Marie Antoinette (4 page)

In the case of Madame Antoine, the enjoyment of music was from childhood central to her life. It is true that she can hardly have taken an important part in the earliest fête that centred round her. This was the celebration held on 1 November 1756, the eve of her first birthday. However, from an early age she took part in the celebration on her name-day, 13 June, the Feast of St. Antony. In the morning her parents would drive to a solemn High Mass at the Church of the Minorities, followed by a gala in honour of the youngest Archduchess.

In 1759, shortly before her fourth birthday, Antoine sang “a French Vaudeville song” at the celebrations for the name-day of her father, the feast of St. Francis, whilst her elder brothers and sisters sang Italian arias. The Empress’s own name-day came shortly afterwards, when the Emperor organized an impromptu musical party for his wife, once again with the children singing and performing; the Archduke Ferdinand played an overture on the kettledrum.

The imperial children acted as audience too. On 13 October 1762 “the little child from Salzburg”—Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart—came with his father and sister Nannerl to Schönbrunn. He played the harpsichord in the presence of the Empress, the Emperor, the court composer Georg Christoph Wagenseil and various of Maria Teresa’s offspring, including Antoine who was three months older than the prodigy. The child played “marvellously,” was the verdict, and he was rewarded with an honorarium of 100 ducats and presents from other nobles. He was also presented with a fine outfit that had belonged to the Archduke Max, a coat of lilac colour and a moiré waistcoat, all trimmed with gold braid. The concert was repeated, again at Schönbrunn, a week later.

Perhaps it is not true that the young Mozart flung himself at the young Marie Antoinette and declared that he would marry her when he grew up (an apocryphal story which, if it had in some amazing way come true, would certainly have altered the course of history). But his impetuosity was certainly in evidence; Antoine was present when he rushed up to the Empress and jumped on her lap, receiving a kiss in return. Mozart also responded to the Emperor’s teasing by accurately playing with one finger on a covered keyboard, and showed his own playfulness by demanding that Wagenseil should turn over his music for him, as he played the court composer’s own work. Shortly afterwards Mozart travelled on to France, where the French King’s daughter Madame Victoire became his patron, receiving a dedication of some piano sonatas in return. The Marquise de Pompadour was, however, less welcoming. “Who is this that will not kiss me?” enquired the “little Orpheus” of the haughty mistress: “The Empress kissed me.”

Much of the girls’ education was centred on their need to appear and perform gracefully at court events as they grew older. Their teachers included not only Gluck, but Wagenseil, Joseph Stephan and Johann Adolph Hasse, who later dedicated a book to Marie Antoinette. There were also two English women, Marianne and Cecilia Davies, who played the harpsichord and also specialized in the armonica or “musical glass.” They lived in the same house as Hasse while they instructed the Empress’s daughters. With such influences it was not difficult for anyone with a modicum of natural talent, plus natural inclination, to shine as required. Marie Antoinette would later be described as sight-reading to a professional standard, and able to take part in enjoyable little concerts with her friends. The harp was her favourite instrument and under the guidance of the talented performer, Joseph Hinner, she would make considerable progress.

Of the various arts, however, dancing was the one at which Marie Antoinette was generally held to excel. The particular grace of her deportment, including the distinguished carriage of her head, would become a feature of her appearance upon which every observer, whether friendly or hostile, commented. Its origin lay in the formal dancing lessons that she was given at a time when ballet itself was beginning to develop in a new direction. It was the celebrated French ballet master and choreographer Jean-Georges Noverre, author of a seminal book of 1760,
Lettres sur la danse et sur les ballets
, who taught Madame Antoine. Maria Teresa was the patroness of Noverre, a role that her daughter would also adopt.

Apart from this perceived need to perform, the other emphasis in the Archduchesses’ education was on docility and obedience. The crucial text used in their upbringing was
Les Aventures de Télémaque
by Fénelon, written at the end of the seventeenth century for the heir to Louis XIV and imported to Austria by Francis Stephen. This underlined the importance for the female sex of industriousness and dexterity (embroidery, which Madame Antoine loved, was fortunately a suitable feminine skill) but also of modesty and submission. The little dancers, especially Antoine, the youngest, were to be like puppets and manipulated as puppets are. The necessity for total obedience from her daughters was something about which Maria Teresa was quite unequivocal. “They are born to obey and must learn to do so in good time,” she declared the year after Antoine was born.

