DURING THESE MONTHS the pace of events was too lively in Paris for people to devote long thought to any particular individual among those who had passed by that bloody road to death. The quicker the progress of time, the shorter are people’s memories. Within a few weeks, perhaps within a few days, there was scarcely anyone in Paris to remember that Marie Antoinette, sometime Queen of France, had been decapitated and that her remains had been buried in the cemetery of the Madeleine. On the day of the execution, Hébert uttered a howl of delight in Père Duchesne: “I saw the head of the female Veto fall into the sack. If only, damn it all, I could convey to you the delight of the sansculottes when the arch-tigress was driven across Paris in the cart with the six-and-thirty uprights … At length her accursed head was severed from her whorish neck, and the air resounded to cries of ‘Vive la république!’” These mouthings received little attention, for in that epoch of the Red Terror people were chiefly concerned as to whether their own heads were firmly fixed upon their shoulders. A little while elapsed before the interment took place, since it was too expensive to dig a grave for one individual. The custom was to await reinforcements from the busy guillotine, and not until three score corpses were on hand was Marie Antoinette’s coffin liberally besprinkled with quicklime and then lowered into a common grave with subsequent arrivals.
There was an end of the matter. In the Conciergerie the Queen’s little dog ran restlessly hither and thither for a few days, sniffing about in one room and another, jumping on various beds in search of his mistress; then he, likewise, lost interest, and the prison governor compassionately took possession of him. An undertaker presented his account to the Commune as follows: “Widow Capet, for the coffin, six livres; for the grave and the grave-diggers, fifteen livres.” An usher of the court collected the few poor remnants of clothing left by the Queen, made a list of them and sent them to an infirmary, where pauper women wore them without knowing whose they had been. For a while there was no further thought of Marie Antoinette. When, a few years later, a German visited Paris and asked where the Queen had been buried, he could find no one in the whole town able to gratify his curiosity.
Nor did the execution of Marie Antoinette, which had for some time been expected, arouse much excitement across the frontier. The Duke of Coburg, who had been too faint-hearted to make a timely attempt for her rescue, breathed threatenings and slaughter in an order of the day. The Count of Provence, who, thanks to this execution, had made a long stride towards the fulfilment of his ambition to ascend the throne as Louis XVIII (since now only the poor little lad in the Temple remained to be hidden or thrust aside), showed a decorous sorrow by having masses said for the soul of the departed. At Vienna, Emperor Francis, who had been too lazy to write so much as a letter which might have been helpful to his aunt, ordered the court to go into mourning. The ladies wore black; His Imperial Majesty refrained for a few weeks from visiting the theatre; the newspapers, according to instructions, expressed the utmost indignation at the behaviour of the wicked Jacobins in Paris. The authorities were so gracious as to take possession of the diamonds which Marie Antoinette had entrusted to Mercy, and subsequently to exchange the imprisoned commissaries for the late Queen’s daughter, but when the question arose of repaying the sums of money advanced by various persons for the attempts at escape and of honouring the late Queen’s drafts, the court of Vienna turned a deaf ear. At the Hofburg, speaking generally, no one had any wish to be reminded of the Queen’s execution. Perhaps the imperial conscience was a trifle uneasy, yet not so much because a close relative had been sacrificed as because all the world was aware of the fact. A good many years later Napoleon remarked: “It was a fixed maxim in the House of Austria to maintain a profound silence concerning the Queen of France. At the name of Marie Antoinette they lowered their eyes and changed the conversation, wishing to evade a disagreeable and embarrassing topic. Such was the rule adopted by the entire family and recommended to Austrian envoys in foreign parts.”
