Marie Antoinette (29 page)

A visit to the porcelain factory at Sèvres was part of the entertainment. Louis XVI loved the traditional royal patronage of the factory, including the annual “Sèvres week” instituted in 1758. The new season’s porcelain would be laid out in the King’s private dining room, and the courtiers were heavily encouraged to buy, the King and Queen themselves setting an example with their purchases. In 1782, for example, there was “jewelled” Sèvres for sale whose garniture made it extremely expensive.
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Such things were, as Bombelles wrote, objects of luxury “but a luxury essential to support.” At the factory the Grand Duchess was enchanted to discover that a ravishing service of lapis lazuli and gold, including a mirror with two Cupids at its base pointing to the words “She is yet more beautiful,” was intended for her.

In fact the stout Grand Duchess was not a beauty, whatever the Cupids might pretend, and Marie Antoinette found her rather formidable with her stiff “German demeanour” despite her tactful interest in French sculpture and opera. Nevertheless, the Queen was eager to display goodwill towards the Russians, given her brother’s new foreign initiative. Yet this initiative could hardly be pleasing to France. On the one hand Turkey, which was menaced by Catherine of Russia, was her natural ally; on the other hand France feared the increased influence of the meddlesome Emperor in the Balkans. In any case, the expense of the American war ruled out any military reaction. The French had to confine themselves to diplomatic manoeuvres.

Over the Emperor’s next two projects, however, he needed French cooperation rather than French passivity. Joseph II planned to reopen the mouth of the Scheldt River; this was for the sake of the city of Antwerp upstream, which had been blocked from access to the sea by the Treaties of Westphalia of 1648 that had ended the Thirty Years’ War. On this occasion it was the energetic Dutch Republic with its great commercial port of Amsterdam which could be expected to resist. Undeterred, the Emperor took the line that France was bound to approve his conduct not only by the terms of their alliance but also because he had upheld their campaign against England.

At the end of 1782 Marie Antoinette promised Mercy that she would raise the issue with Louis XVI, and throughout February she mounted a campaign on the subject. Yet by June her efforts were still not bearing the fruit that the ambassador expected, and he begged her yet again to “prove her devotion to the august house and family.” (He did not mean the Bourbons.) The following year Mercy despaired once more over Marie Antoinette’s reluctance to use her personal ascendancy over her husband in a constructive political way. She remained maddeningly content merely to implement her “persistent desire” to help people who petitioned her, springing, in the words of the Comte de La Marck, from “a rare goodness of heart.” The Emperor was less interested in his sister’s goodness of heart than in what he hopefully termed her “feminine wiles.” Alternately wooing and bullying Marie Antoinette, he instructed her to make use of these weapons of a pretty woman when dealing with her husband’s ministers. Nevertheless, the Scheldt Affair languished, thanks to the absolute hostility of the King and his ministers. This was guided by Vergennes, for whom no feminine wiles could make up for such an extension of the Emperor’s influence.

The second of Joseph’s projects concerned an exchange of territories: the Elector Charles Theodore of Bavaria and the Palatine would receive the Austrian Netherlands in return for his own lands. But the French were equally hostile to this scheme, which would immeasurably strengthen the Emperor in Germany. None of this was liable to lead to good relations between France and Austria. Vergennes wrote frankly to the French ambassador in Vienna: “We have stopped the progress of the Emperor three times and that’s not easily forgiven”—the first occasion having been the War of the Bavarian Succession in 1778.

On 1 September 1784 Joseph irritably accused his “dear sister” of being “
the dupe
” (his italics) of the French Council of State, headed by Vergennes. In reply Marie Antoinette wrote a revealing letter to her “dear brother” about her relationship with her husband and its limitations. Whilst she did not contradict Joseph on the subject of French policy, having spoken to the King on the subject “more than once,” the Queen described quite forcefully “the lack of means and resources” that she had available to establish contact with him, given his character and his prejudices. Louis XVI was “by nature very taciturn” and often did not speak to her about affairs of state, without exactly planning to hide them from her. “He responds when I speak to him, but he hardly can be said to keep me informed, and when I learn about some small portion of a business, I have to be cunning in getting the ministers to tell me the rest of it, letting them believe that the King has told me everything.” When she reproached the King with not informing her about certain matters, he was not angry, but merely looked rather embarrassed; sometimes the King confessed that he had simply not thought to do so.

