Noble Blood - The Second Death of Marie Antoinette

Episode Date: July 9, 2019

In 1793, the infamous Marie Antoinette was moved to the Conciergerie in Temple Prison. A woman who became synonymous with indulgence spent her final months with almost no personal possessions, separated from her children, awaiting her imminent death. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. What's up, everyone? I'm Ago Vodam. My next guest, it's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever. He goes, just give it a shot.

But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, The cat, just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck.

Listen to Thanks, Dad, on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You're listening to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and Aaron Menke. Listener discretion advised. The streets of Paris on September 3rd, 1792 were chaos and anarchy. Reeking of blood and sweat and spit. thousands of starving people and desperate bodies pressed together. Overnight, hasty tribunals were built outside prisons for aristocrats to be swept through one at a time,

pulled from their cells in the middle of the night to stand trial before a teeming crowd. These trials would go on until sunrise. Marie Antoinette, her husband, Louis XVI, and their children, were still not technically imprisoned, yet. They lived in a fortress palace called the temple, under something close to house arrest, forced to wait their days, staring at walls, listening to the mocking, monotonous chance of the guards and the cries for blood from the street. One of Marie Antoinette's favorite ladies in waiting, the Princess Delambeau, was brought into the courtyard. The Tribunal of Revolutionaries

asked the Princess Delambeau to take an oath, swearing her love of liberty and her hatred of the queen. I can swear readily to the former, the princess said, but not to the latter. It is not in my heart. Those with sympathetic hearts looked upon the princess with horror. Some whispered to her, begging her to take the oath and save her own life. The Princess de Limbaal shook her head. The leader of the tribunal brought his history. hand down and shouted. The princess was thrown to the crowd. Her body was torn apart, stabbed, and beaten. Those with knives cut pieces of her flesh to keep as souvenirs. Her head, they stuck on a pike to parade through the city. And so, from cafe to cafe, the princess's

lifeless head was placed before patrons, who were told to drink in celebration of the death of traitors. Then someone in the crowd had an idea. Shouldn't the queen get to see her favorite once more? Should she not get to give her friend a kiss goodbye? But the princess's head was bloodied and swollen, her hair matted and thin. And so the crowd brought it to a hairstylist

who was forced to style the decapitated head until it had the same blonde cascading curls that the princess had been famous for in life. When the head was recognizable, the crowd brought it to the temple. They raised the head on its pike until it was directly outside the queen's window. The crowd began chanting, demanding Marie Antoinette kiss the princess's cold blue lips. Look into her hooded, swollen eyes. See her gray skin, her sunken cheeks, and her perfect, beautifully quaffed golden hair.

The meniscus thin bubble that had kept her safe at Versailles had popped, leaving Marie Antoinette with only the shutters on her windows to shield her from having to see her friend's grotesque head. The sounds from the street, though, the taunts and the jeers there was no protection from. And even when the crowd scattered, bored with waiting for Marie Antoinette to appear, ready to find a fresher body, Marie Antoinette knew, sooner or later, that that body would be hers. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood. Marie Antoinette's first death came when she was 13 years old, on an island in the middle of the Rhine between Austria and France,

where she was to begin her new life as a Dauphine, the wife of the country's young prince. She left everything Austrian behind. In an elaborate tent, she was stripped naked of all of her clothes and dressed anew, all French. Her Austrian dog, Mops, was taken away. All of her friends, her ladies, the ones who had taken the weeks-long journey with her by carriage here to her new life were turned back. Only the little princess, born anew, continued on in a sky-blue carriage of gold and velvet. No longer Maria Antonia.

but Marie Antoinette. She was the 15th child of the Empress Maria Teresa and was only gifted with the prize role of Dauphina France thanks to random happenstance, an unlikely circumstance befallen her older sisters. Her education up until that last-minute betrothal had been minimal. But even if she wasn't studious, she was beautiful and charming and agreeable.

