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Authors: Juliet Grey

Tags: #Fiction, #Historical, #Romance, #General, #Biographical

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BOOK: Confessions of Marie Antoinette
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After a delay of an hour or so we are treated to the reason. A pair of
friseurs
are paraded past our coach, their faces pale with fear, mouths grim, and no wonder, for the blade of a knife is pressed against their respective throats. With their eyes they direct us upward, but we have no need to slouch in our seats in order to obtain the view. What we are meant to see is shoved in our faces. The hapless hairdressers have apparently been forced upon pain of death to coif the severed heads of our bodyguards. The remains of Lieutenants Deshuttes and de Varicourt have been further desecrated, dressed to resemble the famous
poufs
worn by myself and
my ladies in our most frivolous and verdant days, teased and frizzled as high off our foreheads as possible, then pomaded and heavily dusted with powder. But the mockery and the insult do not stop there. With such outlandish coiffures these two brave men have been feminized—even more so with the addition of ribbons, pearls, and feathers. The hideous impression is that the sovereigns had been under the protection of raddled, overdone women, a message not lost on the mob.

One of the pike-wielding ruffians cavorts about our coach, poking the chassis with the butt of his staff, then thrusting Monsieur Deshuttes’s head against the window. He has jettisoned his
poissarde
’s disguise to reveal loose, long pants that reach his scuffed leather shoes, the mark of a man of the lowest social order. Each time Deshuttes’s head bobs in front of us, my daughter screams, which engenders no end of malicious cackling from our tormentor and only incites him to further torture. This day will bring her nightmares enough. I clutch Madame Royale to my breast to shield her vision and shout through the window, “Get this
sans-culotte
away from me!” After one more swipe at the window with poor Lieutenant Deshuttes’s head, the laborer disappears into the crowd, laughing like a madman.

Their gruesome trophies newly embellished, the mob parades them upon the pikestaffs toward the vanguard of this hideous cavalcade and, accompanied by the sort of dancing one expects to see at a country fair, a new chant commences. “
Nous vous amenons le boulanger, la boulangère, et le petit mitron
—We are bringing you the baker, the baker’s wife, and the little baker boy!”

Madame Royale stares glumly out the carriage window. “They do not even mention
me
.”

FOUR

The Tuileries

It is ten in the evening by the time our carriage rumbles up to the courtyard of the Tuileries Palace. In the coaches that have traveled behind us are six hundred and seventy exhausted and frightened attendants.

It is so dark that there are not enough torches to illuminate the vast façade. The château is little more than a ghostly shell. It has remained formally unoccupied by the court for 124 years, although for some time a small apartment has been kept furnished for me and a few of my attendants. If I stayed later than usual at a masquerade ball, we would retire to the cavernous Tuileries for the night.

I expect a footman to open the steps and hand me down from the coach. Instead, Count von Fersen and the comte de Saint-Priest are there to greet us. My eyes meet Axel’s, and our unspoken exchange, conveyed only through our eyes, is noticed by the Secrétaire d’État of the royal household. “You should go,” Saint-Priest murmurs to Axel. “There are too many people who know. And if
they do not know, they suspect. And if they do not suspect, now is not the time to give them reason to do so.”

We have not been able to say a single thing. I extend my hand to Count von Fersen and he raises it to his lips, softly kissing my knuckles. I feel the heat of his mouth through my glove. “I will visit you,” he says quietly. “Tomorrow.” With a toss of his dark blue cloak about his broad shoulders he disappears into the night.

I look back toward the coach. The carriage bearing Madame de Tourzel, her daughter, and the princesse Élisabeth has arrived and the governess has been reunited with her charges. She smoothes the hair off their foreheads and asks them if they are tired.

