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| The Missions Etrangères, rue du Bac |
From Mostrim, Co. Longford (now Edgeworthstown) to Toulouse, then to Paris and finally to Mittau near Saint Petersburg, with brief stays in Warsaw, the Duchy of Brunswick and London in between: the peregrinations of Abbé Henry Essex Edgeworth (Mostrim, Co. Longford, 1745-Mittau, Russia, 1807) in themselves suggest an eventful life. But Abbé Edgeworth's main claim to fame comes from his presence beside King Louis XV on the day the latter was guillotined on the Place de la Concorde (then called Place de la Révolution, 8th arrondissement) on January 21, 1793.
He had actually been brought up in Toulouse from the age of four, after his father had converted from Protestantism. When his father died, the family moved to Paris. The Abbé's existence appears to have been a relatively tranquil one until 1789. Thus, for 20 years, he lived at the Missions Etrangères at the corner of rue de Babylon and rue de Bac (7th arrondissement, see photo), engaging in pastoral work, while his mother and sister lived close by in the Franciscan College in the rue de Bac. But his life changed dramatically with the Revolution.
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Edgeworth's chasuble |
Suspected (rightly) of being an out-an-out royalist, his apartment was searched on several occasions. Fears for his own safety can only have been exacerbated by the massacre of hundreds of priests in the nearby Church of the Carmelites in September 1792, after which he escaped to a village outside the city. By this time, he had become confessor to Madame Elisabeth, who then recommended him to her brother, the deposed king Louis XVI. Thus it was that Edgeworth - still on the run - was called to the king's cell in the Temple prison (3rd arrondissement, address no longer exists) on the eve of the latter's execution on Jan. 21, 1793 and stayed with him through the night. (By this time, the Archbishop of Paris, who had been obliged to flee, had committed the diocese of Paris to Edgeworth). After celebrating Mass, Edgeworth and the King were driven through the streets of Paris as far as Place de la Concorde - a journey that took two hours because of the crowds. Edgeworth was not the only Irishman on the Place de la Concorde that day. Charles Kearney, who had been superior of the Irish College (and who Edgeworth had named as interpreter to a French nobleman in England the previous year), was also on the scene as a "simple spectator".
Edgeworth accompanied the king up the steep steps leading to the guillotine, and once the blade fell, he was sprinkled with the king's blood. As the writer François René de Châteaubriand put it, "a foreigner sustained the Monarch at his last hour - it seemed as if there were not a single Frenchman left who was loyal to his sovereign." Miraculously, Edgeworth himself escaped through the crowd, helped by the fact that the clergy were obliged by Revolutionaries to wear lay dress. In a letter to his brother, Ussher, he later wrote:
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| The Malesherbes residence |
"All eyes were fixed on me, as you may suppose; but as soon as I reached the first line, to my greatest surprise, no resistance was made. The second line opened in the same manner and when I got to the fourth or fifth, my coat, being a common surtout (for I was not permitted, on this occasion, to wear any exterior marks of a priest) I was absolutely lost in the crowd, and no more noticed than if I had been a simple spectator of a scene which forever will dishonour France."
Edgeworth initially made it to a milliner's shop across the river in the rue de Bac, and then sought refuge in the town house of Lamoignon de Malesherbes in the rue de Pavée (see photo, 4th arrondissement) in the Marais district. Malesherbes, who had defended Louis XVI at his trial, was himself to be arrested before the end of 1793 and executed on April 22, 1794.
Edgeworth remained on the run for three and a half-years, never staying in the same house for more than two nights in a row while in Paris, before he finally made it to England. The Abbé then caught up with the exiled Louis XVIII in Blankenberg (Duchy of Brunswick), whom he followed to Mittau in present-day Latvia and (briefly) Warsaw. Now, is that not prime material for a Hollywood film? But the Abbé Edgeworth is not the only Irishman to have had close contact with French royalty; Louis XIV had a certain Owen O'Shiel as a physician, for example, while the favourite mistress of his great grandson, Louis XV was one Louison O'Murphy.
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