Marie Antoinette (14 page)

The first of these reasons was the prudish nature of her own upbringing in which Maria Teresa, ignoring the mistresses of Francis Stephen, had preached a straightforward morality based on the teachings of the Catholic Church. At fourteen, a protected and virginal girl, Marie Antoinette had not lived long enough at the Viennese court to understand the currents of extramarital desire that swirl beneath the surface of any community; she was naturally chaste as she was brought up to be. Now she was launched into a society where the undercurrents were more like rapids. This, however, might have been overcome with time and suitably discreet worldly instruction. Unfortunately there was a second reason. Marie Antoinette’s instinctive revulsion (which cannot have been unaffected by the sense that the Du Barry was succeeding where she was failing) was enhanced by the counsels of the spinster royal aunts and used for their own ends.

The third reason why Marie Antoinette declined to give the Du Barry the brief acknowledgement, required not so much for the favourite’s
amour propre
as for the King’s, lay in her developing character. Desperately insecure for obvious reasons, she took refuge in that kind of obstinacy that is often the refuge of the weak.

Marie Antoinette did have one little victory over the Du Barry when she pleaded prettily for one of her Dames du Palais. The Duchesse de Gramont, Choiseul’s sister, had been exiled to the country for refusing to make room for the favourite in a coach. Although the Duchesse now needed to reach Paris for urgent medical reasons, the Du Barry refused to allow a waiver of the terms of exile. “But Papa,” said the Dauphine in the most winning way, according to Mercy, “quite apart from compassion and justice, think of the hurt to me if a member of my household was to die while still being in disgrace with you.”

In general, however, dignity not sweetness was her stance where the favourite was concerned. It was a dignity that concealed an ability to hold a grudge, on this occasion aided and abetted by Mesdames Tantes. Of course Marie Antoinette was not the only person at Versailles who harboured grudges; but for her there was a danger that her judgements, both private and political, might be warped, where wiser heads knew when to abandon resentments that no longer served their purpose.

The aunts, of course, rested their case on their father’s danger of hell-fire due to his immorality. But a good deal of jealousy also went into the mixture, and sheer trouble-making. It was especially delightful that
l’Autrichienne
could be led into offending Louis XV by simply upholding decency, at the same time as ditching her own prospects. Count Mercy deplored the influence of the royal aunts in this respect, understanding how crucial it was that the Dauphine should please the grandfather if she could not please the grandson. Yet to Marie Antoinette, lonely and rather homesick, the daily company of the aunts at Versailles was highly comforting; they were surrogate mothers, who unlike her own mother had nothing to do but fulfil the royal routine. If she was easily led by them, getting involved in mischiefs not her own, as Mercy told the King, it was hardly surprising. That letter quoted earlier, describing her daily life, makes it clear how much Marie Antoinette saw of the aunts: four extremely long visits daily, in the morning, the afternoon, in the early evening and again later. She spent more time in their apartments than her own.

The year 1770 had begun so promisingly for Madame Antoine, Archduchess of Austria, heralded by the arrival of the Dauphin’s ring, jewelled harbinger of a glorious and contented future. It ended sadly for the Dauphine of France with the exile of the Duc de Choiseul from court. It was he who had brought about “her happiness . . . and that of France” and she felt a fierce loyalty to him as to all those she believed to be her early supporters. As it was, Choiseul was the victim of various elements in the political scene, including intrigues centred round the Du Barry who had conceived one of her rare personal dislikes for him.

Rancour was not generally part of her nature; the Du Barry saw herself as sent into the world to seduce, not to snub. Although the Dauphine refused to address her, the Du Barry had asked to install a portrait of the Dauphine in her apartments. But Choiseul had had the audacity to launch an “open war” against the favourite and—even more mortifying perhaps—had indulged in amusing sallies at her expense along with his intimates and relations. Perhaps the great minister, who had been in power since 1758, might have ridden out the enmity of the Du Barry and her political allies, but his own influence with the King had been gradually eroding. For all Choiseul’s energetic reforms of the army and navy, so necessary following the Seven Years’ War, he had not been able to solve the problem of the country’s finances, which had been severely strained by that conflict. Furthermore Louis XV, looking for a way to curtail the activities of the Parlement de Paris, found his Foreign Minister siding with it over such measures as the suppression of the Jesuits; this was a ban that enraged the King’s devout daughters, the Mesdames.

