“You must do exactly what I tell you to do,” he said.
“You cannot give communion.”
“I can do better than that.”
She looked at him without any expression at all, as if perhaps unsure that he was really there at all.
“We can make our escape, if you will only believe me and do exactly as I say.”
“My dear friend,” she said resignedly, “it is over for me. I am only concerned now that you have placed yourself in such danger.” She struggled to sit upright, and he held her by one delicate elbow until she had managed it.
Reaching under his collar, as if merely to remove the purple stole, he withdrew the hidden garland and held it low, between his knees, where it would be concealed by the breviary.
“I cannot ask you to understand this, but I can beg you to believe it. This wreath, placed upon your head, will render you invisible.”
“Oh, now you sound like our old friend Count Cagliostro,” she said, dismissing his words with a sad smile.
“His powers paled compared to mine,” Sant’Angelo said. “Don’t you remember that night at the Trianon?”
“Yes, of course I do,” she said absently, “please take no offense. But even if I could escape, as you say,” and she spoke, as if trying to reason calmly with a madman, “I would not do so. Not so long as my children were held here, too.”
The marquis had assumed she would say as much. “But they are merely children,” he tried to assure her. “They won’t be harmed.”
“Are you so sure?”
The marquis was not sure at all; the present barbarity knew no bounds. “But we can find a way to rescue them, too. For now, however, it’s you, the queen, that these savages want.”
“And if my death will satisfy them, then my children may be spared.”
“Once you are safely away,” Sant’Angelo urged, “there will be chaos and delay, endless recriminations and denunciations. They’ll have Hebert’s head on a pike, for one. And then I will come back-I promise you-and spirit your children to a safe hiding place, too.”
Placing a cold and frail hand on top of his own, she said, “It is enough that you have come to see me off. They have refused to let me say good-bye to anyone, or to receive any friend or family member.”
“But if you will just let me put the wreath on your head, and keep you close behind me, I swear you will be able to walk out of here under their very noses.”
“You don’t think they would notice my absence?” she said, dryly.
“I will create such confusion that I’ll have them believing a flight of angels just carried you off to Heaven.”
“And where will we go instead?”
“I will take you to my house, where a carriage is already waiting. We can be at my chateau by dusk, and from there-”
But the look on her face told him not to continue. No doubt she was remembering the last escape plan, when her carriage had been delayed at the town of Varennes and the king had been recognized; the royal family was escorted back to the Tuileries in disgrace. Ever since that fateful night-June 21, 1791-their captivity had been complete; the family had been systematically separated and imprisoned in one place after another, each one more dreadful than the one before.
“I thank you,” she said, “but now I only wish for all of this to come to an end. I wish to be with my husband, and in the arms of God.” Bending her head, as if to make the present charade, for his sake, more convincing, she touched the breviary in his hand and murmured a prayer.
“Time’s up,” Hebert 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?” Hebert gloated.
When the cutting was done, the queen was thrown a white linen bonnet, with two black strings to tie it behind.
“Stand up,” Hebert 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,” Hebert 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 abbe, 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 Hebert 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 Hebert and beg him to untie her hands for just a moment.
Hebert 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, Hebert 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.
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
