Marjorie Bowen

Madame la Comtesse du Barry

“Among all the noble and ignoble sufferers by the guillotine there is no record of cowardice on the part of any–save only in the case of Madame du Barry, a woman of the people who had been mistress of France during the most extravagant years of the reign of Louis XV.”–History of France.

On the third day of November, 1793, Madame la Comtesse du Barry, arrested for “supplying the Emigrants with money,” and for this offence sentenced to death, was brought to the prison of the ConciÈrgerie.

There were many prisoners that day, among them Philippe, one time Duc d’Orleans, recently Philippe ÉgalitÉ, the man who had voted for the death of his cousin, the King, and was now to die the same way himself.

Madame du Barry and her companions were conducted through a large Gothic hall, dark and low, down a long stone corridor, also dark and low, and half open one side to grim vaults, through two squat doors and across a courtyard narrowed and cobbled, into another building, up gloomy straight stairs and into a narrow corridor. While the jailer was unlocking doors Madame du Barry looked round her; she perceived that only one of her companions remained–a woman as young and beautiful as herself, with black hair and dusky eyes and a face twisted with terror.

“What is your name?” whispered Madame du Barry.

“Josephine Beauharnais,” answered the dark beauty in a feeble voice. “And for God’s sake tell me–are we to die–to die?”

“No–no,” whispered the fair woman eagerly.

Madame Beauharnais smiled foolishly.

“A wise woman once said that I should be a queen and more,” she replied brokenly, “therefore I cannot be going to die—”

“No, no,” repeated the Countess, shaking her blonde head.

The jailer came and roughly separated them. Madame du Barry saw the pallid, dazed face of her companion and heard her shriek as she was thrust into a room and the key turned; then she herself was pushed through an open door and locked in.

She stumbled across the threshold and nearly fell, recovered herself and went straight to the window and looked out.

The window was heavily and closely barred from top to bottom, and faced the other portion of the prison through which she had just come, which was only a few yards distant. A small portion of sky was visible and a small strip of cobbled courtyard; nothing else.

The sky was grey with the sullen snows of November, and the cobbles and the walls were splashed and stained with dark patches; Madame du Barry knew what they were: a few days before the Girondists had been gathered in the chapel of the ConciÈrgerie and then driven out into the courtyard to be massacred.

She had heard a man say that the blood had been ankle-deep.

A peculiar, terrible and sickening smell filled the prison; she had noticed it as soon as she had stepped down into the dark entrance hall. It was very strong in this room where they had put her. She tried to forget what it was.

“I must think,” she said to herself; “I must think.”

She had been saying that all day. Holding on to her senses and saying to herself that as soon as this horrible and bewildering tumult was over, as soon as she was alone and quiet, away from the abuse, the staring, the rough handling, she would think–straighten things out in her mind, decide what must be done.

And now she was alone she found she could not think; she had acted on impulse, not reflection, all her life; besides, she was rather stupid.

Her mind wandered off to trivial things: the details that had made her life still chiefly interested her; she noticed the dull small room, the wooden bed with a rough coverlet, the broken chair. She pulled out the bed pillow and shuddered to see that it was soiled. Then she began to consider her own dress.

She wore the gown she had been arrested in, a plain yellow taffeta with muslin ruffles at the throat and elbows and a dark green pelerine with a cape.

Her hat had gone; on putting her hands up to her fair curls she found that her hair ribbon had gone too. Her dress was torn and muddy round the hem, and one of her light boots was broken.

She put her hand to her bosom and drew out a string of pearls that she had, the moment before her arrest at her country chÂteau, snatched up mechanically and concealed in her dress. The soft lustre and colour of them gave her pleasure and comfort; she handled them lovingly and laid them next her cheek.

She remembered that she had worn them on the occasion when King Louis, at the review, had stood bare-headed at the door of her sedan, her lacquey before the eyes of France.

And she was still as beautiful as she had been then–perhaps more beautiful; therefore it could not be that they were going to murder her. Beauty like hers was a power. The men who had put her here could not have noticed her.

She looked round, hoping for a mirror, but there was none.

