Marie Antoinette (47 page)

It would not have been at all difficult to “rescue” Louis XVI in the early summer of 1790 or, indeed, for the King himself to take flight. His
Journal
shows that in May he was riding out almost every other day to Bellevue and other places in order to keep up the frantic exercise that he found so necessary to his health, and there were no objections. The uniting of the Queen and the children with the head of the family later might have caused more problems, if not at this stage insuperable ones. However, in June the entire royal family was permitted to go to Saint Cloud as they would normally have done at this season to avoid the summer heat. Not only, as the Queen observed, did they all need fresh air desperately but they could also be more isolated from the menacing atmosphere of Paris where insults were hurled at her person daily. At Saint Cloud the King, riding by permission without guards for as much as five hours daily, was in an even stronger position to take evasive action. According to Madame Campan, the Queen had a plan to meet the King with the children in a wood a short distance from Saint Cloud . . . Her plan foundered because it would have meant abandoning the elderly royal aunts.

At this point the destination of the royal family in any proposed secret flight—or dignified departure—became an issue. Were they actually to cross the borders of France? Going abroad, to become the visible puppet of the émigrés led by Artois and the Princes de Condé and Conti, would be a perilous move for the King in terms of propaganda. As for the situation in Austria, the death of the Emperor Joseph II on 20 February 1790—he had been worn out by hard work and ravaged by tuberculosis—caused Marie Antoinette great grief. It also complicated her relationship with her homeland. In Joseph she mourned the loss of a “friend and brother” and she might have added a “quasi-father” too. But she had had in effect no real contact with his successor, Leopold, Duke of Tuscany, he of the prolific family, for twenty-five years.

Of course, the new Emperor hastened to assure his sister that he would be giving her his full support, asking in return for the same friendship and confidence she had given Joseph. Marie Antoinette for her part told Leopold touchingly, if rather optimistically, that he could count on “a good ally” in Louis XVI. More candidly, Count Mercy admitted that Marie Antoinette and Leopold had never really got on. Yet this was the powerful brother on whom Marie Antoinette now depended to control the émigrés on the one hand and to prop up their own position—possibly with money—on the other. As the Bourbons abroad revealed their selfishness, Artois with his father-in-law the King of Sardinia in Turin, the lesser Princes in Coblenz, Marie Antoinette began to think wistfully of her original family. The thought of the marriage festivities of Leopold’s heir Francis to his first cousin, Maria Carolina’s daughter, who was said to resemble Marie Antoinette herself, made her misty-eyed. “You are in the middle of wedding feasts: I wish all the happiness possible to your children.”

Even the Archduchess Marie Christine, who had had her own troubles, was the subject of a new benevolence. Ejected with the Archduke Albert from Belgium by rebels known as the Patriots, Marie Christine had taken refuge at Bonn. Here the youngest Habsburg, Max, now Elector of Cologne, had given them a castle. Marie Antoinette was becoming increasingly wary of her correspondence falling into the wrong hands—people could so easily take the opportunity to forge her handwriting, with damaging interpolations—so that to Marie Christine she emphasized that their letters were simply “two sisters giving proof of friendship” and who could object to that? Her tone in May was infinitely sad. All the Queen wanted was for order and calm to return to “this unhappy country” and—a key phrase—to “prepare for my poor child [the Dauphin] to have a happier future than our own”; for they had seen “too many horrors and too much blood ever really to be happy again.” “When you are all three together,” Marie Antoinette concluded, referring to Marie Christine, Albert and Max, “think of me sometimes.”

In view of “the extravagance of Turin,” as Marie Antoinette described Artois’ increasingly martial behaviour, it made sense for the King and his own family to remain within the boundaries of France. The taint that an invasion, theoretically intended to help them, would bring to their cause had to be avoided. In July 1790, probably at the insistence of Count Mercy, Marie Antoinette returned to the political role that she had eschewed in the aftershock of 6 October 1789. But it was to be a strictly behind-the-scenes affair; she did not, for example, attend committees as she had done during the brief period of her real political influence. She did, however, allow herself to be drawn into delicate secret negotiations with the radical aristocrat, the Comte de Mirabeau, in the relative privacy of Saint Cloud. Mirabeau, whose dissolute lifestyle had left him with a mountain of debts, needed money; the King needed an ally who still believed that there was a place for the monarchy in the new Constitution.

The Queen had feelings of revulsion for Mirabeau, referring to “the horror that his immorality inspires in me.” But she agreed to suppress these feelings in the interest of making Mirabeau’s constitutional plans work. (He on the contrary admired her “manly” strength of purpose.) The person she referred to as “M” was to be paid 5000 livres a month, all in the strictest secrecy. It was part of Mirabeau’s strategy that the King should leave Paris, and quite openly as well. Aiming at some system by which ministers were responsible to the National Assembly, he needed the King to be free to operate, without apparently being under duress. Mirabeau suggested that Louis XVI should adjourn either to Rouen, which lay in a loyalist area of the country, or to the château of Compiègne.

