by Antal Szerb
The next question is, what did they do with such vast sums of money? It is difficult for us now to believe they could spend so much. A modern American millionaire would struggle to do so. But American millionaires and other people with huge amounts of money are not grands seigneurs. The owner of a vast fortune achieved through economic activity will even in his wildest moments retain some degree of business sense, and preserve some sort of method even in his madness. But the old French grandees were never, in their most sober moments, thinking economists, and had no idea of system or method. Just where money went in the age of Louis XVI we shall seek to explain by means of a few extracts from the work by Taine mentioned earlier.
“The lady-in-waiting to Louis XV’s daughters, the three little old ladies known as the Mesdames, burned candles to the value of 215,068 francs, and the Queen 157,109 francs. In Versailles they still point out the street, once filled with little shops, where the royal footmen would come and feed the entire town on desserts left over from the King’s table. According to the official estimate, the King himself consumed 2,190 francs worth of almond tea and lemonade. The ‘round-the-clock’ consommé kept for Madame Royale, the two-year-old daughter of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, cost 5,201 livres a year.” While Marie-Antoinette was still the Dauphine, the femmes de chambre ran up a bill against her account for “four pairs of shoes per week, three spindles of thread per day to stitch their hairdressing gowns, and two reels of ribbon to adorn the baskets in which her gloves and fans were kept.” (The rules forbade that one should simply hand them to her: they had to be presented in a basket.)
Naturally, tradespeople were never paid on time. When Turgot was Finance Minister the King ran a debt of some 800,000 livres with his wine-merchants, and 3,500,000 with his caterers. (Multiply these figures by ten, advises Funck-Brentano.)
Next come figures which confirm that the nobility did not lag far behind the Court in the scale of their debts and general spending. “On one occasion the Maréchal de Soubise (Rohan’s relation) entertained the King at his country mansion for dinner and the night. The bill came to 200,000 livres. Mme de Matignon allowed herself 24,000 livres a year for a new coiffure every day. Cardinal Rohan owned a needle-lace silk chasuble valued at over 100,000 livres; his saucepans were made of solid silver. And nothing could have been more natural, when you consider the way they thought about money at the time. To economise, to set money aside, was like turning a flowing stream into a useless, foul-smelling swamp. Better to throw the stuff out of the window. Which is precisely what the Maréchal de Richelieu did, when his grandson sent back the bulging purse he had been given because he ‘couldn’t think what to do with it’. So out it went—to the great good fortune the street-sweeper who picked it up. Had the man not happened to be passing by the money would have ended up in the river.
“Mme de B,” Taine continues, “once intimated to the Prince de Conti that she would like a portrait of her canary as a miniature set on a ring. The Prince volunteered his services. The lady accepted, but stipulated that the miniature should be kept quite simple, with no accompanying diamonds. She was indeed given a simple gold ring, but the picture was set not under glass but under a finely-cut sheet of diamond. She sent the diamond back, whereupon the Prince ground it to dust which he scattered over the letter she had written. The cost of this little heap of powder was between four and five thousand livres (raising questions about the tone and content of the letter). The highest gallantry often combined with the most extravagant generosity, and the more fashionable the gentleman, the weaker his understanding of money.”
However, the sheer size of these sums does give cause for wonder.
First and foremost: it could well be that Funck-Brentano’s principle of multiplying by ten is wrong. The money can hardly have been worth that much. To establish its value in today’s terms is not easy. Funck-Brentano seems not to have taken into account its actual purchasing power, or he would have found that the livre would have bought a great deal less than ten pre-war francs. Here are one or two facts which struck us in our reading around the subject.
During the exceptionally cold winter of 1784 the Comédie Française offered a special evening performance for the poor (it was the premier of La Harpe’s Coriolan) where the takings amounted to 10,330 livres. In today’s Budapest Playhouse, with approximately the same seating capacity, a full house would bring in around 7,000 pengős.
Or again, we know what Marie-Antoinette paid for some of the hats she bought from the celebrated Mlle Bertin. They cost her forty-eight, seventy-two, ninety and (possibly) 280 livres. In pre-war Paris the price of a woman’s hat ranged from thirty to 1200 francs. Even the most expensive of those royal purchases hardly justifies the ten-times rule. Further examples: Louis XVI, as I shall mention later, kept a precise record of his petty cash expenditure. From his notes we learn that he paid twelve livres for one hundred apricots for preserving; three livres for six pounds of cherries and two baskets of strawberries; one livre and ten sols for collecting wood and, for one pound of pepper (much more expensive then than here in peacetime), four livres. On the basis of these figures it seems reasonable to conclude that the purchasing power of the livre was very roughly that of today’s Hungarian pengő.
