Marie Antoinette (28 page)

Maria Teresa herself was failing. Her last letter to her daughter was dated 3 November, the day after Marie Antoinette’s twenty-fifth birthday. It struck a wistful note about the child she had not seen for over ten years: “Yesterday I was all day more in France than in Austria.” The Empress was only sixty-three but dropsy had been aggravating her sufferings with her legs for some years. Now her lungs began to “harden”; she complained of a burning sensation inside, and repeatedly demanded the opening of her windows. There were five days of intense illness, which would later be movingly described by her eldest daughter, the Archduchess Marianne, the invalid who had never left home.

To the very end the Empress still exercised her formidable will. She sent away her daughters (the Archduchesses Marie Christine and Elizabeth as well as Marianne) because she did not want them to see her die; they were also forbidden to attend the funeral. The three daughters who were the repositories of her dynastic ambitions were of course far away: the Queens of France and Naples, and the Duchess of Parma. And the Empress firmly refused to go to sleep: “At any moment I may be called before my Judge. I don’t want to be surprised,” she said. “I want to see death come.” Finally death did come—on the morning of 29 November.

It was a full week before the information reached the French court, where Louis XVI decreed grand mourning for his fellow sovereign and mother-in-law. He requested that the Abbé de Vermond should break the news to the Queen on his regular morning visit to her apartments. Louis XVI even went so far as to express his personal thanks to Vermond for doing him “this service”; the King had never chosen to speak to Vermond before, although the latter had been his wife’s confidential advisor for all the years of her sojourn in France. Louis’ tenderness, coming from this notoriously awkward man, left Marie Antoinette touched and grateful.

It was to Joseph II that Marie Antoinette, on 10 December, expressed her full despair: “Devastated by this most frightful misfortune, I cannot stop crying as I start to write to you. Oh my brother, oh my friend! You alone are left to me in a country [Austria] which is, and always will be, so dear to me . . . Remember, we are your friends, your allies. I embrace you.”

It remained to be seen, once mourning was over—the merry pastimes of the Private Society were all temporarily abandoned—whether the Emperor really did remember that he was supposed to be the friend and ally of France, or whether, as Vergennes feared, his current offers of mediation in the American war meant that Joseph was actually veering in the direction of England.

Without Marie Antoinette immediately realizing it, her own situation apropos her homeland had subtly changed. It was not so much that the opportunity to live up to her august mother’s expectations had gone for ever although that was true enough. It was more that Count Mercy’s secret channel of communication with Maria Teresa was not replaced by anything at all similar with Joseph II. As a result, Marie Antoinette’s own relationship with her brother assumed greater importance. How fortunate then that at the beginning of 1781 the Emperor was careful to soothe the French on the subject of the alliance: “Our links with France are natural, advantageous and infinitely preferable to those with England.”

It was in this favourable atmosphere that the Queen of France began to hope that the great event for which Maria Teresa had so fervently hoped—but had not lived to see—might actually be happening. As February wore on, she knew it was possible that she might be pregnant once more. Such a secret, of course, could hardly be kept in Versailles. As early as 2 March the Marquis de Bombelles, in Ratisbon on a diplomatic mission, heard the news from his mother-in-law. The Queen herself had told Madame de Mackau in graceful terms: “I am going to cause you further bother because I am
enceinte
. I assure you that in spite of my joy, I regret the increase in your trouble.” On 17 March—what she took to be the two months’ mark—Marie Antoinette broke the great news to Princess Louise of Hesse; she continued to keep her informed of progress. On 7 May, for example, she reported that her health was “perfect” and that she was putting on “a lot of weight.” The Queen added that Louise’s witchcraft (
sorcellerie
) was very charming to predict a son for her.

The attitude of the Emperor Joseph was typically blunt. He told Count Mercy that the news had given him personally great pleasure. As for his sister, the pregnancy would essentially contribute to her happiness, “if she knows how to make use of it.” In the course of the summer, as the Queen’s condition progressed—her health in general was excellent, better than in 1778—the Emperor decided to come and once more in person give his advice to his sister on “matters of state.”

