Indeed, one can only believe that some of the writings and actions of the actors in the year of terror, 1793, were owing to a state of madness. It is said, and on good authority, that Fouquier-Tinville ultimately confessed to being pursued by horrible visions, saying that he saw the spirits of those he had condemned to death menacing him, not in his dreams, like Richard III., but in broad daylight. And well he might; for between the 10th of March, 1793, and the 27th of July of the following year, two thousand six hundred and sixty-nine victims were sent from that tribunal to the guillotine.
Then followed the second day. “What is your name?” inquired one of the judges.
“Marie Antoinette de Lorraine d’Autriche,” answered the queen.
“What is your condition?” was the next question.
“Widow of Louis, king of France.”
“What is your age?”
“Thirty-eight.”
The act of accusation was then read, and the witnesses appeared. Of these there were forty-one,—men of all sorts and conditions of life, and who were ready to swear anything, however improbable, however atrocious, against the queen. All through the long hours of that awful day the different witnesses were questioned and cross-questioned. She saw again faces familiar to her in past years, faces that must have recalled Versailles and the Trianon; and with what feelings of horror must she have recognized Simon, her son’s jailer and persecutor, among that crowd of witnesses! When the charges relative to the queen’s treatment of her son were again alluded to, the queen deigned no reply. Seeing this, one of the jurors called the attention of the president to her silence. One can imagine what a hush must at that moment have fallen on that great crowd, eager to hear what the queen would answer to such an infamy. But Marie Antoinette was equal, aye, more than equal, to the occasion. She rose proudly from her chair, and in a majestic voice exclaimed: “If I have not answered, it is because nature herself refuses to answer such an accusation made to a mother. I appeal to all that may be present.”
“A thrill ran through that vast hall—a thrill that has not ceased to be felt by all who can enter into what the feelings of that mother were at such a moment. No wonder that when Robespierre heard what a sensation had been made by the sublime manner in which the queen had met that charge, and the effect it had upon the audience, he, being then at dinner, should have broken his plate with rage, and cursed the folly of Fouquier-Tinville in preferring it.” At last all was over, and the queen was asked if she had anything to say. “I was a queen, and you took away my crown; a wife, and you killed my husband; a mother, and you deprived me of my children. My blood alone remains. Take it, but do not make me suffer long.” Then in the dignity of silence, and without the moving of a muscle, she listened to the sentence condemning her to die. It was ten minutes past four in the morning of the 16th of October. The queen had, with hardly an interval, endured this trial more than twenty hours. “Rising from her seat, she walked away calmly and serenely, leaving her judges, or rather murderers, without one look of reproach or shade of anger. But on nearing the portion of the hall where, beyond the barriers, the mob was collected, she raised somewhat her noble head. A great French painter has left a picture of this scene. The queen faces the spectator, as she walks along the side of the barriers, above which the crowd are eagerly scanning her; behind follow the gens d’armes with shouldered muskets; beyond, under the dim light of a lamp, appear the faces of the judges, a lurid background. Delaroche has introduced the thin, handsome face of a youth who seems to feel the iniquity of the transaction keenly: we recognize the features of Bonaparte. Next to the almost angelic sublimity of the figure of the queen, the most touching thing in the picture is the face of a young girl, who gazes, with a look of ineffable pity, through her tears, at the queen as she walks by.”
Truly writes Sainte-Beuve. “I do not believe,” he says, “that a monument of more atrocious stupidity, of greater ignominy for our species, can exist, than this trial of Marie Antoinette. When one reflects that a century which considered itself enlightened and of the most refined civilization, ends with public acts of such barbarity, one begins to doubt of human nature itself, and to fear that the brute, which is always in human nature, has the ascendency.”