Louis is conferring with Monsieur. They speak in low voices, inaudible to the mob that has waited through the brisk October night for our arrival. The king’s brother still looks less perturbed by our enforced
déménagement
than I believe he should be. My husband is approached by the mayor of Paris, the astronomer Jean-Sylvain Bailly, the selfsame delegate to the National Assembly who in June refused to allow the king to grieve for our firstborn son because he required his attention to the meeting of the three Estates General. The men exchange a few words, their faces masks of cordiality, and I hear Louis say, as much for the benefit of his audience of thousands of citizens, “It is always with pleasure that I find myself amidst the inhabitants of the good city of Paris.” If I were to utter those words I would be lying, but Louis really does love them. In his heart he believes the citizens are unhappy and misguided but can be swayed back to the right path when they are made to see that it is their sovereign, and not the Assembly, who cares about their needs and wants.

The royal family is escorted through the entry by armed guards. “Kings who become prisoners are not far from death,” I murmur under my breath to Madame Campan.

Torches and candles illuminate the grand entrance hall. Like
many French châteaux, the main building is a cavernous rectangle, but the Tuileries’ windows are smaller than most, so even on the brightest days, but most especially late at night, one gets the feeling of being trapped inside a large dovecote. The furniture, dating from the distant reigns of the Sun King and Louis XV, is outmoded and the furnishings are coated with dust.

“Maman, it’s very ugly here.” The dauphin’s words are blurted in a child’s burst of honest appraisal.

I chuckle in spite of myself. “The great Louis Quatorze lived here,
mon petit
, and he was very comfortable. We must not be more demanding than he.” We climb the stairs to my little apartment and pull the covers off the furniture, coughing from the clouds of dust. For the time being, we will stay here until apartments can be renovated for us. Madame de Tourzel and I tuck the children in with the linens we have brought from Versailles. The dauphin curls up on a daybed, aslumber within moments. There is nowhere for his
gouvernante
to lay her head, and so the marquise de Tourzel passes her first night in the Tuileries in a chair beside his bed, after first creating a makeshift barricade around the room with all the furniture she can find, as the chamber is open from all sides and none of the doors will shut.

Madame Royale lies down upon a sofa, her only admission of fear being her request to sleep with a doll named Lamballe that she had recently deemed herself “too old” to enjoy. Louis and I bed down together for the first time ever, as matrimonial beds are not comme il faut in France, each spouse maintaining separate sleeping quarters. Madame Campan tries to turn the locks but finds that none of them work properly, if at all. As I fret over our safety, my husband declares with tremendous equanimity that if every lock in this palace of thousands of rooms is in a similar state of decay or disrepair, he and his tutor Monsieur Gamain will have a project to last out his reign. With the prospect before him of indulging in a
favorite hobby, the king is the only one of us to locate the crumbs of birdseed in this gilded cage.

Morning breaks and in the lemon-yellow light of day there is much to do. First, we must decide where to set up our permanent residence within the vast, labyrinthine palace. Monsieur and Madame, wishing to have nothing to do with the Tuileries, elect to move to the Palais du Luxembourg. Good riddance, I say. The immediate royal family, however, hasn’t the luxury of a further
déménagement
. We must make the best of our dark surroundings, for it is clear that
we
have no other option.

Louis chooses a suite of rooms on the first floor overlooking the Seine, and does not mind mounting the stairs to reach his
appartements
even though he has become tremendously rotund. When he becomes anxious, he eats even more than usual. We are determined to hold court as if nothing has changed. Our formal
levers
and
couchers
will continue. What is deeply unsettling, however, is that no matter where any of us goes, we are followed, shadowed by one or more of the Garde Nationale. They are not here to protect us, but rather to monitor our movements. “How are you managing?” a member of the Paris Commune deputation asks me, receiving a glare from his superior officer.

“I’ve seen everything, known everything, and forgotten everything,” I reply, my voice hollow.

However, to my utter astonishment, I have a most unlikely friend who tenders the royal family a remarkable offer. That afternoon I receive a letter from a man in yellow livery.

Votre Majesté
,
Two of your wounded
gardes du corps
managed to escape the awful carnage of the sixth and as soon as I saw who they were and in what dire condition, I opened the doors of
Louveciennes to give them sanctuary and to see that they received medical attention. I hope you will not reproach me for taking it upon myself to nurse them at my château as their families would have done, had they been near. My home is at your disposal, Madame. Everything I possess is due to the kindness and largesse of the royal family. If you recall, I once offered you my treasures, during the Assembly of the Notables. I offer them again, knowing how great your expenditures are.
Permittez-moi, Majesté
, to render what is Caesar’s unto Caesar.