The Duchesse de Choiseul reacted to the unexpected appearance of her husband at dinner—she had believed him to be at court—with some style. “My dear friend,” she said, “you have the air of a man who has been exiled, but pray sit down, our food will not taste any the worse for that.” Such sang-froid could not conceal the fact that with the disappearance of its architect, the Franco-Austrian alliance and its upholders had been dealt a major blow. Maria Teresa was aghast at the loss of Choiseul, as she told Mercy. Nothing seemed to be going right in France, according to her carefully laid plans, neither politics nor sex.

Only the Dauphin reacted to the fall of the Foreign Minister with apathy, greeting it with neither pleasure nor pain. But then, in contrast to his wife’s emotional nature, apathy was his usual reaction to everything.

CHAPTER SEVEN

STRANGE BEHAVIOUR

“If a young girl as charming as the Dauphine cannot fire up the Dauphin . . . it would be better to do nothing and wait for time to remedy such strange behaviour.”

M
ARIA
T
ERESA’S DOCTOR,
V
AN
S
WIETEN, QUOTED
6 J
UNE
1771

During the Carnival celebrations of 1771, which traditionally preceded the dour Catholic Lent, the Comtesse de Noailles gave a weekly series of dances in her apartments. As Mistress of the Household, that was not only her right but her duty; an argument for the steep emoluments attached to the position was the necessity for such expensive entertainments. One of these dances was the setting for the beginning of a sentimental relationship between the fifteen-year-old Marie Antoinette and the twenty-one-year-old Princesse de Lamballe.

Although it was in one sense ironic that Madame Etiquette—the Dauphine’s mischievous nickname for the Comtesse de Noailles—should have been the catalyst for a relationship that diminished her own influence, in another sense this was an inevitable development. Every Dauphine—every princess at Versailles, every young woman in this society—needed her friends not only for intimacy but for support. In particular Marie Antoinette sought to reproduce the close ties she had enjoyed with her sister Maria Carolina (in whose welfare in faraway Naples she continued to take the keenest interest).

This kind of friendship, common among young women of the time, was heavily influenced in its expression by the style of Rousseau’s epistolary novel
La Nouvelle Héloïse
.
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It was a thing of hearts and flowers, not bodily embraces, and in 1771 about as far as could be imagined from the outright lesbian practices of which both Marie Antoinette and the Princesse de Lamballe were later accused. When Marie Antoinette addressed the Princesse de Lamballe (and many others, including her sister-in-law Madame Elisabeth) as “my dear heart” and addressed her as “angel” or signed herself with “a heart entirely yours,” she was in the tradition of Rousseau’s heroine Julie d’étanges writing to her confidante and cousin Claire: palpitatingly sensitive rather than passionately sensual.

As it happened, the Princesse de Lamballe was for many reasons a suitable candidate for such a friendship at this juncture. Her status as the widow of the Duc de Penthièvre’s heir, a (legitimated) descendant of Louis XIV, meant, for example, that Louis Auguste, before his marriage, paid his single recorded visit to a private house to console the Princesse on the death of her husband. According to the usage of Versailles, the Princesse was entitled to be addressed by both Dauphin and Dauphine as “Cousine.”

But there was trouble when the egregious Comtesse de Brionne, with her Lorrainer connections, mooted a marriage between her son the Prince de Lambesc and the Princesse de Lamballe. Count Mercy was quick to point out the damage that would be done if the Dauphine threw her influence behind this plan. Not only would Marie Antoinette have to compensate the Princesse de Lamballe for her loss of rank in some appropriate material manner, but she would also be landed yet again with the uncomfortable burden of the Comtesse’s pretensions. The ambassador suggested handing over the whole matter of the Prince de Lambesc’s marriage to the King—as a result of which the Comtesse abandoned the project and the Princesse remained unmarried.

