Versailles

Geography Lesson

The Temple, an oppressive medieval fortress in the Marais. It is a rainy autumn night, the month of Brumaire, Year One of the new Republican calendar. As the curtain rises we see Louis Capet and his wife, formerly known as the King and Queen of France, seated with their two children at a candlelit wooden table, the Jacobins having papered the walls behind them to resemble the inside of a prison. Louis is in the process of making a puzzle map for his son, who is doing his best to stop coughing long enough to finish his bowl of soup. Antoinette is embroidering pink roses on a white seat cover; the Serious One is scowling into space.

LOUIS: Could you hand me the scissors, dearest?

ANTOINETTE: Just a moment. She surveys her work critically, tries to snip the thread, and throws the scissors on the floor. I give up! I hate these things! You couldn't cut butter with them, let alone someone's throat.

LOUIS: Dearest… He reaches across the table to touch her hand.

ANTOINETTE: I'm sorry. Ignore me. It's just that I'm freezing to death. You'd think they could at least keep the fires going.

SERIOUS ONE: When you get upset like that you get spots all over your face.

ANTOINETTE: Thank you.

She sighs and returns to her sewing; Louis retrieves the scissors from the floor and, with an expression of deep concentration, begins cutting a large piece of paper into smaller pieces.

For a while there is only the sound of snipping and coughing, and then other sounds, muffled at first but growing louder and louder, rattling chains, plodding footsteps, sliding bolts, keys turning in locks; the candles gutter as a heavy oak door bangs open, stage left. Enter the Tisons, the elderly couple hired to "look after" the royal family, each wearing a long white apron and a red Jacobin hat. As Citizeness Tison removes the Dauphin's soup bowl, Citizen Tison stands directly in front of Antoinette, blowing smoke in her face.

Antoinette stares fixedly at her work and keeps on sewing.

LOUIS: Excuse me. I don't think the boy was finished yet.

CITIZENESS TISON: He doesn't think the boy was finished. She spits in the bowl and hands it back to the Dauphin. A thousand pardons.

LOUIS: Please. He's just a little boy. He hasn't been well.

DAUPHIN: It's all right, Papa. He covers his mouth to stifle a cough. I had plenty, really I did.

CITIZENESS TISON: Papa — that's a good one. She elbows her husband.

CITIZEN TISON: Will there be anything else?

He and his wife make their exit without waiting for an answer, slamming the door behind them. Once again there is the sound of turning keys, sliding bolts, rattling chains, plodding footsteps, fainter and fainter.

The Dauphin breaks into uncontrollable coughing; Louis puts his head in his hands.

ANTOINETTE: I can't take it anymore.

SERIOUS ONE: It's not like we have a choice.

LOUIS: Shhh. Shhh. He rouses himself and hands the Dauphin a blank map of Europe, with a pile of cut-out countries. We must at least try to be kind to one another.

SERIOUS ONE: But I'm only telling the truth.

LOUIS: Shhh.

He kisses the top of his daughter's head. The candles flicker; the Dauphin, still coughing, removes the top cut-out from the pile and squints at it.

ANTOINETTE: You have it upside down, darling. Here, let me…

DAUPHIN: I know that. He turns the cut-out around. I knew that all along. It's England.

LOUIS: The Kingdom of Great Britain…

DAUPHIN: That's right. He sets it in place. And this one's France. The Kingdom of France. And this is Prussia. And here comes (walking his fingers across the map) the Duke of Brunswick. Leading the armies of the Holy Roman Empire! Coming to save us!

ANTOINETTE: Oh yes. The Duke of Brunswick. Except don't you have him going in the wrong direction? Shouldn't he be headed away from France? And, come to think of it, shouldn't that be the Republic of France? And shouldn't he be running?

Louis rises stiffly from his chair and makes his way around the table to stand behind Antoinette, gently rubbing her neck and shoulders.

ANTOINETTE: The Duke of Brunswick. The Duke of Brunswick is lower than mud.

LOUIS: It isn't as if he didn't try to help us.

DAUPHIN: The Duke of Brunswick is lower than slime!

LOUIS: Of course I suppose we'll never really know the whole story of what happened at Valmy.

ANTOINETTE: Trying to help us! Everyone knows he threw the battle. He was our last best hope and he sold us out.

LOUIS: We don't know that. His men were sick; they didn't have enough to eat. The weather was bad.

