Marie Antoinette (3 page)

Thus Marie Antoinette was brought up to think of herself as “de Lorraine” as well as “d’Autriche et de Hongrie.” In the meantime Lorraine had become a foreign principality attached to France, so that princes of Lorraine who made their lives in France had the status of “foreign princes” only and were not accorded the respect due to foreign royalties nor that due to French dukes. This ambiguous status was one from which the foreign princes ever sought to escape, while those of superior birth in French courtly terms sought to hold them down. A seemingly small point of French etiquette—small at least to outsiders—was to be of considerable significance in the future of Francis Stephen’s daughter.

This was an age of multiple intermarriage where royal houses were concerned. Insofar as one can simplify it purely in terms of her four grandparents, Marie Antoinette had the blood of the Bourbons—the Orléans branch—and of Lorraine on her father’s side. More remotely, her Orléans great-grandmother, a Palatine princess known as Liselotte, brought her the blood of Mary Queen of Scots via Elizabeth of Bohemia—but this was to go back 200 years. On the maternal side, Marie Antoinette inherited German blood from her grandmother Elizabeth Christina of Brunswick-Wolfbüttel, once described as “the most beautiful queen on earth.” Her appearance at the age of fourteen enchanted her husband Charles VI: “Now that I have seen her, everything that has been said about her is but a shadow devoured by the light of the sun.” However, if exceptional beauty was to be found in the pool of genes that Marie Antoinette might inherit, it was also true that the lovely Empress became immensely large and dropsical in later years.

Lastly, Marie Antoinette inherited the Habsburg blood, both Austrian and Spanish, of her grandfather the Emperor Charles VI. These two branches of the Habsburg family, which had in theory divided in the sixteenth century, were in fact the result of constant intermarriage, like great rivers whose tributaries flowed into each other so frequently that their waters were inextricably mingled. The failure of the direct Spanish Habsburg line in 1700 led to the accession of a French Bourbon prince, the grandson of Louis XIV, to the Spanish throne (via his Spanish Habsburg grandmother) despite the efforts of the then Archduke Charles who was the rival pretender.

In 1711, however, the death of the Emperor Joseph I, leaving only two daughters, meant that Charles as his younger brother inherited the Austrian dominions. He was elected as Holy Roman Emperor shortly afterwards. Although unable to claim the imperial throne, Joseph’s daughters married respectively the Electors of Bavaria and Saxony to provide a plethora of descendants, who would spin webs of alliance and intrigue throughout Europe in the eighteenth century. In the meantime, by one of those historical ironies, Charles VI himself was unable to produce a male heir. He too was left with two daughters, of whom the elder, Maria Teresa, was now to be transformed into his heiress.

Charles VI’s attempts to secure the inheritance of Maria Teresa by, in effect, bribing other European powers to respect the arrangement was known as the Pragmatic Sanction. For all these efforts, his death in 1740 merely unleashed a new dynastic struggle, the eight-year War of the Austrian Succession. Silesia was immediately conquered by the Prussian King: this was the most prosperous region under the Habsburg dominion and the twenty-three-year-old Maria Teresa felt the loss keenly. It seemed that she was doomed to preside over the dismemberment of the once great Habsburg Empire. In her own words: “It would not be easy to find in history an example of a crowned head acceding to government in more unfavourable circumstances than I did myself.”

It was a measure of the greatness of Maria Teresa that fifteen years later, at the time of Marie Antoinette’s birth, she was in fact wreathed in triumph, admired throughout Europe as “the glory of her sex and the model of kings.” For all her losses in the war—at the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748 Maria Teresa still could not recover Silesia—she was nevertheless confirmed in her hereditary possessions. Apart from Upper and Lower Austria, these included Bohemia and Moravia (now the Czech Republic), Hungary, much of what is now Rumania, a portion of former Yugoslavia, as well as the Austrian Netherlands (approximately Belgium
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) and the Duchies of Milan and Tuscany in Italy. Meanwhile Francis Stephen had been elected Emperor.

In 1755 the country was at peace, with memories of the War of Succession receding; the army was contented and a series of domestic reforms had taken place, thanks to Maria Teresa’s chancellor, Haugwitz. As a result the Empress was not only admired abroad but enjoyed popularity at home. For the twentieth anniversary of her wedding to Francis Stephen in February 1756, Maria Teresa gave a surprise children’s party in which all her children, even “the little Madame Antoine,” appeared in masks and costumes. That summed up the Empress’s domestic bliss. Of all the children of Maria Teresa, Marie Antoinette was the one who was born at the zenith of her mother’s glory.

