Marie Antoinette (21 page)

Nor did the Queen fare any better in the case of Choiseul’s ambitious protégé, the Comte de Guines. A cultured man, an accomplished flautist who commissioned a concerto from Mozart, Guines was a member of the Polignac set, quite apart from his Choiseuliste origins. He was also vain; the Duc de Lévis, whose sharp tongue got him the nickname “Mosquito” from Marie Antoinette, reported that as Guines got fatter, he had his clothes made tighter and tighter to minimize his bulk so that in the end he had to have two identical sets of breeches cut according to whether he had to stand up or sit down. Guines had been for several years French ambassador in London. Now a “louche and cruel” scandal blew up, known as the Guines Affair, in which the ambassador was framed by his own secretary who used his master’s name to sell information to speculators. The resolution of the affair turned into a contest of political wills. Vergennes as Foreign Minister was determined to take the opportunity to get rid of Guines from this embassy, and if possible from other future embassies as well. As for the Queen, it has been suggested that she viewed the vindication of Guines as a stepping-stone towards the return of Choiseul himself.

Vergennes, enjoying the confidence of the King where the Queen did not, won. Guines was dismissed without a future. A curt note from Louis XVI to his Foreign Minister early in the following year was explicit: “I have made it quite clear to the Queen that he cannot serve either in England or in any other Embassy.” The dukedom that Guines received subsequently in order to propitiate Marie Antoinette could not mask her actual defeat.

The dreaded
accouchement
of the Comtesse d’Artois took place on 6 August 1775. The result was a large healthy baby and it was a boy. Immediately Louis XVI granted him the royal title of the Duc d’Angoulême. The birth of this first Bourbon prince in the new generation was a blow to the Orléans family, immediately relegating their claims to the throne. It was more than a blow to Marie Antoinette; it was a ritual humiliation. For by the rules of etiquette she, along with all the other courtiers with the suitable Rights of Entry, was compelled to attend the birth and witness its most intimate moments. The Queen was present when the Comtesse d’Artois, hearing that she had gone further than merely produce a baby and had given birth to a male, cried out to her hutx1and: “My God, how happy I am!”

When it was all over, and Marie Antoinette had embraced her sister-in-law most tenderly, she was free at last to retire to her own apartments. At this point, however, this woman, so maternal that she had even envied the Duchesse de Chartres when she gave birth to a baby that died, had to run the gauntlet of the raucous market-women. Exercising their traditional right to hang around Versailles on occasions of state importance, they pursued the departing Queen with their cat-calls: “When will
you
give us an heir to the throne?” Marie Antoinette’s demeanour was as ever calm and dignified and she showed nothing outwardly of her mortification. But once she arrived at the safety of her own suite of rooms, the Queen shut herself up in her inner sanctum, alone with Madame Campan, and wept bitterly. As the First Lady of the Bedchamber wrote: “She was extremely affecting when in misfortune.”

This was the kind of experience that made one of Marie Antoinette’s more desperate acts of charity comprehensible. The Queen was in her carriage near Louveciennes when a little village boy of four or five with fair hair and big blue eyes fell under her horses’ hoofs. He was unhurt. By the time the boy’s grandmother had emerged from her cottage, the Queen was already clutching him to her with the words: “I must take him. He is mine.” It helped that the boy’s mother had died, leaving five other orphans. The grandmother certainly raised no objection when Jacques was whirled away to Versailles, especially since Marie Antoinette promised to maintain the whole family financially. It was poor little Jacques who howled with homesickness as he was thoroughly scrubbed, before being dressed up in white-edged lace to be presented anew to the Queen. Undaunted, the Queen proceeded to share her food with Jacques whenever possible, as well as supervising his education and of course keeping her word about the financial arrangements. The sweet but desperately unreal impulse was characteristic of Marie Antoinette at this time.

The marriage celebrations for the King’s sister, Gros-Madame Clothilde, which followed in the second half of August, were also no great comfort to an Austrian Archduchess. The bridegroom was the Prince of Piedmont, heir to the kingdom of Sardinia, which made the third Savoyard marriage in a row within the royal family, to say nothing of a half-Savoyard heir to the throne, the infant Duc d’Angoulême. Poor Clothilde’s notorious weight caused the wits to say that two Savoyard Princesses had been received in exchange for one very heavy French one. That weight had indeed caused some concern to the grandfather of the bridegroom, King Charles Emmanuel III, on the grounds that if the fourteen-year-old Clothilde was fat already, she would certainly get fatter still in Savoy, as French women always enlarged on Italian food; his anxiety focused on the question of heirs. Clothilde herself worried that her bridegroom might recoil from her appearance although in the event the Prince behaved with style. She was, he said, much less fat than had been reported and in any case, “I find you adorable.” About the only consolation for Marie Antoinette in all this was the increased companionship of her younger sister-in-law Madame Elisabeth, now aged eleven, who was able to graduate from the care of the Royal Governess, the Comtesse de Marsan.

