Marie Antoinette (48 page)

The royal family returned from Saint Cloud on 30 October 1790. The Dauphin was no longer able to enjoy that freedom which had benefited him so much, and all of them were more constrained in the goldfish-bowl that the Tuileries had become. The next day saw the publication (in England) of Edmund Burke’s famous tract,
Reflections on the Revolution in France
. He turned his previous Whig pro-American convictions on their head, urging the King to resist all further negotiations. It was, said George III approvingly, “a book every gentleman should read.” In France alone it sold 16,000 copies in three months. In due course, Marie Antoinette may well have read
Reflections
, the book that made her a legendary heroine in her own lifetime. Burke certainly handed the Duke of Dorset one copy, which he hoped would be passed on, and another copy, in a translation by the cosmopolitan Louis Dutens, was presented to the Queen by the Duchesse de St. James. Madame Elisabeth also read it, in French, unlike one of her ladies, Bombelles’ wife Angélique, who was clever enough to read it in English.

In a famous passage, Burke recalled his sight of Marie Antoinette, then Dauphine, at Versailles: “And surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in—glittering like the morning star, full of life, and splendour, and joy. Oh! what a revolution! and what a heart I must have to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! . . . Little did I dream that I should have lived to see disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour, and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone . . .”

For the Queen, no longer glittering like the morning star, the question of the swords leaping from their scabbards to avenge her was urgently in need of solving. What swords from which scabbards? And given that the age of chivalry was undoubtedly gone (with the exception perhaps of Count Fersen), what were the terms that these modern chevaliers would demand in return for rescuing the royal family?

CHAPTER TWENTY

GREAT HOPES

“At the end of last year . . . I had great hopes.”

M
ARIE
A
NTOINETTE TO THE
P
RINCESSE DE
T
ARANTE
, 31 D
ECEMBER
1791

“It is only from here and only we who can judge the moment and the favourable circumstances that might at last put an end to our woes and those of France.” With these anxious words, written to the Emperor Leopold on 19 December 1790, Marie Antoinette addressed the problem at the heart of any plan of escape: its timing. There was indeed much to disquiet her. France abounded with wild rumours about her future, as Prince Charles of Liechtenstein, the envoy of Leopold II, discovered: the Queen was about to be seized and shut up in a fortress; alternatively she was to be put to death for adultery so that the widower Louis XVI could marry Orléans’ daughter. Meanwhile the Queen’s own perturbation over the possible invasive action of the Princes increased with the months, and not without reason. Artois was reported to be planning to take Lyons and to hive off Alsace from France. The Queen told the Emperor that Louis XVI had written formally to the King of Sardinia and his son-in-law Artois to say that if they persisted in these damaging conspiracies, allegedly on Louis’ behalf, the King would have to disown them officially. For all this, Marie Antoinette was beginning to have “great hopes,” as she would confess to the Princesse de Tarante later.

If the counter-revolutionary Princes signified trouble abroad, the French Catholic clergy offered similar complications at home. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy of July 1790 was followed up at the end of November by the idea of an oath to the state. All priests had to swear it, “non-jurors” being forbidden to exercise their priestly functions. Torn between his duty as a loyal son of the Church, and that of a monarch concerned with his country’s welfare, Louis XVI tried desperately to get the Pope to tolerate the oath. The alternative was the introduction of “a division into France,” in other words a damaging schism in the French Catholic Church between jurors and non-jurors.

Pius VI, a man in his seventies who had been Pope since 1775, had no sympathy with the ultramontane tendencies of monarchs in his own time, nor, for that matter, with the libertarian ideals of their subjects. He had already clashed with Joseph II over the latter’s projected limitations of papal power in his own dominions, known as “Josephinism”; as for France, he had condemned
La Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme
of August. Now Pius VI declined to compromise. Nevertheless Louis XVI signed the decree on 26 December. January 1 1791 was the “fatal day” when the clergy had to decide whether or not to take the oath.

It was also the day on which the Dauphin Louis Charles was given dominoes made of stone and marble torn from the ruins of the Bastille as a New Year’s gift by members of the National Guard. The verses that accompanied the gift alluded to the Bastille when its walls had enclosed “the innocent victims of arbitrary government”; now these toys were intended as the homage of the people and—significant postscript—“to teach you the extent of their power.” The Marquise de Tourzel had a slightly different version: the boy received the gift from Palloi, an architect, one of the chief destroyers of the Bastille, with outward politeness—and inner fury.