She put her hand to her face, felt her smooth skin, her glossy hair, her delicate neck, the curve of her lips.…

“If I were a plain woman I might be afraid,” she murmured; “but they will not touch me.”

Rising impatiently, she moved about the room; she began to be indignant that they had put her in such a place. She knocked on the door and called out, demanding a better apartment–food–clean sheets.

It was absurd that she should be treated thus; they had forgotten who she was, she told herself.

There was no answer to her cries. She began to tremble, and presently returned to the window.

She must think.

She was condemned to death; she had heard the man wearing the tricolor sash and cocked hat say so; but at the time the words had meant little or nothing: they had only been one detail more in the tumult of horror and terror by which she had been surrounded since her arrest. She knew that people were sentenced and left months in prison or set free the next morning; besides, she was not an aristocrat, but a woman of the people. Despite her rapid rise and the brilliance of her shining, she was by birth no better than the draggled women who had shouted at her as she was dragged before the tribunal.

Yes, she was one with these people; the great aristocrats had always scorned her. M. de Choiseul had lost his place for a disdainful word of her; they had all recognised that she was, however gilded by the homage of Louis, only a common creature.

She tried to recall the years of her glory when she had ruled France, and to search in her mind for any cause of offence given to the People who were now the masters. She thought that her conscience was clear: she had never meddled with politics; she had been kind to those dependent on her; she had done her best to amuse a King who was “unamusable.” True, she had used the public treasury as her own, but she had robbed no one, for the money would only have gone to some other woman. No, she could not see that she had done more than fill her part. Certainly, when she had ruled France it had not floated in blood as it was floating now; she had not pulled down God and profaned His Churches; she had not imprisoned the innocent and massacred the helpless.

With the thought that the People had no crime to charge her with she consoled herself, and she was not afraid of the actual charge on which she was condemned, for it was vague and feeble.

The truth they did not know. Having fled to London on the first outbreak of the revolution, she had returned to France–not, as her accusers believed, to fetch her jewels with which to succour the emigrants in England, but to put her wealth and her services at the disposal of those who were engaged in a plot to rescue the Queen.

Marie Antoinette had always looked over the head of Madame du Barry; while the old King lived she had afforded her, under compulsion, a frozen tolerance; when she became Queen the favourite had been banished to a convent, utterly ignored and forgotten.

Yet on an impulse of loyalty Madame du Barry had come impetuously from London to endeavour to rescue the Queen whom she had always admired, whom she admired rather more perhaps for her constant lofty attitude of contempt towards herself; her placid, rather foolish mind had never resented the disdain of an Emperor’s daughter. She was very sorry that her attempt to serve the Queen had been frustrated; she resolved, when she was free, to make another endeavour, though she had already given nearly all the spoils of her years of plunder to help the refugees in England.…

The dusk began to fall; the room was shiveringly cold. No one came to her. She paced up and down the room to keep herself warm and beat her hands on her breast.

Suppose that, after all, they did mean to drag her out to the guillotine?

Many, many had gone already; many, many were yet to go–women as beautiful as herself, as innocent of offence towards the People.

At this thought her spirit shrieked aloud; she fell across the chair by the window and gazed frantically at the strip of darkening sky.

The smell of blood rose intolerably and clung to her nostrils; it reminded her that all her poor reasonings were of no avail, that this was an age of anarchy when none of the old arguments held good.

And she was in the power of creatures without pity, without justice, who stopped for nothing in their swift slaying.

But she would not accept this view; her mind rejected it. She could not and would not believe that she was meant for death.

Suddenly the jailer entered; she had meant to assail him with questions, arguments, reproaches, but when she saw him, though he had no particular appearance of brutality, she could not summon the courage to say one word.

He put a plate of bread and meat and a glass of water on the table. He did not even look at her; his air was one of absolute indifference.

She noticed his black and broken nails, his dirty neck and greasy clothes; she felt sick, and closed her eyes.

The sound of the closing door penetrated her nausea. She tried to ask for a light, but he had gone and the key was turned in the lock; she rose then and pushed away the fat, almost raw meat, the sight of which made her quiver with disgust. She tried to eat a little of the bread, but it was coarse and dry and stuck in her throat.