It was at this point that Marie Antionette made an important reference to the King’s Austrophobe upbringing. The King’s innately suspicious nature had been fortified by his tutor, the Duc de Vauguyon. Long before Louis’ marriage, Vauguyon had frightened him with tales of the dominance—
empire
—that his Austrian wife would wish to exert over him. Vauguyon’s “dark spirit” was pleased to frighten his pupil “by all the phantoms invented against the House of Austria.” As a result, the Queen had never been able to persuade the King of Vergennes’ various deceits and trickeries. “Would it be wise of me,” she asked pointedly, “to have scenes with his minister over matters on which it is practically certain the King would not support me?”

Of course, Marie Antoinette let the public believe that she had more influence than she actually had, “otherwise I would have still less.” This confession to her brother was not good for her self-esteem but she wanted to make it so that Joseph could understand her predicament. Was there a glimmer of realization that the proper duty of the Queen of France, the mother of the Dauphin, was not necessarily to pursue all the interests of the House of Austria? Not so far. The habit of family loyalty, encouraged by Joseph II at a distance and Mercy closer to home, was still too strong.

Domesticity—the care of her own precious family—was where Marie Antoinette’s heart lay at this point, not surprisingly when one considers her strong maternal instinct on the one hand and the difficulties she had encountered in producing this family on the other. The Queen was, for example, personally concerned with the education of her daughter, “keeping her with her all day long” and certainly not wishing to hand her over entirely to the grand court servants who believed it was their right—not the mother’s—to rear the Children of France. Such a preoccupation ran through her letters to her friends the Hesse Princesses, while Count Mercy groaned over the childish talk and games that distracted the Queen from her true political duties. An unexpected and horrifying bankruptcy of a noble family in the early autumn of 1782 was therefore of particular concern to the Queen because it involved the Royal Governess of her children. This was the Princesse de Guéméné who only a year previously had so happily paraded the newborn Dauphin round the ranks of applauding courtiers.

Afterwards the Prince de Rohan-Guéméné—to give him his full title—issued the following sympathetic explanation of his bankruptcy. He invoked the name of the notary Sieur Marchand who had produced all the trouble by his creative way with annuities: “I was deceived and I have deceived the whole world. To do Monsieur Marchand justice he was led on by the desire to give us a splendid lifestyle.” To provide the Prince and Princesse with income, Marchand had in fact encouraged all types of people to invest their savings in these annuities by offering enticing and therefore exorbitant rates of interest. Then he—or rather the Prince de Guéméné—could not pay. It was the latter who went bankrupt to the tune of 33 million livres although it was Marchand who went to prison, a fate preferable to facing the creditors in the outside world.

The Rohan-Guéménés, as a couple, had been dazzling, and for a while it was difficult to believe in the collapse of their brilliant future. The Prince, aged thirty-two in 1782, was a nephew of the former Royal Governess, the Comtesse de Marsan, and the Cardinal de Rohan. His wife came from another branch of the family, Rohan-Soubise, headed by her father, a Marshal of France who had been an intimate of Louis XV. It was an eighteenth-century marriage. The handsome and courteous Prince had been the accepted lover of the beautiful Madame Dillon until her recent death, in her early thirties, from consumption. The Princesse for her part was amusing, intelligent and rather eccentric, with a love of dogs that led her to believe that through them she was in touch with the spirits.

