Days of Splendor, Days of Sorrow (46 page)

As my carriage halted outside the Palais Royal, I was peppered with insults as if I were being pelted with stale bread. My fellow Frenchwomen dared to openly insult my virtue, my honor, and the paternity of my children. Boos and hisses from both sexes greeted my entrance inside the Opéra. More frightening still was that in addition to the familiar epithets they had ascribed to me—
“Autrichienne,”
“manipulative harlot”—came a new appellation, even more wounding for its untruth.

“
Et voilà
Madame Deficit,” a woman exclaimed as I entered my opera box, escorted by the capital’s chief of police, who had come to ensure my safety—a terrifying thought in itself. The woman garnered a laugh and so she repeated the insult. And soon, like a wave crashing upon the shore, a tide of voices, snickers, and murmurs chorused “Madame Deficit.”

I turned to the chief of police and tried to mask my fear. “I don’t understand, Monsieur de Crosne. What do they want of me? What harm have I done them?”

He shook his head. “You should not have come to Paris tonight,” he whispered to me. “And,” he added tactfully, “if I were you, I should stay away from the capital for some time.”

S
UMMER
1786

How had I become the guilty party?

The court painter, Madame Vigée-Lebrun, paid a respectful call to state, with the greatest delicacy, that she felt compelled to withdraw a portrait of me on display at the Academie, for fear it would be destroyed.

The verdict in
l’affaire du collier
had removed the crystal stoppers from the genies’ bottles, loosing a noxious cloud of perfidy perpetuated by caricaturists and pamphleteers not only in France, but from as far away as England and the Low Countries. The king and I were convinced they had been financed by his cousin the new duc d’Orléans, the duc de Chartres having assumed the title upon his father’s death the previous year; however, Louis’s brother Monsieur was also never above my suspicions. It seemed as though every day there was a new entry in the publishers’ stalls along the Seine, although the usual assertions were made: such
titles as
A List of All the Persons With Whom the Queen Has Had Debauched Relations
(the lengthy roster included Mesdames de Polignac and Lamballe, as well as the comte d’Artois,
“et toutes les tribades de Paris”
); and
The Royal Bordello: Followed by a Secret Interview between the Queen and Cardinal de Rohan
—a disgusting farce, the setting being “The Queen’s Apartments in Versailles.”

I could not comprehend such unmitigated hatred; nonetheless, I vowed to change people’s minds. “I shall conquer the malicious by trebling the good I have always tried to do,” I told Louis.

The king feared for my health, not merely for the sake of the child I carried. Axel was equally solicitous, feeding me like a nursemaid when he came to visit me at Trianon, and insisting I take the medicine Monsieur Lassone had prescribed for my sleeplessness and loss of appetite. Mademoiselle Bertin had told me about a Parisian chemist, Sulpice Debauve, who would distill the remedies into chocolate coins flavored with orange flower water, almond milk, strong coffee, or vanilla in order to render the vile-tasting concoctions more palatable. Rose became responsible for acquiring these “Pistoles de Marie Antoinette,” as I was still advised to keep my distance from the capital.

I had thought that once the trial was over, the kingdom would regain its sanity so that Louis and Monsieur Calonne, the Contrôleur-Général, could return their focus to the financial health of the country.

Instead, the trial itself, followed by the spurious verdict that all but exonerated the cardinal-prince, and transformed the scheming comtesse de Lamotte-Valois into the innocent pawn of a debauched court, seemed to have given our subjects carte blanche to attack the monarchy. Had we brought this upon ourselves, I asked Louis, by aiding the American colonies a decade earlier? We had sent Frenchmen across the ocean to fight for another’s democratic precepts, and they had come home with the seeds of
liberty in their pockets. But cannons and swords alone did not win the day. The initial weapons of revolution and rebirth were words and ideas, powerful enough to bring a nation as great as Britain to its knees. Ever since, the winds of rebellion remained in the air, and conditions in France had put nearly everyone on edge. After the verdict was rendered in the affair of the necklace, I imagined that I heard a slow, steady drumbeat wherever I went.

The world had been turned upside down

By sunrise on the morning of June 21, a massive sea of humanity had gathered in the Cour de Mai to witness the punishment of Jeanne de Lamotte-Valois. I heard she was cheered as though she were a martyr, while curses were rained upon my head, not only by the accused, but by the throngs who viewed her sentence. Soon after her scourging and branding, she was carried off to the Salpêtrière, where the Mother Superior of the prison was so shocked by the violence done to her body that she nearly wept for sympathy.

I was brought to bed before my time, giving birth on July 9 to a tiny daughter several weeks early. We named her Sophie Hélène Béatrix, to honor the king’s late aunt, who had gone to heaven in 1782, yet another child named for the Bourbons. Young Marie Thérèse, Madame Royale, was the only Hapsburg namesake. But from the start, Sophie was frail; her lungs were weak and it broke my heart to watch my precious infant struggle for breath.

It took several months before I recovered fully from her delivery. My hair had once again fallen out in clumps and Monsieur Léonard determined that the popular fashion for halos of teased and frizzled tresses surmounting a waterfall of curls—styles bearing ludicrous names such as Porcupine, Pomegranate, and Philadelphia (the last being yet another tribute to Mr. Franklin)—would be difficult to create with my scant amount of locks. Powder was falling out of favor as well, and worry over the fragile health of
ma petite
Sophie and the dauphin, as well as heartsickness over the insulting denouement of
l’affaire du collier
, had resulted
in the mingling of natural threads of silver with my strands of reddish blond.

