Marie Antoinette: The Journey by Antonia Fraser
As Count Mercy reported to Prince Kaunitz on 10 May, everyone blamed her for the King’s inactivity, but by now what she proposed was rarely followed. Provence and Artois used her as a conduit to the King, but then the Princes had their own agenda. Artois in particular was increasingly hardline, his attitude being reflected by that of his adoring sister Madame Elisabeth, who wrote in May: “If the King does not have the severity to cut off at least three heads, everything will be lost.”35 This was not the stance of Marie Antoinette. But her brief period—two years—of real political intervention, following that night when she was so “madly happy” at the appointment of Loménie de Brienne, was almost over. Her new role as a hate figure or, one might say, a scapegoat at the King’s side, was beginning to take over; it was increasingly difficult to combine it with that of an active and influential politician.
On his return to Meudon, Louis Joseph had a whim to sleep on top of the new billiard table. A bed was made up, although the ladies around him exchanged glances at the sight; it looked all too much like a lying-in-state of a corpse. Since he could no longer walk, a mechanical wheelchair upholstered in green velvet with white wool cushions was installed. The whinnying of his favourite chestnut horse from the stables was a reminder of the days of his short childhood. Afterwards many stories would be told of his sweetness: how he would not hurt the feelings of a clumsy valet by sending him away and therefore endured his painful ministrations in silence. He told one of Madame Campan’s sisters, Julie Rousseau, in his household: “I love you so much, Rousseau, that I shall still love you after I am dead.” He was anxious to do the honours to his mother at dinner although Marie Antoinette on these occasions “swallowed more tears than bread.”36
The Dauphin’s precocity was also recorded. Louis Joseph, like his father, had a taste for reading history. The Princesse de Lamballe paid a visit with her companion, the Comtesse de Laage de Volude. The latter related a conversation on the subject of the fifteenth-century King of France, Charles VII, for whom Joan of Arc had raised the standard. It was, said the Dauphin, “a very interesting period in our history; there were many heroes then.” The Princesse and her companion found his beautiful eyes, as he spoke, “the eyes of a dying child,” unbearably moving.37
Marie Antoinette was actually at Meudon, and at her son’s bedside, when the end came very early on 4 June. Louis XVI, who had visited him the previous day, was told at 6 a.m. by the Duc d’Harcourt. He wrote only in his Journal: “Death of my son at one in the morning.”38 The boy whose birth had been saluted by his father to his mother with these triumphant words, “Madame, you have fulfilled my wishes and those of France,” was dead, “a decayed old man,” covered in sores, at the age of seven and a half. After that, etiquette robbed the bereaved parents of that consolation that ritual can sometimes bring. The royal parents, by custom, could take no part in the obsequies. Marie Antoinette was left like Gluck’s Alceste, to call for “some ray of pity” to comfort her suffering, and to believe with that unhappy heroine:
No one understands my ills nor the terror that fills my breast
Who does not know . . .
The heart of a mother.
Later that morning, the King went to Mass before nine and then shut himself away. In an unhappy repetition of the scene when he himself had succeeded to his elder brother, his own second son aged four and a half was simply told that he was now the Dauphin and was given the Order of Saint Louis. Louis Charles wept and so did Marie Thérèse, the other surviving child. Meanwhile Louis Joseph lay in state at Meudon according to custom, visited as a mark of respect by those with the right to do so. This privilege was even claimed by deputies of the Third Estate. Four days after the death, they exercised their rights to sprinkle holy water on the little corpse. Others came from Paris, Versailles and nearby Ville d’Avray. Since it was early June, the powerful perfume of rampant unchecked roses, jasmine and honeysuckle came from the neglected gardens of Meudon.39
According to custom, once again, Louis Joseph’s heart, in an urn, was taken to the Benedictine convent of Val-de-Grâce. The Duc d’Orléans, as senior Prince of the Blood, was supposed to escort it, but he declined to do so, giving the ungracious reason that his role as deputy “did not leave him time to attend functions,” so his eldest son deputized for him once again. For the funeral, Louis XVI decided that elaborate arrangements would be inappropriate; the proper rites for a Dauphin of France could cost 350,000 livres. Like baby Sophie two years before, Louis Joseph was to be given a simple funeral, on the excuse that he had not yet made his First Communion. The Princesse de Lamballe, as Superintendent of the Queen’s Household, presided, with files of monks praying ceaselessly in the background. The little coffin was covered in a silver cloth, with the crown, sword and Orders of the Dauphin of France on top of it.40 After that it was taken to the crypt of Saint-Denis, to lie with the remains of Louis Joseph’s ancestors in eternal undisturbed rest—or so it seemed in June 1789.
