Abundance: A Novel of Marie Antoinette

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  My dear Duchesse de Polignac has reduced even more the number of people who will be allowed in the audience for this event. I am not long at my labor till the babe issues forth.

  A boy! Not twins, but a child like his sister Marie Thérèse, of exceptional vigor and abounding health. He comes to us at seven-thirty in the morning, 27 March 1785, named Louis of course, as all my sons shall be, and his second name is Charles for his godmother Queen Maria Carolina of Naples, my beloved Charlotte. The babe is given into the arms of my jubilant Yolande, now royal governess to the children of France, but for a moment her knees give way and she sways, gasping, “The weight of my joy is almost too much for me,” so that I almost giggle, and the deputy governess hastens to her assistance.

  Ah, to give birth laughing with joy. I feel blessed beyond measure, now the mother of two boys. My good spirits seem to heal my body to such an extent that as the day passes, I decide to invite the Princesse de Lamballe to have supper with me. I sit up in my big bed, and trays are brought for us both, a hot chicken consommé made savory with celery and carrots, and some pâté de foie gras spread on toast. I would like very much to ask for some chocolate, but I fear it might sour my milk, and I would like to nurse this child for a day or two before giving him over to the professionals.

  The princess is quick to tell me how lovely I look, quite youthful. She is a few years older than I, and I notice for the first time that she is no longer in the bloom of youth, though her alabaster complexion and lovely golden curls will always mark her as a charming beauty. She, of course, has never had a child, so her delight in Louis Charles has a special wonder to it.

  “How is it possible?” she says over and over. “How amazing to create new life!”

  “I shall call him my chou d’amour,” I say, in response to her girlish enthusiasm. “His lovely face is as round as a healthy cabbage."

  “No child could be more robust than this one.”

  I give him my finger and exclaim, “What an extraordinary grip he has!”

  I HAVE NEVER felt closer to the King. His delight in the new child is extreme, and he has been pleased to buy the estate of Saint-Cloud for me, and another property as well, but Saint-Cloud, like Trianon, is titled in my own name, which means that I may dispose of it as I like. It has a lovely setting; the garden extends downhill all the way to the Seine, and it is easy for me to imagine our children running happily down that incline. Of course some people think it a great impropriety for the Queen to own property in her own name, but I have always ignored such petty criticism.

  Nonetheless, when the jeweler Boehmer tries once more to persuade the King to buy me a famous and magnificent diamond necklace, whose stones form a letter M large enough to cover the entire chest and valued at nearly two million livres, I decline again. I very much want a simple life. Indeed, I have already declined the necklace twice before, even when Monsieur Boehmer got down on his knees and begged me to buy it, lest he be ruined having invested so much money in the extravagant item. I remind the King it would be better to spend the money on a warship.

  MY JOY IS COMPOUNDED when Count von Fersen returns and accompanies the royal party to the official christening of Louis Charles in May.

  Strange to say, when my carriage enters Paris there are no outpourings of joy among the people. Indeed, it is a cold reception. The King’s face remains impassive as we roll through the streets, but I notice that the count looks melancholy. Because the finances of the people, as well as of the state, are an increasing cause of concern, they look for someone to blame. Who better than a foreigner such as myself?

  I only regret that the Cardinal de Rohan, whose bad behavior when in Vienna caused such scandal, manages to officiate again at the christening ceremony. I am sure he leads a dissolute life, for all his clerical robes. An odious creature—I hate for him to hold my new child in his arms for even a moment.

  A FALL FROM A GREAT HEIGHT

  A lovely morning in June, I sit up in my bed and enjoy my coffee, with slices of oranges and a crisp ginger biscuit. The hangings around the bed and against the windows are covered with flowers—tulips, roses, lilacs, pansies, apple boughs—arranged in sprays and bouquets. The room is a flowery kingdom. My attendants buzz around me like so many cheerful bees, and I feel like a lily myself in my white gown with gold embroidery. On a whim, I ask that my lily-scented perfume be brought to me, and I decide that I shall pretend to be a different flower each morning I wake up in June.

