Marie Antoinette (5 page)

The wedding, at the end of January 1765, was celebrated with suitable magnificence. Gluck composed an operetta for the occasion,
Il Parnasso Confusio
, with a libretto by Metastasio. The Archduchess Elizabeth played Apollo, with Amalia, Josepha and Charlotte as Muses; the Archduke Leopold both conducted the orchestra and played the harpsichord. The ballet
Il Trionfo d’Amore
, which was considered the essential accompaniment to an opera, was danced by the younger children. A picture by Mytens shows Ferdinand and Antoine, shepherd and shepherdess, while Max, wings and all, enacts Cupid. Antoine is exquisitely poised, her famous deportment already in evidence, the graceful arms well displayed. Her face is also instantly recognizable, not so much for the characteristically long neck on which it is set, as for the significantly high forehead. The Mytens picture was one that Antoine herself loved and she would subsequently receive it with delight to adorn her personal haven.

Six months later the courtly family bliss that this picture epitomized vanished utterly. The Emperor and Empress were setting out for Innsbruck in order to celebrate the marriage of their second surviving son, the Archduke Leopold to the Spanish King’s daughter. It was intended to be as splendid an occasion as could be conceived, in order to emphasize not only the majesty of both monarchies, but also the brilliant nature of the alliance. At the last moment the Emperor paused, and on some strange impulse rushed back to give the nine-year-old Antoine one more embrace. He took her on his knee and hugged her over and over again. Antoine noticed with surprise that he had tears in his eyes; leaving her was causing Francis Stephen great suffering. Twenty-five years later she still recalled the incident with pain; she believed that Francis Stephen had had some presentiment of the great unhappiness that would be her lot. For Madame Antoine never saw her father again.

On 18 August 1765 at Innsbruck the Emperor died of a massive stroke. He had lived for fifty-six years and ten days, as Maria Teresa noted in a pathetic list of numbers, which went on to calculate the months, weeks, days and even the hours of his life. She added, “My happy married life lasted twenty-nine years and six months and six days,” and she listed the details of that period too, down to the hours: 258,774.

The devastation of the Empress was total. It was symbolic of her grief that she cut off the hair of which she had once been so proud, draped her apartments in sombre velvets, and herself wore nothing but widow’s black for the rest of her life. The strong young mother, who had once said cheerfully that she would have ridden into battle herself if she had not been perpetually pregnant, was transformed into a figure of tragic severity. Everything about her was and remained “dark and mournful.” Already awesome to her younger children, Maria Teresa now projected a universal dissatisfaction with their behaviour. It was rooted in her own personal unhappiness but nonetheless constituted a perpetual reproach to those who could still enjoy life and its pleasures.

CHAPTER THREE

GREATNESS

“If one is to consider only the greatness of your position, you are the happiest of your sisters and all princesses.”

M
ARIA
T
ERESA TO
M
ARIE
A
NTOINETTE
, 1770

The bereft Empress now shared her power—since part of it could only be enjoyed by a male—with her twenty-four-year-old son, who was elected Emperor (as Joseph II) to replace his father. But she allowed nothing, neither mourning nor Joseph’s promotion, to interrupt her sedulous policy of planning her children’s marriages. There were to be victims of this single-hearted application, giving new meaning to the celebrated family motto in Latin, which can be roughly translated as: “Others have to wage war [to succeed] but you, fortunate Habsburg, marry!” But there was one beneficiary of the Emperor’s untimely death, and that was the Archduchess Marie Christine.

The favourite daughter had set her heart on a cousin on her mother’s side, Prince Albert of Saxony. This intelligent and sensitive young man, four years Marie Christine’s senior, had arrived in Vienna in 1759 with his younger brother Clement. Both fought in Maria Teresa’s army during the Seven Years’ War; Clement of Saxony went into the church and subsequently became Archbishop-Elector of Trier. Albert, however, fell in love with the lively young Archduchess as they shared a sledge on the way to Schönbrunn. Unfortunately for all his qualities, his intelligence and his artistic interests, Albert presented no sort of match for an Emperor’s daughter. A brother of the Dauphine Maria Josepha, he was the fourth son in the huge family of Augustus III of Saxony, King of Poland, and could offer no kind of position. In any case Francis Stephen had wanted Marie Christine to marry his sister’s son the Duke of Chablais, thus underlining the Lorrainer connection.