ANTOINETTE: I do.

DAUPHIN: The Duke of Brunswick is lower than shit!

SERIOUS ONE: Make him stop, Papa. He's driving me crazy.

LOUIS, smiling: I'd like to see the person who could do that, sweetheart.

And then. And then they took him away.

And then they cut off his head.

When I tried to sleep, my ear on the pillow would fill with the noise of my blood pumping through me like voices going on and on:

Antoinette.

Your face follows me wherever I go.

And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten, the cankerworm, and the caterpillar, and the palmerworm, my great army, which I sent among you.

My sister. You are my sister, Antoinette. My dearest friend and companion.

If I could save you by my blood it would be my soul's greatest happiness.

It was January 21,1793.

Excuse me. I mean the second day of Pluviôse, Year One, because of course they had to change everything. Even epiphany cakes weren't to be called Cakes of the Kings anymore but Marat Cakes.

Even the cakes.

Obedient to its name, the second day of Pluviose was cold and wet. Rain was beating on the windowpanes, drenching the citizens of Paris as they danced their ecstatic way to the guillotine with their pikes and their red hats and their drums. We sat huddled together in the Temple, unnaturally alert, as if all we had to do was listen hard enough and we could hear the sound of his feet on the steps, the sound of his breathing. He was wearing a brown overcoat and a tricorn hat with a red, white, and blue cockade. No wedding ring, having handed it over to me earlier. "I die innocent," he said. "I pardon those who have brought on my death and I pray to God—" but already the blade was falling, his lungs taking in their last gulp of air. For a moment everything was perfectly still, followed by the sound of cheering, of cannon. The Serious One fainted.

Louis the Last, they called him. And then, after, Louis the Shortened.

In his will he asked me to help our children regard the grandeur of this world, "should they be fated to encounter it," as a dangerous and transitory advantage. Help them fix their eyes instead on the lasting glory of Eternity, he implored.

The grandeur of this world. The glory of Eternity. As if the Widow Capet had any choice in the matter.

I was given black clothes to wear, whereas a Queen's mourning dress is always white. It made no difference; I never went out. I just stayed in my room and sewed, getting thinner and thinner. Like a magpie, some people said, but I thought I was more like a needle.

Outside, it was the rage for women to tie red ribbons around their necks, à la victime, and for men to shave their throats. Making fashion out of fear, I guess, the idea being that if you got there first, Death would have to look elsewhere.

Meanwhile yet one more escape plan was under way, involving yet more costumes, forged passports, a boat to Normandy, etc. etc. My little boy would be hidden in a basket of dirty laundry, the ever-watchful Tisons dispatched with drugged snuff. Of course it came to nothing, but since I expected nothing I wasn't disappointed.

Though maybe that isn't entirely true. Maybe it wasn't so much nothing I expected as it was the triumph of the political over the personal, of a great blundering headless behemoth over a sad little human scheme.

"The species must be looked on as a tree that is pruned without cease by an invisible hand," wrote Jacques-René Hébert, headlessness's most ardent spokesman. "Blood is the fertilizer of the plant that is called genius." He was the one who got everyone fired up with the idea of removing the bodies of France's dead Kings from their vaults in Saint-Denis and dumping them in the river.

I sent Provence Louis's wedding ring, also a lock of his hair. I sent Axel a wax impression of my seal, a homing pigeon with the words EVERYTHING GUIDES ME TO THEE. Both of them so far off and farther every day, the one near a river, the other the ocean, which might as well have been China, the moon.

Every night the same thing:

Antoinette. Antoinette.

From my heart through my pillow and into my ear.

Your face, Antoinette.

Promised a throne and then ending like this.

My little boy was sick. They took him away from me and made him a ward of the Republic. They put him in his father's old room, where I could hear him sobbing, though even that was better than later when they fed him brandy and had him sing "The Marseillaise." To arms, citizens! Form your battalions! Sometimes I'd catch a glimpse of him through the window, playing with other little boys, using their toy guillotines to decapitate birds and mice.

Spring came and went with its flowers and breezes. Germinal, Floréal, Prairial; Candlemas, Carnival, Lent. I couldn't eat a thing, but what I did eat went right through me, along with my blood, which every month poured out by the bucket. I would see my hand sewing at the end of my arm and it seemed to me it didn't belong to me but to one of those ancient bundles I used to make fun of, those pitiful hags with skin as gray and translucent as raw fish who used to scrabble for purchase on my sleeve, trying to catch my attention back in the days when that was what everyone wanted more than anything.

