Confessions of Marie Antoinette (49 page)

In recent days Madame Harel has become weary of staring at me without surcease. As my activity has not been terribly entertaining to her, she has grown somewhat less vigilant, allowing herself to join the gendarmes’ games of cards. To my relief, their assignments have been reversed and the sympathetic Officer Gilbert now guards me during the daylight hours.

Approaching him and interrupting his game, “Monsieur, I beg your pardon, but I think there is something in my vegetable dish.” I point to my dinner tray. “I would not complain … but I think it is still alive.” I make a dreadful face and he takes my meaning.

“That is indeed unpalatable. I will see to it right away, madame.” Officer Gilbert rises from his chair to speak to Michonis, who is peering through the iron grille at the activity in the Cour des Femmes.

While Citoyen Gilbert busies himself with the complaint, I bend down to retrieve the carnations and read the messages on the scraps of paper secreted within them.
I am your faithful servant with a well-conceived plan of escape; I will come again on Friday
, says one. The other reads,
I have men and three or four hundred louis for bribes at my disposal
.

Color rushes to my cheeks for the first time in months; I start to tremble.

I have no pen and ink with which to write a reply. But I do have a scrap of paper. Using one of the pins I employ for my crude efforts at lacemaking I prick out a response:
Je suis gardée à vue, je ne parle à personne. Je me fie à vous. Je viendrai
—I am watched closely, I speak to no one. I place my trust in you. I will come.

Later in the day I slip the note to Officer Gilbert, who will pass it to the chevalier.

There is nothing to do now but wait and pray.

On the night of September 2, Michonis returns and my cell is unlocked. “Prisoner 280, we have orders to take you back to the Temple,” announces the prison administrator loudly. The guards shoulder their muskets and flank our party. When they pause to open one of the wicket gates that punctuate the prison corridors, Michonis puts his finger to his lips and whispers to me, “The Chevalier de Rougeville is outside the prison with a carriage waiting to bring you to Jarjayes’s home on the outskirts of Paris; from there you will be conveyed into Germany.”

One by one, the padlocks on the wicket gates are opened. And suddenly—just one more set of bolts lies between me and freedom.

After we pass through the final gate, with the sentries’ eyes upon us, Officer Gilbert halts abruptly. “Show me the order,” he tells Michonis.

Michonis pales. “It—it comes directly from Citoyen Robespierre,” he stammers.

“Then there will be a paper with Robespierre’s signature on it. The head of the Committee of Public Safety is most methodical.” I have never seen Gilbert so officious. What has come over him? Not only has he always been most solicitous of my welfare, but there was money to bribe him for his complicity.

“We—we only have his word,” protests Michonis.

“I find that highly unlikely,” the guard replies suspiciously. “When you show me the order with Citoyen Robespierre’s signature affixed to it, I will release Prisoner 280 into your custody.”

The plot has collapsed.

Michonis departs, ostensibly to obtain the “order,” although none will of course be forthcoming and I know he will never return. I am escorted back to my cell. The following day I hear that the chevalier managed to disappear into the night, but Citoyen Michonis has been imprisoned right here in the Conciergerie.

I am visited by a pair of officials from the Convention. Their interrogation begins with a scrap of paper they confiscated from Michonis, peppered with pinpricks. My heart plummets. “The prison administrator tells us he was talked into conducting a man whom he had never before met into paying a call to your cell, and he gave you this,” says one, handing me my own reply to the Chevalier de Rougeville. They have it wrong, but they still may know too much. “We took a rubbing of it with a pencil, but it makes no sense. Perhaps you understand it.” Then they hand me their investigative efforts. Someone—most likely Michonis—added more pinpricks to the paper, completely obscuring my message.

I shrug, “I have no idea what this is, messieurs. The pastime of someone who was bored, perhaps?”

“Did you recognize the visitor who arrived with Citoyen Michonis?”

“No, messieurs, I did not,” I say evenly. “I thought he was an
officer of the guards, but if I ever knew his name I have forgotten it. There have been so many.”

