Marie Antoinette's

Ricardo André Frantz, Conciergerie. 2005, photograph. Wikimedia Commons.

A chilling account from a night spent at the Conciergerie, the prison where Marie Antoinette spent her last days.



This particular account is left by Jacques Claude Beugnot, who survived and would leave an account in his memoirs.

Manning Leonard Krull, Conciergerie-5 (view through her cell door). Photograph, Paris. Cool Stuff in Paris.

 On entering the prison:

"The staircases of the palace (prison) were crowded with women, who appear to be waiting there for some attractive show. The show was always ready at hand in the cart that waited to carry away the unfortunate victims to the guillotine.

When I arrived, all these people rose together as in an amphitheater, yelling with savage delight, showing the most fiendish joy at every fresh arrival. In that short space which I had to pass in order to enter the prison, I received such a welcome that I could judge of the reception that awaited me when I should have to leave."

André Lage Freitas, Marie Antoinette's cell at the Conciergerie. October 10, 2011, photograph. Wikimedia Commons.

A night in the prison:

"From hour to hour the chimes beat slowly out these long hours of suffering; the watchdogs respond with long-drawn-out howls; the jailers charged with the different death warrants take these from cell to cell till far into the night, and awake every prisoner by their menacing and insulting voices.

Every one believes that his last hour has arrived; thus these death-sentences, destined for from sixty to eighty people daily, are so distributed that six hundred are kept in perpetual alarm."
 
Beugnot, Jacques-Claude, and Albert Beugnot. 1868. Mémoires du comte Beugnot, ancien ministre (1783-1815). Paris: E. Dentu. Cited in Gower, Ronald Sutherland. 1973. Last days of Marie Antoinette; an historical sketch. New York: AMS Press.