Antoinette, Antoinette.

Your Highness. Your Majesty.

Messalina, Fredegonde, Brunhild.

Madame Tison lost her mind and they took her away to the madhouse.

I hadn't lost mine, but they took me away too — not to the madhouse but to the Conciergerie, which was delicately referred to as the "waiting room." They took me away and put me in a cramped cell with a brick floor, a little fireplace, a barred window, a straw mattress, a modesty screen, and a nail in the wall where I hung my mother's watch.

Prisoner Number 280: Marie Antoinette de Lorraine d'Autriche.

Her possessions (including the aforementioned watch): A lock of her deceased husband's hair. A lock of hair from each of her four children, two dead and two still living. A sewing purse with scissors and needles and thread. A mirror. A painted miniature of the Princesse de Lamballe. Three rings. A scapular. A pair of black silk stockings. A tin box of hair pomade. A swansdown powder puff. A painted miniature of her son, Louis — Charles, ward of the Republic. His yellow glove.

They gave me a nice young girl named Rosalie to be my maid, who did her best to protect me from being watched by the two guards whenever I sat on the chamber pot, and then burned juniper berries to freshen the air afterward. She brought me linen rags to put between my legs. She brought me books. Captain Cook's Travels. A History of Famous Shipwrecks. She also brought her little boy, Fanfan, who was the same age as my little boy, and broke my heart.

Sometimes I'd read, sometimes I'd sew. Sometimes I'd watch the guards play backgammon, neither one of whom was very good at it. I'd drink my potion of lime-flower water, orange-flower water, maidenhair syrup, and Hofman's liquor. I'd say grâce and eat my supper. Sometimes some of the other prisoners would come by to kiss my shoes.

Prisoner Number 280: bored out of her mind.

Eventually Captain Cook discovered New Caledonia, and then it was Fructidor, the days were getting shorter. In the new calendar each day was represented by a different wonder of nature, a hazelnut, a crayfish, a rose, as if Maximilien Robespierre or Jean-Paul Marat or any one of those monsters would know a crayfish if it bit him.

September 2: Crayfish. Another escape plan came to naught. To punish me I was put in an even smaller cell, a former dispensary that smelled like old medicine and piss. No window this time, no fire, no screen. No sewing purse. Water continually dripped down the walls, the same as the blood down my legs, making puddles on the floor. My shoes got mildewed but it didn't really matter since no one was coming by to kiss them anymore, having lost track of where I was. Rosalie warmed my nightgown every night over her own fire. She hung a bolt of moth-eaten carpet around my bed.

But I was cold, all the same. Cold and wet. The walls were spotted with mustard yellow lichen and dark green moss, and I couldn't help thinking of the Stairways of the Hundred Steps, which had turned out to have a hundred and five, in case anyone's interested.

I used to own two copper bathtubs, one for washing, one for rinsing. I used to sleep on six mattresses. My little boy would run in to wake me, laughing; my daughter would look up from her breviary and blink at how bright the day had grown. I used to be in love. I used to be married to a King. In my bedroom at the Petit Trianon there were three different shades of gold leaf on the ceiling.

The boxes they put me in got smaller and smaller, until the last one was so small you couldn't see it at all, or the woman inside it. Even if you were a guard. Even if you took away the screen. Where did she go? Where did she go?

Am I complaining?

No, frightened.

I was frightened.

I sat there in my chair, hour after hour, day after day, turning my rings, turning and turning them, the two guards watching my every move to make sure I wasn't up to something, meaning playing, amusing myself, in which case they'd have to take my rings away.

My rings. One turn to the right, and the door would swing open; another, and in would come my little boy, my little girl. Three turns, Axel. Four, Louis. Four turns to bring back the dead, their necks no longer severed, their hearts no longer stopped. Four turns and it would come to pass that the mountains drop down new wine, and the hills flow with milk, and all the rivers of Judah flow with waters, and a fountain come forth of the house of the Lord.

Whereas turn the rings to the left, and instead of a door there'd be only more wall, a daughter betrothed to the enemy, a son bearing false witness against his mother. Turn the rings to the left, and the lover would belying in another woman's arms, the King covered with quicklime in a pauper's grave, his severed head tucked between his legs, the sun and moon dark, the stars no longer brilliant.