In general, however, Mercy approved of the Princesse de Lamballe, as an excellent corrective to the undue pressures of Mesdames Tantes. He believed that they had recently created trouble for the Dauphine by influencing her against the Prince de Condé, although Condé himself had always supported Marie Antoinette. Mercy told the Dauphine that she must simply avoid expressing political opinions, despite her protests that it was impossible to be the only one who did not speak in the family circle. As she put it, she was never “the first.”

These tensions stemmed from a royal edict confirming the dissolution of one Parlement and the formation of another, promulgated at a
lit de justice
, so called because historically the King had dispensed this justice from the royal bedchamber and still sat on cushions for the occasion. The finality of such an edict, the imposition of the King’s will against the general wishes, was, however, beginning to be questioned. On this occasion the Princes of the Blood protested against a curtailment of some of their privileges and wrote what Marie Antoinette described to her mother as “a very impertinent letter” to the King on the subject. The result was that the Princes, and those Ducs who had supported them, were exiled from the court. Even if the influence of the aunts was generally harmful, on this particular issue they simply encouraged the Dauphine to follow the King’s own line, which was, after all, what everyone wanted her to do in theory.

Fortunately Marie Antoinette’s new friend the Princesse de Lamballe was not an intriguer. This was what Marie Antoinette indicated to the Empress when she wrote proudly that her new friend “didn’t have the Italian character.” She was, on the contrary, thanks to her mother’s blood, that desirable commodity, a good German. Furthermore she was famously pure and unsullied (in revulsion perhaps from her early experiences of being married to a debauchee). Everyone, rich and poor, admired her father-in-law, the Duc de Penthièvre, for his decency and charity; he in turn admired the dignified young widow of his son.

This respectability of the Princesse de Lamballe, even at Versailles, was maintained. Several years later when other royal friendships had developed, the Abbé de Vermond reproached the Dauphine with the quality of her women friends. Marie Antoinette ignored the generalization and concentrated on defending the Princesse alone as being “pure.” Vermond responded by wondering grouchily how long that purity would survive, before pointing to the Princesse de Lamballe’s stupidity. Here he was on safer ground. The Princesse de Lamballe was not clever. She was, rather, the sort of young woman whose sensitivity was so excessive that she was said to have fainted in public at the sight of a bunch of violets; she was not particularly amusing either. Neither the Princesse’s lack of intelligence nor her lack of sparkle was at this stage a disadvantage where Marie Antoinette was concerned. On the one hand the Dauphine disliked clever women; on the other hand she had not yet discovered the entertaining possibilities of life at Versailles. It was more important that the Princesse’s big sad eyes, her gentle melancholy regard, spoke of devotion not criticism. There was also something that the two women had in common: although their experiences of the male sex were the exact opposite, neither of them had found much happiness there.

In the spring of 1771, Marie Antoinette certainly had need of a sympathetic friend. Nearly a year after their marriage, the Dauphin was apparently no closer to “making her his wife.” In the meantime arrangements for a second marriage—that of the Comte de Provence to Josephine of Savoy—were far advanced. This was seen by the apprehensive Maria Teresa as a threat on two fronts. First of all, she feared that a pliant new granddaughter-in-law would win the French King’s affections and advance the influence of Savoy—a traditional rival due to its geographical position in northern Italy—over that of Austria. Second, and still more menacing to Marie Antoinette’s fortunes, was the prospect—at last—of an heir to the throne in the next generation. But this heir would be begotten by “Monsieur” and borne by “Madame”—that is, by Provence and his Savoyard wife. (These plain appellations, vastly more honorific than more grandiose titles, were generally given to the second son and his wife.)

