The Girls' Book of Famous Queens

The morning of the 5th of October dawns dark, cold, and dreary. The people of Paris are starving. About a baker’s shop is a crowd of women and children, crying for bread. Bread is not to be had. “À Versailles, bonnes femmes!” cries a man passing by. “À Versailles! there is bread enough there, and to spare. À Versailles! the land of plenty, feasting, and revelry! À Versailles!” A young girl seizes a drum, and cries aloud, “Bread! bread!”

Soon a mob is collected; three or four hundred women presently increased to as many thousands. They follow their leader, echoing her cry, “Bread! bread!” On to the Hôtel de Ville they rush. But there is no bread there; and their cry is now, “À Versailles! À Versailles!” “We will give the men,” they exclaim, “a lesson in courage. If they cannot support and protect us, we will do it for ourselves.”

And so along beside the Tuileries, and through the Elysian Fields, rushes on this mighty mass, headlong towards Versailles. Couriers have been sent forward to warn the king and queen of the approaching peril. His Majesty, King Louis XVI., for want of something better to do, has gone to chase hares at Meudon. He is sent for, post haste, and returns to Versailles. “About seven hundred gentlemen were then in the palace, all in full dress, chapeau sous le bras, and armed only with dress swords. Some few had found pistols; and in that unmilitary fashion they declared themselves determined to defend the château if attacked.”

Five minutes after the king’s return, the women arrived, singing, “Vive Henri IV.!” and more like furies than suppliants. All the shops were instantly closed; drums beat to arms, the tocsin sounded, and the troops were drawn up on the Place d’Armes. Entrance to the courts of the palace was refused; but finally the women sent a deputation of fifteen to the king. He received them very graciously, and promised what they desired, so that they came out of the palace shouting, “Vive le roi!” and praising the goodness of the king to such an extent that their fellow-Amazons, in rage, would have strung them to the nearest lamp-posts had not the soldiers interfered.

At nine o’clock, news was brought that General de Lafayette, at the head of the National Guards and the Gardes Française, and followed by a crowd of the Parisian people, was on his way to Versailles. M. de Saint-Priest immediately sought the king, and urged him to leave the palace before their arrival. “The road is open,” he said; “a picket of the household troops is at the gate of the Orangery, and your Majesty, on horseback, at the head of an escort, can freely pass whithersoever you wish.”

Poor Louis! He would wait the course of events; not from courage to face whatever might happen, but from want of resolution to depart. Rightly had the queen called him “le pauvre homme.” In this hour of menacing danger she found no protector in her poor, miserably weak husband and king. But she needed none; for “she alone, among all women and all men, wore a face of courage, of lofty calmness and resolve this day. She alone saw clearly what she meant to do; and Theresa’s daughter dares do what she means, were all France threatening her: abide where her children are, where her husband is.”

Near midnight Lafayette arrived at the château, pale as death, wet through, and splashed with mud. He had ridden hard and fast in advance of his troops, that he might check any alarm felt by the royal family at the sudden incursion of the mixed multitudes of National Guards, Gardes Française, and volunteers of all sorts, whom he had unwillingly been made to lead. Assuming the guarding of the château, he prevailed upon the queen and her ladies to retire to their apartments and seek sleep without fear.

Gradually quiet was restored, and tired, tempest-tossed Versailles lay down to rest. Alas, for peaceful dreams! All know the story of that dreadful night. How the mob, prowling round the palace, found a door unguarded; how they rushed in, and, pressing blindly on, came to the queen’s door; how they fought; how the good guard who defended it poured out their life-blood upon the marble floor; how the queen had barely time to escape through the Œil de Bœuf, when the howling mob rushed in, and stabbed her bed, again and again, with bloody pikes and swords; and how at last the guards of Lafayette arrived and drove them from the palace. It was a night of horror. The queen was saved; but better for Marie Antoinette would it have been, if in that short agony she could have died. It was not to be. A mysterious Providence reserved her, after years of unutterable suffering, for a death more awful.