Six months after the birth of Marie Antoinette, a radical change in the national alliances of Europe put an end to this surface tranquillity. By the Treaty of Versailles, signed on 1 May 1756, Austria joined with her traditional enemy France in a defensive pact against Prussia. If either country was attacked, the other would come to its aid with an army specified to be 24,000 strong. No single event in Marie Antoinette’s childhood was to have a more profound influence on the course of her life than this alliance, forged while she was still in her cradle.

It is not difficult to explain Austria’s hostility to Prussia: Maria Teresa had neither forgotten nor forgiven the Rape of Silesia which occurred at her accession, and she regularly referred to Frederick II as “the evil animal” and “the monster.” (He responded in kind by having a sermon preached pointedly on the text of St. Paul: “Let the woman learn in silence.”) France’s friendship with Prussia, on the other hand, had long been seen as the cornerstone of the latter’s foreign policy; but it had been eroded in a complex series of manoeuvres in which Prussia turned towards England. Not only had hostilities between France and England—rival colonial powers—already broken out in the Americas in 1754, but France also viewed England as an enemy in Europe. Since Austria, once England’s friend, felt similarly betrayed by the latter’s involvement with Prussia, the way was open for a diplomatic
volte-face.

Once the will, or rather the need, was there, personalities played their part. The French King Louis XV favoured the alliance, although his only son and heir, the Dauphin Louis Ferdinand, his daughter-in-law Maria Josepha (a Saxon princess), and his formidable array of grown-up daughters still at court, were all resolutely anti-Austrian. But the appointment of a pro-Austrian Foreign Minister, the Duc de Choiseul, meant that, for the time being at least, these family prejudices were unimportant. Meanwhile Maria Teresa’s own trusted servant Prince Kaunitz, convincing her that French support would enable her to reconquer Silesia, was sent as ambassador to Versailles in 1750. Maria Teresa, that pillar of conjugal virtue, was even accused (falsely) of despatching messages to the Marquise de Pompadour, Louis XV’s all-powerful mistress; there was an ugly rumour that the Empress had actually addressed the mistress as “cousin.” Afterwards Maria Teresa would indignantly deny this to the Electress Maria Antonia of Bavaria, one of Joseph I’s dispossessed daughters: “That channel would not have suited me.” Nevertheless the fact was that there was opportunism on both sides, and Maria Teresa was certainly not without her share of it.

The imperial Austrian will was firm, as was the royal French will.
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As Voltaire wittily expressed it: some people said that the union of France and Austria was an unnatural monstrosity, but since it was necessary, it turned out to be quite natural. Nevertheless the heart and mind of neither country were won over. As we shall see, Austria and Maria Teresa continued to admire France as the fountain of style, just as they continued to employ the French language. At the same time the French were regularly dismissed as frivolous, lightweight, incapable of constancy and so forth, compared with the “solidity and frankness” of the Germans (the word the Empress and her relations always used to describe themselves). It was an unfavourable stereotype, which could not fail to impress itself upon any child—say, a small archduchess—brought up at the Austrian court.

The French for their part, conscious of their civilizing role, were not backward in their derision for customs other than their own. An alliance could not so easily sweep away the prejudices against Austria that had so long held sway, especially the suspicion that Austria might intend to manipulate and control France in its own best interests. This was a point of view that would impress itself upon another young person, for example, a young French prince, Louis Auguste, son of the Dauphin, brought up at the French court.

The question of an alliance between an archduchess and a prince was not an academic one. Europe was now dividing into two powerful groups, whose rivalries in both the Old World and the New World would shortly lead to a seven-year-long war. Prussia, England and Portugal faced an alliance of Austria, France, Sweden and Saxony, to which Russia would soon be added; Spain, France’s fellow Bourbon monarchy, would also become involved on the French side. These various allies would shortly seek to express their future cooperation in the customary manner of the time: royal intermarriage.

As it happened, the 1740s and 1750s had witnessed the birth of a multitude of young royals, both male and female, within the reigning families of these countries. Austria no longer lacked male heirs as it had under two successive emperors, Joseph I and Charles VI. The days when the direct line of the French monarchy was represented by the frail person of a single child, the great-grandson of Louis XIV (the future Louis XV), were over. Europe was positively crowded with small royal pawns, ready, as it seemed, to be employed in the great game of diplomatic alliance.

