The Bartholomew's night of the murderous Catharine de Medicis, and her mad son, Charles IX., now found in France its horrible and bloody repetition; 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 noble 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 passed 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 God 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 masses 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, butterflies 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 masses 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 compassion, 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 compassion on this cry of distress; every one looked perplexed at the others, and no one dared give her a glass 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 compassion. 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 pronounced--"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!