Becoming Marie Antoinette (21 page)

V
IENNA
, A
PRIL
19, 1770

My last full day in Austria. My last day as an unmarried girl. My last day as an archduchess.

The day began with family Mass in our private chapel, the Kammerkapelle. Interminable Latin. Kneel. Stand. Kneel. Sit. My head swam with the heady aroma of incense. I found it difficult to concentrate on the Mass when I knew that the next time I entered the chapel, in less than twelve hours, it would be as a bride.

The celebrations had been lovely, even the one hosted the previous evening by the marquis de Durfort at the French embassy, the Liechtenstein Palace. He had hired designers from Vienna’s Burgtheater to build a Temple of Hymen adorned with replicas of cupids and climbing vines entwined about the fluted columns. This unabashed tribute to the forfeiting of my virginity embarrassed me, although most of the guests, particularly those from the French delegation, found it a huge joke.

But the frivolity dispersed with the advent of dawn; the next step was all solemnity. As the countless hands of numerous attendants flurried about me I had plenty of time to reflect upon my state. That the vast Austrian empire was relying upon me to fulfill my destiny with dignity was daunting enough, but amorphous. However, Austria, as embodied by my mother, a woman who did not countenance failure, was enough to fill me with trepidation. As much as she beamed with pride in public, Maman remained unconvinced that I had completed the transformative journey from unlettered archduchess to future dauphine. My mastery of both the French language and the country’s history remained wanting, hard as I tried to learn them. But there could be no further setbacks: my courses had begun—the event that she and Louis had tacitly awaited for so many months. My body was now able to produce a Bourbon heir.

I knew my mother had fretted constantly over the delays in my marriage plans. “The king is perfectly capable of changing his mind,” she’d remarked on more than one occasion. “Dangle the prospects of a Portuguese or Spanish infanta under his nose, or tout the advantages of a daughter of Savoy or Parma, and he’s liable to break our concord in favor of another bride.” In fact, she was eager for my proxy ceremony to be over and done with. “Until the vows are exchanged, I’ll always be looking out of the corner of my eye for a chevalier to ride up to the Augustinerkirche and interrupt the wedding, still booted and spurred, with a letter from Louis calling it off!”

Everything had led to this moment.

Sieur Larsenneur devoted more than five hours to dressing my hair for the ceremony. Mops rested on my lap while switches of the same pale strawberry shade as my own—most likely shorn from convent novitiates—were fashioned into fat sausage curls with a pair of hot tongs and worked into my tresses until it was impossible to discern where my own hair ended and where the
false locks began. The thick curls formed horizontal rows along the back of my head, the lowest ones grazing my neck and tumbling over one shoulder. After it was all lightly pomaded with rose-scented unguent, I nudged my pug onto the floor and submitted as usual to being draped beneath a cloth while the
friseur
blew the powder onto my coiffure with his little bellows.

Maman herself helped dress me in my wedding gown, a different dress from the one I had chosen for the ceremony at Versailles. One of the half dozen selections modeled in miniature by the
grandes pandores
, it was fashioned from heavy cloth of silver, and after I was laced into the gown and the heavily embroidered stomacher was pinned to the sides of my robe, I felt as though I were wearing a medieval suit of armor. It would have been nigh impossible
not
to walk in a slow and most stately manner. I regarded myself in the mirror. With the French court panniers tied beneath them (the silhouette an homage to the lineage of the absent groom), my skirts became nearly as wide as my sleeping chamber. Between the silver of my gown and the powder in my hair I resembled some fantastical creature from a sylvan grove, or perhaps the goddess of the moon.

At half past five the imperial family assembled in the Spiegelsaal. “How does it feel to be the proxy bridegroom for
two
of your sisters?” I asked Ferdinand, poking him in the ribs. Not yet sixteen, he was nearly a year and a half older than I, and the closest in age to Louis Auguste, yet he seemed so much older somehow. Perhaps it was because Ferdinand was now engaged himself; he would marry the daughter of the Duke of Modena in the fall.

As the clock chimed the quarter hour, Maman took her place with Joseph at the head of the wedding procession. We began the long walk down the marble corridor that led from the state apartments of the Leopoldine wing to the Augustinerkirche, where I would make my wedding vows. The next time I entered these rooms it would be as a married woman.

The grenadiers had taken their places along either side of the long corridor that led directly to the church, smart and noble looking in their carmine-colored coats. As we passed through the gallery, they remained impervious, chins lifted, unseeing gazes facing forward.

Unlike the Kammerkapelle, the Augustinerkirche was a parish church—a vast structure that dwarfed even the loftiest of supplicants. It was precisely six o’clock when the ornate doors were thrown open and the entire edifice resounded with organ music. Herr Gluck himself had composed it and it was he who was making the soaring strains reverberate from the inlaid marble floor to the vaulted roof. Joseph led the procession of the imperial family. Then Maman—for this was truly
her
moment—traversed the length of the nave, her heavy velvet mantle of state trailing for several feet behind her. As she had preceded me, I regretted not being able to see her expression, for everyone in the pews—the entire Austrian court—knew that my marriage was the culmination of her grandest political ambition to date. If Monsieur Ducreux had been there to sketch her with his pastels, the composition would likely have been named “Maria Theresa Triumphant.”

The aroma of incense began to fill the sanctuary, musty and acrid and sweet. Ferdinand and I walked side by side, nearly shoulder to shoulder. He was clad in white watered silk with a blue order draped across his chest. Under his breath, he was counting the steps as if we were dancing, matching them to the pattern in the floor so that he wouldn’t get ahead of himself in the carefully measured wedding march. “One two: coral. Three four: gray. Five six: coral. Seven eight: gray.”

