Marie Antoinette: The Journey by Antonia Fraser
Turgot had argued for a simplified coronation in Paris. This would have given the impression of a King crowned by popular acclamation, with the double effect of bringing extra commerce to the capital. Perhaps it was the May riots that persuaded the King and his advisors to go for the security of Rheims, so much further from the capital. At all events, this excursion of the King and Queen, exposing themselves to the public gaze a long way from Versailles and in the direction of the north-eastern border, at a time when the physical appearance of royalties was generally speaking an unknown factor, was to have unforeseen consequences in years to come.
The day of the coronation, 11 June, was intensely hot and the long ceremony was exhausting. Nevertheless Marie Antoinette was deeply moved by the occasion. First of all her husband’s dignified concentration caused her to weep as the Te Deum was being sung. The King too had tears in his eyes, but the Queen’s emotion was so overwhelming that she was forced to withdraw for a short while. On her return, the eyes of the royal couple met tenderly. All of this was noted and received much approbation: “The people loved her for her tears.” Second, as Marie Antoinette told her mother afterwards, she was affected by “the most touching acclamations” on the part of the people and the evident devotion shown to them both; this despite the shortage of bread, which continued. In the evening both the King and Queen promenaded outdoors informally through the city, stoically enduring the stifling heat, Marie Antoinette on the arm of her husband.29
Now, if at all, during the period of the Flour War, was the occasion when Marie Antoinette might have uttered the notorious phrase: “Let them eat cake” (Qu’ils mangent de la brioche). Instead, she indulged to her mother in a piece of reflection on the duties of royalty. Its tenor was the exact opposite of that phrase, at once callous and ignorant, so often ascribed to her. “It is quite certain,” she wrote, “that in seeing the people who treat us so well despite their own misfortune, we are more obliged than ever to work hard for their happiness. The King seems to understand this truth; as for myself, I know that in my whole life (even if I live for a hundred years) I shall never forget the day of the coronation.” This was the tender-hearted Marie Antoinette who, alone among the French royal family, refused to ruin the peasants’ cornfields by riding over them, because she was well aware of the minutiae of the lives of the poor.30
In fact that lethal phrase had been known for at least a century previously, when it was ascribed to the Spanish princess Marie Thérèse, bride of Louis XIV, in a slightly different form: if there was no bread, let the people eat the crust (croûte) of the pâté. It was known to Rousseau in 1737. It was credited to one of the royal aunts, Madame Sophie, in 1751, when reacting to the news that her brother the Dauphin Louis Ferdinand had been pestered with cries of “Bread, bread” on a visit to Paris. The Comtesse de Boigne, who as a child played at the Versailles of Marie Antoinette, attributed the saying to another aunt, Madame Victoire. But the most convincing proof of Marie Antoinette’s innocence came from the memoirs of the Comte de Provence, published in 1823. No gallant guardian of his sister-in-law’s reputation, he remarked that eating pâté en croûte always reminded him of the saying of his own ancestress, Queen Maria Thérèse. It was, in short, a royal chestnut.*3431
While Marie Antoinette was still at Rheims, she attempted to alleviate the condition of the Duc de Choiseul, exiled from court for the last four and a half years. It was not a notably successful manoeuvre. The best the Queen could do was persuade the King to let her receive her former patron personally. While Choiseul’s enemies shivered at the thought of his return to power, and the Queen herself tried to present the whole episode as a political triumph for herself in an unwise letter to an Austrian diplomat, Count Rosenberg, the truth was that, thanks to Maurepas and Vergennes, she simply did not have sufficient influence with the King to restore Choiseul.
In vain Marie Antoinette boasted to Rosenberg that “the poor man”—a reference to Louis XVI—had been induced to arrange the visit himself without having any idea how his wife had manipulated him. When Maria Teresa heard of the “style, the fashion of thinking” of this letter, she delivered a stunning reprimand to her daughter. The Empress was shocked! How could she refer to her royal husband in such a manner?33 The hypocrisy of the rebuke—delivered to one constantly adjured to govern her husband by stealth—was breathtaking.