Battle lines were being drawn. On 10 March 1791 the Pope issued a condemnation of the French Revolution in general and the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in particular. Three days later, an answer to the chivalrous rhetoric of Burke’s
Reflections
was published in England. The author was Thomas Paine, a Quaker-educated political writer who had spent thirteen years in America and was a passionate advocate of its independence.
The Rights of Man
, written in support of this new revolution and dedicated to George Washington, resulted in Paine being accused of treason in England; he fled to France. The book was, however, an instant bestseller, both in English and in translation.

On quite a different level the scabrous pamphlets attacking the Queen were also bestsellers. Drink, lesbianism, sexual voracity generally (“three quarters of the officers of the Gardes Françaises had penetrated the Queen”), featured as before in works such as
The Memoirs of Antonina,
printed in London in two volumes. Here, due to the demands of such numbers on her time, she was described as preferring lovers in the style of a grenadier “who abridges preliminaries and hastens to the conclusion.” Marie Antoinette was also credited with a new admirer, La Fayette. The story was ridiculous enough to those who knew Marie Antoinette’s personal dislike for the man she derisively nicknamed “Blondinet” for his sandy looks and whose clumsy dancing she had scorned years ago; but it was a useful twist for his enemies in the saga of her debauchery.
Soirées Amoureuses du Général Mottier
[La Fayette]
et la Belle Antoinette
was a piece of pornography supposedly written by “the Austrian woman’s little spaniel.” Having enjoyed a rich sexual education at the hands of his mistress, the pet, jealous of being supplanted in the royal bed by La Fayette, had decided to describe the Queen’s bawdy nights with the revolutionary.

The anguished King was left with the approaching problem of his Easter duties, the absolute necessity of taking Communion to celebrate Easter Sunday—24 April in 1791—that was enjoined on all the faithful. How could he accept the sacrament at the hands of a juror priest? How could he manage to avoid it?
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He had, after all, signed a decree officially condemning the non-jurors. There was another unhappy consequence to the split engendered by the Civil Constitution of the Clergy: the King’s pious aunts reacted to it with horror.

It was unthinkable for the two surviving Mesdames Tantes, Adélaïde and Victoire (the nun Louise had died in 1787), to make
their
Easter Communion at a Mass said by a juror. No conception of their nephew’s good, nor that of the royal family as a whole, troubled these royal ladies. There were to be no compromises with the manners of the old order; for example, the aunts made a fearful fuss at the idea of dining at Saint Cloud with Pauline de Tourzel who had not been officially presented—what a precedent! According to etiquette, the girl ought to eat alone. (But the King simply said: “There will never be similar circumstances. Admit her!”) Now the aunts began to make arrangements to depart for the more wholesome spiritual atmosphere of Rome, finally leaving on 19 February.

The flight of Mesdames Tantes turned out to be a public relations disaster. A dragoon charge was needed to clear away hostile crowds as they went; then the aunts were halted for eleven days in the course of their journey by other angry demonstrators. In order to proceed, they were, ironically enough, obliged to appeal for the implementation of the National Assembly’s new law by which all citizens could travel as they pleased. The Assembly spent four hours debating the issue, all because, as one deputy furiously exclaimed, “two old ladies prefer to hear Mass in Rome rather than in Paris.” Finally agreement was reached.

Nevertheless a deputy named Antoine Barnave, a Protestant lawyer from Grenoble, made an important point when he argued for the symbolic importance of this departure: Mesdames should not be allowed to go while the position of the royal family was still being discussed by the Committee of the Constitution. Certainly this contested departure made two points for the future: first, royalties who were dissatisfied with the present situation in France, for all their emollient words, were preparing to flee; second, they could be stopped . . . “You know that my aunts are going,” wrote Marie Antoinette to Leopold in advance. “We do not believe that we can prevent them.” But a more resolute sovereign than Louis XVI, one who had indeed learnt that early lesson about “firmness” being the most necessary virtue to a king, might have done so.

