G. A. SALA ON MARIE ANTOINETTE
The Royal Family--The Queen--Her “trial,” condemnation and
death--The Sansons--Sala’s impressions.
[Illustration: GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA
From a photograph.]
There are some stories so dreadful in the immensity of human misery which
they reveal--there are some tragedies of which the catastrophe is one
of such unmitigated horror, that the reader who has general impressions
of what will be the end of the dismal tale, but who is unfamiliar with
its particular circumstances, is unable to follow, without some kind
of impatience, the opening scenes of the drama. He has continually in
his mind’s eye the awful falling of the curtain on anguish and despair
and death. Half unconsciously he hastens on in his perusal, and slurs
over minor episodes and seemingly trifling facts, forgetting that these
are subsidiary and auxiliary to the terrible consummation which he
so anxiously awaits. “Toutes choses meuvent vers leur fin,” Rabelais
has said; but the little things--the slender fibres of a story--are
gathered up as it proceeds, into bundles; and, acquiring importance from
consolidation, are ultimately merged in the final and tremendous whole.
Thus there have been many records of human life and action, now
real, now artificial, in reading which we have to encounter an almost
uncontrollable impulse to turn to the end, and ascertain whether that of
which we have had, at the beginning, a vague forecast, will really come
to pass. Who, if he will only have the candour to acknowledge it, has
not had to struggle with such an impulse in reading, say, the _Electra_
of Sophocles, the _Faust_ of Goethe, and the _Bride of Lammermoor_ of
Scott?--three of the most perfectly tragic dramas, I take it, ever
fashioned by the hand of mortal genius. And so it is with numerous
tragedies of superhuman structure and ordinance. In both cases we pant
for the last scene of all, which is to end the strange eventful history.
What will be the fate of Aegisthus, and the doom of Clytemnestra? Who,
if anyone, will rescue Gretchen from a shameful death? How will Edgar
Ravenswood bear his immeasurable sorrow?
These are the problems which agitate us in the study of fiction, and
irresistibly impel us to hasten from the prologue to the epilogue--from
the exordium to the peroration. And to speed as quickly is usually our
desire when we are confronted with the tragedies of history, or with
the vouched-for chronicles of human passion and crime. Throw down on
the floor Clarendon’s _History of the Rebellion_, it has been said, and
the volume will open, automatically, at the page where the execution of
Charles I is described. Try to concentrate your thoughts on the history
of Marie Stuart; and, coldly, clearly, sternly distinct in the midst of
a whirligig of scenes and events--the Louvre, Holyrood, the Kirk of
Field, Lochleven and what not--there stands out the image of the Hall
at Fotheringay, the black scaffold, the block, the masked headsman; the
Dean of Peterborough drearily homilising, and the Puritan Earl of Kent
ranting; while the weeping tire-women disrobe the royal victim, her
little pet dog snuggling by her, not without difficulty when the axe has
fallen to be dislodged from the corse of the kind mistress he loved so
well, and who has been stricken down by cruel men, he knows not why. See
this, as I see it.
It is my purpose to write something on the eventful life and dreadful
ending of Queen Marie Antoinette. I try, when I remember the sunshine
of her early days--her youth, her beauty, her grace--to put myself in a
cheerful frame of mind. I wish to look, at least for a little while, on
the bright side of a career which began so splendidly and so happily. I
would fain picture to myself the daughter of Maria Theresa, as Edmund
Burke saw her at Versailles--smiling, radiant, adored. I would fain hear
the clash of the thirty thousand swords which should have leaped from
their scabbards to avenge the slightest affront to the peerless consort
of the King of France and Navarre.
I take from my shelves the _Journal de Madame Eloff_--the ledger
containing the milliner and dressmaker’s bills of a perhaps too
extravagant young Queen--an endless catalogue of taffetas and
satins, gauze and ribbons, high-heeled shoes and embroidered gloves,
scent-bottles, reticules, feathers, artificial flowers and fans. From an
old Boule cabinet I lift tenderly a dainty little coffee-cup of Sèvres
egg-shell porcelain, adorned with an exquisite miniature of her, painted
when she had only been two years the wife of the hapless Louis. The cup
is half embedded in a setting of velvet _bleu du Roi_; and, alas! when I
draw the ceramic gem delicately from the case I see that the cup has no
handle.
