Marie Antoinette (44 page)

So began that eerie summer at Versailles. Against a background of peasant revolts in various regions, inspired by a powerful if irrational emotion known as the “Great Fear”—in essence a panic about the safety of property, a number of measures were suggested in the National Assembly. It concentrated the mind that stones were thrown at the windows of the Archbishop of Paris, breaking them, on the night of 3 August. Males everywhere were transformed into members of the National Guard, mere valets becoming lieutenants and even the musicians in the Royal Chapel wearing military uniform, although Louis XVI drew the line at an Italian soprano dressed up as a grenadier. On the same date, the abolition of all feudal privileges was suggested; at the end of August La Fayette’s
La Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme
was given official status.

Meanwhile the Queen adopted the lowest possible profile. Although she was popularly supposed to have remained in France with the aim of destroying the National Assembly, while asking for 50,000 troops from her brother, she actually devoted her time to her children. As Joseph II told his brother Leopold on 3 August, the private role of mother was the only one that really suited their sister (something that the Emperor might perhaps have appreciated earlier). It was a foretaste of what life was to be like without the adult friends who were so vital to her.

Yet all ceremony at Versailles could not be abandoned, any more than the King thought of abandoning the routine by which he hunted three or four times a week, including at the moment when the abolition of feudal privileges was raised. In England, Queen Charlotte reflected in her diary: “I often think that this cannot be the eighteenth century in which we live at present for Ancient History can hardly produce anything more Barbarous and Cruel than Our Neighbours in France.” She cheered herself up by reading a history of the reign of the absolutist Louis XIV, when things had been done so much better. Yet if much of Louis XVI’s royal authority had been stripped from him, he was still condemned to carry out the same court routine that his great ancestor had instituted—as was his Queen. Marie Antoinette gave the traditional party to celebrate the Feast of St. Louis on 25 August and found herself receiving the market-women, who arrived in some force from Paris. On the one hand they were exercising another traditional right—to pay their respects; on the other hand their presence reminded everyone exactly how short the twelve-mile route from Paris to Versailles really was. The figure of the majestic Queen who still presided over the most formal court in Europe contrasted with that of the despised woman, who by September was unable even to stroll upon the terraces for fear of hostile comment.

In the meanwhile nothing that had happened so far had alleviated the food crisis. There were bread riots in Versailles itself where a baker was half-hanged on 13 September for allegedly favouring his richer customers with better-quality loaves. In Paris, approaching starvation made the women increasingly aggressive on behalf of their families. Mayor Bailly at the Hôtel de Ville had to receive angry deputations on the subject of the bakers from women who shouted publicly that “men understood nothing.” These demonstrations existed in parallel with the discussions of the National Assembly on the King’s surviving powers. Should he have an absolute right of veto on legislation or was the legislative power of the Assembly paramount? And there were, of course, many shades of opinion in between. What both movements had in common was a growing feeling that matters would go better if the King, absent since 17 July, returned to Paris.

There were changes. The vanishing of the Duchesse de Polignac, Royal Governess for nearly seven years, meant that she had to be replaced in this position of such vital concern to the royal mother. The new choice was summed up by the Queen herself. She was confiding her children to “Virtue,” whereas with the Duchesse they had been confided to “Friendship.” The Marquise de Tourzel was at the age of forty a widow with five children; her husband, like herself a devoted adherent of the royal family, had been killed in 1786 while out hunting with Louis XVI, but they had enjoyed twenty years of perfect conjugal felicity. A strong character as well as a famously upright one, the Marquise de Tourzel would be nicknamed “Madame Severe” by the lively little Dauphin although he also loved her, and in particular he adored her eighteen-year-old daughter Pauline who accompanied Madame Severe into the royal household.

The Marquise’s rectitude was, however, accompanied by two absolute beliefs. The first concerned the divinely ordained place of royalty in the world, at the head of a hierarchy where others also had their allotted places. Her motto was “Faithful to God and the King,” the latter being only a little lower than the former. It was this consciousness, as well as the kindnesses she had received from the King and Queen, that made the Marquise accept the post, although she foresaw dangers ahead that might threaten Pauline. The second belief concerned “the precious trust” that she personally had been given by their “august” Majesties. As a result, the Marquise intended to dedicate her life to the royal children she called “divinities.” In 1789 this concept of duty, which meant she must always be at the Dauphin’s side, seemed to have no disadvantages.
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The arrival of the new Royal Governess gave Marie Antoinette an opportunity to display her common-sense approach as a mother in a long memorandum on the subject of her son’s character. It was not a starry-eyed document and the child delineated was not quite the healthy, merry little peasant boy of her letters to Princess Louise of Hesse-Darmstadt. One may discern in it not only Marie Antoinette’s dissatisfaction with the way her husband had been brought up (a dissatisfaction that he himself shared) but also, perhaps, memories of her own less than helpful upbringing, an injudicious mixture of spoiling and neglect. Certainly the admonition to the Royal Governess not to neglect Marie Thérèse entirely for her brother—a temptation generally felt by servants where the male heir is concerned—may also have its roots in Maria Teresa’s favouritism of Marie Christine. The very frankness of the document also makes it valuable as a clue to certain aspects of Louis Charles’s nature, already present at the age of four and a half.