  To my surprise, the King suddenly enters, unannounced. All curtsy. From under his arm he takes a newspaper, which he waves at my companions, dismissing them. As soon as they exit, he says, “I have the gravest tragedy to report.”

  I am sure I turn pale as the whitest lily.

  “News from the Channel. You recall the young physician Pilâtre de Rozier, the amateur balloonist?”

  I nod, and a great dread seizes my heart.

  “It’s all here—in the newspaper account. The balloon exploded, even before it began to cross the water. Before the very eyes of the spectators watching from the cliff, Rozier and his companion fell fifteen hundred feet to the rocks below.”

  “Then he was killed?”

  “One foot was entirely severed from his leg. They say he fell into a pool of his own blood. His body was shattered.”

  The wonder of the disaster overwhelms me. “We are so used to good news about the balloons,” I say.

  “Gravity has claimed its first victims from the sky.”

  He pinches his nose between the eyes. I am touched by the sincerity of this mundane gesture of grief, and I reach out my hand to him.

  He sighs a mighty heave of sorrow. “I will have a medal struck in their honor.”

  I WONDER IN what state of mind were Rozier and his companion as they fell and fell from the sky. Were they filled with terror? Did their courage sustain them to the end?

  MIDSUMMER

  After the terrible accident, many of us have nightmares of falling. Sometimes I dream that I am aloft in a balloon with my three children; a dark cloud pursues us, and our basket begins to rock in the wind. I look to gather them about me, but little Louis Joseph is gone. The basket tips, and my infant Louis Charles tumbles out headfirst—I awake screaming. I have had variations on this dream more than once.

  Every day, Louis Charles seems stronger and displays more baby smiles and winsome expressions. Everyone remarks how far beyond other babies of his age he has progressed. His big sister likes to teach him games, though of course he is still in his crib. Still, she earnestly explains life to him.

  One day I am shocked to hear her call Louis Joseph to stand beside the crib. She looks back and forth between the faces of her two brothers. Louis Joseph looks as transparent as a little angel, his big eyes focused trustingly on his sister.

  “Now,” she says, “I am deciding which of you will someday be King of France. Do you have an opinion?”

  Louis Joseph looks over his sister’s shoulder at me and speaks in a firm, clear voice. “That is a matter for God to decide.”

  Following his gaze, she turns and sees me. “It was just a guessing game,” she says.

  I am troubled by her lack of frankness. “But the answer is the one your brother has given. You should pursue other entertainments, those more likely to be fun.”

  MY DAUGHTER’S GROWTH in body causes me no concern, but sometimes I worry about the growth of her spirit. She is haughty, and she does not understand that all people are God’s children, regardless of their station in life.

  Once I heard Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun say to her, “I admire your mother the Queen so much. She never loses an opportunity to make any person in her presence happier than they were.”

  I have invited a peasant girl to play with my daughter and to grow up with her, but Marie Thérèse does not want to wait on the other little girl, or take fair turns, and speaks to her ungraciously. Seeing my anxiety about my daughter, Elisabeth tries to reassure me. “She is still very young. As she sees mor
e examples of kindness about her, she will gradually learn to consider the feelings of others. When I was a child, I was told, ‘You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.’ It made all the difference in my attitude.”

  “And did you have a happy childhood, Elisabeth?”

  “All day long I made little pictures. I drew with charcoal on slates, and with a stick in mud. Eventually I was given colored chalk and then paints. I was happy every minute I was at my art, and thoughts of art filled my hours.”

  “I enjoyed music and dancing, theatricals,” I replied. “But I did not fill all my time that way.”

  “Your Majesty had many brothers and sisters to be happy with.”

  “Yes. We were very happy. My mother took care of everything.”

  BECAUSE I KNOW that the theatrical world offers a refuge from the world I must live in, I begin to learn my lines for the ingenue Rosine in The Barber of Seville. In the midst of focusing my attention on my part, I am given a note from the jeweler Boehmer, which I tuck away till later.