There was an epidemic of satiric and grossly obscene pamphlets or
libelles
in the autumn of 1775, a phenomenon that Marie Antoinette felt obliged to report to her mother. “No one was spared,” she wrote, “not even the King.” One pamphlet in particular was dangerously wounding, producing a flood of angry tears from Marie Antoinette, because it was, unlike the majority of them, horribly true. This was against the background of the continuing fecundity of the Comtesse d’Artois who was almost certainly pregnant once more.
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The pamphlet was entitled
Les Nouvelles de la Cour
, centring on the despair of the “sad Queen” with the refrain: “Can the King do it? Can’t the King do it?” The verses themselves were extremely graphic, to the extent that even Bachaumont was shocked, although he printed it happily in his
Correspondance Secrète
. The Lamballe was said to be working at alleviating the Queen’s frustration with her “little fingers,” Maria Teresa to be advocating a lover:

My daughter, to have a successor

It little matters whether the maker

Is in front of the throne or behind it.

The problem of the King’s foreskin (
prépuce
) was contrasted with the Queen’s enthusiasm for puce, the new fashionable colour. Speculation on the royal emissions suggested “clear water” to be the most likely substance.

Count Mercy’s pronouncement on the whole matter of the unfulfilled marriage, made at the end of the year, was much less ribald than the crude verses of the
libelliste
that provoked the disloyal courtiers to snigger behind the backs of their royal master and mistress. But it conveyed the same message. It was not enough to be a true goddess to the people, and listen to the cries of “Let us celebrate our Queen!” at the opera. “However brilliant the Queen’s position at the moment,” wrote Mercy to Maria Teresa on 17 December, she would never consolidate it until she produced an heir to the state. She needed “the quality of a mother to be regarded as French” by this “petulant and frivolous nation,” which would otherwise resent her influence.

CHAPTER TEN

AN UNHAPPY WOMAN?

“You are getting older and you no longer have the excuse of youth. What will become of you? An unhappy woman and still more unhappy princess.”

T
HE
E
MPEROR
J
OSEPH
II
TO THE
Q
UEEN OF
F
RANCE (AGED TWENTY-ONE) IN
1777

The New Year of 1776 was unusually severe with six weeks of snow. Ancient sledges were rooted out, last used by the King’s father in his youth. The noise of the bells on the gold-decked harnesses filled the air; horses were caparisoned with white plumes; masked ladies of the court took to visiting the Champs-Elysées. There was a time when Marie Antoinette would have been in ecstasy at such an opportunity to recreate the pleasures of her youth. But there was a chill in the air quite independent of the weather; in this case, criticisms of the pastime as being too “Viennese” caused her to abandon it after a while. Her relationship with the King, which had failed to develop into warmth in the past year, now became visibly cool.

Their lack of similar interests was obvious. In a revealing letter, written to Count Rosenberg in April 1775 (he was one of the Austrian correspondents approved by her mother because he passed on the contents), Marie Antoinette did not try to disguise the fact. Her tone, however, as invariably when writing to Vienna, was defensive. She suggested that the experienced diplomat should pay no attention to the tales about her conduct that were reaching Austria: “You know Paris and Versailles, you have been there, you can judge.” The Queen would be frank with him. “For example, my tastes are not the same as the King’s, who is only interested in hunting and his metal-working. You will agree that I would cut an odd figure at a forge; I am not one to play Vulcan [the god of Fire] there and if I played the role of Venus that would displease him a great deal more than my actual tastes of which he does not disapprove.”

Eighteen months later, however, this gracious state of compromise outlined by Marie Antoinette, the basis for so many satisfactory royal marriages past and future, was no longer visible to interested observers. Baron Goltz, the well-informed Prussian envoy, heard that there were new scenes, which indicated a complete estrangement between the royal couple. In the view of the Austrians, this would only be solved by a visit from the Emperor Joseph; Goltz reflected that given the absolute diversity of their natures, his task was not going to be easy.

At least the Queen always maintained a “most submissive” attitude to her husband in public. But she was beginning to incarnate what Maria Teresa angrily called “the spirit of dissipation” both by night and day; for the Empress had lost none of the vitriol of her pen with the passing years. In what did this “dissipation” consist? Some of it was harmless enough. The Queen began to enjoy going racing in the Bois de Boulogne escorted by her husband’s cousin (and her own), Philippe Duc de Chartres. The heir to the first Prince of the Blood himself extended his violent Anglomania—from her political institutions to her tailoring—to the English style of racing and English bloodstock.