Nor did the Queen fare any better in the case of Choiseul’s ambitious protégé, the Comte de Guines. A cultured man, an accomplished flautist who commissioned a concerto from Mozart, Guines was a member of the Polignac set, quite apart from his Choiseuliste origins. He was also vain; the Duc de Lévis, whose sharp tongue got him the nickname “Mosquito” from Marie Antoinette, reported that as Guines got fatter, he had his clothes made tighter and tighter to minimize his bulk so that in the end he had to have two identical sets of breeches cut according to whether he had to stand up or sit down. Guines had been for several years French ambassador in London. Now a “louche and cruel” scandal blew up, known as the Guines Affair, in which the ambassador was framed by his own secretary who used his master’s name to sell information to speculators. The resolution of the affair turned into a contest of political wills. Vergennes as Foreign Minister was determined to take the opportunity to get rid of Guines from this embassy, and if possible from other future embassies as well. As for the Queen, it has been suggested that she viewed the vindication of Guines as a stepping-stone towards the return of Choiseul himself.34
Vergennes, enjoying the confidence of the King where the Queen did not, won. Guines was dismissed without a future. A curt note from Louis XVI to his Foreign Minister early in the following year was explicit: “I have made it quite clear to the Queen that he cannot serve either in England or in any other Embassy.”35 The dukedom that Guines received subsequently in order to propitiate Marie Antoinette could not mask her actual defeat.
The dreaded accouchement of the Comtesse d’Artois took place on 6 August 1775. The result was a large healthy baby and it was a boy. Immediately Louis XVI granted him the royal title of the Duc d’Angoulême. The birth of this first Bourbon prince in the new generation was a blow to the Orléans family, immediately relegating their claims to the throne. It was more than a blow to Marie Antoinette; it was a ritual humiliation. For by the rules of etiquette she, along with all the other courtiers with the suitable Rights of Entry, was compelled to attend the birth and witness its most intimate moments. The Queen was present when the Comtesse d’Artois, hearing that she had gone further than merely produce a baby and had given birth to a male, cried out to her hutx1and: “My God, how happy I am!”
When it was all over, and Marie Antoinette had embraced her sister-in-law most tenderly, she was free at last to retire to her own apartments. At this point, however, this woman, so maternal that she had even envied the Duchesse de Chartres when she gave birth to a baby that died, had to run the gauntlet of the raucous market-women. Exercising their traditional right to hang around Versailles on occasions of state importance, they pursued the departing Queen with their cat-calls: “When will you give us an heir to the throne?” Marie Antoinette’s demeanour was as ever calm and dignified and she showed nothing outwardly of her mortification. But once she arrived at the safety of her own suite of rooms, the Queen shut herself up in her inner sanctum, alone with Madame Campan, and wept bitterly. As the First Lady of the Bedchamber wrote: “She was extremely affecting when in misfortune.”36
This was the kind of experience that made one of Marie Antoinette’s more desperate acts of charity comprehensible. The Queen was in her carriage near Louveciennes when a little village boy of four or five with fair hair and big blue eyes fell under her horses’ hoofs. He was unhurt. By the time the boy’s grandmother had emerged from her cottage, the Queen was already clutching him to her with the words: “I must take him. He is mine.” It helped that the boy’s mother had died, leaving five other orphans. The grandmother certainly raised no objection when Jacques was whirled away to Versai
The marriage celebrations for the King’s sister, Gros-Madame Clothilde, which followed in the second half of August, were also no great comfort to an Austrian Archduchess. The bridegroom was the Prince of Piedmont, heir to the kingdom of Sardinia, which made the third Savoyard marriage in a row within the royal family, to say nothing of a half-Savoyard heir to the throne, the infant Duc d’Angoulême. Poor Clothilde’s notorious weight caused the wits to say that two Savoyard Princesses had been received in exchange for one very heavy French one. That weight had indeed caused some concern to the grandfather of the bridegroom, King Charles Emmanuel III, on the grounds that if the fourteen-year-old Clothilde was fat already, she would certainly get fatter still in Savoy, as French women always enlarged on Italian food; his anxiety focused on the question of heirs. Clothilde herself worried that her bridegroom might recoil from her appearance although in the event the Prince behaved with style. She was, he said, much less fat than had been reported and in any case, “I find you adorable.”38 About the only consolation for Marie Antoinette in all this was the increased companionship of her younger sister-in-law Madame Elisabeth, now aged eleven, who was able to graduate from the care of the Royal Governess, the Comtesse de Marsan.