Madame Vigée Le Brun’s unlucky portrait, showing the late Dauphin pointing to the newly empty cradle of Madame Sophie, was removed from the Salon de Mars in Versailles at the Queen’s orders; she found it too painful a reminder of the recent deaths. At the official visit of condolence of the court on 7 June, she made a touching sight, leaning against the balustrade of her chamber, trying hard to choke back her tears. The King had to endure all this, and also the determined efforts of the Third Estate, led by the celebrated astronomer Jean Sylvain Bailly, to come and see him in order to discuss arrangements for the impending meeting of the Estates General. He refused to receive the Third Estate either on the day of his son’s death or on the following two days, saying that it was not possible in “my present situation.” When they insisted on visiting him on 7 June, the King commented bitterly: “So there are no fathers among the Third Estate?”41
At this same season, Arthur Young, on a visit to the Palais-Royal where political pamphlets were being sold in shops in the Duc d’Orléans’ private gardens, was struck by the fact that a new one was being issued every hour: “Nineteen twentieths of these productions are in favour of liberty and commonly violent against the clergy and nobility.” It was no coincidence that the trade flourished on the Duc d’Orléans’ property where the police could not intervene; the radical Duc had sold the sites to cover his lavish expenditure. The coffee houses were crowded; the mood was high, in spite of the terrible want of bread. The contrast between the royal mourning and the national exhilaration was something that Marie Antoinette never got over. Eighteen months later she commented to her brother Archduke Leopold on how the French had been in “a delirium” while she struggled to control her sobs. In short, “At the death of my poor little Dauphin, the nation hardly seemed to notice.”42
It was all a cruel demonstration of the clashing demands of public and private in the existence of kings and queens. At this great crisis in French national life, of what real significance was the death of a child, even a royal child? Given that he had a younger brother. But to Marie Antoinette, an emotional and deeply affectionate woman who was stricken by her loss, it represented something else: the callousness that the French could show, this people whose fundamental goodness of heart she had so often praised in the past, even if they were volatile and somewhat childish. She had largely lost the esteem of the French; it remained to be seen whether they would keep hers.
In this mood Marie Antoinette went to Marly with the King on 14 June for a week’s court mourning.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
HATED, HUMBLED, MORTIFIED
“The Queen [is] hated, humbled, mortified . . . to know that she favours a Measure is the certain Means to frustrate its Success.”
GOUVERNEUR MORRIS, 1 JULY 1789
Crucial decisions of the Third Estate were taken during the week beginning 14 June 1789 when the King and Queen were at Marly, mourning the “first Dauphin” (as Louis Joseph became known with time, the little ghost who had to be distinguished from Louis Charles). Louis XVI’s geograp
This was the woman about whom it was earnestly believed in certain quarters that she intended to poison the King and install Artois—on the grounds that he was her long-term lover—as ruler of France. This was the woman who, according to a play of 1789 called La Destruction de l’Aristocratisme, loathed the French people with such intensity that “with what delight I would bathe in their blood.” She was also the woman of whom it was believed that she had secretly spirited away millions to her brother Joseph.1
And always the pamphlets poured forth their lubricious slime. Artois in L’Autrichienne en Goguette took the Queen from behind in public with obscene exclamations about her “firm and elastic” body. If not an ardent lover of men, Marie Antoinette was an ardent lover of women; the message was always hammered home that the Queen was insatiable—even when alone. In Le Godmiche [Dildo] Royal of 1789 the Queen was satirized as the goddess Juno, in a text which began with Juno sitting alone “with her skirts hitched up . . .” and went on from there.2 Perhaps it was her “Germanic vigour” that was responsible, which had led to her deflowering even before she left Austria. Now it led her to indulge in orgies with bodyguards where drink featured as well as constant sex, although Marie Antoinette was in fact, as has been noted, a teetotaller.
Who could respect such a creature as a woman, let alone a queen? A woman who, quite apart from her sexual appetites, was a dangerous agent of a foreign power. It all had to be true. The stories had, after all, been printed over and over again, repetition being a cynical substitute for veracity. In the words of the radical “Gracchus” Babeuf about this time, Louis XVI was a donkey, weak and obstinate but not cruel, who should have been mated to a young and gentle she-donkey; instead he had been given a tigress.3
Gouverneur Morris summed up the situation harshly in a report back to the United States. Little was to be expected in any way from the King. As for Marie Antoinette, she was “hated, humbled, mortified” and although she was intriguing to save “some shattered Remnants of the Royal Authority,” it was enough to know that she favoured a measure for that to be “the certain Means to frustrate its Success.” But Morris’s words were no harsher than the reality of the Queen’s situation in June and early July. An English doctor, John Rigby, an ardent Whig freshly arrived in France, saw her at Versailles about this time and was struck by how the Queen’s countenance had assumed “the character of severity.” As she went on her way to Mass, that familiar journey in which the grace of her passage had once caused general remark, her brow was deeply “corrugated” and she looked from side to side with narrowed eyes and an expression of suspicion that he found quite spoilt her beauty.4
Hardly a natural politician, let alone a brilliant political thinker, the Queen floundered in an unprecedented situation. But then so did the King, Necker and the vast majority of politically minded people in France. Artois might think that strength was the solution but it remained to be seen whether such strength would not arouse an even more perilous counteraction. On 17 June, three days after the court reached Marly, the Third Estate declared itself unilaterally to be a National Assembly, and that it was intent on providing France with a new Constitution. On 20 June, locked out of the usual salon in which they met, the deputies adjourned to one of Versailles’ tennis courts and a general oath was administered. This oath ignored the theoretical powers of the monarch and, as such, was a gross—or courageous—act of defiance. Necker, the moderate, the conciliator of the Third Estate, advocated concessions to defuse the situation. Artois and Provence on the other hand urged the King strongly the other way, carrying the Queen along with them.