Some of the water she drank and the rest she used to bathe her hands and brow, drying them afterwards on her petticoat.

The light faded quickly in this confined chamber, built in as it was; and though the chimes of the ConciÈrgerie clock told her that it was no more than four, it was soon completely dark.

She faced the fact that they meant to leave her without a light; this did not much trouble her. She felt a dullness creeping over her spirits; she was more conscious of the cold than anything else. Chilled in every limb, she lay down on the distasteful bed and dragged the thin blankets over her. All her terrified and bewildered thoughts were soothed by the exquisite sense of physical relief that ran through her fatigued body. She sighed and dismissed everything till to-morrow; the tension of nerves and brain relaxed. She spread her thick hair between her face and the pillow and slept.

She dreamt of a little episode that had taken place many years ago at Versailles. Marie Antoinette, the childish young Dauphine, had, in her tremendous pride of royal birth and purity, refused to speak to the Comtesse du Barry, who was then the most powerful person in France.

The Austrian Ambassador had besought this concession of her in vain; but at last, on the commands of her mother, the Empress Marie TherÈse, she had given way, and had reluctantly promised to speak to the favourite in full court.

It was this scene that Madame du Barry saw now in her sleep.

She thought that she was standing again in the gorgeous gallery at Versailles that looked out on to the terrace; she thought that she was again powdered, perfumed, and clad in rose-coloured velvet and wearing on her breast diamonds that would have bought bread for all the starving people in France.

And across the shining floor came the young Austrian, her immature figure glittering in jewelled brocade and tense with the effort she was making.

“Madame,” she said in a stifled voice, “there are a number of people at Versailles to-day—”

Then her voice broke, her breast heaved, she flushed crimson and hurried away, bursting into tears.

Madame du Barry thought that she was following her, saying–

“Do not be distressed, Madame. I am sorry they have made you speak to me. I shall not do you any harm.”

But the Princess would not turn, but hastened along the gleaming floor.

She woke with a start and a horrid leap of her heart; the room was quite dark but cut by the yellow light coming through the open door; she could see the shape of a man looking in.

“Six o’clock to-morrow, citizeness,” he said in a tired voice, and closed the door.

She tried to concentrate her mind on what he had said. What was it that was to happen at six o’clock to-morrow?

She was quite ignorant of the rules and customs of the prison. Perhaps it meant that she was to be set free in the morning, or taken to a better apartment, or put on her trial–or perhaps it was merely the hour at which he would rouse her and bring her food.

Fatigue overwhelmed her again; she fell into a heavy sleep, this time dreamless.

When she woke the darkness was faintly filled with the glimmer of dawn; she rose, stiff and giddy, and put up her hair with such pins as she could find scattered on the bed.

Mechanically she pulled her coat and gown, her fichu and ruffles into place. The exquisite habits of years of luxurious living asserted themselves without any prompting of the brain, as her beauty, that neither dissipation nor indolence could mar, asserted itself even now, when she was for perhaps the first time in her life unconscious of it.

She felt very feeble, and her head was aching slightly with a dull pain in the temples. She would not go to the window because of the remembrance of the stained courtyard.

The room was very cold, yet close and foul; she wondered who had been confined here before, and whether they had been released or—

She heard doors opening and shutting down the corridor, footsteps and the jangle of keys.

Her own door opened and the jailer appeared, holding a lantern.

He made a gesture for her to pass out; she rose stiffly.

“What is this? Where am I to go? Am I to have no food? I could not eat what you brought last night.”

The man seized her arm and pushed her out into the corridor, then went on to the next door.

Madame du Barry found several people waiting who had evidently been roused as she had been; they all glanced at her curiously, and some recognised her and all noticed her beauty.

On her part she looked for the gipsy-like lady whom she had spoken with last night, but she was not there. From the others Madame du Barry shrank; she thought that their eyes were cold and disdainful.

When some seven were gathered and the last door had been relocked, the jailer conducted them downstairs and across the courtyard, the way Madame du Barry had been brought last night.