But the imperial daughters were not puppets, none of them, not even the littlest one who would in the future be termed by her mother, lovingly but patronizingly, as “our sweet Antoinette.” Like any other large family, this one contained a collection of diverse individuals and, like any other large family, was inevitably divided by its range of age and experience, which means that it cannot helpfully be regarded as a monolithic entity. As one analyses the internal dynamics of the Habsburgs, the idyllic picture that was promoted by Maria Teresa, which Marie Antoinette obediently remembered, takes on a very different aspect. Even the female submission that the Empress preached contrasted rather oddly with much of her own perceivable behaviour.

It was true that the Empress paraded her wifely deference to the Emperor; on the other hand it was she who worked day and night at her state papers and the Emperor who went happily off hunting. It was Maria Teresa who was the wonder of Europe for her strength and decisiveness, not Francis Stephen. To say the least of it, Maria Teresa presented a complicated role model to her daughters.

Beneath the idyllic surface, there were also currents and rapids and shoals, jealousies and rivalries, which, however common to all large families, took on an added significance in a family of state. In effect the children of Maria Teresa and Francis Stephen, born between 1738 (Marianne) and 1756 (Max), fell into two groups. The first family—and the phrase was apt in more ways than one—consisted, besides the invalid Marianne, of the heir, Joseph, born on 13 March in 1741; Marie Christine born on 13 May, Maria Teresa’s own birthday, the following year; then came “the lovely Elizabeth” as she was known, born in August 1743. The Archduke Charles, born in 1745, died when young; the first family was completed by Amalia born in 1746, and Leopold in 1747.

After that there was an artificial gap of five years caused by the birth and death of a daughter in 1748, compounded when the next-born daughter, Joanna, also died young. The third in line of the row of ill-fated daughters, Josepha, another beauty born in 1751, would not, as we shall see, survive either, with crucial effects on the fortunes of her two younger sisters. Thus the second family began with that Archduchess always called Charlotte by her siblings, just as Marie Antoinette was called Antoine, although she is known to history as Maria Carolina; she was born on 13 August 1752. There followed in quick succession Ferdinand, an extremely pretty little boy, Antoine, and Maximilian, a chubby baby later nicknamed plainly “Fat Max”; the three of them were born in the space of two and a half years.

It will be seen that Madame Antoine’s position in the family was marked on the one hand by distance; the Archduke Joseph was nearly fifteen years older, old enough to be her father by the royal standards of the time. On the other hand this position was marked by closeness; sandwiched as she was between two brothers eighteen months older and thirteen months younger, Antoine’s share of maternal attention as a baby can hardly have been great. In any case Maria Teresa, in her late thirties and forties, was no longer the happy young mother who had greeted the birth of Joseph, the male heir, with ecstasy. In fact her energies were now dominated by affairs of state and the halcyon period during which Antoine had been conceived and born was over. From late 1756 until the Peace of Paris in February 1763—Antoine’s infant years—Austria was at war with Prussia and England, and Maria Teresa was at the helm. The Seven Years’ War was not a time of serenity for the Empress. Nor was the lost region of Silesia gloriously restored, as predicted by Kaunitz, at the subsequent peace, which marked no more than a stalemate between Austria and Prussia.

Nevertheless it was Maria Teresa, however preoccupied, who was the central figure of her children’s lives and whose love—hopefully coupled with respect—they sought, even if, in the case of the younger ones, a strong dose of awe, even fear, was mingled with these feelings. Much later Marie Antoinette told a lady-in-waiting that she had never loved her mother, only feared her; but this was hindsight, when a great many unhappy adult experiences had distorted the simplicities of childhood. Her comment during her mother’s lifetime was probably nearer the truth: “I love the Empress but I’m frightened of her, even at a distance; when I’m writing to her, I never feel completely at ease.” The evidence of earlier times is of an adoring daughter who on occasion was quite pathetic in her desire to please. She dearly wanted to incarnate “our sweet Antoinette,” the personality at once engaging and docile designated for her by Maria Teresa.

