Her new “grandfather,” the sixty-year-old rakish King Louis XV, who was still considered the handsomest man at court, was immediately captivated by the dauphine’s charm, her looks, and her grace. But Marie Antoinette received not a word from the five-foot-ten-inch fifteen-year-old dauphin—a podgy, lumbering youth with heavy-lidded eyes. A novelist would be hard pressed to invent a pair of spouses who were so opposite in every way as Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI. She was vivacious where he was dull, mercurial where he was plodding and indecisive, graceful where he was awkward, frivolous where he was studious, devoted to gaiety where he was antisocial, extravagant where he was economical, and as physically lovely and lithe as he was obese and coarse-looking. It also didn’t help that the youth’s tutors had inculcated him with the belief that women were the cause of all evil, public and private, and that most of all to be feared were Austrian women, who were controlling creatures with dangerous minds, only interested in annexing his kingdom to their homeland.
Just about the only thing the teens had in common was nearsightedness. The dauphin could barely see a thing without a lorgnette, which might have accounted for his clumsiness and his dread of graceful activities, such as dancing. His nasal voice and guttural laugh only added to his physical deficits. But in many ways, Louis is more to be pitied than censured. His parents—Louis, Dauphin of France and Marie-Josèphe of Saxony—had died of tuberculosis a few years earlier, as had his elder brother. Louis was always made to feel guilty that he had survived and would one day wear the crown instead of his adorable, smarter sibling.
Only the highest-ranking nobles were permitted to attend the official wedding ceremony on May 16, 1770, conducted by the Archbishop of Rheims in the chapel of Louis XIV at Versailles. Later in the day six thousand lucky spectators, chosen by lottery, were allowed to watch the wedding feast.
After the banquet the newlyweds were led to the bridal chamber. The king himself handed his grandson his nightgown, while Marie Antoinette received her chemise from the most recently married lady of semi-royal rank, the duchesse de Chârtres, and each of the teens retired to a separate, private closet, where they changed clothes. The archbishop sprinkled the mattress on the enormous four-poster with holy water, and everyone retreated so that the young couple could consummate their royal marriage.
But they didn’t. What happened was exactly nothing, confirmed by the dauphin in his diary the following morning—Rien—although Louis would also write the same single word on July 14, 1789, the day the Bastille was stormed. Of course, most historians now believe the diary was more of a hunting journal, in which Louis meticulously recorded the details of his daily haul, and that rien simply indicates that he didn’t hunt that day, and therefore had killed nothing. In any event, the wedding night was a bust.
And in May 1771, when the young dauphin and dauphine should have joyously celebrated their first anniversary, if not the recent birth of a royal infant, or even a pregnancy—still rien. Although Louis had confided to Marie Antoinette that he was not ignorant of the mechanics involved, she remained puzzled and frustrated by her husband’s complete disinterest in sex, conveying this dismay in several detailed letters to her mother.
In reply, Maria Teresa cautioned her daughter not to become peevish about it. She counseled “caresses, cajoleries”—tenderness and cajoling caresses—but warned Marie Antoinette, “if you show yourself impatient, you may spoil the whole thing.”
By the royal couple’s second anniversary in 1772, the empress had grown very concerned regarding la conduite si étrange—“the rather odd conduct”—of Marie’s mari. It was perfectly legitimate for a barren royal bride to be returned to her homeland for failing to provide an heir, and Austria could not afford that fate.
Evidently, Louis was doing his level best to be a good husband, making regular conjugal visits to his wife’s boudoir, but in the final analysis, he could never get beyond a certain state of arousal and had so far been unable to close the deal. The still virginal Marie Antoinette attributed this failure to her husband’s maladresse et jeunesse—his clumsiness and youth. But there was more to the story. Something was medically amiss.
Empress Maria Teresa was finally able to convince Louis XV to summon the royal physician, Monsieur Lassone. He determined that the dauphin’s romantic troubles were due to phimosis, a condition where the foreskin is so tight that it cannot be retracted from the penis, rendering copulation extremely painful. But Lassone also counseled that the operation to remedy the problem—circumcision—might do as much harm as good, and advised against it.
