Kate Berridge (9 page)

Marie's reminiscences reveal the protagonists of the royal household as flawed and fallible human beings. She conveys the King's weakness in restraining his wife's hedonistic excesses, and gives an impression that the hapless monarch was as unable to stand up to his wife as he was to the Third Estate later on. ‘After all his entreaties that the Queen would renounce or diminish the gorgeous fêtes and entertainments she was giving proved in vain, with a despairing air he would exclaim “Then let the game go on” and extravagance and pleasure and dissipation resumed their reckless fling.' This corroborates other accounts of the King's pathological inability to be assertive. A lack of authority is a dangerous failing in a monarch, and with Louis XVI it was a fatal flaw. The straight-talking Duc de Richelieu confronted the King with an unflattering comparison of his ineffectual style with the authority of his predecessors. In a killer summary of the decline of the French monarchy he said, ‘Under Louis XIV one kept silent, under Louis XV one dared to whisper, under you one talks quite loudly.'

It is almost poetic irony then that, in the absence of iron will and nerves of steel, the King had a passion for metalwork. One of Marie's more striking images of him is as an obsessive lockmaker, constantly leaving the revelry around him to pursue his unusual hobby in private. ‘He was so partial to making locks, that he was engaged in that occupation for some hours each day, and many of those now on the doors of the palace of Versailles were made by him.' There is further irony in the figure of the King imprisoned by destiny, unable to escape his dynastic duty, having this particular preoccupation. This is one example of a memory corroborated by Madame Campan, who relates how the King's hobby irritated the Queen. ‘His hands, blackened by that sort of work, were often, in my presence, the subject of remonstrances and even sharp reproaches from the Queen, who would have chosen other amusements for her husband.' Other records provide fascinating through-the-keyhole views of the royal lockmaker. Hidden from public view, he was never happier than when forging and filing in his private workshop under the expert tuition of the locksmith Gamin. In fact the closest Louis XVI came to infidelity was in his love of the locksmith, who was smuggled up back stairs to these secret
rooms. Like finding lipstick on the collar, one can all too easily imagine the immaculate Marie Antoinette's dismay at her husband's telltale hands, as he returned from furtive sessions at the forge.

The King's corpulence is well known–his pre-hunting breakfast was typically four chops, a chicken, six eggs poached in meat juice, a cut of ham, and a bottle and a half of champagne, and he is said to have come back ravenous for a second sitting–but Marie gives another insight into the Bourbon greed gene with her account of the gluttony of the King's brother, the Comte de Provence, who later became King Louis XVIII. She describes his ‘special private visits' to the pantry, where he furtively packed food in his pockets, and recalls ‘gravy dropping from his coat skirts, as most vexatiously it oozed through his pockets, owing to the provender not having been wrapped up with sufficient caution, and in paper strong enough to keep the juice within its proper limits'. On top of his gluttony, she reveals his lechery, describing a close encounter of an unwanted kind on a staircase, ‘when he was disposed to carry his complimentary politeness to too practical an extreme, and she judged it high time to give him a slap on the face'. This clearly cooled his ardour, for she relates that subsequently ‘his Royal Highness restricted his expressions of politeness and regard towards her within more moderate bounds'.

Other accounts of court at this time describe a carefree cocoon of excess insulated from the worsening social inequalities beyond the gates. Madame de La Tour du Pin, for example, conveys the illusory security and carefree spirit: ‘We were laughing and dancing our way towards the precipice.' This echoes the words of the Comte de Ségur: ‘We stepped out gaily on a carpet of flowers little imagining the abyss beneath.' Marie shows us this indulgent lifestyle, oblivious to the rising tide of discontent: ‘They had naught to employ their minds but to devise new inventions for varying their enjoyments.' Through her eyes we are given a picture of Versailles at the peak of its dazzling decadence, light years away from the chaos and hubbub of the Boulevard du Temple. It is ‘a vortex of pleasure' and ‘the acme of gaiety'. Spectacle was routine. For a reception to honour the heroic victor of Grenada in the West Indies, Marie Antoinette, we are told, asked Marie to distribute ‘grenades' (pomegranates) from a basket entwined with flowers, and she was required with all the other women
present to wear white pomegranate flowers in her hair. When a group of Indian dignitaries, who had been impressed by Curtius's exhibition in Paris, came to court on a state visit, the King and Queen apparently played a practical joke on them, directing some of their courtiers to stand in glass cases to pretend to be waxworks. ‘The king and queen were highly amused with the remarks of the Indians, who were much struck with the wax figures as they imagined them to be so exactly imitating life.'(Marie never dates incidents, but the Grenada ball happened in 1779–a year before she is said to have gone to court–and the Indians' visit happened in August 1788.) From practical jokes to epic-scale entertainments with fireworks and fabulously lavish displays with no other purpose than their visual impact, Marie's portrait of a court on a perpetual quest for pleasure echoes the pictures painted by others, notably Madame Campan.

