Juliet Signal

Marie Antoinette

Marie Antoinette was summoned before the revolutionary tribunal on the 1st of August, and she was transferred to the Conciergerie as early as two in the morning of the 2nd Although described as perfectly calm and collected, she struck her forehead so heavily against a wicket gate as to have brought blood.

The municipal Michonie inquired if she had hurt herself.

'No,' was the reply; 'nothing can hurt me now.'

The two Richards, who had been so kind to Charlotte Corday, were now her jailers, and they treated her with the respect and compassion due to the magnitude of her misfortunes.

Unfortunately, the ill-judged attempt of the Chevalier d'Rougemont to communicate with the royal prisoner, led to the incarceration of the old couple, and she lost their services.

The night before she was led into the presence of the cynical assembly who were to send her to the scaffold, was passed in mending her clothes, which were almost in rags, and she walked into the presence of her inimical judges with all the pride and dignity of a daughter of Austria.

Her hair had become perfectly white, and her countenance had the rigidity of marble, as if her soul had already undergone martyrdom.

Chauveau-Lagarde and Troncon Ducoudray had volunteered the perilous task of being her defenders. The infamous charges brought against her by the wretch Hébert, upon the still more vile and infamous depositions of the jailer Simon, are given at length in Sanson. They reflect an ineffable disgrace upon the court before which they were uttered, and upon the nation in which that court sat.

A shudder of horror pervaded, we are told, the whole auditory.

Marie Antoinette alone appeared insensible to so gross an outrage, not only upon a fallen princess, but upon common humanity, as she listened astounded to the accusation of incest, but without allowing even a look to fall upon the utterer of so base a calumny. As she failed to answer so unnatural an accusation, her judges returned to the charge and after a brief interval revived the accusation.

'If I have not replied,' said the queen, for the first time vividly affected, 'it is because nature opposes itself to such a charge brought against a mother. I appeal to any who may be here.'

Marie Antoinette deemed her life to be too worthless to care to dispute for possession; but for the sake of her children, she asked the court to be incompetent to constitute the wife of Louis XVI responsible for the acts of king who was by the constitution itself irresponsible. As to personal charges against herself they had brought none, except what were deserving of the most infinite contempt. Her claims to exemption were, however, as little heeded as the pleadings of the two devoted men who had risked their lives in her defence.

Marie Antoinette was indeed condemned before she was put upon trial - the latter was a mere judicial form gone through to satisfy appearances. Condemned to follow her husband to the scaffold, Marie Antoinette, worn out by her long trial, slept three quarters of an hour in her dungeon, after which she indited the letter to Madam Elizabeth, which never reached her or her children, but was found afterwards at the house of Couthon by the conventional Courtois, when he was charged with the examination of the papers of the triumvirate. Like the last words of Charlotte Corday, this last legacy of the queen is a noble legacy to futurity.

Charles Henry Sanson had been summoned into the presence of Fouquier-Tinville who inquired from him if the arrangements of the 'fete' were all completed - this was, we are told, the word he used.

The executioner having replied that his duty consisted in awaiting the decision of the court, and not in anticipating them, Fouquier got into a tremendous passion, for the reply contained a vague allusion to his having at all events anticipated the decision of the court.

In his passion he exhausted himself in insults against the queen and her executioner, and it was decided that the former should be led to the scaffold in the same cart as other ordinary victims.

Marie Antoinette, who had declined all aid from the republic, who were in her eyes so many schismatics, and was finally accompanied against her will by the Abbe Lothringer, received absolution from the Abbe Magnien, administered from a window in the Rue St. Honore. As to the insults of the populace on her way to the scaffold, she confronted them without a shudder or a sign of weakness. In the presence of the scaffold alone she muttered:

'My daughter! my children!'

Sanson whispered to her:

'Courage, madame!'

'Merci, monsieur, merci!' she replied.

He then offered to help her up the fatal steps.

'No,' she said; 'I shall, thank God, have strength to get up myself.'

And she stepped up with as much majesty as if they had been the steps of the grand staircase at Versailles.

The assistants having seized upon the royal personage and bound her down to the plank, she lifted up her eyes to heaven and exclaimed in a loud voice:

'Farewell, my children! I am going to join your father.'

A few shouts of 'Vive la Republique!' followed upon the descent of the knife, and one of the assistants, compelled to the melancholy duty by the sword of Nourry Grammont (a fanatical officer in the revolutionary army, who had put his fist in the queen's face when being led to the scaffold, and who now brandished the weapon to which he was a disgrace, with the violence of a maniac), walked round the scaffold with the head of the victim, the eyelids being still agitated by a convulsive shudder.