The Queen described Louis Charles’s chief fault as being a strong tendency to indiscretion. He would repeat all too easily what he had overheard and at the same time, without exactly meaning to lie, he would embellish the truth still further with things that he imagined he had witnessed. The Marquise de Tourzel was to take particular care to curb the Dauphin in this weakness. He was also nervous, with a hatred of loud noises; in particular the barking of the many Versailles dogs, if allowed to come too close, frightened him. The little boy was, however, loyal, affectionate and especially fond of his sister; if he was given anything, he immediately asked for the same gift to be bestowed on her. But Louis Charles was also quick-tempered and hated to have to say the word “sorry” above all things, going to great lengths to avoid it. Yet as his mother admitted, this “inordinate pride” in himself might one day be to the Dauphin’s advantage if he conducted himself well; she was presumably thinking of his father’s unfortunate lack of self-esteem.

The scene was set for the events of October 1789, when the inviolate image of the French monarchy—that image cherished, for example, by the dutiful Marquise de Tourzel—was shattered for ever. Tragically, it was the very attempt to prove the security of the royal family in such an ominous situation that turned out to be the spark that led to the conflagration. The Royal Flanders Regiment was brought from Douai to Versailles and on 1 October a banquet was given in the theatre at Versailles, at which the King’s bodyguards fraternized with the new arrivals, being seated alternately. The King and Queen, the latter with her new policy of retirement, did not, however, plan to attend. It was only the wild enthusiasm of the soldiers that prompted an unwise courtier to suggest that they appeared.

So not only Louis XVI, but Marie Antoinette decided to be present. The Queen was dressed in white and pale blue, with matching feathers in her hair and a turquoise necklace. She carried Louis Charles, wearing a lilac-coloured sailor suit, in her arms and led Marie Thérèse, in green and white, by the hand. The young Pauline de Tourzel never forgot the enthusiasm that greeted her, the cheers, the tears, the cries of loyalty and devotion . . . As Saint-Priest wrote later in his memoirs, the whole scene was inspired by “wine and zeal.” Appropriately enough, as it seemed at the time, it was a celebrated song by the composer Grétry from his opera of 1784,
Richard Coeur-de-Lion
, that provided the theme of the evening. With the words “O Richard! O mon roi!” the minstrel Blondel called for his imprisoned master, and it now found an echo in a mass of loyal hearts.

Unfortunately the whole occasion was transformed in the Parisian press the next day into something that was a deliberate affront to the new national regime. “In the course of an orgy,” according to the revolutionary newspaper
L’Ami du Peuple
, the tricolour cockade had been trampled underfoot. This was a charge strongly denied by those who were there, although Madame Campan, a witness at the behest of the Queen, admitted that certain cockades worn by the few National Guards present were turned inside out to show their white linings; white being the royalist colour. The fervent songs of Grétry and others were construed as incitements to counter-revolution. Thus were the flames lit.

On Monday, 5 October, the routine at Versailles still had a semblance of normality. The Queen was at the Petit Trianon. Count Fersen had arrived at Versailles a week earlier, to spend the winter there in a house he had acquired in the town. It is therefore not improbable that he was present at some point with the Queen on what was to be the very last day she spent in her “pleasure house.” The King was out shooting in the woods above Meudon and was having some good sport. He had killed some eighty-one head when he received an urgent message from Saint-Priest as Minister of the Royal Household, and, as his
Journal
recorded, this prowess was “interrupted by events.” The events in question concerned a march of market-women who had set out from Paris at ten o’clock that morning. They were intending to demand grain or flour from their sovereign at Versailles, as well as his assent, hitherto denied, to certain constitutional changes proposed by the Assembly which would have formally diminished his authority (Louis argued for seeing the new Constitution as a whole). The King turned immediately for home at top speed, galloping all the way up the Grand Avenue. He was back by three o’clock. At the same time a message was sent to the Queen, and she too returned. The Dauphin’s daily outing in his carriage was cancelled.

A series of agitated discussions took place as to how the royal family should prepare for the expected invasion. They knew the mob to be surging towards them, undaunted by patches of thick fog on the road and heavy downpours of rain. Would it not be more secure to decamp to Rambouillet, twice the distance of Versailles from Paris and far more secure than the latter ever-open palace? There was a strong body of opinion that the Queen and children at least should be transported away; this would not be difficult to achieve, since, as the Marquise de Tourzel pointed out later, the horses were still hitched to the Dauphin’s carriage. François Hüe, the Dauphin’s premier valet for the last two years, an intelligent and loving man, thought the advice to go to Rambouillet, urged by Saint-Priest, was good: “If only it had been God’s will that it should be followed.” It was Marie Antoinette who initially rejected the idea and for the same reasons that she had elected to remain in France in July: her place was at the King’s side. Louis XVI, for his part, could not make up his mind to flee, expressing deep reluctance to become a “fugitive King.”

No decision had been made by the time the first market-women reached Versailles at about four o’clock, with the main body arriving between five and six. A message from La Fayette—that he was bringing his National Guards to secure the situation—was also received about six, giving the royal family the impression that they still had an opportunity to reconsider their position. When a deputation of market-women made its way to the Oeil-de-Boeuf antechamber of the King’s apartments, Louis was conferring with his ministers. In the end he consented to receive a single woman whose appearance and dress, according to one observer, indicated neither “misery nor an abject condition.” (Nonetheless, one of the strongest memories of the ten-year-old Madame Royale was of the near-nakedness of the women—she had never witnessed such utter poverty before.) This individual was certainly strong-minded enough to harangue the King on the need of the people of Paris for bread. When the King offered to tell the directors of two granaries to release all possible stores, she went away to join her comrades, only to return so as to get the King’s order in writing. He gave it to her.