A maimed relic, this porcelain trifle, possibly of a priceless breakfast
set, wantonly shattered by a howling mob of _poissardes_ and red
night-capped “patriots” who had sacked one of the Royal Palaces. A crowd
of memories are conjured up by this morsel of dismembered Sèvres. I see,
as in a glass darkly, the Galerie des Glaces and the Œil-de-Boeuf at
Versailles. I see the toy Dairy at the Petit Trianon; the banquet of the
Gardes du Corps in the Great Theatre of the Palace; the King and Queen:
the Royal Princesses circulating among the guests and distributing white
cockades among them; while the musicians make the hall resound with the
strains of “_Oh, Richard! Oh, mon Roi!_”
No, surely, the age of Chivalry is not past, and thrice ten thousand
glaives will leap into the light to vindicate the outraged Majesty of
France. There’s no such thing! A confused picture--a panorama all torn to
shreds and splashed with mud and flecked with blood flows before me. The
Etats Genéraux have wed: the nobility sparkling in velvet and plumes and
golden broideries; the clergy brave in copes and mitres and point lace:
the “Tiers Etat,” all in sombre black, short-cloaked, slouch-hatted,
grave, preoccupied, looking unutterable things. Among them looms, very
real and portentous indeed, a thick-set, pock-marked man, with an eye
of fire. This is Honore Gabriel Riquetti, rightly Comte de Mirabeau, but
who has broken with his order, and styling himself “Mirabeau Marchand
de Draps”--a retail clothier from Marseilles, forsooth! of about
forty-eight hours’ commercial standing--stalks among country notaries and
shopkeepers, farmers and shopkeepers as a Deputy of the Third Estate.
But all these fade away from my field of vision. I set to studying and
balancing my rambling thoughts. I have to deal with Marie Antoinette,
Josephe-Jeanne de Lorraine, wife of Louis XVI, and who was born, you will
remember, at Vienna, on the 2nd of November, 1755, the very day of that
earthquake at Lisbon in the occurrence of which Dr. Johnson for a long
time so resolutely refused to believe. Would the doctor, I wonder, had
he lived in 1793, have declined to place credence in a newspaper report
of what is now to be narrated--an upheaval more dreadful and disastrous
than any physical convulsion of the earth’s crust? The tattered, muddy,
gory panorama fades into a murky nothingness. Then, out of the Valley of
Shadows there arises, terribly distinct and substantial, THIS--
It is a raw, chilly, marrow-searching day in the month of October,
1793. A spacious hall, known in this new and blessed era of Universal
Regeneration, and Unlimited Throat-Cutting, as the Salle de la Liberté,
in the Palais de Justice, hard by the prison of the Conciergerie, has
been swept and garnished for the trial of the discrowned and desolate
widow of “Louis Capet,” murdered on the scaffold in the Place de la
Révolution last January. In a dark and filthy dungeon of that same
Conciergerie Marie Antoinette has been immured since August. The walls
of the Salle de la Liberté have been newly whitewashed--no voluptuous
frescoes or oil painting in this abode of Republican simplicity, if you
please: only patriotic lime-whiting and democratic glue--and the almost
blinding glare of the stark walls brings out in strong relief the dark
green canopy suspended over the heads of the Judges of the Revolutionary
Tribunal, who are five in number, the President being one, Hermann.
Above this precious conclave are the busts of Brutus--save the mark!--and
two recent Revolutionary notorieties: the infamous Marat, deservedly
done to death by Charlotte Corday and the member of the Convention,
Lepelletier de St. Fargeau, who had voted for the death sentence on
Louis XVI, and who immediately afterwards was stabbed to death by an
ex-Garde du Corps in an eating house in the Palais National--once Palais
Royal. The busts are crowned with scarlet caps of liberty, adorned with
monstrous tri-coloured cockades, and are flanked by two huge oil lamps.
There will be need of the lamps; for the deliberation of the tribunal
will probably last far into the night.