The morning of the 6th was now dawning, and the whole multitude, swarming around the palace, demanded as with one voice that the king should go to Paris. As he could not very well do otherwise, the king decided to comply. Loud shouts now rose of “Vive le roi!” But threatening voices were raised against the queen; “À bas l’Autrichienne!” “À bas l’Autrichienne!” they cried.

“Madame,” said Lafayette, “the king goes to Paris; what will you do?”

“Accompany the king,” replied Marie Antoinette.

“Come with me, then,” rejoined the general. He led the queen upon the balcony, from whence she looked upon the multitude, agitated like the ocean in a storm. Proudly she stood, a true daughter of her imperial mother, Maria Theresa, and calmly she gazed upon the mighty throng. The murmurs of the crowd were hushed. At the sight of this fearless woman standing thus exposed to all their fury, those who would have torn in pieces the daughter of the Cæsars were compelled to render homage. Lafayette, bending, took her hand and kissed it, while the marble court resounded with the shouts of “Vive la reine!”

A little after noon the royal family entered their carriage, and slowly the melancholy cortège set out for Paris.

As they passed through the gates of Versailles, the queen glanced backward for a moment upon that splendid palace, the scene of so much happiness and grandeur, which she was to see no more. And the carriage rolled on, bearing its occupants to a dungeon and the scaffold. Adieu to Versailles! Royalty was vanquished; and Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette at the Tuileries were but the captive slaves of their subjects.

Months rolled by, months of insult and humiliation, until even the king was aroused, and seriously contemplated flight; that, escaping from the scenes of violence and danger to which he was exposed in Paris, he might draw around him his loyal subjects upon the frontiers of France, and there endeavor amicably to adjust the difficulties which desolated the kingdom.

Gabriel Honoré de Mirabeau, the son of thunder, was the mightiest and most terrible product of the Revolution. He was the ugliest man and the grandest orator in chaotic France. He swayed the multitude; and it seemed, as he himself believed, that if he would, he, and he only, might yet save the monarchy.

It was at St. Cloud that Marie Antoinette held her famous interview with Mirabeau. As she felt the spell of his genius, so he rendered homage to her majesty. The interview lasted an hour, and Mirabeau closed it with the words: “Madame, when the empress, your mother, admitted one of her subjects to the honor of her presence, she did not take leave of him without allowing him to kiss her hand.” Marie Antoinette held out her hand. “Madame,” exclaimed Mirabeau, “the monarchy is saved!” But opportunity was not given him to keep or break his pledge. Under the sweet April sunshine of 1791, Mirabeau breathed his last. His death paralyzed the hopes of the king, and he now resolved to spare no endeavors to secure his escape; and so in the darkness of midnight, on the 20th of June, 1791, the king, the queen, Madame Elizabeth, the two royal children, and Madame Tourzel, their governess, escaped silently from the palace of Tuileries, and entering their carriages, which stood ready, drove rapidly away. Alas for fond hopes! Through the king’s want of caution, the royal family were recognized at Varennes, arrested, and brought back to Paris. Ah, the humiliations of that long and weary, crowd-encompassed, dust-enveloped journey back to Paris! Threats, imprecations, and torrents of abuse were hurled upon the royal family from all sides. More than this they could not do, for a forest of glittering bayonets surrounded the royal carriage. It was by the glaring light of the torches that the sorrowful cortège entered Paris, and under a canopy of glistening steel the royal family ascended once more the marble staircase of the Tuileries Palace.

A year has rolled away. The 20th of June, 1792, has passed, – that day of horrors on which the mob, with shouts of “Vive la nation!” broke into and rushed through the palace of the Tuileries; that day on which the queen was exposed for hours to insults, abuses, and derisive jests; that day on which the king was made to place upon his royal brow the red cap of the Jacobins, while the mob, exulting in their victory, cried loudly: “Vive le roi!” Poor Louis! As he entered the apartment of the queen, after the rabble had been cleared from the palace, he saw, in the reflection of a mirror, the bonnet rouge upon his head, and flinging it upon the ground, he turned to the queen, exclaiming, with a burst of tears: “Ah! madame, it was not to see me thus insulted that I brought you from Vienna.”

How different were the days when the boy and girl met on that bright spring morning at Compiègne, and hunted, danced, quarrelled, and kissed again, in the old, luxurious times at Versailles and Marly, Fontainebleau and Choisy-le-Roi!