There was but one person stricken to the heart by the news—Fersen, the truest of the true. Day after day, in his deep distress, he awaited the horrible tidings: “For a long time I have been trying to prepare myself, and it seems to me that when the day comes I shall receive the news without too profound an emotion.” But when the journals containing accounts of the Queen’s execution reached Brussels, he felt utterly shattered, writing to his sister: “She for whom I lived, since I have never ceased to love her (how could I, even for a moment, cease to love her); she for whom I would have sacrificed everything … she whom I loved so dearly, and for whom I would have given my life a thousand times—is no more. God, why have you crushed me thus, and what have I done to deserve such a manifestation of your wrath? She is no more. My agony has reached its height, and I do not know how I go on living, I do not know how to support my suffering, which is intense and which nothing can ever efface. Always she will be present to my memory and I shall never cease to bewail her … My dear, how I long to have died at her side, for her, for them, on the twentieth of June. This would have been much happier for me than to drag out a sad existence amid eternal regrets, amid regrets which will end only with my life, for her adored image will never be effaced from my memory.” Only through his memory of her can he still live: “The sole object of my interest has ceased to exist; she alone meant everything to me, and now for the first time do I fully grasp how passionately I was devoted to her. I can think of nothing but her. Her image is continually with me, and will always be with me wherever I go. I care to speak of nothing but her, to recall the happy moments of my life. Alas, nothing is left of them but memories which, however, I shall preserve so long as my life lasts. I have arranged for agents in Paris to buy anything of hers which may be obtainable, for whatever I can get of this sort will be sacred to me. They are relics which will be the unceasing objects of my perpetual admiration.” For him nothing can make good this loss. Months afterwards, he writes in his diary: “I feel so keenly day by day how much I have lost in losing her, and how perfect she was in every respect. There never has been and there never will be another such woman.” The passing of the years did not seem to lessen the shock, and everything that happened served only to remind him of his loss. When, in 1796, he was in Vienna and saw Marie Antoinette’s daughter at the imperial court, his eyes filled with tears. “My knees almost gave way beneath me as I was going downstairs after seeing her. I was profoundly moved by mingled feelings of joy and of sorrow.”
Always when he saw this young woman, Maria Theresa Charlotte, afterwards Duchess of Angoulême, he found it hard to refrain from weeping, and the old passion for the mother was revived in a fatherly affection for the daughter. Not once, however, was she allowed to say or write a word to Fersen. We do not know whether this prohibition was the fruit of a secret court decree, of a decision that the victim was as far as possible to be forgotten, or whether, maybe, her confessor’s influence was at work, since this priest may well have known of the ‘sinful’ relations between Marie Antoinette and the Swedish nobleman. Anyhow, the Austrian court disliked Fersen’s coming and was always ready to speed his departure. Never once did any surviving member of the House of Habsburg show gratitude to the man who had been the most faithful of the Queen’s adherents.
After his beloved’s death, Fersen became gloomy and harsh. The world seemed to him cold and unjust; life, devoid of meaning. His political and diplomatic ambitions were extinct. During the long years of warfare that ensued, he wandered hither and thither through Europe as envoy, appearing now in Vienna, now in Karlsruhe, now in Rastatt, now in Italy, and returning from time to time to Sweden. He had intimacies with other women, but they were only superficial. Nothing could console him. Again and again we find in his diary entries that show him to have been little more than a living shadow. Many years later, on 16th October, the anniversary of the Queen’s death, we find him writing: “For me this is a day of devotion, and I can never forget all that I have lost; my regrets will last as long as my life.”
But there is another date to which Fersen always refers as fateful, the twentieth of June. He never found it possible to forgive himself for having obeyed Louis XVI’s orders on this day of the flight to Varennes, and for having allowed Marie Antoinette to venture alone into the jaws of danger. Whenever 20th June came round, he was reminded of a personal offence, an undischarged sense of guilt was revived. Repeatedly he declared that it would have been better to allow himself to be torn to pieces by the populace than to survive his mistress, with no joy in his heart, and a perpetual victim of self-reproach. “Why, ah why, did I not die for her on the twentieth of June?” Again and again these words recur in his journal.
