Confessions of Marie Antoinette (29 page)

Louis’s final words hang damply in the air. He departs through the door that opens onto the dark corridor and the narrow back staircase to his apartments, leaving me alone with Axel for a final farewell.

My tears flow unceasingly as though a dam has ruptured. For the sake of Louis’s dignity, for all propriety, I had managed to contain them during the king’s adieux, but there is nothing to conceal now. I all but fling myself into Axel’s embrace, pressing him to me, caressing his strong back, wishing I could touch his soft brown hair beneath the ridiculous
curé
’s wig one more time. We cover each other’s faces with kisses, careful not to neglect a single place; and as my lips linger on his neck I detect the bespoke cologne Fargeon concocted for him back in 1781, subtler now, but mingled with Axel’s own scent, a complex aroma that will remain imprinted forever upon my memory, along with the sensation of his skin against my fingertips, the lilting baritone of his voice, the mutable color of his eyes, the way that he knows me as no one else in my life ever has. And when someone so cherishes you that he values your life above his own—that is a sacred gift that should never be squandered or belittled.

It is painful to accept that our parting now is not an “au revoir,” because the chances are so slender that we will ever be able to meet again. It is an
adieu:
we each go with God.

And go he must, because the guards are about to change again. Axel must make his exit from the Tuileries as men and women hasten to enter and leave the palace, their nightly duties ending or about to commence.

A final kiss as our lips meet in ecstasy and sorrow. “I shall write about last night in my
dagbok
,” Axel promises me. “With but two words:
Resté là
. And only you and I shall truly know what transpired between us.”

One more embrace and he leaves my apartments from the entrance
to the salon, slipping in amid the bustling commotion of dozens of uniformed guards, lackeys, and even a few other priests. As I lock the door once again, a tiny crescent of a smile emerges through my tears. Axel still has a key.

The following afternoon I receive a visit from Jean-Louis Fargeon, the
maître parfumeur
who has been creating fragrances for me and supplying perfumed candles, scented gloves, and aromatic pastilles since my verdant days at Trianon. The king and I have exhibited such exemplary behavior during the last few months, and Louis has indeed been true to his word not to quit the capital, that the deputies do not begrudge me such petty luxuries as bath crystals and body lotions. Besides, Citizen Fargeon, as he is addressed now, once the purveyor to the aristocracy, has become thick with some of the louder voices of the Revolution. No longer a friend of my friends, perhaps he has become an enemy. I do not know whether I can still trust him, even as I receive the items I recently commissioned.

Fargeon’s mode of dress is not nearly as dapper as it used to be. He forswears hair powder now, and his pewter-colored locks are secured at the nape of his neck with a plain black ribbon. His “nose,” however—by which I mean a perfumer’s greatest asset, not the shape of his proboscis—remains as discerning as ever. Upon entering my salon, the expression on his face after a single inhalation is one of instant recognition. “Top notes of bergamot, oak moss, and jasmine. With a hint of leather in the bottom note,” he murmurs, more to himself than for my benefit. His faint smile transmits a shared, distant memory. “You have recently had a very special visitor.”

My breath catches in my throat. Citoyen Fargeon never knew precisely for whom he had created the gentleman’s toilet water all those summers ago. But the world has since turned upside down.
Even what the perfumer does not know could be enough to condemn me.

How many purchases have I made from Fargeon’s emporium throughout the duration of my reign? Surely the ability to name the Queen of France among his clientele has made him a wealthy man? But will my longstanding custom be sufficient to buy his silence?

TWENTY

Invasion

S
PRING
1792

From beginning to end, the month of March brings devastating news. Were I a superstitious woman I would be certain by now that we were cursed, like the characters in a tragedy of ancient Greece, punished by the gods for some grievous sins we had committed against man and nature.

My brother Leopold, emperor of Austria and Holy Roman Emperor, succumbs to a brief illness, dying on the first of March. His eldest son succeeds him, a twenty-four-year-old with no memory of his aunt Antonia. The new sovereign, Francis II, was all of two years old when I left Austria forever for France. He accorded a cool reception to the messengers we dispatched to congratulate him upon his accession, and thus far he has been markedly indifferent to my letters seeking his aid.

At the end of the month, a terrifying event compels us to fear not only for our safety but for our future. On the twenty-ninth, the
greatest hope for our deliverance, King Gustavus III of Sweden, dies after being shot in the back thirteen days earlier during a masquerade ball. His murderer is a disaffected military officer who was aided by a pair of coconspirators. From Sweden, I now harbor even fainter hope of assistance. The new king, Gustavus’s son, is only fourteen years old. Gustavus Adolph and his regent, his uncle Charles, are too busy courting an alliance with Russia to continue their support for the late king’s foreign policy.

As the Girondins gain adherents to their antimonarchical views, Louis is compelled to accept a member of their faction, Général Dumouriez, as his chief minister. When the fifty-three-year-old Dumouriez requests an audience with me, I inform him that neither the king nor I can bear all these innovations in the Constitution.

I am surprised when Monsieur le Général falls to his knees and kisses my hand. “Madame, I have no interest in misleading you. Believe me. But as a military man with several decades of experience, I am in a better position than Your Majesty to judge events; and this is not, as you seem to believe, a passing popular movement where the winds will one day blow in another direction. It is the nearly unanimous insurrection against what the people perceive as long-standing and inveterate abuses of power. And yet some of us do have your best interests at heart,” Dumouriez insists. “Allow yourself to be saved.”

