How to Ruin a Queen: Marie Antoinette and the Diamond Necklace Affair (10 page)

It has been suggested that Louis suffered from phimosis, which would have made his erections painful, though he was examined on numerous occasions by doctors who found nothing to inhibit them, and there is no evidence that he ever went under the knife. Marie Antoinette’s brother, the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, left a description of the king’s curious sexual technique: ‘he has strong, perfectly satisfactory erections; he introduces the member, stays there without moving for about two minutes, withdraws without ejaculating but still erect,
and bids goodnight’. Marie Antoinette, for all the later depictions of her as a ravenous nymphomaniac, seemed to have been equally uninterested in sex (Joseph II thought that his sister was
‘prudish’). The frustrations that the queen expressed in her letters to her mother are more social than physical: she was embarrassed at being regarded as frigid and unwomanly, and failing in her primary duty as queen, which was to provide a male heir to the French throne. Eventually in 1778 she gave birth to a daughter, Marie Thérèse; a sickly Dauphin, Louis Joseph, followed in 1781.

But Marie Antoinette’s discomfort at the French Court was not simply a result of marital incompatibility, and Louis had reason to be wary of his wife. The role that Maria Theresa had envisaged for her was distorted by an inherent contradiction. Marie Antoinette had been supposed to consecrate a new era of friendship between the Habsburgs and the Bourbons and conciliate, through her natural charm and adoption of French manners, those who disdained the alliance. But she was also expected to promote Austrian interests when they clashed with French ones – as they increasingly did after the fall of Choiseul – and thwart those whom she most needed to mollify, inevitably leading to increased resentment at her political interference.

Marie Antoinette’s closest advisors at Versailles were Vermond, whose self-importance ballooned so much that he would receive ministers while soaking in the bath; and the ambassador of the Holy Roman Empire, the comte de Mercy-Argenteau. A bachelor though no monk, Mercy-Argenteau was an elegant and experienced diplomat who adopted the role of exasperated parent towards the queen. He
wrote detailed reports to Maria Theresa about her conduct; the empress would then rebuke her daughter in the next post. Historically, the king’s official mistress typically held tremendous influence over the nation’s affairs. Since Louis had no interest in taking one, Marie Antoinette’s position ought to have been strengthened – and Mercy-Argenteau browbeat her into speaking to the king on matters of policy. But Marie Antoinette had neither any interest in the detail of politics – the comte de La Marck spoke of her
‘repugnance for the whole subject’ – nor any finesse. During the Bavarian Crisis of 1778, when the Austrians wished to incorporate Bavaria into their empire, her efforts to persuade her husband to support Joseph II’s tenuous claim to the duchy were ineffective; Louis was able to deflect her with one of his studied silences, faintly lit by a thin smile.

The queen showed greater zest for meddling in the disbursement of offices and honours, though her handling was equally clunky. She failed to restore her friend, the Choiseulist comte de Guînes, to his position as ambassador to the Court of St James, after he was caught in a scandal involving the sale of classified information. She spluttered through a tantrum aimed at obtaining the dismissal of the foreign minister Vergennes to no effect. And when Vermond suggested that Loménie de Brienne, the archbishop of Toulouse – a man more arch than bishop, and his patron – be appointed to the king’s council on Maurepas’s death, Louis worked himself up into ‘a
towering rage’, and bellowed that ‘the one [Brienne] must be confined to his diocese, and have his revenues confiscated and the other [Vermond] must be sent away from the queen’ (neither happened). Yet Marie Antoinette’s influence did grow over the course of the reign, and by 1783 there were three ministers on the king’s council who, at least in part, owed their appointments to her.

