Confessions of Marie Antoinette by Juliet Grey

bodies, the Parlements, when they refused to ratify the king’s edicts. My husband is gradually being reduced to a cipher.
    The comte de Mercy-Argenteau, who has remained Imperial Austria’s ambassador to the Bourbon court since my childhood, arrives at the Tuileries. He is doing his best, he assures me, to convince my brother Joseph to put the Hapsburg might behind us. Were Maman still alive I would feel more secure in Mercy’s efforts. But Joseph has always been a reformer with progressive ideas. I recollect now the emperor’s words after his visit to Versailles in 1777 when he urged me to curtail my frivolities and expenditures: The revolution will be a cruel one, and perhaps of your own making . Their sting is just as painful as it was a dozen years ago.
    The sixty-two-year-old diplomat is finally beginning to wear his age. Beneath Mercy’s wig his temples no longer require powderto make them silver-gray. Wrinkles fan out like spiders’ legs from the corners of his eyes. I can see that events in Paris are making him nearly as anxious as I am. My papa, Francis of Lorraine, Holy Roman Emperor and Grand Duke of Tuscany, died of an apoplectic fit when I was nine years old. Since then, the suave and elegant comte is the closest I have known to a father. We have had our tussles, and over the years, particularly when I was dauphine, I teased him mercilessly for being such a scold.
    How easy it is for a child to believe that the fun will last forever, I tell the comte now, when he asks how the king and I are faring. “As far as we are concerned personally, the notion of happiness belongs to the past—whatever the future may bring. We have seen too much horror and too much bloodshed ever to be happy again.”
    “Is there even some small thing that you take comfort in, nowadays?” Mercy asks.
    “So that you can tell my brother that I am well and hale?” I reply, my words tinged with asperity. “You may inform Joseph that I am still permitted to enjoy long walks in the Tuileries Gardens, when I am not harangued by insults from the market women of Les Halles. That my greatest pleasure is my two children, from whom only God will induce me to separate. But we are far from well, though we do our best to conceal our opinions and our constraints and go on as before. I know that it is the duty for one king to suffer on behalf of all the others, and we are doing our duty well.”
    “From a gadabout, you have become a cynic,” the comte observes.
    “A mob that attempts to murder you in your bed will have that effect,” I remind him quietly. And then, I dissolve into tears, missing my maman, her knowledge, her wisdom, her strength—for the comte is my final connection to her and to my vanished childhood, the youth I tried in vain to recapture with the building of thepastoral hameau in the gardens of le Petit Trianon. For that perceived extravagance, too, I am being made to suffer now.
    I urge the comte de Mercy to extract a promise from my brother to come to our aid, whether it is in the form of money, mercenaries, or Austrian soldiers.
    “You know His Imperial Majesty is not well,” Mercy tells me.
    “That is not an answer.” At least, it is not the answer I seek. And all the more reason I need the ambassador’s guarantee. Finally, the comte acquiesces to my request. But his eyes betray Joseph’s lack of enthusiasm even as his lips agree.
    F EBRUARY 1790
    Louison Chabry had laid aside her chisel and come to the Place de Grève because the ragged boys in Saint-Germain who cry the nouvelles and sell the latest broadsheets for a sou had announced that this execution across from the Hôtel de Ville will make history. So that afternoon she’d opened her reticule, fished for a coin, and purchased one of their newspapers.
    She has never heard of Thomas de Mahy, the forty-four-year-old marquis de Favras, but the paper, published by one of the radicals from the Palais Royal coffeehouses, is written to inflame the heart of even