Their interrogation is uncomfortable, particularly when they divulge the chain of betrayal. The Chevalier de Rougeville’s louis, however generous, were no match for the threat of the guillotine. The gendarme Gilbert showed the scrap of paper to Madame Richard, who, fearful of recriminations, brought it to the attention of the prison administrator, who took it from her but dismissed it as likely having little importance. Yet Gilbert did not wish to risk reprisals for not doing his job properly as it was already becoming known that he had done me a kindness by cleaning my shoe.

Within a few days I am deprived of anything the prison has previously deemed a luxury. The mattresses are destroyed in the search for contraband. Most of my linen is confiscated because they fear I will write and receive messages on the garments in invisible ink. They take my two rings, the last of my jewelry from Louis. At least I am permitted my caps and fichus. Never again will I be allowed any flowers in my cell, and I will be allotted no special privileges when it comes to my meals.

On the same day that Monsieur and Madame Richard are relieved of their duties, arrested, and themselves incarcerated, I am moved to a cell smelling of tinctures—a former pharmacy, I am told, with a new door two inches thick—and my guards are replaced with revolutionary zealots. The new concierge and his wife, Monsieur and Madame Bault, are grim and gruff, but from the way Madame Bault regards me, it is clear that she is too frightened to show me the slightest bit of kindness or humanity. She informs me that the Convention has warned her, she would pay with her life if I were not treated with severity.

Only Rosalie remains. Madame Richard would not allow her to join them in prison, and so she stayed on at the Conciergerie as a
serving girl. She brings me her own chemises now because all but one of mine was confiscated in the wake of what the National Convention has dubbed the Carnation Plot. My candles have been taken, too, which means that I cannot read at night, or make my lace. The windows are boarded up.

Monsieur Bault is the very image of a
sans-culotte
, rudely bareheaded, and wearing the short red
carmagnole
jacket of the revolutionaries. The first time he enters my cell, he finds Rosalie about to coif my hair and, to my surprise, announces that the task is among his duties as concierge. I cannot imagine this coarse man touching me. “Rosalie, I wish you to put up my chignon today,” I say, making sure that Monsieur Bault understands my preference.

“Leave it alone, citoyenne, it’s my job,” he says boldly, elbowing Rosalie out of the way.

“Non, merci, monsieur,”
I reply politely. I twist my hair myself and pin it to my head. Handing Rosalie the length of white ribbon, I murmur, “Take this, and keep it always, in memory of me.”

She pockets the adornment and leaves the cell with the new concierge.

Yet Rosalie continues to risk her life for me. I shiver at night under my thin cotton coverlet but when Monsieur Bault refuses to provide a woolen blanket, insisting that Citoyen Fouquier-Tinville, the Public Prosecutor, has threatened him with the guillotine, she takes my nightgown and the large fichu that I wrap about my shoulders at night, and brings them to her own room to warm in front of the fire before placing them back under my bolster.

“Step lively. Don’t push. She’s not going anywhere!” Monsieur Bault chuckles, while a line of people parade past my cell as if I am a circus attraction. I can just imagine him printing macabre handbills proclaiming
STEP RIGHT UP AND SEE THE
CI-DEVANT
QUEEN OF FRANCE IN HER NATURAL HABITAT
! As a snaggle-toothed man in wooden sabots passes, I notice Citoyen Bault pocketing a silver coin.

The new concierge’s entrepreneurial enterprise goes on for days. Men and women of all stripes file past to goggle at me. Occasionally I see a former friend, a baronne or marquise in disguise who casts me a sympathetic look and whispers news of people we once knew.

The portraitist Alexander Kucharsky comes to paint me, and I am surprised that he is permitted to see me; surely sitting to a painter would be considered a luxury. But perhaps the National Convention will be pleased with the results because I hardly present the glamorous monarch limned so often by Madame Vigée-Lebrun in plumed headdresses and opulent, furbelowed gowns as wide as the canvas itself, or portrayed as a dairymaid in my straw hats and muslin
gaulles
with their pastel-hued silken sashes. Kucharsky’s Antoinette is a shadow of her former self, her hair whitened, not with scented powder, but with grief, the Widow Capet of the nation’s fantasies.

