Marie Antoinette (54 page)

The escape, then, could have succeeded. The outcome of the proposed royal appearance at Montmédy is more difficult to predict. The point has been made that Louis XVI was not the first French King to use retreat from Paris as a method of advance, Henri IV being one notable example and the young Louis XIV under the tutelage of Anne of Austria another. As Madame de Staël wrote afterwards, if the flight had succeeded, it would have put an end to the hypocritical situation whereby the actions of the National Assembly, with which Louis did not agree, were purported to be his.

Yet the combined vision of the King and Queen, in which happy and relieved subjects flocked to their father-sovereign, was surely unrealistic by the summer of 1791. The presence of Bouillé’s force, with the strong possibility of émigré assistance, meant that civil war was a more likely outcome, a solution that had been persistently rejected by the King (and the Queen). Added to which Louis XVI would hardly have made a stirring military leader, a role for which he had neither experience nor inclination. As it was, Louis XVI wrote in his
Journal
: “Departure at midnight from Paris; arrived and stopped at Varennes-en-Argonne at eleven o’clock in the evening.” And at the end of the year, as was his custom, he recorded the journeys he had made: “Five nights spent outside Paris in 1791.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

UP TO THE EMPEROR

“It is up to the Emperor to put an end to the troubles of the French Revolution.”

M
EMORANDUM BY
M
ARIE
A
NTOINETTE
, 8 S
EPTEMBER
1791

As the Duc de Choiseul conducted Louis XVI back to the berlin in Varennes, he felt “an inexpressible anguish” as if he was seeing King Charles I handed over to his executioners. For the time being, however, that appeared to be an exaggerated prophecy of doom. On 26 June deputies came from the National Assembly and cross-examined the King. By dint of taking to her bath—or sending a message that she had done so—Marie Antoinette managed to avoid being examined until the next day, by which time she was able to coordinate her evidence with that given by her husband. The Queen was very firm that she would never have taken part in the expedition if she had not been convinced that the King intended to stay in France.

After a further two weeks, the dominant party in the Assembly, still hoping somehow to reconcile a traditional monarchy with reform, issued a statement on the matter of Varennes in which the guilt of the King was neatly fudged. Louis XVI and his family had in fact been “abducted” by the Marquis de Bouillé and his son. Fersen, Goguelat, Choiseul and Damas were, among others, nominated as guilty. It was a fiction preserved by Bouillé in the proclamation which he now issued: that he had had no orders from the King. After a while the equerries were released and allowed to emigrate, the King and Dauphin bidding farewell to them with embraces. The Marquise de Tourzel, on the other hand, was allowed to resume her duties, having been saved from incarceration by the Queen’s pleas about her ill health. As the new Constitution, so long discussed, neared completion, the King was still a necessary asset to the constitutionalist or Feuillant party;
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his acceptance of the Constitution, leading perhaps to its acceptance by others abroad, was something to be negotiated. The “Triumvir” of the Feuillants’ leaders consisted of Alexandre de Lameth, the youngest of three brothers of noble birth but of democratic convictions; Adrien Duport, a proponent of judicial reform; and Antoine Barnave, who had recently spent two days in the Queen’s company in the berlin.

It was La Fayette whose star was waning. Widely—if unfairly—blamed for the Varennes escape, he was defeated in October in the election for the Mayor of Paris by that very Pétion whose coarseness had caused so much disgust on the journey back. On the other hand the republicanism of the Feuillants’ opponents naturally received a further impetus from the events of Varennes. These included Robespierre, the fastidious president of the Jacobins, with his daily dressed and powdered hair worthy of a courtier, and his “catlike” appearance. This was the phrase of another Jacobin, Merlin de Thionville, the type of cat changing with time from domestic animal to wild cat and finally to “the ferocious aspect of the tiger.” Why should a king alone be inviolable, he enquired pointedly: “The people, aren’t they inviolable too?” Then there was Georges Danton, with his contrastingly shaggy appearance—he described himself as having “the rough features of liberty”—who had brought into being the extremist Cordeliers (Rope-Sellers) Club the previous year. Other opponents to the Feuillants were the journalists Camille Desmoulins and Jean Paul Marat, founder of the hostile newspaper
L’Ami du Peuple
, to whom “Louis and Antoinette” were public enemies. Lastly there was Jean Pierre Brissot, the son of a Chartres caterer. Much travelled in England and America, and founder of the newspaper
Le Patriote Français
, Brissot led the group that was later termed the Girondins, after the geographical area of France from which most of them came.

