Marie Antoinette and Her Son Part 58

Suddenly, the quick steps of several men were heard in the corridor.

The bolts flew back, the doors were opened, and six officials came in.

"We are come," cried one of them, with a brutal voice, "to announce to you the order of the committee, that the son of Capet be separated from his mother and his family."

At these words the queen rose, pale with horror "They are going to take my child from me!" she cried. "No, no, that is not possible.

Gentlemen, the authorities cannot think of separating me from my son. He is still so young and weak, he needs my care."

"The committee has come to this determination," answered the official, "the Convention has confirmed it, and we shall carry it into execution directly."

"I cannot allow it," cried Marie Antoinette in desperation. "In the name of Heaven, I conjure you not to be so cruel!"

Elizabeth and Theresa mingled their tears with those of the mother.

All three had placed themselves before the bed of the dauphin; they clung to it, they folded their hands, they sobbed; the most touching cries, the most humble prayers trembled on their lips, but the guards were not at all moved.

"What is all this whining for?" they said. "No one is going to kill your child; give him to us of your own free will, or we shall have to take him by force."

They strode up to the bed. Marie Antoinette placed herself with extended arms before it, and held the curtain firmly; it however detached itself from the wall and fell upon the face of the dauphin.

He awoke, saw what was going on, and threw himself with loud shrieks into the arms of the queen. "Mamma, dear Mamma, do not leave me!"

She pressed him trembling to her bosom, quieted him, and defended him against the cruel hands that were reached out for him.

In vain, all in vain! The men of the republic have no compa.s.sion on the grief of a mother! "By free will or by force he must go with us."

"Then promise me at least that he shall remain in the tower of the Temple, that I may see him every day."

"We have nothing to promise you, we have no account at all to give you. Parbleu, how can you take on and howl so, merely because your child is taken from you? Our children have to do more than that.

They have every day to have their heads split open with the b.a.l.l.s of the enemies that you have set upon them."

"My son is still too young to be able to serve his country," said the queen, gently, "but I hope that if G.o.d permits it, he will some day be proud to devote his life to Him."

Meanwhile the two princesses, urged on by the officials, had clothed the gasping, sobbing boy. The queen now saw that no more hope remained. She sank upon a chair, and summoning all her strength, she called the dauphin to herself, laid her hands upon his shoulders, and pale, immovable, with widely-opened eyes, whose burning lids were cooled by no tear, she gazed upon the quivering face of the boy, who had fixed his great blue eyes, swimming with tears, upon the countenance of his mother.

"My child," said the queen, solemnly, "we must part. Remember your duties when I am no more with you to remind you of them. Never forget the good G.o.d who is proving you, and your mother who is praying for you. Be good and patient, and your Father in heaven will bless you."

She bent over, and with her cold lips pressed a kiss upon the forehead of her son, then gently pushed him toward the turnkey. But the boy sprang back to her again, clung to her with his arms, and would not go.

"My son, we must obey. G.o.d wills it so." A loud, savage laugh was heard. Shuddering, the queen turned around. There at the open door stood Simon, and with him his wife, their hard features turned maliciously toward the pale queen. The woman stretched out her brown, bare arms to the child, grasped him, and pushed him before her to the door.

"Is she to have him?" shrieked Marie Antoinette. "Is my son to remain with this woman?"

"Yes," said Simon, with a grinning smile, as he put himself, with his arms akimbo, before the queen--" yes, with this woman and with me, her husband, little Capet is to remain, and I tell you he shall receive a royal education. We shall teach him to forget the past, and only to remember that he is a child of the one and indivisible republic. If he does not come to it, he must be brought to it, and my old cobbler's straps will be good helpers in this matter."

He nodded at Marie Antoinette with a fiendish smile, and then followed the officials, who had already gone out. The doors were closed again, the bolts drawn, and within the chamber reigned the stillness of death. The two women put their arms around one another, kneeled upon the floor and prayed.

