Marie Antoinette (15 page)

Nevertheless the new Comtesse de Provence was anxious to do the right thing. When her Mistress of the Household, the Duchesse de Valentinois, advanced on her with the mandatory pot of rouge, Josephine flinched. Coming from the very different court of Savoy, she found rouge repugnant. But on learning that this was the custom of France and she must adhere to it in order to please her husband, Josephine gamely requested a great deal of rouge “so as to please him the more.”

It would take more than a couple of bright red circles on the cheeks to excite the Comte de Provence. Josephine duly received 300,000 livres’ worth of jewels from Louis XV (scaled down to three-quarters of the Dauphine’s casket) and from Provence his portrait as “a pledge of the sentiments that are engraved in my heart for you.” But he showed no sign of bestowing upon his wife anything more than that. At fifteen he was already so fat as to be almost obese. Due to a deformity of the hips he waddled rather than walked, could not ride and took no other exercise. He also ate a great deal. It was probably Provence’s corpulence that made him impotent although there may have been other physical causes as well.

But Provence was quick-witted. If he had a problem all his life with the fact that “he was not born master,” as Marie Antoinette once noted, he was certainly far more adept than Louis Auguste at handling the question of marital consummation. Instead of obstinacy and silence, he met the situation with lewd boasts of four-times-nightly sex. The cognoscenti—a great many people in the inquisitive society that was Versailles—knew perfectly well that nothing had taken place. Marie Antoinette, making it her business through her household to be well informed on this subject, soon assured her mother that Provence’s boasts were baseless: “It would need a miracle.” An interested gossip like Bachaumont quickly dismissed such tales. A couple of years later the incoming Savoyard ambassador reported that there had never been any question of a physical union. Josephine herself confirmed this in February 1772; she was quite sure she was not pregnant “and it’s not my fault.”

None of this stopped the wily Provence from dropping hints about his wife’s condition whenever he could most conveniently bait his brother and his Austrian wife with their own failure. It remained a fact that the birth of a son to the Comte and Comtesse de Provence would considerably undermine the position of the senior couple, the Dauphin and Dauphine—especially that of the Dauphine. It was undeniable that a marriage that was not consummated could be safely annulled by the laws of the Catholic Church—and the failure-bride sent packing. The Dauphin’s boyhood Governor, the Duc de Vauguyon, was said to be angling for this and Count Mercy was well aware of the possibility. Something of Marie Antoinette’s suffering on the subject can be gauged from a sad little aside in a letter to her mother. When the Duchesse de Chartres gave birth to a dead child, Marie Antoinette wrote that for her part, she would be happy to give birth to any child—even a dead one.

Despite the innate family rivalry of the two Princesses, one Austrian, the other Savoyard, Marie Antoinette seemed to be handling her relationship with Josephine well. “My sister,” as the Dauphine called her, was on the surface made into a friend. It was the ambassadors of their respective countries who maintained an open rivalry. The presence of four young married people at Versailles, whose ages ranged between eighteen and fifteen, led to the formation of an informal society that was perfectly in accord with the rules of etiquette. The unvarying precedence of “Monsieur” and “Madame,” in other words the Comte and Comtesse de Provence, was immediately after that of Dauphin and Dauphine. Musical parties (Marie Antoinette had resumed her music and singing lessons), games of billiards (a sport to which the French royal family was devoted), games of cards (equally popular), hunting parties: all these pleasures led to an existence that was certainly not unpleasant, if hollow in one respect.

On that subject, however, Maria Teresa’s doctor, the great Van Swieten, advised patience in the following practical terms: “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.” In the meantime it certainly added to Marie Antoinette’s contentment that by the autumn the French King showed no sign of preferring the Comtesse de Provence’s company to her own, as had been feared.