In the separate but related Spanish branch of the Bourbon family, there was a number of princes and princesses available; for example Isabella, Maria Louisa and Don Ferdinand of Parma, the grandchildren of Louis XV by his favourite daughter known as “Madame Infante.” There were the children of the King of Spain: his heir the Prince of Asturias, another Maria Louisa and his younger son, Ferdinand, who assumed the throne of Naples. Then there were the princes and princesses of Savoy. This was a royal house with many historic links to France—Louis XV’s mother had been a Savoyard princess—more especially because Savoy’s geographical position in what is now northern Italy made it an excellent buffer against Austria. Lastly, of the major players, there were the princes and princesses at Versailles—the Children of France as they were proud to be termed. These were the French grandchildren of Louis XV, the family of his only son.

All in all, fate or nature had provided abundant material for the older generation to weave their dynastic plots, be they Louis XV, Maria Teresa, Charles III of Spain or the reigning King of Sardinia, Charles Emmanuel III, grandfather of the Savoyard family. The so-called Family Pact of 1761, by which Maria Teresa’s heir, the Archduke Joseph, married Isabella of Parma, and Isabella’s younger sister married her first cousin, heir to the throne of Spain, was an outward manifestation of this. French Bourbons, Spanish Bourbons and Habsburgs were all joining together in opposition to Prussia and England.

What then of the many Habsburg archduchesses who had been born in the space of roughly ten years and who were now joined by another sister? What of Marie Christine? Elizabeth? Amalia? Josepha? Joanna? Charlotte? (The eldest, Marianne, being disabled, was not considered a candidate for marriage.) Without any specific names being mentioned—one princess being much like another when it came to dynastic alliances—it was understood that three of the archduchesses might be destined for, in no particular order, Don Ferdinand of Parma, the young King Ferdinand of Naples—and maybe a French prince.

The new baby, contentedly nursed by Constance Weber, was a sweet little thing. But that was hardly the point when it came to the matter of forging an alliance. From the first Madame Antoine had her value, not as an individual, but as a piece on her mother’s chessboard.

CHAPTER TWO

BORN TO OBEY

“They are born to obey and must learn to do so in good time.”

E
MPRESS
M
ARIA
T
ERESA ON HER DAUGHTERS
, 1756

Like many people exiled from the scenes of their childhood, Marie Antoinette would look back on her early years as idyllic. It is easy to see how this might be so. The family portraits of which Maria Teresa was so fond do indeed portray a domestic paradise for which anyone might yearn in later life.

Here was the Empress, supremely confident in herself and her position, still handsome in her forties.
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It is true that, like her husband, she had begun to put on weight and no longer reminded older courtiers of the quicksilver young woman of the 1740s who danced and played cards all night, yet could ride and go sledging with equal energy in the day. In her case, given that her mother the Empress Elizabeth Christina suffered from dropsy, her weight gain may have been partly due to an unavoidable heredity, partly due to multiple child-bearing. However, the celebrated physician and educationalist Gerhard Van Swieten, Maria Teresa’s guru, regularly lectured the imperial couple on the need to take care and eat less, so there may have been an element of personal responsibility. Yet the Empress’s ample appearance only served to emphasize the awesome dignity combined with maternal tenderness that was the image she radiated. Who would not be proud to be the child of such a mother?

As for Francis Stephen, in portraits he cut an equally imposing figure. In private life, however—which he infinitely preferred—he was cheerful, teasing, indulgent. In short, he was an ideal father from the point of view of a small child who would not pick up the strains imposed by his frequent infidelities. To these, Maria Teresa, with a characteristic mixture of fieriness and puritanism, was never reconciled. Wifely tolerance of husbandly frailty was yet another eighteenth-century female virtue, like submissiveness and accepting a worldly marriage, which Maria Teresa preached to others but did not apply to herself.

A preference for informality was Francis Stephen’s legacy to the Austrian Habsburgs; it was undoubtedly one that he handed on to his youngest daughter along with the Lorrainer blood to which it was generally ascribed. Louis Dutens, a traveller who knew most of the European courts, praised the “good-natured” Emperor for his innovations. “The family of Lorraine,” he wrote, “has contributed not a little to banish from the Court of Vienna the severe etiquette which prevailed there.”