On 17 July, two days after the King’s manufactured “acquittal,” a meeting was organized in the Champ de Mars at which republican petitions were presented at a kind of altar. Proceedings got off to a violent start when two men were discovered lurking beneath the altar. They had in fact no more political intent than to spy on the women’s legs but they were executed as spies of a very different sort. The behaviour of the National Guards under La Fayette was far more lethal. Through some kind of fatal misapprehension, there was firing on the crowds and fifty people were killed. Although the extremist leaders were for the present obliged to lie low—Danton vanishing to England—a precedent had been set for the kind of interfactional warfare that would now rage in French politics. As for the “tumult” in the capital city itself, that was well caught by an English visitor, Stephen Weston. Not only the French but every nation under the sun “from Siam to California” was represented among the crowds thronging the streets, all wearing appropriate dress, including Cossacks, Jews, Americans—a “Paul Jones” or a “nephew of Benjamin Franklin”—as well as deserters from various military forces, whether that of the Marquis de Bouillé, the émigré Princes, or just the Turkish army.

Although royalists—and optimists—hoped that the King might be the gainer in all this, the fact was that thanks to Varennes the reputation of Louis XVI had taken a severe knock. Marie Antoinette had, after all, no reputation left to lose; her unpopularity was now so great, reported the English ambassador, that if she had been released by the National Assembly, she would have been torn to pieces by the mob. There were renewed rumours that the Queen would be removed from her husband (and children) to be shut up in that convenient convent, after being tried for crimes against the nation. Maria Carolina in Naples, hearing of these ferocious prognostications, even thought that a convent might be the most secure refuge. “I would give my life blood to save her,” wrote the Queen of Naples to their mutual brother the Emperor Leopold, “not to make her the Queen of France again, but that she may finish her sad days in a convent.” (The Archduchess Marie Christine, characteristically less compassionate, simply thought it might have been better for “my poor sister” if she had never been married.) If these assaults on the Queen were nothing new, those on the King marked a distinct, and distinctly disagreeable, development in his relationship with those “children,” his subjects. Whatever the provocation, whatever the fudging, Louis XVI had tried to deceive the nation—and had been found out.

“The King has reached the lowest stage of vileness,” wrote Manon Roland, the pretty, spirited and intelligent wife of a Girondin deputy, who had established a salon in Paris. “He has been shown up nakedly by those around him; he inspires nothing but scorn . . . People call him Louis the False or the fat pig. It is impossible to envisage a being so totally despised on the throne.” The picture given in
L’Ami du Peuple
was indeed of a “Louis Capet” who was a hypocrite while being physically gross and “consoling himself with the bottle.” To the Jacobin Club, he was “perfectly contemptible.” It was a cunning intensification of the personal denigration of Louis XVI, as someone too base to occupy the dignified position he held at a time when that position itself was under attack. Meanwhile cartoonists abroad cheerfully made mock of the entire Varennes story, Gillray, for example, portraying the whole arrest as a slapstick comedy, while the King of England wondered when, if ever, the King of France would behave like a man. It was even believed—quite erroneously—that the greed of Marie Antoinette’s “beast of a husband” had been responsible for their capture because he would insist that they stop and eat at various places en route.

It was hardly to be expected that the ordeal of Varennes would leave the Queen unaltered, mentally or physically. Her immediate emotions may be glimpsed in two letters written to Fersen at the end of June. The first is brief and begins baldly: “Be reassured about us; we are alive.” The second is full of pauses like sighs: “I exist . . . How worried I have been about you,” and “Don’t write to me, that will expose us, and above all don’t come here under any pretext . . . We are in view of our guards day and night; I’m indifferent to it . . . Be calm, nothing will happen to me . . . Adieu . . . I can’t write any more to you . . .” Using Count Esterhazy as an intermediary, the Queen sent Fersen two inexpensive rings with the fleur-de-lys on them, of the sort that were still generally on sale. One was inscribed: “Coward who abandons them,” and the other: “Many miles and many countries can never separate hearts.”

