Marie Antoinette (40 page)

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CLOSE TO SHIPWRECK

“The boat is being placed in his [Necker’s] hands so close to shipwreck that even my boundless admiration is scarcely enough to inspire me with confidence.”

G
ERMAINE DE
S
TAËL
, 4 S
EPTEMBER
1788

On 8 August 1788 it was at long last formally announced that there would be a meeting of the Estates General. That left the question of its composition—on which the King had invited comments in early July—to be hotly debated in the coming months. Brienne’s measures had demonstrably failed to restore financial credit; by mid-August the Treasury was hovering on the verge of bankruptcy, with one official calculating that there were only enough funds “for state expenditure for one or two days.” It was becoming apparent to the anxious Queen, still in her political role, still trying to galvanise her phlegmatic husband, that it might be necessary to recall the one man thought capable of restoring public confidence. This was Jacques Necker, widely seen as the solid incarnation of Swiss Protestant financial virtues, who had been edged out of office seven years previously and whom the Queen personally disliked. Her protégé Breteuil resigned as Minister of the Royal Household at the end of July; it hardly seemed possible that her other protégé Brienne would survive much longer.

Yet the ceremonial life of Versailles did not cease. An exotic—and expensive—state visit provided a brave public show as the politicians, including the Queen, manoeuvred behind the scenes. The three envoys of the Indian potentate Tippoo Sahib came to France to plead for assistance against the English in the East. Madame de La Tour du Pin wrote: “But we gave them only words, as we had done to the Dutch.” She referred to France’s inertia in 1787 when Frederick William II, the new King of Prussia, attacked Holland in order to reinstate his brother-in-law as Stadtholder. In fact the envoys were entertained lavishly even if France’s domestic troubles precluded further support.

In Paris, Gluck’s
Armide
was thought a suitable offering and everyone flocked to gaze at the three visitors, richly dressed, of a “fine light Hindu complexion” with white beards to their waists. Seated in special armchairs, they propped their slippered feet on the edge of the box “to the delight of the public who . . . had no fault to find with this custom.” At Versailles spectators were similarly amazed at the sight of the envoys’ special cooks sitting cross-legged in the Grand Trianon, sifting rice and meat in their hands. The strange smells of simmering peppers and pimentos flavoured with cumin drifted in the air. Marie Antoinette gamely tried to eat some of the food, before being driven back by the spices.

There was once again a large crowd to witness the last formal audience of the envoys; they departed the day after the announcement of the Estates General. Unfortunately the envoys’ time-keeping was as exotic as their food; they were invited between five and six and arrived long after eight. Their speech to the King had to be translated by Sieur Ruffin, the King’s secretary-interpreter; he used a specially low voice since some of the sentiments expressed by the Indians were notably disobliging towards England and might have caused offence to those English present. The envoys also demanded to be seated in the King’s presence, a privilege not even allowed to his own brothers. Nevertheless for the great gathering of fascinated royals and courtiers, including “the little people” (children) who gazed at the colourful strangers, this show provided a welcome distraction from more serious affairs.

Even the nine-year-old Madame Royale was there, seated among the distinguished ladies on a special platform draped in brocade, although the previous week she had been so ill with a fever that her mother had watched over her for two whole nights, and her father for one. The collapse of the normally healthy Marie Thérèse was a special strain upon parents who alternated between dealing with affairs of state and visiting the Dauphin, who was invisible to the rest of the world at Meudon. It would not have occurred to Marie Thérèse, nor to the little children of the Duchesse de Polignac and the Marquis de Bombelles who were all allowed to watch from an embrasure, that this might be the last state visit of the reign . . . But the thought must have crossed the minds of some of their elders.

Necker was summoned to see the Queen at ten o’clock on the morning on 26 August. He was made Controller of Finance, and was also admitted to the Council of State, a position that had eluded him in 1781 on the grounds of his Protestant religion. The departure of Brienne was personally “affecting” for Marie Antoinette and she made sure that he was rewarded with various emoluments including a Cardinal’s hat on the nomination of the King (that nomination he had refused to bestow on Rohan). Necker’s brilliant daughter, Germaine de Staël, who was now married to the Swedish ambassador and was ecstatic at her father’s return, noted caustically how much less well she was received by the Queen on the feast of Saint Louis than the niece of the outgoing Brienne. Germaine was able to add with satisfaction that the courtiers’ attitude was very different: “Never have so many people offered to conduct me back to my carriage.”

Nevertheless, two things emerge clearly from Marie Antoinette’s correspondence on the subject of Necker. First, for all her aversion, she alone was responsible for his recall. The King continued to behave sullenly, merely commenting that he had been forced to recall Necker without wanting to do so: “They’ll soon regret it.” For the time being, Necker’s appointment did indeed lead to a surge of popularity for the government—cries of “Long live the King” were heard again—as well as an equally welcome rise on the Stock Exchange. It was true, as Germaine de Staël wrote to the King of Sweden on 4 September, that “the boat is being placed in his [Necker’s] hands so close to shipwreck that even my boundless admiration is scarcely enough to inspire me with confidence.” Yet for the time being shipwreck had been undeniably averted by her father’s return.

Second, and more important in the long term, it is evident that Marie Antoinette felt some kind of dark presentiment about the outcome of the new arrangement. This was due to the role that she had personally played in it. She wrote to Count Mercy on the subject, two days before her meeting with Necker, a letter that is the key to her growing feelings of dread: “I am trembling—forgive me this weakness—at the idea that it is I who am bringing about his return. My destiny is to bring misfortune; and if vile scheming makes things go wrong for him once more, alternatively if he diminishes the authority of the King, I shall be detested still further.”

