The Hidden Diary of Marie Antoinette Read online

  THE

  HIDDEN DIARY

  OF

  Marie Antoinette

  NONFICTION BY CAROLLY ERICKSON

  The Records of Medieval Europe

  Civilization and Society in the West

  The Medieval Vision

  Bloody Mary

  Great Harry

  The First Elizabeth

  Mistress Anne

  Our Tempestuous Day

  Bonnie Prince Charlie

  To the Scaffold

  Her Little Majesty

  Arc of the Arrow

  Great Catherine

  Josephine

  Alexandra

  Royal Panoply

  Lilibet

  The Girl from Botany Bay

  THE

  HIDDEN DIARY

  OF

  Marie Antoinette

  CAROLLY ERICKSON

  THE HIDDEN DIARY OF MARIE ANTOINETTE. Copyright © 2005 by Carolly Erickson. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.stmartins.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publicaton Data

  Erickson, Carolly.

  The hidden diary of Marie Antoinette : a novel / Carolly Erickson.—1st U.S.

  ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-312-33708-6

  EAN 978-0-312-33708-7

  1. Marie Antoinette Queen, consort of Louis XVI, King of France, 1754–1793—Fiction. 2. Louis XVI, King of France, 1754–1793—Fiction. 3. Fersen, Hans Axel von, greve, 1755–1810—Fiction. 4. France—History—Revolution, 1789–1799—Fiction. 5. France—History—Louis XVI, 1774–1793—Fiction. 6. Queens—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3605.R53H53 2005

  813′.6—dc22

  2005046584

  First Edition: September 2005

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To Raffaello

  THE

  HIDDEN DIARY

  OF

  Marie Antoinette

  PROLOGUE

  Conciergerie Prison

  October 3, 1793

  They say the fearsome thing doesn’t always work well.

  It takes three or four chops to sever the head. Sometimes the poor wretches scream horribly, for a full minute, before their agony is ended with a single massive blow.

  They say the amount of blood is remarkable. Streaming, cascading out, thick and dark red, more blood than you would imagine a person had in him. The heart goes on pumping it out, pulse after pulse, after the head is cut off.

  The executioner walks proudly to the edge of the scaffold, holding up the bleeding head, the eyes staring in surprise, the mouth open in a silent cry. And as he walks, he is drenched in the gushing blood.

  My husband had a lot of blood, they tell me. He was such a large, heavy man, strong and tough as an ox. A man of the outdoors, with a workman’s big, competent hands. It would have taken more than one slice of the blade to kill him.

  They wouldn’t let me watch him die. I know I could have given him strength at the end, if only I had been there with him. We went through so much together, Louis and I, right up until the day they came for him and took him away from me. He didn’t try to resist, that day when they came, the mayor and the others, to take him away. He merely called for his coat and hat and followed them. I never saw him again.

  I know he died well. They say he was calm and dignified, reading the psalms on the way to the open square where the huge machine with its slicing blade awaited him. I am told he ignored all the shouts and cries from the crowd, and did not look for rescue, though there were those who would gladly have saved him if they could. He undressed himself and opened the collar of his shirt and knelt to offer his neck to the blade, refusing to let them bind his hands like a common criminal.

  At the end he tried to say that he was innocent but they drowned him out with the noise of drums and rushed to drop the heavy blade.

  That was nine months ago. Now they will be coming for me, their former queen, Marie Antoinette, now known as Prisoner 280.

  I don’t know when it will be, but soon. I can tell by Rosalie’s face when she brings me my soup and lime-flower water. She has given up hope that I will be spared.

  At least they let me write in this journal. They will not let me knit or sew, because of the pointed needles—as if I had the strength to stab anyone!—but I am allowed to write, and my guards cannot read so what I write remains private. Rosalie can read some but she is discreet, she will not betray me.

  Writing helps me to forget this horrible dark little airless room in which I am confined, that stinks of rot and mildew and human waste. This awful cold and damp, my wet shoes and sore leg that throbs now more than ever, despite the linament that Rosalie rubs on it. The coarse guards that watch me and the others that stand outside my door, joking about me and laughing. The hard, cold cot I lie on at night, unable to sleep, crying my heart out over my son, my little chou d’amour, Louis-Charles. Or as I must call him now, King Louis XVII.

  Oh, if only I could still see him! My dearest child, my little boy-king.

  Until last August I saw him nearly every day, if I stood at the window of my old cell long enough. The horrible old ruffian who guards him, Antoine Simon, took him past my cell on his way to walk in the courtyard for exercise, making gross jokes and teaching him to sing the Marseillaise.

  Poor Louis-Charles, only eight years old, losing the father he loved and now deprived of his mother too. How I fought when they came to take him away from me. It took them nearly an hour. I would not let go of him, I yelled and threatened them. In the end I begged them, sobbing, not to take him from me. It was only when they said that they would kill both my children that I relented.

  What will they do to my boy? Poison him? Or worse, turn him into a little revolutionary, make him believe their lies. They will try to deny him his royal heritage, of course. No kings for them! And no queens either. Only Citoyen Capet and Veuve Capet, and our son Louis-Charles Capet, citizen of the French Republic.

