Marie Antoinette (32 page)

Could the child have been Fersen’s? Since the Count had been in France at the right date, it was at least theoretically possible, which had not been the case with the Queen’s previous pregnancies. It would obviously be from one angle a romantic solution. Nevertheless the fact that a solution is romantic does not necessarily make it the correct one. The baby’s parentage was certainly never questioned by the King, which is proof in itself that he continued from time to time to make love to his wife. The Abbé de Véri confirmed this fact in his
Journal
. Even the most evil-minded gossips (those who knew the scene at the court, not the scurrilous outsiders) had to admit that the dates of the Queen’s conceptions “fitted only too well with the King’s conjugal visits.”

One more point should be made on a subject that can never be more than speculative. Fertility and sexual prowess are two very different things. It was Louis XVI, despite his deficiencies in the arts of love, who unquestionably begot at least two children. It was Fersen, the great lover, who did not. A likely explanation is provided by Fersen’s celebrated expertise in all matters to do with gallantry; part of this expertise would have been knowing very well how to avoid procreation. Many years into his long amatory career, when his current mistress, Princess “Ketty” Menchikov, announced she was pregnant, Fersen wrote: “The news came as a complete surprise and made me very unhappy.”

The future enlargement of her family was the motivation behind Marie Antoinette’s desire to acquire a new property in the autumn of 1784. Saint Cloud, hitherto the property of the Orléans family, was the palace in question. With three children, La Muette would be too small in the summer. Saint Cloud would be “an interesting acquisition for my children and for me”; she also had to think of the younger children’s future, compared to the dazzling prospects—in the material sense—awaiting the little Dauphin. Marie Antoinette believed she could leave Saint Cloud to “whichever of my children I wish” because it was going to be her personal property. All of this appeared reasonable enough, at least from the Queen’s point of view. The price—6 million livres—was high, but could be covered by other sales such as the château of La Trompette at Bordeaux. Naturally the Emperor saluted with enthusiasm “this new mark of tenderness” on the part of the King because it would bolster his sister’s position.

Unfortunately there were other interests at work beyond maternal preoccupation. The idea of acquiring Saint Cloud as a piece of personal property was probably the inspiration of the new Minister of the Royal Household appointed in November 1783, the Baron de Breteuil, who saw it as “a ring on the Queen’s finger.” He may have planned to be Governor of the palace but he also had a larger aim: to make the Queen rule or, put more elegantly in French, “faire régner la Reine.” The circumstances were hardly propitious for the furtherance of such an ambitious project. The Scheldt Affair had ended in frustration for the Emperor; he had not secured access to the mouth of the river for Antwerp, the French backing the Dutch Republic in its resistance, and had finally been obliged to agree to French mediation. As for the matter of the Bavarian exchange, that had not yet been settled satisfactorily. Joseph had, as he thought, secured the agreement of the Elector’s heir, the Duke Charles of Zweibrücken, who had been brought up in Brussels and was consequently not opposed to returning there. But the French, including Louis XVI, remained resolutely opposed to such a redrawing of territorial alignments.

In the end the scheme came to nothing because Duke Charles rejected it, but not before Marie Antoinette, six months pregnant, had denounced Vergennes furiously in the King’s presence for his deceitfulness. Vergennes offered his resignation, and the whole matter had to be smoothed over by the King himself. Vainly he tried to persuade his wife that the minister had no intention of causing trouble between Austria and France. Under the circumstances, Mercy’s simultaneous complaint that the Queen was really only interested in the education of her daughter makes rather sad reading; it is certainly an eloquent testimony to the continuing gap between her inclinations and the duties expected of “my dear and charming Queen” by Joseph II.

If the Austrian ambassador deplored the Queen’s “frivolous” interest in her child’s education, her efforts to secure her younger children’s future by the purchase of Saint Cloud were no more popular in France. Breteuil’s own character played its part in this. Now aged fifty-one, Breteuil was a wealthy widower with a magnificent lifestyle including a permanent mistress in the Duchesse de Brancas. As a diplomat he had served in Stockholm where he had formed a friendship with the Fersen family (hence that mooted alliance between his heiress-daughter and the young Count). It was, however, his eight years of service in Vienna, where Breteuil, unlike Rohan, had earned the approval of Maria Teresa, that constituted the bond with Marie Antoinette. Breteuil was an intelligent man of liberal ideas in politics; unfortunately there were those, his opponents, to whom Breteuil appeared “tyrannical, haughty and silent.”

For example, Breteuil greatly disliked Rohan and was disliked in return; his appointment as Minister of the Royal Household had exacerbated the latter’s feelings of social exclusion, already stirred up by the forced resignation in 1782 of his niece the Princesse de Guéméné, from the position of Governess to the Children of France. More important at the time, however, was the breach that Breteuil’s handling of the Saint Cloud sale occasioned with the Controller General of Finance, Charles Alexandre Calonne. Marie Antoinette had never liked Calonne, despite his studied deference towards the Polignac set. This resulted not only in their further enrichment by 100,000 livres a year but also in further lucrative positions, such as the English embassy for Comte d’Adhémar, who had been passed over by the Queen as Minister of the Royal Household in favour of Breteuil.

