To the scaffold (44 page)

It seemed as if, at last, the powers of Europe were bestirring themselves to act, and great wars loomed. On August 27, 1791, just two months after Louis and Antoinette attempted to make their escape. Emperor Leopold and the King of Prussia, Frederick William II, joined in declaring that they regarded "the present situation of the King of France as a subject of common interest to all the sovereigns of Europe." In the joint Declaration of Pillnitz they swore to "act promptly" and "with all the force necessary" to restore Louis XVFs rights as King. To be sure, the other European sovereigns did not hasten to join their names to the declaration. Apart from King Gustavus of Sweden, the most passionate (and least practical) of Louis's champions among his brother mon-archs, the other members of the royal fraternity were decidedly lukewarm. The King of Spain, though well disposed, had neither the money nor the troops to join in a counter-revolutionary invasion, and the English Prime Minister, William Pitt, was for the time being content to be merely watchful. Indeed none of the great powers had been willing to finance Louis's flight from Paris; funds had come from Fersen's personal fortune and from the tiny Order of Malta.

Still, the forces of counter-revolution were clearly swelling in size, if not in boldness. Now that Provence had joined Artois in exile (having succeeded in his escape where the King and Queen had failed), the emigre organization gained stature. The Elector of Treves was host to the two royal brothers and their suites, allowing them to use his chateau at Schonbumlust and paying the costs of feeding and lodging their households. He also paid pensions to the exiled nonjuring priests and provided housing for the thousands of members of the bodyguard who now formed themselves into companies and prepared themselves to serve as the core of an invasion force. More emigres joined the community every day, and though he was not prepared to fund them directly. Emperor Leopold sent Provence and his government in exile two million livres through his wife."^ Louis also began sending his brothers funds; Artois received nearly seven hundred thousand livres from Louis between July of 1791 and February of 1792,

Antoinette was contemptuous of her brothers-in-law and their "confused and selfish" group at Coblentz. They had shown cowardice in running away from danger, she said, and they were traitors to their country. Provence in particular, she referred to as "Cain," who was doing his best to usurp his brother's birthright, exploiting Louis's danger for his own advantage. Now that the Emperor and the King of Prussia had issued their joint declaration, the emigres were bound to become more of a problem, posturing and saber-rattling and giving the revolutionaries more cause to punish the royal family and circumscribe their movements.

They were already more closely guarded than they had ever been. "We are watched like criminals," Antoinette told the Duch-esse de Polignac in a letter, "and such restraint is indeed horrible to endure." Their every move was scrutinized, they were watched even while sleeping, privacy was a thing of the past. Still Antoinette found ways to send ciphered letters to Fersen, and Leopold, and Mercy. She corresponded too with Antoine Bar-nave, a leader in the Assembly who had shown himself surprisingly sympathetic to the monarchy after spending time with the royal family on their return journey from Varennes.

"I have not a moment to myself, between the people I must see, the writing I must do, and the time I have to spend with my children," she confided to Fersen. Simply composing her secret letters, which were sometimes twenty or thirty pages long, and carefully ciphering them took many hours. Madame Campan wrote in her memoirs of the "great patience" the ciphering required. Both the writer and the intended recipient of the letter had to use the same book—in Antoinette's case, Paul et Virginie, The page and line of each letter or monosyllable were indicated according to an agreed-on code. Madame Campan helped Antoinette compose the cipher, and often made a copy of it, though she was not privy to its meaning.^

Then there was the difficulty of finding ways to smuggle the letters out of the Tuileries, sometimes in servants' pockets, sometimes inside articles of clothing or other unlikely places. Trustworthy couriers were hard to find; those that could be trusted were not always clever enough to avoid being caught by the police or committees of search.

Most of the letters Antoinette composed were appeals for military aid, appeals that became more urgent with every passing

month. To Fersen, who was visiting the various European courts in an effort to impress upon the sovereigns the desperate plight of the French King and Queen, Antoinette wrote personal messages, addressing him as "most beloved and most loving of men," telling him that she loved him and that she could not live without writing to him, dangerous though this was. She urged him not to return to France for any reason, no matter what happened to her. His complicity in the escape attempt was known, and if he tried to cross the border into France he would be putting himself at the mercy of the revolutionary government. Much as she must have wanted to see him, she could not let him risk arrest.

