In March 1785, Marie-Antoinette had a second son, Louis-Charles, Duc de Normandie. Could Count Axel Fersen have fathered this child, as some historians have suggested? He was the only man out of the many named in the
libelles
with whom the queen might have had an affair. There is no doubt of their mutual attraction, yet historians cannot agree over the nature of their relationship. Was this a courtly romance, where Fersen discreetly adored the queen from a distance? Or was this a romantic passion with many secret rendezvous in the privacy of her gardens at Trianon? The many deletions in Marie-Antoinette’s correspondence with Fersen, made years later by the Fersen family, make the matter impossible to resolve. The most likely conclusion is that, although it is likely that they had an affair, there is no evidence that Louis XVI was not Louis-Charles’s father. Quite the reverse. Courtiers noted that the date of conception did indeed neatly coincide with the dates of the king’s visits to his wife’s bedroom.
However, so successfully had lampoonists demolished the queen’s reputation that when she made her traditional ceremonial entry into Paris after the birth of her second son, there was not a single cheer from the crowd. As she walked though the dark interior of Notre Dame toward the great sunlit western door and square beyond, the awesome silence of the crowd was the menacing backdrop as the clatter of horses’ hooves rang out in the spring air. It was in stark contrast to the tumultuous celebrations that had greeted her on her arrival in Paris as a young girl. The queen, distraught
by this hostility, returned to Versailles crying out, “What have I done to them?”
She could no longer turn to her mother in Austria for advice. The Empress Maria-Theresa never had the satisfaction of knowing that her daughter had finally provided two male heirs. After a short illness, she had died of inflammation of the lungs. Marie-Antoinette was inconsolable, reported Madame Campan. “She kept herself shut up in her closet for several days … saw none but the royal family, and received none but the Princesse de Lamballe and the Duchesse de Polignac.” Even at a distance, her mother had been a powerful influence in her life, constantly providing shrewd and critical guidance. She felt her isolation now, in a foreign court, with all the responsibilities of queen, wife and mother.
Marie-Antoinette did have one treasured memento of her mother, a lock of her hair, which she wore close to her skin. And in Austria, concealed in the empress’s rosary, there was a small token of her distant daughter. The delicate chain of black rosary beads was entwined with sixteen gold medallions, each one encasing locks of hair from her children. After her death, the rosary passed to her oldest daughter, the invalid, Maria-Anna, who lived in the Elizabethinen convent in Klagenfurt. These small symbols of the empress’s children were all but forgotten. In time, they would assume great significance.
“GRÂCE POUR MAMAN”
“This is a revolt?” asked the King, hearing of the fall of the Bastille.
“No, sire, it is a Revolution” came the reply.
A
t Versailles, Louis-Charles, Duc de Normandie, lived a charmed life, well protected from the “trifling disturbances”—as they were sometimes known at court—beyond the palace gates. In the royal nursery, under the sensitive administration of the Governess of the Children of France, the Duchesse de Polignac, his little empire was well endowed with servants. Apart from Cécile, his wet nurse, there was a cradle rocker, Madame Rambaud, and his personal rocker, Madame Rousseau, otherwise known as Rocker to the Children of France, whose sister, Madame Campan, worked in the queen’s household. Valets were appointed, such as Hanet Cléry, a particularly loyal and discreet servant who had been in service to the royal family since 1782. In addition, the Duc de Normandie had two room boys, four ushers, a porter, a silver cleaner, a laundress, a hairdresser, two First Chamber Women, eight Ordinary Women and a periphery of minor staff all vying for importance.
The nursery on the ground floor of Versailles opened out onto the large terraces and acres of ornamental gardens beyond; rows of orange trees and neatly trimmed box bushes receded into the distance, geometrically arranged
around circular pools with tall fountains cascading onto statues, gilded each year. Any infant tumble from the prince as he took his first steps would bring a kaleidoscope of riches to view; wherever he looked, his soft and silken world was perfect. His mother watched his excellent progress with delight. Louis-Charles was glowing with vitality, “a real peasant boy, big, rosy and plump,” she wrote. This contrasted sharply with his brother, Monsieur le Dauphin who, although more than three years older, was constantly prone to infections.
Monsieur le Dauphin was eventually moved out of the nursery and established in his own official suite on the ground floor of Versailles, ousting his uncle Provence. His older sister, Madame Royale, also had her own apartment near Marie-Antoinette, under the Hall of Mirrors. Apart from occasional state duties, such as the
grand couvert,
where they would dine in public—Madame Royale with her hair powdered and wearing a stiff panniered gown, the Duc de Normandie usually sitting on his mother’s lap—their lives were shielded from the public. The Duc de Normandie was taken on carriage trips around the park, visits to the farm at the Trianon or he could play in his little garden on the terrace. Occasionally there would be trips to nearby palaces at Marly, Saint-Cloud or Fontainebleau.