Marie's memoirs evoke dreamlike images of the fêtes that were staged in the magnificent gardens of the palace on fine summer evenings, giving the whole place the aura of an earthly paradise: ‘A stranger on first entering these Elysian gardens appeared as it were bewildered with delight, and as if transported to some fairy scene of enchantment.' These entertainments were carefully choreographed, down to the position of every orange tree and lantern, and the timing of every firework. Thousands of privileged revellers would be entertained, with musicians strategically positioned in bowers, arbours and grottoes, from where their music would mingle with the sound of the fountains. The grounds were brilliantly illuminated, so that every fountain, shrubbery and bed was a kaleidoscope of colour–water and foliage seen in variegated dazzling patterns of light. The effects of sight and sound were blended with the heady scent of hundreds of orange trees and myrtle bushes. It was a long way from the smell of sauerkraut on the stairway. For the young woman who grew up sustained by her mother's casseroles and who spent morning until dusk working for the family enterprise, with the odd foray to watch a puppet show or circus nearby, the most tangible sense Marie conveys to her readers with her account of the luxurious life at court is the taste of success.

But the more one delves into her claims, and compares them with the accounts of other witnesses, the more one can't help but wonder
whether her memories of her life at court are but a gigantic fairy tale, with the believable bits culled from other places, particularly the published memoirs of ‘her most intimate friend' Madame Campan. Her reminiscences, if not outright identity theft, do smack of a status upgrade. They are an attempt to pass herself off as a pet of the palace and a trusted noblewoman, as Madame Campan undoubtedly was. It is a persona that would engage much public sympathy for her in Georgian and Regency England, where the French émigré population and horror stories about the Revolution testified to the plight of nobles fallen on hard times.

Marie's eyes are only ever directed upward to the gilded cornices and chandeliers of Versailles. It is as if she is blinded by the glare of the gold and gilt all around her, for she reveals nothing of the filth for which the palace was renowned. Leather umbrellas were advised when walking beneath windows, to avoid the common hazard of chamber pots being emptied without warning, and foreign visitors habitually commented on the sheer amount of human waste. One pictures William Cole holding his nose, horrified by ‘people laying their nastiness in such quantities that it was equally offensive to the sight and smell'. Aristocrats accepted this as part of life, as the Marquis de Bombelles observed: ‘A palace which lodges twelve thousand persons cannot be tended like the boudoir of a pretty woman.' In fact Versailles was capable of accommodating around twenty thousand people. It was vast, although the scale is not conveyed by Marie, who relates things as though the King and Queen are in the next room. The scale was partly functional–Versailles was the King's home, with an elaborate domestic infrastructure, but it was also the administrative centre for the diplomatic, military and domestic affairs of the entire country, the headquarters of the board of trade, home office, foreign office, and armed forces.

Above all, Marie's account is misleading because the supposed relaxed informality and centrality of her position contravene everything we know about the strict protocol at court. Access to the royal family was governed by a code of privilege and precedent. In addition–and she does make a passing reference to this–the essential attributes for admission to court circles were wit, flattery and bon mots–verbal bullets ready to be fired in the duelling that
passed for conversation. These qualities–essential for men–were also desirable for women, though with a greater premium on grace. As her memoirs state, ‘compliment, wit and repartee were considered as indispensable for those admitted within the precincts of the royal saloons'. From what we can gather, via Hervé and from the fragments of information provided by third parties who knew Marie as a hard-nosed businesswoman, the attributes of erudition, wit and articulate banter were not hers; nor was she a natural beauty. Even a regular visitor like Madame de Staël, equipped with the advantages of wit and brains, was mocked by the court cronies at Versailles more than she amused them. Once she was seen with a ripped sleeve, and this and her forgetting the correct form of curtseying scandalized the Versailles set, who spoke of her faux pas for weeks, and stonewalled her.