Politics was not the only royal activity that Marie Antoinette found tiresome. She was little more than fourteen when she arrived at Versailles – when Louis XV first met her, he found her
‘spontaneous and a little childish’ – and she struggled to find stimulation in court life. It took a great deal of cajoling before she would even deliver a few words in the vague direction of Louis XV’s mistress, Madame du Barry (‘there are a lot of people here
at Versailles today’, ran the deathless opening gambit). Marie Antoinette felt the rituals
of the Court were humiliating and claustrophobic – and with good reason: on one morning she was left naked and prickled with goose-pimples as three noblewomen, each more senior than the last, arrived in succession and demanded the privilege of handing the queen her chemise. When she ate in public in the Grand Couvert, she scarcely tasted her food. She jibbed against the strictures of her
dame d’honneur
, the comtesse de Noailles, whom she dubbed ‘Madame Etiquette’. Having fallen down once when riding, she told her companions not to help her up: ‘We must wait for Madame Etiquette. She will show us the right way to pick up a Dauphine who has
tumbled off a donkey.’ One of the reasons that she enjoyed the company of children so much, especially her young sister-in-law Elisabeth, was their emotional transparency and lack of artifice. Marie Antoinette was sentimental in the best sense of the word – her feelings had not been juiced out of her by the estrangements and cynicism of the sclerotic Court. She has been unjustly and inaccurately maligned for remarking of starving peasants during the Flour War of 1775 ‘let them eat cake’ (a comment only attributed to her in the nineteenth century). In fact, she was conscious of her duties to her adopted people: ‘It is quite certain that in seeing people who treat us so well despite their own misfortune,’ she wrote to Maria Theresa, ‘we are more obliged than ever to work hard
for their happiness.’

It must have been particularly frustrating for Marie Antoinette to have arrived in France just as she emerged from childhood. The infantilising nature of court protocol prevented her from being treated by adults as an equal, because the regimen was designed to make her exceptional. She couldn’t perform the simplest tasks without prompting disapproval, and was once reprimanded for acting like a servant when she passed food around at a picnic. Trapped between the wagging finger of Madame Etiquette and the unblinking gaze of Mercy-Argenteau, it is unsurprising that she developed a craving for privacy and simplicity. The most delicate aspects of her life became subject of public chatter: when the comtesse d’Artois gave birth, Marie Antoinette was heckled by the fishwives of Versailles, asking when she would pop a sprog. After she became queen, she ordered the construction of a secret passageway between her apartments and the king’s, so she would not be seen en route.

She developed an instinct for secrecy – papers were carefully locked away in her bureau – as she was confused by how well informed her mother seemed to be and assumed the French were spying on her too, a presumption that only heightened her sense of isolation. Versailles was the kind of place where behind every door stood a man with his ear squeezed against it – on one occasion a footman’s departure revealed to Louis and Marie Antoinette the figure of the duc de La Vauguyon crouched on the other side of the threshold, who reacted as though he had been caught fondling himself.

Marie Antoinette established a parallel life in which she could behave as a friend and companion, rather than a royal consort. She held exclusive dinners in her rooms where the guests were allowed to wear less formal clothes. Her pastimes tended toward the louche: they were permitted though not embraced by her husband, who perhaps saw that obstructing them would give rise to grievances not worth the bother. She frequented the opera in Paris – she kept her own box in all the main theatres – where she chatted amiably and unaffectedly with theatregoers.

Her frivolity was in part an attempt to avoid confronting her difficult and ambiguous predicament. It was also motivated by the wish to carve out a sphere for herself in which she could escape the passivity that life at Versailles imposed, even if she could act with abandon only in the most minor matters. With the assistance of her couturier Rose Bertin – ‘the Minister of Fashion’ – she dedicated herself to style. In 1776, she spent 100,000 livres on accessories alone (the budget for her entire wardrobe was supposed to be 120,000 livres). In her early years in France, Bertin and the queen’s hairdresser Leonard assembled
poufs
, teetering smokestacks on the top of the head, in which the natural tresses were bulked up by horsehair and cloth. These were adorned with ribbons, flowers, feathers, and bejewelled objets d’art, including on one occasion a neck-straining model of a frigate.