From this day on, Marie Antoinette had no hope more; her heart was broken. Whole days long she sat fixed and immovable, without paying any regard to the tender words of her sister-in-law and the caresses of her daughter, without working, reading, or busying herself in any way. Formerly she had helped to put the rooms in order, and mend the clothes and linen; now she let the two princesses do this alone and serve her.

Only for a few hours each day did her countenance lighten at all, and the power of motion return to this pale, marble figure. Those were the hours when she waited for her son, as he went with Simon every day to the upper story and the platform of the tower. She would then put her head to the door and listen to every step and all the words that he directed to the turnkey as he pa.s.sed by.

Soon she discovered a means of seeing him. There was a little crack on the floor of the platform on which the boy walked. The world revolved for the queen only around this little crack, and the instant in which she could see her boy.

At times, too, a compa.s.sionate guard who had to inspect the prison brought her tidings of her son, told her that he was well, that he had learned to play ball, and that by his friendly nature he won every one's love. Then Marie Antoinette's countenance would lighten, a smile would play over her features and linger on her pale lips as long as they were speaking of her boy. But oh! soon there came other tidings about the unhappy child. His wailing tones, Simon's threats, and his wife's abusive words penetrated even the queen's apartments, and filled her with the anguish of despair. And yet it was not the worst to hear him cry, and to know that the son of the queen was treated ill; it was still more dreadful to hear him sing with a loud voice, accompanied by the laugh and the bravoes of Simon and his wife, revolutionary and obscene songs--to know that not only his body but his soul was doomed to destruction.

At first the queen, on hearing these dreadful songs, broke out into lamentations, cries, and loud threats against those who were destroying the soul of her child. Then a gradual paralysis crept over her heart, and when, on the 3d of August, she was taken from the Temple to the prison, the pale lips of the queen merely whispered,

"Thank G.o.d, I shall not have to hear him sing any more!"

BOOK V.

CHAPTER XXIV.

THE DEATH OF THE QUEEN.

The Bartholomew's night of the murderous Catharine de Medicis, and her mad son, Charles IX., now found in France its horrible and b.l.o.o.d.y repet.i.tion; but the night of horror which we are now to contemplate was continued on into the day, and did not shrink even before the light.

The sun shone down upon the streams of blood which flowed through the streets of Paris, and upon the pack of wild dogs that swarmed in uncounted numbers on the thoroughfares of the city, and lived on this blood, which gave back even to the tame their natural wildness.

The sun shone down upon the scaffold, that rose like a threatening monster upon the Place de la Revolution, and upon the dreadful axe which daily severed so many n.o.ble forms, and then rose from the block glittering and menacing.

The sun shone on that day, too, when Marie Antoinette ascended the scaffold, as her husband had done before, and so pa.s.sed to her rest, from all the pains and humiliations of her last years.

That day was the 16th of October, 1793. For four months Marie Antoinette looked forward to it as to a joyful deliverance. It was four months from the time when she was transferred from the Temple to the prison, and she knew that those who were confined in the latter place only left it to gain the freedom, not that man gives, but which G.o.d grants to the suffering--the freedom of death!

Marie Antoinette longed for the deliverance. How far behind her now lay the days of her happy, joyous youth! how long ago the time when the tall, grave woman, her face full of pride and yet of resignation, had been charming Marie Antoinette, the very impersonation of beauty, youth, and love, carrying out in Trianon the idyl of romantic country life--in the excess of her gayety going disguised to the public opera-house ball, believing herself so safe amid the French people that she could dispense with the protection of etiquette--hailed with an enthusiastic admiration then, as she was now saluted with the savage shouts of the enraged people!

