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Marie Antoinette

Chapter 29: APPENDIX D ON THE LOGE OF THE “LOGOTACHYGRAPHE”
By Hilaire Belloc
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About This Book

The narrative traces the life of the French queen from her dynastic upbringing and marriage into the royal household through court life, scandals, and political crises. It chronicles episodes such as intrigues surrounding court favorites, the notorious jewel affair, popular uprisings, a failed royal escape, wartime strains and the collapse of the monarchy, followed by imprisonment and death. The author treats these events as a convergence of personal impulses, misjudgments, and larger impersonal forces, arguing for a sense of tragic destiny. The volume is organized chronologically and supplemented with illustrations, maps, and documentary appendices.

APPENDIX D
 
ON THE LOGE OF THE “LOGOTACHYGRAPHE”

THE Manège was pulled down after the consular decree of year XI., which originated the Rue de Rivoli; the historical reconstruction of its arrangements on the 10th of August 1792 is the more difficult from the fact that the only accurate plan of it which has come down to us[56] dates from a period earlier than December 1791, in which month (on the 27th) the order was given to change nearly the whole of its dispositions. The box of the Logographe can be fixed in this plan (though not in the new place it occupied after the 5th of January 1792),[57] but not that of the Logotachygraphe.

56.  In the Histoire des Edifices, &c., by Paris.

57.  The work was finished by the 26th of January 1792.

We know[58] that the first was near the President’s Chair, and this was on the south side of the Manège, in the middle. It was in this box that the Queen had appeared when her husband had accepted the Constitution on the return from Varennes; and it was in this box that the Royal Family were supposed, until lately, to have stayed in the three days after the fall of the palace.

58.  By the 7th clause of the order cited.

There were many such grated boxes for reporters up and down the Hall: the proximity of the Logographe’s to the Chair being due to the desire for accurate verbatim reports to be recorded from the best acoustic position of the Hall.

Our establishment of the Logographe’s box is only of value to the history of the 10th of August because (though a confusion was till recently made between the two) the box in which the Royal Family were put, that of the Logotachygraphe, a journal not yet published, but in preparation, and one which had already obtained leave to have its reporting place in the Hall, must have been near by. Its exact situation we cannot determine, but it was certainly not far from the Chair on the south wall, and presumably in the eastern half of it.