Marie Antoinette gambled prodigiously at the racetrack and on the baize – in 1777 she lost nearly 500,000 livres. Louis had no interest in cards – his older brother had cheated him when they played as children – but his wife’s predilection meant that they spent an increasing number of evenings apart, as the queen played canasta or faro with her set. Her male friends were raddled,
charismatic womanisers, such as the baron de Besenval and the duc de Coigny, whose company, though entirely chaste, lent support to the prevailing view that her marriage was disintegrating. The women who became her favourites – first the princesse de Lamballe, then Yolande de Polastron, the comtesse, later duchesse de Polignac – were distinguishable by their extreme vapidness: Lamballe was famed for her stupidity and was so sensitive that she once reportedly passed out on encountering a sprig of violets; Polignac was a winsome young woman with a gleaming pallor, entirely bereft of
‘avidity or egotism’, in whose pleasantly mind-numbing company the queen could relax.

Marie Antoinette’s closest friendship was with the Swedish count, Axel Fersen – blade-nosed, sharp-cheeked and lean, with an air of wistfulness – who spent long stretches of time at Versailles from 1774 and fought with French troops during the American War of Independence. There was speculation that he had an affair with the queen, though contemporaries had no proof or confession by either party. To keep such a liaison hidden for years would have required a talent for logistics and discretion well beyond Marie Antoinette. Irrespective of whether they slept with each other, their mutual ardour was beyond doubt.

In 1775, Louis gave Marie Antoinette the Petit Trianon, a small, clean-lined caramel-coloured palace at the far end of the gardens of Versailles, which Louis XV had commissioned for Madame du Pompadour. Here, with the painter Hubert Robert, Marie Antoinette planted a
jardin anglais
– artificial arcadian landscapes of undulating terrain, studiedly haphazard planting and the odd neoclassical temple – that repudiated the trimness of Versailles’s classical horticulture. She also built a
hameau
– a hamlet – containing twelve cottages, a mill, a dovecot, an aviary, a henhouse and a farm with a working dairy. The village was quilted in flowers that filled hundreds of faience pots stamped in blue with the figure of the queen, along with bushes and trees stooping with apricots, gooseberries, raspberries and strawberries. The
hameau
was another of the fandangles for which Marie Antoinette was taxed. But it should also be seen as an attempt, however remote and patronising, to understand something of the lives of her more lowly subjects,
to whom she had shown sympathy and affection on the occasions she had encountered them (for example, when 130 people had been killed in a stampede in Paris at a fireworks display to mark her marriage, she had given generously to the bereaved). In a similar vein, Louis XVI had, as a child, been taught how to plough a field.

The queen’s retreat into a Shangri-La of her own fashioning was accompanied by a turn in public opinion against her. She had been genuinely adored on her arrival in France; in 1773, she and Louis were mobbed by so many well-wishers at the Tuileries that their progress was stalled for forty-five minutes. When the chorus in Gluck’s
Iphigénie en Aulide
sang ‘Let us sing now, let us celebrate our Queen’ there was vigorous clapping and cries of ‘Vive la Reine’. Marie Antoinette knew how fickle such adulation was: ‘How fortunate we are’, she wrote, ‘given our rank, to have gained the love of a whole
people with such ease.’ She was aware that her privileges might as easily breed resentment.

Little in her conduct, however, seemed directed at preserving the respect of her subjects, and her disavowal of much of her public role led to malicious speculation about what went on behind closed doors. When her first child was born, numerous potential fathers were listed by the satirists. These libels were not necessarily being produced by fervent republicans (who, at this point, existed only in tiny numbers); they were commissioned and distributed by courtiers who felt excluded from the queen’s coterie. She was also accused of acting as a fifth columnist for Austrian interests – during the Bavarian crisis, sporadic applause for her at the opera was stifled by other spectators. And her extravagant expenditure caused consternation; it was believed, for instance, that Trianon contained a wall of diamonds. In 1784 the king bought for her the chateau of Saint-Cloud for 6 million livres from his cousin the duc d’Orléans; the palace was to be the queen’s personal property and all orders there were given in her name. There was suspicion about the purchase – objections were raised in the
parlement
of Paris, where the king’s edicts needed to be ratified – much of which was justified; the deal had been orchestrated by the baron de Breteuil, a ministerial supporter of Marie Antoinette, against the objections
of the finance minister, Calonne, as a staging post in his project to let the queen rule (‘
faire regner la Reine
’). Saint-Cloud marked the confluence of disgust at the queen’s excess and distrust of her political aspirations. From then on, both would fret harder and deeper.