The weight of her skirts had been a heavy sort of comfort. Something to ground her and make her feel stable in such an unknown environment. They were always so ruffled and adorned with golden wire and bounds of lace; contrasted with the tight pull of her corset. Sometimes they were even heavier with cloaks and furs, she had always found them beautiful.
Standing on a cylinder like step surrounded by various servants and handmaidens, being primped and primed to fit a new dress. It only fueled her desire to buy more gowns, each heavier and each more expensive.
Pretty dresses brought in more peoples favor, and saying she needed peoples favor was an understatement of the situation she was currently in.
Now the weight off of her had been lifted, instead a thin cotton white dress danced off her shoulders; slightly too large in size. Weight had been lifted in many ways: by the way her hair, usually teased and plated into ringlets, fell in light stretched out curls; or by the searing mid-June heat, cicadas songs in her ears, dirt on her feet.
She hadn’t really ever felt this out of place, this naked. Since she could remember those dresses had been on her back, her hair had been meticulously done every morning, and she had been in a palace. Here was different: no palace, no royal carriage and nice cobblestone paths.
People sneered at her when the walked by, ignoring her bound hands and display in a farmer's cart. She wanted to cry, these were her people. She had only wanted them to be happy, that’d been her only intention. She hadn’t understood what they meant when they said they were starving, it hadn’t made sense to her.
These people--maybe they weren’t exactly hers. They had always seemed so foreign, the way they farmed for food instead of calling upon a servant, the way they wore weightless clothes and never really had their hair primped and adorned with accessories. But that didn’t mean she was any less theirs, their queen. A French queen of Austrian descent, maybe she was set up for failure when her father envisioned and enforced this marriage.
Now was too late to be concerned with her chances of avoiding this from the beginning, if anything the King held more causation than her. She’d simply done what she’d been taught, she listened and she stayed silent. When he told her to wait she waited, when he told her to flee with him she fled.
She didn’t exactly have any problems with Louis XVI, she couldn’t help but think where he was now. Was he dressed the same as her? Changed into the clothes of his people, stained by the blood of his people, as she was by the tomatoes hurled at her while her cart rolled through the streets of Paris?
The tomatoes stung her eyes, juice slowly staining her dress pink. She cowered, covering her eyes with arms slung around her head, crouched down with hay poking her newly exposed thighs. Vulnerable, loose, losing.
Weeks ago they had her watch his execution. Watch the blood spurt out of his partially severed neck, blood foaming at his mouth while he choked. Watch them lift the blade only to bring it down again, cheering as they suck his head on a pike and raised it as if it was a torch. The brutality made her feel sick, riddled her with disgust and fear. It made her miss her daughters and sons, the arms at which they’d been ripped out of.
She remembers what she had said when they’d thrown her in a disgusting cell, with putrid air that smelled of piss; after they’d read her crimes and instituted her trial. “I was a queen, and you took away my crown; a wife, and you killed my husband; a mother, and you deprived me of my children. My blood alone remains: take it, but do not make me suffer long.”
Weeks of what felt like a malnourished diet and hand me down bonnets weighed down when the 24 hour trial began. It weighed more than those dresses ever did but less than when they’d sentenced her to the guillotine. A sentence she took in silence, like she took many other things in the palace. Just like the palace, she attempted to think in comfort, except nothing was.
Not when they dressed her and put her in the carriage, taking her bonnet and cutting her hair just below her ears; for a clean cut. Not when she cried out against the cries of the city, against the cries on hatred when something sharper or harder was thrown. Slight cuts formed on her bare skin, the tingling sensation burning like a cut on a shard of grass when playing crochet.
All because she was Austrian, or because she married an incompetent King, or because she was an incompetent Queen. Sweat forced her hair to curl up on her forehead and caress the side of her face; the last summer she would see. She couldn’t hear the cicadas anymore, their cries overshadowed by the cries of the people. “Vive la République!”
Heat and the unfamiliar crowd of people clouded her mind, constantly bustling and yelling. Where had their sympathy gone? Why did they blame her for things she couldn’t help? For things her husband did, for things set up for decimation by previous Kings. She bit her tongue and they lowered her body, bound at the arms and ankles, onto a stained red plank of wood. Placing her down, head in the guillotine.
Her breath stilled alongside the crowds, they held the rope tight and the world too. The stillness let her hear the cicadas one more time, sounds of a peaceful summertime picnic in the gardens, or of a spring tea party held in a greenery. She tried to imagine her there, children off playing while her husband indulged on sweets and sugars imported from the colonies. Tried to imagine being anywhere but here, under the blade.
The fall of the blade was bigger than her, the effect bigger than her, important in a larger scope. It was a quick way to go, the start of a yell was heard before nothing.
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