“Did you hurt yourself?” inquired the gendarme.
“No, nothing can further harm me.” Poor Marie Antoinette!
“The candle gave just light enough to reveal the horrors of her cell. The floor was covered with mud, and streams of water trickled down the stone walls. A miserable pallet, with a dirty covering of coarse and tattered cloth, a small pine table, and a chair, constituted the only furniture.” So deep was the fall from the salons of Versailles!
Here for two long, weary months the poor queen lingered; her misery being slightly alleviated by the kind-heartedness of Madame Richard, the wife of the jailer, and Rosalie Lamorlière, an inmate of the prison, who did all the rigorous rules allowed them to mitigate her woes. “The night of her arrival at the Conciergerie the queen had not so much as a change of linen. For days she begged to be allowed some, but it was not till the tenth day that her prayer was granted, when Michonis went to the Temple and brought back with him a parcel of linen and some clothes; among others, the white gown which the queen wore on the day of her execution. Little by little everything was taken from the queen. The souvenirs of her happy past, to which she clung, were taken from her; first her watch, a gift of her mother’s, and which had never left her since she left Vienna,—the watch which had counted the happy hours of her youth and womanhood was taken from her. Bitterly she wept at having to part with it, as if it had been a friend. There was not a moment that the queen could be out of sight of her gens d’armes; a little screen, four feet high, was the only separation between the space in which she changed her dress and those men.” Imagine the misery of this state for a woman so delicately nurtured, so luxuriously brought up, having at her command a household of over four hundred persons, and accustomed to the refinements of the most polished court in Europe.
In the old days of splendor at Versailles, when her attendants were unable to find some article of dress or toilet, she had exclaimed pettishly: “How terrible it is not to be able to find what one wants!” But now, in these last days of her life, when surrounded by every aggravation that could wound a proud spirit, treated like the worst of offenders, insulted as mother, wife, queen, and woman, she never uttered one word that could be construed into petulance, or gave one angry look.
“With threads taken from her bedding, she worked a kind of garter, and not being allowed any knitting-needles, used a pair of toothpicks. When finished, she dropped it, with a significant look, when her jailer entered the prison. It reached—thanks to one of her loyalest followers, M. Hue, a faithful servant of Louis XVI.—its destination, for he gave it to Madame Royale when he accompanied her, two years later, to Vienna.” This was the richest legacy the daughter of Maria Theresa and the queen of France could bequeath to her child. The queen was not so fortunate with another little relic that she hoped her daughter would receive. This consisted of a pair of gloves and a lock of her hair, which she slipped into the jailer’s hand; but the action was observed by one of the gens d’armes, and the little parcel was confiscated. “The damp of the queen’s underground prison was such that her black gown began to fall into rags. She had another,—a white one; but this she wore only on the day of her death.
“The few other clothes she had were in a deplorable state, and required constant repair. She was only permitted three shirts, but the revolutionary tribunal decided that but one of these should be given to the queen, and worn ten days before another was allowed her; even her handkerchiefs were only allowed one by one, and a strict account was kept of every article as it came from or entered her prison.” Not being allowed a chest of drawers she placed her clothes in a paper box that Rosalie brought her, “and which she received,” says Rosalie, “as if it had been the most beautiful piece of furniture in the world.” Rosalie also procured her a little looking-glass, bordered with red, with little Chinese figures painted on the sides. This too seemed much to please the queen; and doubtless it gave her more satisfaction than had done all the miles of gorgeous, gilded mirrors at Versailles.
And now the 14th of October has come, and Marie Antoinette is summoned to appear before her judges. There are wretches present who cry as she enters, “À bas l’Autrichienne!” Yet even the fear of the guillotine is not able to check the visible signs of pity and deep-felt sympathy her appearance elicits in others.
How startlingly the sorrowful present contrasts with the gay and brilliant past, when, in her bridal dress of satin, pearls, and diamonds, the Duc de Cossé-Brissac led her to the balcony of the Tuileries to gratify the eager desire of the dense multitude to see her, and bade her behold in them two hundred thousand adorers, while shouts of “Vive la Dauphine!” rent the air. Marie Antoinette was then a youthful bride. Twenty-three years have passed away, and she is now a widow. In a faded black dress, she stands in the theatre of that same palace of the Tuileries, amidst a throng of canaille, to be tried for her life by men whose own lives would be the forfeit, if either compassion or justice should move them to find her innocent. Alas! the daughter of the Cæsars, she whom Edmund Burke had seen, “glittering like the morning star, full of life, and splendor, and joy,” is hurled low indeed. And yet, to me, as she stands there in her frayed and patched black gown, with her widow’s cap upon her almost white hair, before her judges, and her jury, and the crowded tribunes, Marie Antoinette is a far nobler, far grander figure, than when a blooming bride she stood upon the Tuileries balcony, surrounded by the acclamations of the multitude, or when, as queen of France, blazing with diamonds, and in all the pomp and splendor of regality, she received the homage of her courtiers in the gilded galleries of Versailles.
The tribunal which judged the queen was composed of a president and four judges, the public prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville,—a man who even at that time was notorious as being amongst the most inhuman of the monsters who then governed revolutionary France,—the chief registrar, and fifteen jurymen. Fouquier-Tinville had himself drawn out at great length the act of accusation. He looked upon it as his chef d’œuvre, and Chauveau-Lagarde, the queen’s counsel, did not exaggerate when he called it a “work of the devil.” In it the queen was compared to Messalina, Brunehild, Frédégond, and the Medici. He declared that “since her arrival in France she had been the curse and leech of the French nation; that she had maintained a secret correspondence with the king of Bohemia and Hungary; that her aim was the ruin of the country; that by her instigation, and in concert with the brothers of Louis XVI. and the infamous Calonne, formerly minister of finance, she had lavished the wealth of the nation, the spoils of the sweat of the people, in maintaining her criminal expenditure and in paying the agents of her treasonable intrigues; that she had sent millions out of the country to the emperor, in order to maintain the war against the republic, and that she had thus exhausted the revenues of the country. Further, that since the commencement of the Revolution she had not ceased an instant from maintaining a treasonable correspondence with the enemy, and, by every means in her power, aided and abetted a counter revolution.” He then went back and harped, at great length, upon the affair of the Gardes du Corps at Versailles in 1789, and also on the flight to Varennes; accused her of the loss of life on the 17th of July, 1792, at the Champs de Mars, and declared that owing to her, and her alone, the massacre occurred at Nancy and elsewhere. “Thus this man raved on in an endless series of accusations, which seem more as if they came from the disordered brain of a homicidal maniac than from a man in his senses.”