“Time’s up,” Hébert said, striding into the room. Right behind him, he had a barber, carrying a rusty pair of scissors. “Move along now, priest.”
Shoving Sant’Angelo aside, he yanked away the muslin fichu draped around the queen’s shoulders and said to the barber, “Start cutting.” The barber gathered whatever he could of her hair and sheared it off as if she were a sheep.
“We don’t want anything to impede the razor, do we?” Hébert gloated.
When the cutting was done, the queen was thrown a white linen bonnet, with two black strings to tie it behind.
“Stand up,” Hébert barked, and the marquis could tell he took exquisite pleasure in every discourtesy he could show her. “Put your hands behind your back.”
At this, even Antoinette seemed surprised, and said, “You did not bind the hands of the king.”
“And that was a mistake,” he replied, pulling her wrists back, then knotting a rope around them. Her shoulders were so sharp, it looked as if they might pierce the cloth of her simple white dress.
“Time to go,” Hébert said, nudging the queen with his knee, the way one might nudge a turkey toward the chopping block.
With the Chief of the Committee of Public Safety in the front, and his minions on either side of her, Marie Antoinette was led through the anteroom and down the winding stair. For a moment, the marquis considered attacking them all right then and there, and dragging her off, but he knew that even the queen would resist him. She was reconciled to her fate and did not so much as look back at him.
But he would not—he could not—abandon her. Even the king had been allowed the company and solace of his own abbé, Edge-worth de Firmont, on the way to his execution. Marie Antoinette had no one. Alone in the cell, Sant’Angelo tossed the black hat in the corner, along with the breviary, and lifted the garland to his own head. Made so long ago, from the bulrushes surrounding Medusa’s pool, twisted and gilded together in the solitude of his studio, he placed it on his own head.
But the effect, as he knew, was not instantaneous.
Rather, it was as if he had stepped beneath the cascade of water spilling over the lip of the Gorgon’s rock. The top of his head felt anointed, then his face, and neck, and shoulders. Slowly, the sensation, like a trickle of cool water, worked its way all the way down his body, and even as he looked on, his chest, then his legs, then his feet too, disappeared. He was as solid as ever—something he sometimes forgot, when he banged into a doorframe or stumbled over a stool—but he was utterly invisible to the mortal eye.
By the time he had managed to get downstairs, carefully avoiding any contact with the turnkeys or the guards, the queen was being led toward a rickety tumbrel. Her husband, he knew, had been transported to his death in a closed carriage, safe from the howls and imprecations of the mob, but Hébert seemed determined to miss no opportunity to torment the widow Capet. Her steps faltered as she realized that this was to be the way in which she was conveyed to her death, and she had to turn to Hébert and beg him to untie her hands for just a moment.
Hébert nodded at one of his men, wearing a red stocking cap with a white feather stuck in it, who undid the knot, and the queen, desperately seeking some corner of the courtyard that might afford her some privacy, scurried toward a wall, and lifting her hem, squatted there, her pale face reddening with shame, meeting no one’s eye.
As soon as she was done, Hébert had her hands retied and she was thrust back into the open cart. Stepping into it, she naturally sat facing the front, as she had always done in her coach, but the driver, not unkindly, directed her to sit with her back to the horses. This, the marquis knew, was to keep the prisoners from catching sight of the looming guillotine until the last moments of their journey.
And just as the cart jolted to a start, Sant’Angelo leapt up into it. For a second, the horses slowed, reacting to the added weight, but then plodded on, out of the Cour de Mai, where all was relatively silent and restrained, out of the Conciergerie, with its thick walls and lofty towers, and, finally, into the open streets of the city … where madness reigned.
The marquis had never seen a more frightening sight, even in the underworld.