Days of Splendor, Days of Sorrow

by Juliet Grey

  “Sweeter than what?” Louis looked as if he had a bellyache, or a stitch in his side from a surfeit of brisk exertion. As neither could have been the case, “What pains you, Sire?” I asked. I rested my gloved hand in his. He made no reply but the pallor on his face was the same greenish hue as I recalled from our wedding day some four years earlier. He was terrified of what awaited him, fearful of the awful responsibility that now rested entirely upon his broad shoulders. And as much as I desired to be a helpmeet in the governance of the realm, I was no more than his consort. Queens of France were made for one thing only. And that responsibility, I was painfully aware, I had thus far failed to fulfill.

  I pressed Louis’s hand in a gesture of reassurance. Just at that moment, the doors of the carriage were sprung open and the traveling steps unfolded by a team of efficient footmen. “Sois courageux,” I murmured. “And remember—there is no one to scold you anymore. The crown is yours.”

  The Ministers’ Courtyard and the Cour Royale just inside the great gates were once again pulsing with people. The vendors had returned to their customary locations and were already doing a brisk business renting hats and swords to the men who wished to visit Versailles but were unaware of the etiquette required. The various marchandes of ribbons and fans and parfums had set up their stalls as well. I wondered briefly where they had been during the past two weeks. How had they put bread on their tables while the court was away?

  My husband adjusted the glittering Order of the Holy Spirit which he wore pinned to a sash across his chest. But for the enormous diamond star, his attire was so unprepossessing—his black mourning suit of ottoman striped silk was devoid of gilt embroidery, and his silver shoe buckles were unadorned—that he could have easily been mistaken for a wealthy merchant. As we were handed out of the carriage into the bright afternoon, at the sight of my husband a great cheer went up. “Vive le roi Louis Seize!” How the French had hated their old king—and how they loved their new sovereign. Louis le Desiré they called my husband.

  Louis reddened. I would have to remind him that kings did not blush, even if they were only nineteen. “Et mon peuple—my good people—vive la reine Marie Antoinette!” he exclaimed, leading me forth as if we were stepping onto a parquet dance floor instead of the vast gravel courtyard.

  They did not shout quite as loudly for me. I suppose I had expected they would, and managed to mask my disappointment behind a gracious smile. When I departed Vienna in the spring of 1770 my mother had not so much exhorted, but instructed me to make the people of France love me. I dared not tell her that they weren’t fond of foreigners, and that even at court there were those who employed a spiteful little nickname for me—l’Autrichienne—a play on words, crossing my nationality with the word for a female dog. Didn’t Maman realize that France had been Austria’s enemy for nine hundred years before they signed a peace treaty with the Hapsburgs in 1756? Make the French love me? It was my fondest hope, but I had so many centuries of hatred to reverse.

  The courtyards teemed with the excitement of a festival day. Citizens, noisy, curious, and jubilant, swarmed about us as we made our way toward the palace. A flower seller offered me a bouquet of pink roses, but I insisted on choosing only a single perfect stem and paying for it out of my own pocket. Sinking to her knees in gratitude, she told me I was “three times beautiful.” I thanked her for the unusual compliment and tried to press on through the crowd. After several minutes of jostling and much waving and smiling and doffing of hats, we finally reached the flat pavement of the Marble Courtyard and the entrance to the State Apartments.

  For days I had imagined how it would feel to enter Versailles for the first time as Queen of France. I rushed up the grand marble staircase clutching my inky-hued mourning skirts, anxious to see my home, as I now thought of it—my palace. Would I view it through new eyes, now that I was no longer someone waiting—now that I had become?

  Like a caterpillar bursting from its chrysalis, I emerged into the Salon d’Hercule, with its soaring pilasters topped with gilded acanthus leaves, and glided airily through the State Apartments, appraising them with the keen eyes of ownership, noting immediately which wall coverings and upholstery were faded or threadbare—or which simply were not to my taste—and were therefore in need of replacement. I had nearly forgotten how much the chimneys smoked. Something would have to be done about the intolerable soot that coated every surface with a patina of black grime every time a fire was lit.

