Marie Antoinette

by Antonia Fraser

  Marie Antoinette had a weakness for furniture incorporating mechanical devices; David Roentgen of Neuwied, ébéniste mécanicien to the King and Queen, made her a writing-table surmounted by the realistic figure of a lady playing arias on a little clavichord. Riesener also collaborated with the German Merklein to produce pieces of furniture with mechanical devices to smooth away any possible difficulties in the Queen’s luxurious routine. For example, a special mechanical table was constructed for her to eat in bed following her accouchement; it was so cunningly constructed that “even the weakest hand” could lower it without making any noise. A dressing-table revealed little compartments for pomades, pins and furbelows, as well as producing a mirror at the touch of a button; another button transformed it into a desk or a music stand, which could be adapted for use either sitting or standing.21

  This pretty but practical object, its wood edged with gilded bronze, was so popular with the Queen that she often took it with her on her travels. In general Marie Antoinette tended to move her furniture about, having a range of residences in which to arrange it within a comparatively small geographic compass,*59 including the Tuileries Palace in which she had a small pied-à-terre. Certain types of chairs—bergères or fauteuils often made by Georges Jacob—or the large chests of drawers known as commodes, were in effect reordered in exactly the same models, She also had a passion for little tables, and especially for the lightly built writing-desks called secrétaires. The name indicated their origin as places where writings could be kept secret. Also, from the psychological angle, one might point out that the hiding of her correspondence had been one of the Queen’s prime concerns ever since her arrival in France. Sometimes furniture was specially adapted in order to be upholstered with the embroideries for which the Queen, surrounded by her ladies, had such enthusiasm, making her the ideal customer of Madame Éloffe, the fashionable purveyor of wools and silks as well as lingerie.22

  None of this came particularly cheap and it was not helpful that the prices of objets d’art in general rose sharply after 1750. It would, however, be quite wrong to give the impression of an economical King married to a free-spending Queen, to say nothing once again of the extravagant habits of the rest of the royal family, including the aunts. All of them paid top prices for their own interesting acquisitions—up to 5000 francs each for commodes and secrétaires. Louis XVI, ordering from Adam Weisweiler, Jacob and others as well as Riesener, suffered from his familiar indecision as he tried out an ornate commode at Saint Cloud or ordered two beds in 1785 and then changed his mind. More sympathetically, he asked for furniture without sharp corners to avoid those painful encounters that threaten short-sighted people. Marie Antoinette, on the other hand, liked carvings of all sorts: rams’ heads, fruit, flowers, of course—and the heads of her dogs.23

  At the great sale of the belongings of the Duc d’Aumale in 1782, the King as well as the Queen bid lavishly, the latter acquiring two wonderful jasper tables as well as yet more commodes, which were then altered at yet further expense.24 Nor did their expenditure on their apartments lighten with the years, despite the kingdom’s worsening finances. One can point to the custom of the society in which they lived; that is what royalties did, in the process patronizing great artist-designers and furniture-makers. A more effective defence, as with the Petit Trianon, is to do with the creation of beauty. One might cite Marie Antoinette’s boudoir at Fontainebleau as the supreme example of this. Of all the surviving rooms associated with her, this is the one that still ravishes the eye. Created on the theme of the pearl by Barthélémy, the Rousseau brothers and Roland in 1786, delicate flowers, cherubs and ribbons decorate the pale iridescent silk of its walls and furnishings; Riesener’s glimmering mother-of-pearl secrétaire with its diamond-shaped paillettes evokes the graceful ghost of its royal owner.*60

