Of this victory, coincident with the beginning of the King’s agony, Marie Antoinette for days could know nothing, and even when the rumour reached her it was but the victorious shouting in the streets and a name or two whispered by a servant that gave her a passing impression that her champions had suffered a further check—no more. Yet before that tide should flow back and finally swamp the French packed in Leipsig, twenty years must pass, and not till then should the Kings and the Lords at last see Paris from a hill.
SANSON’S LETTER ASKING THE AUTHORITIES WHAT STEPS HE IS
TO TAKE FOR THE EXECUTION OF THE KING
There is one detail in connection with Jemappes which the reader must know because it does so illustrate the myriad coincidences of the Queen’s life:—
That child whom she had seen and adopted during her early childless years, when her fever of youth and exasperation was upon her, that child which for a moment had supplied to the girl something of maternity, had now grown to manhood. The birth of her own daughter had long ago driven out any recollection of the whim: the peasant boy of St. Michel was forgotten. He had grown into his teens full of the bitterness which irresponsible and spasmodic patronage can so vigorously breed. During the days of October he had been recognised among the wildest of those who attacked the palace in Versailles; he had shouted for the Nation; he had enlisted and was there at Jemappes, an obscure volunteer among the thousands whom Dumouriez forced forward upon the frontier. He was present upon the 6th of November upon the bank of the Haine when the mixed battalions charged, singing: a bullet struck him and he fell down dead. She, the Queen, was there a prisoner in her dimly-lit room at night—separated from the father of the children who slept near by: her mind was big with the new doom of his Indictment and Trial which the dull day had brought her. Eighteen years before she had caught up that peasant baby in the Louveciennes road and kissed it, her eyes full of tears, and in her heart a violent yearning half-virginal, half-maternal: he, however, lay dead that same night in the Hainault mud with the autumn rain upon his body: his name was Jacques Amand.
With December there was some little respite, for a new Municipality had been elected that was a trifle more moderate than the old; but in general this life of hers, with its calm, its dread and its monotony, continued. Now it contained some act of humiliation, as when all razors and sharp-edged things were taken from the King (upon the 7th); now some indulgence, as when (upon the 9th) a clavecin was allowed the Queen—and it is said that from curiosity she played upon this, later, the new notes of the Marseillaise.
For a few hours the Dauphin was taken from her. It was her turn to ask questions of the guards, and theirs to be silent; she asked distractedly: they did not reply: but the child returned.
The affair of the Trial proceeded rapidly. The briefs were gathered; the King’s counsel met the King day after day in the apartment below, and she stayed above there alone with her children and was still. She had no communications with him at all save when at Christmas, after he had drafted his will, he wrote to the Convention and caused a short message to be conveyed to the Queen. It was perhaps during these days that she wrote upon a fly-leaf which is still preserved in St. Germain, “Oportet unum mori pro populo.”
Louis, as the new year broke, saluted it sadly. Within a fortnight he had been pronounced guilty at the bar of the Parliament before which he was arraigned—guilty, that is, of intrigue with the foreigner and of abetting the invasion. Upon the 17th of January 1793 it was known in his prison that his penalty would be death. Again did Marie Antoinette hear in the room below the step of Malesherbes, her husband’s counsel, coming upon that day to confer with the King, but this time he came to speak not of defence but of death. A respite was denied to Louis. Upon the 20th his prayer for three days in which he might prepare to meet God was again refused, and his execution was fixed for the morrow. His sentence was read to him in his prison: he heard it quietly: and thus upon that 20th of January (a Sunday), a murky evening and cold, when it was quite dark the Princesses heard in the street a newspaper-seller crying the news that the King must die; the hollow word “la mort,” very deep and lugubrious, repeated and repeated in the chanting tones of that trade, floated up from the winter streets.