And then there were the exotic animals, brought back by the merchant ships dealing in sugar, coffee, indigo and slaves with the Caribbean, Africa and the Far East. After Bougainville’s circumnavigation of the globe between 1768 and 1771, artists and naturalists were eager passengers on ships to the undiscovered parts of the world. The specimens they carried back with them were displayed at fairs and in travelling menageries. Posters advertised fabulous beasts, such as the great Tarlata of Tartary, which turned out to be a hairless bear, wearing clothes and performing ‘disgusting caresses’. An elephant able to uncork and drink bottles of beer inspired a book, Mémoires de l’Éléphant, narrated in the first person.
When the Ménagerie at Versailles had been built, under Louis XIV, it was constructed in the shape of a large octagon, with doors opening on to balconies from which visitors could gaze down into eight enclosures, each with an exotic species of animal or bird. Under Louis XVI, given the vogue for natural history, these animals had acquired scientific interest. For the naturalist Buffon, the elephant, gentle and obedient, stood at the pinnacle of the animal hierarchy, second only to man in intelligence, ‘at least as much as matter can approach spirit’. By the time Lucie began to visit Versailles, the King’s Ménagerie housed a panther, a hyena, badgers, a mandrill and an elephant which, soon afterwards, broke out and drowned itself in the nearby lake. There were other large beasts and the cost and the difficulty of transporting them were prodigious, the tiger having needed fresh meat for 10 months at sea and 24 days overland. The rhinoceros, being vegetarian, was cheaper, but even so it had grown ‘fort et méchant’, strong and nasty, on the long sea voyage, and had to be conveyed to Versailles in a cart, restrained by a leather collar and iron shackles, looked after by two keepers–who happened to be butchers–and an overseer, who kept its skin supple by rubbing it with fish oil. It was, wrote Thomas Blaikie, a Scottish gardener working for the French royal family, ‘an huge Animal the skin of which is of a looss scaly nature without hairs’, and its horn had been cut off because ‘it tore up the walls’.
It was all of it, the animals and the spectacles and the luxury, as the Comte de Ségur, companion to Arthur in the American war, would later write, like a sparkling picture, composed of thousands of colours, made up of magnificent castles, laughing landscapes and rich harvests–except that even then it was clear that the very lightest of breezes would be enough to blow it all away. ‘We were proud to be French,’ he wrote in the 1820s, looking back on the years leading up to the revolution, ‘and even prouder to be French in the 18th century, which we regarded as a golden age handed to us by the Enlightenment philosophers…Each of us believed that we were advancing towards perfection, without worrying about obstacles and without fearing them.’
In the autumn of 1785, Lucie once again accompanied her grandmother and Archbishop Dillon to Montpellier. On the way, they spent a month in the Cevennes, where Lucie was taken to see coal and sulphate mines and spent her evenings discussing with the engineers who came to dine all that she had learnt from M. Combes about physics and chemistry. The young men of the Cevennes had formed themselves into a guard of honour for the Archbishop and in the evenings, wearing the red and yellow uniform of the Dillon regiment, they came to dine and dance in the château where Lucie was staying. Among the young men were several whose names were proposed to the Archbishop as possible suitors. Neither he nor Mme de Rothe considered them of sufficient grandeur.
At the end of the winter, the Archbishop accepted an invitation to visit Bordeaux, where the neo-classical architect Victor Louis’s fine theatre had recently opened. A new ship, the Henriette-Lucy, was to be launched, a 600-ton vessel belonging to an Irishman, Mr MacHarty, and he had asked if Lucie would name her. Before the ship set sail for India, there was a splendid lunch party on board. A few days later, as they were preparing to return to Paris, Lucie’s servant asked whether he might have leave to visit friends at the nearby château of Le Bouilh, belonging to a Comte de la Tour du Pin Gouvernet, and to rejoin the party as they passed by on their journey northwards. Lucie agreed. She realised that the estate must belong to Frédéric de Gouvernet’s father, and hoped that when they paused to collect her servant before crossing the Dordogne at Saint-André-en-Cubzac, she might catch sight of the château from the road. To her annoyance, it was shielded from sight by tall poplars. As her carriage skirted the estate she told herself ‘over and over again that I might have been châtelaine of all that beautiful countryside’. Frédéric–once proposed by her father as a possible husband for her–was now back in her thoughts, but why she felt so intrigued by the idea of this unknown young man, she could not say.