The 10th of August has arrived. The streets are swarming with a frenzied multitude. All Paris is marching toward the Tuileries, for the mob have declared that unless the dethronement of the king is procured, they will sack the palace. The peal of bells, the clangor of drums, the rumbling of artillery wheels, and the shouts of the advancing bands fill the air.

From every direction, east, west, north and south, the portentous booming of the tocsin is heard, and the infuriated insurgents, in numbers which cannot be counted, through all the streets and avenues are pouring toward the palace.

The spectacle aroused the energies of Marie Antoinette, and as she entered the apartment where her “pauvre homme” stood bewildered and submissive to his lot, she approached a grenadier, and drawing a pistol from his belt, presented it to the king, exclaiming, “Now, sire, now is the time to show yourself a king!”

But there was nothing imperial in the nature of Louis XVI. With a passive meekness, which it is difficult to understand, he took the pistol and quietly handed it back to the grenadier.

It was five o’clock of one of the most brilliant of summer mornings as the king, followed by the queen, and accompanied by six staff officers, descended the marble stairs and entered the courtyard to review the troops and ascertain the spirit with which they were animated. The music of martial bands greeted him, the polished weapons of the soldiers glittered in the sun as they presented arms, and a few voices rather languidly shouted: “Vive le roi!” Others, however, shouted defiantly: “Vive la nation!” thus showing that many of those who were marshalled for his defence were ready to unite with his assailants. Had the king been a spirited man, in uniform, mounted on horseback, he would have roused their enthusiasm, for the French have always loved the vrai chevalier. But fat, awkward Louis was well calculated to excite no other emotion than that of compassion blended with contempt.

“The appearance of the queen in this terrible hour riveted every eye, and excited even the enthusiasm of her foes. Her flushed cheek, dilated nostril, compressed lip, and flashing eye invested her with an imperial beauty almost more than human. Her head was erect, her carriage proud, her step dignified, and she looked around her upon applauding friends and assailing foes with a majesty of courage which touched every heart. Even the most ardent patriots forgot, for the moment, their devotion to liberty, in the enthusiasm excited by the heroism of the queen.”

On entering the palace Marie Antoinette exclaimed in despair, “All is lost! The king has shown no energy. A review like this has done us more harm than good.”

The king had now passed into the garden to ascertain the disposition of the troops stationed there. With his small retinue he traversed the whole length of the line. Some of the battalions received him with applause, others were silent, while here and there voices, in continually increasing numbers, cried, “À bas le veto! à bas le tyran!” As the king turned to retrace his steps, menaces and insults were multiplied. Some of the gunners even left their places and thrust their fists in his face, assailing him with the most brutal abuse. The clamor penetrated to the interior of the palace, and the queen, turning pale as death, sank into a chair, exclaiming, “Great God! they are hooting the king. We are all lost.” The king returned to the palace, pale, exhausted, perspiring at every pore, and overwhelmed with shame and confusion. He retired to his cabinet. M. Roederer, chief magistrate of the Department of the Seine, entered immediately.

“Sire,” said he, “you have not a moment to lose. Neither the number nor the disposition of the men here assembled can guarantee your life nor the lives of your family. There is no safety for you but in the National Assembly.” Such a refuge to the high-spirited queen was more dreadful than death. It was draining the cup of humiliation to the dregs.

“Go to the Assembly!” exclaimed Marie Antoinette; “never! never will I take refuge there. Rather than submit to such infamy, I would prefer to be nailed to the walls of the palace.”

“It is there only,” replied M. Roederer, “that the royal family can be in safety, and it is necessary to escape immediately. In another quarter of an hour, perhaps, I shall not be able to command a retreat.”

“What!” rejoined the queen, “have we then no defenders? Are we alone?”

“Yes, madam,” M. Roederer replied, “we are alone. The troops in the garden and in the court are fraternizing with your assailants, and turning their guns against the palace. All Paris is on the march. Action is useless; resistance impossible.”