She made a resolve, and kept it, of not looking down when she crossed those foul cobbles, but forced herself to look up at the strip of sky sadly coloured with the winter dawn, that–melancholy and remote as it was–yet seemed kinder and more human than either buildings or people. Then the sombre walls closed round them again. A couple of Republican Guards took charge of the prisoners and conducted them to the large, dark Gothic entrance hall–“la salle des pas perdu.”

This was lit by two lanterns and already contained several people besides the soldiers on duty.

There was a great silence. Madame du Barry wished to speak, to ask what was going to happen, but could not; she leant against one of the pillars and looked round with frightened eyes.

Every one was very quiet; a few whispered together, but in the most hushed of tones. The soldiers paced about heavily; one was eating nuts.

Most of the people were poorly dressed and white-faced, as if they had been long in prison, but some were fashionable and neat, and must have been just arrested.

One of these, a young man wearing a handsome travelling dress and his hair elaborately curled, approached Madame du Barry.

His face was vaguely familiar to her; she thought that she must have seen him at Versailles.

“Why did you return to France, Madame?” he asked.

The sound of a refined man’s voice was beyond words grateful to her ears; the numb sensation left her brain. She raised her blue eyes and gave him (unconsciously) the sideway glance she had used with such effect at the court of France.

“They think it was for my jewels,” she whispered; “but I was in a plot to save the Queen.”

He looked at her very kindly, and she was pleased and flattered to a great degree, for she had believed that the aristocracy still despised her, and this man was obviously an aristocrat.

“What are they keeping us here for?” she asked. “What is going to happen?”

He made no immediate answer, and, looking intently at him, she perceived that his face was slightly distorted–or was it that her vision was distracted and gave this abnormal appearance to others?

A soldier passed them, insolently near; when he had gone the young man answered–

“They must have told you? You were tried yesterday?”

She faintly shook her fair head.

“Oh no, you could not call it a trial; they dragged me before some tribunal. A servant denounced me, Monsieur.”

“Do you not know, Madame, what this means?”

A spasm of agony contracted her heart.

“No–no—” she stammered.

He very gently laid his hand on her wrist. “We are all condemned to the guillotine,” he said. “We are waiting for that now–the guillotine.”

Incomprehension and confusion showed in the blue eyes of Madame du Barry; her mouth fell open.

“They are going to kill–me?” she asked.

His fingers tightened on her wrist; he answered, and his voice was so low and hoarse that it seemed a whistle in his throat.

“They are watching us. Do not let them see that you care.”

“Oh, I shall be very quiet,” she answered.

He let go of her hand, and it fell like a dead thing to her side.

She was, as she had promised, very quiet, but it was only because she did not, could not, realise what this man had said. Yesterday she had clung to the idea that once she was alone in prison she would think clearly, but she had not, and now the nightmare was closing round her again.

Her weight slipped against the pillar; she felt both sick and giddy. Some one moved a chair towards her and gently pushed her into it; she looked up to see a woman holding some knitting in her left hand.

“The bad air makes you faint,” said this lady kindly and serenely.

“Was I faint?” asked Madame du Barry.

The lady and the young man exchanged glances over her bent blonde head.

“You must not be afraid,” he said. “It is only death.”

“And it is very quickly over,” added the lady.

“Who are you?” asked Madame du Barry stupidly.

The lady mentioned a great name, the name of a friend of the Queen, the name of a woman who had quietly ignored the favourite at Versailles.

“Yes, I remember you,” muttered the Countess and shrank away.

The other woman touched her shoulder. “Madame has behaved like a person of quality,” she said gently. “Madame will die as such—”

At this a little blood crept into the poor prisoner’s face; she caught at the kind hand on her shoulder.

“Yes, yes,” she answered pitifully, “I will try to behave well.”

“Are you afraid?” asked the young man.

She looked up at him and thought that his face was beyond doubt horribly distorted now, like a wet clay mask pulled awry by clumsy fingers.

