Виктория Холт - Flaunting, Extravagant Queen

‘What?’ said the boy.

Simon winked.

He then taught the boy how to masturbate. It was all part of the duties outlined to him by Hébert.

* * *

‘Who taught you that?’ demanded Simon.

‘You did,’ said the boy.

‘That’s a lie.’

‘But you … you did … You know you did!’

A blow sent the Dauphin reeling across the room. He was startled. He had never been treated in such a way before. He stared in astonishment at Simon.

‘Now, not so many lies,’ said Simon. ‘You’ve got to tell the truth like a patriot.’

‘I was telling the truth.’

Simon caught the boy by his ear.

‘When I say who taught you that, you give me the truth. You say, my mother.’

The boy flushed scarlet. ‘My mother … But … she … she must not know of this. She … she would be … very angry. She would be ashamed of it.’ His lips trembled. ‘Please let me go back to my mother.’

Simon shook the boy’s head to and fro, still gripping his ear violently. ‘Didn’t I tell you I wanted the truth?’

The boy looked bewildered.

‘Listen here,’ said Simon. ‘Your mother taught you that. When you slept in the bed with her.’

The boy was silent, the pain in his ear made him want to scream.

‘Yes, you used to lie between her and your aunt, and they used to say, do that … and they laughed at you, while you did it.’

The boy shook his head. It was too fantastic. His mother to do such a thing! His saintly aunt! He longed to be with them; he longed to return to sanity.

‘And I’ll tell you something else your mother did, shall I? She used to hold you tight against her …’ Simon released the boy’s ear and put his foul mouth against it.

His whispering words made the boy feel that he had stepped into some fantastically horrible world which was quite outside his comprehension.

Simon finished by saying: ‘Now that’s what really happened. Is it not so?’

‘It … it couldn’t,’ said the Dauphin.

Simon shook him until his teeth chattered and the room swung round him.

‘I tell you it did.’

‘It didn’t … it didn’t … it didn’t!’ sobbed the Dauphin.

Simon’s foul face was close to the boy’s. He said: ‘I’m going to teach you to speak the truth … no matter what I have to do to you.’

The Dauphin stared at him with horrified eyes. This was like one of his nightmares coming true. He shook his head dumbly.

But Simon was not perturbed. A few beatings … a few days all alone … on black bread and lentils … then they would see.

Simon would not disappoint Hébert. They would make the boy admit anything they wanted him to. After all, he was only eight years old.

* * *

Madame Tison dreamed terrible dreams. She dreamed that her bedroom was filled with headless corpses which marched towards her, getting nearer and nearer. They carried their heads before them, and the eyes in their heads accused her while the lips chanted: ‘Madame Tison, your turn will come.’

Often she dreamed of the Queen, the Queen with her arms outstretched, the Queen crying for her son.

When she saw the Queen standing at the window hoping for a glimpse of the Dauphin, she shared her misery.

Her husband was brutal to her; he struck her once or twice. ‘What’s come over you? Do you want to lose us our job? We’re in clover here. Do you want to get us turned out of the prison?’

She was sent for that she might be questioned.

‘Go on,’ said Tison. ‘What are you waiting for?’

‘I do not want to tell them,’ she said. ‘I do not want to be their spy.’

Her husband advanced, his arm lifted to strike her. ‘You’ll go,’ he said, ‘and you’ll tell them about that new guard we saw talking to Elisabeth.’

So she went and, as though under a spell, she told.

When she returned to the prison she burst into the Queen’s quarters. Madame Royal was sitting at the table staring ahead of her; Madame Elisabeth was praying; and the Queen was at the window, hoping for a glimpse of the Dauphin.

Madame Tison ran to the Queen and threw herself at her feet; she took the hem of her dress and looked imploringly up at Antoinette.

‘Madame, forgive me,’ she cried. ‘I am going mad. I am a miserable sinner. I have spied on you … They are watching you all the time, because they want to murder you as they murdered the King … Madame, I beg your forgiveness for what I have done.’

The Queen’s face softened immediately. ‘You must not be distressed. What have you done you have been made to do. And you have lately been very kind.’