The years stretched on. After reigning for six decades, Louis XV died of smallpox in the spring of 1774 and the young dauphin assumed the throne of France as Louis XVI.
According to the memoirs of Madame Campan, a loyal member of Marie Antoinette’s entourage, at the death of Louis XV Louis and Marie Antoinette fell on their knees, embraced each other, and appealed to God to guide them: “Bless us, for we are too young to rule.” Although some twentieth-century historians dismiss Campan’s version of events as sentimental hogwash that was completely out of character for both Marie Antoinette and her husband, others give it credence, because the fact in and of itself is patently true. Empress Maria Teresa knew too well that the nineteen-year-old king, and more particularly her daughter (who was a year younger), were absolutely out of their depth. “There is nothing to calm my apprehensions in the situation of the King, the ministers, or the state. She herself is so young, has never had any power of application, nor ever will have—unless with great difficulty.”
With great prescience about the future of France, the empress advised the new monarchs to “change nothing; let matters go on as they are, otherwise chaos and intrigue will become insurmountable, and my dear children, you will find yourselves in such a tangle that you will be unable to extricate yourselves.” Maria Teresa specifically warned her daughter, “You must learn to interest yourself in serious matters, for this may be most useful if the King should ask your counsel. . . . Be careful to avoid misleading him into any great or unusual expenditure.”
By now, all of France seemed to know about the king’s impotence. Scurrilous pamphlets and nasty little ditties made the rounds of coffeehouses. Back in 1773, the Spanish ambassador, Count d’Aranda, had felt compelled to share every juicy detail in dispatches to his sovereign, informing him that there were stains, which proved emissions were taking place outside the proper place because of the pain of introducing the member. Foreign courts were indeed affected by these events because they impacted the future of the powerful Bourbon dynasty.
The public awareness of Louis’s private shame soon affected other aspects of his life, including his inability to make firm decisions about anything. Destiny and birthright had made him a king. But all the comparisons of Louis XVI to a peasant, including his rather oxlike appearance, more accurately reflected where his true interests lay. He adored outdoor sports; he skillfully worked a lathe, and wielded the hammer in his own forge, where he was a talented locksmith under the tutelage of France’s master craftsman. Yet he never seemed happy and rarely laughed, taking out his frustrations in these pursuits while remaining tacitly disgusted by the way his vivacious wife expressed her own dissatisfaction and discontent—her noisy frivolity, financial extravagances, and relentless pursuit of distraction and pleasure. Blazing her own social trails, she rebelled at the French court’s rigid and scripted behavior, wounding the pride of legions of influential nobles accustomed to centuries of perquisites. It would eventually cost her dearly.
Still intacta, Marie Antoinette poured her passions into outrageously costly fashion, garish makeup, outlandish coiffures, and high-stakes gambling, hosting lavish parties and sneaking into Paris late at night to attend masked balls while her husband snored away in his bedchamber. “I am terrified of being bored,” she admitted. Her sexuality was by now fully awakened and she could only tremble, blush, and stammer in the presence of courtiers who stirred her heart, aware that she could
not get too close to them. She couldn’t even consider taking a lover, a perfectly acceptable custom within France’s aristocratic circles, until she produced an heir.
Maria Teresa routinely scolded her daughter for wasting her time on nocturnal exploits and disdained the French custom of separate bedrooms that regulated marital intimacy and stifled one’s natural biological inclinations. She also reminded her daughter to maintain the impression of a completely submissive wife and not to meddle in politics or governmental affairs—yet at the same time, instructed Marie Antoinette to dominate her husband beyond the marriage bed, never forgetting that she was an agent of Austrian interests. These mixed signals completely confused the bubbleheaded queen, who had already demonstrated her naiveté by falling under the influence of Louis’s three maiden aunts, a fat and sour-dispositioned trio who had clear political agendas of their own, schooling the young queen in palace intrigues, gossip, and médisance—the art of backbiting.
