As the cart lurched along the quayside and past the old clock tower, hundreds of people, their faces twisted with rage, shaking their fists, brandishing clubs and knives, pitchforks and bottles, poured toward them from every direction. The gendarmes accompanying the cart could barely keep them from overturning the tumbrel and tearing Marie Antoinette limb from limb on the spot. A famous actor, Grammont, rode in front, and attempted to divert the crowd by waving his sword in the air and shouting assuredly, “She’s done for, my friends! The infamous Antoinette! Have no fear—she’ll soon be roasting in hell!”
But that didn’t stop the curses and the spittle and the rotten fruit from being thrown. The marquis could only wonder at the queen’s composure. She sat erect in the cart, her head high, her chin thrust out, determined, it would seem, to emulate the sangfroid displayed by her late husband. Sant’Angelo did whatever he could do, blocking what projectiles he could without giving himself away, and once, when one of the savages tried to leap into the cart, kicking him in the face so hard his teeth exploded like sparks. The man, not knowing what had happened, staggered back into the street, blood gushing between the fingers he held to his stunned mouth.
The journey seemed interminable, and Sant’Angelo assumed that the driver had been instructed to take the more roundabout route in order to prolong the queen’s agony. On the narrower streets, heads poked out of windows above the procession, and in one of them the marquis saw the painter Jacques-Louis David perched on the sill, hastily drawing in a sketchpad on his lap. On the rue St. Honoré, he saw a silent priest, nodding his head in a benediction to the passing queen. Only once did the mob thin, and that was as the tumbrel passed the Jacobin Club, where loitering was not allowed. Nearby, in the Maison Duplay, behind the shutters he always kept drawn, lived the ruthless mastermind of the Revolution, Maximilien Robespierre. But he was nowhere to be seen this day.
Even the heavy, slow-moving horses, called rosinantes, were meant to be an affront to the queen’s dignity. These were not carriage horses, accustomed to city traffic, but lumbering beasts, used for drawing plows, and the driver had to calm them down and keep them from trying to bolt. Several times the queen was nearly toppled over by a sudden lurch, and the marquis put out a hand to steady her. But in her mind she was clearly so far away, her eyes focused on something no one else could see, that his touch did not even register.
And then the cart slowly turned into the rue Royale, where the sound of the waiting mob, tens of thousands of them gathered in the Place de la Révolution, swelled like the crashing of an ocean wave. The cart rumbled on, past the palace of the Tuileries, where the king and queen had spent so many happy times with their children. The marquis himself had given an impromptu flute lesson to their daughter, Marie Thérèse, in a music room off the mezzanine there. Marie Antoinette’s gaze lifted at the sight of the gates and terraces and momentarily glistened with tears.
And above the roar of the crowd, he could hear the guillotine, even now going about its business. Prisoners were being dispatched with grim regularity, their demise signaled by a succession of distinctive sounds. First, there was the dropping of the bascule, the plank on which the victim was laid flat. Then, after the plank was slid into place, there was the bang of the lunette, the wooden pillory, which locked the victim’s head, facedown, beneath the blade. And finally the swishing of the blade itself, as it plunged eighteen feet, then rebounded, splashed with blood and bits of flesh.
Depending on the notoriety of the beheaded, all of this was immediately followed by general exultation, as the executioner wiped his instrument off and his crew threw buckets of water on the platform to wash it clean.
Armed guards had to force a path through the mob for the queen’s tumbrel, which gradually drew to the foot of the scaffold and stopped. Antoinette, who had barely even seen the sun or breathed fresh air for months, struggled to stand up, and Sant’Angelo quickly put an arm around her waist and helped her to keep her balance as she stepped from the unsteady cart. For a moment, she seemed bewildered at this strange sensation of assistance, and looked around, but he said nothing to give himself away.
Let her imagine it to be an angel at her side, he thought.
With her hands still bound behind her, and unknowingly supported by the marquis’s unseen arm, she ascended the stairs, her plum-colored slippers sliding on the slick wood. Purely by accident, she stepped on the foot of the executioner.
“I am sorry, monsieur,” she said instinctively. “I did not do it on purpose.”
And then, as the marquis stood helplessly by, Marie Antoinette was laid on the plank and her neck was clamped into the lunette. Just below her, the eager spectators jockeyed for position, the better to dip their hats and handkerchiefs in her blood. Among them Sant’Angelo saw Hébert’s companion, the man with the long white feather in his cap. He was dancing a jig in anticipation.
And then the executioner took a step back and released the gleaming blade. It hurtled down with a rattle and a crash. When the head was displayed—its mouth open, its eyes bulging wide—a cheer like nothing the marquis had ever heard before went up from the happy crowd.
Chapter 28