The message was not, however, of the need to abolish all formality. Although the strict customs, including the old-fashioned black court dress inherited from Spain, were gradually dropped, the Austrian court remained a place of much stately splendour when the occasion demanded it. There were still, for example, 1500 Court Chamberlains in the time of Maria Teresa whose existence was justified by various ritual duties whose origins lay far in the past. What was important was the distinction, encouraged by Francis Stephen and supported by Maria Teresa, between state ceremonial and private life. The one was to be carried out as a matter of duty, and as magnificently as possible. The other was to be enjoyed.

Joseph Weber, Madame Antoine’s foster-brother, revealed that the Archdukes and Archduchesses were encouraged to make friends with “ordinary” children in their everyday lives. In the same way, people of merit were admitted freely to the court, without necessity of birth or title. Except, that is, on the great days of formal celebration; then, as in the old days, ceremonial pomp continued to be observed, including the restrictions of the Rights of Entry. The young Madame Antoine, born when this relaxation had already taken place, grew up taking this distinction at court or in Vienna for granted.

A family group on St. Nicholas’ Day 1762, painted by the Archduchess Marie Christine, perfectly depicts the bourgeois cosiness of the imperial couple’s home life, something that was unthinkable at the parallel court of Versailles. This was the feast at which young children traditionally received presents. The Emperor, at his breakfast, wears a robe and slippers, with a turban-style cap on his head instead of a wig. The Empress’s dress is extremely plain and Marie Christine, who put herself in the picture, looks more like a maid than an archduchess. The Archduke Ferdinand is apparently upset with his gift, while little Max, on the floor with his toys, is delighted. A smiling Madame Antoine holds a doll aloft to indicate that she has just been given it; at the age of seven she looks much like a doll herself.

This seemingly perfect childhood had for its background three principal castles, as well as numerous other lesser ones, and the superb houses of the Austrian grandees. The stately and sprawling Hofburg, where Antoine was born, was used in the winter months; it was central to the capital where these same grandees also had their splendid town houses. In spite of its size, the opportunities for freedom for the children could hardly be extensive there. Nevertheless, Marie Antoinette would later remember it with pleasure. She became sentimental at the thought of proposed changes, although she was happy to think of Maria Teresa moving into her old rooms. Only about five miles away, however, lay the magical palace of Schönbrunn.

This enormous imperial abode could compete in size and splendour with most of the palaces in Europe. At the same time it enjoyed a pastoral setting. Its short distance from central Vienna—and a well-maintained road—meant it could be used for state occasions in the spring and summer; the family generally took up residence there from Easter onwards. In contrast, the French court at Versailles had no real base in Paris itself by the middle of the eighteenth century. The Austrian court was thus more like that of England as it developed under George III, able to oscillate between his London residence (now Buckingham Palace), Windsor Castle, and Hampton Court.

Everyone loved Schönbrunn with its beautiful gardens, leading to parkland and woods beyond as far as the eye could see. By the time of Madame Antoine’s birth Maria Teresa had made substantial improvements to the residence of her forefathers, not only necessary repairs—it had been destroyed by the Turks in 1683—but various enhancements. She was seized by the contemporary passion for chinoiserie and Eastern decor, including lacquer, mirrors, vellum miniatures and tapestries, declaring “all the diamonds in the world” were as nothing compared to “what comes from the Indies.”

Significant from the point of view of Habsburg family life was the Empress’s decision to construct two new wings to meet the demands of her growing family. The Archdukes inhabited the right wing, the Archduchesses the left. Although each child or young person had his or her own suite of five rooms—including an audience room as well as a salon and a bedroom, sisters close in age and in the same wing were in fact thrown further together by this arrangement, which separated them from both their brothers and their parents.
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Francis Stephen loved plants and gardens; the Dutch Botanical Garden at Schönbrunn was created in 1753 and an orangery was built two years later, housing a rich collection of tropical plants. The gardens themselves were planned and replanned with zest, an enthusiasm that Madame Antoine herself would take for granted as one of the natural interests of a civilized royal person. A menagerie, situated so that Francis Stephen could enjoy contemplating it over his breakfast, had been established in 1751; it included a camel sent by a sultan, a rhinoceros that had arrived by boat down the Danube, a puma, the red squirrels favoured by Marie Christine and the parrots that were the favourites of Elizabeth. There was a theatre for those constant musical and dramatic celebrations.

