Abundance. Part 38

Hours pa.s.s, and with the pa.s.sing of each hour, the people along the route become more hostile. I determine to use the time as best I can, talking with one of our captors who has chosen to place himself on the seat of the carriage beside me. His name is Barnave, a member of the National a.s.sembly. He is young and willing to be charmed by the conversation of one who pa.s.ses for the Queen. I do my best to convince him of our humanity and of our concern for the welfare of France.

WHEN WE REACH the Tuileries, the King stumbles from the carriage but walks unaccosted by the howling mob up the stairs. When I step out, several people lunge at me-I watch their approach with the equanimity of exhaustion. Behold, members of the National Guard step between me and my would-be a.s.sailants. A gigantic guardsman takes the Dauphin in his arms and rushes inside.

I am covered by the gray dust of the road. When Madame Campan greets me at the door of my apartment, I take off my cap to show her my hair, which has turned completely white. I ask for scissors and snip off a lock, which I intend to send later to the dear Princesse de Lamballe, whose own escape, I pray, has been accomplished. I shall simply explain that my hair has been blanched by sorrow. Now I ask for a bath.

The King is taken away to offer explanation to the National a.s.sembly for our flight. "Just remember," I say softly into his ear, my lips so dry with dust that I can hardly form any words, "we never had any intention of deserting France."

But I worry about the accusations and complaints my husband has so injudiciously left behind in his farewell letter, for all to read, before our flight.

AS SOON AS POSSIBLE, I take up my pen to write to Axel von Fersen: Put your mind at ease, for we are alive. Yes, I exist, but I cannot begin to express how anxious I have been about you. To know how you have suffered for lack of word from us has doubled my own suffering.

Do not write to me-I know your thoughts and feelings already-and a letter might incriminate us further in some way.

Above all, do not come to Paris under any pretext. It is well known that you planned and helped us to leave, and everything would be lost if you came here.

Although I am watched every minute, both night and day, I do not let that bother me. Do not be anxious, as it is already clear that the a.s.sembly wishes to deal with us in a kindly fas.h.i.+on. They wish to pretend that we were abducted and not ourselves responsible for our absence.

Farewell. I cannot write any more, only to say I love you and indeed that is all I have time to say. Tell me to whom I can send my letters to you because I could not live without being able to write you. Farewell most beloved of men and the most loving of men. With all my heart, I embrace you and only you.

My most dear friend, Princesse de Lamballe, No, don't come back, my dear heart, no, don't throw yourself into the mouth of the tiger. It would only add to my distress and my deep and constant anxiety about my husband and my poor little children. By all means, do not come. My chou d'amour will now sign his name in his own little hand, and you must obey me and your future king.

The princess replies to me, in mid-November, from the home of her father-in-law, the Duc de Penthievre, that she wishes to return as "a patriotic act." The winter is coming on, and my dear friend will no longer allow me to remain alone and cold. It seems I am unable to prevent her return, so the good Barnave has persuaded the National a.s.sembly to let her live in an apartment close to me within the Tuileries and to resume her post as the superintendent of the queen's household.

I SPEND MY DAYS writing to the crowned heads of Europe, imploring them to come to our a.s.sistance. I write to Fersen, my champion, who travels from Brussels to Vienna to speak with my brother Leopold, the Emperor, and to speak with his own King Gustavus, who wants to help us. Day in, day out, I weary myself, trying to be convincing, trying to avoid saying anything stupid.

I tell my friends that the tigers who surround me grow more fierce and hungry every day.

With great secrecy and only in whispers to each other, the King and I speak of Count von Fersen and how he hopes to arouse support for our position among the monarchs of Europe. Surely they would rather put down rebellion in France than face it in their own countries. But the King always worries that any force from outside our borders might then try to occupy France.

ON NEW YEAR'S DAY, 1792, I don a new court dress, with wide panniers in the grand old style. If Barnave were still here, he would glory in such a dress, but he has been sent away as too moderate a voice in the a.s.sembly. His party, termed the Feuillants, is being displaced by those called the Jacobins, and the Girondins also struggle for power.

The dress is blue satin and will remind the people of the portrait in blue that Vigee-Lebrun painted of me holding a pink rose, which everyone loved. This dress, however, is more elaborate, and the satin is embroidered all over.