More dangerous was the Queen’s growing passion for gambling at the various card games with which the court passed its time. Here neither Marie Antoinette nor the court of France was unique. Gambling was an endemic danger at such leisured and privileged places, extending back to the notorious occasion in the previous century when the Marquise de Montespan, mistress of Louis XIV, had won 700,000 écus gambling on Christmas Day. The current furious craze had actually started in the reign of Louis XV. In the previous generation both Marie Antoinette’s parents had adored cards. Unfortunately the late-night card parties of Marie Antoinette, concentrating on the games of lansquenet and pharaoh, had two particular effects. They kept her away from the sleeping King, which she probably intended, and contributed to her financial problems, which she certainly did not. (They also contributed to the financial problems of her courtiers when she won.) It was not even that profit was the point of it all; the Queen gambled to be in the fashion and to amuse herself, not to win. By January 1778 Count Mercy contended that the Queen was so straitened that she no longer gave fully to the charities that she loved.

There is a vignette of the Queen’s life—and that of the King—in an account of a gambling session on the eve of the Queen’s twenty-first birthday in 1776. Marie Antoinette cajoled Louis XVI into importing players from Paris who would act as bankers. Play started on the night of 30 October and continued to the morning of the 31st, and then went on again until 3 a.m. on the morning of the Feast of All Saints. When the King taxed his wife with this, she replied naughtily: “You said we could play, but you never specified for how long.” The King merely laughed and said quite cheerfully: “You’re all worthless, the lot of you.”

The so-called frenzy did not, however, consist of a full-blooded amorous intrigue of the sort practised by most of the inhabitants of Versailles. On the contrary, Marie Antoinette had, wrote the Prince de Ligne, “a charming quality of obtuseness which kept any lovers at a distance.” Courtly admiration and innocent but gallant flirtation with men who initially were a lot older was what pleased her. Saint-Priest, in his
Mémoires
, noted that there was “coquetry at the bottom of her nature.” These admirers were expected to be able to sing and of course dance to a certain elegant level—arts in which the King was singularly lacking. She herself listed a few of such men for herself in that letter to Count Rosenberg which rejected “Vulcan’s forge.” Her singing parties consisted of chosen ladies with good voices and “certain agreeable men who were, however, no longer young.” Apart from Comte Jules de Polignac, who was thirty, these included the Duc de Duras, father-in-law of one of her Dames du Palais, who was sixty, the Duc de Noailles who was seventy-two and the Baron de Besenval who was in his fifties.

The Baron de Besenval, a lieutenant colonel of the Swiss Guards, was typical of the kind of older man who appealed to the young Queen as an amusing companion. As the Comte de Ségur wrote, “His agreeable levity, entirely French, made one forget that he was born a Swiss.” He was rated the best raconteur in the Polignac set, a virtue that weighed heavily in those circles against his minor vices of drinking and womanizing. Besenval was later accused by contemporaries of encouraging the Queen’s spirit of mockery (to her friends this was merely her sense of fun) although he stepped out of line with an inappropriate declaration of passion. It seems that there was a misunderstanding on both sides. Marie Antoinette imagined that Besenval’s “grey hairs” were security against serious attentions, whereas as a result of the Queen’s friendship Besenval deluded himself into thinking that they would be welcome. When Besenval fell on his knees, it was the Queen of France who rebuked him in icy tones: “Rise, sir, the King shall not be informed of an offence that would disgrace you for ever.” Besenval stammered an apology and withdrew.

Almost exactly the same thing happened when an even more celebrated roué, the Duc de Lauzun, was encouraged by the spectacle—as he saw it—of a beautiful young Queen for the taking and similarly declared himself. In his case the false impression arose over a misunderstanding connected with a magnificent plume of white heron’s feathers sported by Lauzun at the salon of the Princesse de Guéméné and which the Queen admired. Her admiration forgotten, the Queen was startled to receive the plume subsequently as a present via the Princesse. Wrote Madame Campan: “As Lauzun had been wearing it, the Queen had not imagined that he could think of giving it to her.” Etiquette being all-important, Marie Antoinette now calculated that a single airing of the plume in her own coiffure in Lauzun’s presence would be sufficient to avoid giving offence. Unfortunately Lauzun’s vanity led him to magnify the favour. He too pressed his suit, and was also rejected, with the chilling regal words: “Go, sir.” Whereas Besenval remained part of the Polignac set, finally being too amusing to be banished, Lauzun moved to the Orléanist opposition circle.
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There is a sense of hysteria about these rejections. But it was an understandable hysteria; the Queen was only too well aware that her chastity, like the state of her marriage, must always be a subject of gossip and conjecture. For example, a whole romance was built round an incident in which a good-looking if slightly foolish young man in the household of Artois, called “
le beau
Dillon,” fainted in public. The alarmed Queen placed her hand over his heart to check for signs of life—a spontaneous gesture, which was either “imprudent” or concerned, depending on the point of view. She repaid those who badmouthed her on the subject with an intense dislike. One notable example was the malicious Prince Louis de Rohan, French ambassador in Vienna, about whom she began to share her mother’s feelings of acute disapproval.