After nearly seven years of marriage with nothing to show for it, very few people in France believed that Marie Antoinette was not satisfying her sexual urges elsewhere. Speculation took on a life of its own; stories abounded of orgies and lovers of both genders. Provocative poems and songs soon burst the locked confines of nobles’ secretaires and made their way onto the streets and into the burgeoning hotbeds of reform.
Her frivolity, arrogance, and heedless extravagance prompted a flurry of scalding scoldings from her mother.
. . . Your good luck will not last forever and by your own fault you will be plunged into the depths of misfortune. The trouble arises because you lead so terribly dissipated a life and never apply your mind to anything. What books do you read? Yet you venture to thrust your finger into every pie to meddle with affairs of State, with the choice of ministers!
. . . I have news from Paris to the effect that you have been buying bracelets at the cost of two hundred and fifty thousand livres, with the result that you have thrown your finances into disorder and have heaped up a burden of debt. . . . A queen only degrades herself by decking herself out in this preposterous way; and she degrades herself still more by unthrifty expendi-ture, especially in such difficult times. . . . Everyone knows that the king is very modest in his expenditure, so the whole blame will rest on your shoulders. I hope I shall not live to see the disaster that is likely to ensue.
It was fruitless for Marie Antoinette to convince her pious and prudish mother that everyone at court was spending extravagantly on jewels, gowns, and modish coiffures, and that as queen she was expected to set the tone—and that her levity was characteristic of her generation. In the artificial Rococo era, filled with women who were highly cultivated, delicate hothouse blooms with idle hands and coddled minds, she was the most contrived. In a coterie of spendthrifts, she was the biggest; and among a generation of coquettes, she was the most flirtatious and charming.
Where Louis could not satisfy his wife sexually, he tried to make up for it by lavishing material treasures upon her, among them le Petit Trianon, the little summer villa on the grounds of Versailles, about a mile from the palace. But her exorbitant expenditures on furnishings and refurbishment for this little pleasure idyll would eventually come back to haunt her. As would le Petit Trianon’s exclusivity. It was the queen’s domain alone and she chose to surround herself with a clique of intimates and family members, insulting high-ranking nobles by shutting them out. Marie Antoinette saw no reason to host at her safe haven those who detested her, who spoke ill of her behind her back, and who after all those years still thought of her as the outsider—L’Autrichienne—a pun that reflected her heritage as well as the French word for a female dog, or bitch.
When Louis would visit his wife at le Petit Trianon—which, very graciously, he only did by invitation—he would complain about the numerous violations of court etiquette and she would laugh him off as dull and pedantic. He cast a pall on the lively discussions because in a world where wit was prized, he lacked the gift for it. When Marie Antoinette tired of his company and wished to be rid of him so that she and her coterie could rattle off to Paris and avail themselves of the nightlife, she would deliberately set the clock at the Petit Trianon ahead by an hour and the too-trusting monarch, thinking it was his bedtime, would slouch off to the palace.
Yet there were occasions when the king showed himself to be a true romantic—even in public. One day when he was riding through the Bois de Boulogne he saw the queen sitting on the grass with his aunts, enjoying a repast of strawberries and cream, an image straight out of the pastoral canvases of Fragonard. He alit from the saddle, clasped his wife by her waist, and kissed her. All who witnessed this charming display of domestic bliss and marital harmony applauded.
Louis was as much in awe of his beautiful, graceful wife as her behavior irritated him. And despite the best efforts of his courtiers and ministers to find him a paramour to teach him the arts of love, the pious and moral Louis only had eyes for his spouse.
But in 1777, Marie Antoinette was twenty-two years old and still a virgin. Among the married friends and female relatives her own age, she was the only one without a child. Immensely frustrated sexually, she was running out of self-control. To prevent disaster, such as an extramarital dalliance, Marie Antoinette’s brother Joseph, the Emperor of Austria (who now coruled the empire with Maria Teresa), decided to pay his little sister a visit.
