MAISON BEAULIEUAB ÉDITIONS · CUISINE & LETTRESMAISON BEAULIEUAB ÉDITIONS · CUISINE & LETTRES“The chamber of the Princesse de Lamballe.”The Prisons of Europe · Volume IV
In the frozen corridors of the Marais, on the terrible night when the Queen’s angel crossed the wicket gate of eternity.
Beneath the low, greasy skies of Paris, at the corner of the Rue Saint-Antoine and the Rue du Roi-de-Sicile, once rose a civil fortress whose very name made the passerby turn pale: La Force. Raised upon the ruins of the proud townhouse of the Duc de Caumont la Force, the jail had been hollowed out under Louis XVI to swallow up insolvent debtors, insubordinate actors, and petty pickpockets. Yet behind these thick limestone ramparts, the royal authorities had grafted a still more clandestine cloaca: the Petite-Force, reserved for public women and female suspects. There reigned a labyrinth of narrow courtyards—the Cour Saint-Bernard, the Cour de la Boucherie—paved with slimy flagstones and girded by monumental grilles bristling with iron spikes. In this opening week of September 1792, the stench of rotting straw was no longer enough to mask that of curdled blood. Paris was beating to quarters, the tocsin pealed like a continuous death rattle, and the people in arms, convinced of an internal conspiracy, were converging upon the prisons with axes and rusted pikes.
The turnkeys, accustomed to extorting ruined marquises for a truss of fresh straw or a pitcher of Argenteuil wine, clutched their great iron keys against their leather aprons. The massive bolts could no longer shield a soul. In the registry office, the sheepskin-bound gaol ledgers lay piled beneath the flies, defiled with violet ink and drops of tallow. A dull roar, made of thousands of hobnailed footsteps and guttural vociferations, rose from the roadway. They were butchering at the Abbaye, slitting throats at the Châtelet; and now the tumultuous flood was surging toward La Force.
On the first floor of the Petite-Force, a meager tallow dip flickered inside the bottom of a broken glass. The cell was stripped almost bare: a webbing cot, a straw-bottomed chair, an ivory crucifix. There kept vigil Marie-Thérèse-Louise de Savoie-Carignan, widowed Princesse de Lamballe and intimate confidante to Marie-Antoinette. Torn from the keep of the Temple only weeks earlier, the princess had spurned the golden exile of England to share the death agony of her sovereign masters. Her attire still retained a rumpled elegance: a gown of white silk strewn with small violet florets, and a gauze bonnet holding back her ash-blonde hair.
“Madame, arise, you must go down! They are throwing open the cells one by one!”
It was the voice of an under-jailer, cracked with terror, whispering through the iron-banded judas-hole. The night had been one protracted agony. From the flickering night-light to the iron bars of her window, the clamor of the street had ascended, mournful and sinister, driven by the rhythmic refrain of the Ça ira, broken by pleas for mercy that were silenced with a sabre stroke. The princess did not weep. Her delicate hands, of a marble whiteness, clasped her Book of Hours. She knew that two trusted National Guardsmen, purchased at the price of gold by her father-in-law, the Duc de Penthièvre, were lurking in the shadows to snatch her from the carnage. But along the corridors, whose stone walls wept with saltpeter, the sinister clanking of sabres dragged over the pavement announced that the slaughterers had breached the outer portcullis.
At six o’clock on the morning of September 3rd, the iron-studded door of her cell was wrenched open with violence. Two men with faces blackened by gunpowder, their bare arms splashed with scarlet gore, strode into the room. “Come now, march! The people will hear you!” The princess faltered, then drew herself upright. Hemmed in by these furies, she descended the spiral stairway, nearly slipping upon the damp steps, from which rose the lukewarm vapor of an improvised slaughterhouse. They hurried her into the vestibule of the prison registry.
Behind a table of plain deal, piled high with jugs of cheap wine, broken pipes, and the prison’s open ledgers, sat two municipal commissioners wearing sullied tricolor sashes. One of them leafed feverishly through the committal register: name, forenames, rank. The makeshift jurymen—artisans from the faubourg and butchers from the Marché des Innocents—smoked in silence, their eyes glazed with drunkenness and exhaustion. The interrogation was curt, rushed through like a bureaucratic formality in the midst of pandemonium:
“Who are you?”
“Marie-Thérèse-Louise of Savoy, Princesse de Lamballe.”
“Your quality?”
“Superintendent of the Queen’s household.”
“Had you knowledge of the plots of the Court?”
“If there were plots, I knew nothing of them.”
The president of this improvised court leaned forward, fixing the prisoner with reddened eyes:
“Swear to liberty, to equality, and swear hatred to the King and Queen!”
The princess shuddered, yet her bearing remained as haughty as it had been at Versailles:
“The first oath I will take readily. The second I cannot. It is not in my heart.”
A murmur ran through the men in carmagnoles. One of the municipal officers leaned down and whispered frantically: “Swear it, wretched woman, or you are lost!” She turned her head aside with gentle resolve. Thereupon, the president brought his heavy hand down upon the register and pronounced the formula of acquittal which, in the dread cant of the butchers of La Force, was a sentence of irrevocable death:
“Let Madame be released.”
The fatal phrase echoed beneath the stone vaulting. Two men seized her by the armpits. She was not led back to her chamber; she was thrust toward the low wicket opening directly onto the blind alley of the Rue du Roi-de-Sicile. The instant she crossed the iron wicket, the stench of the charnel house struck her full in the face. The alley was choked with a mountain of corpses stripped of their garments, piled high upon the red cobblestones where a crimson rivulet trickled sluggishly along the gutter.
Her satin slipper had scarcely grazed the mud without when a butcher’s boy struck her behind the neck with a wooden billet. The unhappy woman uttered a muffled cry and collapsed across the heap of the butchered. In a single heartbeat, the pack fell upon her. Pikes were thrust into her flesh; sabres tore through the white silk. In that dim, dismal alley of the Marais, La Force had just inscribed the darkest and most indelible page of its annals. Later, her severed head, powdered and coiffed in cruel derision, was hoisted upon the point of a pike to be borne as a trophy beneath the windows of the Temple, wresting a cry of sheer horror from the lips of Marie-Antoinette.
Many decades later, when the demolisher’s hammer came to throw down the lofty curtain walls of La Force to open the Rue Malher, the workmen uncovered, beneath the paving stones of that accursed wicket, rusted iron rings and anonymous human bones. The memory of the princess still hovered among the rubble—the everlasting ghost of a royal prison crushed beneath the wheel of the Terror.