The Hidden Diary of Marie Antoinette - Hardcover

Erickson, Carolly

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1597221570 ISBN 13: 9781597221573

Publisher: Wheeler Pub Inc, 2006

Synopsis

Imagine that, on the night before she is to die under the blade of the guillotine, Marie Antoinette leaves behind in her prison cell a diary telling the story of her life—from her privileged childhood as Austrian Archduchess to her years as glamorous mistress of Versailles to the heartbreak of imprisonment and humiliation during the French Revolution.

Carolly Erickson takes the reader deep into the psyche of France’s doomed queen: her love affair with handsome Swedish diplomat Count Axel Fersen, who risked his life to save her; her fears on the terrifying night the Parisian mob broke into her palace bedroom intent on murdering her and her family; her harrowing attempted flight from France in disguise; her recapture and the grim months of harsh captivity; her agony when her beloved husband was guillotined and her young son was torn from her arms, never to be seen again.

Erickson brilliantly captures the queen’s voice, her hopes, her dreads, and her suffering. We follow, mesmerized, as she reveals every detail of her remarkable, eventful life—from her teenage years when she began keeping a diary to her final days when she awaited her own bloody appointment with the guillotine.

About this title

About the Author:

Distinguished historian Carolly Erickson is the author of Rival to the Queen, The Memoirs of Mary Queen of Scots, The First Elizabeth, The Hidden Life of Josephine, The Last Wife of Henry VIII, and many other prize-winning works of fiction and nonfiction. Her novel The Tsarina's Daughter won the Romantic Times Reviewer's Choice Award for Best Historical Fiction. She lives in Hawaii.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter One
June 17, 1769

My name is Archduchess Maria Antonia, called Antoinette, and I am thirteen years and seven months old, and this is the record of my life.

Writing in this journal is my punishment. Father Kunibert, my confessor, has told me to write down all my sins in this journal so that I may reflect on them and pray for forgiveness.

“Write!” he said, pushing the book toward me, his thick white eyebrows going up, making him look ferocious.

“Write what you have done! Confess!”

“But I have done nothing wrong,” I tell him.

“Write it down. Then we will see. Put there everything you did, starting with last Friday. And leave nothing out!”

Very well, I will put down in this book all that I did on the day I went to see Josepha, and what happened afterward, and then I will show Father Kunibert what I have written and make my confession.

Tomorrow I will begin.

June 18, 1769

It is very hard and sad to write what happened, because I am so very sorry that my sister was in such pain. I tried to tell Father Kunibert this, but he just opened the journal and handed me the box of sharpened quills. He is a hard man, as Carlotta says. He does not listen to explanations.

On Friday morning, then, this is what I did.

I borrowed a plain black cloak and hood from my maid Sophie, and put a silver crucifix around my neck such as the Sisters of Mercy wear. I prepared a basket with fresh loaves and a ripe cheese and some strawberries from the palace garden. Without telling Sophie or anyone else where I was going, I went at night to the old abandoned stables where I was sure my sister Josepha was being kept.

Josepha had been missing for a week, ever since she became hot with fever and began to cough. No one would tell me where she was, so I had to find out by asking the servants. Servants know everything that happens in the palace, even what goes on between the master and mistress in the privacy of their bedroom. I found out from Eric, the stable boy who grooms my riding horse Lysander that there was a sick girl in the basement of the old riding school. He had seen the Sisters of Mercy going there at night, and once he saw our court physician Dr. Van Swieten go in and come out again very quickly, holding a handkerchief over his mouth and looking very pale.

I was sure my sister Josepha was there, lying in the dark probably, sick and lonely, waiting to die. I had to go to her. I had to tell her that she was not forgotten or abandoned.

So I wrapped the black cloak around me and went out. The candle I carried guttered in the wind as I crossed the courtyard and made my way along the arcaded walkway and out into the stable yard. There were no lights in the old riding school, no one ever went there and no horses were kept tethered in its stalls.

I tried to keep my thoughts on Josepha, but my fear rose as I entered the dark building with its high domed ceiling. Dim shapes loomed up amid the darkness. When I shone my light on them they turned out to be cupboards for harnesses and empty bins that had once held hay.

All was silent, except for the creaking of the old timbers in the roof and the distant calling of the palace sentinels as they made their rounds. I found steps leading down into more darkness. I started to go down, praying that my candle would not go out, and trying not to think of the stories Sophie liked to tell about the palace ghost, the Gray Lady who walked weeping through the corridors at night and sometimes flew in at the windows.

“Don’t be foolish, Antonia,” my mother would say when I asked her about the Gray Lady, “there are no ghosts. When we die, we die. We do not live on as disembodied spirits. Only peasants believe such nonsense.”

I respected my mother’s wisdom, but I wasn’t sure about the ghosts. Sophie had seen the Gray Lady several times, she said, and many others had seen her too.