  And what of my Mousseline, my Marie-Thérèse, my lovely daughter, only fourteen, so young. Far too young to be an orphan. I miss her, I miss all my children. Poor little Sophie, my baby, who was never well and who only lived a year. And my dearest Louis-Joseph, my firstborn, the poor crippled one, never strong, in his grave at Meudon. How many tears have I shed for him, for them all.

  I know that I suffer from an excess of emotion. It is because I am unwell, and because they give me so much lime-flower water and ether to drink. I do not have enough strength to keep my composure. I live on soup and bread, and I have become very thin. Rosalie has had to alter both my gowns to make them smaller. I bleed so much, and so often, that I know something is wrong, though they will not let me see a doctor.

  I am tired and full of tears and blood, but still I have not given up. In the messages Rosalie slips under my plate of soup, messages I read when I sit on the chamber pot, partly hidden from my guards by a screen, there is much hopeful news. The armies of Austria and Prussia are coming nearer, they are winning battle after battle against the rabble revolutionary forces. The Swedish may yet send a fleet to invade Normandy. Peasant armies in the Vendée—oh, thank heaven for the ever faithful Vendéans!—are fighting to restore the throne.

  It may yet happen, and I may live to see it. Paris may come under attack, and the revolution may be destroyed. My Louis-Charles may yet sit on his father’s throne.

  I am weary, I can write no
more. But I can read, until they come for me. I can read this journal, the only thing I have left from my youth. I like to reread it, to relive those happier times, before I learned how cruel the world can be. Before I became Queen Marie Antoinette, when I was simply Archduchess Antonia, living at the court of my dear mother Empress Maria Theresa in Vienna. With all my life ahead of me . . .

  ONE

  June 17, 1769

  My name is Archduchess Maria Antonia, called Antoinette, and I am thirteen years and seven months old, and this is the record of my life.

  Writing in this journal is my punishment. Father Kunibert, my confessor, has told me to write down all my sins in this journal so that I may reflect on them and pray for forgiveness.

  “Write!” he said, pushing the book toward me, his thick white eyebrows going up, making him look ferocious.

  “Write what you have done! Confess!”

  “But I have done nothing wrong,” I tell him.

  “Write it down. Then we will see. Put there everything you did, starting with last Friday. And leave nothing out!”

  Very well, I will put down in this book all that I did on the day I went to see Josepha, and what happened afterward, and then I will show Father Kunibert what I have written and make my confession.

  Tomorrow I will begin.

  June 18, 1769

  It is very hard and sad to write what happened, because I am so very sorry that my sister was in such pain. I tried to tell Father Kunibert this, but he just opened the journal and handed me the box of sharpened quills. He is a hard man, as Carlotta says. He does not listen to explanations.

  On Friday morning, then, this is what I did.

  I borrowed a plain black cloak and hood from my maid Sophie, and put a silver crucifix around my neck such as the Sisters of Mercy wear. I prepared a basket with fresh loaves and a ripe cheese and some strawberries from the palace garden. Without telling Sophie or anyone else where I was going, I went at night to the old abandoned stables where I was sure my sister Josepha was being kept.

  Josepha had been missing for a week, ever since she became hot with fever and began to cough. No one would tell me where she was, so I had to find out by asking the servants. Servants know everything that happens in the palace, even what goes on between the master and mistress in the privacy of their bedroom. I found out from Eric, the stable boy who grooms my riding horse Lysander that there was a sick girl in the basement of the old riding school. He had seen the Sisters of Mercy going there at night, and once he saw our court physician Dr. Van Swieten go in and come out again very quickly, holding a handkerchief over his mouth and looking very pale.

  I was sure my sister Josepha was there, lying in the dark probably, sick and lonely, waiting to die. I had to go to her. I had to tell her that she was not forgotten or abandoned.

  So I wrapped the black cloak around me and went out. The candle I carried guttered in the wind as I crossed the courtyard and made my way along the arcaded walkway and out into the stable yard. There were no lights in the old riding school, no one ever went there and no horses were kept tethered in its stalls.

  I tried to keep my thoughts on Josepha, but my fear rose as I entered the dark building with its high domed ceiling. Dim shapes loomed up amid the darkness. When I shone my light on them they turned out to be cupboards for harnesses and empty bins that had once held hay.

  All was silent, except for the creaking of the old timbers in the roof and the distant calling of the palace sentinels as they made their rounds. I found steps leading down into more darkness. I started to go down, praying that my candle would not go out, and trying not to think of the stories Sophie liked to tell about the palace ghost, the Gray Lady who walked weeping through the corridors at night and sometimes flew in at the windows.

  “Don’t be foolish, Antonia,” my mother would say when I asked her about the Gray Lady, “there are no ghosts. When we die, we die. We do not live on as disembodied spirits. Only peasants believe such nonsense.”

  I respected my mother’s wisdom, but I wasn’t sure about the ghosts. Sophie had seen the Gray Lady several times, she said, and many others had seen her too.

  To keep my mind off ghosts I called out to Josepha as I descended the stairs.

  I thought I heard a weak cry.

