Marie Antoinette (12 page)

Where court conventions were concerned, however, Marie Antoinette was for the time being completely docile. With her natural dexterity, she could manage with ease the cumbersome court dress with its wide hoops and long train, and the famous “Versailles glide,” by which ladies seemingly moved without their feet touching the ground, their satin slippers mysteriously avoiding the dirt, was something of which she would become the supreme exponent. For lesser mortals, the glide was practical too; by this means ladies avoided stepping on the train of the lady in front of them. There were two other practices that symbolized the courtly way of life. First was the essential powdering of the hair. So all-embracing was this practice—in 1770 you could not come to court without it—that the smell of powder (and the pomatum that was applied first to fix it) became one of the pervading perfumes of eighteenth-century Versailles, remembered long afterwards by those who had been there. Huge capes had to be draped round those in court dress, men and women, while the powder was blown on to their coiffures; Louis XVI would need a vast peignoir. But these monstrous edifices of wool, tow, pads and wire, looking as if they had been “dipped in a meal-tub” (in the words of Eliza Hancock, Jane Austen’s cousin), that were so often identified with Marie Antoinette actually predated her and were already part of the normal usage of Versailles.

The second symbolic practice was the lavish application of rouge to the cheeks: not delicate shading but huge precise circles of a colour not far from scarlet. Casanova believed that rouge emphasized ladies’ eyes and indicated “amorous fury,” while widows like Maria Teresa and the Dauphine Maria Josepha gave up wearing it as a measure of austerity. In the case of Marie Antoinette, with her superb complexion, it still had to be formally applied every morning in front of “the whole world.” Rouge, however, was not worn at Versailles in order to allure. It was a badge, or rather two badges, of rank and distinction. It was for this reason that the market-women, who ignored the prohibition on those outside court using rouge, made themselves look like “raddled old dolls,” according to Madame Vigée Le Brun, in an attempt to ape the great ladies; by 1780 French women were said to use 2 million pots of rouge a year.

Visitors from other courts were often appalled by what they saw; in the 1760s Leopold Mozart thought the aristocratic French women looked like wooden Nuremberg dolls on account of this “detestable make-up . . . unbearable to the eyes of an honest German.” The Emperor Joseph II was equally scathing; he would mock his little sister for her grotesque appearance. In wearing her rouge, however (and spending a great deal of money on it; rouge was so expensive that poorer people used red wine to stain their cheeks) Marie Antoinette was for the time being loyally obeying the convention for Versailles, even if it made her unbearable to German eyes.

“Everything that characterizes the public spirit of a court . . . is always interesting to note,” wrote the Baron Grimm in one of his witty reports on Versailles life, which were sent back to his master the Duke of Saxe-Gotha. For this reason, a row about etiquette that broke out immediately after the Dauphine’s arrival, although apparently trivial, took on a significant aspect. It was all a question of a single dance—a minuet—and two masterful women. The first was the Empress Maria Teresa who liked the idea of family connections abroad being favoured. The second was the Comtesse de Brionne. Born a Rohan (of the Rochefort line) she was the widow of Charles Louis de Lorraine, from the cadet branch of the House of Lorraine established in France.

Once beautiful, and reputedly the mistress of Choiseul, the Comtesse de Brionne in middle age was one of those powerful women mentioned earlier; in her case she had settled into the solid pursuit of her children’s advantage. In particular, the Comtesse had social ambitions for her daughter Anne Charlotte, known as Mademoiselle de Lorraine. At Versailles, the Comtesse was determined to use the new Dauphine’s family connection with Lorraine to advance Anne Charlotte (who was exactly the same age as Marie Antoinette) above the duchesses. This Lorrainer Cinderella was to be among those who opened the court ball.

The duchesses were predictably—and according to court rules quite justifiably—furious over this breach of etiquette. Collectively, they indicated that they would not attend the ball, and although many of them did in the end, they managed to spoil the occasion by drifting around Versailles for some hours, parading the fact that they had not yet changed into court dress; as a result the ball got off to a late start.

So grave indeed was the threat perceived to be to the established order from Mademoiselle de Lorraine’s elevation that the Archbishop of Rheims and the Bishop of Noyon, the first and second ecclesiastical peers, actually addressed a memorandum to the King on the subject. It was not long before a little rhyme was being circulated:

Sir, the great ones at your dance

Will see with much pain

A Princess of Lorraine

Be the first at the ball to advance.

Louis XV, who hated this kind of trouble, refused to make any kind of ruling beyond saying that the presence of Mademoiselle de Lorraine did not create any kind of precedent. Since an invitation to the opening minuet was in his personal gift, he had merely intended to honour the Dauphine. As for Mademoiselle de Lorraine (or her mother), her dreams of grandeur were blighted by a complicated ruse. The Comte d’Artois danced for a second time
after
Mademoiselle de Lorraine. Since he was a member of the royal family and unarguably her superior in rank, it was obvious that the strict rules of etiquette were not being observed on this occasion. No precedent had been set for the future about the position of Mademoiselle Lorraine. Thus the Brionne triumph was negated.