‘I am going mad … mad, Madame. These terrible dreams. … I cannot live with them. They haunt me … they will not leave me …’

The guards came in. They seized her and took her away.

That night the news went round the Temple: ‘Madame Tison has gone mad.’

* * *

The Queen was at the barred window. He could not see her but she could catch a glimpse of him now and then. How he had changed! He no longer seemed like her little boy. His clothes were stained and greasy; his hair was unkempt.

He shouted as he ran about the courtyard. That gross man, Simon, played games with him … rough games.

They sang together. Antoinette recognised the revolutionary song ‘Ça ira’. It was strange to hear those words on the lips of a son of the royal house.

But was he well? Was he happy?

If only she might speak to him, have his own assurance that all was well with him.

‘My darling boy …’ she murmured.

Then she heard the thin reedy voice of her son singing in the courtyard below.

‘Allons, enfants de la patrie …’

‘They have taken him from me completely,’ she told herself. ‘What does anything matter now? Surely I have touched the nadir of all my sorrows.’

But she was wrong. A greater sorrow awaited her.

* * *

It was decided that the time had come for the Queen to stand her trial.

One August morning a carriage came to the door of the Temple. With resignation Antoinette said good-bye to Madame Elisabeth and Madame Royale.

She seemed dazed as she walked out of the Temple; and as she passed under the low porch she forgot to stoop, and knocked her head on the hard stone.

‘You have hurt yourself,’ said one of the guards, overcome by compassion.

‘Nothing can hurt me now,’ she answered.

She stepped into the carriage and was taken to the Conciergerie.

There was little comfort in the Conciergerie.

She was taken to a small room with barred windows recently vacated by an old General who had left that day in a tumbril for the Place de la Revolution.

Moisture trickled down the walls of the cell and it was impossible to keep the mattress dry.

The Conciergerie was known throughout Paris as the prison of doom. Few left it nowadays except for that last journey to the guillotine.

Hébert was inflaming the people against the Queen. It was time, he said, that she tried on Samson’s necktie. It was time the executioner should play ball with the she-wolf’s head. She should be chopped into mincemeat to pay for the blood she had on her conscience.

But the military commanders were not eager for the death of Antoinette. The war was going less satisfactorily, and it was felt that alive she could be used to bargain with the Austrian enemy.

* * *

Fersen was in despair when he heard of her removal to the Conciergerie, and at the root of his fear was his feeling of helplessness.

He wrote to his sister: ‘Since I have heard that the Queen is in the Conciergerie, I have no longer felt that I am alive, for it is not life to exist as I do and to suffer the pains which I now endure. If I could do something to bring about her release my agony would be less. It is terrible that all I can do is to go about imploring others to act. I would give my life to save her. My greatest happiness would be to die that she might live. I reproach myself for breathing this pure air while she is in that loathsome place. My life is poisoned, so that I veer from pain to wrath and from wrath back to pain.’

But Fersen was powerless. He could only mourn.

* * *

There was more kindness in the Conciergerie than there had been in the Temple. Was this because the place was known as the ‘ante-room of death’?

The jailer’s wife, Madame Richard, was a kindly woman. She was charmed by the Queen’s graciousness and did all she could for her comfort. She made her husband fit a piece of carpet over that part of the ceiling through which the water dripped onto the bed. And when Madame Richard’s little boy came into the cell, the Queen embraced him because he was as fair-haired as the Dauphin was, and of the same age.

‘You see, Madame Richard,’ she said, ‘he reminds me of my own son.’

Madame Richard turned away to hide her tears, and after that she asked the police commissioner, Michonis, who had been a lemonade-seller before the revolution and was now an inspector of prisoners, if he would discover and bring news of the Queen’s children. ‘For what harm can that do to the Republic?’ she asked. ‘And look what good it can do to a poor mother!’

So Michonis, who was a good-hearted man, brought little bits of news about Madame Elisabeth and Madame Royale. The Dauphin was well and not unhappy, he said. ‘These young children,’ he added, ‘they are resilient. They recover from griefs more quickly than we do.’