"The Queen wrote almost all day and spent a part of the night in reading," according to Madame Campan. Beyond pleading with her brother Leopold, corresponding with agents abroad and trying to keep Provence and Artois from acting rashly, she received information from the various secret committees operating on behalf of the monarchy in Paris, groups that were the eyes and ears of the court keeping track of what the political factions in the Assembly were planning. Though Antoinette put no faith in these spies and intriguers, Louis employed more and more of them, using the fiinds the Assembly voted him to finance "secret measures" and to pay the informers hired by De Laporte, Intendant of the Civil List. If his own safety and that of his family could be bought, Louis intended to spare no expense to buy it, and began bribing radical deputies to the Legislative Assembly in hopes of improving his situation.^

All this made Antoinette profoundly weary. To Fersen she wrote of "the prodigious mental fatigue which afflicts me ceaselessly." Sorrow haunted her, and during the long sleepless nights she relived the unsuccessful journey that had ended at Varennes and tried to decide whom to blame for what had gone wrong. They had come so close to succeeding, after all. Others with better luck had followed their route and crossed the frontier safely. Her own hairdresser, Leonard, had ridden through Varennes only hours ahead of the royal berlin, carrying Antoinette's priceless jewels. No one had stopped him. Provence and his wife, taking only a slightly altered route, had been recognized at the last post before the border. But the man who recognized them was a monarchist; he had not only kept their secret but had driven them on to the frontier himself to ensure that they would not be apprehended.

If only the Due de Choiseul had stayed longer at Pont-Sommevel, if only he had not sent word to the other detachments to leave their posts, if only one of the hussar officers at Varennes had ignored Louis's squeamishness about avoiding bloodshed and ordered his men to cut a path through the crowd. ... If only they had taken along, as the Chevalier de Coigny had suggested, a retired post officer who knew the back roads. Time and again she relived the moment when, just outside of Varennes, the stranger had tried to warn them of the danger ahead. They had not understood him at the time, but afterwards, thinking back, both Lx)uis and Antoinette realized that his words had been "You are known" or "You are discovered."^

Tormented by insomnia at night, harried during her waking hours, Antoinette had another fear to contend with. The pastrycook at the Tuileries was known to be "a furious Jacobin" who had been overheard to say "it would be a good thing for France if the King's days were shortened." The kitchen officials, who were fortunately devoted to Lx)uis, tried to keep a close eye on him but could not be absolutely sure he would not try to poison the King's food. To be safe, Louis, Antoinette and Elisabeth, who ate together, touched nothing from the kitchen other than plain roasted meat—no breaded dishes, no sweets, no meat pies. A trusted servant bought bread and wine from shops and smuggled them into the palace, where Madame Campan locked them in a cupboard in the King's apartments. Because Louis refused to give up pastry altogether, the bedchamber woman was sent out to buy cakes and pies and pounded sugar from tradesmen, always being careful to disguise her errand and to buy from different suppliers each time.^ The designs of the Jacobin pastrycook were thwarted. After three or four months of these precautions, the King and Queen heard from Laporte's spies that they need not fear poison any longer, for the revolutionaries had changed their strategy. There was no need to kill the ruler when they intended to abolish the throne.

Another winter had come, Paris shivered under severe frosts and the Queen's once lovely complexion withered in the cold, dry air. A joyless New Year's Day followed a joyless Christmas, and the news from Vienna and Brussels and Coblentz was bleak. The Legislative Assembly was proceeding aggressively to punish the emigres by confiscating their property and to harass nonjuring priests by depriving them of their pensions. The King was no

longer to be called "Majesty" or "Sire," and no one was to show him any of the traditional marks of honor, such as remaining standing in his presence or uncovering their heads. Louis, inert and withdrawn, nursed his wounds and read his journals and his library of works about Charles I, muttering that he was "abandoned by everyone."