Fifty years old, Calonne was a passionate art collector, famously witty and with a sophisticated appreciation of women. Coming from the so-called Noblesse de Robe, the administrative aristocracy, his manners were so elegant as to call down the condescending comment from the Duc de Lévis that they were quite uncharacteristic of his class. One might have supposed such a man to have appealed to Marie Antoinette, even before Calonne, a close friend of Vaudreuil and Artois, embarked on his deliberate policy of placating the Polignacs. In fact the roots of her dislike seem to stretch back into the past, as is so often the case with Marie Antoinette; Calonne had been early associated with the Duc d’Aiguillon, the unforgiven minister of Louis XV. Now Calonne struggled to right the finances of the kingdom, including the appalling yearly sum needed to service the national debt that had originally been incurred by the Seven Years’ War and which had recently been much increased by the struggle in America. His negative reaction to the acquisition of Saint Cloud was on the surface a predictable revulsion against the expense; but Calonne also resented Breteuil’s personal handling of a transaction that he considered to be his own due. Lastly, he did not care for the Queen sitting in on his meetings with the King to do with the sale.

Given Marie Antoinette’s lament, expressed to her brother at this time, that she never really knew what was going on from the King, and had to fake knowledge in order to acquire it, one can understand her interest in being present at the negotiations. The real nub of the Saint Cloud problem—as it became, forming part of the groundswell of her unpopularity—was the unwise decision to make it her personal property. There was no tradition of such gifts to a French Queen Consort, and Saint Cloud was not a secluded “pleasure house” like the Trianon. It was, in fact, near enough to Paris for everyone to take note of the unfamiliar command “by the orders of the Queen” (
de par la Reine
) as well as the Queen’s special livery.
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It was enough to start the ridiculous rumour that if the Queen died, the property would go by default to the Emperor. More seriously, there were protests when the letters patent of the King’s gift were registered with the Parlement de Paris. One member of the junior chamber cried out that it was “impolitic and immoral” to see the palace belonging to the Queen.

Whatever the hostility incurred by its possession, Saint Cloud provided Marie Antoinette with a new opportunity to indulge her ardent love of interior decoration. There were the colours she loved, a spectrum not unlike the colours she chose for her clothes, pale blue and pale green for painted panelling, a kind of lavender-grey for the Great Bathroom at Versailles with its Neptune-like motifs of tridents, waterfalls, shells, fossils and corals; apple-green for the draperies at the Trianon. (But she hated orange according to Madame de La Tour du Pin and would not let the colour into her presence, even in the form of ribbons.) White material sprigged with blue flowers was used for summer in her private apartments; white muslin might be draped over the apple-green. Marie Antoinette, animatrix of the Petit Trianon, had a special fancy for the cotton
toiles de Jouy
, introduced into France in the 1770s, for chinoiserie or pastoral scenes in the style of Boucher. On the other hand the decor of the so-called Salon Doré in her private apartments, created about 1783, looked to a neo-classical future—white and gold with sphinxes prominent among the gilded decorations in the Pompeian style.

A major part of the Queen’s enthusiasm for decoration concerned furniture. Here too there were many interesting acquisitions. Marie Antoinette was an ardent connoisseur and showed discernment in what she chose and commissioned. Indeed, the elegant spirit of Marie Antoinette is perhaps better represented by those exquisite pieces of her known furniture that survive than almost anything else.
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Favourite pieces were made of inlaid wood or lacquer and ornamented with gilded bronze, often with flower motifs or children playing. Designers were celebrated
ébénistes
(cabinet-makers) such as Jean Henri Riesener who made more than 700 pieces for the Royal Collection overall.

Marie Antoinette had a weakness for furniture incorporating mechanical devices; David Roentgen of Neuwied,
ébéniste mécanicien
to the King and Queen, made her a writing-table surmounted by the realistic figure of a lady playing arias on a little clavichord. Riesener also collaborated with the German Merklein to produce pieces of furniture with mechanical devices to smooth away any possible difficulties in the Queen’s luxurious routine. For example, a special mechanical table was constructed for her to eat in bed following her
accouchement
; it was so cunningly constructed that “even the weakest hand” could lower it without making any noise. A dressing-table revealed little compartments for pomades, pins and furbelows, as well as producing a mirror at the touch of a button; another button transformed it into a desk or a music stand, which could be adapted for use either sitting or standing.

This pretty but practical object, its wood edged with gilded bronze, was so popular with the Queen that she often took it with her on her travels. In general Marie Antoinette tended to move her furniture about, having a range of residences in which to arrange it within a comparatively small geographic compass,
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including the Tuileries Palace in which she had a small pied-à-terre. Certain types of chairs—
bergères
or
fauteuils
often made by Georges Jacob—or the large chests of drawers known as commodes, were in effect reordered in exactly the same models, She also had a passion for little tables, and especially for the lightly built writing-desks called
secrétaires
. The name indicated their origin as places where writings could be kept secret. Also, from the psychological angle, one might point out that the hiding of her correspondence had been one of the Queen’s prime concerns ever since her arrival in France. Sometimes furniture was specially adapted in order to be upholstered with the embroideries for which the Queen, surrounded by her ladies, had such enthusiasm, making her the ideal customer of Madame Éloffe, the fashionable purveyor of wools and silks as well as lingerie.

None of this came particularly cheap and it was not helpful that the prices of objets d’art in general rose sharply after 1750. It would, however, be quite wrong to give the impression of an economical King married to a free-spending Queen, to say nothing once again of the extravagant habits of the rest of the royal family, including the aunts. All of them paid top prices for their own interesting acquisitions—up to 5000 francs each for commodes and
secrétaires
. Louis XVI, ordering from Adam Weisweiler, Jacob and others as well as Riesener, suffered from his familiar indecision as he tried out an ornate commode at Saint Cloud or ordered two beds in 1785 and then changed his mind. More sympathetically, he asked for furniture without sharp corners to avoid those painful encounters that threaten short-sighted people. Marie Antoinette, on the other hand, liked carvings of all sorts: rams’ heads, fruit, flowers, of course—and the heads of her dogs.