What's she doing? the guards asked each other. They thought it was witchcraft, I guess. Watch out, the old witch is casting a spell! Hard to believe people used to call her beautiful. Hard to believe she used to be a woman. By now they liked me well enough; they felt sorry for me. Sometimes they even brought me flowers.

Magpie. Needle. Fructidor. Vendémiaire.

Four turns to the right, and the Austrian army would take me back to Vienna.

Four turns to the left, and the box would fill with ghosts.

My hearing was still good. I could hear the nearby bells of Sainte-Chapelle perfectly, but my vision was failing, my eyes starved either for things to look at or for food. By then I was eating nothing, though I'd still say grâce. Preparing to vanish, either out a door or up a chimney, which reminded me of how the old King used to climb onto the roof at Versailles and whisper down the chimney flues.

"Who are you?"

"I was called Marie Antoinette de Lorraine d'Autriche."

"Do you want counsel?"

"Yes."

When they finally brought me before the Revolutionary Tribunal I could scarcely see a thing. A huge dark hall, two candles, twelve jurors: a wigmaker, a cobbler, a cafe proprietor, a hatter, a printer, a musician, a lemonade seller, two carpenters, a surgeon, an ex-priest, a former marquis. Forty-one witnesses.

Who are you?

I was called Maria Antonia Josephina Johanna.

Do you want counsel?

I want my family.

My eyes failing but my ears still perfect — I could hear every whisper. Oho, look at her now, the bitch. That'll teach her to steal our food. But why is she drumming like that on the arm of the chair?

My mother stifling a yawn as my fingers flew across the keys of the clavichord. Les Barricades Mystérieuses. François Couperin. Sit straighter, Antonia. Do you want to end up with a hump?

To which the answer of course is no no no no no, unless to avoid it you have to die before the age of forty.

"Do you believe Kings are necessary for a people's happiness?"

"An individual cannot make such a decision."

The trial lasted two days. Among other things, I was accused of conspiring with my brother against France, of forcing my husband out the door and into a carriage bound for Varennes, of appointing perverse ministers, of engineering famine, of keeping the Swiss Guard in a state of perpetual drunkenness, of printing slanderous pamphlets about myself to arouse sympathy abroad, of having sex with my own son.

"Human nature cannot answer such a charge against a mother," I said. "I appeal to all the mothers in the room" — at which even the most crazed of the tricoteuses stood up in their red bonnets and cheered.

Naturally it didn't matter what I said.

Naturally I was found guilty.

Then it was Vendémiaire, the Feast Day of Saint Theresa, sacred to my mother, my daughter. Then it was Amaryllis, in the new calendar. A fine fresh day, a little mist, the sun trying to shine, and all the birds singing. Two hundred thousand people have fallen in love with you, said the Maréchal de Brissac twenty years earlier, when I made my triumphal entry into this same Parisian square. On that day, as now, people were selling cakes and lemonade. On that day, as now, everyone was in a state of high excitement.

October 16. Theresa, Amaryllis. I combed and powdered my hair. So thin, so white but with hints of fire, of who I used to be. My hair used to be beautiful. Also my eyes, also my mouth. I removed the bloody rag from be tween my legs, rolled it up and stuffed it in a chink in the wall. For posterity, I told myself, but I admit I was angry. Let posterity make what it would of menstrual blood. Rosalie was sobbing and to please her I ate a little bouillon. I dressed myself for the last time, in a gown of white piqué, a black slip, a muslin shawl, and my plum-colored high-heeled shoes.

When they went to bind my wrists, I put up a fight. You didn't bind my husband's wrists, I said. But when I saw the tumbril, I fell apart. My husband rode in a carriage, I told them. I squatted in the Mouse's Corner and relieved myself.

I was going. I was going.

Antonia, SIT UP STRAIGHT!

In the tumbril, riding backward, leaves and nuts raining from the trees. The sky blue now, dotted with clouds. Blue. Blue and white.

Though the soul has no spine. THE SOUL NO SPINE.

Antoinette. Antoinette.

He cut my hair, I stepped on his foot.

When you look up, clouds; when you look down, the same. Blue sky and clouds and, suddenly, water. Suddenly against the blue sky a spray of jewels.

Pardon, monsieur, I said. I did not mean to do it.