Mademoiselle Bertin tried to raise my spirits during one of our twice-weekly tête-à-têtes with an armload of fabric swatches and sketches. Always an advertisement for the latest fashions, she was dressed most
à la mode
, disgusted to be wearing flat leather shoes (though with her height, she did not need a court heel to make her appear more imposing), and skirts that, while full, lacked the underpinnings of panniers.

Much to the king’s annoyance, the dandyish comte d’Artois had begun to favor the masculine version of these simple, and (to my taste, somewhat dowdy) clothes—unadorned frock coats, and round hats that made him resemble a country cleric.

“This shade is all the vogue,” said Rose, unfurling a bolt of greenish-brown satin. “We call it ‘goose droppings.’ And this,” she added, displaying a length of black-and-white-striped silk, “is an homage to the zebra in His Majesty’s royal menagerie. Stripes are
au courant
nowadays, no matter the colors. You will find them in men’s breeches, vests, and coats, ladies’ skirts and underskirts, full gowns—I have a lovely petal-pink stripe that would suit you exquisitely—and if you prefer a darker, more matronly look, I will show you a green and gold silk taffeta that would emphasize your coloring.”

I shook my head sorrowfully. “They call me Madame Deficit now. My accounts have recently been shown to me. And my greatest expenses, apart from renovating and redecorating the royal châteaux, have been the purchases I have made for my wardrobe. In one year alone, I spent almost eight thousand livres for your creations, and who knows how much I paid to the court dressmaker, Madame Éloffe. My riding habits alone have cost me thirty-one thousand francs.” Rose began to protest, but I raised my hand to quiet her. I knew she would insist that her own talent
was worth the price, but I was, regrettably, forced to make economies.

“I am no more responsible for France’s financial ills than for the sun and the moon, but every breath I take is assiduously chronicled and there are numberless people just waiting for yet another exhalation that they can add to their catalogue of my misdeeds. Why, even the comte de Mercy has chided me for playing games with my children in my
petits appartements
when he comes to discuss important business. He says such behavior feeds the false impression that I am a frivolous and superficial woman. I have already laid aside my original plan for the renovation of Saint-Cloud—I had thought to enlarge the Egyptian scheme at Fontainebleau—for the Crown cannot afford it.”

My eyes misted over with tears. “For the past dozen years I have relied upon you—and we have made quite a good pair. And I am certain you profited immensely every time I wore one of your lavish creations,” I added with a chuckle, “for every woman in France desired the same ensemble. But, through no fault of mine, I was judged a monster for ‘forcing’ my countrywomen to follow these modes.”

I laid my gloved hand across Rose’s arm. “But now,
et je le regrette beaucoup, ma très chère amie
, I must, with the heaviest of hearts, give you your congé.”

Mademoiselle Bertin’s eyes and mouth widened. “I do not believe it!” she declared. “
C’est impossible
—that you should dismiss me. After everything I have done for you!”

“You have always been handsomely paid, Mademoiselle. And, I would hazard, you are one of our rare creditors to have your invoices discharged in a timely manner. Even so, you are forever refusing my
dame d’atours
’s requests to itemize your bills, so how do we know that you have not grossly inflated them, assuming the Crown can pay?” I caught my breath, not wishing to sound
cross. “Please, Rose. Please do not make this parting any more difficult than it already is.”

She folded her arms, and drew herself up, seeming to grow another half foot in height.
“Je le regrette, Majesté,”
she said evenly, betraying no hint of emotion. I, on the other hand, was in tears.

“J’en suis désolée,”
I murmured. “Rose, I am so sorry.”

Mademoiselle Bertin dropped into a court curtsy, far grander than the circumstances of our meeting required. Then she rose with effortless grace and backed out of the room, eyes not lowered, but fixed on something above my head, determined not to swallow her pride.

Despondency seemed to lurk all about us. It permeated the draperies and tapestries and seeped into our souls. The new year of 1787 opened inauspiciously, with the death in January of the king’s ablest minister, the Foreign Secretary, comte de Vergennes.

“I am come unmoored by it,” Louis confided in me as we sat alone in his library. Openly sobbing, he gave a frustrated push to his great globe, sending it spinning. “A vessel without a rudder.” My brother Joseph had entered an alliance with Catherine the Great and was preparing to go on the defensive against the Turks. Across the Atlantic, in Massachusetts, an armed uprising led by a disgruntled veteran of the American Revolution named Daniel Shays led to the widespread fear that the infant nation’s democratic impulse had spiraled out of control. Privately, Louis and I wondered what the impact of their fledgling democratic ideals would have on Continental Europe, now that they had been revealed to be less than Utopian. Perhaps the nation could not survive after all without a king.

The only bright spot was the death the previous August of “the Devil”—Frederick the Great, who had been succeeded by
his spectacularly corpulent, but considerably more affable son, Frederick William II. If only Maman had lived to see it.

My husband had gained a significant amount of weight in the last year or so; his already full face was showing the beginnings of a treble chin. His myopic eyes had grown tired and yellow from so much reading, but it was not comme il faut for the king of France to be seen wearing spectacles. Because he reeled a bit on occasion as his heavy body endeavored to compensate for his poor vision, rumors that had begun in the palace, and then pervaded the pamplets, intimated that Louis had taken to drink. They were of course untrue, as he had no taste for wine or spirits, but facts never frustrated the aims of the propagandists.