  Oddly enough in one who had such a vivid interest in her personal setting, the Queen was not particularly interested in painting. She was unimpressed by the great classical and biblical compositions hanging in the Louvre on which her husband, for example, expended a lot of money. Marie Antoinette preferred the romantic seascapes, sunsets and storms of Claude Joseph Vernet, a follower of Claude Lorraine. Sending for Vernet after she had admired his works in the Salon of the Académie Royale de Peinture et Sculpture, Marie Antoinette made royal small talk: “Ah, Monsieur Vernet, I see that it is you who are responsible for our rain and fine weather.” She also liked animal pictures—the painter Anne Vallayer Coster was given lodging in the Louvre and helped to become a member of the Royal Academy and there were of course cosy little pictures of her favourite dogs, to complement the little black lacquer dogs, of Japanese work decorated in gold, sent to her by Maria Teresa. Still lifes were also popular; like Louis XV she admired Chardin, whose clear vision of the beauty of everyday things was so sympathetic to her own spirit. A picture of a pineapple in a pot by Jean-Baptiste Oudry, the famous painter of nature who designed for the Beauvais tapestry factory, was hung in an inner cabinet.26

  Although Marie Antoinette enjoyed having family likenesses around her, and took the trouble to visit Habsburg family portraits executed in tapestry at the Louvre, she regarded pictures of herself with indifference, much as modern royalties must view official photographs. According to Madame Campan, she was only interested in resemblance.27 The tremendous public fuss made about the group portrait painted by Adolf Ulrik von Wertmüller for King Gustav, showing Marie Antoinette with her first two children in the grounds of the Petit Trianon, seems to have left her personally unaffected. It was denounced on the one hand as too casual for a queen, on the other hand as unflattering.*61 Certainly King Gustav thought the picture did not do her justice, whilst to the modern eye the children are wooden and Marie Antoinette’s face, beneath a dominating Rose Bertin pouf of feathers and ribbons, verges on the caricature. Yet Wertmüller was allowed to paint the Queen again in 1788 when the results were even plainer.

  The main result of the unfortunate Wertmüller portrait was to advance the career of the charming young Frenchwoman, Louise Vigée Le Brun who was commissioned by the Minister of the King’s Works to do something both more stately and more beguiling. One of her earlier portraits, a study of the Queen in one of her ruffled and sashed dresses, wearing a straw hat, had also courted trouble for an informality thought unsuitable in a Queen of France. Yet, as the new commission demonstrated, Madame Vigée Le Brun, a true Frenchwoman in contrast to the interloping Swede, was a natural image-maker for the Queen.

  The same age as Marie Antoinette, Elisabeth Louise Vigée was the daughter of a minor artist and had married a fellow painter, Jean Baptiste Le Brun. She was the protégée of Vernet, whose portrait she painted. But it was in fact the direct intervention of Marie Antoinette that secured membership of the Académie Royale for her in May 1783. Extremely pretty, Louise’s delightful appearance led to rumours that she was the mistress of various of her subjects including Calonne (possibly correctly) and Vaudreuil. She also shared the Queen’s taste for simplicity, dressing in the kind of muslins and lawns that Marie Antoinette loved. She wore little powder in her hair at a time when the Queen herself was increasingly sparing with it, just as the latter’s rouge was by now barely perceptible.28

  In 1788 Louise would give a celebrated “Greek” dinner in honour of Vaudreuil, with the guests wearing unadorned classical white. When the guest of honour arrived, he discovered the whole party singing Gluck. It was hardly surprising that a creature of such gratifying tastes, conveyed in the simple but sensuous beauty of her work, should have received the Queen’s patronage. In her Souvenirs, Louise summed up the essence of her most famous subject: “I do not believe that Queen Marie Antoinette ever allowed an occasion to pass by without saying an agreeable thing to those who had the honour of approaching her.”29 That innate charm, based on a wish to please, which had characterized Marie Antoinette since childhood, was something the portraitist’s talent made her ideally qualified to convey.

  The birth of the Queen’s third
child took place at seven-thirty in the morning on Easter Sunday, 27 March 1785. The Queen had been so large that Calonne, as the appropriate minister, was said to have prepared two blue ribbons of the Order of the Saint Esprit for twin princes.30 But it was in fact a single healthy boy, who was named Louis Charles at his instant baptism half an hour later and was equally immediately created Duc de Normandie. Since the godmother was to be Queen Maria Carolina, the name Charles, the French version of Carolus, was a tribute to Marie Antoinette’s favourite sister, and to the shared childhood of Charlotte and Antoine.

