Marie Antoinette (18 page)

Grotesque monument! Infamous pedestal!

Virtues on foot, vice on horseback.
²³

On 27 April 1774, the King, who was staying at the Grand Trianon, went out hunting, but felt sufficiently weak to stay in his carriage. Fever and nausea the next day caused his doctor La Martinière to recommend a return to Versailles. It was at this point that the drama began. When kings were dying—or conceivably dying—a delicate balance had to be maintained by those around them between their physical needs in this world and their spiritual needs in the next. That is to say, even a king could not expect absolution for his sins unless he sent away his current mistress and made a full act of repentance. If the fateful act of exclusion was not performed in time, he risked dying in a state of mortal sin, with the prospect of eternal damnation. Unfortunately from the King’s point of view the decision could not be reversed; to repent totally of a particular relationship and then cheerfully renew it with the return of health was against the rules of spiritual etiquette, which, however lax and casuistical, still existed.

No one was more aware of this dilemma than Louis XV himself as his health deteriorated, since he had already experienced it once. Thirty years earlier the King had fallen seriously ill, and after a period of agitated conjecture, his then mistress the Duchesse de Châteauroux was sent away. The King duly received absolution. But he did not die. Regrettably, this meant that the Duchesse could not return; her reign was over, if that of the King was not. Other mistresses followed, principal among them the Pompadour, last among them the Du Barry.

It was not until 3 May that the King, looking at the pustules on his body, said aloud the dreaded words that no one else had dared to pronounce to him: “It is smallpox.” Hitherto he had been buoyed up by believing that he had already suffered smallpox as a young man and was therefore immune. The diagnosis meant that his confession became a matter of urgency. It also meant that his spiritual advisors, including the Cardinal de la Roche-Aymon and the Archbishop of Paris, had a duty to see that it was made; otherwise criticism within the Church of their pusillanimous conduct would have been severe. As for his devout daughters, they were understandably determined that his spiritual welfare should now take precedence and that the favourite should be banished. The Duc d’Aiguillon, on the other hand, as the favourite’s protégé, had a more complicated hand to play. In all of this, the one person nobody thought of consulting was the Dauphin. It seemed to occur to nobody that in a few days’ time “he might be master.”

On the evening of 4 May the King finally ordered the Du Barry to leave for Ruel (Aiguillon’s own château, not far away from Versailles). His words were dignified: “Madame, I am sick, and I know what I have to do . . . Rest assured that I shall always have the most tender feelings of friendship for you.” But perhaps he did not even then give up all hope because a few hours later he sent for his mistress again, only to be told that she had already departed. Two large tears rolled down the King’s cheeks. It was then that he finally confronted the truth of his own mortality. Yet in spite of increasing sickness, which gradually swelled up his whole face and turned it dark “like a Moor’s head,” the King did not die.

Was the drama of thirty years ago to be re-enacted? Fifteen carriages containing various courtiers were noted by Mesdames Tantes as going to call at Ruel just in case . . . This insurance policy would be held against the courtiers concerned for many years to come. Meanwhile the King’s daughters, defying the possibilities of infection, nursed him devotedly.

It was not until three o’clock on the afternoon of 10 May 1774 that the candle that stood in the window of Louis XV during his ordeal was extinguished. Suddenly the young couple, Louis Auguste and Marie Antoinette, waiting anxiously together in the Dauphine’s apartments and still ignorant of what happened, heard “a terrible noise, exactly like thunder.” It was the sound of rushing feet. The crowd of courtiers hanging around the antechambers of the royal deathbed had instantly deserted them when the news of the King’s decease was broken. All ran towards the rising sun, every man and woman intent on being the first to pay compliments to the new monarch and his wife.

The King and Queen of France, as they had thus become, fell on their knees and, in a scene that touched everyone who witnessed it, prayed together: “Dear God, guide us and protect us. We are too young to reign.” After that Marie Antoinette leant on her husband’s arm and touched her eyes with her handkerchief as she received the compliments of the courtiers. The first person to present herself, as of right, was the Mistress of the Household, the Comtesse de Noailles, just as she had proudly greeted the Dauphine on her arrival on French soil, four years earlier.