The stream of nagging letters from Vienna continued. Some of the criticism was on a petty domestic level. For example, the Empress heard that her daughter was not wearing her corsets, which would certainly ruin her figure. When Marie Antoinette contended that such corsets were not worn in France, her mother offered to send her Viennese corsets. Increasingly, however, the Empress picked on her daughter’s inadequate character, her preference for pleasure over duty, her lack of application and so forth and so on, to the extent that even Count Mercy respectfully suggested that the leaven of a little sweetness might get better results.

When Maria Teresa denounced her daughter for laughing with her younger ladies and making fun of others at the court, she was certainly drawing attention to unwise behaviour. Sins that would be venial in any other girl were far more consequential in the future Queen of France. It was a question of how the passage of the Dauphine from adolescence into maturity was to be handled. With the Comtesse de Noailles over-strict and stuffy, with the critical Empress apparently all-knowing of the slightest trifle at the French court, there seemed to be no one to bolster Marie Antoinette’s confidence on the one hand, and supervise her intelligently on the other.

Certainly the letter that the Empress wrote to the Dauphine on 8 May 1771 was more like a collection of skilfully directed blows with a dagger than a helpful maternal missive. Maria Teresa began by bemoaning the fact that her daughter’s looks were deteriorating; a recent miniature no longer showed that look of youth Marie Antoinette had had when she left Austria. She added the surely unnecessary reminder that a change in the Dauphine’s condition (that is, pregnancy) was not the cause.
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On that subject, there followed the usual admonition—“I can’t repeat it to you often enough”—about employing patience and charm, never ill humour, to remedy the unfortunate situation, for it was the Empress’s strongly held view that everything in this respect depended on the wife. After that Marie Antoinette was criticized on “an essential point.” She should for reasons of public prestige be inducing Louis XV to pay her daily social visits in her apartments, just as he had paid to the late Dauphine, Maria Josepha.

It was, however, on the subject of Count Mercy and the reception of the “Germans” generally that Maria Teresa waxed most eloquent. Why did Marie Antoinette receive her own ambassador so rarely, a man of such qualities, so much esteemed at court? Why did she not show more favour towards what the Empress called “your nation?” “Believe me,” wrote the Empress, “the French will respect you much more and hold you in much greater account if they find in you the seriousness and straightforwardness of the Germans. Don’t be ashamed of being German even to the point of awkwardness.” Thus Marie Antoinette was to make a point of singling out distinguished Germans with her attentions, and to extend her patronage towards the lesser ones who did not have the right to appear at court. This was her royal destiny: to make herself loved. And how well she had done so far! After this apparent tribute, the Empress proceeded to wield the dagger again. Marie Antoinette must be quite clear about what had helped her to do this. Otherwise disaster would follow.

“It’s not your beauty, which frankly is not very great,” wrote the mother to the daughter. “Nor your talents nor your brilliance (you know perfectly well that you have neither).” It was solely her good nature and her pretty ways, so well deployed, that had enabled Marie Antoinette to please. Without these, she was nothing. For a fifteen-year-old girl accused of losing her youthful freshness, who was conspicuously failing to please the most important man in her life, and was yet expected to cement the “German” fortunes at court, it was not an encouraging report.

In one potentially disastrous area of the Dauphine’s life, at least, there was a reprieve. It quickly became clear that no offspring was to be expected from the Provence marriage—not now, and probably not ever. Josephine, who at eighteen was over three years older than her hutx1and, was small, plain, with a sallow skin and with what Louis XV unkindly described in a letter to his grandson in Parma as “a villainous nose.” She was certainly no match for the Dauphine, being timid, gauche and ill educated in all those graces considered so important at Versailles. Nor was she a quick learner. A subsequent ambassador to France from Savoy had to ask Josephine’s father, Victor Amadeus III, to drop a hint about the necessity for a careful
toilette
, in particular with regard to her teeth and hair: “It is embarrassing for me to discuss such things,” admitted the ambassador, “but these mere details to us are vital matters in this country.”