Many years later, looking back on the events that befell France in 1789, Napoleon would say that the French Revolution dated, not from the fall of the Bastille, but from the opening night of The Marriage of Figaro.
In 1775, the playwright Beaumarchais had won great acclaim with The Barber of Seville. Its sequel, The Marriage of Figaro, was finished three years later, but the plot, revolving around a licentious count and a cast of duplicitous servants who triumph over their masters, was judged too subversive and shocking, and it was not until April 1784 that it finally opened in Paris, with the action shifted to Spain and its anti-clerical passages removed. It delighted the Parisians. And though Beaumarchais was briefly detained, Figaro earned him 60,000 livres in the next three years, a phenomenal sum at the time, when even Laclos’s daring and successful Les Liaisons Dangereuses earned just 1,600. At heart, Beaumarchais was not opposed to the monarchy: he was a royal watchmaker, a member of the nobility, and he had bought himself a number of the many posts for sale at court, which entailed no duties but brought status to the holder and revenue to the government. But Figaro, making its way from Paris to provincial theatres, was soon perceived as a call for greater freedom of speech, and a warning to Louis XVI–who very publicly condemned the play–that he could not rule by fiat over theatre, court and kingdom.
Then, in the summer of 1784, just a few months later, came the scandal of Marie Antoinette, the Cardinal de Rohan, and the diamonds.
Louis, Prince de Rohan, Cardinal Bishop of Strasbourg and Grand Almoner to the King, was a greedy, arrogant man who craved acceptance at court and knew that to win it he needed Marie Antoinette’s approval. Aware, as was all Versailles, of the Queen’s appetite for jewellery, and made gullible by ambition, he fell for a swindle that could have come straight out of Beaumarchais’s play. It involved a young woman called Jeanne de la Motte, a member of the minor nobility who had fallen on hard times and who, like the Cardinal, was desperate to make her way at court.
Some years earlier, Bohmer and Bassenge, Paris’s leading jewellers, had made a rivière, a many-looped necklace with 647 diamonds. It was designed for Mme du Barry, Louis XV’s mistress, but the King had died before they could deliver it. The only likely customer for this extremely expensive item–said to cost 1.6 million livres–was Marie Antoinette, who had bought several pieces of jewellery from them in the past. But Marie Antoinette was not interested.
On 10 August 1784, Jeanne de la Motte, who may have been the Cardinal’s mistress and certainly knew of his ambitions, dressed up a young, blonde woman in the kind of white muslin dress that Marie Antoinette favoured, and placed her late at night in the Grove of Venus at Versailles. The girl was told that she was to press a single rose into the hand of the man who approached her, with the words ‘You know what this means’. The Cardinal, lurking in the bushes, saw what he thought to be the Queen, approached and took the rose; he was overcome with pleasure, all the greater because Marie Antoinette had previously made no effort to conceal her dislike for him. And when, not long afterwards, Jeanne de la Motte told him that the Queen, eager to own the famous necklace, wished for the Cardinal to act as her intermediary with the jewellers in order to negotiate a series of deferred payments, he readily agreed. The jewellers were informed that the Queen had changed her mind and now wanted the necklace, and they gave it to Jeanne de l
a Motte to pass on to her. The necklace disappeared into the hands of La Motte’s lover, who quickly broke it up into many different pieces, sending some to London.
The days passed, and still the Cardinal did not see Marie Antoinette in the magnificent necklace. Weeks, then months, went by. Finally, Bohmer and Bassenge began to press for payment, and the whole farcical affair unravelled. Summoned to see the King, the Cardinal was forced to admit that he had been taken in by the hoax; he begged Louis XVI to cover up the scandal. The King, furious at the light it shed on Marie Antoinette, refused and had the Cardinal thrown into the Bastille.
