The Lost King of France: A True Story of Revolution, Revenge, and DNA by Deborah Cadbury

mother, whispering in her ear, “Was that all right?” With his customary charm, he soon made friends with the sons of National Guards and established his own pretend “Royal Dauphin Regiment” with himself as colonel. People flocked to see him when he was allowed outside where he kept his own pet rabbits and tended a small garden.
    Marie-Antoinette struggled to keep up a semblance of normalcy and various possessions claimed from Versailles helped as she set about making it as comfortable as possible. She drew strength from devoting herself to her children. “They are nearly always with me and are my consolation,” she wrote to Gabrielle de Polignac, who was now safely out of the country. “Mon chou d’amour [the dauphin] is charming and I love him madly. He loves me very much too, in his way, without embarrassment. He is well, growing stronger and has no more temper tantrums. He goes for a walk everyday which is extremely
good for him.” The queen still had a few of her friends around her, such as the loyal Princesse de Lamballe, who invariably accompanied her when she had to receive deputations of poissardes and others, who had come for a hundred reasons, but mostly to air their grievances. Count Axel Fersen also remained discreetly in Paris, in case he could be of any use to the queen.
    The king desperately allowed himself to hope that all these arrangements would be temporary, and that he would eventually be restored to Versailles with full power. But power lay in the Assembly, renamed the Constituent Assembly, and gallingly, now installed in the building opposite the Tuileries and flying the new flag which bore the words FREEDOM. NATION. LAW. KING. Although Louis was still king, his authority to pass laws had been effectively taken over by the Assembly. In principle, he retained a delaying veto, yet in the intimidating atmosphere of his confinement in the Tuileries, he was fearful of using even this remaining influence.
    For several months the king could not face the meetings of the Assembly, and took refuge in family life, spending more time with his children. While the deputies debated the future of France, he had a smithy installed in the Tuileries, and worked at making locks in his smithy, alone. For Louis, in his virtual prison, terrible despair and fragile hope had become the bread and butter of his daily life as he sank into helpless depression. “The late Grand Monarch makes a figure as ridiculous as pitiable,” commented the English writer Edmund Burke. Burke was struck by “the portentous state of France—where elements which compose Human Society seem all to be dissolved, and a world of Monsters to be produced in the place of it.” Stripped of the glory of Versailles and the powers of an absolute monarch, the king seemed a spent political force.
    Royal authority was also undermined by the continuous outpouring of vicious slander, especially against the queen. Absurdly, even while under the close scrutiny of the National Guard at the Tuileries, she was accused of every conceivable sexual obsession and debauchery: with the guards themselves, courtiers, actors, there was no limit to her superhuman appetite. In an updated version of Madame de La Motte’s Mémoires published in 1789,
her passion for women was also set out in explicit detail. “Her lips, her kisses followed her greedy glances over my quivering body,” claimed La Motte. “What a welcome substitute I made, she laughed, for the lumpish, repulsive body of the ‘Prime Minister’—her mocking name for the king.” The image of her as an insatiable, tyrannical queen was invariably linked to her bloodthirsty lust for revenge on the French people for the uprising. “Her callous eyes, treacherous and inflamed, radiate sheer fire and carnage to gratify her craving for unjust revenge … . Her stinking mouth harbors a cruel tongue, eternally thirsty for French blood.” Letters were “found,” allegedly written by her and intercepted by