Unfortunately he was not paying those daily visits to the Dauphine either. The problem of the Du Barry and her acknowledgement would not go away, more especially because Choiseul’s replacement, the Duc d’Aiguillon, was part of the Du Barry’s set. Politics as well as prudence thus dictated a realistic approach to the situation at the French court on the part of “the Archduchess,” as Mercy significantly described Marie Antoinette in his letters to Maria Teresa.

It was the aunts, whose influence over their niece by marriage was now well established, who bedevilled the situation. Mercy in France and Maria Teresa in Austria urged on Marie Antoinette the absolute necessity of seeking the King’s favour. This merely involved a simple greeting to the Du Barry, who by the rules of Versailles was entitled to be in the presence of the Dauphine. As Maria Teresa pointed out, anything else begged the question of exactly
why
the Dauphine would not receive a lady who was part of the royal circle, making her by implication most inappropriately and publicly critical of the King’s behaviour. But the aunts managed to scupper the first occasion when this brief greeting had been set up to take place, by sending for their beloved niece to join them at the last minute. This gave Marie Antoinette the excuse she needed to duck out of the encounter.

On 31 October 1771—to mark Marie Antoinette’s sixteenth birthday three days later—the Empress sent another of her lethal missives. This one related, with a joy verging on the sadistic, how well Marie Antoinette’s brothers and sisters were doing in their marriages—and their marriage beds. Maria Carolina was at last pregnant after three years of marriage, and her first child would be born the following June. The Archduke Ferdinand, who had married the heiress of Modena, Beatrice d’Este, was “enchanted” with her and had “made her his wife” at once. “All this news,” wrote the Empress, “which should fill me with contentment, is diminished by reflections on your dangerous situation, all the worse because you either don’t understand the danger, or don’t wish to. You simply will not employ the necessary means to get yourself out of it.” The French King—“such a good father, such a good prince”—was the clue to it all. Seeking out the King’s company had to be her daily occupation, not just when she wanted something. Whatever the moral implication, the worldly implication was clear: she must placate the monarch if she was to survive at Versailles.

It was under these circumstances that on New Year’s Day 1772 at Versailles, the Dauphine surrendered at last. There was a big crowd of courtiers paying their respects. In their midst Marie Antoinette made a remark of superb royal banality in the general direction of the Du Barry: “There are a lot of people here today at Versailles.” After that she allowed herself to explode to Louis Auguste, vowing that she would never address another word to the dreadful creature. Writing to her mother Marie Antoinette took a less explosive line but she made it clear that she had sacrificed “all her prejudices and repugnances” on being assured that there was nothing dishonourable about doing so. After all, it would be the greatest unhappiness of her life if she were to be the cause of trouble between the two families, Habsburgs and Bourbons. However, “my heart will always be with my own,” she added to the Empress. Marie Antoinette meant of course the Habsburg family. “My duties here are sometimes hard to fulfil.”

For all these complaints, Marie Antoinette’s behaviour towards the Du Barry became more circumspect. In the summer at Compiègne, where the atmosphere was not so ostentatiously formal, Count Mercy, who as a diplomat saw it as his business to pay visits to the favourite, brokered another public acknowledgement. First of all the Dauphine made conversation with the Duchesse d’Aiguillon and then, since the favourite had just arrived with the King,
turned her body
in the Du Barry’s direction. She proceeded to chat on easily about the weather and the hunts without making it clear to whom her remarks were being specifically addressed. Louis XV, ignoring the ambiguity, was delighted, and that night at the royal supper, showered his granddaughter-in-law with attentions. It marked the beginning of Marie Antoinette’s realization that Mesdames Tantes had been wrong in the rigorous stance they had preached to her.