  By now I was trailed by a phalanx of attendants, and suddenly I found myself giving them orders, commanding this petite armée to remove this and cover that and “Send for the royal tapissiers!” Everything would be redecorated, befitting the splendor of the glorious new reign of Louis XVI! My imagination was swirling with color. The Queen’s Apartments had not been occupied in six years, and to put it bluntly, Marie Leszczyńska had not been a stylish woman. If I was to give birth to the future king of France in her former bedchamber, much would need to be ameliorated. Hues that were dear to me—cream and gold and pink—and floral motifs, should abound. “Make a note of it!” I instructed the princesse de Lamballe, my pulse racing with anticipation.

  That night, long after the tedious ceremonial business of our respective couchers, in which we were formally undressed and put to bed in the presence of any number of the highest ranking members of the nobility, Louis visited me in that great bed. I had lain awake so long, I feared he might have fallen asleep or decided not to honor me with his presence. “Where did you come from?” I asked him.

  His face, illuminated by the candle glow, looked bemused. “My bed. Where should I have come from?” The corners of his full, soft mouth suddenly turned downward and his expression became crestfallen. “You didn’t think I was with anyone else … ? Another woman?” He extinguished the candle with a pinch of his fingers and drew the hangings, cocooning us in a waterfall of brocade.

  “Mon Dieu, non!” I gasped. The thought had never occurred to me. “I meant the great bed of State where Papa Roi used to hold his levers and couchers, or the bedchamber in the king’s private apartments. The one where he …” I didn’t finish the sentence, unwilling to contemplate the image of the old king’s passion for the vulgar, voluptuous comtesse du Barry.

  “Neither feels right to me. Not yet,” Louis admitted. His voice was barely above a whisper. “It’s almost as though I can feel Grand-père’s shadow.”

  “Then you must take a deep breath and step into the sun,” I whispered. “We are the future of France now. It is here.” Timidly, I reached for his hand and placed it over my belly, resting his palm on the soft cambric of my nightgown. Our first night in Versailles as the new sovereigns of the realm. Wouldn’t this be the perfect time to finally consummate our marriage and start a family to continue the Bourbon line?

  But Louis froze. Although he did not snatch away his hand as he had always done when I had tried so valiantly, so patiently, to encourage him in his marital duty, his fingers became like a claw, stiff and unyielding. I agonized over his reluctance to embrace me. Our attempts had been rare, clumsy, furtive, and fruitless. My husband would moan, or even cry out in pain, as if I were doing him some injury, then turn away from me and refuse to discuss the matter. I was left to gaze at the underside of the embroidered silken canopy, stifling my tears, fearful about being sent home to Austria, falsely accused of barrenness.

  I tried to hold his hand. “What is the matter, mon cher?”

  “Rien,” he groaned, clutching his arms to his chest. “It’s nothing. Let’s go to sleep.”

  I couldn’t mask my disappointment. “Will you kiss me good night first?” He obliged by turning toward me and placing his lips on my forehead. Then he rolled away. Side by side, for several minutes we lay completely still in the darkness. Dozens of questions were dancing inside my mind. Finally I summoned the courage to address them—and my reluctant spouse.

  “If you did not want to … to love me … then why did you come to see me tonight?” I could bare
ly squeeze the words past my lips so great was my humiliation, accumulated over four years of celibacy with only the scantest of attempts at intimacy. Maman had counseled me to employ caresses and cajoleries but even the gentlest of inducements had been met with rebuffs.

  “I do,” Louis insisted, after a considerable pause. “And I love you. It’s just that … I’ve told you before … I can’t explain it … it hurts.”

  “But I didn’t even touch you,” I replied. “Touch you there, I mean. I had thought, perhaps. Hoped. You know.”

  “I did, too,” he confessed with a ponderous sigh. “Which is why I am here. Do you have any notion how mortifying it is to creep from the King’s Bedchamber to the Queen’s, tiptoeing past the sentries, knowing how they will snigger?”