No, the former queen, Marie Antoinette, who, in the gilded saloons of Versailles and in the Tuileries, had received the homage of all France, and with a smiling face and perfect grace of manner acknowledged all the tribute that was brought to her, had no longer any resemblance to the widow of Louis Capet, sitting before the revolutionary tribunal, and giving earnest answers to the questions which were put to her. She arranged her toilet that day--but how different was the toilet of the Widow Capet from that which Queen Marie Antoinette had once displayed! At that earlier time, she, the easy, light-hearted daughter of fortune, had shut herself up for hours with her intimate companion, Madame Berthier, the royal milliner, planning a new ball-dress, or a new fichu; or her Leonard would lavish all the resources of his fancy and his art inventing new styles of head-dress, now decorating the beautiful head of the queen with towering ma.s.ses of auburn hair; now braiding it so as to make it enfold little war-ships, the sails of which were finely woven from her own locks; now laying out a garden filled with fruits and flowers, b.u.t.terflies and birds of paradise.

The "Widow Capet" needed no milliner and no hairdresser in making her toilet. Her tall, slender figure was enveloped with the black woollen dress which the republic had given her at her request, that she might commemorate her deceased husband. Her neck and shoulders, which had once been the admiration of France, was now concealed by a white muslin kerchief, which her keeper Bault had given her out of sympathy. Her hair was uncovered, and fell in long, natural locks on both sides of her pale, transparent face. Her hair needed no powder now; the long, sleepless nights and the sorrowful days have whitened it more than any powder could do; and the widow of Louis Capet, though but thirty-eight years old, had the gray locks of a woman of seventy.

In this toilet Marie Antoinette appeared before the revolutionary tribunal, from the 6th to the 13th of October. Nothing royal was left about her but her look and her proud bearing.

The people, pressing in dense ma.s.ses into the spectators' seats, did not weary of seeing the queen in her humiliation and in her mourning-robe, and constantly demanded that Marie Antoinette should rise from the woven rush chair on which she was sitting, that she should allow herself to be stared at by this throng, brought there not out of compa.s.sion, but curiosity.

Once, as she rose in reply to the demand of the public, she was heard to whisper, as to herself: "Ah, will this people not soon be satisfied with my sufferings?" [Footnote: Marie Antoinette's own words.--See Goncourt, "Histoire de Marie Antoinette," p. 404.] At another time, her pale, dry lips murmured, "I am thirsty!" but no one around her dared to have compa.s.sion on this cry of distress; every one looked perplexed at the others, and no one dared give her a gla.s.s of water. At last one of the gens d'armes ventured to do it, and Marie Antoinette thanked him with a look that brought tears into his eyes, and that perhaps caused him to fall on the morrow under the guillotine as a traitor.

The gens d'armes who guarded the queen, they alone had the courage to show her compa.s.sion. One night, when she was conducted from the session-room to her prison, Marie Antoinette felt herself so exhausted, so overcome, that she murmured to herself, as she staggered on, "I cannot see, I cannot walk any farther." [Footnote: Goncourt, p.416] The guard who was walking by her side gave her his arm, and, supported by him, Marie Antoinette reeled up the stone steps that led to her prison.

At last, in the night intervening between the 14th and 15th of October, at four o'clock in the morning, her sentence was p.r.o.nounced--"Death! execution by the guillotine!"

Marie Antoinette received it with unshakable calmness, while the tumult of the excited mob was hushed as by magic, and while many faces even of the exasperated fish-wives grew pale!

Marie Antoinette remained calm; gravely and coldly she rose from her seat, and with her own hands opened the bal.u.s.trade in order to leave the hall to return to her prison!

Finally, on the morning of the 16th of October, her sufferings were allowed to end, and she was permitted to take refuge in the grave.

It almost made her joyful; she had suffered so much, that to die was for her really blessedness.

She employed the still hours of the night before her death in writing to her sister-in-law, Madame Elizabeth, and her letter was at the same time her testament. But the widow of Louis Capet had no riches, no treasures to convey. She had nothing more that she could call her own but her love, her tears, and her farewell greetings.