It is my purpose to write something on the eventful life and dreadful ending of Queen Marie Antoinette. I try, when I remember the sunshine of her early days—her youth, her beauty, her grace—to put myself in a cheerful frame of mind. I wish to look, at least for a little while, on the bright side of a career which began so splendidly and so happily. I would fain picture to myself the daughter of Maria Theresa, as Edmund Burke saw her at Versailles—smiling, radiant, adored. I would fain hear the clash of the thirty thousand swords which should have leaped from their scabbards to avenge the slightest affront to the peerless consort of the King of France and Navarre.
I take from my shelves the Journal de Madame Eloff—the ledger containing the milliner and dressmaker’s bills of a perhaps too extravagant young Queen—an endless catalogue of taffetas and satins, gauze and ribbons, high-heeled shoes and embroidered gloves, scent-bottles, reticules, feathers, artificial flowers and fans. From an old Boule cabinet I lift tenderly a dainty little coffee-cup of Sèvres egg-shell porcelain, adorned with an exquisite miniature of her, painted when she had only been two years the wife of the hapless Louis. The cup is half embedded in a setting of velvet bleu du Roi; and, alas! when I draw the ceramic gem delicately from the case I see that the cup has no handle.
A maimed relic, this porcelain trifle, possibly of a priceless breakfast set, wantonly shattered by a howling mob of poissardes and red night-capped “patriots” who had sacked one of the Royal Palaces. A crowd of memories are conjured up by this morsel of dismembered Sèvres. I see, as in a glass darkly, the Galerie des Glaces and the Œil-de-Boeuf at Versailles. I see the toy Dairy at the Petit Trianon; the banquet of the Gardes du Corps in the Great Theatre of the Palace; the King and Queen: the Royal Princesses circulating among the guests and distributing white cockades among them; while the musicians make the hall resound with the strains of “Oh, Richard! Oh, mon Roi!”
No, surely, the age of Chivalry is not past, and thrice ten thousand glaives will leap into the light to vindicate the outraged Majesty of France. There’s no such thing! A confused picture—a panorama all torn to shreds and splashed with mud and flecked with blood flows before me. The Etats Genéraux have wed: the nobility sparkling in velvet and plumes and golden broideries; the clergy brave in copes and mitres and point lace: the “Tiers Etat,” all in sombre black, short-cloaked, slouch-hatted, grave, preoccupied, looking unutterable things. Among them looms, very real and portentous indeed, a thick-set, pock-marked man, with an eye of fire. This is Honore Gabriel Riquetti, rightly Comte de Mirabeau, but who has broken with his order, and styling himself “Mirabeau Marchand de Draps”—a retail clothier from Marseilles, forsooth! of about forty-eight hours’ commercial standing—stalks among country notaries and shopkeepers, farmers and shopkeepers as a Deputy of the Third Estate.
But all these fade away from my field of vision. I set to studying and balancing my rambling thoughts. I have to deal with Marie Antoinette, Josephe-Jeanne de Lorraine, wife of Louis XVI, and who was born, you will remember, at Vienna, on the 2nd of November, 1755, the very day of that earthquake at Lisbon in the occurrence of which Dr. Johnson for a long time so resolutely refused to believe. Would the doctor, I wonder, had he lived in 1793, have declined to place credence in a newspaper report of what is now to be narrated—an upheaval more dreadful and disastrous than any physical convulsion of the earth’s crust? The tattered, muddy, gory panorama fades into a murky nothingness. Then, out of the Valley of Shadows there arises, terribly distinct and substantial, THIS—
It is a raw, chilly, marrow-searching day in the month of October, 1793. A spacious hall, known in this new and blessed era of Universal Regeneration, and Unlimited Throat-Cutting, as the Salle de la Liberté, in the Palais de Justice, hard by the prison of the Conciergerie, has been swept and garnished for the trial of the discrowned and desolate widow of “Louis Capet,” murdered on the scaffold in the Place de la Révolution last January. In a dark and filthy dungeon of that same Conciergerie Marie Antoinette has been immured since August. The walls of the Salle de la Liberté have been newly whitewashed—no voluptuous frescoes or oil painting in this abode of Republican simplicity, if you please: only patriotic lime-whiting and democratic glue—and the almost blinding glare of the stark walls brings out in strong relief the dark green canopy suspended over the heads of the Judges of the Revolutionary Tribunal, who are five in number, the President being one, Hermann.
Above this precious conclave are the busts of Brutus—save the mark!—and two recent Revolutionary notorieties: the infamous Marat, deservedly done to death by Charlotte Corday and the member of the Convention, Lepelletier de St. Fargeau, who had voted for the death sentence on Louis XVI, and who immediately afterwards was stabbed to death by an ex-Garde du Corps in an eating house in the Palais National—once Palais Royal. The busts are crowned with scarlet caps of liberty, adorned with monstrous tri-coloured cockades, and are flanked by two huge oil lamps. There will be need of the lamps; for the deliberation of the tribunal will probably last far into the night.
The judges sit at a long table which, although shabby, is somewhat pretentious in its upholstering, since the legs are of mahogany, and fluted, and the brazen feet are fashioned in the shape of griffin’s claws, and exhibit some traces of bygone gilding. This table is yet extant, and forms part of the furniture of the Court of Cassation, which at present holds its sittings in the old Salle de la Liberté. The Public Accuser has his place in front of the President; the jury—yes, this monstrous tribunal has a jury!—is to the left of the judges; and to the right is the desk of the Counsel for the defence. Behind him is the seat for the prisoners. A breast-high balustrade separates the Court from the space set apart for the public, which is ample enough, and is thronged, this dreary October morning, by a motley crew of sans culottes, mechanics, lamplighters, bargemen and coarse, loud-voiced women from the markets, some of them known as “Tricoteuses” and “Furies of the Guillotine.”
Between the balustrade and the body of the Court runs a long gangway, at one extremity of which is a door, communicating by means of a narrow staircase with the Gaol of the Conciergerie.
Up this staircase and through this door, and along this gangway, and so through an opening of the balustrade into the criminal dock, there is brought, between two gendarmes, a woman of middle age, with abundant hair which has turned quite grey lately, and features which retain a few—a very few—traces of former comeliness. She is barely eight-and-thirty, and she looks full fifty. She is miserably clad in an old, patched, threadbare gown of black serge, which has been mended for her innumerable times by a compassionate girl named Rosalie, the daughter of the gaoler. Her shoes are old, full of holes, and down at heel. She wears black cotton stockings, and about her shoulders is arranged a kind of tippet, or pelérine, of frayed white muslin. As yet she wears no cap; and her long tresses have been carefully dressed and oiled this morning by the pitying Rosalie. Obviously, she is in mourning for her husband, sometime King of France and Navarre; but the Revolutionary Tribunal knows nothing of such titles, and in the Act of Accusation, which is read in a monotonous sing-song by the Greffier, the prisoner is arraigned as “Marie Antoinette, of Austria and Lorraine, widow of Louis Capet.”