French internal politics were certainly intricate enough. While the expensive American war wound on into its fourth year, Necker took a calculated risk. Necker’s official accounting, which was made public (his so-called
compte rendu au roi
), proposed against all the odds that there was actually a surplus rather than a deficit in the royal finances. This conjuring trick caused more than one raised eyebrow among observers of the political scene. Nevertheless it was not for his accounting but for his demands over status that Necker found himself in crisis in May. Necker’s Protestant religion had always been a complication in a country where certain titular offices could not be occupied by a non-Catholic. When Necker attempted to better his public position, given his existing responsibilities, he failed, whereupon he allowed himself to be provoked into resignation by Maurepas.

“Count Falkenstein”—once again the Emperor came incognito—arrived in France on 29 July. And once again he demanded a hotel in Versailles rather than more lavish apartments within the palace itself. His suite consisted of two servants only, with an official from his chancellery. This low-key style suited the Queen. Joseph’s visit was only to last a week, but Marie Antoinette was determined to see as much of him as possible; it was helpful that her activities were by now considerably curtailed given that she was in the seventh month of her pregnancy. Ridiculous rumours were being reported by the Chief of Police, Lenoir, that the Queen was using her brother’s visit to pass him immense amounts of money from “the royal treasure.” They seemed at the time to be no more than rumours—and were very far from the truth. Economy was to be the watchword of the French court. When a performance of
Iphigénie en Tauride
was given in the new theatre at the Trianon, the Queen was careful to point out that the limited seating meant the event would not be all that expensive. The sum of 500 livres spent on the burning of “good wood” to illuminate the Temple of Love was less frugal.

It was the Emperor Joseph who was invited to act as godfather to the expected baby on this occasion, as his mother had been three years before. This gave him the right to choose the baby’s name, and also to appoint proxies at the instant baptism. On 14 October, Joseph wrote to Count Mercy that the two younger brothers, the Comtes de Provence and d’Artois, should take his place at the christening.
^*50
He told the ambassador that he wanted to know every single detail of the Queen’s impending
accouchement
, for he yielded nothing to his mother in that respect. For his part, Mercy assured the Emperor that Marie Antoinette was showing real zeal and affection “in everything that concerns your Majesty.”

The Queen went into labour on the morning of 22 October. She had spent a good night, according to the meticulous account of her progress in the King’s
Journal
, had a few pains on waking, but was still able to have her morning bath. It was only at midday that the King gave orders to cancel the shoot that was about to be held at Saclé. In the next half an hour the
douleurs
increased. There were present, according to the King, “only” the Princesse de Lamballe, the Comte d’Artois, Mesdames Tantes, the Princesse de Chimay, the Comtesse de Mailly, the Comtesse d’Ossun, and the Comtesse de Tavannes. The most important personage allowed into the royal bedchamber was, however, the Princesse de Guéméné. At present the Royal Governess only had Marie Thérèse, not quite three, in her care, but it was in her hands that the new baby would immediately be placed. Members of the two households were, as in 1778, close by. This time the King had taken precautions that the flow of fresh air should not be impeded, for fear of a recurrence of the Queen’s fainting fit.

Finally Marie Antoinette lay down on the little white delivery bed. Then: “
At exactly a quarter past one by my watch she was successfully delivered of a boy
.” The italics are those of the King. For those outside, there were fifteen minutes of suspense, before one of the Queen’s women, her dress dishevelled and in a state of tremendous excitement, rushed in and cried out: “A Dauphin! But you must not mention it yet.” Inside, the Queen herself was still unaware of the sex of her baby, and imagined from the profound silence around her that it must be another girl. It was the King himself who broke the news. These were his words, as he wrote them down: “Madame, you have fulfilled our wishes and those of France, you are the mother of a Dauphin.”

Afterwards a tender story was told about the Queen’s anxiety. “You can see I’m behaving very well,” she said. “I’m not asking you anything.” At this point the King thought it time to put her out of her agony. Holding the baby, with tears in his eyes, he told his wife: “Monsieur le Dauphin asks to come in.” Yet the King’s actual words—for his own account of what he said must be preferred—if less playful, are in a sense even more touching. For they indicate formally that Marie Antoinette had at last achieved what as a foreign princess she had been sent to do. It had taken eleven and a half years. She had borne an heir, half Habsburg, half Bourbon.