I think there may be civil war; nothing is more horrible in the King's mind than the idea of Frenchmen fighting against Frenchmen, spilling fraternal blood on the soil of France.

THOUGH STILL BITTERLY COLD, February has come and with it, in disguise and using a false pa.s.sport, my Fersen! How can I be unhappy when he is here? My joy makes me numb to his danger.

We are full of gaiety at seeing each other again, both of us as splendidly dressed as of old, but he is risking his life to see us. After staying here this evening, he will confer with the King tomorrow, bringing news from the King of Sweden. As soon as it is possible, we embrace, and I remark that it is like embracing a man made of ice.

He tells me that it is so cold outside that his carriage wheels make exactly the same crunching sound that they make in the extreme cold of Sweden as they pa.s.s through the snow.

Then he tells me that despite the chill that lingers in his clothing, his heart within is a glowing ember, eternally. Simply to look at him again fills me with the most exquisite pleasure, and I know that it is the same for him. What friends we are!

We speak of that last day at my beloved Trianon. I tell him that I had returned to the mossy grotto among the rocks to remember our intimacy when I saw the messenger coming with the news that the market women were marching from Paris.

"Ah, I had not known that it was in that most hidden and delightful spot that you were lingering when the world changed. To think, we have not had time till now for you to share that moment with me."

He takes both my hands in his, then slowly with that combination of pa.s.sion and elegance that he evokes, he bends to kiss my knuckles, then steps backward, our hands still joined, to view me at exactly the distance spanned by our two arms, outstretched. "I am memorizing you," he says. "Just so."

"And I you."

I think that we both have a premonition that we will never see each other again. But it is our disposition and determination to forbid the occasion to be sad. No, every moment that we are together has always been and is to be filled with joy, just as the bee perpetually fills the honeycomb.

"What nectar," I say to him, smiling.

He knows exactly what I mean.

"It has always been so," he replies.

With exquisite grace, he draws me a step forward and meets me in a holy kiss.

THE TOWER, 1792.

1 September With a great deal of irony, I think of us this way: One afternoon during the Reign of Terror-that is, on 1 September 1792-the King and the Queen of France sat in the Tower, built as part of the palace of the old Knights Templar, in Paris, playing a game of backgammon.

Taking turns, we each scoop up the dice from the playing board, rattle the spotted cubes in their leather-covered cups, and toss the dice out among the triangular shapes painted on the game board, which have something of the appearance, at least to me, of a dragon's mouth full of opposing, pointed teeth.

According to the numbers we have rolled, we move our pieces, his chocolate brown, mine cream, in opposite directions so that each little group of pieces has to face and pa.s.s through the defenses of the other in order to get home. Usually when we play, I try to keep each of my pieces safe from capture, while the King takes more risks to set up blocks in order to impede the movement of the Queen's creamy troop.

We are playing for the sake of the children, for Marie Therese and Louis Charles, the Dauphin, so that they may think the Temple, as this palace and its towers are known, seems homelike and safe instead of like the prison it actually is. Because the Knights of Malta left a collection of some fifteen hundred books in the Tower, the King has a library here. He would rather have retired upstairs to read in the turret-study adjacent to his bedroom than to play backgammon. I muse and wonder for a moment about how the King has always been a man who enjoys the company of books, while I prefer active conversation with real minds. I wonder if my life would have been different had I liked to read, or his, if he had liked to converse.

In his turret, my husband reads twice a day, after breakfast and after dinner, for two or three hours at each sitting. Lately he has been studying an account of the English king Charles I, who left his head on the chopping block in the century before. Really, the King has studied this story since he was fifteen, and even before I came to France. Perhaps it has always been a cautionary tale for him.

The French, or rather Dr. Guillotine, have recently introduced a more humane means of execution than the hand-held, shoulder-swung ax of the seventeenth century. A high sharp blade is hoisted between two grooved struts that make the device resemble the skeleton of a tall door, with a slant of steel, something like a butcher's meat cleaver, but more triangular and without a handle, positioned at the top. If the execution occurs on a bright day, I am told, the glint of the sun on the polished steel can be seen by even those far back in the crowd. Near the base and at a right angle to the upright business, on something like a wooden sled, the criminal is made to lie facedown with hands tied together behind his or her back. The sled with its human cargo is shoved forward so that the head of the person is positioned just beyond the open door, and the blade rattles down the grooved frame to fall straight down upon the neck, lopping off the criminal's head, which falls neatly into a waiting basket. I suppose there must be a great deal of blood. Spectators have said, I am told, it all happens very quickly, mechanically, and one can hardly believe how brief that moment is between a living body...and what is left, that is, between life and death.

