Marie Antoinette (71 page)

Undoubtedly it is the death of Marie Antoinette that casts a glow of nobility over her life story. Some of her admirers understood this from the first, such as Horace Walpole who had once hailed her as Virgil’s “true goddess.” He reflected “coolly” for three days before writing on the subject to his friend Mary Berry and then pronounced: “Mine is not grief
now
. No, it is all admiration and enthusiasm!” The last days of “that unparalleled Princess” with not one friend to comfort her were so superior to any death ever exhibited or recorded that he would not choose to revive her evenif he could—unless of course she could be restored to a true happiness that would include her children. “Let history or legend produce a similar model.”

Certainly the “greatness” at the end for which Marie Antoinette was much praised was true enough. “Unhappy Queen! What courage and what firmness she has shown!” exclaimed Madame Adélaïde in September 1793—the very aunt who had spoken so dismissively of
l’Autrichienne
twenty-three years earlier. “How has she talked to all these villains! . . .
If only everything had depended on her!
”

Let it be remembered, however, that this constancy was not a virtue that she exhibited on one solitary occasion in October 1793. On the contrary, Marie Antoinette faced a remarkable, even horrifying, tally of potentially violent assaults between 5 October 1789 and her death four years later. The howling invasion of Versailles, the events at the Tuileries of 20 June when she had to hide and the still more awful ones of 10 August, followed by the threats to her personally in the Tower during the September Massacres, as the crowd exhibiting the head of the Princesse de Lamballe wanted to acquire “the head of Antoinette” as well; these were simply the most salient episodes. They leave out of the account other occurrences that were merely deeply unpleasant, such as the mobbing of the carriages intended for Saint Cloud and the slow torture of the return from Varennes, to say nothing of the gross, often maniacal threats to her person to which she had to listen almost daily—with the hope but not the absolute assurance that the words were empty.

On all these occasions Marie Antoinette experienced extreme fear, as we know from her private communications, quite apart from her dread on behalf of her children (and husband). Yet never at any time did she exhibit her distress publicly; her composure was so sublime as to be interpreted as contempt by her enemies until finally Hébert in
Le Père Duchesne
resorted to calling it the serenity of a habitual criminal. Courage like that did not come out of the blue. Nor could it be simply inherited, with due respect to those who casually attributed Marie Antoinette’s bravery to the fact that she was the daughter of the great Maria Teresa. The Empress of Austria died in her bed at the age of sixty-three, surrounded by her family and servants, a very different, lonely fate being reserved for the Queen of France.

But a death, however noble, can never be the whole picture. The last weeks of Marie Antoinette’s life also drew attention to the remarkable intelligence with which she faced her accusers. Her friend Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire, writing to her mother two weeks after the Queen’s death, commented on this, how “her answers, her cleverness, and greatness of mind” blazed forth in double splendour in view of her circumstances. The “horror of making the child appear against her was what one should have hoped the mind of man incapable of,” added the Duchess. The Princesse de Tarante wondered that the Queen did not quote Julius Caesar’s words, “Et tu, Brute,” regarding her son: “Et toi aussi.” Yet it was this dreadful accusation that gave the Queen her opportunity for a superb reply: “Is there a mother amongst you . . .” This instinctive intelligence, confounding those who routinely refer to her as “vapid” and “feather-brained,” leads one to the crucial consideration where a biographical study is concerned. Given that her trial was a travesty, given that her treatment was inhuman, did Marie Antoinette nevertheless contribute to her own downfall?

In one important sense, Marie Antoinette was a victim from birth. That is to say, she was the victim of her mother’s matrimonial alliances and the diplomatic ventures of the King of France. And princesses were of course “born to obey,” as Maria Teresa believed. Marie Antoinette was certainly not exceptional among the “daughters of a great Prince” to be from birth “the slave of other people’s prejudices . . . a sacrifice to the supposed public good”—Isabella of Parma’s words. Hers was an uncommon story but it did not begin with an uncommon situation. Where she was exceptionally unlucky was to be shunted off to France in order to cement a Habsburg-Bourbon treaty, entered into after the Seven Years’ War, which reversed traditional alliances. Yet this treaty was purely one of convenience for the great ones involved; it carried with it neither the hearts nor the minds of the French court. She was, after all,
l’Autrichienne
long before she appeared in France.