Another strong advocate of flight from an early stage was Count Fersen, now the Queen’s closest confidant. Whether or not an active sexual relationship still flourished, on which some doubt has already been cast, he continued to be Marie Antoinette’s passionate admirer, as he repeatedly confided to his sister Sophie Piper. To Fersen she was a heroine, misused, misjudged, sensitive and suffering—above all, so full of goodness, at a time when this kind of opinion of Marie Antoinette was rare enough. Although it was incidentally a loyalty shared by his mistress, Eléanore Sullivan, who with her official protector Quentin Craufurd, “ce bon Craufurd” as Marie Antoinette called him, was an enthusiastic supporter of the Queen. As early as January 1790, Fersen wrote that only a war—be it “exterior” or “interior”—could re-establish the royal authority in France; but how could that be achieved “when the King is a prisoner in Paris?” Fersen borrowed a house at Auteuil from the Queen’s friend and a member of her Private Society, Count Esterhazy. He was thus able to take full advantage of the presence of the royal family at Saint Cloud, which continued, with certain intermissions, until the end of October.

Fersen’s influence as an active and practical promoter of an escape plan was further increased with the departure of Count Mercy, at the request of the Emperor Leopold. Marie Antoinette described herself as being “in despair” at this development and it is easy to see why. Although she staunchly tried to see that it was better for him personally to depart, Marie Antoinette had, after all, depended on Mercy’s advice, for better or for worse, for twenty years. Now he was leaving her at the most critical moment in her fortunes and she was terrified of “being mistaken in the course I must take.”

The Queen told the Emperor that Mercy had for her “the feelings of a father for a child,” but the reverse was actually the truth; it was Marie Antoinette who nourished childish sentiments of respect for and dependency on the ambassador, which were not necessarily reciprocated. Unlike Marie Antoinette, Mercy was not sentimental. The fact that he had known the Queen since she was a nervous fourteen-year-old fiancée weighed less with him than the duties imposed by his career, as he saw them. How could the emotional Marie Antoinette foresee that these duties would divide them, once the former ambassador to France became Minister in Brussels? His new task would be the pacification of Belgium following the Patriots’ revolt, which was brought to an end by Austrian troops in December 1790. The “Austrian woman” was left with only Counsellor Blumendorf and a skeleton staff representing her homeland in Paris.

One of the forays made by the royal family from Saint Cloud to the Tuileries concerned the official celebration of the anniversary of the Fall of the Bastille. Marie Antoinette dreaded the occasion in advance, saying that she could not think back to that terrible time without trembling: “It brings together for us everything that is most cruel and sorrowful.” Nevertheless all the royals were dutifully present. In fact the Fête de la Fédération, as it was described in honour of patriotic “federal” movements nation-wide, had none of the violence associated with the previous years; it simply illustrated the bizarre contradictions as yet unresolved in the future of the government of France. There was, for example, the position of the Church. Two days earlier a Civil Constitution of the Clergy had been proposed, involving the popular elections of bishops and clergy; the pious King sanctioned it, with a heavy heart, perhaps, but he sanctioned it. On 14 July 1790 a commemorative Mass was said at the Champ-de-Mars by the Abbé Talleyrand, once assistant to Calonne in his financial reforms, then a deputy of the First Estate, now allied to Mirabeau. The Duc d’Orléans, returned from England, was present, as was the Duc de Chartres. Nearly seventeen and sharing his father’s political tendencies, Louis Philippe had taken to attending the Jacobin Club
^*76
—one of the many lively debating clubs or “pressure groups” springing up in Paris. The young radical was recognized and carried shoulder high by the crowd.

Yet there was comfort to be derived from the event for a sovereign who still could not make up his mind to be “a fugitive King.” The event was immensely popular, with advertisements carried in the newspapers for houses to rent with a good view. Even the appallingly wet weather, which effectively doused the Queen’s tactful red, white and blue plumes and extinguished the illuminations, did not put the crowd off. Three hundred thousand people watched, some of them wearing the
bonnet rouge
, based on the red Roman cap that slaves sported when they gained their liberty. Eighteen thousand National Guards took part. When royal umbrellas were raised, the crowd shouted “Down with them!” and “No umbrellas!”; they wanted to see their King. The oath that La Fayette proposed from the altar included the royal name; La Fayette suggested it should be “to the Nation, the Law and the King.” That night at the public dinner following the fête, there were cries of “Long live the King!” outside the windows of the Tuileries.

Even the Queen was momentarily entitled to believe that she had her uses. On the eve of the ceremony, delegates from the various provinces were received. Those from Maine congratulated Marie Antoinette on her courage on 6 October, although she turned the compliment aside in favour of a reference to the superior bravery of her loyal bodyguards. Watching the troops file past the King, the Queen’s attention was caught by a particular uniform. She asked its wearer, “Monsieur, from what province do you come?” The answer was: “The province over which your ancestors reigned,” and the Queen, happily, was able to point out to her husband: “These are your faithful Lorrainers.” For these delegates “the presence of the august daughter of Francis I, the last Duke of Lorraine” made an impression that was “visible on their countenances.”

The fact was, however, that the situation of the royal family was as unresolved as ever. In August the Marquis de Bouillé, at the head of the Royal German Regiment, succeeded in putting down a mutiny at Nancy in the north-west of France. This news had the effect of encouraging the royal couple to see in the politically constitutionalist Bouillé a loyal and efficient soldier; it was a view that was to have some bearing on their future in the year ahead. Yet when the news reached Paris, there were demonstrations at the Tuileries against the King’s ministers and fears that there might be another violent march, this time to Saint Cloud. Unable to control its course, Necker vanished for the third time from the government, this time unmourned. Mirabeau, for his part, wrote a memorandum that horrified the Queen, since he advocated civil war as the way of introducing order, and the kind of constitutional rule he wanted, into France. “He must be mad to think that we would provoke civil war!” cried the desperate Queen.