The judges sit at a long table which, although shabby, is somewhat
pretentious in its upholstering, since the legs are of mahogany, and
fluted, and the brazen feet are fashioned in the shape of griffin’s
claws, and exhibit some traces of bygone gilding. This table is yet
extant, and forms part of the furniture of the Court of Cassation, which
at present holds its sittings in the old Salle de la Liberté. The Public
Accuser has his place in front of the President; the jury--yes, this
monstrous tribunal has a jury!--is to the left of the judges; and to the
right is the desk of the Counsel for the defence. Behind him is the seat
for the prisoners. A breast-high balustrade separates the Court from the
space set apart for the public, which is ample enough, and is thronged,
this dreary October morning, by a motley crew of _sans culottes_,
mechanics, lamplighters, bargemen and coarse, loud-voiced women from
the markets, some of them known as “_Tricoteuses_” and “Furies of the
Guillotine.”
Between the balustrade and the body of the Court runs a long gangway,
at one extremity of which is a door, communicating by means of a narrow
staircase with the Gaol of the Conciergerie.
Up this staircase and through this door, and along this gangway, and so
through an opening of the balustrade into the criminal dock, there is
brought, between two gendarmes, a woman of middle age, with abundant hair
which has turned quite grey lately, and features which retain a few--a
very few--traces of former comeliness. She is barely eight-and-thirty,
and she looks full fifty. She is miserably clad in an old, patched,
threadbare gown of black serge, which has been mended for her innumerable
times by a compassionate girl named Rosalie, the daughter of the gaoler.
Her shoes are old, full of holes, and down at heel. She wears black
cotton stockings, and about her shoulders is arranged a kind of tippet,
or pelérine, of frayed white muslin. As yet she wears no cap; and her
long tresses have been carefully dressed and oiled this morning by
the pitying Rosalie. Obviously, she is in mourning for her husband,
sometime King of France and Navarre; but the Revolutionary Tribunal knows
nothing of such titles, and in the Act of Accusation, which is read in
a monotonous sing-song by the _Greffier_, the prisoner is arraigned as
“Marie Antoinette, of Austria and Lorraine, widow of Louis Capet.”
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.”
Another witness testifies that among the effects of the ex-Queen found
at the prison of the Temple was a satin riband bearing the gilt image
of a Heart with the inscription “_Cor Jesu miserere nobis_.” Other
testimony is to the effect that while the Queen and the children were
incarcerated in the Temple, after the execution of Louis, the poor little
Dauphin was placed at the top of the table by his mother, and was served
first; thus justifying the inference that she ignored the Republic, One
and Indivisible, and recognised her young son as Louis XVII, and the
successor of his murdered sire.
Another charge, an abominable charge, and one so monstrous as to make
it scarcely credible that it should be launched against a woman and a
mother, is that she had systematically sought to corrupt the mind of the
poor young prince. To this horrible allegation she makes at first no
answer. At length, when the charge is repeated, she is moved to noble
indignation, and exclaims: You accuse me of an impossibility: “_J’en
appelle à toutes les mères_.” I appeal to all mothers. But the instinct
of maternity seems to be dead in all that hall of blood, and the beldames
in the public tribunes only yell and gibe at her.
Less revolting, but equally preposterous, is the evidence of one Renée
Mullet, a chambermaid who has been in service at Versailles, and this
hussey swears that one day, “in a moment of good humour,” she asked the
_ci-devant_ Duc de Coigny whether the Emperor still continued to wage war
against the Turks; as in that case France would soon be ruined, the Queen
having sent her brother no less than two hundred millions of livres,
wherewith to carry on hostilities. To this, according to the gossiping
waiting woman, the Duke made answer: “Thou art right enough. Two hundred
millions have already been spent, and we are not at the end of it yet.”
It is on such evidence as this--evidence not heavy enough to detach a
feather from a pigeon’s wing, not convincing enough to prove a forty
shilling debt, the wretched Marie Antoinette is at length convicted. The
President sums up, furiously, against her. The advocates who defend her,
Chauveau and Tronçon-Ducoudray have little to say, to the point, and can
only feebly plead for clemency to be extended to her; and the jury, after
deliberating for fifty-five minutes, return a verdict _affirming all
the charges submitted to them_. Hermann calls on the accused to declare
whether she has any objection to make to the sentence of the law demanded
by the Public Accuser. Marie Antoinette bows her head in token of a
negative.
Then the tribunal, putting their bloodthirsty heads together for a few
minutes, condemn Marie Antoinette of Austria and Lorraine, widow of
Louis Capet to the punishment of Death, “and the confiscation of all her
property for the benefit of the Republic, the sentence to be executed in
the Square of the Revolution.” The confiscation of all her property! When
she was dead, an inventory was taken of the few rags which she had left
behind her in her cell in the Conciergerie, and they were appraised at
the magnificent sum of nine livres, about seven and sixpence sterling.