In a scene probably stage-managed by the Duchesse de Polignac, Marie Antoinette appeared in the King’s presence with her two surviving children. Pushing them into his arms, she pleaded with him to remain firm. The maternal card was, after all, the one good card in her hand. Five days later Marie Antoinette would receive the deputies charmingly, holding little Louis Charles, the “second Dauphin,” by the hand. On 27 June she once again appeared on a balcony with both her children this time, at the King’s side. According to the Parman envoy, Virieu, the Queen, mourning her lost son, looked pale and her eyes were red.5 But she was still able to make the point of her position in the state. And she could still put on a show; it was at this time that the young Chateaubriand at Versailles received a smile from a Queen who seemed “delighted with life,” something that he would remember nearly thirty years later under bizarre circumstances.6
As for Louis XVI, who was as temperamentally disinclined towards firmness as he was disinclined towards the strife, he first adopted one attitude, and then reversed it. In the process, he sacrificed any possible advantage that strength and clarity of purpose might have brought. The Tennis Court Oath, he muttered disconsolately, was “merely a phrase.” On 23 June the King held a séance royale — that is, a session in which edicts would be promulgated; the Queen was not present. He refused to permit all three Estates to meet together although he recognized the need for the Estates to approve taxation in the future. Four days later he went back on his decision and accepted the composite meeting of the Three Estates, since the Third Estate showed no sign of going to their allotted (separate) chamber. Meanwhile Mirabeau, whose eloquent speeches given without notes were holding the deputies in thrall, declared of the Third Estate turned National Assembly: “We are here by the will of the people, we shall only go away by the force of bayonets.”*70 The desperate atmosphere at court was reported by the Comtesse de Provence to her close friend Madame de Gourbillon in a letter of 2 July: “You have no idea what life at Versailles is like . . .” Stones were being thrown and shots fired at night.7
On 4 July, Count Mercy reported to Joseph II that the King, wavering once more, was now inclining towards the interests of the clergy and nobility, while Necker continued to believe in the potential of the Third Estate to throw its weight on the side of the monarchy. As Gouverneur Morris wrote, Louis was “an honest Man and wishes really to do Good” without having either “Genius or Education” to discover what that good might be.8 In the meantime, with the royal brothers holding firm conservative views on the authority of the monarchy, it was not likely that Necker would last long in the seat of power.
On 9 July there was another revolutionary step forward as the previous National Assembly turned itself into a Constituent National Assembly, with the power to make laws. La Fayette, the deputy for Riom where his estates were, put forward a draft declaration concerning human rights that was based on the American Declaration of Independence. Meanwhile the plotting against Necker went forward, also at Versailles, while in Paris troops, up to 30,000 of them, were brought in against possible repetitions of those sinister Réveillon riots of April. On 11 July Necker was dismissed (for the second time) by the King, and with him went Montmorin and others associated with his ministry. In Necker’s place came the notoriously conservative Breteuil, and other aristocrats such as the aged Marshal Duc de Broglie as Minister of War, and the son of the Duc de Vauguyon, Louis’ Governor of years before.
Since Necker had remained popular with the public, his disappearance—the King told him that he counted on his departure being “prompt and in secret”—was one more element in the savage general discontent.9 Rioting on 12 July, which led to the closure of the theatres and the opera, was succeeded by much worse violence on the 13th. There was a seemingly minor incident, when the troops o
Perhaps Lambesc was not guilty of inordinate brutality; he was subsequently acquitted after an investigation. His own explanation was that he had to stop the mob seizing the Pont Tournant over the Seine. Marie Antoinette remained loyal to him: “How wrong that someone should be punished for being faithful to the King and obeying orders!” she told Mercy. Lambesc, son of the Comtesse de Brionne, was a distant cousin, a non-royal Lorrainer, and the Queen retained her sympathy for him after he emigrated, advocating his cause to her brother Joseph.10 However, she kept these feelings private, declining, for example, to plead Lambesc’s cause with the Marquis de La Fayette, the dominant figure of the National Assembly. Her explanation—“I would give the impression of believing him guilty if I spoke for him”—was probably not the real one; the truth was that the Queen knew that her days as a successful petitioner were drawing to a close.
The Lambesc Affair certainly did great harm to the royal reputation with the idea that the king’s troops were deliberately assaulting his people. It was only a portent of the trouble to come. The following day the great prison fortress, the Bastille, was stormed by a determined crowd who wanted the weapons and powder that they believed were stored there, in order to arm themselves against the depredations of the state. Some of their members who rifled the Opéra for the weapons used on stage were frustrated, “the axes and clubs being only made of cardboard.”11