Because my hand starts to tremble, I quickly take up my dice cup and rattle it furiously, throwing out the "bones" onto the board. I rest my hand, hunched, on the table. The King is not deceived. He places his hand over mine for a moment, making a little shelter for me.

I breathe deeply, a long pull of air into my lungs, and resume my courage. "Your turn," I say, and smile.

AS WE PLAY, both of us recall, though we speak nothing of it, that only a couple of weeks before this game of backgammon there was a great deal of brutal killing by revolutionaries at the Tuileries. They hoped to kill us, I believe, but the Swiss Guard stood between us and the mob, and the loyal guardsmen were ma.s.sacred.

AFTER THE CARNAGE, the Tuileries was uninhabitable, and we were to be moved to the Convent of the Feuillants. The mob left the Tuileries smeared with blood and littered not only with shredded pieces of clothing-velvet and brocade-but also pieces of human flesh. It required only two carriages to carry away those of us of the court of Louis XVI who remained alive, including my most precious friend the Princesse de Lamballe. I have almost forgotten my other friends, such as the d.u.c.h.esse de Polignac, who have fled, although I hear from Fersen that he had a touching reunion with her, someplace in Europe.

If I could, I would like to have a sensible conversation with the painter Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun, but I do not know where she is, and if she is alive or dead. I wonder if the violence of the times we live in has affected her artistic style. I hope that she has lived to paint the royalty of some other more fortunate country.

As the carriage rolled away from the Tuileries, I remember thinking how beautiful and strangely calm was the face of the Princesse de Lamballe. We have never been lovers, not in the sense of the obscene pamphlets, but my love for her knows no bounds. Of all my friends at court who successfully fled the country at the beginning of the revolution, when flight was relatively easy, only the Princesse de Lamballe, upon learning that I was alone, returned to France. In the past her sensitivity was so extreme that she sometimes burst into tears for fear of a mouse or over the touching beauty of a rose, but her love for me has given her the courage to return to a country increasingly dangerous for any aristocrat.

As the carriages transported us across Paris, from the blood-drenched Tuileries to the Convent of the Feuillants, she never flinched. The air in which we moved was filled with the snarl of snare drums and the thud of huge tympani, along with the ominous tolling of bells, not to mention the shouts of the people of "No more King." She and I ignored those who called out as our carriage rattled over the humped stones shaped like loaves of bread. They shouted that Louis XVI is nothing but a fat porpoise. Through the coach window, I saw the huge heart of an ox, with a cuckold's horns attached to it, displayed and labeled as that of the monarch. Placards and little models with dolls showed an image of a Queen being hung from a lantern post.

Once at the convent, all of us were happy to inhabit only four rooms, and those rooms had humble brick floors and whitewashed walls for the most part. We had plenty of food.

Despite the stress of the times, the King slept well and ate a dinner of eight appetizers balanced by eight desserts with four roasts in between. I could not eat at all, and my friend the Princesse de Lamballe joined me in my abstinence. Clothing being scarce at the convent, my fastidious friend the Princesse de Lamballe, who had not worn fresh underwear for two days, sent a note to a friend to borrow a chemise.

"WE STAYED IN the convent for only a few days," I suddenly remark to my husband. He is about to win in this Tower game of backgammon, unless the dice go very much against him. Our eyes follow the dice and the movement of the tokens of the game, while our thoughts wander in the past.

EACH OF THE CARRIAGES bound from the convent for the Temple was pulled by only two horses. Though we left the convent at six-thirty in the evening, it was nearly nine o'clock before the horses succeeded in pulling their heavy loads the short distance between these two locations within Paris. On the way, we pa.s.sed our former abode, the Tuileries palace, where someone had placed a For Rent sign. We also pa.s.sed through the old Place de Louis XV, where the people had pulled down the statue of the grandfather of Louis XVI. The mob not only had smashed its face and broken off the statue's arms and legs but also had battered flat the head of the bronze horse he had been riding.