Nine livres all told! In the second year of her marriage it was computed
that the roll and butter served every morning to each of her ladies of
honour, cost two thousand livres, or eighty pounds a year; and five
thousand livres was the annual charge for the bouillon, or beef-tea,
kept hot by day and by night for Madame Royale, who was a weakly child.
During the earlier portion of her imprisonment the unhappy Queen had been
supplied with body linen by the compassionate care of the Marchioness of
Stafford, the wife of the British Ambassador in Paris, but there was no
kindly Ambassadress to succour her in her last and darkest days, and the
only hand held forth in pity to this forlorn daughter of the Cæsars was
that of a gaoler’s daughter.
It was half past four on the morning of the sixteenth of October when
this infernal tribunal adjourned, and the Queen was conducted back to her
prison. Throughout the whole of her trial she had not ceased to maintain
a calm countenance; but at times she seemed to be giving way to a feeling
of sheer weary listlessness, and moved her fingers on the bar of the
dock before her, as though she was playing on the harpsichord When she
heard the sentence pronounced, her features did not shew the slightest
alteration; and she walked from the hall erect and seemingly unmoved,
gendarmes with drawn swords before and behind her, and the beldames of
the fish-market and the rag-shops cursing and shrieking at her, just as
you may see them in Paul Delaroche’s noble picture.
So they took her back to a dungeon twelve feet long, eight feet broad,
four feet underground, with a grated window on a level with the pavement.
Into this wretched hole some scraps of the coarsest food were brought
her; but she was left under the incessant supervision of a female
prisoner and two soldiers. It is said that she snatched a little sleep.
On waking she asked one of the gendarmes who had been present at the
trial whether she had replied “with too much dignity” to the question put
to her. “I ask,” she added, “because I overheard a woman say, _See how
haughty she still is_.” The woman who could have made such an observation
must have been one of the hags that Delaroche has painted.
At seven o’clock in the morning, the entire garrison of Paris was under
arms. Cannon were placed in all the public places; and at the foot
of every bridge from the Quay of the Conciergerie to the Place de la
Révolution, that magnificent area between the gardens of the Tuileries,
originally called the Place Louis XV, and now know as the Place de la
Concorde. At half-past eleven Marie Antoinette, dressed in a white linen
déshabille, was brought out from the prison. As though she had been the
commonest of malefactors she was made to mount the charette, or open
cart, the appointed tumbril of infamy. At least the murderers of her
husband had had the decency to allow him the “luxury” of a hackney coach,
when he was taken from the Temple to the scaffold. Her hair had been cut
short ere she left the gaol, and what remained of her formerly luxuriant
tresses was tucked under a white mob-cap. Her hands were tied behind her
back.
Of the Queen in this deplorable plight there exists a very beautiful
statue executed by Lord Ronald Gower. On the right, in the tumbril,
was seated Sanson, the executioner, and on the left a “constitutional”
priest, that is to say, one who had taken the oath of fealty to the
Republic. To the ministrations of this “patriotic” cleric, who was
dressed in light grey coat and a bob-wig, Marie Antoinette had in the
first instance declined to listen; but she occasionally spoke to him on
her way to the fatal Place de la Révolution.
An immense mob, in which women were revoltingly numerous, crowded
the streets throughout the entire line of route insulting the Queen
and vociferating “Long live the Republic!” She seldom cast her eyes
on the populace, but from time to time looked with some curiosity on
the prodigious military force surrounding the cart. Otherwise her
attitude throughout this last dismal pilgrimage was one of half torpid
indifference.
As the cart traversed the Rue St. Honoré, the numbed faculties of the
Queen seemed momentarily to revive; and she examined with some attention
the multitudinous inscriptions of “Liberty” and “Equality” over the
shop-fronts.