I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye. “Shhhhh.” All right, I was never a good scholar, and maybe I still mixed up Burgogne and Bretagne even after the abbé Vermond had drilled me incessantly on the regions of France, but at least
I
never had to look where I was going when I danced.

As we processed toward the altar I tried to think of anything except the import of the occasion, for to do so would only result in a childish flood of tears or the paralytic inability to continue.
Don’t tremble
, I told myself.
Think of something light and pleasant. Baumkuchen
. At Christmastime the imperial bakers would make a special confection—the
Baumkuchen
, or tree cake. It was really a series of cakes, each level slightly smaller than the one beneath it, stacked into an enormous tower and iced with a bright white sugar glaze. With each step toward the altar of the high Gothic Augustinerkirche, with its soaring ceiling and pristine white walls supported by fluted columns, I thought of a
Baumkuchen
.

In this way I reached the base of the ornate gold retable before I knew it; the trip had been sweet. As Archbishop Visconti, the papal nuncio, made the sign of the cross above our heads, Ferdinand and I knelt beside each other on purple velvet cushions rimmed with golden fringe. How silly it did seem at the time, and certainly so in retrospect, to be wed to one’s brother!

The wedding ceremony itself was not a lengthy one. We recited our vows in Latin and the archbishop pronounced me the bride of the dauphin of France. Ferdinand placed Louis Auguste’s ruby ring upon my finger, then raised me to my feet and kissed me on both cheeks. The church bells pealed in exultation. And the whole imperial court erupted into song as the first notes of Herr Gluck’s “Te Deum” wafted down from the choir loft. A psalm of thanksgiving was appropriate to the culmination of a wedding Mass in any case, but that evening it was particularly resonant.

I overheard Maman reminding the comte de Mercy that she had the greatest reason to be thankful. That her fear of the ceremony being called off at the last moment had not come to fruition was written in her smile.

The Church had offered its congratulations in music, and the
State was not to be outdone as the Hofburg’s cannons emitted a thundering salute.

After the ceremony, the crush of people in the Hofburg’s Audience Chamber nearly gave me a headache; the red and white salon had never been intended to host so many visitors at once. Yet Maman chose the room deliberately for its modest size, for it lent an atmosphere of exclusivity to the reception. Vienna’s loftiest citizens, as well as the highest-ranking members of the French entourage, offered their congratulations as dozens of gloved servants bearing trays of iced wine endeavored to thread their way through the throng. My hand was kissed so many times I feared the kidskin glove would wear away.

It was not until nine o’clock, when the imperial family sat down to a comparatively modest supper in the Spiegelsaal, that I found the time to exhale, or so it seemed, and the freedom to be myself. The first thing I did after being seated as the guest of honor at Maman’s right hand was to surreptitiously slip my feet out of my shoes. The long day had been the first of many celebrations to come; I would have to grow accustomed to standing for several hours at a time without shifting from hip to hip to relieve my sore feet.

All of my favorite dishes had been prepared. My head swam with the familiar, mouthwatering aromas of Austria: roasted joints of pork, beef stew and dumplings, strong coffee. When I thought no one was watching me I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply, wishing I could store the scents within my memory for a day when, in a kingdom far away, I might secretly crave the tastes of home.

I looked around the long table at my family. My boisterous younger brother Maxl, with his round face and rosy cheeks—always the loudest one of us because he was the youngest and never thought he was being listened to—insisted on sharing the most
shameless jokes, which he had heard from the stable grooms, earning a stern rebuke from Maman. Ferdinand got drunk and jested that he no longer feared the state of wedlock, as he had survived two dress rehearsals, although he admitted that his wedding would likely be more like Charlotte’s—not nearly so grand as mine. Then he chided me for eating too many potato dumplings, insisting that the real dauphin would not want a fat wife. “
Je te déteste
,” I told him, sticking out my tongue. He speared a dumpling from my plate and popped it into his mouth, before taunting me to grow up in two languages.

“In that case, I hope that your Maria Beatrice d’Este becomes a
monstrously
fat wife,” I teased, puffing out my cheeks. “
Oink, oink.
”

“Children!” Maman exclaimed—but I could see that her eyes were laughing. She took a celebratory sip of wine. “I have a riddle for all of you.” Aware of what was about to come, she suppressed a rare chuckle. “How many Hapsburgs does it take to rule the world?”

Joseph regarded our mother with both curiosity and amusement. “All right then, you’ve got me. How many?”

“As many as Her Imperial Majesty has children!”

Maman convulsed with laughter at her own joke. My younger brothers joined in, but I didn’t think it was so terribly funny. Joseph noticed that I wasn’t smiling. He disappeared into a world of his own, contemplating something that left him with a troubled countenance. For the remainder of the meal, every so often he would regard me and sigh deeply without saying a word.

I glanced at my mother, my eyes raised appreciatively, and received a warm smile. I had made her proud, which filled my own heart with gladness. I had not failed her that day and would not do so as the dauphine of France. My family toasted my good health and when Ferdinand raised his glass to my fertility, I could
not suppress a blush. No one knew as well as he how to mortify me in company. Nevertheless, I would not have bartered that meal for any crown in Christendom. It was rather a lark to have been the center of attention for so many celebrations, but the feast that evening carried a special significance. I traced the golden rim of my dinner plate with the tip of my finger, and touched the imperial crests etched into the wine and water goblets as if to imprint them into my flesh. My childhood, my home. A Hapsburg archduchess. All of it could be measured in the imposing table laden with fragile porcelain and crystal bearing the marks that distinguished us from every other family in the world. It was a bittersweet repast we enjoyed that evening, laughing and jesting as if it were any other supper; and yet, if one paused for a moment to listen more closely, our gay voices sounded perhaps a bit too forced, the jibes a tad too hollow, because in truth we knew full well that it
was
a night like no other; it would be the last time we would ever dine
en famille
.