Much royal favour was enjoyed. At the time of the King’s coronation, seven years earlier, it was Marie Antoinette who had negotiated for the Prince to take the post of Grand Chamberlain. This had previously been occupied by the Prince’s uncle on his mother’s side, the Duc de Bouillon. The latter would have much preferred to have kept the position himself for his lifetime, allowing his nephew the “reversion”—to receive it on his death. But Guéméné had his way. The lofty standing of the Prince and Princesse was confirmed by the fact that the whole royal family signed the marriage contracts of their son the Duc de Montbazon and daughter Josephine who in the Rohan fashion had married a cousin, Prince Charles de Rohan-Rochefort.

As for the role of the Princesse, for a while it seemed that she might weather the storm if only because a Royal Governess, in common with other similar office-holders at Versailles, could not be dismissed. Yet it was unthinkable by the standards of the time—of any time—that someone tainted with such a disgrace should occupy such a position of trust and power, even if rumours of the Princesse’s maladministration were probably not true. It was resignation or nothing, and this resignation was the subject of delicate negotiations. The Princesse finally gave up her post exactly a year after the birth of the Dauphin, the day of her greatest triumph. The King and Queen behaved as well and generously as it was in their power to do, despite the advice of Mercy and Vermond that the Queen should avoid any entanglement in this distressing affair. Marie Antoinette secured an enormous pension for the Princesse on the surrender of her post, while the King bought the Guéméné property at Montreuil and presented it to Madame Elisabeth. Guéméné himself was similarly rewarded on his surrender of the post of Grand Chamberlain, which was restored to his uncle the Duc de Bouillon.

Nevertheless there were elements in the whole affair that had uncomfortable repercussions for the future, despite the desperate efforts of the Rohan family, closing ranks, to pay off the debt. The Cardinal de Rohan lost a valuable contact in the departed Royal Governess, who was doubly related to him both by blood and by marriage. His sense of exclusion could only be enhanced. Naturally, the fall of the arrogant Rohans, with their high-flown pretensions to independent princedom, was greeted with sardonic glee by the rest of the court. One exchange had a member of the stricken family declaring: “Only a King or a Rohan could go bankrupt on such a scale,” and receiving the rejoinder: “I hope this is the last act of sovereignty of the House of Rohan.” On the surface the stain of the disgrace remained. When the old Duc de Bouillon finally died six years later, Louis XVI still felt strongly enough on the subject to refuse to give the post of Grand Chamberlain to Guéméné’s son.

The filling of the vacuum created by the resignation of the Princesse also had a long-lasting effect on the reputation of Marie Antoinette. With her strong views on the education of her children, her unfashionable desire to be closely involved with it, it was certainly comprehensible that she wanted to award the post of Royal Governess to a beloved friend. On any normal level, the Duchesse de Polignac, sympathetic and sweet-natured, was a suitable choice. She shared the concerns of motherhood; her fourth child, Camille, was born three months after the Dauphin.

But Versailles was not a normal world. The danger did not lie in the vices portrayed in the pamphlets about the Polignac with titles like
La Princesse de Priape
or
La Messaline Française
. Nor did Louis XVI object to the appointment. He took the trouble to assure the Duchesse in advance that he would readily entrust his children to her. His grateful reliance on Yolande’s ability to manage the Queen and her mercurial moods did not falter. A significant report had the King entering the Queen’s apartments and asking the Duchesse: “Well, is she still in a bad temper today?” Yolande drew the King aside, and although the subsequent conversation could not be overheard, it was clear from her manner that the Duchesse was advocating patience in the face of a storm that would soon pass.

The new appointment was added to the list of benefits enjoyed by the Polignacs, from the thirteen-roomed apartment in Versailles to the reversion of the profitable position of Director General of the Posts, given to the Duc de Polignac. It is true that by 1782 Marie Antoinette was no longer totally dominated by the Polignac set. It was her affection for Yolande herself that was constant, although even here the Queen’s mercurial nature meant that the friendship was likened by the Comte de Tilly to a beautiful day, not without clouds and changes, but always ending fair.