakness before the people. I lift my chin and square my shoulders. My posture will remain regal, as if I am wearing the unforgiving stays I always detested as a girl, when my refusal to abide such corsets nearly resulted in an incident of international proportions.

The crude open cart rumbles past the Tuileries Palace and Gardens and I recall the days I spent there with my family. How foolish I was to think only of our deprivations at first, how little we had
compared to the splendor of Versailles and Fontainebleau. We had each other then. At the sight of the gardens littered with fallen leaves in shades of ruby, gold, and brown, and the façade of the Tuileries with its shattered windows and battered stone, I blink away tears.

As we near the Place de la Révolution, I am struck by the eerie silence that greets the arrival of my cavalcade. In June of 1773, Louis and I made our first formal entrance into Paris as dauphin and dauphine. How the people had loved us then! They greeted us with songs and dances and showered us with flowers. On the steps of the Hôtel de Ville the capital’s mayor presented us with the keys to the city. We represented a young, bright hope for France’s future. How much has changed in twenty years! The same people who once pelted the rosy-cheeked royals with blossoms and sugared almonds not only orchestrated but cheered for their executions.

The mist begins to lift, revealing patches of blue, punctuated by big-bellied white clouds. As the tumbrel rounds a corner, two monuments dominate my view, piercing the sky. The first is the enormous seated figure of the Goddess of Liberty who replaced the toppled and desecrated statue of Louis XV in the center of the Place. In one hand she holds the sword of justice; on her head is sculpted a triangular liberty bonnet. Her unseeing eyes look across the Place toward the other vertical shrine, the altar of the Revolution on which its victims are slaughtered, the trapezoidal blade glinting as it catches a ray of sunlight.

Two tall wooden uprights connected by a crossbar form this neoclassical sculpture. Suspended from the crosspiece is the fatal instrument, the great equalizer that dispatches baron and bootblack, princesse and petty thief, with the same reputedly painless alacrity. A pair of sparrows dips and wings above it as if they plan to build a nest upon the crossbar.

As we reach the foot of the scaffold, I realize, to my horror, that the stories I have heard of the circus atmosphere surrounding the executions are no exaggeration. I spy lemonade sellers, people consuming bags of nuts, and pamphleteers still hawking
libelles
and lewd caricatures accusing me of fornicating with Polignac, Lamballe, Artois, and anyone else the authors can invent. The
tricoteuses
are indeed seated around the perimeter of the scaffold, the incessant clicking of their wooden needles providing a percussive accompaniment to the daily parade of judicial murders.

“Two hundred thousand people have come here this morning,” Henri Sanson tells me.

Why do they behave as though they are here to watch a Punchinello puppet show?
I wonder. The notion that a fifth of a million people have come to witness my gruesome demise is enough to make me ill.

I refuse the
bourreau
’s assistance in alighting from the tumbrel, although it is no mean feat to descend with my hands tied behind my back. Before me looms the wooden platform, larger than I had imagined, high and broad enough to cast the yard below it into shadow. The scale is not human. I feel dwarfed by it; a grown man could almost stand beneath it without stooping.

I ascend a mundane wooden staircase. My spirit is strangely calm, now. There is supposed to be no pain. But even if there is, I have endured so much over the years that one instant more would scarcely trouble me. I am looking at the white clouds scudding across the sky, thinking of my family waiting for me just beyond them, when I hear the
bourreau
mutter,
“Sacré bleu!”
and I realize I have stepped on his foot in my haste to greet Madame Guillotine. “Pardon, monsieur,” I murmur contritely. “I didn’t mean to do it.”

I do not wish to address the crowd, nor do I expect that the Nation would permit me to do so, as other queens about to lose their
heads such as Anne Boleyn and Kathryn Howard did in their day. However, I have something to say to God and to my absent children, and raising my eyes to heaven I utter it simply. “Dear Lord, may you enlighten and touch my executioners.
Adieu, mes enfants
. I go to rejoin your father.”

The
bourreau
’s two assistants, men with ummemorable faces wearing long brown vests and sand-colored
sans-culottes
, grasp my upper arms and thrust me roughly toward the guillotine, physically forcing me to lie facedown upon the horizontal plank beneath the shining blade with my throat resting in the lower section of the neckhole. I look out across the rabble below me, seeking a friendly face. Perhaps it is only my imagination but I think I spy the young woman who came to the Conciergerie with her chisel. Then the vast sea of faces begins to blur. Henri Sanson removes a watch from his pocket. It is precisely 12:11, he says. I have four minutes left to live. That is how much time it will take his assistants to secure me to the plank of the guillotine and to lower the board above my neck.

I feel a breeze upon my brow. The air shimmers before my eyes. My field of vision is reduced to a patch of purest blue October sky.

Out of the corner of my eye I spy something fluttering on the breeze and try to identify it but my head is immobilized. Yet then I see it again, dancing before my eyes.