Inside the carriage the procurator-general of the Commune pointed to the mutilated statue and informed us, "That is how the people deal with kings."

Not lacking in a sense of humor, Louis XVI replied, "How pleasant for us that their rage is focused on inanimate objects."

I smile now to think of his wit and glance at him, but he is lost in his own thoughts.

As we approached the walls of the Temple, people were chanting, "Madame goes up into her Tower / When will she come down again?"

When we were taken to eat dinner into the portion of the Temple that remains a palace, I allowed myself to hope that perhaps we would remain there. The taller tower was not ready for us-I trembled only when I heard our keepers consider separating the King from the rest of the family-but in the long run, we went together to the small tower attached to the wall surrounding the palace.

THOUGH CLOTHING has remained scarce, and there is a great deal of climbing up and down stairs, food is still plentiful in the Tower, and the King enjoys fare with which he is familiar-savory soups, fowls, and the pastries he loved so well when he was a big boy of fifteen and sixteen. He has Champagne and Bordeaux and sometimes a single sweet and potent after-dinner drink. Despite ugly rumors and many pamphlets blackening my reputation as one who often partic.i.p.ated in drunken orgies, I never drink liquors or wine at all, not even now.

I do not know if there is any virtue in my abstinence. I enjoy the clarity of my thought, and I wish to respond to reality unclouded by alcohol. The princess Elisabeth sometimes takes a gla.s.s of wine with her brother.

After only a week in the small Tower, we are informed by the Commune that the Princesse de Lamballe is to be taken away to the prison known as La Force. We embrace, we weep, we part. My heart goes numb.

More indirectly, from the town criers outside the walls of the Temple, we hear that Lafayette, who fought for American independence and was considered a hero by the populace of France, has fled France and its mockery of the rule of law in the name of liberty. This revolution in France has not ushered in a better order; it has opened the gates of chaos and anarchy.

TERROR, FURY, AND HORROR SEIZE THE EARTHLY POWERS.

By 2 September, some four hundred throats on the other side of the wall surrounding the Tower are chanting "Strangle the little cubs and the fat pig" and "She shall dance from the lantern." If my friend the princess were still here, we would pretend together that we do not hear these voices.

A letter blessedly arrives, delivered by one of our keepers, from the King's aging aunts, who have escaped to Rome and are leading devout lives there as daughters of the Church. Both the King and Queen-my husband and myself-read it over and over, silently and then aloud to each other as rea.s.surance that there are quiet, safe places in the world where people do not behave more cruelly than rabid animals.

THE ROYAL FAMILY-I mean ourselves-are exercising within the garden walls on 3 September when suddenly their guards escort them inside. Drums sound, and they hear shouts and a confusing din in the distance. When a cannon is fired nearby, Marie Antoinette-called Toinette by her friends, but none of them are left and she does not know even what has become of the last of them, the beautiful princess Lamballe-cries out, "Save my husband!" As to what is going on in Paris, no one tells them.

Once inside the Tower again, the royal family dine, and then the King and Queen settle down to their board game upstairs, watched as always by four munic.i.p.al officers, one of whom pities the royals and treats them with consideration. Madame Elisabeth (who is she, really? the younger sister of the King) reads aloud one of Aesop's fables-possibly a cautionary tale-to the children. More like a picture than a mirror, the scene is one that the Queen views from a safe distance. There is perhaps some confusion about time in her mind-so great is her anxiety about the future of her children-for it seems that the King and Queen have been playing backgammon forever, and the game does not progress.

Suddenly the gruff and impa.s.sive keeper downstairs-Madame Tison-shrieks! A sound like a bright pick into the convolutions of the brain.

I hear savage cries from the streets surrounding the Tower: "Kiss the lips, kiss the lips!" Upstairs, the munic.i.p.al officers hurry to close our shutters. We hear the sound of footsteps running up the stairs, and four unarmed revolutionaries burst in demanding that the King and Queen stand at the window.