Like their mother, Joseph proved to be a prophet when it came to predicting Marie Antoinette’s future, able to read the writing on a wall that the French queen refused to recognize even existed. “In very truth, I tremble for your happiness, seeing that in the long run things cannot go on like this . . . the revolution will be a cruel one, and perhaps of your own making,” Joseph scolded.
After three weeks at Versailles, he began to understand the gravity of the situation and what seemed to be keeping Marie Antoinette and Louis apart, physically and emotionally. The king had confided in him frankly, devoid of all prudery, which gave Joseph the opportunity to reassure Louis that contrary to his assumptions, he was not “endangering his health by fulfilling his conjugal duties.”
In a letter to his younger brother Leopold, Joseph violated the king’s confidence by sharing the lurid details of Louis’s sexual problems: In his conjugal bed he has normal erections; he introduces his member, stays there without moving for about two minutes, then withdraws without ejaculating, and still erect, bids good night. This is incomprehensible because he sometimes has nocturnal emissions, but while inside and in the process, never; and he is content, and says quite frankly that he was doing it purely from a sense of duty and that he did not like it. . . . My sister, moreover, has very little temperament [hot blood] and together they are two complete fumblers.
Having realized that Marie Antoinette “had no affection for her husband” and was indifferent to the point of disdain, when he was about to return to Vienna, Joseph left his “giddy-pate” little sister a thirty-page letter, containing some astute marital advice: Do you try to make yourself necessary to him; do you endeavor to convince him that no one loves him more sincerely than you, and that no one has his glory or his happiness more at heart? . . . Do you ever suppress any of your own wishes for his sake? . . . Do you occupy yourself with matters which he has neglected in order to produce the impression that you are meritorious where he has failed? . . . Do you sacrifice yourself to him in any way? . . . Do you maintain an inviolable silence as concerns his errors and infirmities?
Not only that, it rankled Joseph that “the king is left alone at night while you defile yourself by mixing with the canaille [riff-raff] of Paris!” Then the widowed emperor spoke of more intimate matters: Do you really seek opportunities [to spend quality time with the king]? Do you honestly respond to the affection he manifests for you? Are you not cold or absentminded when he caresses you or when he speaks to you? Do you not show yourself bored, or even repelled by him? If so, how can you expect that a man of cold temperament who has never experienced carnal pleasures
should make advances to you, become aroused, love you and successfully complete his great act, or at least taste the possible pleasures with you? This point requires all your attention, and whatever you do to reach this great goal will be your strongest link to happiness in life. Never get discouraged and always give him the hope that he will still be able to have children; don’t ever let him give up or despair of it. You must avoid this idea and any separation of beds with all your powers, which consist only of your charms and friendship.
The Emperor Joseph’s multiple admonitions—or Marie Antoinette’s “charms and friendship”—evidently yielded results. In a letter to Vienna dated August 30, 1777—seven and a quarter years after her wedding—Marie Antoinette trumpeted the good news: I have attained the happiness which is of the utmost importance to my whole life. More than a week ago my marriage was thoroughly consummated. Yesterday the attempt was repeated, with results even more successful than the first time. . . . I don’t think I am with child yet, but at any rate I have hopes of becoming so from moment to moment.
This happy event soon became the topic of international buzz, as the various ambassadors reported the news of the queen’s defloration to their respective sovereigns. According to the Spanish envoy to the French court, “His Majesty has become more cheerful than he used to be, and no one can fail to note that the Queen has blue circles around her eyes far more often than of yore.”
Louis finally had something to smile about. He confided to one of his maiden aunts, “I find the pleasure very great, and I regret that so long a time has passed without my being able to enjoy it.”
Unfortunately, ten days later, the new toy was already cast aside. Marie Antoinette lamented, “The King is not fond of sleeping in the same bed with me. I do my best to ensure that there shall not be a total separation between us in this matter. Sometimes he comes to spend the night with me, and I think it would be a mistake for me to urge him to do so more often.”
Notorious Royal Marriages: A Juicy Journey through Nine Centuries of Dynasty, Destiny, and Desire Page 29