She would be happy in France, marrying the awkward young prince, only a few months her senior. But even if she wasn't, her happiness wasn't the point. She was a pawn to secure an alliance between Austria and France. Twenty-two years after she became a French princess, after two decades of decadence in the most cultured and luxurious palace in the world, Marie Antoinette was alone, in a cell, in the heart of Paris, with mobs outside calling for her head to do.

join that of her husband and her friends in the guillotine. Marie Antoinette's prison cell at the conciergerie was not a place of warmth and kindness, but the jailkeeper Madame Richard tried to make the woman who had once lived in a palace comfortable. Madame Richard, who ran the conciergeury with her husband, had watched the queen hang a small, golden watch on the wall of her cell. The only bit of adornment in the dark room where the walls dripped and moaning could be heard from all hours of the night. It was a gift from long ago from her mother, the Empress Maria Therese. Madame Richard had also watched the guards confiscate the watch five days later.

The queen was mostly quiet after that. Her hand stayed in her laps. She thanked the guards when they brought her food and thanked Madame Richard when the jailer brought fresh flowers to the cell before those two were banned. One afternoon, to try to cheer up the queen, Madame Richard brought her own son to the prison. Marie Antoinette had always famously loved children. She once stopped her carriage to help a poor boy on the street, paying for his boarding and education. She had clutched her own children to her so tightly and for so long that Versailles had wagged their tongues at her overindulgence.

When Madame Richard's son, Fen, Fan, arrived at the conciergerie, Marie Antoinette burst into two. tears. For the first time in weeks, her voice rose above a whisper. She wailed while hugging the boy, pulling her arms tighter and tighter around him. It was a cry of misery. Fanfan was seven at the time, the same age as Marie Antoinette's son, Louis Charles, imprisoned somewhere far away, being re-educated by revolutionaries. When Madame Richard took her son's hand and let him back into the Paul, she confessed to a maid that she had made a mistake, and she would never again bring Fanfan to visit Marie Antoinette. Six months prior, Marie Antoinette's family had all been together for what would be the last time.

It was the night before the former King Louis XVI's execution, and the man, now called Louis Capet, was permitted one last meal. Marie Antoinette and Louis's younger sister, Elizabeth, cried the entire evening while the children a boy and a girl looked up at their stoic father with wide, watery eyes. Promise me, the once king said to his children, that you will not seek revenge for those who do this to me. Little Louis Charles nodded his head. Marie Antoinette would not stop her weeping.

She and her husband had been married for 23 years. Louis XVIth had never taken a mistress. Perhaps if he had, things would have been easier for his queen. someone else to deflect the gossip and attention. But I was far too late to try to imagine how things might have been different. Louis XVIth had been sentenced to death and his head would be on the guillotine the next morning. To stop his wife and his sister and his children from crying, Louis promised that he would see them tomorrow morning,

that he would say one final goodbye. This was just goodnight. We'll say goodbye tomorrow morning, he lied. The next morning, Marie Antoinette, now called the widow Capet, was taken to a new prison cell. Her son, seven years old, was now technically the king of France, and it was time for him to be re-educated in the ways of the revolutionaries. Young Louis Charles was ripped from his mother's arms and taken away, but still within earshot, that was important.

The guards wanted to make sure that Marie Antoinette heard her son's crying, heard his beatings at the hand of his new teacher, a cobbler named Simone. Marie Antoinette became obsessed with trying to catch just a glimpse of her small son. She would spend days pressed against a wall in the spot where, if she craned her neck, she could just see him being brought to his new exercises. The guards would laugh at little Louis Charles, giving him wine until he got drunk, then more wine until he got drunker.

They beat him until he agreed that he hated his parents, that the former king and queen were traitors, and he loved only liberty and the revolution. They beat him until he agreed that his mother had molested him, forced him to lie with her, that she was a harlot, a degenerate, a monster. Marie Antoinette heard it all. Eventually, she stopped crying. When she was moved to yet another cell, she accidentally hit her head on a doorframe. A guard asked her if she was all right. Marie Antoinette answered, Nothing can hurt me anymore. The queen was to be moved to the prison of the conciergerie in the middle of the night.

Her guards lifted their bayonet to knock on the prison door. A young man named Louis L'Rivier answered. When Louis was a boy, he had worked at Versailles as a pastry cook. He had caught glimpses of the queen in all of her splendence. The woman before him now was salivier. as wax, dressed all in black. Even still, it's impossible that the young Louis did not recognize her, that he could not see the shadow of the woman who had once been the sun. What is your name? Louis L'Rivier asked her, determined to obey the proper intake protocols

for the woman who is now just prisoner number 280. What could Marie Antoinette say? was she Maria Antonia Josefa Joanna, Archduchess of Austria, the Dowager Queen of France? Or was she just the widow Capet? There was no answer she could give. Instead, Marie Antoinette just simply replied, Look at me.