The political significance of her position was none of her making, any more than “the little wife,” as Maria Teresa called her, was herself responsible for the pitiful lack of preparedness with which she was despatched to France. Her education was woefully neglected until the death of one sister, and the moving up in the pecking order of another, meant that the last Archduchess was suddenly to be awarded the greatest position. Nevertheless the political implications of that position haunted Marie Antoinette from the first and followed her to the last.

As Dauphine and young Queen, this untrained girl was designated by her family to advance the interests of Austria in a role described by Joseph at one point as the “finest and greatest . . . that any woman ever played.” There were many Austrian complaints over the years that she did not fulfil it. At the same time, Marie Antoinette was suspected by the French of exerting exactly the kind of petticoat influence that the Austrians criticized her for neglecting. There was scant sympathy in Austria for her position once she had lost her political value, more especially after the death of Joseph II, who for all his claims had at least loved her (one suspects that his affection was deeper than Maria Teresa’s). The unalloyed Habsburg-Bourbon rivalry meant that France’s internal troubles provided opportunities for predatory Austria.

The attitude of the Austrians towards Marie Antoinette in her last years was cold, where that of the French was brutal; both behaved according to the exigencies of their own situation, not hers. This extended right up to October 1793. Queens were not usually killed; imprisoned, yes; banished; but killed? Yet at the National Convention, Hébert called for the head of Antoinette to unite them all in blood. Like her marriage, Marie Antoinette’s death was a political decision.

The final irony in all this was that Marie Antoinette was not by nature a political animal, a point on which Count Mercy frequently expatiated in despair. Left to herself, she would have carried out the role of queen consort in a graceful apolitical fashion, concentrating on the care of her children—she was indeed the “tender mother” of Madame de Staël’s plea—while adorning court functions. The effective collapse of Louis XVI in 1787, and periodically thereafter, meant that she really did have to assume control if they were not all to founder. But it is clear that she did so with much trepidation even if she surprised herself with her energy and her industry.

Curiously enough, Marie Antoinette’s instinctive attitude to her role as Queen—as opposed to the political twist she attempted, in the main unsuccessfully, to give to it—pointed to the way that royal ladies would see their role in the future: leading those apolitical, “retired” but charitable lives by which women could do the most good, in the words of Queen Charlotte. Individual acts of benevolence, private philanthropy, shedding an aura of kindness about her, above all
pleasing
—from childhood on, her love of pleasing people was one of her marked characteristics—all this was very much to Marie Antoinette’s taste. As Besenval said, she was easily touched by the unfortunate. Her famous care at the age of eighteen for the peasant injured in the royal stag-hunt, that much-disseminated image, was not an isolated incident but stood for a genuine, admirable compassion. The Marie Antoinette of the Tuileries in the spring of 1790, presiding over a charity committee, instructing her little boy on the need to care for unfortunate children, was a figure who would have fitted easily into the coming apolitical monarchies.

As for the simplicity she preferred, that, too, simply marked the transition from the grand baroque courts of the past to the more restrained versions of the nineteenth century with a strong domestic dimension. It was of course much criticized at the time—particularly by those left out or who suffered from the economies. Even Louis XVI felt that he had been at fault in approving such simple new ways just because they accorded so much with his own tastes. Nevertheless Mary Wollstonecraft, in
An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution
of 1794, surely carried such criticism rather far in blaming Marie Antoinette for throwing aside “the cumbersome brocade of ceremony” that would have masked the French court’s effeminate idle “caprices” and general emptiness. The truth was that the age of “cumbersome brocade” was inevitably passing, as Marie Antoinette, like many people in touch with the
Zeitgeist
, knew by intuition, not by reason. Ironically enough, the Queen, so often seen as the epitome of the
ancien régime
in all its foolish, stilted splendour, actually disliked such ways. It was the life of Versailles that was going out of date, not that of the Petit Trianon.

