Free Confessions of Marie Antoinette by Juliet Grey Page B

continue. And at all costs, I hope for as long as possible to shield them from whatever deprivations we adults may suffer here.”
    The king and I fight to retain as much of the status quo as we can. The princesse de Lamballe has returned to court, too distressed by our circumstances to consider remaining safely at the Château d’Eu with her father-in-law, the duc de Penthièvre. Upon her arrival at the Tuileries in October she resumed her post as superintendent of my household without missing a breath.
    “How could I fail to be by your side, Majesté ?” she had asked, her eyes brimming, as always, with sympathetic tears.
    “It is more of a risk than you know,” I’d told her. “Did you hear what happened to our dear baron de Besenval?” The princesse de Lamballe shook her head. “Imprisoned in the Châtelet—awaiting a trial that I fully expect to be another sham.” I trembled with anger even as I spoke the words.
    The princesse’s cheeks grew pink with shock. “What did he do?”
    “It’s what the revolutionaries think he did not do. In July, he was in charge of commanding the Parisian garrison. He resisted those monsters who rioted at the Bastille, rather than allow them to continue their insurrection.”
    The princesse shivered. “What is happening nowadays?” she murmured, her hands clasped so tightly in her lap that her knuckles grew pale.
    We no longer go to the Opéra or the Comédie-Française, where actors speaking lines that can be interpreted as “royalist” are drowned out by catcalls and forced to retreat from the stage, often under a hail of edible projectiles. But at the Tuileries we still cling to our routines: Grand couverts —public dinners—on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and cards on Sundays. I smile to think that I’d so detested dining in public when we began our reign fifteen years ago that I urged Louis to change the ancient etiquette and hold private soupers instead. And when I had yet to see my twentieth year I had derided the most popular pastime at court, a dreary lotto game called cavagnole, the delight of the prudish collets-montés who were north of the age of thirty. Nowadays, I am happy to reclaim these silly rituals, embracing them with a fervor equal to my prior disdain. Scorn has become the purview of the Revolution.
    Louis has expected his ministers to remain in place as well, or at least to be part of the new government, and we have counted upon the support of the comte de Mirabeau in the National Assembly to assure this. Mirabeau proposed a number of names to us, illustrious men who were Assembly delegates, including Lafayette, Talleyrand, the duc de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, and Monsieur Target, the lawyer who so successfully defended the Cardinal de Rohan in the notorious affaire du collier three years ago, when HisEminence had been swindled into purchasing a massive diamond necklace in my name. Jacques Necker, our popular Minister of Finance, has been suggested for Premier or Chief Minister, primarily, Louis believes, as a sop to everyone. Necker’s liberal beliefs would please the Assembly and the people, yet he is a man who is already intimately familiar with my husband’s government.
    But on the seventh of November, Mirabeau’s fragile house of cards collapses when Necker refuses to cooperate with him, and the National Assembly ultimately issues a decree that no member of the legislature may become a minister in His Majesty’s government. I do not comprehend Necker’s motives. From our thrones in the king’s formal bedchamber, all hope of compromise, of working with the revolutionaries, of maintaining a powerful executive by virtue of gaining a more cooperative Assembly, crumble in a tense struggle for political dominance. Louis has already seen his powers reduced. In September, when we still resided at Versailles, he was permitted to retain only a suspensive veto. All French monarchs had always been given the authority to override the realm’s judicial