No one, however, lingered at Versailles. The danger of contagion was extreme for everyone but especially for Louis Auguste who had never had smallpox, nor even been inoculated. By four o’clock the royal party was organized to depart for the palace of Choisy, five miles from Paris on the banks of the Seine, famous for its freshness and its flower gardens. One carriage took the aunts, following their heroic stints of nursing, and the younger Princesses, Clothilde and Elisabeth, with their Governess, the Comtesse de Marsan. The other carriage conveyed the new King and Queen, and his two brothers with their wives. A little while later some English visitors were able to ramble freely through Versailles due to that indifference to security already remarked. Having enjoyed the loud sound of birdsong in the gardens, they inspected the state apartments and found them dirty and neglected. The rooms of Mesdames Tantes, with their books, were more appealing. Here a majestic cat was wandering. The name on the silver collar was that of Madame Victoire, once daughter to the King, now aunt to Louis XVI—for the new King quickly indicated he was ridding himself of the name Auguste.

As for the corpse of Louis XV, that was hastily sealed up in its coffin and driven at breakneck speed to the cathedral of Saint-Denis, so that the infection would not be spread. The spanking pace caused much merriment among the waiting crowds of his erstwhile subjects. Lady Mary Coke described how “so far from showing the least concern, they whooped and hallooed as if they had been at a horse-race instead of a funeral procession.” The once familiar cry of Louis XV out hunting was heard again in mockery: “Tally ho! Tally ho!”

Nor was the atmosphere in the new King’s carriage on its way to Choisy any more sombre. For a while the solemnity of what had just happened meant that the six young people—the Comtesse de Provence at twenty-one was the oldest, Artois at seventeen the youngest—were plunged in sadness. But then that peculiar mixture of mirth and mourning that often attends deaths took a hold. A word inadvertently pronounced wrongly by the Comtesse d’Artois sent everyone in the carriage into fits of hysterical laughter. The tears were dried. A new life was beginning.

CHAPTER NINE

IN TRUTH A GODDESS

Vera incessu patuit dea: by her gait she revealed that she was in truth a goddess.

V
IRGIL, QUOTED BY
H
ORACE
W
ALPOLE ABOUT
M
ARIE
A
NTOINETTE

Shortly after the death of Louis XV, a fashionable jeweller made a fortune by selling mourning snuffboxes which showed a portrait of the young Queen surrounded by black and bearing the inscription “Consolation in Grief.” There was no doubt that the new reign was immensely popular at its outset. Not only the general indifference felt for the memory of the late King, but also the vivid expectations entertained for his successor contributed to this. The accession to the throne of “a young virtuous prince” was expected to lead to “a regeneration.”

Few could remember the coming to the throne of Louis XV as a child of five, in 1715. This new accession, only the second in the eighteenth century, brought an adult to the role. In contrast to his grandfather, Louis XVI might provide that domestic propriety that was gradually beginning to be expected of royal families—as witness the English royal family across the Channel. For Louis XVI, in the popular perception, was a king with a gracious consort. The glamour of Marie Antoinette—to use a twentieth-century word which nevertheless seems appropriate—appeared to fit her admirably for the position of Queen of France. During the next few years Marie Antoinette’s beauty, or the illusion of beauty that she gave, reached its prime, fulfilling that promise hinted at when she had been a child in Vienna. Her figure, especially her bosom, filled out. Her large wide-apart blue-grey eyes were notably expressive, their short-sightedness only giving a softness to her gaze; her hair, insofar as the natural colour could be discerned beneath the “meal tub” of powder, had darkened from the childish ash to a light brown and was very thick. Her defects of course remained. Her nose was aquiline and, as such noses generally do, became more pronounced with age. Although increasingly elaborate hairdressing concealed the notorious forehead, there was nothing to be done about the Habsburg lower lip, other than ignore it, as the artists tried to do, concentrating on the Queen’s short and pretty upper lip.