This is not to say that Marie Antoinette—crushed as she might be between the nether and the upper millstone of Austria and France, and blamed for changes that were actually brought about by the passage of time—was without faults. She was unquestionably pleasure-loving. The loyal Goncourt brothers in their biography of 1858 exclaimed indignantly: “In this century of women, nothing feminine is pardoned to the Queen.” Certainly it was incumbent upon the First Lady of Versailles to lead in fashion or at any rate in feminine display.

In the pursuit of pleasure she was also extravagant. To point out that the French royal family as a whole, including Mesdames Tantes as well as the King’s brothers and their wives, were prodigal in their spending is to explain the atmosphere in which she lived, but not to acquit her of the charge. Yet one might add to that defence not only the beauty that she created round about her but also a genuine appreciation of the arts, especially music in all its forms, which made her a generous patron. Finally, by what standards does one judge a royalty of great taste who spends too much money? (Charles I is the outstanding example.) Artistic or political? It is notoriously impossible to say.

One satiric pamphlet of 1792,
Les Adieux de la Reine à ses Mignons et Mignonnes
, was on stronger ground condemning the Trianon for its cost than when it listed the Queen’s lovers of both sexes: Rohan, the “vigorous Cardinal, Hercules of my burning and ferocious passion,” and Jeanne Lamotte. Such ostentatious spending was imprudent, and the acquisition of Saint Cloud for her own personal possession even more so. The atmosphere in which the details of the Diamond Necklace Affair would be believable—at least to her enemies—was created.

It is also true that Marie Antoinette as a young woman was not particularly prudent, if not in fact as imprudent as these same enemies believed. “My poor sister,” wrote Maria Carolina. “Her only fault was that she loved entertainments and parties and this led to her misery.” This was not the whole truth, although there was much truth in it. Many of her sins were venial, but nevertheless gave ammunition to those who had decided to criticize in the first place. If one takes, for example, the incident that led to the first personal attack,
Le Lever d’Aurore
, it was not a crime for a nineteen-year-old Queen, inspired by Rousseau-esque notions, to wish to see the dawn rising at Versailles. She was accompanied, after all, by Madame Étiquette herself, the Comtesse de Noailles, as well as by ladies and sisters-in-law. But there was a lightness of spirit there, that famous
légèreté
of which the French accused her and she accused the French. It vanished more or less with motherhood, certainly with the birth of her first son, Louis Joseph, by which she fulfilled at last “the wishes of France.”

The question therefore arises as to how much this frivolity—which faded but left its impression behind—was the product of an extremely unhappy and, indeed, humiliating married situation for the first seven and a quarter years of her time in France. Once again politics played its part in this, since the suspicion inculcated in the Dauphin about his Austrian bride can hardly have helped the shy and uncouth young man to make love to her. Nevertheless this failure was of enormous importance to them both psychologically—whether it was due to Marie Antoinette’s lack of adequate “caresses,” as Maria Teresa hinted, or to the Dauphin’s physical disability or, more plausibly, to awkwardness on both their parts, as the Emperor Joseph believed. Marie Antoinette, whose self-esteem was hardly bolstered by her mother’s incessant criticism, was branded a public failure. Louis XVI, a weak, indecisive but never malevolent character, also developed a sense of guilt towards his wife. He could never become the kind of strong dominant husband worthy of respect close to reverence, which Marie Antoinette had been taught in Vienna to expect. All he could do was dumbly resist her political influence with the aid of his ministers, as he did until 1787. And at the end of the monarchy—September 1792—he expressed his sense of despair to her in tears: “Madame, that you came from Austria for this!”