"You must not go to the window," one of their munic.i.p.al guards, his young face radiant with anxiety, tells me, but the mob spokesman who has burst into our domain insists more vehemently that the King and Queen of the Tower expose themselves to the crowd by standing in a narrow window just yonder. We have done as much in the past-faced them.

"Why should we not address the people?" the King stoutly asks our familiar guard.

"If you must know," the guard replies, "they only want to show you the head of the Princesse de Lamballe."

The cry from below rings out, "Kiss the lips you've kissed before!"

The cry hits me with concussive force. I wilt into a chair, my mind vague as a cloud.

"The people have attacked the prisons, killing the aristocrats," another guard explains.

Opening the shutter a crack, the hairdresser Clery looks out and recoils in horror. He gasps, "The head of the Princesse de Lamballe is on a pike." He begins to vomit, burying his mouth in the crook of his arm.

Another guard replaces him at the open window. He takes a step backward, while the cry below becomes a chant: The Queen! The Queen! The Queen-must-see!

"Her Majesty must not see," the guard insists.

"Tell me what you have seen, monsieur." There is nothing between our world and theirs, except height. The window is open, and the air moves back and forth between the inside and the outside. I can hear them very clearly. From my seat, I see a narrow blue rectangle of sky. I ask, "What is out there, on the street?"

"On a second pike, is a dripping heart." He begins to sob, for he has often been in this room with the princess. "On a third, her entrails."

"Enough!" the King thunders. He goes to another unopened window, stands a step away from it, but peers through the latticework. "The men holding up these trophies are yelling with glee and fury. Not yet having obtained their goal," the King says grimly, "they are carrying stones and boards to pile against the side of the tower."

Numbly, I know their thoughts. They want the Queen to kiss the dead lips of her lover. It is to be the culminating act for their p.o.r.nographic feast. I think of hunting dogs leaping against the side of a tree where their prey has taken refuge.

"They are trying to construct a means of raising the head higher," I explain. "They wish to make Marie Antoinette kiss the lips of the gory head of her dearest friend." Yes, I know they carry rubble to place against the wall of the Tower so that they might climb higher and raise the head of the princess up to the next level in the Tower, where they believe the Queen to be. They want to make the eyes of my dead friend appear at my window to look in at me.

"Jackals! Jackals!" the King mutters, his eyes wet with grief. "Is it certainly the princess?" he asks Clery.

His face streaming with tears, holding his soiled arm out from his body, Clery says, "Her golden curls float around her face as though she were alive. Someone has dressed her hair."

With terrifying glee the men who have invaded our rooms recount that, indeed, the head had been taken to a hairdresser and also to an apprentice wax modeler, Marie Grosholz. At her name, I am startled into reality, for in earlier days this girl came to the palace to instruct Madame Elisabeth in art. She would surely have recognized the princess.

One of the rough boys from the mob adds, "She didn't want to touch it, but we made her hold the head between her knees and cover it with molding wax. For an impression."

AS THE FURY and frustration of the mob mounts, they call not just for the grisly kiss but for the head of the Queen "to parade beside the tribade Lamballe."

One of our commissioners goes downstairs to confront the rioters. I can hear him shouting at them.

"You shall not have the head of Antoinette," he yells. "I hold up the tricolor ribbon. See it! I speak with the authority of the revolution. The head of the Antoinette does not belong to you."

I expect to hear the rush of their feet mounting the steps. I fix my eyes on my son and rise so as to move as far from him as possible.

But the room below falls only into muttering. When we hear movement, it is for them to go outside again, among their own const.i.tuents.

The King takes me by the hand to lead me higher in the Tower. Among the books, he puts me on a small sofa in the turret. Here there is a heavy velvet curtain, and he draws it across the only window. As he moves the curtain, its bra.s.s rings rattle.

Rigid with sorrow, I lie awake all night, thinking of the soft, kind body of my friend, my first real friend in France, the Princesse de Lamballe. I recall the day when we, with Elisabeth, still a little girl, sat beside the fountain of the dragon and watched the spume from its mouth tower into the sky. My sobs, like a child's, are automatic convulsions I cannot end.

Sitting beside me, the King says with calm sadness, "The fiends have finished with us, for tonight." All around the Tower is the silence of ordinary noises.

"Did others die?" I ask. "In the prison." We would have known many of the people in La Force.