Nonetheless, the “gilded youth” of Versailles, in the words of one nobleman, the Comte de Ségur, walked “upon a carpet of flowers which covered an abyss.” France’s deepening financial crisis was beginning to dominate public life. In 1787 interest on the national debt alone had risen to almost
half
of all state expenditure. Louis and his finance minister, Charles Alexandre de Calonne, were fast approaching a point where it was no longer possible to borrow more money except at excessive interest rates. They faced no alternative but to raise taxes.
Calonne, like his predecessors, urged the king to reform the tax system and abolish the partial exemption from direct taxation enjoyed by the nobility and clergy. The king, always anxious to create a consensus for change rather than appear to act as autocratic leader, wanted to introduce Calonne’s reforms without confrontation. Consequently, rather than present his proposals
to the
parlements
—which he knew would be hostile—he decided to take a chance and call a special Assembly of Notables, composed of leading figures in society, hand-picked for the occasion.
However, when the Assembly of Notables gathered in Versailles in February 1787, far from accepting and popularizing the tax reforms as the king had hoped, they were suspicious. The clergy and nobles, who owned most of the land, were largely exempt from the principal land tax, the
taille,
yet under the new measures they would pay up to five percent of their own income. As news spread of the proposed tax reforms and soaring deficit, Calonne became the focus of the passionate criticism. In Paris his effigy was burned in the streets. By April 1787, the king was forced to dismiss his unpopular minister, and the following month he dissolved the Assembly of Notables.
His new finance minister, Loménie de Brienne, prepared a revised package of tax reforms and boldly decided he would try to win approval directly from the
parlement
of Paris. However,
parlement,
like the Assembly of Notables, rejected the equalization of taxation. Ironically, this revolutionary measure, which would have benefited the vast majority of people, was perceived to be an act of despotism by the monarchy. Since the king had to raise money somehow, to pay staff and honor debts, he was becoming increasingly desperate. In August 1787, he exiled the entire
parlement
of Paris to the country at Troyes. This caused uproar; There were demonstrations in Paris and crowds gathered outside
parlement
crying for “liberty.” Although Louis had reduced court spending, the increase in taxes for the nobles and clergy was inextricably linked in the public’s mind with the demands made by the royal family on the public purse to fund their extravagant lifestyle. The public’s growing hostility began to focus on Louis and, inevitably, his Austrian wife, Marie-Antoinette.
A large diamond necklace would prove the queen’s undoing: 647 brilliants, two thousand eight hundred carats, arranged in glittering layer upon layer, a piece of jewellery to dazzle the eye and empty the purse. It was the dream creation of the court jewellers, Böhmer and Bassenge, and they hoped
to sell this diamond fantasy to Marie-Antoinette. To their disappointment, by the late 1780s, the “Queen of the Rococo” was now much more restrained; she repeatedly refused to buy the necklace.
Böhmer would not give up. He offered his 1.6-million-livre “superb necklace” to the king, hoping he would buy it for Marie-Antoinette. The king, it seems, was not in a necklace-buying mood. Faced with constant if polite refusals, the worried Böhmer, increasingly looking bankruptcy in the eye, decided on a rather theatrical appeal to the queen as he waylaid her at court. “Madame, I am ruined and disgraced if you do not purchase my necklace,” he cried as he threw himself on his knees. “I shall throw myself into the river.” The queen spoke with him severely. “Rise, Böhmer. I do not like these rhapsodies.” She urged him to break up the necklace and sell the stones separately.
It was the queen’s misfortune that the Grand Almoner of France, one Cardinal de Rohan, had long dreamed of enhancing his standing with the royal family. The cardinal fell prey to a con artist posing as a friend of the queen, a certain charming Comtesse Jeanne de La Motte-Valois. Knowing that the cardinal wished to ingratiate himself and be part of the queen’s elite circle, Jeanne de La Motte hired a woman to dress like Marie-Antoinette and meet him secretly one night in the palace grounds. This false queen pressed a rose into the cardinal’s hand and hurried away, leaving him under the delightful impression that he had indeed met with the queen’s favor.
Encouraged by this, when Jeanne de La Motte told the cardinal that the queen wished him to purchase Bohmer’s famous necklace on her behalf, he obligingly did so. He duly passed the fabulous necklace to Jeanne de La Motte, who went to London posthaste to make her fortune as the gems emerged in brooches, earrings, snuff boxes, and other trifles.
There was just the outstanding sum of 1.6 million livres. When the court jewellers demanded payment, the shocking scandal began to unravel. The king arrested the cardinal and he was sent to the Bastille, only to be tried and acquitted of theft later before a sympathetic
parlement.
There were cries of
“Vive le Cardinal”
in the streets as people thought he was the foolish victim of a tyrant king. Eventually brought to justice, Jeanne de La Motte
was sent to the prison of
La Salpetrière
and condemned to a public flogging. She was to be branded with a V for
voleuse,
or thief, on her shoulder. In front of a huge crowd, the iron rod slipped as she struggled and she was burned on the breast. She, too, successfully portrayed herself as victim in the “Diamond Necklace Affair” in her memoirs, in which she claimed only to have confessed to the theft to protect the queen, with whom she had had an affair.