The Dauphine’s Habtx1urg “heart”—if that was what it was—became relevant in the summer of 1772, when she was sixteen and a half. Poland and its partial dismemberment was the issue. The reforms in that country by King Stanislaus Poniatowski (who followed the Saxon ruler, part of the late Dauphine’s family, on the throne) had led, in effect, to civil war. This in turn was a cynical opportunity for the great powers—Russia, Austria and Prussia—to help themselves to large chunks of Poland, provided they could agree with each other to do so without going to war. The problem was France, traditionally a friend and ally of Poland. How would she react to the forcible removal of over one-third of Polish territory? Would the Franco-Austrian alliance stand the strain? Prolonged negotiations between the three aggressors were finally concluded in the summer of 1772 by the Conventions of St. Petertx1urg. As Frederick II observed, unpleasantly but accurately, of his old enemy Maria Teresa, now his collaborator in robbery: “She wept and she wept but she took and she took.”

The Empress’s anxiety about Louis XV, expressed privately to Mercy in June, was a great deal more sincere: “I know very well that the line we have just taken with regard to Poland will have created a sensation in France.” Nevertheless the French alliance was still the cornerstone of Austrian policy; nothing that had happened to Poland changed that, although Maria Teresa admitted that France might feel a certain grievance, if only because there had been no warning. Who would smooth over this family crisis? “There is only my daughter, the Dauphine, to do so, assisted by your counsels and local knowledge,” she told Mercy in a long memorandum of 2 July. This way the Dauphine could do a real service to “her family and her homeland” (
patrie
).
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The Empress demanded nothing that could be held demeaning, only due consideration and attention to her “grandfather and master.” Her last words were the most menacing: “Perhaps the alliance depends on it.”

As it happened, the alliance proved to be impregnable simply because Louis XV had no intention of breaking it. He had little means to rescue Poland in the face of a united and powerful force on the other side. Choiseul’s replacement, the Duc d’Aiguillon, was much disliked by Marie Antoinette for his loose life and his connection to the Du Barry; he also had a malicious tongue, which she suspected mocked her amusingly behind her back. But whatever his dislike of the Austrian connection, Aiguillon too was helpless. Mercy was able to reassure Maria Teresa that since Aiguillon perceived the Austrian alliance was “in the heart of his master,” he would make no attempt to dissolve it. The following year Louis XV stated categorically: “I have made that alliance and it will continue as long as the Empress lives and the Emperor as well . . . I do not want a war.”

The interesting aspect of the Polish affair from the point of view of Marie Antoinette is the real fear with which she greeted her diplomatic instructions from her mother. (She was somewhat in the position of a modern spy, left in a foreign country for several years as a “sleeper” and now ordered to spring into action.) She ended a letter to the Empress of 17 July 1772, after she had received these instructions from Mercy, simply enough: “I shall certainly not forget what Mercy has said to me; this is very important and I’m very anxious about it; but I shall be only too happy to contribute to the union [of the two families] and to prove to my dear mother the deference and loving respect which I shall accord to her all her life . . .” But the next day, in one of his long private communications to the Empress, Mercy revealed a more agonized reaction. “Where will I be if there is a rupture between our two families?” the Dauphine had asked desperately. “I hope that God will preserve me from this misfortune, and guide me as to what to do. I have prayed fervently to Him.”

The truth was that for better or worse Marie Antoinette showed none of the instincts of a political intriguer, that sheer zest for the art of manipulation shown by her sister Amalia, who was no longer on speaking terms with her mother due to her machinations and general bad behaviour. At least the Dauphine was developing physically; the childishness of appearance that Louis XV had marked on her arrival at Versailles was vanishing. In the autumn of 1772 Marie Antoinette boasted to Maria Teresa that she had grown a lot and put on some weight, through drinking milk, although unfortunately that started ill-founded rumours of pregnancy. When it came to her character at seventeen, that was developing too. Her reading habits were improving and in June she reported proudly that she had been reading some history with Vermond. This was obviously a ploy intended to appeal to Louis Auguste, noted since early youth as a lover of historical works. The following January, Marie Antoinette dutifully recorded her own impression of her husband’s favourite book, Hume’s
History of England
: “It seems very interesting to me, although one must remember it was written by a Protestant.”