  This was the first child borne by the Queen since the Duchesse de Polignac had taken over the position of Royal Governess, and it was therefore into her waiting arms that the desired second male baby was placed; the emotion felt by this sensitive creature was so great that Madame de Mackau, as deputy Governess, had to stand and assist. Already, however, the Duchesse had done Marie Antoinette a favour by making sure that she endured the inevitable ordeal in circumstances less traumatic and less frankly humiliating than had attended the births of her previous children, not forgetting the Queen’s life-threatening convulsions in 1778, when she was stifled by lack of air amid the press of spectators.

  Royal women in Europe were beginning to revolt against this archaic ritual. It will be remembered that in Austria, Maria Teresa had done away with the custom of courtiers actually being present in the delivery room, banishing them to the next room; similarly in England, the German-born Queen Charlotte, who gave birth to fifteen children from 1762 onwards, permitted members of the Cabinet and the Archbishop of Canterbury only in the room next door—although the door was left open.31 Now the Queen of France managed to give birth without the usual debilitating crowds.

  In this case, it was helpful in the interests of the Queen’s privacy that her douleurs were short-lived, and even more helpful that the Duchesse de Polignac, as Governess, was in a position to suppress the news that labour had actually started. The fact that this time labour took place on the morning of so great a feast of the Church as Easter Sunday was no disadvantage either, in terms of distracting attention. Marie Antoinette was well enough to sup with the Princesse de Lamballe that evening.

  Like his sister Marie Thérèse, the baby Louis Charles impressed everybody with his strong constitution, as the Queen happily reported to Joseph II. In May, Marie Antoinette referred to his health again; he was definitely stronger than usual for a baby of that age. In time his sweetness, his lively winning ways and, above all, robust physique which gave such promise for the future, would make Louis Charles the chief source of pleasure in Marie Antoinette’s life. His very presence would later remind her of the days when Yolande had been his Governess and they had all been happy together. She used the same tender endearment, chou d’amour, that the pious Dauphine Maria Josepha had applied to her beloved Duc de Bourgogne, Louis XVI’s eldest brother.*6232

  The Queen had need of comfort at home. The Scheldt Affair had still not been settled, despite French mediation, and despite the fervent wish of the Queen for an end to “this Dutch nuisance.” Her discomfort was also due to the fact that the war of attrition that had been fought by the satirists over a number of years was beginning to succeed. The birth of the Duc de Normandie was accompanied, naturally, by the usual accusations, although the name of Fersen, incidentally, did not figure in them. One sacrilegious parody of the Christmas Story had Marie Antoinette, like her patroness, the Virgin Mary, bearing a baby who was not conceived by her husband. Louis XVI was seen as a complaisant St. Joseph figure, whose chief interest was stuffing himself with food and drink while the Queen gave birth to an heir to the throne “engendered by love.”33

  A picture was being painted, for the benefit of those who had never met Marie Antoinette, of an extravagant, foolish woman, without a thought in her head (except lecherous ones towards sundry unsuitable love objects, female and male), presiding over a dissipated court where Dionysian feasts were a regular occurrence in order to pursue these lusts. Her waning popularity with the French as a whole was noted by Count Fersen, who returned to France on 10 May 1785 and stayed until June before joining his regiment in Flanders. He noted how coldly Marie Antoinette was received when she entered Paris, as was customary for a queen following an accouchement: “not a single acclamation” broke “the perfect silence,” although that night at the opera she was applauded for a quarter of an hour.34

  At the same time, completely contradictorily—but when did that bother a satirist?—this frivolous creature was credited with Machiavellian wiles where the manipulation of her gross and apathetic husband was concerned, mainly in the interests of Austria. But that was not the whole of it. Marie Antoinette was also being made the useful female (and, of course, foreign) scapegoat for the general political troubles of the King, troubles that had at their root the impossible financial situation of the crown. In this way rumours of grandiose feasting, against the background of a Petit Trianon pasted with diamonds and glittering with gold, became symbolic of resentment with the governing power as a whole—but focused on the Queen.