In 1774 Jean-Baptiste Gautier-Dagoty painted Marie Antoinette in her bedroom in Versailles at her favourite pursuit of the harp, one beautiful hand well displayed. It was a charming composition. She wore a light grey gauzy dress under a wrapper with a hint of peach-coloured ribbon at her breast; a reader (female) held a book, a singer (male) held out music, a waiting-woman extended a basket of plumes to put in her hair and in the corner the artist surveyed his palette. The next year Gautier-Dagoty painted a portrait that was widely copied in different versions, showing the Queen with a diamond
aigrette
pinned to her coiffure, pearl and blue ribbons threaded through her locks, lace on her pale blue dress and a cloak of blue velvet, richly ornamented with fleur-de-lys and ermine, surrounding her. It was a cunning study of femininity and majesty combined. Both pictures showed Marie Antoinette full face. Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne’s marble bust, which was sent to Vienna a few years earlier, is, given the rigidity of the medium, inevitably a good deal less flattering.

The radiance of the Queen’s smile was celebrated; it contained “an enchantment,” which the future Madame Tussaud, an observer at Versailles, would say was enough to win over “the most brutal of her enemies.” But the Comte de Tilly, who first saw Marie Antoinette in 1775 when he was fourteen, and judged her with the critical eye of youth, thought it ridiculous to pretend that the heavy “and at times drooping underlip” lent nobility and distinction to the Queen’s appearance. Whatever the sweetness of her smile, it was a mouth that only came into its own when the Queen was angry.

Yet even Tilly had to admit that her skin, her neck, her lovely shoulders, her arms and hands, were the most beautiful he had ever seen. The brilliance of her complexion caused the Prince de Ligne, who adored the Queen, to remark that her skin and her soul were equally white, and in a letter home Eliza Hancock picked out the Queen’s “very fine white complexion” for mention. It was this that led Mrs. Thrale, touring France with Dr. Johnson in 1775, to rate Marie Antoinette “the prettiest Woman at her own Court,” even better by day than she was by night (when of course she was still obliged to deface herself with the obligatory rouge). The artist Madame Vigée Le Brun was honest enough to say that since the Queen’s skin was “so transparent that it allowed no shadow,” paint could never quite capture it.

It was, however, the graceful whole rather than the perfect individual elements that made such an impression on those who knew Marie Antoinette. Above all it was her bearing; in Baron de Besenval’s words, “Something delightful about the carriage of her head, a wonderful elegance in everything, made her able to dispute the advantage with others better endowed by nature and even beat them.” Of course the physical charms of royalty are seldom cried down, the lustre of a crown enhancing even the most mediocre appearance in the eyes of the public. Yet in the case of Marie Antoinette there is such unanimity of report from so many sources, including foreign visitors as well as her intimates, that it is difficult to doubt the truth of the picture.

The result was a plethora of comparisons to goddesses and nymphs—much as had been made on her wedding journey, the difference being that Marie Antoinette was now a visible woman, rather than an unknown girl. Madame Campan compared her to the classical statues in the royal gardens, for example, the Atalanta at Marly. There was the story of the twelve-year-old boy, educated in the classics, who flung himself at the Queen’s feet at court, seeing in her the embodiment of “all my father’s goddesses.” At least two writers chose to cite the famous passage in the
Aeneid
when Venus appeared incognito to her son Aeneas. But as Venus turned away “by her gait she revealed that she was in truth a goddess” (
vera incessu patuit dea
). The novelist and essayist Sénac de Meilhan was reminded of Virgil by the Queen’s manner of walking, so light of foot and yet so majestic. Horace Walpole would never forget seeing her following Louis XV into the Royal Chapel, how she “shot through the room like an aerial Being, all brightness and grace and without seeming to touch earth.” Madame Vigée Le Brun, watching her outdoors with her ladies at Fontainebleau, thought that the dazzling Queen, her diamonds sparkling in the sunlight, might have been a goddess surrounded by nymphs.
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It was on this occasion that Marie Antoinette turned to the painter and asked, half humorously, half regretfully: “If I were not the Queen, they would say I looked insolent, is that not so?” Yet it was not a totally unconscious posture. An English child at Versailles, petted by Marie Antoinette, was “astonished and terrified” to witness the deliberate change in her countenance when she had to receive some ambassadors; “the striking air of dignity” she assumed where minutes earlier there had been a friendly, playful woman. It might not always be so advantageous for Marie Antoinette to indicate by her very bearing that she was born an Austrian archduchess. However, there was no such shadow on the popular mood at the time of the accession of Louis XVI.

