The Lost King of France: The Tragic Story of Marie-Antoinette's Favourite Son. Deborah Cadbury
nerve. ‘She expected to perish,’ reported her daughter, but happily ‘her great courage awed the whole crowd of people, who confined themselves to loading her with insults, without daring to attack her person’. No one fired. After a while she simply curtsied and went back into the palace, gathered her son into her arms and wept.
However, their ordeal was not over. The menacing cry went up: ‘The king to Paris!’ The king felt he had no alternative but to agree, in order to avoid further bloodshed. He decided he must take his family with him as it was too dangerous to leave them behind. ‘I confide all that I hold most dear to the love of my good and faithful subjects,’ he told the vengeful mob in the courtyard.
By one o’clock in the afternoon everything was ready for the departure of the royal family. ‘They wished to prevent my father from crossing the great guard rooms that were inundated with blood,’ reported Marie-Thérèse; ‘we therefore went down by a small staircase … and got into a carriage for six persons; on the back seat were my father, mother and brother; on the front seat … my Aunt Elisabeth and I, in the middle my uncle Monsieur and Madame de Tourzel … the crowd was so great it was long before we could advance.’
It was the most extraordinary and grotesque procession. News had spread that the royal family was forced out of Versailles and thirty thousand, at least, had gathered to escort the king to Paris. The scene was terrifying: a great, swirling mass of humanity, most intent on harm, some so drunk with hatred that any form of violent disturbance could erupt within seconds. Leading the ‘horrible masquerade’ – in the words of one courtier – was the National Guard, with Lafayette always in view near the royal coach. The poissardes, market women and other rioters followed like so many furies, brandishing sticks and spikes, some topped with the heads of the king’s murdered guardsmen. These gruesome trophies were paraded with devilish excitement as they danced around the royal coach, all too conscious that power was indeed an intoxicating mixture as they endlessly threatened obscene and imminent death to the queen. Many had loaves of bread from the kitchens of Versailles stuck on their bayonets and were chanting, ‘We won’t go short of bread any more. We are bringing back the baker, the baker’s wife and the baker’s boy’. Behind were the household troops and Flanders regiment, unarmed – many obliged to wear the revolutionary cockade. They were followed by innumerable carriages bearing the remnants of the royal court and deputies from the new National Assembly. Count Axel Fersen, who was in one of the carriages following the king, wrote of their six-and-a-half-hour journey to Paris: ‘May God preserve me from ever seeing again so heart-breaking a spectacle as that of the last few days.’
For the royal family, forced to take part in this terrifying and until then almost unimaginable procession, it was a definitive end of an era. In the distance behind them, glimpsed only through a forest of pikes and a sea of hostile faces, the palace of Versailles, which for more than a century had epitomised the Bourbons’ absolute power, slowly retreated from view, quietness descending, the only sound the hammers of workmen fastening the shutters. Now the king, impassive and silent, was a consenting victim to the barbarity of the mob, as he allowed his family to be led in humiliation to Paris. Inside the coach, he held a handkerchief to his face to hide his shame and tears. Next to him was the queen, clutching her four-year-old son tightly, her expression bearing ‘the marks of violent grief’. She tried to ignore the poissardes who climbed onto the carriage, yelling still more insults and abuse at her. ‘Along the whole way, the brigands never ceased firing their muskets … and shouted “Vive la nation!”’ wrote Marie-Thérèse. Occasionally the young Dauphin – terrified as this horrific grown-up world suddenly burst in on his orderly life with such force – bravely leaned out of the window and pleaded with the crowds not to harm his mother. ‘Grâce pour Maman! Grâce pour Maman!’ he cried. ‘Spare my mother, spare my mother …’.
The Tuileries Palace, a large jail filled with the condemned, stood amid the celebration of destruction. Those sentenced also amused themselves as they waited for the cart, the clipping, and the red shirt they had put out to dry. And through the windows, the queen’s circle could be seen, stunningly illuminated.
Châteaubriand, Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe (1849–50)
The royal family were taken to the Tuileries, a sixteenth-century palace in the heart of Paris by the Seine. For over sixty years it had been abandoned as a royal residence and servants and artisans had settled into the rabbit warren of dark chambers and seemingly endless, dimly lit galleries and stairways. The place was crowded and in disrepair. Rooms were hurriedly prepared for the royal family, but it was soon found that the doors to the Dauphin’s room would not close and had to be barricaded with furniture. ‘Isn’t it ugly here, Maman,’ said Louis-Charles. Marie-Antoinette replied, ‘Louis XIV was happy here. You should not ask for more.’ Yet he was clearly anxious. The young child who had lived surrounded by richness and elegance, with never a cross word, found, in the space of a few days, his world had become an unrecognisable, frightening chaos. The queen asked the Marquise de Tourzel to watch over him all night.
Woken by the clamour of the crowd outside their windows in the gardens of the Tuileries, Louis-Charles was still terrified. ‘Good God, Maman! Is it still yesterday?’ he cried as he threw himself in her arms. Struggling to understand their change in fortunes, later he went up to his father and asked why his people, who once loved him so well, were ‘all at once so angry with him and what had he done to irritate them so much?’ The king took his young son on his lap. ‘I wanted money to pay the expenses occasioned by wars,’ he replied. He carefully tried to explain how he had tried, unsuccessfully, to raise money through the parlement and then through the Estates-General. ‘When they were assembled they required concessions of me which I could not make, either with due respect for myself or with justice to you, who will be my successor. Wicked men, inducing the people to rise, have occasioned the excesses of the last few days; the people must not be blamed for them.’
The king and queen were forced to face the fact that they were now detained in Paris indefinitely – at the people’s pleasure. They no longer had their own bodyguards; the Tuileries was surrounded by the National Guard, who answered to the Assembly. With six armed guards constantly tailing them and their movements closely monitored, the queen quickly made the young prince understand the importance of treating everyone about him politely and ‘with affability’ – even those that they distrusted. The Dauphin ‘took great pains’ to please any visitors. When he had an opportunity to speak to any important dignitaries, he often looked for reassurance from his mother, whispering in her ear, ‘Was that all right?’ With his customary charm, he soon made friends with the sons of National Guards, and established his own pretend ‘Royal Dauphin Regiment’ with himself as colonel. People flocked to see him when he was allowed outside where he kept his own pet rabbits and tended a small garden.
Marie-Antoinette struggled to keep up a semblance of normality, and various possessions claimed from Versailles helped as she set about making the Tuileries as comfortable as possible. She drew strength from devoting herself to her children. ‘They are nearly always with me and are my consolation,’ she wrote to Gabrielle de Polignac, who was now safely out of the country. ‘Mon chou d’amour [the Dauphin] is charming and I love him madly. He loves me very much too, in his way, without embarrassment. He is well, growing stronger and has no more temper tantrums. He goes for a walk every day which is extremely good for him.’ The queen still had a few of her friends around her, such as the loyal Princesse de Lamballe, who invariably accompanied her when she had to receive deputations of poissardes and others, who had come for a hundred reasons, but mostly to air their grievances. Count Axel Fersen also remained discreetly in Paris, in case he could be of any use to the queen.
The king desperately allowed himself to hope that all these arrangements would be temporary, and that he would eventually be restored to Versailles with full power. But power lay in the Assembly, renamed the ‘Constituent Assembly’, and, gallingly, now installed in the building opposite the Tuileries and flying the new flag which bore the words: ‘Freedom. Nation. Law. King.’ Although