The Queen`s Confession (63 page)

“I think he is right, Madame Campan,” I said. lie has told me that he believes that what is happening here is an imitation of what once happened in England. The English cut off the head of their King Charles I. I fear they will bring him to trial But I am a foreigner, my dear Madame Campan, not one of them. Perhaps they will have less scruples where I am concerned. They will very likely assassinate me.

If it were not for the children . I should not care. But the children, my dear Campan, what will become of them? “

Dear Campan was too full of sense to deny what I said. She was so practical that she immediately set about making me a corselet similar to the King’s waistcoat.

I thanked her but I would not wear it.

“If they kill me, Madame Campan, it will be fortunate for me. It will at least deliver me from this painful existence. Only the children worry me. But there are you and kind Tourzel and I do not believe that even those people would be cruel to little children. I remember how moved that woman was. It was because of the children. No, even they would not harm them. So … when they kill me, do not mourn for me.

Remember I shall go to a happier life than I suffer here. “

Madame Campan was alarmed. All during that sultry July she refused to go to bed. She would sit in my apartment dozing, ready to leap up at the first sound. I believe she saved my life on one occasion.

It was one o’clock in the morning when I started out of a doze to find Madame Campan bending over me.

“Madame 1’ she whispered.

“Listen. There is someone creeping along the corridor.”

I sat up in bed startled. The corridor passed along the whole line of my apartments and was locked at each end.

Madame Campan dashed into the anteroom where the valet de chwnbre was

sleeping. He too had heard the foot470 steps and was ready to rush out. In a few seconds Madame Campan and I heard the sounds of scuffling.

“Oh, Campan, Campan I’ I said, and I put my arms about the dear faithful creature.

“What should I do without friends such as you?

Insults by day and assassins by night. Where will it end? “

Tou have good servants, Madame,” she said quietly.

And it was true, for the valet de chambre at that moment came into the bedroom dragging a man with him.

“I know the wretch, Madame,” he said.

“He is a servant of the King’s toilette. He admits taking the key from His Majesty’s pocket when the King was in bed.”

He was a small man and the valet de chambre was both tall and strong, and for this I bad to be grateful otherwise it would have been the end of me that night. The miserable wretch no doubt thought to earn the praise of the mob for doing something which they were constantly screaming should be done.

I will lock him up, Madame,” said the valet de chambre.

“No,” I said.

“Let him go. Open the door for him and send him away from the palace. He came to murder me, and if he succeeded the people would be carrying him about in triumph tomorrow.”

The valet obeyed me, and when he returned I thanked him and told him that I was grieved that he should be exposed to danger on my account.

To this he replied that be feared nothing and that he had a pair of very excellent pistols which he carried always with him for no other purpose but to defend me.

Such incidents always moved me deeply, and I said to Madame Campan as we returned to my bedroom that the goodness of people such as herself and the valet would never have been appreciated by me but for the fact that these terrible times brought it home to me.

She was touched, but she was already making plans to have all the locks changed the next day, and she saw that the King’s were too.

Now the great Terror was upon us. It was as though a new 47

race of men had filtered into the capital—small, very dark, lithe, fierce and bloodthirsty—the men of the south, the men of Marseilles.

With them they brought the song which had been composed by Rouget de Lisle, one of their officers. We were soon to hear it sung all over Paris, and it was called the “Marseillaise. Bloodthirsty words set to a rousing tune—it could not fail to win popularity. It replaced die unrilnow-favourite ” Ca ira’ and every time I heard it it made me shiver. It haunted me. I would fancy I heard it when during the night I woke from an uneasy doze, for I was scarcely sleeping during these nights.

“Allans, enfants de la Patrie, Le your de gloire est arrive.

Contre nous, de la tyrannic, Le couteau sanglant est leve, Le couteau sanglant est leve.

Entendes-vous, clans les camp agnes Mugir ces feroces soldats.

Us viennent jusque clans vos bras Egorger vos fils, vos comp agnes

Aux comes, dtoyens!