  In my room I read it aloud to Madame Campan:

  “‘Madame, We are at the summit of happiness…The latest arrangements proposed…New proof of our devotion to…Your Majesty. The most beautiful set of diamonds…The greatest and best of Queens.’"

  “What is this about?” I ask my First Lady of the Bedchamber. “You are adept at solving newspaper riddles in the Mercure de France.”

  “This letter makes no sense to me.” Madame Campan sounds weary.

  Because this note also makes no sense to me, I twist the paper into a spill and thrust it into the flame of my candle and drop the ashes onto a plate. Instead of asking Madame Campan to read me to sleep, I decide to lie in bed considering my role in the play.

  Is Rosine at all attracted to her would-be seducer? Suddenly I remember the old King, Louis XV, and his special kindness to me. I was always able to speak with him in a manner that he found charming, but in many ways I was uncomfortable in his presence. I have always thought my lack of ease with him arose from my knowledge of his morals in regard to women—that I was powerless in ending his scandalous relationship to the du Barry.

  But at the same time, no female could not be attracted to his luminous eye, the charm of being in his favor.

  I know now that he kept something like a harem of young prostitutes, just the age I was then.

  Lines from Beaumarchais’s Figaro come to mind: “Nobility, fortune, rank, position make a lord so proud! What have you done to deserve these advantages? You were born—that is all."

  My husband swore that the fortress-prison of the Bastille would have to be razed before he would allow the performance of such subversive lines. Then the Polignacs had the effrontery to tell the King he was acting like a despot. Next, Beaumarchais said he would excise the objectionable parts. Assuming he was as good as his word, I never bothered to read the revision, but only a few of the promised changes were made. I trusted where perhaps I should not have done so—but the play was so clever and funny!

  The Barber of Seville was performed ten years ago. It is merely light and frothy—no one has ever found its ideas objectionable.

  A HOAX IN DIAMONDS

  I have never seen Madame Campan so distressed! Upon returning from a walk in the gardens, I was about to settle at the harp, when a servant reported that Monsieur Boehmer, the jeweler, wished to see me, here at Trianon! How irritating to be bothered at a place where everyone knows admission is only by special invitation! I waved my hand in the negative, then I casually asked Madame Campan if she had any idea why Boehmer was being persistent in his attentions.

  All in a moment, her face becomes stricken. “Majesty, you recall the mysterious note two or three weeks ago?” Not waiting for my reply, she rushes on. “Last night, at my home in the country, the jeweler Boehmer came to me and spoke as though he had lost his mind. He said that Your Majesty had contracted to buy the diamond necklace, through the Cardinal de Rohan, that the necklace is in your possession, and a payment of four hundred thousand livres is now due.”

  “Impossible. I despise the Cardinal de Rohan. I would never use him as an intermediary. And I have no new diamond necklace, as you well know.”

  Madame Campan is not a woman given to hysterics, and she remained calm now.

  “I said as much to Monsieur Boehmer. And I asked him what made him think you had given any such commission. He said that he possessed notes signed by the Queen to the cardinal.”

  “If he does have such notes,” I say as calmly as I can, “they are forgeries. Certainly, I have no necklace from Boehmer or the cardinal.” That last idea makes me shudder.

  “Boehmer was distraught,” Madame Campan explains. “He told me there are bankers involved, who lent him money on the strength of the letters to the cardinal said to bear your signature.”

  My signature! I am speechless.

  Madame Campan continues. “I told Monsieur Boehmer to consult Breteuil, since he is the minister of the royal household. Instead the jeweler has gone straight to the cardinal.”

  Immediately I think of turning to Count Mercy for advice, but I know that his hemorrhoid condition has become exceedingly painful. “I must turn to Breteuil myself,” I tell Madame Campan, “but also to the King.”

  “THE CARDINAL IS either a knave or a fool,” the King thunders, when I tell him of my supposed purchase of an extravagant necklace.