All outsiders were subjected to vicious criticism–women who visited from Paris were treated like country bumpkins and referred to as ‘stragglers'. For interlopers and new faces to survive even a one-off presentation at Versailles seemed to require outstanding diplomatic and social skills; to survive there for eight years, as Marie claims, would have been exceptional. For a girl with Marie's antecedents to earn the approval of the Princess to such a degree that ‘she was required by Madame Elizabeth to sleep in the next room to her, in order to be always near her', seems nothing short of miraculous. Given all the available information, the likelihood seems slim that a lowly-born niece of a showman famous for commercial entertainments, and with links to the fair, came to be on first-hand terms with the King and Queen, treated as an equal by a Princess and granted an unusually relaxed degree of access for a commoner.

At the court of Versailles everything was regulated–the length of a dress, the number of curtsies, even how you walked. Madame de La Tour du Pin describes preparing for presentation at Versailles by having curtsey coaching, with rehearsals of the correct moves for four hours at a time without a break. She also had to learn how to walk the walk–practising not taking her feet off the ground, but ‘gliding on gleaming parquet'. Marie seems to have taken both feet off the ground in her own presentation of her life at court.

There was a strict protocol for even the most private activities, including the dubiously honorary duties of the royal bottom-wiper. Rank determined proximity to senior royals, and the privilege of taking part in such events as the King and Queen getting dressed was exclusively confined to the highest echelons of old nobility. Stretching away to menial duties to keep the palace lit, heated and so forth there were a vast number of jobs such as clock-mending and clock-winding, each so circumscribed that the man who mended the clocks would not dream of winding them up, and the person who turned over the royal mattress each day would never make the bed.

Complex behind-the-scenes-activity regulated the surface display. The sense of a face and a back was enhanced by the physical layout, whereby behind public corridors and apartments was a warren of private passages that were off limits to all but the chief members of the royal household. It was a change-resistant customary culture, which is why Marie Antoinette was regarded as so dangerous with her desire to modernize the monarchy and her flagrant breaches of etiquette.

The protocol was like a security system. It was designed to preserve a carefully controlled distance between monarch and subject, to exaggerate the otherness of the royal family and thereby increase their power. The enactment of the private in public was a crucial aspect of this system. When Marie Antoinette complained, ‘I put on my rouge in front of the whole world' she had reason to grumble. Her daily routine of bathing and getting dressed commonly took place in the presence of forty people, and her apartment was often so crowded that on occasion there were ladies-in-waiting two rows deep at the edge of the room.

Among many accounts that illuminate the minutiae of protocol, Harriet Martineau's 1841 description of how the Queen started her day stands out. Marie Antoinette liked to have breakfast in the bath, and the sole job of two women was to supervise her morning ablutions. A bath was rolled in on castors. Instead of undressing to bathe, the Queen got in wearing an elaborate bathing gown lined with fine linen. Breakfast was served on a tray placed on the cover of the bath. After her bath she returned to bed, where she received those entitled to attend her levee. These were her secretary, the King's messengers, and court physicians and surgeons. Noon was the main
visiting hour. During the few hours spent at her dressing table having her hair arranged, the Queen had formal audiences, but not everyone admitted to her at this time had the right to sit down. Typically, this is where she would receive the ladies of the palace, the governess of the royal children, the princes of the royal family, the secretaries of state, the captains of the guard and, on Tuesdays, the foreign ambassadors. ‘According to their rank the Queen either nodded to them as they entered, or bowed her head, or leaned with her arm upon her toilette table as if about to rise. This last salutation was only to the royal princes. She never actually rose because her hairdresser was powdering her hair.'