“I am very much afraid–I can’t believe it—” Her voice trailed off; she turned her eyes to the woman the other side of her. In that white, calm face was that same dragged look of distortion. Madame du Barry did not know that her own features were now almost unrecognisable through the contraction of terror and anticipation of death.

“Why do you not do something?” she glanced round the assembled prisoners. “All these people cannot be going to–die?”

The lady put her knitting in the pocket of her black silk apron; she had seen the guards unbarring the doors.

“Whatever we are or have been,” she answered, “none of us, so far, have failed in this moment.”

Madame du Barry sprang up.

“But I cannot–do–it—” she stammered. “I–cannot–I am not an aristocrat–I–I–have nothing to die for–I am only a woman of the people—”

There was no response in the faces of her two companions; they were watching the opening of the doors at the top of the few shallow steps. Madame du Barry watched too; her senses seemed suspended or dulled; her mouth hung open in a childish circle and her eyes showed the white round the pupils.

The doors were flung wide and fastened back; four soldiers entered and took up their places inside the entrance. A shaft of chill white light fell across the lantern-lit gloom, and a rush of bitter air dispersed the close odours of the hall.

Madame du Barry found the name–“salle des pas perdu” running in her head; for the first time in her life she noticed the meaning.… Of course, “The hall of lost footsteps.” Of course that was why it was given to entrance places: people came and went, but no one stayed–lost footsteps … lost footsteps.…

She could see a cart outside, a humble, dirty cart with straw in the bottom. A jailer began to call out numbers; the prisoners moved towards the door. She found herself being drawn along by the young man who had spoken to her, found herself mounting the few steps and outside in the raw, cold morning.

She had an appalling sensation of being hurried along too fast for comprehension. If they would only give her time to think! She could not realise anything.

There were very few people before the prison; the one or two there took no notice. A man delivering bread looked over his shoulder, then away again, indifferently.

Some passers-by on the quay stopped to watch.… Madame du Barry wondered what was the matter with these people, with the river, with the houses beyond, with the sky–all seemed unreal, distorted. This was not the world that she knew … she was among grotesque strangers. Following the others meekly, she ascended the cart; there were about twelve people in it, and they had to stand. When the horse started the jerk almost threw her on her knees; the man next her helped her up.

“Where are we going?” she asked. “Where are we going?”

“To Heaven, I hope,” was the flippant answer.

A man the other side of her spoke. “One cannot be sure of one’s company even in the tumbrils,” he remarked, glancing at her. “But poor Duquesne had to go with Philippe ÉgalitÉ, which was worse,” he added.

Madame du Barry looked wildly round for the young aristocrat who had befriended her; he was standing towards the front of the cart, looking with a melancholy air at the river. She could not attract his attention. The lady with the knitting had not come.

They soon left the quay for the more crowded thoroughfares. People began to line the roads, to fill the windows. There was an unusual crowd to-day to watch the passing of the King’s favourite.

The wretched object of this attention began to be aware of it, began to understand that the abuse and execrations that were flung after them were chiefly directed against her, began to grasp the meaning of the finger-pointing, the shouting.

She was going to her death, and these people were hounding her to it with delight and ferocity.

A convulsion shook her and a light foam frothed on her lips while her eyes turned in her head; she gave a shriek so sharp and ghastly that the men beside her covered their ears; she would have fallen had not the wooden rails of the cart held her up.

This new spectacle of abandoned terror brought the mob rushing after the cart with fresh imprecations of hate and contempt towards the woman who had spent the revenues of France in wanton luxury while such as themselves sweated and starved.

But she was ignorant of her offence towards them; and now the conviction of the truth was borne blazingly into her brain, filled only with one desire–to save her life.

She stretched her hands out over the back of the cart.

“I am no aristocrat!” she cried. “I am a woman of the people! Save me; do not let them take me! I do not want to die!”

Such taunts of vile and horrible abuse answered her that she drew back with her fingers to her lips.

“No, no!” she shrieked. “I never wronged any one of you!”

The surging crowd now almost blocked the progress of the cart; the soldiers who were conducting it had to make a way with their bayonets.

Stones and garbage were hurled at her; dirt splashed on her dress; the jerking of the cart shook her hair down; she continually lost her balance and fell against the wooden side.