Most visitors to Monsieur Bault’s lurid sideshow are
sans-culottes
who have come to gloat and
tricoteuses
who have taken a holiday from their front-row vantages at the executions in the Place de la Révolution as the hungry Reign of Terror claims its daily feast of blood. The hags cackle and jab at me through the bars with their knitting needles. My own were confiscated for fear I would employ them as weapons, and yet these red-bonneted harpies may carry them with impunity into the Conciergerie.

One day I spy a young woman amid the crowd bearing a different sort of weapon altogether—a chisel. I call out to my guards, for I fear she means to do some harm, forgetting for the moment the heavy bars that separate me from the rabble. Of course, she still might stab someone else. There is a scuffle outside the cell when a
pair of gendarmes appear and pin the woman’s arms behind her back, wresting the chisel from her grasp.

Immediately, the pretty young woman becomes hysterical. “Please, messieurs—I meant no harm! I am an artist. The tool you have taken from me is the only thing of value that I own besides my talent.” She carries it everywhere, she says, because you cannot be too careful nowadays. With so many going hungry, people will steal anything in the hopes of selling it at a pawnshop for a sou or two that will buy half a loaf of bread.

At her mention of bread I begin to pay closer attention to the confrontation. Somewhere, in the dim recesses of my memory, I believe, perhaps, that I may have seen her before. Did she work at Versailles? In the kitchens, perhaps? Yet what cause would I have had to cross paths with a kitchen lackey? Nonetheless, I am certain I saw her at Versailles, although I cannot place the occasion.

“Laissez,”
I command, and hope that someone will heed me. “Leave her alone. She means to do me no harm.”
Unlike most of the rest of you
, I wish I could say.

Begrudgingly, the gendarmes relax their grip on the young woman, and return her chisel. She turns to me with a look of pure gratitude in her dark eyes, eyes that well with empathy and almost fill with tears; and because these days I am acutely aware of the value of a grateful expression, suddenly I remember that look and where I have seen it. She looked at my husband that way when each of them was in direst straits. If ever I learned her name, now would not be the time to use it. The last thing I should wish to do would be to imperil her life.

Autumn has arrived. The encroaching darkness is only one reason I begin to lose track of time. On the 5th of October the National Convention abolishes the Gregorian calendar, replacing it with the French Republican calendar. Weeks now have ten days, and the
months have silly names redolent of weather or seasons of the year. Every day celebrates an animal, natural element, or aspect of vegetation. Roman numerals have replaced Arabic ones, so it is no longer 1793, but the year II, because the Convention has begun the new Republic with the year the idea of the calendar was first introduced. And it is not October anymore. I am told that this month, named for the time of the grape harvest, is Vendémiaire. From now on, the start of every month falls sometime between what had been the 22nd and 24th of the months on the old Gregorian calendar. I cannot imagine how most of France, people who can barely read, will commit all of this arcane nonsense to memory.

One night I have a dream that Rosalie is bringing me her white ribbon, but as soon as I take it in my hands it turns black. Then Rose Bertin visits my cell, bearing a stick full of ribbons in a panoply of colors—crimson, apple green, buttercup, royal blue, rose, violet, peach, lilac, and vermillion, but no sooner do I touch
them
, than each one becomes black, the color of death, and I dash them to the floor in horror.

They come for me on the evening of October 12. I have been expecting them. For the past several nights I have slept in my clothes, anticipating the summons to the guillotine. I intend to honor it in my widow’s weeds.

The padlocks on my cell are opened to admit six armed guards, prepared to escort me across the cobbled courtyard to the building that once housed the Grande Chambre of the Parlement de Paris, the same hall where Louis had conducted many
lits de justice
, as well as the location of the sham trial of
l’affaire du collier
, the affair of the diamond necklace, where my nemesis the Cardinal de Rohan was exonerated by his peers and the clever confidence artist, the comtesse de Lamotte-Valois, was sentenced to branding and imprisonment.

With blue-coated soldiers in front of me and behind, I mount a
winding stone staircase that leads to the hall with its High Gothic columns and black and white tiled floor. Only two candles illuminate the vast space, lending the home of the Revolutionary Tribunal, known nowadays without irony as the Hall of Freedom, the funereal glow of a crypt. There have been changes since I last entered it. In the niche once dominated by an enormous painting of the Crucifixion are busts of fallen heroes of revolutions past and present—Brutus and Marat.