  For all of its over 670 diamonds, I never even thought the necklace beautiful. It hung like a halter around my neck, the one time I consented to try it on, years ago.

  “I think he is both,” I reply.

  “As crown jeweler, Boehmer is a sworn officer of this court. His duty is to consult Breteuil or myself before such an outrageous purchase.”

  Trying to be fair to the jeweler, I add meekly, “I suppose if the cardinal, as a member of the House of Rohan, showed him a letter with my signature, he felt he had received assurances enough.”

  I do not believe I have ever seen the King so angry, and I remind myself again of his goodness and loyalty to me.

  A MONTH HAS PASSED slowly, as not even rehearsals drive from my mind my anxiety about this diamond necklace affair. The King has investigated the missing necklace to the extent possible and discussed matters with Breteuil and with our trusted advisor Abbé Vermond, both of whom hate the cardinal as much as I do. I am very glad the King includes Vermond, who has served first as my tutor, then as my spiritual advisor ever since I came to France.

  At times, Vermond and Breteuil speak with glee about this necklace affair's being an opportunity to destroy Rohan, and I admit I would also like to do so sometimes. I am grateful that I am utterly innocent in the affair. Because I feel anxious, I do not care, really, if they destroy Cardinal de Rohan, whom I too have disliked for years; I only want my reputation to be untarnished. Yet of course I have been the subject of lying pamphlets for years. I do not know to what extent people may have believed such fabrications. I have considered them beneath my notice.

  This is 15 August, the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, for whom my mother, all my sisters, and I are named. Today, as he makes his way in his red robes—I suppose his stockings are cardinal too—to celebrate the Mass, the cardinal will be summoned to appear before the King and his minister to give an accounting of this sordid business. Surely I can take the coincidence of the date as a good omen—that today the name of Marie Antoinette will be cleared of any vile association with this mystery of the diamond necklace. No one seems to know where it is.

  It is Breteuil who conceived the idea of summoning the cardinal so publicly, in all his splendor, so as to cause the most embarrassment. Breteuil, I explain to Madame Campan, does not forget that when the cardinal was recalled from Vienna, Breteuil was sent in his place. But Breteuil’s work as ambassador was then ruined by the cardinal, who spitefully cut off the connections Breteuil needed in Vienna to help him serve effectively.

  Madame Campan responds that perhaps those insults in V
ienna are best left to lie in the past.

  I reply, “Because the Cardinal de Rohan helped to depose Choiseul, to whom I owe the happiness of my marriage, I, like Breteuil, have an old grudge to settle with him.” I do not mention that his behavior has long offended me.

  It is not without satisfaction, though I greatly dread the confrontation about to occur, that I consider how, as the defender of my good name, the King will also be able to disgrace and totally discredit the cardinal. It is a sign of the King’s complete trust in me that he insists I be present—“That way you will always be perfectly easy about my role in this affair and about what has been said,” he tells me. I can see the sorrow in his eyes that I am to be worried by such unpleasantness. It is noon, and we fall silent as we sit in the King’s inner chamber, expecting any moment to hear the sound of the cardinal approaching the room.

  When he enters the room, the splendor of his garments, the richness of the fabric and of the lace at his throat, impresses me so much that I quail inside and am grateful that it is the King himself who conducts the interrogation. He shows all royal firmness and majesty in every syllable as he upbraids Rohan for the purchase of diamonds and then demands to know where they are. All of the time I am looking at the needlepoint of the cardinal’s alb, which seems too beautiful for human fingers to touch.

  “It is my impression,” the cardinal replies, not without his own clerical dignity, “that the diamonds were delivered to the Queen.”

  “By what agent were they to be delivered?”

  “A lady named the Comtesse de La Motte-Valois held the commission.”

  At this news—the name of someone with a reputation for many careless affairs, though personally quite unknown to all of us—we cannot suppress a gasp. Comtesse Jeanne La Motte!