The Queen's Necklace (13 page)

What can also be seen in this story is the way members of the royal family were never left to themselves. They were surrounded by attendants at all times, like the gods and goddesses in baroque paintings. This was true even in the most intimate moments of their lives. We know that the
lever
—when the King got out of bed—was a formal and very public occasion, as was the moment when he put his boots on; and that the members of the royal family gave audience while
seated on that discreetly named item of furniture known as the
chaise percée
. The Queen even took her bath in public—in her shift, naturally.

Whenever she passed from one part of the building to the next, four ladies of the court in full formal dress, together with various other flunkeys, had to follow her around in procession. These ‘processions’ were almost always undertaken in full formal costume.

On certain days, royal mealtimes were a public spectacle. Anyone who turned up could watch. “Once the honest folk,” says Mme Campan, “had had a good look at the way the Dauphine drank her soup, they moved on to see how the Princes ate their
bouilli
, and then ran themselves out of breath to behold
Mesdames
polishing off their dessert.”

The rule was that only women could wait at the royal table, the
Dame d’Honneur
, kneeling on a little stool, and four ladies
en grand habit
. All these tedious customs were abolished by Marie-Antoinette.

Every book dealing with the Court includes a description of how Marie-Antoinette gave birth to her first child. So many people were milling about the room that she could not breathe, and the King had to haul the windows open with his own hands.

When Marie-Antoinette first arrived at the Court, it was controlled by the most rigidly protocol-minded of the older generation. To counterbalance the situation she found herself obliged to join forces with Louis XV’s ‘girls’—who had inherited none of the Bourbon magnificence beyond an awareness of protocol and a respect for it, but were otherwise just little old ladies. The
Dame d’Honneur
, the Comtesse de Noailles, she christened ‘Mme Etiquette’.

But her greatest horror was Mme de Marsan, who was connected through her husband to the House of Lotharingia (Lorraine) and thus a relation, but who was also one of the Rohan tribe, and the Cardinal’s most important patroness.

According to the Goncourts she was like the Bad Fairy in the stories. “She more or less personified the narrow and oppressive morality of the age of Henry IV, and retained something of the character of that infamous Marsan who distinguished himself at the time of the
dragonnades
by the zeal with which he persecuted Huguenots. The Dauphine’s easy, rocking walk was in her eyes the saunter of a courtesan; the airy linen dresses she wore were a theatrical costume calculated to seduce. If the Dauphine raised her eyes, Mme de Marsan saw it as the practised glance of a flirt. If her hair was in the slightest bit awry, it was dishevelled (‘the hair of a goatherd!’ she would complain). If, as was her custom, she spoke in a lively manner, she was talking for the sake of talking when she had nothing to say. If her face lit up during conversation and showed sympathy, Mme de Marsan found it insupportable that she should behave as if she knew everything. If she broke out into happy, childlike laughter, it was simply forced or affected. The old lady was suspicious of everything, and placed an unpleasant construction on all she did. In time Marie-Antoinette took revenge on her, as she did on the Comtesse de Noailles, quite disregarding the fact that Mme de Marsan was the
Gouvernante
to and friend of the King’s sisters, which ensured that the least of her actions would be criticised and she would be enmeshed in slander.” This was a pattern that would be repeated many times over.

Marie-Antoinette waged war on Mme de Noailles, Mme de Marsan, and even Mesdames the royal aunts. Primarily it was a battle of the generations, the most instinctive conflict in any society. Perhaps she carried her disdain for formality a little too far the greater to annoy them—an all-too-human trait. But then the two generations grew apart in really significant ways. Those with Mme de Marsan represented the old-style grandeur, the baroque pomp and formality of Louis XIV, which had already been undermined in Louis XV’s day by the spirit of rococo. Marie-Antoinette and her entourage were children of that new age, whose sense of beauty depended not on pomp and
grandeur
but on delicacy, grace, wit, the
joli
—charm and prettiness, as critics like Kármány and Kazinczy would say of our own belated Hungarian rococo. The formal severity of the baroque had lost its inner meaning: the age of great passions was over and there was nothing left that needed to be restrained through the imposition of formality. The half-savage courtiers of Louis XIV had had to learn calmness and dignity; the cooler spirits of Louis XVI’s needed to display a little vivacity. In her war on protocol, Marie-Antoinette was very much of her time.