Outside the bedchamber, the world went mad. Good intentions of secrecy went for very little. Count Curt Stedingk, a Swedish soldier who was a great favourite with the Queen (like Fersen, he had served bravely on the French side in America), was among those present. He gave an unforgettable picture of his encounter with the Comtesse de Provence, rushing towards the apartment of her sister-in-law “at a great gallop.” Forgetting in his enthusiasm exactly whom he was addressing—a woman whose husband had just been demoted from his position as heir presumptive—he cried out: “Madame, a Dauphin! What joy!” Elsewhere the Marquis de Bombelles ran through his own house like a madman, shouting to his wife: “A Dauphin? A Dauphin! Is it possible? Yes, it’s really true. What are they saying, what are they doing at Versailles?”

The scenes at Versailles were indeed almost religious. For they centred on the adoration of a tiny child, arriving as a saviour. As Royal Governess, the Princess de Guéméné took the baby in her arms. Carried in a chair, she paraded him through Versailles on the way to her own apartments. The noise of the acclamation and the sound of clapping penetrated even the Queen’s room. Everyone wanted to touch the baby, or failing that, the Princesse’s chair. “We adored him,” wrote Stedingk. “We followed him in a great crowd.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

THE FLOWERS OF THE CROWN

“She as yet knew nothing of the crown but its flowers . . .”

M
ARQUIS
DE S
ÉGUR ON
M
ARIE
A
NTOINETTE
, 1783

“The happiest and most important event for me”: so Marie Antoinette described the birth of her son in a letter to her friend, Princess Charlotte of Hesse-Darmstadt. Such a jubilant reaction was not confined to the baby’s mother. The baptism, according to custom, was performed in the afternoon following the birth. The child was named Louis Joseph for his Bourbon forefathers and his Habsburg godfather (and uncle) with the additional names of Xavier and François. The King wept throughout the ceremony. Soon, as Madame Campan noted, he was framing his conversation so that the words “my son the Dauphin” could be introduced as frequently as possible.

“Oh Papa!” exclaimed the little Duc d’Angoulême when shown the Dauphin. “How tiny my cousin is!”

“The day will come,” replied Artois with meaning, “when you will find him great enough.”

It was true that Angoulême had just been dispossessed of the illustrious position of heir in the next generation, which had been his since his birth in August 1775. More importantly, the Comte de Provence, displaced in his own generation, was now one step further away from the throne.

At this baptism, however, there were no impertinent allusions as there had been in 1778. Provence held his peace. Nevertheless there was a discordant note. As with the baptism of Marie Thérèse, the ceremony had by right to be performed by the Grand Almoner. This was none other than that Prince Louis de Rohan, now Cardinal, whose appointment the Queen had tried so hard to block. Even the Cardinal’s hat, granted in 1778, had been the subject of dispute. Louis XVI, egged on by his wife, had refused to exercise his prerogative—the so-called “nomination of crowns”—to put forward Rohan’s name. But the Queen was foiled once again by the Rohan family’s skill at intrigue; as a result Prince Louis was nominated by the King of Poland.

The presence of this bad man—as the Queen firmly believed he was, bad as in immoral, bad as in trouble-making—in such a prominent role at the baby’s christening could not dampen the happiness of the royal parents. The coral and multi-diamonded rattle donated by the Tsarina of Russia, valued at 24,000 livres, represented an alternative and splendid omen of the baby’s future happiness.

The response of the French nation as a whole was summed up in a letter from Count Mercy to Prince Kaunitz in Vienna: “Tumultuous joy reigns here.” Some celebrations were more elegant than others. On 27 October the new Opera House—built to replace one that had burnt down—opened with a free performance of
Adèle et Ponthieu
by Gluck’s rival Piccinni. Eighteen hundred people were expected; in the event 6000 forced their way in, jamming the boxes. Cries of “Long live the King,” “Long live the Queen” and “Long live Monsieur le Dauphin” came from the happy audience. In the world of fashion, however, a new colour was termed
caca-dauphin
, as though even the royal baby’s natural functions needed somehow to be fêted. Perhaps the new and widely copied short feathery hairstyle created for the Queen by Léonard, to help with her hair-loss, named
coiffure à l’enfant
, struck a better note.