It was as the vehicle turned the corner of the Rue St. Honoré into that
which is now the Rue Royale that the famous painter, David, who, during
the Reign of Terror, was a furious Jacobin and a friend of Robespierre,
but who was destined to become a Baron of the Empire, and to paint the
Coronation of Napoleon at Notre Dame, was able from the balcony which he
occupied in company with the wife of a member of the Convention to make a
sketch of Marie Antoinette. The drawing has come down to us. The features
of the Martyr Queen are sharp and pinched, exhibiting no traces whatever
of former comeliness, and she looks fifty years of age. It may here be
mentioned that the illustrious and pure-minded English sculptor, John
Flaxman, when he visited Paris, after the Peace of Amiens, resolutely
refused to meet the artist who made the last sketch of Marie Antoinette,
and always spoke of him disdainfully as “David of the bloodstained brush.”
The historians are divided in opinion as to the demeanor of Marie
Antoinette on the scaffold. Some say that she laid herself down on
the fatal plank with calm deliberation, and met her death with noble
fortitude, recalling Andrew Marvell’s superb lines on the execution of
Charles I:--
And while the armèd bands
Did clap their bloody hands,
He nothing common did, nor mean,
Upon that memorable scene;
Nor called the gods, in vulgar spite,
To vindicate his helpless might;
But, with his keener eye
The axe’s edge did try;
Then bowed his comely head
Down, as upon a bed.
Others narrate that the Queen ascended the steps of the scaffold in
great haste, and with apparent impatience, and turned her eyes with much
emotion towards the Palace of the Tuileries, the scene of her former
greatness, and that she made some slight resistance before submitting to
the executioner. My own impression is that she was two-thirds dead--that
the _rigor mortis_ was upon her before she reached the scaffold; that
she was lifted out of the cart and half carried to the guillotine, and
that she did not give the headsman and his assistants the slightest
trouble.
It is, at all events, certain that at half past twelve her head was
severed from her body. One of the _valets du bourreau_, or executioner’s
men, lifted and showed the head streaming with blood, from the four
quarters of the scaffold, the mob meanwhile screeching “_Vive la
République!_” and it is asserted that a young man who dipped his
handkerchief in the blood, and pressed it with veneration to his heart,
was instantly apprehended. The corpse of Marie Antoinette was immediately
flung into a pit filled with quicklime, in the graveyard of the Madeleine
where the remains of her husband had also been interred.
At the Restoration in 1814, diligent search was made for the ashes of the
King and Queen in the cemetery, on the site of which was subsequently
erected an Expiatory Chapel. Some half calcined bones and a few scraps
of cloth and linen were found; and these last having been identified
by experts as having been part of the apparel of Louis XVI and Marie
Antoinette, the relics with a considerable quantity of the surrounding
earth, were inhumed with much pomp and solemnity, in the Royal Vault of
the Cathedral of St. Denis.
Touching the executioner, it may be expedient to record that Marie
Antoinette was guillotined, not by Charles Henri Sanson, who beheaded
Louis XVI, but by his son, Henri, who died in Paris in 1840, aged
seventy-three. The elder Sanson died only a few weeks after he had
executed Louis, and the Royalist historians maintain that his death was
hastened by remorse for the deed which he had been constrained to commit,
and that in his will he bequeathed a considerable sum for the celebration
of an annual Expiatory Mass. But this is very doubtful. It has been
shown, however, without the possibility of doubt, that the Sanson family
were of Florentine origin, and that the ancestors of Charles Henri and of
Henri Sanson came to France in the train of Catherine de Medicis. For two
hundred years, without intermission, had members of this gloomy historic
family been executioners in ordinary to the city of Paris.
In addition to Marie Antoinette, the younger Sanson decapitated the
Queen’s sister-in-law, Madame Elisabeth, and the eloquent advocate,
Malesherbes, who undertook the defence of Louise XVI. He likewise
beheaded the Duke of Orléans (Philippe Égalité), and last, but not
least, Maximilien Robespierre. The so-called _Memoirs of the Sanson
Family_ are more than half suspected to be mainly apocryphal, and to
have been written by one D’Olbreuse, a bookseller’s hack; and, according
to a writer in the Paris _Temps_, in 1875 the last of the Sansons was
a remarkably mild, flaccid and stupid old gentleman, who was certainly
incapable of writing any “Memoirs” whatever, since his own memory was
hopelessly decayed, and whose circumstances in his old age became so
embarrassed that he was arrested for debt, and confined in the prison
of Clichy, whence he only procured his enlargement by _pawning the
guillotine itself_ for 4,000 francs!