  When they learn, as the entire palace will, that our sheets remained unsoiled for yet another night. Ever since our nuptials my mother had insisted that it was unnatural for us to have separate quarters, that we should share a connubial bedroom as she had done with Papa for the entirety of their marriage and the birth of their sixteen children. It was the Austrian way. But such informality was not comme il faut at the French court.

  “If it hurts, then promise me you will speak to monsieur le médecin.” Louis was silent. “Mon cher?” It pained me to know he was suffering, but it was not the first time I had encouraged him to seek the advice of his personal physician.

  “I promise,” Louis grumbled. It was the sound of a man who wished to avoid the whole unpleasant business. I knew then to leave well enough alone. But there was another subject that weighed nearly as heavily upon my chest, and one that was almost as personal, for there was scarcely a single thing we did, from getting dressed in the morning to retiring at night, that was not also a matter of State.

  “Louis?” I whispered, staring into the blackness overhead.

  “Oui? Are you not tired yet?” Spoken like a man prostrate with fatigue.

  “Non—not just yet. My mind is racing.”

  “Eh bien—catch it, then.”

  I giggled. “Is that an order, Sire? I am hurt, too,” I began, slowly, “but in a different way. I thought this was to be our world now. And, to that end, I have been wondering … why … after you finally recognized what a detestable man your former tutor the duc de la Vauguyon is … why one of the first things you do as king is to name two of his friends as your top ministers.” I had hoped that he would recall the duc de Choiseul, who had been an architect of our marriage and a trusted minister of the late king until Madame du Barry forced his removal. This my husband had agreed to, but only in part; Choiseul’s involvement in the new government would be nominal at best.

  “Toinette, why do you raise this now?” Louis was at this instant completely awake, and his voice had become guarded, despite his use of the same pet name for me that my favorite sister Charlotte had always employed.

  “Why not discuss it now? When else can I speak to you utterly alone? When there is no one to overhear us? When I feel I have your complete confidence and trust?

  “The comte de Vergennes?” I murmured. “How could you select a Foreign Minister who is not a friend of Austria when your wife is a Hapsburg? And I thought you hated the duc d’Aiguillon as much as I did and yet you allowed your aunt Adélaïde to bully you into sending for his uncle, the comte de Maurepas. You have chosen for your Chief Minister a man who is old enough to have been the father of Papa Roi!” As a way of asserting his dominion (and, to my mind, further separating me from the seat of power), the elderly minister had immediately taken over the comtesse du Barry’s suite of rooms, a hidden warren that lay just behind the King’s Apartments. My husband had not uttered a word of remonstrance regarding this act of audacity. “Where is that new beginning we planned? And how can we ever hope to achieve it when you are holding the reins while facing backwards?”

  No sooner had these words escaped my lips than I knew I had said far too much. My husband’s silence hung in the great bedchamber like a third presence. He sighed heavily and I was punished for my mistake by twin pools of tears that stung my eyes.

  Finally, he spoke. “I had not thought to ask you. I am sorry. In France the queen is not consulted in matters of State.” Louis’s voice was soft but firm.

  I knew this; I had just hoped we would be different. There were so many things I wished to change now that we were king and queen. And wasn’t that, in some measure at least, what being the sovereign was all about—the ability to make the rules? Why carry on with the ones you never liked? Nowhere did it say that kings (or queens) had to martyr themselves to etiquette—or law—even at Versailles. In 1771 Louis XV had even exiled the Parlements, France’s judicial bodies, for refusing to ratify his edicts; and instead overrode them in a lit de justice where he reposed like a Roman Caesar on a bed of cushions. Papa Roi had made a number of enemies with this exercise in autocracy, even among the Princes of the Blood, his own cousins. My husband, unlike his grand-père in nearly every way, in one of his first acts as king, recalled the Parlements, believing it was better to rule as a friend of the people, with a firm but just hand. I wondered if he had done the right thing. It seemed as though the king of France could never make everyone happy at once, for whatever decision he made was bound to anger the clergy or the nobility or the trade guilds or the merchants or the farmers or the army; yet even as I saw that Louis was already seeking to improve the lives of our subjects, one faction or another vociferously resisted his new programs and sought to prevent him from achieving them. But why must I be excluded from these plans? At Maman’s skirts I had been inculcated with the lesson that it is the Christian duty of a princess, no less a queen, to give charity to those who were born under less fortunate circumstances.