Formes vos bataillons, , Marchons, marcfwnst Qu’un sang impur Abreuve nos siltons* The gardens outside the apartments were always crowded. People looked in at the windows. At any moment one little spark would set alight the conflagration. How did we know from one hour to another what atrocities would be committed? Hawkers called their wares under my window.

“La Vie Scandaleuse de Mane Antoinette’ they shrieked. They sold figures representing me in various indecent positions with men and women.

“Why should I want to live?” I asked Madame Campan.

“Why should these precautions be taken to save a life which is not worth having?”

I wrote to Axel of the terror of our lives. I said that unless our

friends issued a manifesto to the effect that 472 Paris would be attacked if we were banned, we should very soon be murdered.

Axel, I knew, was doing everything possible. No one ever worked more indefatigably in any cause.

If only the King had had half Axel’s energy. I tried to rouse him to action. Outside our windows the guards were drawn up. If he showed them he was a leader they would respect him-I had seen how even the most crude of the revolutionaries could be overawed by a little royal dignity. I begged him to go to the guards to make some show of reviewing them.

He nodded. I was right, he was sure. He went out and it was heartbreaking to see him ambling between the lines of soldiers. He had grown so fat and unwieldy now that he , was never allowed to hunt.

I trust you,” he told them.
I have every confidence in my guard.”

I heard the snigger. I saw one man break from the ranks and walk behind him imitating his ponderous walk. Dignity was what was needed.

I was a fool to nave expected Louis to show that.

I was relieved when he came in. I looked away, for I did not wish to see the humiliation on his face.

“La Fayette will save us from the fanatics,” he said heavily.

“You should not despair.”

I wonder,” I retorted bitterly, who will save us from Monsieur de La Fayette.”

The climax arrived when the Duke of Brunswick issued the Manifesto at Coblenz. Military force would be used on Paris if the least violence or outrage was committed against the King and the Queen.

It was the signal for which they had been waiting. The agitators were working harder than ever. All over Paris men were marching in groups—the sons-culottes and the ragged men of the south; they sang as they went:

“Allow enfants de la Patrie …”

They were saying that we were preparing a counterrevolution at the Tuileries.

On the tenth of August the faubourgs were on the march Hi and their objective was the Tuileries.

id A We were aware of the rising storm. All through the night dc of the ninth and the early morning of the tenth I had not cc taken off my clothes. I had wandered through the corridors M accompanied by Madame Campan and the Princesse de 01 Lamballe. The King was sleeping, though fully dressed. M The tocsins had started to ring all over the city and Elisa-n beth came to join us.

w Together we watched the dawn come. That was about four o’clock, and the sky was blood-red. I said to her: “Paris must have seen something like this at the Massacre of the Saint Bartholomew.” t She took my hand and clung to it.

“We will keep together.”

I replied: “If my time should come and you survive t me …” < She nodded.

“The children, of course. They shall be as my own.”

‘ The silence occasioned by the cessation of the bells seemed even more alarming than they had been. The Marquis de Mandant, Commander of the National Guard, who had many times saved us from death, received a summons to the Hotel de Ville. We watched him go with misgivings, and when shortly afterwards a messenger arrived at the Tuileries to tell us that he had been brutally murdered on his way to the Hotel de Ville and his body thrown into the Seine, I knew that disaster was very close.

The Attorney-General of Paris came riding in haste. He asked for the King. Louis arose from his bed, his clothes awry, his wig flattened, his eyes heavy with sleep.

“The faubourgs are on the march,” said the Attorney-General.

“They are coming to the Palace. And their intention is massacre.”

The King declared his belief in the National Guard. Oh God, I thought, his sentimentality will get us all murdered! The Guard was all about the palace, but I bad seen the

sullen looks on some faces; I remembered how they had sneered at Louis when he had made an attempt to review them, I remembered the man who had broken the line and mocked him from behind.

