The Knight of Maison-Rouge_ A Novel of Marie Antoinette - Alexandre Dumas [125]
The concierge fell back into his chair and, with some trepidation, wrote in his register the Christian names, surname, and titles that the prisoner had given herself, listings whose reddish ink can still be seen today, though the rats of the revolutionary Conciergerie have gnawed the page at the most precious spot in all the register.
Mother Richard went on standing behind her husband’s armchair; but a feeling of religious commiseration had caused her to join her hands in an attitude of prayer.
“Your age?” continued the concierge.
“Thirty-seven years and nine months,” replied the Queen.
Richard began writing again, then listed the details of her physical features and ended with general formulae and personal notes.
“Right!” he said. “Done!”
“Where are we taking the prisoner?” asked the chief of the escort. Richard took a second pinch of tobacco and looked at his wife.
“Blast!” said the woman. “We weren’t notified, so heaven knows.…”
“Find somewhere!” said the brigadier.
“There’s the Council Chamber,” ventured Madame Richard.
“Hmmm. That’s on the spacious side,” muttered Richard.
“So much the better if it is! All the more room to lodge the guards there.”
“The Council Chamber it is, then,” said Richard.
“But it’s uninhabitable for the present, as it doesn’t have a bed.”
“True,” said his wife, “I didn’t think of that.”
“Bah!” went one of the gendarmes. “We’ll put a bed in there tomorrow, and tomorrow will soon be upon us.”
“In any case, the citizeness can spend the night in our room,” said Madame Richard.
“Oh, yes, and what about us?” asked her husband.
“We won’t go to bed; like the citizen gendarme says, a night is soon over.”
“Well, then,” said Richard, “take the citizeness to my room.”
“While we’re doing that, you’ll get the receipt ready for us, won’t you?”
“It’ll be here when you get back.”
Madame Richard took a candle that was burning on the table and led the way. Marie Antoinette followed without a word, composed and pale as ever. Two wicket clerks to whom Madame Richard signaled closed off the stairs. The Queen was shown a bed, which Madame Richard promptly made up with fresh white sheets. The clerks stationed themselves at the exits, and then the door was locked with a double lock and Marie Antoinette found herself alone.
How she passed that night no one knows, for she passed it face-to-face with God.
It was only the next day that the Queen was taken to the Council Chamber, an extended rectangular box whose wicket gate opened onto a corridor of the Conciergerie and which was divided into two sections lengthwise by a half-curtain partition that did not come up to the ceiling.
The men on guard duty took over the outer section. The other became the Queen’s bedroom.
A thickly barred window let light into each of the two sections. A screen was used as a door, separating the Queen from the guards and closing off the opening between the two cells. The entire chamber was tiled with clay bricks. The walls had once been decorated with gilt wood paneling and fleur-de-lys5 wallpaper, and strips of paper still hung raggedly here and there.
A bed set up facing the window, a chair placed close to the screen—such was the furnishing of the royal prison cell.
On entering the room, the Queen asked to be brought her books and her needlework. She was brought Les Révolutions d’Angleterre, which she had begun at the Temple, as well as Le Voyage du jeune Anarcharsis6and her tapestry.
The gendarmes settled into the neighboring cell, for their part. History has preserved their names, as it does all the most insignificant beings whom Providence associates with great catastrophes and who see reflected on themselves a spark of that luminous energy that causes thunder as it smashes either the thrones of kings or the kings themselves.
The Commune had appointed these two men as brave patriots; they were supposed to remain at their fixed post in the cell until Marie Antoinette’s