Jeanne du Barry

I refold the note very slowly and place it in my pocket. My eyes grow moist with tears. We had once been rivals, oh so many years ago, when she was vain and jealous and I was stubborn and naïve. Twenty years ago I was certain we had nothing in common. Who then could have imagined that the comtesse du Barry would one day offer me her unswerving loyalty?

A half dozen of the guard, fully armed, are assigned to follow the king, even during his strolls in the Tuileries Gardens. They are in the employ of the National Assembly. What have they been instructed to do, should the king try to elude them? Will they draw their sabers or raise their muskets against their own sovereign? Would they fire?

The National Assembly have themselves become our wardens. Lafeyette tells us that next month they intend to move into the Tuileries’ disused riding school, the Salle du Manège, as it is the single most capacious space within the palace precincts. How fitting, I think, that these animals who see fit to govern France in our place will occupy a practice ground for horses! I hope the lingering
odor of manure haunts the hall, even after it is renovated to suit the needs of this fledgling legislative body.

Louis spends our first morning at the Tuileries meeting with deputies from the Assembly. Yet it would seem that the comte de Mirabeau—a mountain of a man whom I had thought more rational than the other revolutionaries, and who
au fond
is a monarchist—wishes to demonstrate his republican sensibilities and his weight in the new legislature by parading before the king all manner of human detritus. These delegates to the National Assembly are ragged and unwashed, their hair uncombed and unpowdered. Nearly every one of them is a
sans-culotte
, wearing
pantalons
of unhemmed slubbed textiles rather than knee breeches and hose. In a deliberate affront they keep their hats on in the presence of their sovereign, bloodred liberty bonnets modeled after the ancient Phrygian slave cap. Are these truly the men who represent the new government? Or is this a mockery, intended to demonstrate to my husband that any fool can rule France? I am disgusted, but Louis calmly listens to their petitions and entreaties even as they seek to strip him, bit by bit, of his monarchical rights.

Later that day I, too, am visited, or should I say confronted, by a deputation of sorts. In the company of my
belle-soeur
I am taking coffee on my balcony, still in my bonnet and negligée—the dressing gown I wear when I receive courtiers during my toilette. Below me, dozens of women have gathered. I can’t say if they are the same
poissardes
from Les Halles and prostitutes from the arcades of the Palais Royal who convened in the courtyard and garden throughout the night, singing and chanting, so as to deprive me of my slumber. Louis, on the other hand, told me he slept through the cacophony. I do not believe he has passed a fitful night in our nineteen years of marriage. The entry in his hunting journal for the frightful day of October 5 when our life was forever disturbed by
the arrival of the market women was a mere three words:
Interrupted by events
. Yet in the two decades I have known him I have learned that much lies beneath his laconic prose.

The market women ask how the king spent the night and his sister replies that he slept very well,
merci
. At this they seem pleased, but not fully satisfied. They demand to see the dauphin. Élisabeth and I exchange glances. Will these harridans terrify my son? He is frightened of loud noises.

Madame Élisabeth steps inside and returns with the dauphin, to the sound of exultant cheers from the women. How ironic, I think, that they wish to tear apart the monarchy and strip away the sovereign’s powers and yet they are genuinely ecstatic at the sight of his heir, the future king of France. I do not understand their fickleness other than to hazard a guess that many of them are mothers, too, and are moved by the sight of such innocence. Under my watchful gaze, Louis Charles explores his new surroundings within the limited confines of the iron railings as the crowd beneath us begins to pepper me with questions and demands. At first they desire me to comprehend that they were not—do I believe them?—among the harpies (my word, not theirs) who marched in the rain to Versailles two days ago and tried to murder me in my bed. The real perpetrators, they say, wish you to believe the
poissardes
from Les Halles were the instigators, but that is a calumny. The true culprits disguised themselves inside the striped skirts and stained aprons of the Paris fishmongers. We are good and honest women, but make no mistake,
Majesté
, we are not without our grievances against you.

BOOK: Confessions of Marie Antoinette
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