No event since the attack on Versailles had caused Marie Antoinette equal
anguish. It showed that attachment to the king and herself was in itself
regarded as an inexpiable crime, and her distress was greatly augmented
when, on the Sunday following the execution of the marquis, some of his
friends brought to the table where, as usual, she was dining in public
with the king, the widowed marchioness and her orphaned son in deep
mourning, and presented them to their majesties. Their introducers
evidently expected that the king, or at least the queen, by the
distinguished reception which she would accord to them, would mark their
sense of the merits of their late husband and father, and of the indignity
of the sentence under which he had suffered.

Marie Antoinette was sadly embarrassed and distressed: she was taken
wholly by surprise; and it happened by a cruel perverseness of fortune
that Santerre, the brewer, whose ruffianly and ferocious enmity to the
whole royal family, and especially to herself, had been conspicuous
throughout the worst outrages of the past summer and autumn, was on the
same day on duty at the palace as commander of one of the battalions of
the Parisian Guard, and was standing behind her chair when the marchioness
and her son were introduced. Her embarrassment and all her feelings on the
occasion were described by herself in the course of the afternoon to
Madame Campan.

After the dinner was over, she went up to her attendant's room, saying
that it was a relief to find herself where she could weep at her ease; for
weep she must at the folly of the ultra-Royalists. "We can not but be
destroyed," she continued, "when we are attacked by people who unite every
kind of talent to every kind of wickedness; and when we are defended by
folks who are indeed very estimable, but who have no just notion of our
position. They have now compromised me with both parties, in their
presenting to me the widow and son of Favras. If I had been free to do as
I would, I should have taken the child of a man who had just been
sacrificed for us, and have placed him at table between the king and
myself; but surrounded as I was by the very murderers who had caused his
father's death, I could not venture even to bestow a glance upon him. Yet
the Royalists will blame me for not having seemed to be interested in the
poor child; while the Revolutionists will be furious, thinking that those
who presented him to me knew that it wou