“Madame, for God’s sake—” said the man next her. “You demean us all.”

She put her hands over her face; these others might well be brave, she thought; they were dying for all they believed in, for the sake of what they were, but she had nothing to die for. All she had, all she had ever had, was her beauty, and death would take that from her–and what was left?

Death presented itself to her as an intolerable blackness; she could not, she would not face it. She would resist. They could not be such fiends as to drag her to her death.

She clenched her hands. She heard the words they were throwing at her; a sense of rage nerved her against them. She hated them, especially the women. She lifted her head, and her blue eyes had a hot brilliance like madness.

“I am not a wicked woman!” she cried out fiercely, looking over the sea of haggard, angry faces. “What I did any of you women here would have done had it been offered to you as it was offered to me!”

Such of the women who could hear these words replied by a rush of fury that nearly upset the cart, and tried to pull the speaker down among them; the soldiers drove them back, and one man struck Madame du Barry with the flat of his sword and violently bade her be silent.

She crouched down, hiding her eyes and her ears. A little cold rain began to fall; she felt it on her head and shivered.

The cart stopped. She dropped her stiff fingers and looked up; she was face to face with the final horror.

A platform surrounded with soldiers in the midst of an open place crowded with people; at one side a palace and trees–the great square once named after her lover, Louis XV.

From the centre of the platform rose the hideous machine itself, the guillotine, with two tall upright posts dyed red, the plank, the basket, the cloth, a man in a dark coat holding a cord, all outlined against a grey tumultuous sky and the leafless, dry trees of November.

The prisoners began to descend from the cart, began to ascend the steps to the guillotine amid the murmurs and yells of the haggard feverish crowd.

Madame du Barry stood at the foot of the scaffold. One by one her companions passed her. The young man in the handsome great coat murmured “courage” as he stepped up and looked at her with pitying eyes.

Her heart was beating very fast; she did not know what she was thinking or doing, only that all her worst anticipations had not equalled this horror—

There were only three left besides herself. The man in charge of the cart seized hold of her long locks and quickly and roughly cut them off.

“Your turn, my little piece of royalty,” he said.

She looked at him blankly; he snatched her small, feeble hands and tied them behind her before she had guessed his intention.

“Oh!” she cried. “Oh!”

She was quite bewildered. The world seemed to have stopped. She saw her blonde curls lying at her feet and moved her head stiffly to and fro to see if the ringlets were not still there.

They pushed her forward and told her to mount.

“Up there?” she asked vacantly, and stared at the scaffold.

“Yes, up there,” was the answer. She hesitated, looked about her as if she did not understand. The man, becoming impatient, pushed her again, roughly, and she, impeded by her bound arms, could not save herself, but fell in the slime and mud at the foot of the steps.

They dragged her to her feet and up the steps, one either side of her, hurting her arms.

The roar of the crowd that greeted her was prolonged and horrible; she looked round at them; no one who had seen her, even yesterday, would have recognised her then.

Samson approached and caught hold of her fichu.

“May I not keep that?” she asked. He did not even trouble to refuse, but snatched away the muslin, leaving her throat and bosom bare. She struggled to release her arms, turned and saw the plank, the posts, the basket full of heads. Shriek after shriek left her lips. Such desperate strength possessed her that she almost broke from the two men holding her.

“Have mercy on me–I never hurt anything–I was not properly tried–I am not an aristocrat! Why did he denounce me? I was always good to him! Oh, my God, my God, save me from this!”

For an awful moment the two men and the woman struggled together, she being drawn nearer, nearer the plank. The pearls, last remnant of her guilty greatness, fell from her poor torn bodice on to the dirty boards. Samson stooped to pick them up, and the other man, using brutal force, hurled Madame du Barry to her knees.

“Do not hurt me!” she screamed. They seized her again and pitched her forward on to the plank. She strove unavailingly.

Samson pulled the cord. She saw and smelt blood and slime; she felt herself being swung forward. She shrieked once–twice–and the knife descended, sending her common blood gushing over the other noble blood that stained the oak and iron.