Marie Antoinette (27 page)

The amateur actors included the talented Comte d’Artois; Yolande de Polignac’s lover, the Comte de Vaudreuil (who was generally agreed to be the most skilful); another member of the Polignac set, the Comte d’Adhémar; and Yolande’s ravishing young daughter Aglä ié who, from her recent marriage to the Duc de Guiche, was nicknamed “Guichette.” Significantly, Marie Antoinette’s chosen parts had absolutely nothing to do with the gorgeously attired stately role she played day by day at Versailles. She played shepherdesses, village maidens and chambermaids, just as Artois played gamekeepers and valets. Rousseau’s
Le Devin du Village (The Village Soothsayer
) ended with the village
devin
adjuring everyone to return to the countryside, away from the court; a happy dance round the maypole followed. Marie Antoinette played the faithful—but simple—Colette with Artois as her admirer Colin and Vaudreuil as the eponymous soothsayer.

In the summer of 1780 Marie Antoinette needed distraction, and not only from gambling sessions and late-night trips to Paris; she had also lost a member of her circle for whom she had an acknowledged
penchant
. This was Count Axel Fersen. He succeeded at last in leaving for the American war as ADC to the French General Rochambeau on 23 March, having been kicking his heels since the previous autumn when a Franco-Spanish invasion plan in which he hoped to take part was aborted. Where this particular phase of the relationship between Marie Antoinette and Fersen is concerned—the first real phase—it is as ever important to beware of hindsight. The Swedish ambassador, in a report to his king of April 1779, wrote of the Queen’s “leaning” towards Fersen: “I confess that I cannot help believing it . . . I have seen signs too unmistakable to doubt it.” She had regarded him so “favourably” that this had given offence to several people.

A weakness for a young and good-looking man is, however, a very different matter from an adulterous liaison, especially since the fondness concerned was expressed in the kind of patronage that would inevitably absent Fersen from her side, by going to America. At the age of twenty-five Fersen also had an agenda that was clear enough. Putting the needs of a military career first, he wanted to be part of the French support of independence in the New World.

Already, young French aristocrats, inspired by a mixture of idealism and ambition, were beginning to cross the Atlantic under their own impetus, despite the theoretical need for government permission. The rebels were beginning to capture the imagination: “Their cause was our cause. We were proud of their victories, wept for their defeats,” wrote one noblewoman. The young red-haired radical, the Marquis de La Fayette, backed by his colossal private wealth—a rumoured income of 100,000 livres a year—defiantly charted a boat and departed for the war. Another voyager was La Fayette’s brother-in-law, the Vicomte de Noailles, son of Marie Antoinette’s first Mistress of the Household (the two men were married to sisters, Noailles cousins). While some might have privately agreed with Yolande de Polignac’s verdict in a letter to an English friend—“This dreadful America, since it has been discovered, has produced nothing but evil!”—others including Fersen saw there the opportunity for glory and self-advancement.

Fersen certainly placed the perceived need for action above his other need to marry an heiress, although even here he was prepared to contemplate the widowed daughter of the Baron de Breteuil as a possible bride. Apart from that, he was thoroughly beguiled by the Queen—particularly as she was so helpful. Fersen’s candid letters on the subject to his father in Sweden are the best possible proof of the lack of any deeper level to their relationship at this point. “She is a charming princess,” Fersen wrote in the same terms he had used two years previously, adding, “she has always treated me very kindly.” He also pointed to the influence of Breteuil, the French ambassador in Vienna who was currently visiting France: “Since the Baron spoke to her, she singles me out even more. She almost always walks with me at opera balls . . .” But it was his next comment that was the real clue to Marie Antoinette’s favour: “Her kindness has aroused the jealousy of the younger courtiers who cannot understand a foreigner being better treated than they are.” This, of course, was the whole point; Fersen, apart from his attractions, brought no baggage from the court of France, something that was fully understood by the Polignac set. The Polignacs were quite content that the Queen should have an admirer who wanted a commission for America rather than richer pickings in France itself.

In his concern to leave, did Fersen also feel that he was being sucked too far into the Queen’s circle—and the Queen’s affections? It is possible. Certainly Fersen wrote of his appointment to Rochambeau’s expedition, which he attributed finally to Vergennes’ feeling for the senior Count Fersen: “I am in a state of joy that cannot be expressed.” The Queen, on the other hand, was said to have wept when Fersen took his departure, having invited him to a series of her supper parties in the weeks before.

When Fersen originally planned to depart, one of the Queen’s Dames du Palais, the Duchesse de Saint-James, had teased Fersen about his “conquest” of the Queen, a light remark that probably would not have been made if it had had serious substance. Then she asked him: “Are you abandoning your conquest?” Fersen was quick to reply with that modesty and discretion he would show throughout his life: “If I had made one, I would not abandon it.” He went on: “Unhappily I depart . . . without leaving any regrets behind me.” It was not strictly speaking true. When Marie Antoinette wrote to her mother in April of her fervent prayers for the embarkation of the French expedition—“May God grant that they arrive successfully!”—it is plausible to think that she had the Swedish Count as well as the French soldiers in mind. Fersen, on the other hand, as ever turning to attractive female company, was soon finding the women of Newport, Rhode Island, to his great satisfaction, “pretty, friendly and
coquettes
,” while the people in general were “cheerful and straighforward.”