In Austria, pride in the achievement of “their” princess was uncontained. Gluck reported how all Vienna rejoiced, not so much for the sake of the French, of course, as for the sake of the Queen. In the case of the Emperor, Joseph confessed that he had thought himself incapable of a young man’s enthusiasm (he was forty), yet now found that he was staggered by his own emotion. After all, “this sister, who is the woman I love best in the world” was at this very moment “the most happy” being on earth.

About this time the eleven-year-old Henrietta Lucy, daughter of Madame Dillon, who as the Marquise de La Tour du Pin would write perceptive memoirs of the period, saw the Queen for the first time. Marie Antoinette was wearing a blue dress strewn with sapphires and diamonds, and she was opening the ball given by the royal bodyguards at Versailles with one of the guardsmen: “She was young, beautiful and adored by all; she had just given France a Dauphin . . .” This was the outwardly brilliant period of which the Comte de Ségur would later write that the French “of every class” regarded the Queen as one among the sweetest ornaments of the fêtes that embellished the court. Encouraging literature, protecting the arts, dispensing many benefits and disobliging no one, “she as yet knew nothing of the crown but its flowers.” The Queen did not foresee that she was soon to feel “the crown’s dreadful weight.”

Of course it was not literally true that the Queen had not felt this weight. The
libellistes
did not ignore the birth of the Dauphin, any more than they had ignored that of Madame Fille du Roi. The official medal might bear the legend in Latin “Public Happiness.” But a malicious engraving showed Marie Antoinette cradling her baby, accompanied by Louis XVI wearing a cuckold’s horns and an angel with a trumpet who was supposed to “announce to all parts” the birth of the Dauphin: “But be careful not to open your eyes to the secret of his birth.” The Spanish chargé d’affaires passed on another scurrilous rhyme whose refrain on the subject of the Dauphin was: “Who the Devil produced him?” Suggestions included the Duc de Coigny as before, and the Comte d’Artois. One of the most notorious embroideries on this latter theme had appeared during the Queen’s pregnancy. This was
Les Amours de Charlot
[Artois]
et Antoinette
, a lewd and ludicrous romp in which a page kept appearing to interrupt the moment of climax because the Queen inadvertently pressed the bell beside her as she thrashed about in ecstasy.

Similarly Jean Lenoir, the Chief of Police, whose business it was to see to these things, reported with horror that a pamphlet printed in English,
Naissance du Dauphin
, ascribed the paternity of the baby to “another royal prince.” Another scabrous pamphlet, which would go through many stages (and numerous editions), began life in December 1781 as
La Vie d’Antoinette
. Yet for the time being the Queen was able to continue her policy of studied indifference, enjoying the flowers of the crown while the police in France and the French ambassador in London attempted the impossible task of buying up all the editions and pulping them.

The welfare of the baby himself was her prime concern at this time. There was no talk on this occasion of the Queen nursing him. Louis Joseph was entrusted to a woman nicknamed “Madame Poitrine” for the vast bosom that would nurture the little Prince. This strong-minded lady, the wife of a gardener, absolutely refused to have her hair powdered, according to court custom, saying that a lace cap was just as good. She also introduced a little rhyme, which she crooned over the baby’s head, beginning: “Marlbrouck s’en va à la guerre . . .” This folk-song, referring to the English general engaged in the wars of Louis XIV, had remained popular in her village down the years. It now became the fashion at a court that was enchanted by every manifestation of Madame Poitrine’s rusticity.