A hat, the cardinal sur paille–in the gutter–was soon being worn all round Paris, and ivory snuffboxes were sold, with a single black spot in the middle to indicate that the Cardinal would be unlikely to emerge from the affair entirely white. When the trial against him, La Motte and their various accomplices came to a close, Cardinal de Rohan, wearing the deepest purple for mourning, was divested of all his offices; Jeanne de la Motte was ordered to be stripped naked, beaten by the public executioner, branded with a V for voleuse, thief, and sent to serve a life sentence in the prison of the Salpêtrière. While branding her shoulder, during which Jeanne struggled and screamed, the executioner’s hand slipped and the V ended up on her breast.
But the real casualty was the Queen’s reputation. For she emerged as spiteful, wishing to destroy the Cardinal, and a spendthrift. Worse was the implication that the Cardinal could actually have believed that Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, was so without moral scruples that she was prepared to have a secret tryst with him in a garden late at night. In the libelles, the scandalous, clandestine pamphlets that fed the French public daily with tales of corruption and licentiousness at court, Marie Antoinette was portrayed as stopping at nothing to satisfy her appetites. Some hinted at lesbian relations with Jeanne de la Motte. There had been attacks on the Queen’s morals in satirical cartoons from the moment she came to the throne, but they now rose to new heights of vitriol; Marie Antoinette and her coterie were portrayed as debauched, riddled with venereal disease and as sexually degenerate as they were politically corrupt. None of this would have been quite so damaging had it not been for the excesses for which the Queen was known.
When Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were crowned in 1774, there had been genuine approval of their simple, unfussy manners after the solemnity of the court of Louis XV. For a while, the people enjoyed their pretty young Queen, and Lucie’s mother’s time at court had coincided with a moment of popularity for the monarchy. But by the mid-1780s stories began to circulate about excessive gambling and frivolity, and about a ‘queen’s party’ of pleasure-seeking and horse-racing aristocrats such as Thérèse-Lucy’s supposed admirer, the Duc de Lauzun. The names of Arthur Dillon and a good-looking young Swede, the Comte de Fersen, were also mentioned. After the Prince de Guéménée’s bankruptcy and his wife’s retirement from court, Marie Antoinette had taken into service as royal governess a beautiful but chilly young woman, the Countess Yolande de Polignac. The Polignacs, like the de Rohans, were perceived as ambitious and venal, as the Prince de Guéménée had once tried to warn Thérèse-Lucy.
The Queen was now surrounded by a group of courtiers very different from those who had filled Versailles under Louis XV. The starchy princesses and countesses, elderly and jealous guardians of ritual and prerogative, had departed, offended, to Paris or to their estates. Their places had been taken by light-hearted young women, with a taste for amateur theatricals in which they dressed as dreamy Watteau shepherdesses, for parties with magicians and tightrope walkers, and for the gaming tables. They were eager to spend, prodigiously, on clothes, jewellery, trinkets and anything else that might provide them with pleasure. ‘Virtue in men and good conduct in women,’ Lucie would write, ‘became the objects of ridicule and were considered provincial.’ At Le Petit Trianon, where the servants wore the Queen’s own livery of red and silver, rather than the blue, silver and red of the King, etiquette was largely forgotten. On coming to the throne, Marie Antoinette had replaced the staid, ageing footmen with flamboyantly dressed tall young men.
It was this world that Lucie was about to join, for Marie Antoinette had indicated that, when she came of age, Lucie was to take her mother’s place at court as one of the 12 Ladies of the Queen’s Household. Lucie was both intrigued and nervous. Her thoughts were concentrated on how to escape her grandmother, and both Versailles and marriage promised early release. Reflective and knowing beyond her years, and with a sternness that verged on prudishness, she was also extremely wary. She mistrusted the way that, in the Queen’s circle, ‘gaming, debauchery, immorality’ were now all ‘flaunted openly’.