The new King and Queen did not stay long at Choisy because it was feared that the royal aunts had become infected with smallpox. The court then moved on to the château of La Muette, on the outskirts of Paris, and then progressed to Marly and Fontainebleau. Altogether the court stayed away from Versailles for six months, until that palace was deemed safe for habitation again. During this period there were two dismissals. Both were predictable and both were attributed to Marie Antoinette.

The Comtesse Du Barry could not expect her reign to outlast that of the former King. For the time being she was instructed to reside in a convent; later she was able to live at her château of Louveciennes where she received the curious, and on occasion the amorous. For the Comtesse still remained beautiful, still wanton, into her forties; the “full-breasted” figure that had pleased the late King was still appealing, if ampler. All this meant that the late King’s favourite had been treated without vindictive severity by the standards of the time. Gossips were furthermore wrong in ascribing her exile to the Queen. It was Louis XVI, under the influence of his pious aunts, who had every intention of banishing their old enemy. Marie Antoinette might have demanded the banishment of the Du Barry, but it was not necessary.

Sorting out a scandalous situation left behind from the previous reign was one thing. A far more serious question of rearrangement was needed where the question of the new King’s advisors was concerned. In theory the monarch possessed absolute power but in practice he could hardly operate alone. The prevailing method of government was to use a series of committees and even more informal consultations, some of them tête-à-tête with a minister, known as the King’s
travail
(labour). Louis XVI was an honourable and conscientious young man, but even those who wished him well referred to his indecisiveness, the need for a stronger nature to dominate him, a relic no doubt of the lack of confidence inculcated during his unloved childhood. Furthermore there is no evidence that he had been prepared by his grandfather to be “the master.” Under the circumstances, the character and inclinations of his chief advisor and other ministers were likely to be of the greatest significance.

It was unthinkable, however, that the Duc d’Aiguillon should continue to fulfil the role he had played under Louis XV. His connection to the Du Barry, together with suspicions of his disloyalty in conduct and conversation, made him personally odious to both King and Queen. Here too his speedy dismissal was attributed to Marie Antoinette alone whereas the truth was very different. Anxious as the Queen was to see Aiguillon dismissed, she was equally anxious to see him replaced by the man, still exiled from the court, to whom she remained loyally attached, the Duc de Choiseul. In the event the Comte de Maurepas was appointed to be the King’s chief minister. This was the first example of Marie Antoinette’s inability, whatever the hostile propaganda to the contrary, to sway her husband where their interests diverged.

Many other examples would follow. Ten years later the Queen wrote ruefully to her brother the Emperor that “the natural suspiciousness of the King had been strengthened long before his marriage by his boyhood Governor.” The Queen added that the Comte de Maurepas, although less forceful and less wicked than Vauguyon, thought it useful for the maintenance of his own credit “to maintain the King in the same ideas.” More philosophically, Count Mercy reflected that a chief minister would inevitably try to curb the influence of the Queen.

Maurepas, a man in his seventies, had been in exile for twenty-five years for allegedly circulating scurrilous verses about the Pompadour. He seems to have been a candidate of the King’s aunts who, during the period when quarantine from smallpox meant that Louis XVI was cut off from many other potential ministers, exerted a particular sway. In short, the King preferred the advice of his French aunts to that of his Austrian wife. Cynical by nature—people mistook the stylish indifference with which he had greeted his disgrace for wisdom—Maurepas was an excellent manager of the court system. According to the Comte de Ségur: “All his policy consisted in taking men and times as he found them and maintaining peace at home.” The Duc de Lévis, more critically, described him as having no feeling at all for the public good.

This man would now be the closest advisor of the young French King for the next seven years. An even longer span of influence was enjoyed by the Comte de Vergennes, fifty-five at the time of his appointment as Foreign Minister in 1774. A career diplomat, Vergennes had been hampered in his rise by what was regarded as an unsuitable marriage to his mistress, of Turkish origin, whom Louis XV called “that dreadful woman.” But he was clever and hard-working, his main character fault being a strong mercenary streak—“the man of his age who most loved money.” Vergennes would serve the King in various capacities for nearly thirteen years.