In part, this reaction sprang from that new strain of “German melancholy,” which the hairdresser Léonard, in constant attendance upon the Queen, noticed in her character. She took to saying, “If I began my life again . . .” before breaking off and asking him to cheer her up with one of his stories. This melancholy coexisted with the new determination that she had developed as a result of the Diamond Necklace Affair. It sapped her spirits if not her resolution. The death of one child and the serious illness of another obviously contributed to this depression. More than that, however, Marie Antoinette was beginning to feel ill-fated, even doomed. She could no longer maintain that elegant studied indifference to the insults dealt out to her both in print and when she appeared in public. The Queen was forced to appreciate the horrible malign power of such things. The contrast between the wicked Messalina of the public imagination and the benevolent mother-figure of her own was becoming too painful to be ignored.

Under the circumstances, the friendship of Count Fersen—both romantic and supportive—was more important to the Queen than ever. Fersen played a double role. He was the Queen’s admirer but he was also the emissary of the King of Sweden in various connections. For example, it was Fersen who brought a letter to Louis XVI from Gustav III in May 1787. It was Fersen who acted as the Swedish King’s proxy at the baptism of the child of Germaine de Staël and her husband, the Swedish ambassador to France, a few months later. Although the colonel of a French regiment—the Royal Swedish garrisoned at Maubeuge—Fersen continued to be part of King Gustav’s entourage. His role as a kind of liaison officer between the French and Swedish courts made Fersen valuable to Louis XVI, quite apart from his notional position as Marie Antoinette’s lover.

In the past years, Fersen had travelled constantly between France and Sweden, his absences from the Queen’s side always marked by correspondence with “Josephine” being noted in his Letter Book. In the spring of 1788 he went to Sweden in order to take part in King Gustav’s Finnish campaign against Russia, but by 6 November he was back in Paris, twenty-two letters marking this particular six months’ absence. His account books reveal the extent of his visits to Versailles in the critical period that followed, since the tips he had to give to servants were also written down.

Did his sexual relationship with Marie Antoinette continue? The same common sense which suggested that the Queen and Fersen had an affair starting in 1783, now suggests that their relationship, if far from over, was nevertheless being gradually transformed into something more romantic than carnal. The Queen’s ill health, the Queen’s melancholy, the Queen’s family worries, the deteriorating political situation, even developing religious scruples: none of these would necessarily prevent her continuing a full-blown affair although any one of them might inhibit it. Yet one cannot help speculating—as with the nature of their original relationship, it can be no more than speculation—that with the passage of time Marie Antoinette and Fersen began to play rather different parts. They lived, after all, in an age of romantic role-playing, the supreme example being the relationship of Julie and Saint-Preux in Rousseau’s
La Nouvelle Héloïse
, much of whose epistolary language is strangely similar to that of Marie Antoinette and Fersen. The novel ended with Julie’s renunciation of carnal love.

Fersen was now her devoted cavalier, and he was also increasingly her vital political ally. According to the Comte de La Marck, Marie Antoinette liked the fact that Fersen did not let himself be drawn into the Polignac set; he was her kindred spirit, not theirs, or as the English put it, he was “Mrs. B’s special friend.” Marie Antoinette had originally been attracted to Fersen not only for his handsome face and gallant manners but because he was an outsider, alien to the intrigues of Versailles. This foreign status was to become even more important in the future.

There was also the critical question of how Fersen saw Marie Antoinette. It is clear from a letter to his father, written the following year, that he was one of the few people who saw her exactly as she had always wished to be seen. “You cannot fail to applaud the Queen,” he wrote, “if you do justice to her desire to do good and the goodness of her own heart.” Fersen, of course, as a true lover of women, had always had mistresses, in whatever country he found himself. But it is not irrelevant that the most physically passionate relationship of his life—so very different from his romantic devotion to the Queen—began in the spring of 1789.

The fascinating Eléanore Sullivan, five years older than Fersen and the Queen, had arrived in Paris in 1783. She had, to say the least of it, a colourful past. The daughter of a Tuscan tailor, she had first become a dancer and a trapeze artiste. Originally married to an actor, Eléanore had then become the mistress of the Duke of Württemberg to whom she bore a son. In Vienna, Eléanore was rumoured to have been the mistress of Joseph II; in Paris she married an Irishman, Sullivan, who swept her off to Manila; there she met a rich Scot, Quentin Craufurd, who brought her back to Paris again. Fersen was erotically enchained by Eléanore Sullivan and his connection to her was long-lasting. But it was to be a three-cornered relationship, that included Eléanore’s wealthy protector Craufurd.

With the Queen as the object of his devotion, Fersen also entered into another three-cornered relationship but of a political complexion. This time the King was the third party. There is no evidence that Louis XVI ever tried to oust Fersen from his wife’s life, or that he even contemplated doing so. Fersen for his part paid tribute to “the goodness, honesty, frankness and loyalty of the King,” which at this period he genuinely believed must prevail with the people, returning France to the weight and influence she had always enjoyed in Europe.

One story that has sometimes been linked to Fersen’s name scarcely fits the known facts. A servant reported that the King had received certain letters while out hunting, and had been so upset by their contents that he had begun to weep silently; finally Louis XVI was too devastated to continue with his sport. But the servant in question had not seen the content of the letters and as a result attached the name of no particular individual to them. Bombelles recorded the incident in his journal as “a fact, a distressing fact, but I have absolutely no idea what caused it.” At this stage, the King’s distressing reading matter was far more likely to be some freshly obscene publications emanating from England to do with the Lamotte than Fersen’s love letters (which would in any case have been addressed to “Josephine”).
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