Where a more recent war was concerned, it seemed a wonderful augury for France that there had been a great victory overseas on 19 October 1781, three days before the birth of its long-awaited Dauphin. At Yorktown, Virginia, George Washington’s forces, supported by the French fleet under Admiral de Grasse, defeated the English army led by General Cornwallis. As the news reached Europe, even more important than the military reverse was the sapping of the English will to continue the struggle. The way was open for peace negotiations, not only with the former colony but with her allies France and Spain. Although these negotiations themselves would be protracted, the French “heroes” of the American struggle now began to return to their own country, regaling their compatriots with stories brought back from the New World. These stories concerned a country where American rebels—with French assistance, of course—had taken charge of their own destiny and cast off the oppressive rule of a king, creating thereby a very different political system.

The Marquis de La Fayette, for example, arrived back in Paris to his wife’s family home of the Hôtel de Noailles on 21 January 1782. This happened to be the day set apart for the official celebrations of the birth of the Dauphin, now three months old. There was the ceremony of “churching” for the royal mother at the cathedral of Notre-Dame (a rite of purification after childbirth), followed by a banquet at the Hôtel de Ville, and in the end a huge display of fireworks. The Queen, taking the Marquise de La Fayette, a member of her household, into her own coach, proceeded to the Hôtel de Noailles, where she graciously received La Fayette himself at the door. It was the kind of considerate gesture at which Marie Antoinette excelled. It did not, however, stop La Fayette observing of a subsequent lavish court ball that the cost would have equipped a whole regiment in America . . . He was literally and metaphorically coming from a different place.

There was another rite of passage a month after the Dauphin’s birth. On 21 November 1781 Louis XVI recorded in his laconic
Journal
: “Nothing,” meaning no hunting, then: “Death of Monsieur de Maurepas at eleven-thirty in the evening.” Joseph II was quick to point out that the disappearance of the King’s mentor, his chief servant for over seven years, presented an obvious political opportunity for the Queen in the first flush of her triumph as the mother of the Dauphin. Marie Antoinette’s advisor, the Abbé de Vermond, put forward the name of the ambitious Archbishop of Toulouse, Loménie de Brienne, as a substitute, who would act as the Queen’s man. But the King, with a new sense of his own independence, declined angrily.

The real gainer from Maurepas’ death was not Marie Antoinette but Vergennes, who was able to slip unostentatiously into the position of confidence that his patron Maurepas had formerly occupied. By February 1782 Mercy was back with his usual litany of complaints about the Queen’s unreliable behaviour where politics were concerned; how she let the King believe she was bored with affairs of state and did not even want to know about them. Her “great credit” with her husband was used only to dispense favours.

It might have been better for Marie Antoinette’s reputation in France if she had maintained the apolitical stance that obviously accorded with her own deepest wishes, despite family pressure from Austria. Unfortunately—for her—she continued to be an important chess piece in the predatory foreign schemes of Joseph II, as she had once been a pawn in her mother’s game of matrimonial alliances. Over the next few years, the Emperor made relentless demands on his sister. She must assure him of French support by exerting her influence with the King. Yet in most areas, the foreign policy of Austria, as interpreted by the Emperor, brought him into conflict with French interests. Nevertheless Joseph urged on Marie Antoinette what he called “the finest and greatest role that any woman ever played.” (He had forgotten the late Empress Maria Teresa, it seems, in his attempt to galvanize his sister.)

The previous year, the Emperor and the Tsarina Catherine of Russia had concluded a secret alliance against Turkish attack. Now Joseph gave Marie Antoinette instructions for the warm reception to be accorded to the Tsarina’s heir, the Grand Duke Paul, and his Grand Duchess, a German princess. Arriving in May as the “Comte and Comtesse du Nord,” the imperial couple were subjected to the full panoply of Versailles, including a performance of
Iphigénie en Aulide
. There was also a masked ball in which Marie Antoinette appeared as Gabrielle d’Estrées, mistress of Henri IV, in shining silver gauze and a black hat whose massive white plumes were fastened by diamonds including the “Pitt” jewel. The customary lavish display of fireworks was only marred by the discovery of the Cardinal de Rohan who had bribed a porter to smuggle him in, despite his marked lack of invitation. The Cardinal was unmasked because he wore his trademark red stockings beneath his coat. The unforgiving Marie Antoinette was predictably furious and had the porter in question sacked, until Madame de Campan—by her own account—successfully pleaded for him to be reinstated.