It was the Polignac set that remained Marie Antoinette’s “family.” It formed the basis of the group known as the Queen’s Private Society (
Société Particulière de la Reine
), which included at least six Polignac relations. As such exclusive clubs always are, the Private Society—a form of salon, something that had a long tradition among ladies in France, both grand and intellectual—was resented and criticized by those outside it. None of the members was a very “elevated character,” wrote the Comte de La Marck, and there were many to point out how greedy all of them were. Certainly the Queen gave lavishly or rather saw to it that the King gave. Comte Jules was created a Duc and “Guichette’s” magnificent dowry at her wedding in the summer of 1780 was the talk of the court.

Yet it is important to note that Louis XVI felt about the Polignac set rather as he felt about the theatre: here were people and activities who diverted his wife. In the case of the Duchesse de Polignac, as she had become, she understood how to handle Marie Antoinette’s mercurial moods, one of her methods being to stand silently and offer a concoction of soothing orange-flower water into which sugar had been stirred. On a personal level, the charming Yolande was one of the few women the King actually liked and trusted. On 5 May 1780 she gave birth to a son whose paternity was generally ascribed to her lover, the Comte de Vaudreuil. Wags asked whether the father was perhaps the Queen, since it could not be the Duc de Polignac (there had been a gap of nine years since the births of Aglä ié and Armand). Louis XVI, undeterred by such gossip, paid the new mother a visit of courtesy; hers was the only private house in Paris he had entered since his accession.

Since this was the court of France, and for the first time there was no royal mistress in sight, sporadic efforts were made to put other women in the King’s way. In January 1778 even Marie Antoinette had braced herself for the King taking a mistress now that their marriage was fully consummated. She promised her brother Joseph in a letter that if there were liaisons, she would do everything to win the King back. It was not for nothing that Henri IV, of celebrated virility, was the most popular king in French history; the image of both Louis XIV and Louis XV included sexual prowess. Thus the King’s supposed interest in an actress at the Comédie Française or even his casual inspection of a young woman at a card party through his lorgnette—he asked who she was—caused prurient excitement. To all of this the King’s reaction is best summed up by an incident in which the Duc de Fronsac, heir to the dissipated Duc de Richelieu, dangled his own mistress, an opera singer known as “la petite Zacharie,” as bait in front of the King. “Be gone, Fronsac,” said the King in disgust. “It’s obvious whose son you are . . .”

In February 1782 the King himself made his position quite clear: “Everyone would like me to take a mistress but I have no intention of doing so. I do not wish to re-create the scenes of the preceding reigns . . .” Louis XVI’s way of dealing with such rumours consisted of sitting safely beside the gentle and unthreatening Yolande de Polignac at a ball. The obstinacy that had enabled him to hold out against the consummation of his marriage for so many years was not likely to desert the King now in favour of behaviour that he found both distasteful and immoral. Nevertheless the position of royal mistress remaining unfilled meant that there was in a sense a vacancy at court. Courtiers could not seek out favours from the
ma"tresse-en-titre
as they had been accustomed to do; nor could they play off the royal mistress against the royal consort. The future would show whether the Queen of France was, against precedent, to fill the position and enjoy the influence of both wife and mistress.

The politics of the autumn of 1780 presented the Polignacs with an opportunity for advancing their own. On 13 October Necker managed to secure the dismissal of Antoine Sartine, the Minister for the Navy, whose management of the finances of the fleet had earned his disfavour. The Polignac candidate to replace Sartine was the military aristocrat the Marquis de Castries, a brilliant soldier in the Seven Years’ War who had been a protégé of the Duc de Choiseul. It was, however, the approval of Necker that clinched the job for Castries rather than purely and simply the influence of the Queen. Mercy and Vermond were in any case anxiously counselling her to step back from the Polignac intrigues, in order to concentrate her talents on supporting Austria.

The Minister of War was also to be replaced. This time the Polignacs strongly forwarded a member of the Queen’s Private Society, the Comte d’Adhémar. But once again Mercy struck home. Adhémar was passed over and a second military aristocrat, also a hero of the Seven Years’ War, the Marquis de Ségur, was appointed; a man of great authority, Ségur was descended illegitimately from that Duc d’Orléans who had been Regent. Marie Antoinette now had two service ministers, Castries and Ségur, who owed their advancement at least partly to her patronage, to parallel the increasing interest she was taking in military and naval appointments.

None of this amounted to a genuine power base. The Queen’s influence was limited and the Polignac influence more limited still. Maurepas, although nearly eighty and increasingly debilitated by ill health, continued to exercise political domination over the King, in alliance with Vergennes. Where the Queen scored small victories, it was because these ministers had decided to avoid unnecessary confrontation. Significantly, Mercy still complained of the Queen’s lack of a really intelligent commitment to politics. Her general, rather vague, benevolent attitude to patronage led her rather to please those she liked than think the matter through.

The death in the summer of 1780 of Marie Antoinette’s uncle on her father’s side, the veteran Prince Charles of Lorraine, presaged a far greater family loss in the late autumn. Marie Antoinette, ever conscious of the need to promote Lorrainers in France in order to please her mother, wrote a nostalgic letter to Maria Teresa about her sadness at the end of the (royal) House of Lorraine. For the Prince, the childless widower of Maria Teresa’s younger sister, had never remarried; instead, as Governor of the Austrian Netherlands he had pursued the arts and women with equal zest, showing a true Lorrainer’s instinct for enjoyment of life.