Early one evening in mid-February of 1792 a tall, spare stranger with a large dog was let into the palace by a private entrance. It was Fersen, wearing a disguise and carrying important letters from the Swedish King. He had been fortunate to pass the frontier into France without incident, using false papers placing him under the protection of the Queen of Portugal. Luck remained with him; the guards were not only cooperative but polite, and did not guess that they were admitting the envoy of a foreign enemy. King Gustavus was doing a great deal for the beleaguered Louis and Antoinette. A few months earlier he had tried to launch an invasion of France via the Normandy coast, and was currently hoping to facilitate the escape of the royal family from Paris, while not abandoning hope that a second invasion plan for Normandy might still succeed. Fersen's mission was to persuade Louis—Antoinette, he knew, would be more than willing—to cooperate in their rescue.

Fersen made his way to Antoinette's apartments by the familiar route he had taken many times, fearing detection by the guardsmen but managing to avoid suspicion on account of his disguise and his dog. He was forewarned of the Queen's probable state of mind. Only days earlier she had had a secret meeting with the envoy of Catherine the Great, Simolin, and Simolin had told Fersen how she felt about the question of leaving Paris. It was the King and her son who needed rescuing, she had told the Russian envoy, she herself was not important. Her condition was so wretched, her anxiety so great that she had all but ceased to care about preserving herself. With tears in his eyes Simolin had recounted Antoinette's words. "I fear nothing," she had told him with a ferocious pride, "and I would rather run all possible dangers than live any longer in my present state of degradation and unhappiness."^

Fersen knew that he could count on Antoinette's courage, but he cannot have been prepared for the sight that met his eyes when he entered her apartments. There she was, a thin, tired, worn out

To the Scaffold joi

woman who looked closer to sixty than to thirty-six. She was tense and pale, quite devastated by grief and overwork. No account survives of what they said to each other, but Fersen must have given her King Gustavus's letters, and urged her, with all the eloquence at his command, to insist that Lx)uis avail himself of what might be their last opportunity for rescue. They talked for hours. Louis did not interrupt them. Fersen spent the night in her rooms.

The next day Louis informed the Count that he had made up his mind to stay on at the palace. He was after all under heavy guard, he did not like Gustavus's advice that he should escape alone, with Antoinette and the children remaining behind, and besides, he had given his word not to attempt to leave. ("The truth is," Fersen wrote in his diary afterwards, "he has scruples, having so often promised to remain—he is an honest man.") Once the allied armies began their invasion, which he counted on, he would agree to put himself into the hands of a party of smugglers who were expert at moving secretly, traveling with them through the forests north of Paris to where a detachment of troops would be waiting. Such was the extent of his planning. And he was deluded into thinking that, when the counter-revolutionary armies arrived, the revolutionaries would not dare to harm him as they would need him as a live hostage to save themselves from annihilation.

Louis talked to Fersen frankly, a sad figure in his old-fashioned wig and court dress, the red sash of the Order of Saint-Louis across his chest.

"Ah, 9a! here we are alone and we can speak," he said. "I know that I am taxed with weakness and irresolution, but no one was ever in my position. I know that I missed the right moment; it was July 14 [1790]; I ought to have gone then, and wished it. But what could I do when Monsieur [Provence] himself begged me not to go, and Marechal de Broglie who commanded said: Tes, we can go to Metz, but what shall we do when we get there?'"

Louis confessed that he had "lost the moment," and that since then he had never been able to find it again. He told Fersen his own view of what had happened on the disastrous escape attempt the previous year, and admitted that he knew nothing could be done to save the monarchy or unseat the revolutionaries except by

force. But he now believed that he could never recover his foil authority, no matter what happened. He would have to continue to cooperate with the Assembly, to use his veto power when he thought it necessary, and to wait for the other European monarchs to gather their forces.

Antoinette, who was present at this tete-^-tete, told Fersen that "there was no remedy but that of foreign troops, without them all was lost." Her efforts to cultivate allies among the deputies, the bribes the court had paid, their secret intrigues were leading nowhere. The deputies could not be trusted, and "all the ministers are traitors who betray the King."^^