Marie Antoinette

by Hilaire Belloc

She had preserved her carriage, which all who knew her had regarded since her childhood as the chief expression of her soul. She still moved with solemnity and with that exaggerated but unflinching poise of the head which, in the surroundings of Versailles, had seemed to some so queenly, to others so affected, which here, in her last hours, seemed to all, as she still preserved it, so defiant. For the rest she was not the same. Her glance seemed dull and full of weariness; the constant loss of blood which she had suffered during those many weeks spent below ground had paled her so that the artificial, painted red of her cheeks was awful in that grey morning, and her still ample hair was ashen and touched with white, save where some traces of its old auburn could be perhaps distinguished.

She was in black. A little scarf of lace was laid with exactitude about her shoulders and her breast, and on her head she wore a great cap which a woman who loved her, the same who had served her in her cell, put on her as she went to her passion. The pure white of this ornament hung in great strings of lawn on either side, and round it and beneath it she had wound the crape of her widowhood. So dressed, and so standing at the bar, so watched in silence by so many eyes, she heard once more the new sound which yesterday she had first learned to hate: the hard and nasal voice of Herman. He asked her formally her name. She answered in a voice which was no longer strong, but which was still clear and well heard in that complete silence:

“Marie Antoinette of Austria, some thirty-eight years old, widow to Louis Capet the King of France.”

To the second formal question on the place of her first arrest, that:

“It was in the place where the sittings of the National Assembly were held.”

The clerk, a man of no great learning, wrote his heading: “The 23rd day of the first month of the fourth year of Freedom,” and when he had done this he noted her replies, and Herman’s short questions also: his bidding to the jury that they must be firm, to the prisoner that she must be attentive.

Into the clerk’s writing there crept, as there will into that of poor men, certain grievous errors of grammar which in an earlier (and a later) time would not have appeared in the record of the meanest Court trying a tramp for hunger; but it was the Revolution and they were trying a Queen, so everything was strange; and this clerk called himself Fabricius, which had a noble sound—but it was not his name.

This clerk read the list of witnesses and the indictment out loud.

When these formalities were over they brought a chair. The Queen sat down by leave of the Court and the trial began. She saw rising upon her right a new figure of a kind which she had not known in all her life up to the day when the door of the prison had shut her out from the noise and change of the world. It was a figure of the Terror, Fouquier Tinville. His eyes were steadfast, the skin of his face was brown, hard and strong; he was a hired politician covered with the politician’s outer mask of firmness. Within he was full of the politician’s hesitation and nervous inconstancy. A genuine poverty and a politician’s hunger for a salary had been satisfied by the post of Public Prosecutor. He earned that salary with zeal and with little discernment, and therefore, when the time came, he also was condemned to die. It was he now in this forenoon who opened against the Queen.

His voice was harsh and mechanical: his speech was long, dull and violent: rhetorical with that scenic and cardboard rhetoric which is the official commonplace of all tribunals. The Widow Capet was a Messalina; she was a leech; she was a Merovingian Tyrant; she was a Medicis. She had held relations with the “Man called King” of Bohemia and Hungary; she had urged Capet on to all his crimes. She had sent millions to aid her family in their war against the French people. She had woven the horrid plot of the 10th of August, which nothing but incredible valour had defeated. She was the main enemy which the new and angry Freedom for which he spoke had had to meet and to conquer.