Although Marie-Antoinette was entirely innocent, as the unbelievable saga unfolded before the amazed public in the late 1780s, it was
her
reputation that became the most sullied. Her love of beautiful jewels had been widely reported. It was easy to believe that she had accepted the necklace, refused to pay for it and then spitefully passed the blame onto others. Under the relentless onslaught of outrageous
libelles
that poured onto the streets of Paris, her image became irrevocably tarnished. It was claimed that she and her favored friends continued to spend recklessly and that she had handed over millions of livres to her Austrian family.
She was portrayed as the real power behind the throne who pushed Austrian interests on a weak king. The degree to which she was seen as out of touch with the realities of the poor came when she was attributed as saying, “Let them eat cake,” when bread was in short supply. There is no evidence that she said this; the remark is more likely to have been made a century before, by Louis XIV’s queen. Yet the queen began to receive pointed demonstrations of disapproval when she ventured out in public. Trips into Paris could turn quickly into frightening undertakings.
With France teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and the king demanding yet more taxes, the queen began to emerge as the prime culprit. The “Austrian whore” or “Austrian bitch” was transformed into the root cause of the country’s financial plight. At a watershed in the destruction of her image she was dubbed the wildly extravagant “Madame
Déficit.”
Due to her unpopularity, her latest portrait was not hung in the Royal Academy of Paris. In the blank frame remaining, someone had written, “Behold the deficit!”
The once pleasure-loving queen retreated from public gaze. Occasional rides into the country around the Trianon with Count Axel Fersen were one
of the few consolations at a time when she was increasingly preoccupied with motherhood. In the summer of 1787, her fourth child, Sophie, born the year before, died suddenly from tuberculosis. As she struggled with this loss, it was becoming increasingly evident that the dauphin, too, was showing signs of tuberculosis. He began to lose weight and suffered attacks of fever.
As the autumn and winter months wore on, the king was losing control of the political situation. Under continued financial pressure, Louis recalled the
parlement.
However, the king’s insistence that he wanted a fairer system of taxation fell on deaf ears. He seemed unable to get his message across, and was even opposed by his own relative, his distant cousin, the scheming Philippe d’Orléans, head of the Orléanist line of the Bourbon family. It was becoming clear to Louis that the tax issue was being used as a pretext for a wider challenge to his authority as the king. A system of rule that had existed in France for generations was now at risk. At stake was not just balancing the budget and pushing through a fairer system of taxation, but more fundamentally who had the right to make these decisions and govern France.
Determined to reestablish his authority, on May 8, 1788, Louis gambled yet again. He suspended not only the
parlement
of Paris but also the other twelve provincial
parlements
as well. This prompted a wave of rioting across France. There was an outpouring of support for the
parlements
and all sections of society seemed ranged against a king who was increasingly portrayed as a tyrant. Louis began to doubt his own ability and, according to his youngest sister, Madame Élisabeth, was wracked with indecision. “My brother has such good intentions,” she wrote, “but fears always to make a mistake. His first impulse over, he is tormented by the dread of doing an injustice.” Both he and his finance minister became ill with the stress as the government’s financial position continued to deteriorate. Many people refused to pay any taxes at all until the king backed down. Loménie de Brienne, now unable to raise money either by credit or taxes, was obliged to print money to pay government staff. It was, in effect, an admission of bankruptcy. He was losing command of the situation and by August he was fired.
In the hope of bringing order to the disintegrating condition of the state, Louis came under increasing pressure to summon an ancient institution known as the Estates-General. This comprised elected representatives of three great medieval orders or estates: the clergy, the nobles and the commoners. The Estates-General was only summoned in times of crisis; Louis was only too aware that such a meeting might undermine his authority still further. The last time the Estates-General had sat, in 1614, they had only become a forum for disagreement and conflict. Yet the whole nation seemed to be demanding its recall. In late August, responding to popular demand, he reappointed his former finance minister, Jacques Necker. Lurching from one policy to another, increasingly unable to stave off bankruptcy, Louis became trapped. Finally, he agreed to summon the Estates-General to Versailles the following year. It was a desperate gamble.
When the Estates-General had last met 174 years previously, it had had an equal number of representatives from each Estate, in which the First Estate (the clergy) and the Second Estate (the nobility) could always combine together to outvote the Third Estate (the commoners). When the restored
parlement
demanded the same arrangement this time, there was outrage and further riots. Louis decided to right this imbalance by giving the commoners as many representatives as the nobility and clergy together, but he neglected to say whether the voting would be by “order” or by head. What had initially begun as a protest by the clergy and nobles against the powers of the king to raise their taxes had now set in motion a chain of events in which all sections in France sought to exert greater political power. Even the elements seemed ranged against Louis. A very bad harvest was followed in 1788 by a viciously cruel winter in which many of the poor died of cold or starved. Unrest was growing; robber bands pillaged the countryside. To many ordinary people the whole system in France seemed rotten; feelings against the king and queen hardened as deeply felt grievances were aired.