The death of her father and the increased dependency of her mother on her Mimi gave Marie Christine her chance. She married Albert in April 1766. It was a brilliant stroke in more ways than one. First of all, Mimi had achieved that ultimate rarity among the marriages of princesses, a love match. That was in itself enough to arouse the jealousy of her sisters for whom less romantic fates were reserved. But there was more to envy. Since Albert was not a rich man, Maria Teresa proceeded to even things up. Marie Christine was given a huge dowry while Albert received the Duchy of Teschen which Maria Teresa acquired for him. The couple were promised jointly the reversion of the governorship of the Austrian Netherlands on the death of Maria Teresa’s brother-in-law Prince Charles of Lorraine. In the meantime Albert was made Governor of Pressburg in Hungary, with its vast castle on the Danube.

After the wedding Maria Teresa was “childish enough,” in her own words, to hear her remaining daughters pass through her room and fancy that “my Mimi” was among them, instead of in her own home at Pressburg. In truth the position of Pressburg made it easy for the Empress to visit this young couple, whom she found it a pleasure to see together. Marie Christine also received the coveted award of a house of her own at Laxenburg. A year after the wedding Marie Christine nearly died in childbirth, and her baby daughter did die; there would be no more children. The consequence was that Marie Christine enjoyed the greatest prize of all, the constant gift of her mother’s company. As Marie Antoinette would write wistfully to Maria Teresa: “How I envy Marie [Christine] the happiness of seeing you so often!”

At the beginning of 1767 the Empress was left with five daughters on her hands. “The lovely Elizabeth” was twenty-three, Amalia nearly twenty-one, and Josepha, another beauty, was sixteen; then there was Charlotte, who would be fifteen in August, and Antoine, who was in her twelfth year. Due to her youth, the last named was not at this point a vital player in the imperial game, although she was mentioned vaguely in connection with her coevals, the French princes. This game might be termed that of “alliances and establishments”; the phrase was that of the memorialist Louis Dutens as he congratulated Maria Teresa on that mixture of “good fortune and address” that had brought her such success in setting up her children.

The two Ferdinands—of Parma and Naples, both born in 1751—were prizes that Maria Teresa was determined to secure, not so much for her daughters—whose individuality was of no moment—as for the sake of the alliances they would symbolize. Louis XV, advising his grandson Don Ferdinand of Parma, took a worldly-wise attitude to the whole matter: what did it matter who she was, so long as he got a suitable wife? It was true that it was easier to make love to a pretty woman than a plain one, but that was about the measure of the difference. Charles III of Spain on the other hand, as his father, objected to the choice of Amalia for Ferdinand of Naples since she was six years older than her prospective bridegroom. This made the sixteen-year-old Archduchess Josepha the obvious candidate for this Ferdinand. She was also delightfully pretty, pliant by nature and, for all these reasons, her brother the Emperor’s favourite.

Then a series of disasters struck, making 1767 Maria Teresa’s
annus horribilis
. Already Marie Christine had lost her baby, and she herself had been seriously ill. Then the poor unloved Empress, Joseph’s second wife, died of smallpox at the end of May and was placed, as was the custom, in a tomb in the imperial crypt of the Hofburg.
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After that Maria Teresa herself caught smallpox, and came close enough to death to receive the Last Sacrament; Europe trembled at the news, while her own family was in shock.

The next disaster was in fact indirectly caused by Maria Teresa herself. Once recovered, she insisted that her daughter, the Archduchess Josepha, who was on the verge of making her long bridal journey to Naples, go with her down into the imperial crypt to pray; it was intended as an act of filial piety. But the tomb of Joseph’s wife was not sufficiently sealed. As the anticipatory nuptial celebrations were in full swing in Vienna, the Archduchess caught smallpox. On 15 October—ironically enough Maria Teresa’s name-day—Josepha died. Leopold Mozart, among others, had attended the celebrations with young Wolfgang, hoping for profitable engagements. As he gloomily put it, in view of the cancellation of all public events: “The Princess Bride has become the bride of a heavenly bridegroom.” It was a terrible death, which left a permanent impression on her little sister. Antoine remembered Josepha taking her in her arms; with a grim premonition, Josepha told the girl that she was leaving her for ever—not for the kingdom of Naples but for the family vault.