The fact was that the situation regarding the departure—or escape—of the main royal family was at the most delicate stage. And it was Marie Antoinette who found herself, perforce, the practical instigator of the action. The King’s depression as ever took the form of semi-stupor. When he discussed business with his Minister of the Royal Household, the King might have been talking about the affairs of the Emperor of China, said Montmorin sadly in January 1791. Louis’ personal unhappiness, caused by the odious religious situation to which he had reluctantly agreed, was not helped by serious illness in the spring. He suffered from high fever and began to cough up blood: was it the fatal tuberculosis that had carried off so many members of his family including his elder son? He was treated with a series of debilitating emetics and purges. For about a week, the King lay in bed. His strongest emotion seems to have been a deep, hurt bewilderment. As he told his favoured confidante the Duchesse de Polignac in a letter some weeks later: “How can I have these enemies when I have only ever desired the good of all?” He quoted Molière in
L’École des Femmes
: “The world, my dear Agnes, is a strange thing.”

Marie Antoinette on the other hand, was developing a more positive attitude, although she still had a residue of melancholy. “Oh my God!” she wrote to her brother Leopold in October 1790. “If we have committed faults, we have certainly expiated them.” She too felt misunderstood by the French, who were “a cruel, childish people,” while at the same time she felt equally misunderstood by the émigrés, so blithely ignorant in their exile of the true conditions in France. But Marie Antoinette had also begun to believe fervently in the cause of kingship, for a reason indicated in that letter to her sister Marie Christine of the previous May. She wanted “her poor child” to have a happier future than their own, and that was a future in which he sat on the throne of France.

It was “the monsters” in France—both Marie Antoinette and her critics were free in their use of this word—who threatened this future, and in this connection, she warned her brother Leopold against the Freemasons, whose societies had been used by the monsters to link themselves together: “Oh God, guard my homeland and you from similar perils.” The émigrés, especially Artois, might come into this threatening category too, if they sought to circumvent the role of the King on the grounds that he was a virtual prisoner and thus subject to unlawful pressures. At the same time any wife who becomes obsessed by her son’s heritage—in the lifetime of his father—must have a slightly different agenda from that father himself. Marie Antoinette was by now quite convinced of the need to escape in order to save the crown: “Too much delay risks losing everything.” Louis XVI still wavered.

He could hand a kind of roving commission to the Baron de Breteuil to approach the European powers with a view to restoring his “legitimate authority,” as he did on 26 November 1790. He could despatch the young Comte Louis de Bouillé, son of the soldier Marquis, to the Emperor in an ambassadorial capacity, as he did in early January 1791. On 4 February there was a further tentative step forward when the Comte de La Marck was sent off to the Marquis de Bouillé himself at Metz with a commission from the King. But as yet, unlike Caesar crossing the Hellespont, Louis could not decide to burn his boats.

Of course the logic of Marie Antoinette’s position—that the crown of France must be preserved at all costs—dictated that she should have escaped accompanied only by the Dauphin. (Madame Royale’s gender, which prevented her accession, also meant that her security was never seen as an issue; unlike her Austrian mother, the Daughter of France was not subject to personal threats.) Originally put forward by Marie Antoinette’s secretary, Augeard, with the idea that Louis Charles should be dressed as a girl, this plan of a mother-and-son flight was always the one with the best hope of success. Comte Louis de Bouillé reiterated it to the Queen in January 1791. A plainly dressed woman in an age when garments automatically spoke a person’s rank, an obscure little girl . . . There were few to connect such a limited party with the glorious goddess of Versailles (or its wicked Queen for that matter) and the boy prince who was the hope of the nation.

There was a further impetus to removing Louis Charles from the nation’s acquisitive gaze. Both his status and his future education were becoming a matter of debate. A memoir on the subject by the Abbé Audrein, Vice Rector of the Collège des Grassins, was presented to the National Assembly on 11 December 1790, and printed in the newspaper
L’Ami du Roi
shortly after Louis Charles’s sixth birthday on 27 March 1791. The Dauphin should be put through an elaborate programme of education in various colleges that would report on his prowess to four carefully chosen governors once a month. He would eat “frugal but healthy” food and be attended to only by the small number of servants necessary. As an adolescent, he was to do military service under an assumed name, the final summary of his progress to be circulated throughout the nation. Such a regime was not harsh—resembling perhaps the education of a modern heir to a throne—but it was the principle that was sinister from the point of view of the Dauphin’s parents: that royal children “belong to the Nation and must be brought up by it.”