But his dark eyes are stern and it is hard to conceive that this face, which looks as if it has been carved of stone, is sympathetic. After all, the Girondins wish to do away with us altogether. “One cannot believe in the protestations of a traitor,” I reply coolly. In my view, to a man, they are
all
traitors.

Louis, who has vowed to avoid shedding a single drop of his subjects’ blood, now contemplates drastic measures. War is inevitable. The émigrés have been rattling their sabers for months.
Francis has permitted the prince de Condé, the only Bourbon with any military experience, to assemble an army of them in the Austrian Netherlands. I write to the comte de Mercy in cipher with details of France’s intentions.

In order to prod the Austrians into military action on our behalf, and in the desperate hope that a foreign conflict will draw attention, resources, and troops away from the Revolution, on April 20, his eyes brimming with tears, my husband declares war against the king of Hungary and Bohemia.

My nephew Francis II, who is the Apostolic King of Hungary in addition to his other titles, is not the pacifist his father was and welcomes Louis’s challenge. But I cannot endorse the scheme. It will lead to our ruin, I argue. We cannot be the aggressors. The monarchy will become more reviled than ever, I aver. But Louis refuses to look with my eyes.

My emotions are horribly torn by this turn of events. A part of me secretly hopes the countrymen of my homeland will prevail over those of my adopted nation who have never accepted me as their own.
Never have I been more proud than at this moment to have been born a German
, I write to Axel. But the better part of me despairs over our fate, keenly aware that Louis’s declaration has only made things worse for us here at home. Vicious pamphlets bearing hideous caricatures of me are slipped surreptitiously beneath my doors or find their way into my embroidery workbox or my dinner napkin, accusing me,
l’Autrichienne
, of trafficking with France’s enemies. Some propose my permanent removal to the convent of Val de Grâce; other less charitable souls demand my death. A new guardian watches over me when I sleep, a brown and white spaniel I name Thisbe, who makes her bed under my own and awakens me at the slightest disturbance.

The people sing a new song now, an anthem called the
Marche des Marsellois
and a deadly method of execution has been introduced
by a man who had been a delegate from the Third Estate during the historic convening of the Estates General in 1789. Dr. Joseph Ignace Guillotin invented a method of dispatching a criminal that is rumored to be humane, permitting the malfeasor to meet his maker with dignity. This “blade of eternity” is a giant angular knife that plunges through a channel, decapitating the victim, who lies several feet below, at the foot of the channel, bound facedown to a board with his head secured in the manner of medieval wooden stocks.

I marvel at the notion that the words “execution” and “humane” should be uttered within the same breath, but the Revolutionary mind remains a mystery to me. Named for its creator, the “Guillotine” has been tested on sheep and goats, and even on corpses, but in April the machine is used for the first time to send a convicted highwayman and forger to his heavenly reward. On the twenty-fifth of the month, a tremendous crowd gathers in the Place de Grève to witness the blade’s baptism in the first blood of the living. We hear that Charles Henri Sanson, France’s public executioner, prefers the guillotine to decapitation by sword, because the latter, being the punishment accorded to the nobility, still bears aristocratic connotations, whereas the “national razor” knows no social distinction. Yet the mob that gathers for the spectacle of Monsieur Pelletier’s bloody demise is almost disappointed with the effortlessness by which the hapless convict is swiftly despatched. The silver blade plunges so quickly and the severed head falls with a dull
thump
into the wicker basket beneath the neck cradle; the merest blink of an eye could cause an onlooker to miss the show.

Outside the city walls, the war does not go well for the French army. Secretly I rejoice that so many of them are inept, and countless others are cowardly. Two-thirds of the officers have emigrated; those who remain are deserting the army like rats at high tide. Even Axel’s former superior, old Général Rochambeau, has resigned,
unable to fulfill his commission at so great a disadvantage. Three weeks after Louis’s declaration of war, with the Austrian troops advancing toward the frontier, Lafayette is desperately suing for peace.

The propagandists take every advantage of the tension, playing upon the people’s greatest fears. Throughout the narrow
rues
comes the hue and cry that not only are the Austrians coming to mow down the capital’s innocent citizens and destroy the liberty the revolutionaries fought so valiantly to gain, but that the deserters from the French army are about to descend upon the city en masse, seizing what little food there is to be had and slaughtering anyone who stands in their way. Red-bonneted rabble-rousers bearing cudgels and pikes demand a call to arms. When they encounter a man or woman who appears too well dressed, they attack the poor soul, blaming the “royalist dog” for the astronomical price of firewood and beef, bread and wine, and leaving the battered body lying in the gutter, to be pelted with refuse.

As the Assembly flexes its political muscle, passing the most decisive antiroyalist measures to date, Louis pushes back. Yet he has grown so melancholy that he appears somnambulant. A week earlier, at the Mass in celebration of the Feast of Corpus Christi, without even bothering to dress for the occasion, he’d moved so sluggishly that palace lackeys spread gleeful rumors he was a drunkard. June 16 brings a deluge of bad news. The king’s constitutional guard, our only remaining source of protection, are to be dismissed, replaced by members of the untrustworthy Garde Nationale. Nonjuring priests, the clerics who refused to take the oath of fealty to the Constitution above the word of God, are to be deported. And a camp—it might as well be an army—of twenty thousand Federates is to be set up outside the walls of Paris, no doubt as the capital’s first line of defense against the anticipated Austrian invasion.