The King, meanwhile, hunted. The vast forests of the Ile de France were his hunting grounds, full of stag, boar, partridge, pheasants and hares. In the saddle, this serious-minded, shortsighted, ungainly man lost his gaucheness. He hunted at Fontainebleau, at Compiègne, at Marly and Choisy, and later at Rambouillet and Saint-Cloud, which he bought from the Duc d’Orléans, soon after the death of his father, Louis-Philippe le Gros, whose appetite was so voracious that he was said to eat 27 partridge wings at a single sitting. And when he was not hunting, which was seldom–the phrase ‘the King is doing nothing today’ had come to mean that he had not gone out hunting–Louis XVI shut himself away in his special workshops, to pore over his scientific instruments, clocks and locks.
Versailles itself, still extraordinarily splendid on the nights of Marie Antoinette’s Wednesday balls, was often deserted, the nobility more and more preferring to spend their time in salons in Paris or on their estates when not actually summoned to a court many found exaggerated and frivolous. The public, on the other hand, flocked: the palace of Versailles and its park were open for visitors to wander and stare at the royal family. Thomas Blaikie, the Scottish gardener, was taken to see the King at breakfast and marvelled to find him so available and little guarded, ‘dressed almost like a country farmer, a good Rough man’.
Marie Antoinette had a weakness not just for jewels, but for clothes. Three rooms in her private apartments were set aside for her wardrobe, where several times a week the royal milliners and dressmakers came to show their wares. Every season, every event, every ritual in the royal day had its change of dress, of material and of trimming. Gold was the colour for frosty days. After the King remarked that brown, the shade of the moment in the summer of 1775, looked ‘flea-coloured’, everything was known by a different hue of flea–flea’s back, flea’s belly. Trimmings, too, incorporated every ‘caprice du moment’. As the Evangelical philanthropist Hannah More wrote to a friend, during a visit to Paris, the fashionable material of the day was silk with ‘a soupçon de vert, lined with a soupir étoffe et brodée de l’espérance; now you must not consult your old-fashioned dictionary for the word espérance, for you will find that it means nothing but hope, whereas espérance in the new language of the times means rose-buds.’
When Marie Antoinette had first come to the throne, her dress allowance of 96,000 livres was raised to 200,000; but it was never enough. In the hands of Rose Bertin, her increasingly influential milliner, who irritated the women at court with her mixture of fawning and haughtiness, Marie Antoinette sped from one fashion to another; and the rest of the court followed. Rose Bertin became very rich. There were Tyrolean balls, Indian balls, Norwegian balls, each necessitating costumes for the several thousand guests; and when the snow was deep enough to take out the horse-drawn sledges, the grooms wore special Russian hussar outfits. After the first zebra arrived at the Ménagerie, coats, waistcoats and even men’s stockings were striped.
Nowhere, however, did fashion reach such ludicrous heights as over hats. They were enormous, grotesque and fanciful, gigantic scaffoldings of gauze, papier mâché, silk, flowers, paint, ribbon and feathers, fashioned to mirror the topic of the day. The craze for the hat as riddle, allegory, social comment or celebration, started in 1775, when the high price of flour led to bread riots in Paris an
d someone had the idea of creating a ‘bonnet à la revolte’. After that, no major event passed unmarked: there were hats à la Montgolfier, à la Suzanne (The Marriage of Figaro), aux insurgents (the American War of Independence), à l’inoculation (vaccination of the King against smallpox). Léonard Autie, the Queen’s hairdresser, described what he called the ‘ménagerie’ at court. ‘Frivolous women,’ he wrote, ‘covered their heads with butterflies, sentimental women nestled swarms of cupids in their hair; the wives of general officers wore squadrons perched on their forehead; melancholic women put a sarcophagus and cinerary urns.’ But none, it was universally agreed, was more spectacular than the landscape sported by the Duchesse de Lauzun one night in Mme du Deffand’s salon. The Duchess arrived with an entire tableau consisting of a stormy sea, ducks swimming near the shore and a man with a gun sprouting from her head. Above, on the crown, stood a mill with the miller’s wife being seduced by a priest, while over one ear the miller could be seen leading his donkey. It made Madame de Matignon’s display of fresh vegetables, broccoli topped with artichokes, look very tame.
Dancing to the Precipice Page 8