“All Paris is on the march,” warned the Attorney-General.

“Your Majesties’ only safe place is in the National Assembly. We must take you there and there is not a minute to be lost. Actions would not help us against so many. You see that resistance is impossible.”

Then let us go,” said the King.

“Call the household.”

“Only you and your family. Sire.”

“But we cannot abandon all the brave people who have been with us here,” I protested.

“Should we leave them to the fury of the mob?”

“Madame, if you oppose this move, you will be responsible for the deaths of the King and your children.”

What could I do? I thought of dear Campan, Lamballe, Tourzel. all those who were almost as dear to me as my own family.

But I saw that I could do nothing, and the Dauphin was beside me.

We left the palace. Already some of the people were looking at us through the railings and others had come into the grounds, but they made no attempt to stop us. The leaves were thick on the ground although it was only August. The Dauphin kicked through them almost joyously. Poor child, he was so accustomed to alarms like this that he found them part of his life and as long as we were together he seemed indifferent to them. That was something to rejoice about. In the distance I could hear the shouts and screams. The mob was very close.

I could hear raucous “Allans enfants de la Patrie …”

The King said calmly. The leaves have fallen early this year As we approached the Assembly Hall a tall man picked up the Dauphin in his arms. I screamed in terror, but he looked at me kindly and said:

“Have no fear, Madame. I mean him no harm. But there is not a minute to be lost.” I could not

take my eyes from my child. I was terrified, but the Dauphin was smiling and saying something in his precocious way to his captor.

And as we came to the Assembly Hall my son was given back to me. I thanked the man and grasped the boy’s hand so fiercely that he reminded me I was hurting him.

But we had reached the Assembly Hall, and there we were placed in the reporter’s box while the President declared that the Assembly had sworn to stand by the Constitution and that they would protect the King.

During the walk from the Tuileries my watch and my purse had been stolen. I laughed at myself for the momentary concern I felt for these worthless objects. For in the Assembly Hall I could hear the shouts of the mob as they reached the Tuileries, and I wondered what was happening to those faithful friends. I thought in particular of the Princesse de Lamballe who might have been safe in England but who had come back for love of me.

I wept silently and I wondered what would happen next, for we could not return to the ruin which those people would have made of the Tuileries.

But what did it matter? Why fight to preserve an existence which was not worth the effort?

When it is necessary, 1 shall know how to die.

LOUIS XVI

Frenchmen, I die innocent of the crimes imputed to me. 1 forgive the authors of my death, and 1 pray that my blood may not fall upon France.

LOUIS XVI ON THE SCAFFOLD

Prisoners m the Temple

We were lodged in the Temple—not that palace which had been the castle of the Knights Templar and in which Artois had once lived and where I remembered driving in my gay sledge one winter’s day to dine with him, but the fortress which adjoined it, the grim prison, not unlike the Bastille with its round towers, slits of windows and courtyards from which the sun was excluded. Here we were kept as prisoners. The Deputy Public Prosecutor Jacques Rene Hebert was in charge of the Temple; he was a man whom the more idealistic leaders such as Desmoulins and Robespierre despised. He was cruel and unscrupulous, delighting in the revolution not because he truly believed it could bring a better life to the poor but because it gave him an opportunity of behaving brutally. He had become powerful through his newspaper Pere Duchesne, in which he had done as much as many men to inflame the mob.

My dismay was great when I learned that we were in the charge of this man. Whenever I saw him he regarded me with insolence, and I knew that he was thinking of the scandalous things which had been written of me.

I read his evil thoughts and in my fear I endeavoured to appear indifferent to him, which had the effect of making me seem haughtier than ever.

But there were men in the Commune whose desire was 477 to show us and the world that cruelty was not in their H programme.

They it was who controlled the mob, who had 1(3 plucked us only recently from its blood-hungry hands. These were the men who wanted reforms—liberty, equality, fraterd’ nity—through constitutional methods, and at the rime, they 0 were in control.