The physical fullness of her childbearing years was rapidly disappearing; Léonard had mentioned her thin arms and sunken bust as early as 1789. In 1791 the Comte d’Hezecques called her outrightly thin, and a pastel portrait by Aleksander Kucharski that was begun this year for the Marquise de Tourzel shows a haggard middle-aged woman—one might almost say an old woman, although Marie Antoinette was not yet thirty-six.
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Certainly the pastoral prettiness of Madame Vigée Le Brun’s images has quite vanished; there is no rose here, no straw hat, no ribbons, only a Queen with a strong nose and chin, her single remaining good feature being her large, sad, wide-apart eyes.

When Marie Antoinette greeted Madame Campan on her return to the Tuileries for the first time after Varennes, she took off her cap to reveal hair that had gone quite white through her sufferings. The Queen had another ring sent to the Princesse de Lamballe containing a lock of the altered hair with an inscription making the point that the change was due to unhappiness: “Blanchis par malheur.” The Princesse had fled in July, first to Brussels, then to Aix, finally to Spa where she resided as the Comtesse d’Amboisse. In fact Marie Antoinette’s hair had probably been turning white or at least grey for some time, with traces noted by Count Esterhazy as early as 1786.
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Later the Queen would ascribe white hairs at her temples to “the trouble of 6 October,” although her foster-brother Joseph Weber thought that the death of the first Dauphin had whitened it. The colour, of course, was not visible when her hair was being dressed or when she wore a simple cap; pomade, powder and no doubt dye covered up a great deal.

Nevertheless Marie Antoinette had not lost her ability to please, even to fascinate, when it was urgent for her to do so. At the end of the year Quentin Craufurd, the protector of Fersen’s mistress and her supporter, paid the Queen a number of visits. He was impressed as so many others had been by her demeanour. “All her movements were graceful,” he wrote. As for her appearance, “The expression, so often used, ’full of charms,’ is that which suited her in all its exactitude, and best described her whole person.” It was a chivalrous reaction of the sort that Marie Antoinette was always able to evoke among those who had actually been in her presence. Among these was the Feuillant leader Antoine Barnave.

To reach Barnave, the Queen used an intermediary, the Chevalier François Régnier de Jarjayes, with whom she worked out a code of a fairly rudimentary nature. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s great romantic novel
Paul et Virginie
was to be used as a code with Fersen,
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with both parties careful to use the same edition; with Jarjayes, however, it was a question of the alphabet and numbers, Barnave being 2:1 for the first two letters of his name, and Jarjayes 10 for J. Jarjayes, a man in his mid-forties, had like Barnave been born in Grenoble. His wife was one of the Queen’s waiting-women, an intimate who often slept in her room, and was—at least according to the Marquise de Tourzel who may have been jealous—preferred over Madame Campan. Jarjayes himself was a devoted servant of the royal cause and had already been employed on commissions to try to curb the ambitions of Artois when he was still in Turin.

There had evidently been private conversations between the Queen and the handsome Barnave at the various stopping-places on the journey back from Varennes, in which Barnave, unlike Pétion, had shown “respectful delicacy.” Barnave had expressed his growing conviction that the Revolution as such must be brought to an end in favour of liberal reforms and conciliation. In short, constitutionalists were not at all the same animals as the republicans. In a letter of early July, the Queen expressed herself as having been “struck by his [Barnave’s] personality” during the two days they spent together and later she also referred to his “most animated and captivating eloquence” in a letter to her brother.

Throughout the summer and autumn, the Queen was in constant communication with Barnave, although they did not in fact have any further private interviews until early October and then Alexandre de Lameth was present.
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Naturally their association, once known, was given the usual lubricious spin.
Le Bordel Patriotique
, a pornographic play of 1791, had the Queen, Barnave, Bailly, La Fayette and the revolutionary known as
la belle Liégoise
, Théroigne de Mericourt, all involved in a chain of sexual acts. Count Fersen, more calmly, reported in his
Journal intime
: “They say the Queen is sleeping with Barnave.” The fact that these explicit charges were ludicrous did not mean that Barnave was not in some subtler way mesmerized by the Queen. And he saw himself as playing a crucial role, with her help, in persuading the King to accept the Constitution.