There was an epidemic of satiric and grossly obscene pamphlets or libelles in the autumn of 1775, a phenomenon that Marie Antoinette felt obliged to report to her mother. “No one was spared,” she wrote, “not even the King.” One pamphlet in particular was dangerously wounding, producing a flood of angry tears from Marie Antoinette, because it was, unlike the majority of them, horribly true.39 This was against the background of the continuing fecundity of the Comtesse d’Artois who was almost certainly pregnant once more.*35
The pamphlet was entitled Les Nouvelles de la Cour, centring on the despair of the “sad Queen” with the refrain: “Can the King do it? Can’t the King do it?” The verses themselves were extremely graphic, to the extent that even Bachaumont was shocked, although he printed it happily in his Correspondance Secrète. The Lamballe was said to be working at alleviating the Queen’s frustration with her “little fingers,” Maria Teresa to be advocating a lover:
My daughter, to have a successor
It little matters whether the maker
Is in front of the throne or behind it.
The problem of the King’s foreskin (prépuce) was contrasted with the Queen’s enthusiasm for puce, the new fashionable colour. Speculation on the royal emissions suggested “clear water” to be the most likely substance.40
Count Mercy’s pronouncement on the whole matter of the unfulfilled marriage, made at the end of the year, was much less ribald than the crude verses of the libelliste that provoked the disloyal courtiers to snigger behind the backs of their royal master and mistress. But it conveyed the same message. It was not enough to be a true goddess to the people, and listen to the cries of “Let us celebrate our Queen!” at the opera. “However brilliant the Queen’s position at the moment,” wrote Mercy to Maria Teresa on 17 December, she would never consolidate it until she produced an heir to the state. She needed “the quality of a mother to be regarded as French” by this “petulant and frivolous nation,” which would otherwise resent her influence.41
CHAPTER TEN
AN UNHAPPY WOMAN?
“You are getting older and you no longer have the excuse of youth. What will become of you? An unhappy woman and still more unhappy princess.”
THE EMPEROR JOSEPH II TO THE QUEEN OF FRANCE (AGED TWENTY-ONE) IN 1777
The New Year of 1776 was unusually severe with six weeks of snow. Ancient sledges were rooted out, last used by the King’s father in his youth. The noise of the bells on the gold-decked harnesses filled the air; horses were caparisoned with white plumes; masked ladies of the court took to visiting the Champs-Elysées. There was a time when Marie Antoinette would have been in ecstasy at such an opportunity to recreate the pleasures of her youth. But there was a chill in the air quite independent of the weather; in this case, criticisms of the pastime as being too “Viennese” caused her to abandon it after a while. Her relationship with the King, which had failed to develop into warmth in the past year, now became visibly cool.
