Marie Antoinette (25 page)

Social life and entertaining according to the prescribed pattern did not cease although there were some restrictions. One sufferer from this was the musical prodigy whom Marie Antoinette had last encountered as a child in Vienna. Now aged twenty-two, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had arrived in Paris in late March 1778 accompanied by his mother, who, given the Habsburg connection, hoped for “a letter of introduction from someone in Vienna to the Queen.” But the coincidence of Marie Antoinette’s first pregnancy meant that Mozart was unable to secure her patronage as he might otherwise have done. A separate offer of employment as organist at Versailles was rejected as unworthy despite Leopold Mozart’s emphatic advice that an appointment of this kind would be the surest way to win “the protection of the Queen.”

Mozart departed from France in late September having got no nearer Marie Antoinette herself than the household of her favourite, the Duc de Guines, where he gave lessons to the untalented daughter. As the French argued over the respective merits of the rival composers Gluck and Piccinni in a frenetic cultural battle, Mozart denounced their musicality in patriotic terms, which echoed the sentiments of Gluck five years earlier. Where music was concerned, the French “are and always will be asses,” he wrote on 9 July, “and as they can do nothing for themselves, they are obliged to have recourse to foreigners.”

The senior foreigner, Gluck, the Queen’s former teacher, old friend and protégé all in one, fared better. His operas continued to be supported unfalteringly by Marie Antoinette. Even her enthusiasm could not make
Alceste
and
Armide
of 1776 and 1777 respectively such rapid popular successes as their predecessors
Iphigénie en Aulide
and
Orphée
. But she took a detailed interest in Gluck’s creations and whenever he was in France, it was remarked how the Queen instantly admitted him to her company, chattering away “in the most lively fashion.” Since Gluck (back in Vienna) projected a new opera,
Iphigénie en Tauride
, it was thought that his return to Paris would solace the Queen in her last months of pregnancy. Here the awkward diplomatic situation between France and Austria ruled out a direct request from the French Queen in the interests of her own amusement.

Fortunately the Empress now thought of her daughter’s amusement as a legitimate concern “especially if a Dauphin came into the world.” Gluck received permission to return on 1 November 1778. He was once more in the orbit of France “of which Your Majesty [Marie Antoinette] is both ornament and joy . . . a sensitive and enlightened Princess, who loves and protects all the arts . . . applauds them all and carefully distinguishes them.” These were the words of his formal dedication of
Iphigénie en Tauride
to the French Queen the following year.

Two episodes that occurred at court as the Queen became increasingly weighed down by her pregnancy presaged the extremes of loyalty and disloyalty to which Marie Antoinette would one day be subject. On 25 August, the Queen saw a handsome face that she recognized among the crowd being presented to her. Count Fersen, last seen four and a half years ago at the end of the reign of the old King, had recently returned to France from Sweden. He had failed to persuade his English heiress to marry him; she did not care to leave her family for a foreign country. Fortunately love had not been involved, merely the suitability of the match in worldly terms. Fersen was now determined to pursue a military career instead. As he told his father, “I am young and I still have a great deal to learn.” Fersen did not bother to record this royal meeting in his
Journal intime
, but he did mention it in a letter home. The day he was at Versailles to be presented, “The Queen, who is charming, exclaimed when she saw me: ’
Ah, it’s an old acquaintance!
’ The rest of the royal family did not speak a word to me.” In his letter, Fersen underlined the Queen’s spontaneous and gratifying reaction.

On 8 September he returned to the subject of the Queen in a further letter to his father. Marie Antoinette was declared to be “the prettiest and most delightful princess that I know” and she was taking a real interest in him. She enquired, for example, why he did not turn up at her regular Sunday salons for cards and entertainment. On hearing that Fersen had done so, but had found no salon that particular Sunday, the Queen expressed her apologies. The evidence of Marie Antoinette’s immediate predilection for Fersen in 1778 is clear—another gallant and good-looking foreigner to add to her circle. Fersen’s admiration for her, openly related to his father, is similarly unabashed. But his concluding sentence on the subject points eloquently to the Queen’s real preoccupation at this time: “Her pregnancy advances and her condition is extremely visible.”
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The return of Philippe d’Orléans, Duc de Chartres, from the naval campaign against the English off the coast of France was a less happy affair. The Battle of Ouessant, in which he had had an official position, was hailed as a French victory. The Duc de Chartres rode to Versailles, arriving at 2 a.m. on 2 August, and had to wait for the King’s
lever
the next morning to break the news. He then travelled on to Paris where the Palais-Royal, the family’s official Parisian residence, was filled with rejoicing multitudes, before appearing at the opera to a hero’s welcome.

After that, things got worse. It turned out that the Duc de Chartres was not exactly the hero of the occasion that he purported to be. There were accusations of cowardice, alternatively incompetence. His culpability is open to question. Was he in fact a coward? Over-promoted, thanks to his royal rank, did he mistake the naval signals during the battle through ignorance? Philippe’s frivolous insistence on leaving the scene of the battle for the rapturous Parisian welcome of his dreams was less easy to defend. The satirists went quickly to work:

What! You have seen the smoke!

What a prodigious achievement . . .