Marie Antoinette was brought to her cell. The sun had only just begun to rise. Madame Richard, a former haberdasher, had managed to get linen for the queen's bed and a lace-edged pillow. But the cell was still a cell, damp brick floors and peeling walls, furnished only by a canvas bed, a table and two chairs. Madame Richard had brought a stool from her own room.

There was a bucket in the corner. The room itself was humid with stinking, stagnant air. Marie Antoinette began to undress, and Madame Richard offered to help. Thank you, my child, the queen said, but since I no longer have any of my household with me, I will look after myself. When one of the maids brought Marie Antoinette a small mirror, a little cheap thing with a red border and an oriental pattern on its back, Marie Antoinette held both of the maids' hands in her own and kissed her on the cheek.

The small mirror she kept safe in a cardboard box, and she prized it. Marie Antoinette watched the guards play their card games. She requested a needle and thread for embroidery, but she was denied until she pulled the frayed edges of the cell's wallpaper and wove with that. She read adventure novels over and over again, like the travels of Captain Cook, lent to her by one of her sympathetic jailers. The queen still had allies, technically. There was her family in Austria, but her mother, Maria Terace, was long dead, and her brother, the next emperor, was also dead. Now on the throne was his son, her nephew, a boy who had never met his aunt that doomed queen so far away. Marie Antoinette had not seen her home country since she was sent away to become a princess of France when she was 13 years old.

But there were still loyalists in France, those who tried to imagine ways the queen could escape to freedom. A former military officer, Alexandro de Rueville, visited the queen in her. cell and dropped a single red carnation at her feet. Inside the tightly packed petals, there was a tiny note. The note had a plan for escape. The guards could be bribed, and the queen could be spirited away in a carriage to the home of an ally and then onto Germany. All the queen needed to do was to use a needle to prick her answer in one of the petals of the flower. But before the plan had even begun, it was a little. foiled. A guard, knowing that the queen escaping would cost him his own head, gave the game up.

The queen was escorted to a deeper, more secure dungeon. The kind Madame Richard and her husband were thrown in prison for their laity, replaced by another couple, grim and brutal. None of the small indulgences the queen had enjoyed were to remain. If one had bothered to look at the carnation after all that, they would have seen the queen's answer, her response to some self-proclaimed hero's escape attempt that had ended up causing her her final bits of freedom. In tiny letters, with a pin, the queen had punctured the letters of the word.

Negative. When Marie Antoinette was finally brought in for her trial, there were gasps from the crowd. They knew the queen from her glistening portraits and from the propaganda that was circulated. depicting her as a wild harlot, cheeks rouged and hair-stacked high. She was drawn as a harpy sometimes, or a silly, flamboyant ostrich. The woman before them was hardly recognizable.

In the year and a half she had been in prison, her hair had gone wiry and gray, her eyes lifeless, her cheeks were sunken and her hands shriveled. She was dressed all in black in a simple dress that had been mended over and over. But the shock of the crowd did not mean mercy. Her husband had been given time to prepare a case with lawyers, as if he might have been declared innocent. There was no similar show of fairness for the queen. One by one, the cases against her were listed,

that she had manipulated her husband, that she was treasonous, that she had passed along information to Austria and communicated with foreigners to sabotage France. Marie Antoinette remained impassive the entire time, No expression flickering across her face, until the court reached its final accusation. On the confession of her son, Louis Charles,

Marie Antoinette was accused of sexual abuse that she had laid with him in bed and taught him pernicious practices. Marie Antoinette's composure drained from her, and the woman became fire. One of the jurors turned to the court and said, the accused has not responded to the facts regarding what took place between her and her son. Marie Antoinette answered, If I have not replied, it is because nature itself refuses to respond to such a charge laid against a mother.

