The indictment goes on to say that the widow Capet has by her crimes rendered herself the worthy compeer of Brunéhaut, Fredegonde, and Catherine de Medicis; that since she has had her abode in France she has been the scourge and bloodsucker of her adopted country; and that even before “the Happy Revolution which gave the French their sovereignty” she entered into political correspondence with “the man calling himself King of Bohemia and Hungary”—this is the Emperor of Austria her brother—that, in conjunction with the brothers of Louis Capet, and “the execrable and infamous Calonne” she had squandered the resources of France (the fruit of the sweat of the people) in a dreadful manner, “to satisfy inordinate pleasures and to pay the agents of her criminal intrigues.”
In another count of the indictment she is charged with being “an adept in all sorts of crimes.” One of these “crimes” is, that on the evening of the famous banquet to the Garde du Corps, and the Regiment de Flanders, in the Opera House at Versailles, she, with the King and a numerous and brilliant following, had passed between the lines of tables, distributing white cockades to the officers and encouraging them to trample the national or tri-coloured cockade under foot.
“Prisoner,” thunders the President, “were you there when the band played the air, ‘Oh, Richard, oh mon Roi’?”
“I do not recollect,” replies the Queen.
“Were you there when the toast of ‘The Nation’ was proposed and refused?”
“I do not think that I was.”
“Did not your husband read his speech to the representatives to you half-an-hour before he delivered it?”
“My husband had great confidence in me, and that made him read his speech to me; but I made no observations.”
Fancy cutting a poor woman’s head off because her husband read her a speech which he was about to deliver in public! Does Mr. Gladstone, does Lord Randolph Churchill, does Sir William Harcourt, I wonder, ever favour the domestic circle with such “fore-lectures” as Dr. Furnival might call them?
A remarkable witness against Marie Antoinette is a ruffian named Roussillon, who deposes that on the fatal Tenth of August when the Tuileries was stormed by the mob, he saw under the Queen’s bed a number of empty wine-bottles, “from which,” adds Roussillon, “I concluded that she had herself distributed wine to the Swiss soldiers, that these wretches in their intoxication might assassinate the people.”