  At least my husband had bowed to my wishes and recalled my distant relation, the unctuous prince de Rohan, from his diplomatic post. I had met him only once, when he had greeted me upon my arrival in France, but the single occasion sufficed to make me dislike him. A particular favorite of Madame du Barry (for they shared a louche manner of living), at her instigation Papa Roi had named him his ambassador to Austria. Maman had been appalled by the appointment, for the prince had nothing good to say about the Hapsburgs, and was particularly insulting to her. In a letter to the old king’s maîtresse en titre, the prince de Rohan dared to repeat a joke that Frederick of Prussia had made at Maman’s expense after the partition of Poland was affected. “The Devil,” as my mother called Frederick, had jested that in one hand my mother held a handkerchief and wept for the poor innocent Poles, while in her other she wielded a sword against them.

  According to Maman, who minced no words on his account, the prince had arrived in Vienna in January 1772, and proceeded to install himself like an Oriental pasha, setting up a private brothel in his residential mansion. Maman, a devout Catholic, remained further offended by the prince’s cavalier attitude toward the Church despite his aspirations to a sinecure in it. He rode booted and spurred through religious processions, hunted on Sundays, and harbored an unhealthy fascination for mysticism and the occult. He illicitly funded his extravagant mode of living by smuggling silk and then selling it at a tremendous profit, in violation of religious custom. And still, according to Maman, he had amassed enormous debts although he refused to economize, attended as he was by scarlet-liveried servants whose uniforms were trimmed in gold lace.

  It was a small victory, but at least I had been able to do something for Austria. Yet my mother expected much more. As my sister Charlotte had so swiftly managed to achieve once she became Queen of Naples, Maman wanted me to master my husband.

  Several minutes of painful silence elapsed. I found myself counting Louis’s ragged wheezing breaths. At length, he reached out and stroked my hand. “I’ll make it up to you, Toinette. This I promise.”

  In the darkness, the grim expression on my lips metamorphosed into a hopeful grin. “Does that mean I get to choose the next minister?”

  The enormous bedchamber echoed with my husband’
s braying laugh, as though I had just told him the silliest joke. “No, of course not—but I assure you, it will be something wonderful. I have just the present in mind; and I do not think you will be disappointed.”

  I fell asleep anxiously endeavoring to imagine what he had conceived, for I knew what Maman would think of Louis’s attempts to mollify me. What could be a satisfying substitute for power?

  TWO

  Le Grand Mogol et le Petit Trianon

  June 14, 1774

  My Dear Daughter,

  Although you are surely feeling a certain headiness now that you preside over the most illustrious court in Europe, allow me to offer a few words of advice to ease your transition from dauphine to queen. As the reign of Louis XV was a lengthy one, many of the nobles have been accustomed for decades to a certain manner of doing things. For the time being, change nothing. Otherwise, chaos and intrigue will become insurmountable, and you, my dear children, will find yourselves in such a tangle that you will be unable to extricate yourselves.

  What I fear most, Antoinette, is that you think of nothing but pleasure. Now more than ever you must learn to interest yourself in serious matters, for this may be most useful if the king should seek your counsel. Be careful to avoid misleading him into any great or unusual expenditure.

  Maria Theresa

  “Look!” I exclaimed to the duchesse de Chartres, as we strolled by the window of a shop in Paris. “That’s the eighth display we’ve seen this morning!” I could not wait to write to my mother. She would be delighted to hear that portraits of Louis and me were displayed prominently in nearly every merchant’s window. The outpouring of love for us in the capital had been so gratifying. At the opera and the theater my appearance was greeted with cheers, as was my husband’s, of course, but he did not accompany me often. Try as I might, I still could not disabuse the king of his conviction that the soprano arias resembled the cries of tormented cats.