Her eyes scanned across the entire courtroom, mad and desperate and determined. I appeal to all mothers who may be present. A murmur went through the court. For the first time in the entire trial, the women in the room seemed to soften. They looked at one another. A hatred, hard as a clenched fist, began to unfurl. But it was too late. Marie Antoinette was guilty of being Marie Antoinette,

and so she was sentenced to death by guillotine by the all-male jury. Like her first death, on an island in the middle of the Rhine so many years ago, the second death of Marie Antoinette also began with being stripped down. Marie Antoinette had not known when her trial and her death would come, and so she wore black continually so she would meet her lord in proper mourning for her husband. But on the morning of her death, her guards forced her to change into a simple white frock. She begged for them to leave her to change in privacy, but they refused.

They were assigned to watch her. And so, under the eyes of men who hated her, Marie Antoinette shed her mourning clothes and put on white. Neither the guards nor Antoinette knew that white, not black, was actually the historic color for French queens to wear in mourning. She asked to relieve herself. The guards did not respond. And so the queen squatted in the corner as they watched,

and then she was taken out into the street. This time her carriage was not gilded or velvet. It was a cart with a cage at the back. And when the queen sat facing forward, the guard shouted at her. She was to face the opposite way, her back to the horses. She sat in the open so the crowds could spit on her and throw cabbages as she passed. The night before she had written letters to her family. To her daughter, she sent her love and instructions to care for her brother.

to her son a reminder to heed his father's words that he would never avenge their deaths. This advice would prove unnecessary. Little Louis Charles would die two years later of prison fever. Marie Antoinette had also written to her sister-in-law, Elizabeth, asking her to forgive Louis Charles for his testimony in court. Forgive him, dear sister. Think of his age and how easy it is to make a child say what one wants, even things he doesn't understand. The queen's famous hair was cut short at the neck to make the guillotine's journey easier.

As Marie Antoinette stepped onto the platform of her execution, she uttered her final words. She had stepped on the executioner's foot by mistake. I'm sorry, sir, she said. I did not do it on purpose. The blade came down. A man rushed from the crowd to soak his handkerchief in blood. Marie Antoinette's body was thrown into a mass grave

next to bodies of guards who had died in the attacks on her palaces. Bodies of people who had been crushed to death in the ecstatic fireworks celebrations of her wedding to the prince nearly a quarter of a century before. The mass grave were that very prince who became King Louis XVIth was himself interred. The queen was among her people. What's up, everyone? I'm Ego Wode.

My next guest, you know from someone, Step Brothers Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network. It's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever. I went and had lunch with them one day, and I was like, and Dad, I think I want to really give this a shot. I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings. I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place that come look for up-and-coming talent.

He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet. Yeah. He goes, but there's so much luck involved. And he's like, just give it a shot. He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat. Just hang in there.

Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks, Dad, on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong stance. And then there's your body having its own program. I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans,

a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. We share stories and scientific insights to how. help us all better navigate these periods of turbulence and transformation. There is one finding that is consistent, and that is that our resilience rests on our relationships. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A young woman named Marie Grusholz was also imprisoned in the revolution.

Marie had once been the art tutor to King Louis' little sister Elizabeth at Versailles, and it was thought she was still a royalist. To prove her loyalty to the revolution, the young woman, a sculptor, was brought to the grass where Marie Antoinette's head remained, still unburied. Marie took the bloody head in her lap and made a wax sculpture of it, just like the one she had made for the dead King Louis and for the martyr of the revolution, Mara. When the revolution was over and Marie Grusselst made it through alive, she got married and began touring her wax sculptures around Europe.

Eventually she made it to England and opened a permanent exhibition on the second story of a building on Baker Street. Her husband, Frank, remained in France, but Marie continued to use his surname. It's the name that became associated, with one of the most popular tourist attractions of all time. Madame Tussaud. Noble Blood is a co-production of IHeart Radio and Aaron Manky. The show is written and hosted by Dana Schwartz

and produced by Aaron Manky, Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Trevor Young. Noble Blood is on social media at Noble Blood Tales, and you can learn more about the show over at Noble Blood Tales.com. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, Visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Everyone, I'm Ago Vodam. My next guest, it's Will Ferrell.

Woo, woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever. He goes, just give it a shot. But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there yeah it would not be right it wouldn't be that there's a lot of luck listen to thanks dad on the iHeart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts

this is an iHeart podcast guaranteed human