That was not all. Smallpox stalked the royal houses of Europe like a spectre with a scythe. It was fortunate for Antoine personally that she had caught it at the age of two, in a mild version; having recovered completely except for a few practically invisible marks, she was immune to infection. At times, however, the scythe wounded but did not kill. The Archduchess Elizabeth also caught the disease; she lived but her beauty was utterly destroyed. It was a personal tragedy for the Archduchess, who had been extremely vain of her proverbial good looks; according to her mother, “It mattered not if the look of admiration came from a prince or a Swiss Guard, Elizabeth was satisfied.” But in public terms, it meant that she was immediately and ruthlessly eliminated from the European marriage market.
^*09

The immediate problem was to arrange a bride for King Ferdinand of Naples, he who was expecting the speedy arrival of a young wife. Maria Teresa swung into action once more. In a letter to Charles III of Spain a month after Josepha’s death she outlined her bloodstock: “I grant you with real pleasure one of my remaining daughters to make good the loss . . . I do currently have two who could fit, one is the Archduchess Amalia who is said to have a pretty face and whose health should promise a numerous progeny, and the other is the Archduchess Charlotte who is also very healthy and a year and seven months younger than the King of Naples.” Maria Teresa left it up to the Spanish King as the boy’s father to choose as long as “the association of my house with Your Majesty’s” was preserved.

It was true that where Charlotte was concerned, Maria Teresa said she felt a rival obligation to Louis XV and his house. Charlotte happened to be Louis XV’s god-daughter, and his granddaughter Maria Louisa of Parma also thought Charlotte would be an excellent choice to marry the heir to the French throne. Charlotte was only two years older than Louis Auguste, the former Duc de Berry, whose father’s death in 1765 made him the new Dauphin of France; that was not an impossible gap. Not only was she “healthy,” she was also known to be vivacious and intelligent. But the King of Naples was not to be fobbed off; he was declared by his father to prefer the much younger Charlotte to Amalia. Whatever the claims of the French, the deal was done with the Spanish. That meant that Amalia could in turn be allotted Louis XV’s grandson, Don Ferdinand of Parma.

From Amalia’s point of view it was a devastating decision, since she was violently in love with Charles of Zweibrücken. But this German princeling was not considered of sufficient stature by Maria Teresa. Not only was Don Ferdinand six years Amalia’s junior, but he was only a duke, so that she would be a mere duchess while her younger sister Charlotte would be a queen. Yet the match suited the Empress’s strategy and was not to be avoided. It was a ruling in direct contrast to Maria Teresa’s treatment of Marie Christine, and left Amalia permanently embittered. As for Charlotte, her name—her new name, Maria Carolina—was simply substituted for that of the dead Josepha in the marriage treaty that had already been drawn up. It was a sensible solution, as all concerned except the unfortunate Amalia were agreed.

By 2 November 1767—Antoine’s twelfth birthday—death and disease had robbed Maria Teresa of all the other available Archduchesses. Certainly Charlotte’s disappearance in the direction of Naples meant that there was no longer any question of her making that mooted French royal marriage. The possible consequences of the union of the forceful, highly-sexed Maria Carolina to the future Louis XVI, in place of the gentler Marie Antoinette, must remain for ever in the domain of historical speculation. It was thus the rapid fall of a series of dominoes that made Antoine the focus of her mother’s attention. For the first time the Empress properly contemplated the material she had to hand in the shape of her fifteenth child. It had to be said that in many respects, she found it distinctly unpromising.

To the Empress’s critical eye, the girl’s appearance was satisfactory enough, and where it was not, it could easily be fixed. Her teeth, for example, were noticed to be in a bad state, and crooked; but wires were beginning to be used to straighten unsightly teeth, in a system known as the “pelican,” invented by a Frenchman who was later the royal dentist. Three months of this treatment gave Antoine the required, regular teeth. Her large, well-spaced eyes, a subtle blue-grey, were slightly short-sighted. But the consequent misty look was not unattractive, and for the rest, lorgnettes could be brought into play; fans often elegantly included them.

Of her advantages, her hair was fair: a light ash colour that would probably deepen with the years, but that now set off her pink and white complexion to good effect. It was also as thick as Maria Teresa’s had once been. On the other hand Antoine had an uneven hairline. Together with a high forehead, which was considered to be a Lorraine trait and was unfashionable by the standards of the time, this made for difficulties. The long neck was a definite asset but the nose was slightly aquiline; fortunately this was not a period when short noses were admired to the exclusion of all others. Antoine’s nose could be described as a distinguished one, suited to an archduchess—or a queen.

There was, however, nothing to be done about the notorious Habsburg lip, a projecting lower lip visible in Habsburg portraits down the centuries. The effect given was that of a slight pout in a girl, a rather more disdainful attitude in a woman. It was something that Marie Antoinette came to sigh over; that haughty
hochnä sig
(literally high-nosed) look, which she felt, as it were, did not correspond to the character of the inner woman. At this time, it was simply a matter of getting artists to avoid portraying her in profile. Sculptors obviously had more of a problem, which is why it is much easier to comprehend the reality of Marie Antoinette’s appearance—if not her allure—from the busts.