This was the affair of “the famous minuet of Mademoiselle de Lorraine,” as the Duc de Croÿ called it. It left an early, damaging impression of a foreign Dauphine determined to favour her own relations in defiance of the rules of Versailles. Yet the responsibility for all this unnecessary brouhaha lay, surely, with Mercy d’Argenteau, the Austrian ambassador who had been in France for the past four years (where he had also served a previous tour of duty) rather than with the newly arrived, rather dazed and extremely youthful Marie Antoinette. He should have headed off demands of the Empress that her relation be honoured and with equal tact disposed of the pretensions of the Comtesse de Brionne. Florimond, Count Mercy d’Argenteau, now takes the stage as the most important person in the Dauphine’s life in practical terms, and her major advisor. Nearly thirty years older than the Dauphine, he was intended to be, and did become, a kind of father figure to Marie Antoinette.

Tall, spare and elegantly dressed, rich—and keen on riches—Mercy d’Argenteau had been born in the prince-bishopric of Liège, part of modern Belgium. He adored life in Paris, having also experienced Turin, St. Petersburg and Warsaw, and accompanied his single status with a splendid lifestyle, which included the fascinating singer Rosalie Levasseur as his mistress. (She had made her debut in 1766, the year of Mercy’s arrival in France, and would create the role of Amour in Gluck’s
Orphée
when it came to Paris.) This relationship flourished despite the prayers of the nuns at Liège for his reform, and the efforts of his uncle to arrange a good marriage. Mercy shrugged his shoulders and declared that Providence would decide. But since that was not how eighteenth-century marriages were brought about, he remained theoretically a bachelor; although it is notable that Mademoiselle de Lorraine and her elder sister were at one point considered candidates for the honour, thus emphasizing Mercy’s links to the Comtesse de Brionne.

Fundamentally Mercy was a cold man and remarkably centred on his own material interests. Bad health of a peculiarly enervating kind (haemorrhoids) may have contributed to a sort of irritable detachment where Marie Antoinette was concerned. Yet he did show real and selfless devotion throughout his long life to one individual: the Empress Maria Teresa, and through her, to the interests of Austria. That was, unfortunately, not necessarily to the advantage of her daughter. Of course in one sense it was hardly surprising that the Austrian ambassador would put the interests of his own country first. But, as has been stressed, this management of double loyalties was a matter of enormous delicacy where foreign princesses were concerned.

Mercy, who was supposedly helping Marie Antoinette find her feet at the French court, actually perpetuated a Rule-by-Maria-Teresa with consequences that were increasingly dubious. He was not at all abashed about this, telling the Empress at one point, with some satisfaction, that he saw no reason why her influence with her daughter would ever fade. In October 1770 the Abbé de Vermond who had been allowed to rejoin her household in France as Reader, summed up Marie Antoinette as having above all “a desire to please her august mother”; it was questionable whether this was an appropriate motivation for the Dauphine of France.

Marie Antoinette was supposed to write to her mother every month. On exceptional occasions, such as a royal illness, an extra courier might be despatched. But in general the imperial couriers left Vienna at the beginning of each month, travelling to Brussels for despatches, before going on to Paris and picking up further letters there. They were expected back in Vienna around the 28th of the month. Since the whole process took eight or nine days either way, Marie Antoinette had to cope with a quick turnaround; in any case she tended to write her letters at the last minute, for fear of being spied on by her new family. Mercy commented on how the Dauphine was forever locking things up against unlawful inspection; he defended the blots on the letters on the grounds of this necessary speed. The Empress herself dictated her letters to her secretary, adding personal comments in the margin which the latter did not see. Similarly, Mercy sent his own letters attached to the Dauphine’s correspondence after she had already handed it over to him.

The first surviving letter of Marie Antoinette to Maria Teresa from France, dated 9 July 1770, is certainly an ill-written missive, full of crossings-out. The signature was evidently intended to be “Antoine” since “tte” is cramped by the margin as in the wedding certificate, but the Dauphine now had to sign herself “Antoinette” to her mother, “Marie Antoinette” being reserved for formal documents. It was not, however, until the following year that the signature was really flowing and easy.
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In addition to these rather desperate dutiful letters from one who was never a natural correspondent, the Empress was receiving regular, detailed and intimate reports on her daughter’s behaviour from Count Mercy. These were kept utterly secret from their subject. Confronted by her mother’s omniscience, which never seemed to work to her advantage, only to her discredit, Marie Antoinette does not appear to have suspected the true culprit. How could the Empress be so well informed about much that was quite trivial gossip? “My sister Marie,” the Archduchess Marie Christine, known in the family as a tale-bearer, was a prime suspect; her aunt, Princess Charlotte of Lorraine, was also blamed. It all added up to a feeling of inferiority, of personal failure. Praise from the Empress was extremely rare; criticism—such well-informed, guilt-inducing and therefore often unanswerable criticism—inexorable.

At the heart of Marie Antoinette’s personal failure—as the Empress saw it—was her inability to inspire sexual passion in her hutx1and. In her marriage to the heir to the throne, she represented the future, including future preferments for courtiers, as well as the present. Or did she? Nothing was quite certain about her position until the final physical act was performed that was intended to crown the Franco-Austrian alliance.

The Dauphin’s continued refusal to perform this act, or even to contemplate doing so, could at first be ascribed to his youth and shyness. That was Marie Antoinette’s hopeful scenario. Outwardly all seemed well. The two of them had the air of a gracious royal pair whose innocence in the public eye contrasted favourably with the debauched reputation of the King, his nymphets and now his wanton mistress. One popular rhyme on the subject contrasted two ruling women: Joan of Arc, who had saved the country, with “the Harlot”—the Du Barry—who was now ruining it. Even a frightful tragedy, which marred the magnificent fireworks set off in Paris on 30 May, did not redound to the discredit of the Dauphin and Dauphine.