Demonic_ How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America - Ann Coulter [61]
Hours before her execution, the former queen wrote a letter to her sister-in-law, Princess Elisabeth, stained with her tears. An excerpt gives the lie to portrayals of Antoinette as a frivolous airhead. She begins:
16TH OCTOBER, 4.30 A.M.
It is to you, my sister, that I write for the last time. I have just been condemned, not to a shameful death, for such is only for criminals, but to go and rejoin your brother. Innocent like him, I hope to show the same firmness in my last moments. I am calm, as one is when one’s conscience reproaches one with nothing.
Antoinette raises the incest charge at her trial, asking Elisabeth to forgive her son:
I have to speak to you of one thing which is very painful to my heart, I know how much pain the child must have caused you. Forgive him, my dear sister; think of his age, and how easy it is to make a child say whatever one wishes, especially when he does not understand it. It will come to pass one day, I hope, that he will better feel the value of your kindness and of your tender affection for both of [my children].
She concludes by reaffirming her faith and forgiving her enemies:
I die in the Catholic Apostolic and Roman religion, that of my fathers, that in which I was brought up, and which I have always professed. Having no spiritual consolation to look for, not even knowing whether there are still in this place any priests of that religion (and indeed the place where I am would expose them to too much danger if they were to enter it but once), I sincerely implore pardon of God for all the faults which I may have committed during my life. I trust that, in His goodness, He will mercifully accept my last prayers, as well as those which I have for a long time addressed to Him, to receive my soul into His mercy. I beg pardon of all whom I know, and especially of you, my sister, for all the vexations which, without intending it, I may have caused you. I pardon all my enemies the evils that they have done me. I bid farewell to my aunts and to all my brothers and sisters. I had friends. The idea of being forever separated from them and from all their troubles is one of the greatest sorrows that I suffer in dying. Let them at least know that to my latest moment I thought of them.
Farewell, my good and tender sister. May this letter reach you. Think always of me; I embrace you with all my heart, as I do my poor dear children. My God, how heart-rending it is to leave them forever! Farewell! farewell!46
The mob had intended to extinguish the idea of the divine right of kings and queens, but Marie Antoinette’s preternatural grace in the face of their barbarism might have caused some Frenchmen to reconsider whether God had a role in choosing their queen.
The humiliations heaped on Antoinette continued to her last breath. To suppress sympathy from the crowd, she was stripped of her mourning clothes and ordered to wear a white smock. Bleeding badly, Antoinette needed to change her undergarments before leaving for the guillotine, but the gendarme guarding her refused to let her out of his sight even for this.
To protect France against a beaten, half-starved, prematurely gray, tuberculosis-ridden, hemorrhaging widow, the full cavalry was called out and the streets and bridges throughout Paris were lined with cannon and bayonet-toting soldiers. Shackled to a rope held by the executioner and surrounded by armed guards, Antoinette rode to the guillotine on a rough cart used to transport hardened criminals. The drive was long and slow, the better to allow the mob to taunt her. Her face was placid, as she continued to pray quietly, showing neither fear nor defiance. On the scaffold, Marie Antoinette uttered her last words after accidentally stepping on the executioner’s foot: “Monsieur, I beg your pardon.”47
After the guillotine fell, the executioner lifted Antoinette’s head from the basket and the crowd cheered,