It seems from a quick internet search, there’s varying stories about what happened to Thisbe, whether he was killed during her execution or lived a long life with her children. Is there any definitive evidence of what truly happened to him?
On another note, have there been other cases of a dog surviving it’s executed owner? What happened to it then?
Let's try to track down this one. The earliest version of the dog story can be found in a book about French prisons published in 1797 by Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Nougaret (1742-1823), a polygraph who wrote about anything. Nougaret participated in the Revolution and may have been in Paris at that time, so he was at least close to the events he described. The story goes like this:
Marie-Antoinette had a dog in the Temple which had constantly followed her. When she was transferred to the Conciergerie, the dog came with her; but he was not allowed to enter this new prison. He waited for a long time at the window, where he was mistreated by the gendarmes, who hit him with bayonets. These bad treatments did not shake his fidelity; he always remained close to the place where his mistress was, and when he felt pressed by hunger he went to some houses close to the palace, where he found food; he returned then to lie down at the door of the Conciergerie. When Marie-Antoinette lost her life on the scaffold, the dog kept watch at the door of her prison; he continued to fetch some kitchen scraps from traiteurs in the neighbourhood; but he did not give himself to anyone, and returned to the post where his loyalty had placed him. As he disappeared after about a year, without us knowing what became of him, it is presumed that he finally died of his suffering.
This is relatively terse, and somehow plausible, as Nougaret does not seem to add fancy details to this Revolution-era Jurassic Bark episode.
The next version was told much later, in 1858, 65 years after the facts. It appeared in the royalist newspaper L'Union (Mac Sheehy, 23 February 1858). This version was supposed to be part of a new edition of the memoirs of Madame la Duchesse d'Angoulême, Marie-Thérèse, who was Marie-Antoinette's surviving daughter. Marie-Thérèse had written her memoirs as a teenager when she was emprisoned at the Temple, and a first version had been published in 1823. The new version, edited by François de Barghon Fort-Rion, added materials derived from writings collected by his uncle, Barghon-Monteil, who had been Louis XVI's bodyguard. Before publication, Barghon Fort-Rion sent to Mac Sheehy of L'Union a small chapter titled Thisbé or the Queen's dog.
That version is really an ampliation of Nougaret's story: it reuses entire sequences but add details, a new character, and a new ending. The dog gets a name, Thisbé, and is now female. When she's not looking for food, she is kept by a young milliner called Miss Arnaud, "at the risk of her life". When the Queen is taken away to be executed, the dog follows her, and she starts howling when Marie-Antoinette is guillotined. A Revolutionary wounds her with his spike, and the heroic, bleeding doggo has to be hidden by Miss Arnaud (who fears to be caught and accused of being a royalist) in her sister's house next to the Saint-Michel Bridge. The dog becomes a local celebrity known as "The Queen's dog". This is how it ends:
Thisbé, seeing herself thus locked up far from the places where her august mistress had lived, did not want to take any food; she became wild, frightened, and finding one day the window of the room open, she threw herself into the Seine.
The article of Mac Sheehy ends by saying that the story had until now been censored by the government, who did not want people to know that "under the regime of blood, animals were more sensitive and compassionate" than authorities.
Strangely, this version of the dog story published in L'Union was not included in the Barghon edition of the Memoirs. Marie-Thérèse, in fact, does not even mention a dog when she describes her emprisonement. There is one dog that appears in a footnote by Barghon, a "speaking dog" named Barassin, a thief and assassin who had been appointed personal valet of Marie-Antoinette. Still, this version was reprinted with variants in other newspapers in the following years, though some historians only used the Nougaret version. One can speculate that the Mac Sheehy/Barghon version is a fanciful and propagandistic retelling of the Nougaret one, now with a royalist twist.
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