But Fate loves the analogies of what we call chance, and is fond of playing in a mysterious way with figures. After many years his romantic desire was strangely fulfilled. On this very date, 20th June, Fersen perished, dying a violent death. This was in the year 1810. By degrees, though he never sought advancement, he had become a man of note in his homeland; he was a Swedish marshal and the most trusted among the king’s counsellors; a man wielding much power, but harsh and severe; a masterful man. His spirit was that of the old regime. Since the days of the flight to Varennes and the frustrated escape, he had detested the people who had robbed him of his Queen. They were the mob; they were canaille, and his hatred was frankly reciprocated by the common folk. Being powerful and harsh, he had made enemies among his own order, and these had disseminated a rumour, which had found ready credence, that—in his desire to take vengeance on France—he wanted to make himself King of Sweden and drag the nation into war. When, therefore, in June 1810, Prince Christian of Holstein-Augustenberg died suddenly, the report ran in Stockholm that Marshal Fersen had poisoned the heir to the throne in order to smooth his own path. Now Fersen was in the same sort of danger as Marie Antoinette during the Revolution. During the days before the Prince’s burial, therefore, well-meaning friends, who had heard that sinister plans were afoot, warned the Marshal against attending the funeral. It would be wiser for him, they said, to stay at home. But the day fixed for the interment was 20th June, and he had an obscure urge to meet the fate of which he had dreamt. The result was, on this twentieth of June in Stockholm, what would have been the result twenty-one years earlier in Paris if the mob had discovered Fersen in the chariot as Marie Antoinette’s companion. Hardly had his carriage left the palace when a raging crowd broke through the protecting cordon of troops, tore the grey-headed man down among them and dispatched him, defenceless as he was, with sticks and stones. The visionary picture of 20th June had been fulfilled. The bleeding and mutilated corpse of ‘handsome Fersen’, the last champion of the Queen of France, was left lying on the pavement in front of the Stockholm town hall, the life crushed out of it by the same savage untamable element—the indiscriminate wrath of the populace—which had brought Marie Antoinette to the scaffold. In life they had had to be sundered, but in death at least, symbolically united by the likeness of their destiny, they were not divided.
With Fersen the last had perished of those who retained loving memories of Marie Antoinette. Neither one who passes by the name of living nor one who has entered into the shadow of death is truly alive unless still sincerely loved by a fellow human being. Fersen’s lament for his long-dead mistress was the last word of fidelity to her image. The rest was silence. Soon any others who had remained faithful to her had passed away; Trianon was falling into decay, its ornamental gardens ran wild; the pictures, the furniture which, in their harmony, had reflected her charm, had been sold by auction and scattered; thus it seemed that the last visible traces of her existence on earth had vanished. Time ran its course, bloodshed followed bloodshed, the Revolution was succeeded by the Consulate, Bonaparte had become Emperor Napoleon, and had sought, as second wife, another archduchess from the House of Habsburg. Yet Marie Louise, however incredible it may seem, never sought to enquire where this unhappy woman of her kin who had lived before her and suffered in the palace of the Tuileries was sleeping her last sleep. Never in so short a space of time had a Queen been so coldly forgotten by her nearest relatives and successors.
Then there came a new turn of fortune’s wheel, and memories were stirred by an uneasy conscience. Over the corpses of three million, the Count of Provence had ascended the throne of France as Louis XVIII. Since those who had been barriers to his ambition—Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and their unhappy son Louis XVII—had long since been swept out of the way, and since the dead cannot arise and bring complaints against the living, would it not be well to provide them with a splendid tomb? Never before this had he who was now a monarch troubled to enquire where his brother might have been buried, but after his accession the search was duly instituted. It was by no means easy, when two-and-twenty years had elapsed, to find what was wanted in that notorious cemetery of the Madeleine, the old monastery garden which the chiefs of the Terror had manured with thousands of corpses. The grave-diggers had been hard-worked, with no time to distinguish one headless body from another. They had swiftly carted and swiftly interred, huddled indifferently together, the mortal remains which the insatiable guillotine vomited forth day after day. Neither cross nor crown marked the spot. All that was known was that the Convention had issued orders for the royal corpses to be buried with plenty of quicklime. The searchers, therefore, had an aim in their digging, and they went on indefatigably until their spades clashed upon a hard stratum which had been made by the slaking of the lime. Amid this, a mouldering garter enabled them to recognise that the handful of pale dust which was disinterred from the damp soil was the last trace of that long-dead woman who in her day had been the goddess of grace and of taste, and subsequently the queen of many sorrows.