  I called out again, and this time I was sure I heard an answer.

  But the voice I heard was not my sister’s. Josepha had a strong, laughing voice. The voice I heard now was pinched and thin, and terribly anxious.

  “Don’t come any nearer, whoever you are,” it said. “I have the pox. If you come near me you will die.”

  “I hear you, I’m almost there,” I called out, ignoring the warning.

  I found her in a small, cell-like room where a lantern hanging from a nail in the wall gave the only light. I could not help but gag, the stench in the room was so overwhelming. A powerful, cloying odor, not the odor of decay or dirt but a sickly, ghastly stench of rot.

  From where she lay in her narrow bed Josepha lifted one weak arm as if to ward me off.

  “Please, dearest Antonia, turn back. Go back.”

  I was crying. What the weak lantern-light showed me was monstrous. Josepha’s skin was purple, and full of blisters. Her face was swollen and red, her cheeks puffed out grotesquely, and there was blood dripping from her nose. Her eyes were bloodshot.

  “I love you,” I said through my tears. “I am praying for you.” I put down the basket, wondering whether rats would come and eat the food I had brought. But then I thought, the smell in this room is so terrible not even rats would come near.

  “I am so thirsty,” came the voice from the bed.

  I took from my basket the bottle of wine I had brought and set it beside Josepha’s bed. With difficulty she raised herself, reached for the bottle and drank. I could tell she was having trouble swallowing.

  “Oh, Antonia,” she said when she had put the bottle down, “I have such terrible dreams! Fire coming down, and burning us all up. Mother on fire, screaming. Father, laughing while he watches us all burn.”

  “It is only the sickness that makes you dream such things. We are all safe, there is no fire.” But there is, I thought. There is the fire of the cowpox, that makes Josepha burn with fever and turns her brain to madness.

  “You must have medicine, you must get well.”

  “The sisters give me brandy and valerian, but it doesn’t help. I know they have given up on me.”

  “I have not. I will come back, I promise.”

  “No. Stay away. Everyone must stay away.”

  Her voice grew fainter. She was going to sleep. “Dear Antonia . . .”

  My tears were falling fast, but I knew I couldn’t stay. I couldn’t risk being missed. No one knew where I had gone, I hadn’t even told Carlotta, with whom I share my bedroom.

  So I left Josepha, and went back up the dark stairs and out through the old riding school and back along the torchlit arcade to the palace.

  The next day I was in the room when Dr. Van Swieten came to see my mother the empress. My brother Joseph, who is twenty-six and who has just buried his second wife, was also there. Ever since our father died, our mother has looked to Joseph for help in governing her many lands. One day after she dies Joseph will rule them all, so he needs to learn. Already he has the firmness that my mother says all rulers need. But I have heard her say to Count Khevenhüller that Joseph does not yet have the necessary compassion and concern for people that he will need if he is to rule well.

  “What of Josepha?” my mother asked the doctor as he bowed and murmured “Your imperial highness.”

  “It is the black pox.”

  I saw my mother blanch, and Joseph turn his face away. The black pox was the severest kind of cowpox. No one ever survived it. When there was black pox in Vienna we children were always taken away at once into the country, so that we would not become ill. Servants with black pox were turned out of the palace and sent as far away as possible. None ever returned. And now
my sister Josepha was dying of it too.

  “It is perfectly horrifying,” the doctor was saying. “I have seen it often before. There is no point in trying to preserve life once the pox takes hold. The archduchess cannot be saved. She can only make others ill.”

  “Is she receiving every care?” I heard my mother ask.

  “Of course. The Sisters of Mercy visit her, and the dairymaids.” It was well known that dairymaids were spared from being struck down with the cowpox. For some reason, they could care for sick people without fear of becoming sick themselves.

  “No one must know who she is,” Joseph boomed out. “No one from the court must be allowed near her. We cannot have another outbreak of Pox Fear, like last summer.”

  Whenever the cowpox appeared, people panicked. The entire town caught the Pox Fear. There were frenzied efforts to escape the sickness. Terrified householders, trying to flee, were trampled or crushed to death.

  No one wanted the Pox Fear to invade the palace, where hundreds of servants and officials lived in close quarters and served the empress and our family.

  “That is understood,” Dr. Van Swieten said. “The archduchess is being kept where no one will find her.”

  I almost spoke up then, but managed to hold my tongue. Standing beside my mother, I heard her black silk skirts rustling, and was aware that she was trembling.

  “I can’t lose any more of my children,” she was saying. “First my dear Karl, and then Johanna, only eleven when she died, poor girl, and now my lovely Josepha, so young, and about to be married—”

  “You have ten of us left, maman.” Joseph’s voice was cutting. He knew that although he was the eldest son, and our mother’s heir, she had preferred Karl, and loved him more. “Surely ten children is a sufficient number.”

  I am fond of my brother Joseph, but he does not understand what it is to love someone. When our father died four years ago he did not weep, but snorted with contempt.

  “He was a lazy do-nothing, surrounded by idle hangers-on,” I heard him say. He refused even to lay a wreath on father’s grave, though he did offer his arm to mother at the funeral.