It is absolutely right

That you should be an august sight

At the opera.
²³

A few months later the Duc de Chartres was ogling various beauties at a ball, when he designated the looks of one particular noble lady as “faded.” The lady in question overheard him. “Like your reputation, Monseigneur,” was her curt retort. As if this was not enough, the heir to the Orléans dukedom allowed himself with characteristic lack of judgement to be involved in a squalid intrigue to do with ministers and corruption. Humiliated, the old Duc d’Orléans pleaded for his son. But Louis XVI, who—unlike his wife—had never enjoyed the company of this light-hearted, dashing cousin, banished Philippe from court for a month. The Queen, feeling that her personal position was too vulnerable in view of the Austrian démarche, detached herself from his cause. The estrangement of the main Bourbon line and that of Orléans began to take root.

The Queen’s
douleurs
, the expressive French phrase for labour pains, began very early in the morning of 19 December 1778. Marie Antoinette had gone to bed at eleven o’clock without any sign that the baby was starting. Shortly after midnight she felt the first pains and rang her bell at 1:30 a.m. As Superintendent of the Household, the Princesse de Lamballe had the right to be told immediately, as did those who enjoyed the “honours,” in other words the privilege of being present. At three o’clock the Prince de Chimay came to fetch the King.

Never was the etiquette of Versailles held to be so vital. It was the duty of the Princesse de Lamballe personally to tell members of the royal family and the Princes and Princesses of the Blood who were at Versailles. She then sent pages to inform the Duc d’Orléans who was at his nearby palace of Saint Cloud with the Duchesse de Bourbon and the Princesse de Conti. The Duc de Chartres (still sulking), the Duc de Bourbon and the Prince de Conti were all in Paris.

At the same time as these measured steps were being taken, there was another totally disorganized rush in the direction of the Queen’s apartments from the moment the cry of the royal
accoucheur
was heard: “The Queen has gone into labour.” These avid sightseers—for that is what they were—were mainly confined to outer rooms such as the gallery, but in the general pandemonium, several got through to the inner rooms, including a couple of Savoyards, who were discovered perched aloft in order to get a really good view.

The Queen was still able to walk about until about eight o’clock in the morning when she finally took to the small white delivery bed in her room. Around her, besides the King, were the royal family, the Princes and Princesses of the Blood, and those with the “honours” including Yolande de Polignac. In the Grand Cabinet were members of her household, the King’s household and those who had the Rights of Entry. Throughout the labour, Louis XVI remained helpfully practical. It was he, for example, who insisted on the immense tapestry screens that surrounded the bed being fastened with ropes; otherwise they might well have fallen down on the hapless Queen.

The baby was born just before 11:30 a.m. It was a tiny Maria Teresa, in other words a daughter.

The position of the Comte d’Artois, proud father of two sons, the Ducs d’Angoulême and de Berry, was still unchallenged in a country where females could not succeed. From the point of view of the Comte de Provence, still the heir presumptive to his brother’s throne, things had also turned out well. His continuing status was acknowledged by the fact that the grand title of “Madame,” borne by his wife, was not removed from her in favour of the newborn princess, even though the latter was the daughter of the reigning monarch. The baby, given the names Marie Thérèse Charlotte (for both her godparents), was to be Madame Fille du Roi, or by the time she was five years old, Madame Royale.

Was the King disappointed? Much later the girl-child born that day happened to ask her father the age of the new King of Sweden. Louis XVI replied that he knew exactly the date of his birth because it was when they had all been awaiting her mother’s
accouchement
. Louis XVI had proceeded to warn Marie Antoinette to prepare herself for a girl, “because two Kings would not have two sons in the same month.” Marie Thérèse could not resist asking with great respect whether her father regretted her birth. Naturally the King assured her he did not, and embraced her while the watching courtiers wept with emotion and Marie Thérèse herself also burst into tears. Thirteen years later, this was surely true, the trauma having long faded as with most parents whose first child is not the desired sex. At the time his
Journal
recorded no disappointment—only his attendance at the ceremony of the swaddling up of his infant daughter in the Grand Cabinet next door—but then his personal feelings were almost entirely absent from his diary. After that Madame Fille du Roi was handed to the Princesse de Guéméné, who had the right to the post of Governess to the Children of France.

As for the Queen, she had had a convulsive fit and fainted. The press of people, the heat and the lack of fresh air in the rooms, whose windows had been sealed up for months against the winter cold, was too much for her after her twelve-hour labour. She may also have been physically damaged by the birth and have haemorrhaged as a result, her
accoucheur
having been chosen more for his connections than his skill. The Marquis de Bombelles, via his courtier mother-in-law and wife, heard that the Queen had been “wounded” in the course of her labour, and Maria Teresa, learning of some “terrible accident,” even believed in her paranoid way that it had been done on purpose to stop her daughter having more children.

For a while nobody seems to have noticed her swoon, in a scene so crowded and noisy that in the words of Madame Campan, “anyone might have fancied himself in a place of public entertainment.” When the Queen’s inanimate condition was eventually registered, some strong men tore down the nailed-up shutters and winter air streamed into the room, saving her.
^*46

Thanks to this mishap, the Queen was not informed of the sex of her child for at least an hour and a quarter after Marie Thérèse’s birth. When she heard, she wept—or so the relatives of the Duc de Croÿ told him. These tears were, however, likely to have been a reaction to her labour and the general intensity of emotion at having produced a living child, especially when silence had originally caused her to think the baby was born dead. Her first reported words on the subject were touching in their unconscious reflection on the fate of a princess in a patriarchal society: “Poor little girl, you are not what was desired, but you are no less dear to me on that account. A son would have been the property of the state. You shall be mine; you shall have my undivided care; you will share all my happinesses and you will alleviate my sufferings . . .”

As to the real implications of the child’s gender—the need to try again as soon as possible—they were summed up for the Queen and many others in a popular little rhyme: