Marie Antoinette (26 page)

A Dauphin we asked of our Queen,

A Princess announces him near;

Since one of the Graces is seen

Young Cupid will quickly appear.

Certainly for Marie Antoinette, with her lifelong passion for children in practice as well as in theory, the birth of a daughter who was exceptionally robust and healthy was not the straightforward “domestic misfortune” it was rated in Vienna. It was the Prince de Lambesc, son of the Comtesse de Brionne, who was despatched to Austria to make the official announcement on behalf of the King of France. By etiquette, Count Mercy’s own messenger was supposed to follow forty-eight hours later (although Mercy managed to cut that delay in half). Marie Antoinette had wanted to scribble a few lines in pencil to her mother but was stopped on the grounds that the Empress would be worried by the thought of her daughter’s unnecessary effort at such a critical moment.

The Queen was not present at her child’s instant baptism. Thus Marie Antoinette was spared the incident when the malicious Comte de Provence protested to the officiating Archbishop that “the name and quality” of the parents had not been formally given, according to the usual rite of a christening. Under the mask of concern about correct procedure, the Comte was making an impertinent allusion to the allegations about the baby’s paternity made in the
libelles
. The allusion was certainly not lost on the courtiers present. In Paris, the Duc de Chartres mounted a different sort of protest by decorating the Palais-Royal with an extremely modest set of illuminations; this meanness was attributed by the crowds to his continued state of dudgeon with the King and Queen. Marie Antoinette, more easily able to overlook such insults because she did not hear or see them herself, concentrated on celebrating her daughter’s birth with donations to appropriate charities. She asked the King for 5000 livres to be used as dowries for one hundred “poor and virtuous” girls who were marrying “honest” workmen.

The Queen stayed in bed for eighteen days, her ladies watching over her night and day in large armchairs with backs that let down as beds. Léonard visited her to cut her hair short and give it a chance to repair the ravages of the past few months. During this period, Marie Antoinette bravely attempted to breastfeed her baby, in accordance with the theories of Rousseau about natural healthy motherhood. This was the advantage of having produced a daughter—“you are mine”—since a Dauphin would have been borne away immediately to the best wet-nurse in the land. But the belief that maternal nursing acted as a contraceptive meant that Maria Teresa greeted the news with open disapproval. It was up to the King of France and the doctor to decide, wrote the Empress, although she would not have permitted it herself; the idea that the Queen of France, still in the happy dream of having given birth, might have some kind of will of her own on the subject was ruled out. Although a wet-nurse for the baby Princess was obviously employed as well, Marie Antoinette seems to have managed to nurse her daughter for a certain period; four months later she told her mother she still had traces of milk.

In April 1779, as the Empress called forcefully for “a companion” for Marie Thérèse, she received the unwelcome news that Marie Antoinette had been struck down with an “exceptionally severe” case of measles. Since the King had never had the illness, the Queen decided to keep her three-week quarantine at the Petit Trianon. This was the first occasion on which she actually spent the night in her beloved little paradise, instead of returning to Versailles to sleep. The size of the Petit Trianon meant that the Queen’s household had to be lodged at the nearby Grand Trianon. The days were spent in such therapeutic activities as drinking asses’ milk and boating on the Grand Canal. Certain aristocratic ladies came down from Paris to provide company. So far, so good; there was nothing here that Count Mercy could not explain away to the Empress.

More difficult to gloss over was the ostentatiously chivalrous behaviour of four male members of the Queen’s circle who went to watch over their liege lady like so many mediaeval squires. In other words, the Duc de Coigny, the Duc de Guines, Count Esterhazy and the Baron de Besenval (rated as too entertaining to be omitted) were there to amuse the Queen during her convalescence. With the Princesse de Lamballe and the Comtesse de Provence as fellow members of the merry crew, the whole escapade was an innocent frolic rather than anything more sinister. There had been a similar incident in March when the Queen and her ladies were stranded in a broken-down coach on their way to Paris for late-night revelry and had to hire a hackney carriage. “The very next day” this innocent adventure was “blared all over the town.” Such episodes were open to misinterpretation.

A question went the rounds: if the King got measles, would he be tended by four ladies? In fact the King did not get the measles and he did miss the Queen; their relationship became noticeably deeper following the birth of their child. Finding three weeks too long to be apart, Louis XVI made his own romantic gesture. He stood for a quarter of an hour in a private courtyard of the Petit Trianon while the Queen leant out of a window. No one else was allowed to be present at this touching encounter but it was learnt afterwards that tender words had been exchanged on both sides.

In a further step forward, that bone of contention between the King and Queen, the matter of the Bavarian succession, was removed when the military action came to an end. The Peace of Teschen, of 13 May 1779, gave none of the warring powers exactly what they wanted, although everyone received something. Charles Theodore, the Elector Palatine, was acknowledged as the legitimate heir to certain lands, while Austria’s Joseph II got a small piece of Bavarian territory—he called it “a morsel”—known as the Innviertel. Frederick II of Prussia had, however, blocked the Emperor’s major plan of aggrandizement. The “co-guarantors” of the Peace were to be the Russia of Catherine II—who had brilliantly succeeded in imposing herself on European councils as a result of the war—and, of course, France.

Subsequently Vergennes was exultant on the subject in a memorandum to his sovereign: “Your Majesty has prevented the house of Austria getting dominions, and has established the influence of France in Germany; also harmony between herself and Prussia.” Marie Antoinette’s attitude was somewhat different. For her it was naturally a “much desired peace” and her happiness was overflowing at its arrival, as she told her mother. Nevertheless, she ascribed the pacification largely to Maria Teresa’s efforts, praising the Empress’s goodness, sweetness, and, if she dared say so, her patience towards “this country” (France).

The American war with England, on which Vergennes was concentrating France’s efforts, was certainly a more remote prospect for her personally. When the Comte d’Estaing returned from capturing Grenada in July, he was crowned with flowers by Marie Antoinette and her ladies who wore white satin “Grenada” hats. Léonard created a special coiffure
aux insurgents
in honour of the rebels. A new ballet, devised by Gardel and performed in the autumn of 1779, had an American island as a setting and the American hero [John] Paul Jones as a leading character. There were dances by “American officers and their ladies,” and a display of military drill in the third act, which in the early stages of the ballet was prudently performed by professional infantrymen. So far, the distant military struggle had no more substance than the passing fashion; no more reality than the ballet.

Naval warfare was different. The autumn visit to Fontainebleau had to be cancelled because of its expense. An outbreak of dysentery among the fleets in Brittany and Normandy was inconvenient, particularly as it had spread to the Spanish fleet. The Spaniards, who had finally allied themselves with France the previous April, remained reluctant partners, given that their colonies made them more vulnerable in the New World than France. They demanded that there should be a joint operation against England in Europe—possibly using Ireland as a back door—in exchange for supporting France in America. Marie Antoinette hoped that this unfortunate outbreak of disease in the fleet would not encourage the English to be obdurate in refusing to make peace.

Yet as the year drew to a close with the first birthday of Marie Thérèse, Madame Fille du Roi, the main preoccupations of Marie Antoinette were not political. Her chief joy was in the precocious development of her daughter. Marie Thérèse had the big blue eyes and healthy complexion that in babies make for admiration. She was also tall and strong, walking in her basketwork stroller by the time she was eight months old and shouting out, “Papa, Papa.” These preferential cries did not offend her mother; on the contrary she was delighted that father and daughter were in this way linked more strongly. As for Marie Antoinette, she could hardly love her more than she did—the child who was “mine.” Marie Thérèse had four teeth by the time she was eleven months old, and at fifteen months, by which time she was walking easily, could have been taken for a child of two. In her letters to her mother, Marie Antoinette apologized disingenuously for babbling on about her daughter . . .

Her chief worry was her own health, if a “young Cupid” (that is, a Dauphin) was to follow quickly. Marie Antoinette believed herself to have had a miscarriage in the summer of 1779, as a result of reaching up to close a carriage window.
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The relentless questioning of the Empress on this intimate subject continued. A typical comment was evoked by the death of the Austrian court lady, Générale Krottendorf, who had—for some obscure reason—been the origin of the nickname given by the Empress and her family to their periods. In her New Year letter of 1780, Maria Teresa hoped that her death was an omen that meant the annoying monthly Générale would not visit her daughter again.

This was a period when marital relations with Louis XVI had fallen into an amicable pattern. They did not share beds—that was not the French way, as Marie Antoinette tried in vain to persuade her mother—but they did live together as man and wife, and the “two thirds husband” was a thing of the past. However, Marie Antoinette endured persistent gastric troubles. This was an icy winter, which laid low everyone except Louis XVI and the Comte de Provence, so that the Queen’s illnesses may have been due to the general epidemic. On the other hand, they may have been a portent of something more serious as a result of that badly handled labour.

At least the Queen was able to send a novel New Year present to her mother: a souvenir containing a lock of the King’s hair, her own hair—and that of “my daughter.” Now the seemingly interminable letters of official congratulation that the Queen of France had to write to the King of England on the frequent deliveries of his wife could at last strike a genuine note. The birth of Princess Sophia in December 1777 was greeted with “sincere interest” but that of Prince Octavius, shortly after that of Marie Thérèse, met with “real satisfaction.” Where royalties were concerned, Marie Antoinette was no longer the odd—infertile—one out.

CHAPTER TWELVE

FULFILLING THEIR WISHES

“Madame, you have fulfilled our wishes and those of France . . .”

L
OUIS
XVI
TO
M
ARIE
A
NTOINETTE
, 1781

In the spring of 1780 a prolonged visit from those friends of Marie Antoinette’s youth, the Hesse Princesses, enabled the Queen to demonstrate in eloquent fashion the style that she was beginning to develop in her own private life. For like the rest of Europe, royalties not excepted, Marie Antoinette had a growing belief in the right to some kind of personal privacy. The contrast between the magnificent state rooms and the network of poky little cabinets or private rooms behind them (which is so striking to the modern visitor to Versailles) represented a chasm between two worlds.

Of course the older generation in France resented such changes as older generations tend to do. Even such obviously appropriate modernizations as allowing men and women to eat together, and the Queen being present at the King’s “little suppers,” which was instituted by Marie Antoinette in 1774 at the suggestion of Count Mercy, had met with furious disapproval. Previously the Queen and the Princesses were forbidden to sit down with the non-royal males. Mercy made the excellent point that the loose morals of the court of Louis XV had been enhanced by this artificial segregation, which led directly to “licentious” social occasions presided over by the Comtesse Du Barry.

The senior women at the French court, according to the memoirs of the Vicomtesse de Fausselandry, had always found it difficult to pardon the Queen for her beauty and her “sweet familiarity.” Her friendship with the kind of young people who shared her own predilection for an escape from court traditions provided further ammunition; in revenge they called her proud, when the reverse was the truth. Yet it is important to note that Marie Antoinette’s instinct towards a simpler and more private way of life was actually welcome to the monarch himself. As Louis XVI would confide to one of his servants much later, “These manners, new at Court, were too suitable to my own taste to be opposed by me.”

The pleasures of this privacy included the enjoyment of her burgeoning gardens, the introduction of private theatricals and wherever possible the adoption of much plainer clothes in place of the rigid court dress, with its stiff structures of panniers and train. For it was at about this time that Marie Antoinette, abandoning heavy traditional make-up, began to wear her classic white muslin gowns. These consisted of a plain piece of material put over the head, with a drawstring neck. A few ruffles and ribbons were added, and it was tied at the waist by a silk sash, pale blue or striped. With a straw hat to complete it, this was the costume of Marie Antoinette immortalized in 1783 by the brush of Madame Vigée Le Brun. The following year, when Mrs. Cradock, wife of a wealthy Englishman, was shown the Queen’s Robes of State, it was as though she was inspecting museum pieces. In a sense, that was true, even if those concoctions of rose satin and blue velvet, heavily embroidered with pearls and other jewels, garnished with lace and gold and silver tissue, were still let out of the museum from time to time.

The Wardrobe Book of the Queen was presented to her daily by her Mistress of the Robes together with a pincushion; Marie Antoinette would prick the book with a pin to indicate her choices. The porters attached to the Queen’s Wardrobe (this was three large rooms filled with closets, drawers and tables) then carried in the huge baskets covered in cloths of green taffeta. The Wardrobe Book of 1782, in the care of the Comtesse d’Ossun, survives. Each outfit is categorized and accompanied by a tiny swatch of material. There are samples for the court dresses in various shades of pink, in shadowy grey-striped tissue and in the self-striped turquoise velvet intended for Easter.

But what is notable is the preponderance of swatches for the more casual clothes, the loose
Lévites
shown together on one page in an array of colours, from pale grey and pale blue through to the much darker shades of maroon and navy, sometimes with small sprigs embroidered between the stripes. There are redingotes (from the English word riding-coat) in the same palette of blues, as well as a particular mauve marked Bertin-Normand, coupling together the names of the couturier and the silk-merchant. Swatches for the so-called “Turkish” robes are shown in self-striped pink and very dark mauve, for the
robes anglaises
in turquoise and self-striped mauve as well as dark maroon striped in pale blue. One swatch of material, supplied by the other celebrated silk-merchant, Barbier, uses the Queen’s favourite cornflower to good effect, set in a design of wavy, cream-coloured stripes.
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The muslin dresses added simplicity of material to that of shape. Originally imported to France by the Creole ladies of the West Indies, her muslin dresses suited Marie Antoinette’s romantic idea of a simplified life to the extent that she came to present them to her English friends, such as the Duchess of Devonshire, as a token of esteem. Although the Queen of France was denounced by the French silk industry by failing in her duty to them, it has to be said that, once again, Marie Antoinette was not so much innovating fashion as flowing instinctively with it. All over Europe costumes were becoming simplified (as were hairstyles) as if in response to some shared
Zeitgeist
. In Vienna the Emperor Joseph even tried to ban the cumbersome panniers and expensive paraphernalia of official court dress. Although he did not succeed, the liberating intention was much like that of his sister in France. Similarly Marie Antoinette’s permission for gentlemen to wear frockcoats (
le frac
) in her private company might be denounced by conservatives. Twenty years ago, fulminated the Marquis de Bombelles, gentlemen wearing such a costume would not even have dared present themselves to the wife of a notary! Nevertheless it was the way the world was going.

It was the same instinct that led Marie Antoinette, with a bevy of courtiers (but not the King), to visit the tomb of Rousseau. All present admired the simple good taste of the tomb, the soft romantic melancholy of the site, without, in the opinion of the sardonic Baron Grimm, having any thought to the memory of the man. And yet all of them, including Marie Antoinette, were being influenced by the man’s ideas. . . . Sensibility, even excessive sensibility, was much admired; appreciation of Gluck was another mark of it. When
Iphigénie en Tauride
was first performed, many people, anxious not to be thought coarse-grained, took the precaution of weeping the whole way through the opera.

For their taste of the Queen’s new style, the Hesse Princesses came in a large family party, their visit being connected to a lawsuit in Paris. There was the unmarried Princess Charlotte, Marie Antoinette’s special friend: “All your family can be quite sure of my affection, but as for you, my dear Princess, I can’t convey to you the depth of my feeling for you.” Then there was the nineteen-year-old Princess Louise, with her husband (also her cousin) Prince Louis, who was heir to the Landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt, and his younger brother Prince Frederick. Unlike Marie Antoinette, Louise was pregnant—she would give birth at the end of August—and a great deal of concern on the subject of her health was displayed by the Queen throughout her visit; this vicarious solicitude made up for the continued blighting of her own hopes in this direction, despite courses of iron pills.

The father of the Princesses, Prince George William, although badly afflicted with gout and failing eyesight, was also in Paris for the sake of the family lawsuit, together with his wife, another unmarried daughter Princess Augusta and his son Prince George Charles. The latter, as a foreign prince in his mid-twenties, was someone whose interests Marie Antoinette could try to promote, in the patroness’s role that she enjoyed. The Landgrave of Hesse-Homburg and his wife the Landgravine Caroline, herself the sister of Princes Louis and Frederick, completed this interwoven family group, which brought with it memories of another time and a shared past.

Immediately the Queen sought to involve her friends in her favourite pursuits. On the evening of her arrival, Marie Antoinette’s “dear Princess” Charlotte was bidden to the Queen’s own box at Versailles for a theatrical performance. To re-establish their friendship, Charlotte and her family were to be sure to arrive an hour or so in advance. Such an invitation was a sign of great favour since the Queen’s box was extremely small. Huge panniered skirts would obviously be a disaster, so Marie Antoinette added the important words to her handwritten note: “I beg you all not to be too dressed up.” On 2 March an invitation to a ball given by the Comtesse Diane de Polignac, sister of Comte Jules and Mistress of the Household to Madame Elisabeth, was accompanied by a similar instruction regarding informality. Since this was to be a ball “without ceremony,” beginning at 11:30 p.m., the Princesses should wear “little” dresses or polonaises, robes where the light silk overskirts were conveniently looped up instead of grandly sweeping the floor.

An invitation came to Princess Louise, her husband and brother-in-law from Marie Antoinette to see the garden at the Petit Trianon: “It’s looking so beautiful that I should be charmed to show it to you.” There was the provision: “I shall be quite alone so don’t dress up; country clothes and the men in frockcoats.” Midday was the best time to see the garden and lunch would be offered. A note to Princess Charlotte with arrangements for picking her up in order to go for a walk in the forest (at Marly or Saint-Germain) warned once again: “Don’t be dressed up and don’t wear big hats, because the carriage is only a barouche.”

The Queen took a keen personal interest in the transformation of her gardens at the Petit Trianon. A series of little models made by the sculptor Deschamps were produced for her inspection. Trees and grass were represented by wood or moss or scrapings of horn dyed green; columns of the sort that were to feature in this romantic landscape, devised in part by the painter Hubert Robert, were modelled in wax. Fourteen models had to be produced before the Queen was satisfied. At Choisy, Marie Antoinette indulged her “real passion” for flowers; she particularly enjoyed painting the
rose-modèles
who posed for her, as it were, along a great white trellis nine feet long, where all her favourite species were grown. Appropriately enough, the young Pierre Joseph Redouté, who shared her love of roses, would be appointed her official draughtsman in 1787. Hyacinths—with blue the favourite colour—tulips and irises were among those flowers she favoured, not only in her gardens but as a theme of decoration for her various boudoirs. One of her ladies had special responsibility for seeing that everywhere in her apartments huge Chinese pots and small vases of crystal, Sèvres or Venetian glass were filled with flowers. Then there was her love of wild flowers such as violets and the flowery essences that were replacing the heavier musky perfumes, now thought to be old-fashioned.

The theatre, including opera and the ballet, had long been an obsession; Madame Campan reported how Marie Antoinette was always eager to hear news of the latest plays and performances while at her
toilette
. In Paris, of course, she had her boxes at the Opéra, the Comédie Française and the Comédie Italienne (later the Opéra Comique), whose retiring rooms included dressing-tables. Ballerinas such as the exquisite Madeleine Guimard, perennially youthful and so thin that she was known as “the skeleton of the Graces,” fell under her patronage.

But amateur theatricals were also part of eighteenth-century court tradition, the Pompadour, for example, having a great taste for them, whilst in Paris well over a hundred private theatres flourished. In the summer of 1780 Marie Antoinette graduated from minor performances in her own apartments, where she had been coached by her erudite Librarian, Monsieur Campan, to something more ambitious. On 1 June a new theatre was inaugurated at Versailles adjacent to the Petit Trianon. Designed by Richard Mique, its decor was blue and gold, with blue velvet and blue moiré, and papier-mâché to simulate marble.
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Active participation in the theatricals was a great favour, and even an invitation to watch was a sign of approval. Aristocrats who were kept out were indignant when it was a nobody, the Librarian Campan, who acted as director and prompter, rather than some more suitable Duc. The celebrated theatrical companies came down from Paris to perform, but on 1 August some “little trifles,” to use Count Mercy’s careful phrase to Maria Teresa, were given by the courtiers themselves and their mistress.

Mercy’s tact in breaking the news to the Empress was part of his general policy where any new pastimes of Marie Antoinette were concerned. In fact, in this case her reaction was hardly relevant since the King himself thoroughly enjoyed his wife’s performance on the stage. With the Princes and Princesses of the Blood, Louis XVI watched enchanted, unaccompanied by any great train of courtiers, and with only the body of ordinary domestic servants present who were performing their usual duties. Furthermore, as Mercy himself commented, the passion for theatricals now took over from the passion for gambling at late-night card parties, and it diverted the Queen from giddy expeditions to Paris. Expert tutors were imported: the actor Joseph Dazincourt from the Comédie Française for theatrical technique and Louis Michu from the Comédie Italienne as singing master.