Given the inexorable authority of the Empress, the clear favouritism that she exhibited for the Archduchess Marie Christine almost from her birth (was it the shared birthday?) was a source of great resentment to all the brothers and sisters. At one point Marianne was said to have been made ill by it. Joseph felt it; and when his wife, Isabella of Parma, that bride, half-French and half-Spanish Bourbon, bestowed on him by the Family Pact in 1761, also professed herself fascinated by Marie Christine, matters were only exacerbated. The phenomenon was so marked that one wonders, as with all parents who indulge in marked favouritism, why the Empress did not sometimes question it herself. On the contrary, Maria Teresa saw “Mimi,” or “la Marie” as her second surviving daughter was known, as the consolation that was owed to her by life.

Outwardly Antoine resented the bossiness of this sister who was thirteen and a half years older than she; as she saw it, Marie Christine used her paramount position to make trouble with her mother. It was a view shared by her brother Leopold, who was much closer in age to Marie Christine, who denounced her scolding ways, her sharp tongue and, above all, her habit of “telling everything to the Empress.” Certainly Marie Christine had a strong streak of the “masculine” or masterful in her nature. This was inherited from Maria Teresa by more than one archduchess—Amalia and Maria Carolina, for example—but not by Marie Antoinette. At the same time Marie Christine was highly intelligent as well as artistically gifted; she was certainly the outstanding sister in that respect.

It was easy as a result for Antoine to conceive a timid disinclination for the company of intellectual, brilliantly self-possessed older women, exactly the sort of sophisticated creatures who by tradition dominated French society. Amalia, although nearly ten years older, was a much less threatening figure; she was not so clever, not so interesting, not so pretty, not so graceful—and for all these reasons she was not so much loved by Maria Teresa. Although Antoine could cope with Amalia, the echoes of her childish jealousy for Mimi, as the years passed, would resonate ever more strongly.

Antoine’s relationship with her closest sister in age, Charlotte, on the other hand, set quite a different pattern. The future Maria Carolina, three years her senior, was raised with Antoine almost as though they were twins. As Frederick the Great said of his relationship with his own sister: “These first bonds are indissoluble.” From Charlotte, Antoine learnt that loving relationships with delightful female contemporaries could be like bastions in an unkind or puzzling world. The very fact that for some years the two youngest Archduchesses escaped a great deal of official attention meant that they could bond happily with each other. They tended to share experiences; if one got ill, the other would catch the infection, and both would be segregated, then sent off to convalesce together.

These were two lively little girls; at the same time Charlotte was the dominant one, the protectress, Antoine the dependent one. Maria Teresa, besotted as she was with her Mimi, insistent as she was on obedience, nevertheless admired Charlotte’s spirit; she was, said the Empress, the one who most closely resembled herself. Perhaps it helped their symbiotic relationship that Charlotte and Antoine “resembled each other greatly,” as the painter Madame Vigée Le Brun later pointed out (portraits of the two can easily be mistaken). As children they shared the same big blue eyes, pink and white complexions, fair hair and longish noses; but for indefinable reasons, it all added up to feminine prettiness in Antoine. Charlotte, if “not as pretty,” was on the other hand attractive with a forceful personality.

The marriage of Joseph to Isabella of Parma, which was intended to solidify the connection of Austria with the France of her grandfather Louis XV, did not in fact last long. In 1762 Isabella gave birth to a daughter, the Archduchess Teresa, and died a year later giving birth to a second daughter, who also died. The latter had been named Christine after the sister-in-law for whom Isabella had felt such a passion, comparing the two of them to Orpheus and Eurydice, following Gluck’s opera on the same subject. Broken-hearted, Joseph placed the matter of a second marriage, essential to produce an imperial heir, in the hands of his parents. After some arguments on the subject of rival German princesses in which Marie Christine favoured Cunegonde of Saxony, the choice was made of a Habtx1urg second cousin, Josepha of Bavaria.