On the other hand, the Baults were indebted to Marie Antoinette, who had patronised them when she was queen. And when the couple discovered that the brutish caretaker of the Temple prison was being considered for the wardenship at the Conciergerie, the couple quickly solicited and obtained the position.
They looked forward to using the opportunity to console and soften the captivity of their former mistress, as they had done for the royal prisoners of La Force.
But times had changed. Since the departure of the Richards, wardens could no longer shop for food provisions for the queen; suppliers had to pass through the prison checkpoints with their goods. And because Marie Antoinette never drank wine and the fetid water of the Seine River did not agree with her, Madame Bault also took great risk to have the pure waters of Arcueil brought to her every day.
Monsieur Bault was more cautious. On one occasion, the queen reportedly offered the prison maid Rosalie a piece of white ribbon. When the queen asked for a cotton blanket for her bed, Bault asked the prosecutor Fouquier-Tinville if he could procure one. The verdict of the jury was affirmative. It was 4. After guards returned Marie Antoinette to her cell, she asked Warden Bault for a pen and paper. I have been condemned, not to an ignominious death — that only awaits criminals — but to go and rejoin your brother.
Innocent as he, I hope to show the same firmness as he did in his last moments. I grieve bitterly at leaving my poor children; you know that I existed but for them and you — you who have by your friendship sacrificed all to be with us.
Hardman insists that both of them were sincere. Barnave saw an opportunity to get the queen and king to see the necessity of cooperating with the constitutional monarchists if they wanted to save the monarchy and themselves. To explain his departure, he cited family business and a simple desire to return home.
A new assembly had been elected, and by law he could not serve in it. At the end of July she wrote to the Austrian ambassador:. Right now I have a sort of correspondence with the last two which no one knows about, even their friends. I have to do them justice. Although they always stick to their opinions I have always found in them great openness, strength and a true desire to restore order and consequently royal authority.
Hardman pays little attention to Lameth, who was also a deputy, but this may simply reflect the accidents of history. In the face of persistent rumors, Barnave had repeatedly denied any commerce with the royal family after their return to Paris. Barnave was immediately arrested in Grenoble, where he spent fifteenth months in prison writing an account of the revolution and his participation in it.
In those pages, and again during his trial, he insisted that he had had no personal contact with the queen or the royal family after their return to Paris. Lameth had fled into exile, which Barnave could also have done since he lived close to the Swiss border—a fact that he cited futilely in his defense.
The Barnave episode is fascinating, but in the end it occupied only a brief moment in the eventful, contentious, and tragic life of Marie-Antoinette. To call their alliance a duumvirate assigns it more weight than it merits. They could concert their efforts to obtain the outcomes they considered imperative, but their voices did not command authority on their own. They had to work through the ministers, and the ministers could pursue their own initiatives that ran counter to those of the queen and Barnave.
Their hand-picked minister of war, Louis, Comte de Narbonne, wanted a war with Austria because he thought it would strengthen the monarchy, and he mistakenly believed that he could secure Prussian neutrality. Barnave gave up on the partnership with the queen once he saw that the war party was inexorably gaining ground. She could not but be guilty since she was a royalist in a republic, and her own future depended on overthrowing that republic.
She did betray French campaign plans to the Austrians, and her very existence might have helped provoke civil war, but the former had no real effect on the course of the war, and while in prison after August , she was hardly in a position to conspire with anyone. The parade of other charges raised at her trial make it clear that more was at stake than the guilt or innocence of the former queen. The public prosecutor concluded his opening statement with a scurrilous diatribe that reflected the influence of all those underground pamphlets claiming to detail the promiscuity of the queen:.
That finally the widow Capet, immoral in every respect, the new Agrippina, is so perverse and so familiar with every crime that, forgetting her quality of mother and the limits placed by the laws of nature, she did not blush to give herself over with Louis Charles Capet [her eight-year-old son] and by his own admission to indecencies whose very name makes one shudder.
Her son had been kept separate from her for the three months preceding her trial. Repeatedly badgered to inform on his mother, he finally signed a statement that she had taught him to masturbate and that as a consequence he was left with a swollen testicle that needed treatment. He sees a mixture of contradictory qualities: she was a loving mother, an interfering wife, vengeful to a fault, a high-stakes gambler, and before , at least, a compulsive pleasure-seeker who could not have enough diamonds, dresses, hats, or horses.
Even Hardman, however, has trouble answering the nagging question that confronts anyone who reads the slightest scrap about the queen: Why was she so hated?
He grew up in Ireland and went to England to attend Oxford, where he graduated with honors in A popular society figure known for his wit and flamboyant style, he published his own book of poems in He spent a The book, about the struggles of an orphan girl who grows up to become a governess, was an immediate popular success.
Hennard then turned the gun on himself and died by suicide. The incident was one of the deadliest Abolitionist John Brown leads a small group on a raid against a federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia now West Virginia , in an attempt to start an armed revolt of enslaved people and destroy the institution of slavery. Born in Connecticut in and raised in Ohio, Brown On October 16, , Chevrolet begins to sell a car-truck hybrid that it calls the El Camino.
Louis XVI grew up strong and healthy, though very shy. He was tutored by French noblemen and studied religion, morality and humanities. He excelled in Latin, history, geography and astronomy and achieved fluency in Italian and English.
With his good health, Louis enjoyed physical activities including hunting and wrestling. From an early age, he enjoyed locksmithing, which became a lifelong hobby. Louis' parents paid little attention to him, instead focusing on his older brother, the heir apparent, Louis duc de Bourgogne, who died at age nine in Then, on December 20, , his father died of tuberculosis, and Louis Auguste became Dauphin at age His mother never recovered from the family tragedies and also succumbed to tuberculosis on March 13, Louis Auguste was ill-prepared for the throne he was soon to inherit.
Following the death of his parents, Louis' tutors provided him with poor interpersonal skills. They exacerbated his shyness by teaching him that austerity was a sign of a strong character in monarchs.
As a result, he presented himself as being very indecisive. Only 20 years old at the time, Louis XVI was immature and lacked self-confidence.
While Louis XVI wanted to be a good king and help his subjects, he faced enormous debt and rising resentment towards a despotic monarchy. His failure to successfully address serious fiscal problems would dog him for most of his reign.
Louis lacked sufficient strength of character and decisiveness to combat the influence of court factions or give support to reformers in their efforts to improve France's government.
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