A gentleman present, who had been active in promoting reform, ventured to add his voice in favor of an immediate retreat to the Assembly. The queen turned upon him sternly, exclaiming: “Silence, sir, silence! It becomes you to be silent here. When the mischief is done, those who did it should not pretend to wish to remedy it.”

M. Roederer resumed, saying: “Madam, you endanger the lives of your husband and your children. Think of the responsibility which you take upon yourself!” The queen cast a glance upon her daughter, and a mother’s fears prevailed. The crimson blood mounted to her temples. Rising from her seat, she said proudly, “Let us go.”

A guard of soldiers was instantly called in, and the royal family descended the stairs, entered the garden, and crossed it unopposed. The leaves of autumn strewed the paths, and the young Dauphin kicked them before him as he walked along. It is characteristic of the weak mental qualities of the king, that in such an hour he should have remarked, “There are a great many leaves. They fall early this year.” Some writers have found in this expression the evidence of a deep and solemn mind reflecting upon the calamities which had fallen upon France. Reflections! What had Louis XVI. to do with reflections at a time like this? His affairs demanded actions, not reflections.

At the hall of the Assembly they found an immense crowd blocking up the entrance. “They shall not enter here,” was the cry; “they shall no longer deceive the nation. They are the cause of all our misfortunes. À bas le veto! à bas l’Autrichienne! Abdication ou mort!” But the soldiers forced their way through, and the royal family entered the Assembly. The king approached the president. “I have come hither,” he said, “to prevent a great crime. I thought I could not be safer than with you.”

“You may rely, sire,” the president replied, “on the firmness of the Assembly.”

But few of the excited thousands who crowded all the approaches to the Tuileries were conscious that the royal family had escaped from the palace. The clamor rapidly increased to a scene of terrific uproar. The volleys of musketry, the deep booming of artillery, the cries of fury, and the shrieks of the wounded and dying filled the air.

The hall of the Assembly was already crowded to suffocation, and the deputies stood powerless and appalled, for all now felt that a storm was beating against the throne which no human power could allay. Suddenly the king beckoned to an attendant, and spoke a few words to him in an undertone. The man started to leave the hall, but the terror-stricken deputies crowded around him.

“What has the king said?” they anxiously inquired; “what new order has he given? Quick! quick! speak out!”

“Why! my friends,” replied the messenger, laughing, “do you not know that you are dealing with a Bourbon? The king has simply ordered his dinner.”

And so in the midst of the National Assembly, while outside a raging, howling mob was storming his palace of the Tuileries, and his good Swiss guard were pouring out their life-blood upon the marble stairs, and while the throne of his ancestors hung tottering in the balance, King Louis munched his bread and drank his wine. Thus low had fallen the descendant of the Grand Monarque.

The king munched on; the mob took and sacked the palace; thousands lay dead in the Place du Carrousel, around the Tuileries, and in the Champs Élysées. The throne was demolished, and the last vestiges of the old court régime and the monarchy of the superb Louis Quatorze disappeared forever.

And now followed those long months of imprisonment in the Temple, – months of unutterable suffering, while the king was on trial for his life. And then that sorrowful night of the 20th of January, when for the last time the king was permitted to behold his family. Ah! what prayers, what groans, what tears were heard and seen that night. Then came that awful morning of the 21st of January, 1793, and while the king was suffering upon the guillotine, the queen, with Madame Elizabeth and the children, remained in their prison, in the endurance of anguish as severe as could be laid on human hearts. As the deep booming of the artillery announced that the fatal axe had fallen, poor Marie Antoinette swooned dead away.

But haste we on to the last act of the dreadful tragedy.

On the 2d of August, 1793, Marie Antoinette Jeanne Josèphe de Lorraine, Queen of France and Navarre and Archduchess of Austria, the once brilliant sovereign of Versailles, now a prisoner and a widow, torn from her children and treated like a common felon, was removed from the prison of the Temple to that of the Conciergerie, there to linger until her release from human barbarity on the 16th of October. In one of the vast halls of this edifice, when occupied by the Parliament, Louis XIV. had entered during a sitting, booted and spurred, and declared that he was the state. “It was a strange fate that this building, once the dwelling-place of the sovereigns of the House of Capet, when holding their state in the capital, should see a captive within its walls, the widow of their descendant, – the ‘widow Capet,’ as the Jacobins described her in their blood-stained edicts.” The damp, foul dungeons were the most gloomy tombs imagination can conceive. Down the dripping and slimy steps the queen was led by the light of a tallow candle, until, through a labyrinth of corridors, she approached her iron door. The rusty hinges grated as the door was opened, and entering, she struck her forehead against the low beam.