Shortly after the conclusion of this singular transaction, a murderer
had to be executed, and the usual instructions were issued by the
Procureur General to Henri Sanson, to have his death dealing apparatus
ready on a certain morning in the Place de la Roquette. It then became
necessary to explain to the authorities that the fatal machine was
practically in the custody of My Uncle. Justice, however, had to be
satisfied, and the murderer’s head was duly cut off on the appointed
morning; but simultaneously with the signature of the Minister of Justice
of a draft for 4,000 francs to release the hypothecated guillotine, there
was issued an order dismissing Sanson from his post.
And Marie Antoinette? I have drawn her picture as faithfully as I could,
not without much toil and more perplexity for the memoirs of the period
in which she lived and died absolutely bristle with falsehoods, the
inventions now of Royalist and now of Republican writers. Comparatively
few are the facts concerning her which have been exactly ascertained
and are altogether indisputable; whereas the name of the unfounded
assertions, the insinuations, the hypotheses, and the downright lies,
is legion. By some this most unhappy woman has been represented as
an angel of goodness and purity, a faithful spouse, a fond parent, a
kind mistress, and a most pious and charitable princess. By others she
has been depicted as a crafty, unscrupulous and vindictive woman, as
perfidious as Borgia and profligate as Messalina.
This is no place in which to discuss at length a most intricate question,
all hedged about by obscurity, uncertainties and mysteries which will,
perhaps, never be solved. At all events, the story which I have told
of her trial and her last moments is true. For the rest, both Royalists
and Republicans agree that Marie Antoinette was born at Vienna, in 1755,
and was the daughter of Francis of Lorraine, Emperor of Germany, and of
Marie Theresa of Austria. In May, 1770, she married the Dauphin Louis,
who was grandson of Louis XV of France, and who, in 1774, ascended the
French throne as Louis XVI. It would not seem that Marie Antoinette was
absolutely beautiful, as beautiful, say, as Queen Louisa of Prussia, or
as the Empress Eugene, still there is a tolerably unanimous consensus
of opinion that she was handsome, lively, amiable, and thoroughly
kind-hearted. It is possible that she may have been a little thoughtless
in her youth; and the ledgers of Madame Eloffe certainly show that, as
regards her toilet, Marie Antoinette was a most prodigal Queen. But is
it a mortal sin in a young, pretty and sprightly woman to spend a good
deal of money on dress? How many hundred dresses did our chaste Queen
Elizabeth leave behind her, in her wardrobe, at her death?
It must be granted that when the dissensions of the Revolution began,
Marie Antoinette was on the Conservative side, and that she tried her
hardest to incline her husband to that side. Was it so very unnatural
that she should do so? Her brother, the Emperor Joseph, used to say that
“Royalty was his trade”; and poor Marie Antoinette may have laboured
under a similar persuasion. But the times were very bad indeed for the
“trade” of Royalty, and there arose a grim conviction among the working
millions that the best way of mending matters was to dethrone, plunder,
and murder their masters and mistresses.
The influence of Marie Antoinette in the councils of Louis has been,
I should say, considerably exaggerated by her enemies. Her husband,
naturally disposed to concession, was by temper irresolute, and he
allowed himself to be led away by the course of events, instead of
striving to control and direct them. There can be little doubt, either,
that Marie Antoinette was one of the chief advisers of the flight of the
King and Royal Family to Varennes; and that imprudent enterprise served,
even more fiercely, to inflame the public animosity against herself and
her husband.
But again, I fail to see the criminality of this attempted escape. The
King and Queen knew well enough that the Revolutionists intended to
deprive them of their crowns, and, in all probability, of their lives,
they had no adequate armed force with which to resist the mob. Were
they not justified in running away? After the deposition of Louis, all
the elements of grandeur in the character of Marie Antoinette began to
manifest themselves. She showed the greatest courage during the dastardly
attacks made on the Royal Family; and she appeared to be always more
anxious for the safety of her husband and children than for her own.
She shared their captivity with noble resignation, and her demeanour
under the most trying circumstances never lost an iota of its dignity.
In the presence of her judges her fortitude never forsook her; her burst
of indignant maternal feeling overawed even the butchers who were
perverting and burlesquing the law to bring her to the shambles; and her
behaviour in almost unparalleled misfortunes, has won for her not only
the pity and the sympathy, but the reverent admiration of posterity.