Throwing off his robe, he dressed quickly in the priestly black vestments he had set aside in the armoire and concealed the garland under his starched white collar; then he hung the harpe—the short sword with its distinctive notched end—beneath his robe and stuck a sack of gold coins in his pocket. Racing down the stairs with a letter and a breviary in hand, he passed Ascanio and warned him to have the carriage ready for a hasty departure to the Chateau Perdu later that day.
“Keep the horses in harness and the curtains drawn!” he bellowed, as he raced into the streets of Paris.
Although the queen had been interrogated for the past two days, the sentence of death had only been passed at four in the morning, and the whole city was abuzz. Everywhere, people were gathered at street corners, or in the doorways of shops and taverns, chattering away, laughing, slapping each other on the back, singing a few bars of “La Marseillaise.” It was a holiday mood, and Sant’Angelo’s heart sickened.
What did they truly know of the woman who had been sentenced?
He, too, had heard the vile stories that had been spread for years.
That she had purchased a diamond necklace with two million livres stolen from the national treasury.
That she and her loyal retainers Lamballe and Polignac had enticed the members of her Swiss Guard to join them in orgies at Le Petit Trianon.
That she had advised the starving peasants, who had no bread, to eat cake.
But all of the stories, he knew, were lies—lies designed to sell papers and pamphlets. Calumnies whose sole purpose was to inflame the mob and feed the fires of the Revolution—fires that needed constant stoking. For all of their talk of reform and revolution, the likes of Danton and Robespierre and Marat had plunged the country into even greater turmoil and despair, into war with neighboring countries and abject poverty at home. If these self-anointed leaders did not keep the people aroused with calls to preserve the Revolution, or to defend it from one imaginary foe after another, then the people might shake themselves awake from the trance they were in and begin to question the very men who had drenched their streets in blood and made France a pariah among the civilized nations of the world.
Even his clerical garb, with his broad-brimmed black hat shielding his face, made Sant’Angelo an object of unwelcome attention on the streets. Much of the clergy had been purged, and only those priests who had taken the constitutional oath were permitted to perform the customary ecclesiastical functions. Marie Antoinette had never wavered from her firm Catholic faith, and the marquis knew that she would never admit to her presence—much less make her final confession to—any clergyman who had sworn such an oath.
But he also knew that, once she saw his face beneath the black brim, she would understand that something else was afoot.
As he approached the Conciergerie, once a Merovingian palace, but now—along with the Tour de L’Horloge and the Palais de Justice—the hub of the Revolutionary Tribunal, he could feel its silent menace poisoning the very air. A Gothic fortress, it was recognizable from afar by its three towers—the Caesar Tower, named for the Roman emperor; the Silver Tower, so-called because it reputedly held the royal treasury at one time; and the third and most awful tower of all, the Bonbec, or “good beak.” The name was inspired by the “singing” of the prisoners who were consigned to its torture chambers.
The marquis hurried along the banks of the Seine as it caught the full morning light, and across the old stone bridge. There was a strange heavy air in the courtyard, compounded of victory, revenge, and a vague sense of unease. Even the hostlers and guards, going about their usual business, seemed to feel the weight of what they were about to do. Killing the king had been bad enough; killing the queen, the weaker vessel, the mother of two living children and the last person who would ever sit upon a throne of France, felt, even to some of the firebrands among them, fundamentally ignoble.
In all the commotion and confusion—horses being tethered to the tumbrels, gendarmes reading out the lists of those to be executed that morning and corralling them into the waiting carts, lawyers searching for their doomed clients—the marquis was able to make swift progress toward the queen’s own chambers in the inner courtyard. Looking up, he could see the narrow window of her cell, not only barred but partially blocked up. Two sentries stood at the door to the tower, and he brandished his letter of authorization from the Tribunal (which he had forged several weeks before, and signed in the name of Fouquier Tinville, the principal prosecutor in the case against the queen). He watched their worried faces as they debated its merits.
“Come, come,” the marquis said impatiently, “the widow Capet is entitled to her last communion.” The words—the widow Capet—were like ashes on his tongue, but that was how the court now referred to her. The ancestors of Louis XVI had borne that ordinary surname.
“But she already refused a priest yesterday,” one of them objected.
“She wasn’t on her way to the guillotine then.”