MARIE ANTOINETTE

Stereotyped sights are rarely the most engrossing. At the Palace of Versailles the petits appartements de la Reine, those tiny rooms whose grey old-world furniture might have been in use yesterday, to me hold more actuality than all the regal salons in whose vast emptiness footsteps reverberate like echoes from the past.

In the pretty sitting-room the coverings to-day are a reproduction of the same pale blue satin that draped the furniture in the days when queens preferred the snug seclusion of those dainty rooms overlooking the dank inner courtyard to the frigid grandeur of their State chambers. Therein it was that Marie Leczinska was wont to instruct her young daughters in the virtues as she had known them in her girlhood’s thread-bare home, not as her residence at the profligate French Court had taught her to understand them.

The heavy gilt bolts bearing the interlaced initials M.A. remind us that these, too, were the favourite rooms of Marie Antoinette, and that in all probability the cunningly entwined bolts were the handiwork of her honest spouse, who wrought at his blacksmith forge below while his wife flirted above. But in truth the petits appartements are instinct with memories of Marie Antoinette, and it is difficult to think of any save only her occupying them. The beautiful coffre presented to her with the layette of the Dauphin still stands on a table in an adjoining chamber, and the paintings on its white silk casing are scarcely faded yet, though the decorative ruching of green silk leaves has long ago fallen into decay.

A step farther is the little white and gold boudoir which still holds the mirror that gave the haughty Queen her first premonition of the catastrophe that awaited her. Viewed casually the triple mirror, lining an alcove wherein stands a couch garlanded with flowers, betrays no sinister qualities. But any visitor who approaches looking at his reflection where at the left the side panels meet the angle of the wall, will be greeted by a sight similar to that whose tragic suggestion made even the haughty Queen pause a moment in her reckless career. For in the innocent appearing mirrors the gazer is reflected without a head.

It was through this liliputian suite, this strip of homeliness so artfully introduced into a palace, that Marie Antoinette fled on that fateful August morning when the mob of infuriated women invaded the Chateau.

Knowing this, I was puzzling over the transparent fact that either of the apparent exits would have led her directly into the hands of the enemy, when the idea of a secret staircase suggested itself. A little judicious inquiry elicited the information that one did exist. “But it is not seen. It is locked. To view it, an order from the Commissary that is necessary,” explained the old guide.

To know that a secret staircase, and one of such vivid historical importance, was at hand, and not to have seen it would have been too tantalising. The “Commissary” was an unknown quantity, and for a space it seemed as though our desire would be ungratified. Happily the knowledge of our interest awoke a kindly reciprocity in our guide, who, hurrying off, quickly returned with the venerable custodian of the key. A moment later, the unobtrusive panel that concealed the exit flew open at its touch, and the secret staircase, dark, narrow, and hoary with the dust of years, lay before us.

Many must have been the romantic meetings aided by those diminutive steps, but, peering into their shadows, we saw nothing but a vision of Marie Antoinette, half clad in dishevelled wrappings of petticoat and shawl, flying distracted from the vengeance of the furies through the refuge of the low-roofed stairway.

In my ingenuous youth, when studying French history, I evolved a theory which seemed, to myself at least, to account satisfactorily for the radical differences distinguishing Louis XVI. from his brothers and antecedents. Finding that, when a delicate infant, he had been sent to the country to nurse, I rushed to the conclusion that the royal infant had died, and that his foster-mother, fearful of the consequences, had substituted a child of her own in his place. The literature of the nursery is full of instances that seemed to suggest the probability of my conjecture being correct.

As a youth, Louis had proved himself both awkward and clumsy. He was loutish, silent in company, ill at ease in his princely surroundings, and in all respects unlike his younger brothers. He was honest, sincere, pious, a faithful husband, a devoted father; amply endowed, indeed, with the middle-class virtues which at that period were but rarely found in palaces. To my childish reasoning the most convincing proof lay in his innate craving for physical labour; a craving that no ridicule could dispel.

With the romantic enthusiasm of youth, I used to fancy the peasant mother stealing into the Palace among the spectators who daily were permitted to view the royal couple at dinner, and imagine her, having seen the King, depart glorying secretly in the strategy that had raised her son to so high an estate. There was another picture, in whose dramatic misery I used to revel. It showed the unknown mother, who had discovered that by her own act she had condemned her innocent son to suffer for the sins of past generations of royal profligates, journeying to Paris (in my dreams she always wore sabots and walked the entire distance in a state of extreme physical exhaustion) with the intention of preventing his execution by declaring his lowly parentage to the mob. The final tableau revealed her, footsore and weary, reaching within sight of the guillotine just in time to see the executioner holding up her son’s severed head. I think my imaginary heroine died of a broken heart at this juncture, a catastrophe that would naturally account for her secret dying with her.

During our winter stay at Versailles, my childish phantasies recurred to me, and I almost found them feasible. What an amazing irony of fate it would have shown had a son of the soil expired to expiate the crimes of sovereigns!

But more pitiful by far than the saddest of illusions is the sordid reality of a scene indelibly imprinted on my mental vision. Memory takes me back to the twilight of a spring Sunday several years ago, when in the wake of a cluster of market folks we wandered into the old Cathedral of St. Denis. Deep in the sombre shadows of the crypt a light gleamed faintly through a narrow slit in the stone wall. Approaching, we looked into a gloomy vault wherein, just visible by the ray of a solitary candle, lay two zinc coffins.

Earth holds no more dismal sepulchre than that dark vault, through the crevice in whose wall the blue-bloused marketers cast curious glances. Yet within these grim coffins lie two bodies with their severed heads, all that remains mortal of the haughty Marie Antoinette and other humble spouse.