To keep my mind off ghosts I called out to Josepha as I descended the stairs.

I thought I heard a weak cry.

I called out again, and this time I was sure I heard an answer.

But the voice I heard was not my sister’s. Josepha had a strong, laughing voice. The voice I heard now was pinched and thin, and terribly anxious.

“Don’t come any nearer, whoever you are,” it said. “I have the pox. If you come near me you will die.”

“I hear you, I’m almost there,” I called out, ignoring the warning.

I found her in a small, cell-like room where a lantern hanging from a nail in the wall gave the only light. I could not help but gag, the stench in the room was so overwhelming. A powerful, cloying odor, not the odor of decay or dirt but a sickly, ghastly stench of rot.

From where she lay in her narrow bed Josepha lifted one weak arm as if to ward me off.

“Please, dearest Antonia, turn back. Go back.”

I was crying. What the weak lantern-light showed me was monstrous. Josepha’s skin was purple, and full of blisters. Her face was swollen and red, her cheeks puffed out grotesquely, and there was blood dripping from her nose. Her eyes were bloodshot.

“I love you,” I said through my tears. “I am praying for you.” I put down the basket, wondering whether rats would come and eat the food I had brought. But then I thought, the smell in this room is so terrible not even rats would come near.

“I am so thirsty,” came the voice from the bed.

I took from my basket the bottle of wine I had brought and set it beside Josepha’s bed. With difficulty she raised herself, reached for the bottle and drank. I could tell she was having trouble swallowing.

“Oh, Antonia,” she said when she had put the bottle down, “I have such terrible dreams! Fire coming down, and burning us all up. Mother on fire, screaming. Father, laughing while he watches us all burn.”

“It is only the sickness that makes you dream such things. We are all safe, there is no fire.” But there is, I thought. There is the fire of the cowpox, that makes Josepha burn with fever and turns her brain to madness.

“You must have medicine, you must get well.”

“The sisters give me brandy and valerian, but it doesn’t help. I know they have given up on me.”

“I have not. I will come back, I promise.”

“No. Stay away. Everyone must stay away.”

Her voice grew fainter. She was going to sleep. “Dear Antonia...”

My tears were falling fast, but I knew I couldn’t stay. I couldn’t risk being missed. No one knew where I had gone, I hadn’t even told Carlotta, with whom I share my bedroom.

So I left Josepha, and went back up the dark stairs and out through the old riding school and back along the torchlit arcade to the palace.

The next day I was in the room when Dr. Van Swieten came to see my mother the empress. My brother Joseph, who is twenty-six and who has just buried his second wife, was also there. Ever since our father died, our mother has looked to Joseph for help in governing her many lands. One day after she dies Joseph will rule them all, so he needs to learn. Already he has the firmness that my mother says all rulers need. But I have heard her say to Count Khevenhüller that Joseph does not yet have the necessary compassion and concern for people that he will need if he is to rule well.

“What of Josepha?” my mother asked the doctor as he bowed and murmured “Your imperial highness.”

“It is the black pox.”

I saw my mother blanch, and Joseph turn his face away. The black pox was the severest kind of cowpox. No one ever survived it. When there was black pox in Vienna we children were always taken away at once into the country, so that we would not become ill. Servants with black pox were turned out of the palace and sent as far away as possible. None ever returned. And now my sister Josepha was dying of it too.

“It is perfectly horrifying,” the doctor was saying. “I have seen it often before. There is no point in trying to preserve life once the pox takes hold. The archduchess cannot be saved. She can only make others ill.”

“Is she receiving every care?” I heard my mother ask.

“Of course. The Sisters of Mercy visit her, and the dairymaids.” It was well known that dairymaids were spared from being struck down with the cowpox. For some reason, they could care for sick people without fear of becoming sick themselves.

“No one must know who she is,” Joseph boomed out. “No one from the court must be allowed near her. We cannot have another outbreak of Pox Fear, like last summer.”

Whenever the cowpox appeared, people panicked. The entire town caught the Pox Fear. There were frenzied efforts to escape the sickness. Terrified householders, trying to flee, were trampled or crushed to death.

No one wanted the Pox Fear to invade the palace, where hundreds of servants and officials lived in close quarters and served the empress and our family.

“That is understood,” Dr. Van Swieten said. “The archduchess is being kept where no one will find her.”

I almost spoke up then, but managed to hold my tongue. Standing beside my mother, I heard her black silk skirts rustling, and was aware that she was trembling.

“I can’t lose any more of my children,” she was saying. “First my dear Karl, and then Johanna, only eleven when she died, poor girl, and now my lovely Josepha, so young, and about to be married—&rdq...

About this edition

• Publisher: Wheeler Pub Inc
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1597221570
• ISBN 13: 9781597221573
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 499