More seriously, her undeniable enjoyment of the company of the Comte d’Artois himself, the most attractive royal brother, would become a long-running favourite of the
libellistes
. They drew obscene conclusions about the Queen’s pleasures by contrasting Artois’ evident virility with Louis XVI’s impotence. In fact the attitude of Marie Antoinette to Artois had something of the big sister about it (she was two years older than he) even if she did have more tastes in common with him than with her husband. In any case, had Marie Antoinette indeed chosen to embark on a real love affair at this stage, her brother-in-law was the last man she would have chosen. The danger of revelation was far too great in view of the fact that Artois’ own children had much to gain from the Queen’s ruin; their chances in the succession would have been improved still further.

With the whole question of physical intimacy in her marriage unresolved, it would be natural for Marie Antoinette to feel awkwardness if not outright disgust at the whole sexual process. Certainly Madame Campan called her personal modesty “extreme.” Marie Antoinette understandably appreciated admirers who courted her without pressing their suit, either out of respect or because they were in fact romantically engaged elsewhere. With the handsome young Swedish aristocrat Count Fersen far away from France (insofar as their brief encounter had been remembered by either party), it was the gallantry of older men that bolstered the Queen’s selfconfidence and allowed her to give vent to her taste for harmless flirtation. The Duc de Coigny, for example, one of her clear favourites, was almost twenty years her senior. He had been a good soldier in the Seven Years’ War, and was now the pattern of a faithful servant. His elegant manners and devotion were much commended, but to those in the know, it was clearly not an ardent relationship.

Where younger men were concerned, the foreign-born were particularly welcome because their material expectations at Versailles would not match those of the French and they might also avoid some of the many interfamilial intrigues that plagued the court. Marie Antoinette was fascinated by several of the other personable young Swedes at court, with their dashing appearance and excellent French. Then there were various British aristocrats from across the Channel who made an appearance at Versailles as part of the constant Anglo-French connection at the court level, which somehow floated lightly above more mundane political differences. Indeed, the Emperor Joseph (who had an extremely low opinion of Austria’s former ally) accused his sister of flirtatiousness where “useless” young English people were concerned. A few years later, whether flirtatiously or not, Marie Antoinette certainly relished the spectacle of the young Lord Strathavon, who possessed a famously well-turned pair of legs, dancing the Highland Fling at Versailles. She also danced with “this charming Scot” herself, presumably something more conventional.
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More serious and long-lasting relationships were enjoyed by Marie Antoinette with the Prince de Ligne and Count Valentin Esterhazy, respectively twenty years and fifteen years her senior. The Prince’s roots were in Belgium but he had come to Vienna at the age of sixteen; his mother was a princess of Salm and his wife—to whom he had been married about the time Marie Antoinette was born—a princess of Liechtenstein. Thoroughly cosmopolitan, he could claim cousinage of sorts not only with the Habsburgs but also with the Kings of France, Prussia and Poland. Such a man, who described himself as feeling “an Austrian in France [where he had a house in Paris in the rue Jacob] and a Frenchman in Austria,” could not fail to appeal to the expatriate Marie Antoinette. Furthermore, for “elegance of mind and manners,” the Prince de Ligne never had an equal, according to Madame Vigée Le Brun.

Count Valentin Esterhazy was of Hungarian origin but he had been brought up in France and had fought well in the Seven Years’ War. Madame de la Tour du Pin wrote that the Queen addressed Esterhazy as “brother” and treated him as friend. The Empress expressed surprise that such a “whippersnapper” of no particular distinction should be a member of her daughter’s circle; her view was coloured by the part that Esterhazy’s Hungarian family had played in an uprising against her. But Esterhazy showed himself unselfish as well as a dashing courtier; the Queen rewarded his fidelity by helping to arrange his marriage to a wealthy young heiress, to whom Esterhazy became notably attached. He was also approved by Louis XVI, who wrote him a delightful little note on the arrival of his son: “A little Hussar has been born,” signed “A Person at Versailles.”