Another theatre was built at Laxenburg in 1753. Like everything to do with Laxenburg, it was on a much smaller scale. That was in fact the point of the Empress’s predilection for this charming rococo palace.
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It lay about ten miles south of Vienna in the direction of Hungary, at the edge of a small pretty town, and was bordered by thick woods good for hunting. Here there was simply no room for the vast crowds of courtiers thought essential to the imperial dignity at Schönbrunn and the Hofburg; even great officials had to make do with houses in the town. Understandably, the imperial family greatly preferred performances in the Laxenburg theatre, because the scale made it much easier for them to hear.

This was a period when many royalties were embellishing their country retreats by requiring special uniforms (the modern equivalent of this dress code would be that oxymoron casual chic). For example, the colours demanded by the Pompadour at Bellevue were purple, gold and white. Laxenburg’s dress code was a red cloth frockcoat (
le frac
), which was considered informal at this period, with a green waistcoat, and red dresses for the ladies. Both had to be ornamented with gold, which made their casual chic expensive for the courtiers to produce. Nevertheless the message was clear: Laxenburg is different; even the clothes are different.

The Empress herself, with all her cares of state, was known to be generally cheerful while at Laxenburg; her father Charles VI had also loved it for the beauty of its surroundings. These were in effect family holidays. It was no wonder that of all the scenes of Antoine’s childhood, Laxenburg was the one that exercised the greatest nostalgic pull. Not only was there that cheerful mother but the Archdukes and Archduchesses could also enjoy a measure of personal freedom.

Early in the next century, the Empress Marie Louise, Marie Antoinette’s great-niece, would be struck by the similarity between Laxenburg and the Petit Trianon at Versailles; no doubt the resemblance was one effect of Marie Antoinette’s affection for this first exquisite palace of retreat. In fact Laxenburg was an adapted hunting lodge, rebuilt by Leopold I, like so much else, after the end of the Turkish depredations. It was during Antoine’s own childhood that the court architect Nicholas Pacassi designed the so-called Blue Court (a corruption of the original owner’s name) as a further enlargement; the need, as at Schönbrunn, was to accommodate the royal family.

A belvedere now crowned the roof of the north wing and there was a sequence of playrooms, like elevated garden rooms, with wide views across the park.
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They were painted with a series of
trompe l’oeils
, birds on the ceiling, and romantic pastoral scenes on the walls, glimpsed through pale green latticework up which climbed painted sweet peas. The feeling of freshness, of greenery and light, was intended to be vivid for the children, even when the weather was bad. In eighteenth-century royal terms—the only ones Marie Antoinette was in a position to understand—Laxenburg presented an image of rustic bliss, a paradise that could perhaps one day be recreated.

At Laxenburg and elsewhere, festivities, both outdoors and indoors, punctuated the lives of the imperial family. The heavy Austrian winters offered unrivalled opportunities for sledging and sledging parties. (Memories of such jollities meant that Marie Antoinette would get excited all her life at the sight of any serious snowfall.) One traveller evoked a glamorous vision of the Archduchesses in fur-trimmed velvet and diamonds, gliding by in gilded sledges in the shape of swans; the Archdukes Ferdinand and Max acted as drivers and the whole scene—at Schönbrunn—took place by torchlight. There were cavalry tournaments known as carousels to be watched, and elaborate equestrian displays. Riding and hunting were considered normal occupations for young women.

The court fêtes in theatres, big and small, were dominated by the strong taste for music in the imperial family and its supporting aristocracy, something that was taken for granted and viewed with pleasure, much like the heavy snows. Nor was this appreciation and talent confined to the aristocracy: Dr. Charles Burney, the English musicologist who journeyed throughout Europe for his general history of music of the mid-1770s, was struck by the level of musical education not only at court but also among the villagers. “It has been said by travellers that the nobility keep musicians in their houses,” he noted, “but in keeping servants, it is impossible to do otherwise.” This was not a new thing. Joseph Haydn, for whose music Marie Antoinette would later display enthusiasm, was born in eastern Austria in 1732, the son of a wheelwright. For nearly thirty years, off and on, he was employed at the court of the great Esterhazy family. Gluck, nearly twenty years his senior, who was at one point singing-master to the young Archduchess and would enjoy a long-lasting and valued connection to her, was the son of the chief forester of Count Kinsky.