“Did you hurt yourself?” inquired the gendarme.

“No, nothing can further harm me.” Poor Marie Antoinette!

“The candle gave just light enough to reveal the horrors of her cell. The floor was covered with mud, and streams of water trickled down the stone walls. A miserable pallet, with a dirty covering of coarse and tattered cloth, a small pine table, and a chair, constituted the only furniture.” So deep was the fall from the salons of Versailles!

Here for two long, weary months the poor queen lingered; her misery being slightly alleviated by the kind-heartedness of Madame Richard, the wife of the jailer, and Rosalie Lamorlière, an inmate of the prison, who did all the rigorous rules allowed them to mitigate her woes. “The night of her arrival at the Conciergerie the queen had not so much as a change of linen. For days she begged to be allowed some, but it was not till the tenth day that her prayer was granted, when Michonis went to the Temple and brought back with him a parcel of linen and some clothes; among others, the white gown which the queen wore on the day of her execution. Little by little everything was taken from the queen. The souvenirs of her happy past, to which she clung, were taken from her; first her watch, a gift of her mother’s, and which had never left her since she left Vienna, – the watch which had counted the happy hours of her youth and womanhood was taken from her. Bitterly she wept at having to part with it, as if it had been a friend. There was not a moment that the queen could be out of sight of her gens d’armes; a little screen, four feet high, was the only separation between the space in which she changed her dress and those men.” Imagine the misery of this state for a woman so delicately nurtured, so luxuriously brought up, having at her command a household of over four hundred persons, and accustomed to the refinements of the most polished court in Europe.

In the old days of splendor at Versailles, when her attendants were unable to find some article of dress or toilet, she had exclaimed pettishly: “How terrible it is not to be able to find what one wants!” But now, in these last days of her life, when surrounded by every aggravation that could wound a proud spirit, treated like the worst of offenders, insulted as mother, wife, queen, and woman, she never uttered one word that could be construed into petulance, or gave one angry look.

“With threads taken from her bedding, she worked a kind of garter, and not being allowed any knitting-needles, used a pair of toothpicks. When finished, she dropped it, with a significant look, when her jailer entered the prison. It reached – thanks to one of her loyalest followers, M. Hue, a faithful servant of Louis XVI. – its destination, for he gave it to Madame Royale when he accompanied her, two years later, to Vienna.” This was the richest legacy the daughter of Maria Theresa and the queen of France could bequeath to her child. The queen was not so fortunate with another little relic that she hoped her daughter would receive. This consisted of a pair of gloves and a lock of her hair, which she slipped into the jailer’s hand; but the action was observed by one of the gens d’armes, and the little parcel was confiscated. “The damp of the queen’s underground prison was such that her black gown began to fall into rags. She had another, – a white one; but this she wore only on the day of her death.

“The few other clothes she had were in a deplorable state, and required constant repair. She was only permitted three shirts, but the revolutionary tribunal decided that but one of these should be given to the queen, and worn ten days before another was allowed her; even her handkerchiefs were only allowed one by one, and a strict account was kept of every article as it came from or entered her prison.” Not being allowed a chest of drawers she placed her clothes in a paper box that Rosalie brought her, “and which she received,” says Rosalie, “as if it had been the most beautiful piece of furniture in the world.” Rosalie also procured her a little looking-glass, bordered with red, with little Chinese figures painted on the sides. This too seemed much to please the queen; and doubtless it gave her more satisfaction than had done all the miles of gorgeous, gilded mirrors at Versailles.

And now the 14th of October has come, and Marie Antoinette is summoned to appear before her judges. There are wretches present who cry as she enters, “À bas l’Autrichienne!” Yet even the fear of the guillotine is not able to check the visible signs of pity and deep-felt sympathy her appearance elicits in others.