Their lack of similar interests was obvious. In a revealing letter, written to Count Rosenberg in April 1775 (he was one of the Austrian correspondents approved by her mother because he passed on the contents), Marie Antoinette did not try to disguise the fact. Her tone, however, as invariably when writing to Vienna, was defensive. She suggested that the experienced diplomat should pay no attention to the tales about her conduct that were reaching Austria: “You know Paris and Versailles, you have been there, you can judge.” The Queen would be frank with him. “For example, my tastes are not the same as the King’s, who is only interested in hunting and his metal-working. You will agree that I would cut an odd figure at a forge; I am not one to play Vulcan [the god of Fire] there and if I played the role of Venus that would displease him a great deal more than my actual tastes of which he does not disapprove.”1
Eighteen months later, however, this gracious state of compromise outlined by Marie Antoinette, the basis for so many satisfactory royal marriages past and future, was no longer visible to interested observers. Baron Goltz, the well-informed Prussian envoy, heard that there were new scenes, which indicated a complete estrangement between the royal couple. In the view of the Austrians, this would only be solved by a visit from the Emperor Joseph; Goltz reflected that given the absolute diversity of their natures, his task was not going to be easy.2
At least the Queen always maintained a “most submissive” attitude to her husband in public. But she was beginning to incarnate what Maria Teresa angrily called “the spirit of dissipation” both by night and day; for the Empress had lost none of the vitriol of her pen with the passing years.3 In what did this “dissipation” consist? Some of it was harmless enough. The Queen began to enjoy going racing in the Bois de Boulogne escorted by her husband’s cousin (and her own), Philippe Duc de Chartres. The heir to the first Prince of the Blood himself extended his violent Anglomania—from her political institutions to her tailoring—to the English style of racing and English bloodstock.
More dangerous was the Queen’s growing passion for gambling at the various card games with which the court passed its time. Here neither Marie Antoinette nor the court of France was unique. Gambling was an endemic danger at such leisured and privileged places, extending back to the notorious occasion in the previous century when the Marquise de Montespan, mistress of Louis XIV, had won 700,000 écus gambling on Christmas Day. The current furious craze had actually started in the reign of Louis XV. In the previous generation both Marie Antoinette’s parents had adored cards. Unfortunately the late-night card parties of Marie Antoinette, concentrating on the games of lansquenet and pharaoh, had two particular effects. They kept her away from the sleeping King, which she probably intended, and contributed to her financial problems, which she certainly did not. (They also contributed to the financial problems of her courtiers when she won.) It was not even that profit was the point of it all; the Queen gambled to be in the fashion and to amuse herself, not to win. By January 1778 Count Mercy contended that the Queen was so straitened that she no longer gave fully to the charities that she loved.
There is a vignette of the Queen’s life—and that of the King—in an account of a gambling session on the eve of the Queen’s twenty-first birthday in 1776. Marie Antoinette cajoled Louis XVI into importing players from Paris who would act as bankers. Pl
The so-called frenzy did not, however, consist of a full-blooded amorous intrigue of the sort practised by most of the inhabitants of Versailles. On the contrary, Marie Antoinette had, wrote the Prince de Ligne, “a charming quality of obtuseness which kept any lovers at a distance.” Courtly admiration and innocent but gallant flirtation with men who initially were a lot older was what pleased her. Saint-Priest, in his Mémoires, noted that there was “coquetry at the bottom of her nature.”5 These admirers were expected to be able to sing and of course dance to a certain elegant level—arts in which the King was singularly lacking. She herself listed a few of such men for herself in that letter to Count Rosenberg which rejected “Vulcan’s forge.” Her singing parties consisted of chosen ladies with good voices and “certain agreeable men who were, however, no longer young.” Apart from Comte Jules de Polignac, who was thirty, these included the Duc de Duras, father-in-law of one of her Dames du Palais, who was sixty, the Duc de Noailles who was seventy-two and the Baron de Besenval who was in his fifties.
The Baron de Besenval, a lieutenant colonel of the Swiss Guards, was typical of the kind of older man who appealed to the young Queen as an amusing companion. As the Comte de Ségur wrote, “His agreeable levity, entirely French, made one forget that he was born a Swiss.” He was rated the best raconteur in the Polignac set, a virtue that weighed heavily in those circles against his minor vices of drinking and womanizing. Besenval was later accused by contemporaries of encouraging the Queen’s spirit of mockery (to her friends this was merely her sense of fun) although he stepped out of line with an inappropriate declaration of passion. It seems that there was a misunderstanding on both sides. Marie Antoinette imagined that Besenval’s “grey hairs” were security against serious attentions, whereas as a result of the Queen’s friendship Besenval deluded himself into thinking that they would be welcome. When Besenval fell on his knees, it was the Queen of France who rebuked him in icy tones: “Rise, sir, the King shall not be informed of an offence that would disgrace you for ever.” Besenval stammered an apology and withdrew.6