Margaret Anne MacLeod's Blog

“Stay in Paris, then it’ll be easy to reach you. The king of Prussia, with his army, has resolved to make straight for Paris. Stay in Paris.”

This was the disastrous advice from Axel von Fersen, Marie Antoinette’s beloved, in the weeks before her palace was stormed and her husband deposed.

Marie Antoinette listened to her love – don’t we all – and weeks later the Parisians stormed her palace, imprisoned her, and months later guillotined her.

Fersen never forgave himself. Marie Antoinette, of course, would have forgiven her beloved.

The princesse de Lamballe was Marie Antoinette’s foremost heroine. She returned to France from the safety of London so that Marie Antoinette could have a friend with her in the months before the king was deposed – and the brave woman was slaughtered just weeks after Marie Antoinette’s husband was deposed.

Lamballe was by Marie Antoinette’s side on her first weeks of imprisonment, sharing the queen’s agony – but all too soon the revolutionaries came in the dead of the night, as was their wont, to remove Lamballe. The next Marie Antoinette heard of her dear friend was when the thugs broke off from massacring thousands of suspected royalists in the prisons to come to her prison to force the queen to kiss the dead lips of her so-called ‘lover’.

Fortunately, the brave town councillor Daujon, faced down the thugs and, with a mixture of cunning and flattery, persuaded the thugs to move on to the centre of Paris with their ‘trophies’ (Lamballe’s body, in gruesome bits).