This liberation from formality was also, without question, a kind of sexual emancipation—which certainly led Rohan, for one, astray. Wherever she could, the Queen spurned the official court costume and appeared dressed down, in light and comfortable clothing. The ladies were deeply shocked—and frantically imitated her. They queued up for Mlle Bertinel, her official dressmaker. Everyone wanted to be as
déshabillée
as Marie-Antoinette. But the style was not simply more comfortable, it also revealed rather more of the female form.

The Queen organised donkey rides, during which women sometimes fell off, producing a pretty
déshabillée
.

“Send for Mme Etiquette,” she cried, “so she can tell us what a queen of France should do when she falls off a donkey.” But what people claimed she said was:

“Anyone who wants to take part should come dressed to fall off.”

We know from Fragonard’s famous painting
Les hazards heureux de l’escarpolette
—The Happy Accidents of the Swing—how much the rococo age valued those gratuitous moments which unexpectedly exposed the normally-concealed charms of women. Mercier tells us that ladies would often receive their guests in the morning while still at their
toilette
, because at those times there would be frequent opportunities for them innocently to reveal parts of the body which the clothes of the time enviously concealed. (But do not think the worst—he means, for example, the arms.)

One by one the ladies of the Court began to follow the Queen’s example. They gave up their embroidered costumes, their
talons rouges
(their red boots, which at one time became so typical that the word was used as a general term for the aristocracy). They began to dress like normal people. One problem was that Parisians could no longer identify them by rank and unpleasant scenes occurred. And here lay a hidden danger. Once a courtier dispensed with protocol, how was he or she different from anyone else?

Even more dangerously, the Queen indulged in that suicidal passion common to every late and over-refined aristocracy: she loved
s’encanailler
, to mix with the common people, though the translated phrase lacks the suggestion of coarseness and vulgarity in the original. She was thrilled when her carriage broke down and she turned up somewhere in a hired carriage, like a common mortal. Her passion for the theatre in particular presented her with a wealth of opportunities to make contact with the populace, in this case people associated with the stage. She was herself an accomplished actress, brought up as such in Schönbrunn, and as Dauphine she would rehearse and present plays with her brothers and sisters-in-law, with her husband as the only member of the audience (he often fell asleep during performances). When she became Queen she had even more such opportunities, and amateur theatricals became the chief diversion at Versailles, this form of amusement incidentally costing 250,000 livres per annum. (“Do I sing well?” the Comte de Provence once asked Mme Vigée-Lebrun, the painter. “Like a prince!” came the reply.) The Queen took an intense interest in everything going on in the theatre and often visited Paris to keep in touch. She befriended the players, supported an actress with the unfortunate name, given her profession, of Mlle Raucourt, and got herself involved in a diplomatic incident with the Venetian Republic over a tightrope walker called Picq. She knew all the gossip, and had she been alive today she would have been the most ardent reader of the theatrical weekly journals.

In 1773 she took part for the first time in an opera ball, and from then on attended them with great enthusiasm. They presented the best opportunities for mingling incognito among her people, the people of Paris, and having direct contact with them, not as subjects but as one human being with another, or rather, as a woman among men. She enjoyed the amusing situations that occurred, the
jeux de l’amour et du hasard
—The Games of Love and Chance—as Marivaux, one of the most outstanding writers of the rococo period, expresses it in the title of one of his plays: that subtly erotic ambience elicited by simple feminine charm. This naturally gave rise to a great deal of gossip, and to one or two impudent comments from those who recognised her as the Queen and took unpleasant advantage of the situation. Joseph II rebuked his sister severely for these little outings. He worried that they might prove fatal to the French monarchy. His anxiety was not unfounded.

