Storming of the Tuilleries

At the Images of Marie Antoinette website, there were two posts and several photos posted about the anniversary of the beginning of the end for the royal family in France.

The most that I had ever known of Marie Antoinette was from tenth grade English when we read the Tale of Two Cities. Through that novel, we became aware of the French Revolution. At MSU later, I studied the impact of the French thinking about revolution, equality and fraternity in an education class. I still had never really learned anything about the royal family as my interests had been concentrated on psychology, sociology, English Literature, and education. I had to take a foreign language so I opted to take French in summer school, and failed it miserably.

I had a friend who lived on the dorm floor who always made me think of Antoinette as this girl was a natural redhead, had a receding chin, and was a t.v. major from Illinois. I had always thought of her as a lot like Antoinette since this girl liked very expensive shoes, fashions, and trinkets, and appeared quite spoiled as an only child often is.

So to my surprise when I lived in California, a friend of mine called me Antoinette due to my hair style, and I shrugged it off, not thinking much about it...never knowing whether to be insulted or flattered because I had no knowledge of her life at all and did not truly care either.

Oh,how I wish I had known then what I know now. But another teacher gave me a book called True Confessions of a Queen, and I then learned a little bit more about her, and had great sympathy for her, especially when she lost her children. I was quite surprised to learn about a word called faubourg. It has such a resemblance to my last name...I learned it means suburubs, and there are many streets in Paris called that incidentally.

Funny then that I learned that it was the march of the faubourgs which descended on the Versailles to storm the palace and to threaten the king and queen also.

So because of this anniversary of the storming of the palace of the Tuilleries I took time to study the photos that Axel had placed in the album. One was of a statue of Louis XIV that was being taken down. That impressed me a lot. I already placed two videos of a film made in 1938 about the Queen. Antoinette was not that attractive as Hollywood stars or French films want to portray her. She was closer in resemblance to my college friend than the movie stars who have portrayed her. That was one of the reasons that I had dubbed that woman as MA since there was a slight resemblance physically as well as apparently extravagantly.

I would like to read a good novel about that time when the palace was under attack, how the queen reacted, and how the king protected her, if he did and in what manner.

People have imaginations about it...I remember that the young Louis XIV had suffered the same kind of invasion of his privacy when a child so that is the cause for the Chateau du Versailles being built outside of Paris. Louis XIV never quite forgave the Parisians for their actions against his own mother. An irony that for all his good intentions, even the distance could not prevent the Parisians from doing the same to his chateau that many years later.

Louis XIV feigned sleep. Little did he know then that one day his own statue would be brought down to another mob angry at the king and queen for imagined ills.

I can write about Louis XIV as a child...I can visualize him hiding under a blanket, and these were threadbare sheets upon which he lay, as at that time, he did not have it so good in his young life...his mother was living quite frugally, and he pretended to be asleep, covering his head, keeping his eyes closed so that the crowd could see that he was still there. The crowd had feared that his mother and the Cardinal would take the children out of town. He was a prisoner in his own room.


When he heard the sounds of the footsteps recede into the distance, he flung the blanket off and looked around to see that he was safe. His mother comforted him, assuring him that the crowd had gone, that he was just fine, and could go to sleep now for real. He buried himself further under the blankets, and lay his head back down upon a pillow to fall soundly asleep.

Now that is imagination at work...not a memory. the memories I usually discuss in first person as I am so involved in them. But I can imagine a lot of things also but I do try to distinguish between that which is imagination and which is something that I relived.

I have not ever relived that moment in his history. I have only read of it.

Sometimes I have noticed that if I open a topic to discuss, that I will go into a kind of automatic writing where thoughts will come pouring out. I let that happen to learn what it is that is pouring out of me. I listen to myself a lot I have often said.

At any rate, I see a terrible irony in the fact that this time in which the King had to feign sleep affected him so much that he moved the seat of government from Paris to the hunting lodge in the Versailles region. It proved to be of no avail when push came to shove and the mob became angry again. How sad it is for me to realize all this now, some 300 years later.

So that is what I try to learn from the study of these past lifetimes...what has happened in a previous life to make the present life to happen. I see many things in the life of the King which I believe are a direct result of a time period in another name and another role in life. Genghis Khan and Louis XIV both suffered the same lot of having a father taken from them when very young, and a mother who is the most important and influential person in their lives. Likewise, Alexander lost his father at an older age, but his mother again was the single most important influence in his life.

And sorry to say, but George Washington also lost his father early in his youth, and his mother was a thorn in his side and had a great influence on him as well...intriguing...how repetitive...how much the same.

I will continue...am posting for now...