  It was in this climate of public suspicion that, on 12 July 1785, Marie Antoinette received a strange letter at the hand of the leading jeweller, Charles Auguste Boehmer. She had received Boehmer briefly after Mass on behalf of the King, as Louis XVI had commissioned the usual bejewelled presents for the official baptism of his ten-year-old nephew, the Duc d’Angoulême. Like most of the celebrated international jewellers of the time, Boehmer was Jewish; he was regarded in the courts of Europe, where he was much at home, as “a most amiable man.” With his partner Paul Bassenge, who acted as designer to his salesman, Boehmer ran a shop in Paris; but when their customers were the Queen of France or other great ladies, including the Comtesse Du Barry in the previous reign, Boehmer naturally brought his wares to them. In the past he had had many dealings with Marie Antoinette.35 But this was before a passion for her children had taken over, coupled with an enthusiasm for decoration that went better with domesticity than diamonds.

  In particular Marie Antoinette had rejected on several occasions an elaborate, many-looped diamond necklace, which Boehmer and Bassenge had probably produced with the Du Barry in mind. It consisted of a total of 647 diamonds, gemstones from the mines of South Africa; its weight was 2800 carats. Taste surely played a part in her decision—it was certainly not the sort of thing that appealed to her personally—but also her change in lifestyle. The answer that the Queen gave was polite but firm: “She found her jewel cases rich enough.” The jewellers, becoming slightly desperate over their investment, at one point asked her Librarian, Campan, to intercede, but he refused, as did several others. France not being the only option, a paste copy of the necklace toured other European courts—but without takers.

  Boehmer and Bassenge also substantially reduced the price and suggested various easy methods of payment, which made the necklace, if an object worth nearly two million francs can ever be so described, something of a bargain. Since Boehmer had purchased the position of Crown Jeweller, he could not, for all his unwelcome pestering on the subject, be banned from the court. Nevertheless Marie Antoinette was resolute; she believed that the money would be better spent on the navy: “We have more need of ships than diamonds.” If the necklace was such a bargain, the King might buy it in trust for his young family and in fact he did toy with the idea before deciding that the money would be locked up for too long. In short, the Queen of France did not want the necklace and never had. In her own opinion she had made this amply clear to the ambitious jewellers.

  The letter that Boehmer handed to the Queen ran as follows:

  Madame,

  We are at the summit of happiness to dare to think that the latest arrangements which have been proposed to us and to which we have submitted with zeal and respect, are a new proof of our submission and devotion to the orders of Your Majesty. We have real satisfaction in the thought that the most beautiful set of diamonds in the world will be at the service of the greatest and be
st of Queens.36

  Marie Antoinette’s first instinct was to interpret this letter as a new solicitation for her custom. Nevertheless, even in that context the letter remained slightly baffling. The Queen read it aloud to her First Lady of the Bedchamber with the casual aside that, since Madame Campan was so good at solving the riddles printed in the newspaper the Mercure de France, perhaps she could cast light on this one.

  But Madame Campan could not. So the Queen twisted this odd little missive into a spill and lit it at the candle kept burning on her desk to melt the sealing wax for her correspondence. The Queen remarked, most inappropriately as it turned out: “This letter is hardly worth keeping.” As for Boehmer, she was determined never to use him again. She instructed Madame Campan to make it clear that she no longer liked diamonds: “If I have money to spend I prefer to add to my properties at Saint Cloud.” After thinking it over, she was sure that Boehmer must have created some new piece of jewellery to sell to her.

  What Marie Antoinette did not know, and had indeed absolutely no way of knowing, was that she was wrong on both counts. Boehmer had not created a new piece of jewellery and he was not trying to sell her anything. It was the magnificent if flashy diamond necklace of previous history to which he referred. And Boehmer was under the impression that he had already sold it to the Queen of France.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  ARREST THE CARDINAL!

  “By orders of the King, arrest the Cardinal!”