The rebellion against protocol also involved the Queen’s dressmaker and hairdresser. Mme Campan tells us that Marie-Antoinette would be ceremonially robed in her chamber, in full view of the ladies and other visitors, before briefly thanking them and disappearing into her
cabinet
, where the really important person, her couturier Mlle Bertin, who according to the rules should not have been there, was waiting. But Mlle Bertin did not work for the Queen alone, nor did her hairdresser Léonard, whose job it was to pile up the mighty tower of her coiffure with emblems, portraits and favourite animals—a whole little market town: he attended to every fashionable female head in Paris. Women readers will find this perfectly natural: if the Queen’s dressmaker worked only for her, and her hairdresser did only her hair, as protocol required, neither of them would have had sufficient practice or been able to keep up with the fashions.

And—perhaps to overcompensate for feelings of inferiority, as an Austrian vis-à-vis the women of Paris—Marie-Antoinette wanted to be absolutely the most fashionable lady in France.
But this concern with the
mode
was itself a form of
s’encanailler
. Elizabeth of England and Mary Stuart were also beautiful queens, but were regal enough to ignore the fashions of the town and be guided instead by those of the Court. This deferential attitude to the ‘town’ was a sign of the times, the first step towards the downgrading of the monarchy. In this respect Marie-Antoinette was ahead of her own circle—and closer to the Revolution.

But all this applies only to her early years. After the birth of her children the urge to pursue pleasure left her, and she took little interest in fashion. However, her hatred of protocol did not disappear. In fact, it came to a head. At which point she withdrew to Le Petit Trianon.

Le Petit Trianon had been built by Louis XV. This little mansion in the park of Versailles, with its nobly simple outline, had from the very first asserted the spirit of the coming age against its neighbour, the grandiose, marble-clad, pink-coloured Grand Trianon erected by Louis XIV, which stirs up so many painful and humiliating memories for Hungarians. At one time Mme du Barry lived in the newer building, when it was known chiefly for the way the dining table was piled progressively higher from the bottom end so that no one would be embarrassed by the billings and cooings of the King and his mistress. After that, it stood unused for some years. Then in 1774 Marie-Antoinette exerted all her influence to have the banished Duc de Choiseul—whom she had to thank for her becoming Queen of France—recalled to ministerial office, but Louis XVI held out against her, and to make amends he gave her Le Petit Trianon.

“Do you like flowers?” he asked her. “If you do, I have a very pretty bunch waiting for you—Le Petit Trianon.”

The Queen set about redesigning both the house and the garden with a passion. It occupied her, and gave her enormous pleasure, for several years. The garden was a particular labour
of love. Gardening was a specialist art in the Ancien Régime, reaching its heyday in the eighteenth century, and the park at Le Petit Trianon is a graphic memorial to the major shift in taste that occurred in this period.

Her immediate inspiration was the Anglo-Chinese garden of the Comte de Caraman, though by this time there were already a number of different ‘English’, that is to say, typically pre-romantic, gardens in the country. People had become bored with mathematically correct creations laid out, in the style of Le Nôtre, like a star—mighty avenues of stiffly erect trees lined with frigid statues of classical gods, with their fixed smiles and disdainful expressions of divine serenity. People were bored with formal fountains and baroque arrogance, bored with the topiarised trees, the geometric figures, the general triumph of art and reason over nature. And the royal family was especially bored with Marly, where, in the vivid phrase of the Goncourts, “The pavilions and gardens were filled with the shades of Louis XIV, his greatness and his tediousness.” They were bored, too, with Versailles, where in winter the cold in the predominantly marble and glass rooms was simply intolerable, along with the appalling draught and the hellish smoke from the old-fashioned, poorly-ventilated fireplaces.

The new fashion, like the whole pre-romantic movement, originated in England. When building, the English nobility began with their gardens. These were to be “like nature itself”. Narrow, winding paths led between fresh, grassy meadows, wild groves and woodland traversed by babbling streams, with flowers growing everywhere, just as one imagined them to do, and with birds singing in the trees the way real birds sing—and heard as if for the very first time. And at night the moon shone just like a real moon, and you were once again transfixed by its long-forgotten, silver-blue enchantment.