The figures may diminish our sense of the scale of the sums involved, but they are still monstrous. One wonders how it was possible to pay out such amounts in the coinage of the day. Ever since the collapse of the system introduced by John Law at the start of the century the French had been extremely wary of paper money. In 1776 they set up the Caisse d’Escompte to issue banknotes, and those notes were generally preferred to the not always reliable coinage. But in our particular period only very small numbers of banknotes were issued, and by 1783 there were no more than forty million livres’ worth in circulation.
And that gives rise to another little puzzle: whether the aristocracy really did always get their hands on their supposed income. We have seen that Louis XVI owed huge sums to his caterers and wine merchants, so it is possible that the Treasury itself was in debt, and the reason why Rohan and his peers found themselves in permanent financial difficulty was that their stipends were purely nominal, or were received only in part.
Despite all this, they must still have had access to vast sums, which brings us to the third question: where did it all come from? We have seen the size of the bills presented to the King and his nobles, both by their suppliers and by those who billed them in the name of those suppliers, for almond-tea, lemonade or whatever. They suggest a very cosy relationship between two social groups: on the one hand, the tradespeople and merchants supplying the Court and the aristocracy, and on the other, the intendants (financial administrators for the Court and nobility) with their army of clerks and assistants, together with the many different orders of flunkey.
As regards this last group, we find some interesting notes in our treasured guide to the old city, Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s Tableau de Paris: “The principal footman of a high-ranking man at this time would enjoy an annual income of 40,000 livres, and he too would have a footman, who in turn had one of his own. This lowest functionary’s task was to brush Monseigneur’s coat and straighten his wig. The head footman would take the wig from the last of four hands in line, and had merely to arrange it on the head in which reposed the great questions of state. This momentous task being duly accomplished, it became his turn to be dressed by his men. He would order them about in a loud voice, scolding them fiercely: he was expecting visitors, he would explain loftily, as he ordered them to make his carriage ready. The footman’s footman did not have a carriage, but that too suited him perfectly well … The principal footman’s possessions included an engraved gold watch, lace apparel, diamond buckles and a little vendor of fashionable goods as his mistress.
“This pointless and purely ostentatious army of servants was viewed in Paris as a most dangerous form of corruption, and as their numbers grew ever larger it seemed only too frighteningly obvious that they would one
day bring a major disaster down on society.” In the backyards and basements, a new social class was coming into existence—Figaro’s class. Intelligent, affluent and sharp-tongued, they had seen the aristocracy from close up, with no real experience of what lay behind the facade: they knew only one side, the weaker. As Hegel reminds us, no man is a hero to his valet.
On the other hand, the luxury enjoyed by the nobility enriched the citizenry both directly and indirectly. The money might drain away through the hands of the privileged, but it came to rest in the reservoirs of the bourgeoisie, and increased the general prosperity we spoke of earlier—which, paradoxically, was itself one of the most important reasons behind the changing times.
But to return to Vienna. The city had its own grands seigneurs, but the scale of Rohan’s magnificence astonished and enchanted everyone, and no one, it seems, was troubled by those financial concerns that, from the distance of a century-and-a-half, are so obviously disquieting. Rohan charmed everyone, even the cynically superior Emperor Joseph II and his wise and canny chancellor Kaunitz. He charmed everyone, with one exception—the one person who mattered—Maria Theresa.
Maria Theresa probably disliked him simply because everyone else was charmed, and here we can see just how blind Rohan could be. The Empress did not take kindly to a foreigner overshadowing her royal household in pomp and splendour—something the Habsburgs had quite understandably never liked. Their censor had even suppressed József Katona’s opera Bánk Bán on the grounds that it cast aspersions on the imperial house. And how could the Episcopal Coadjutor, accustomed as he was to French ways of doing things, understand how deeply his manner of life—so often unworthy of his position—might offend her religious sensibilities? No doubt the Empress saw him as the embodiment of the French frivolity and immorality that so alienated her. But perhaps, in the end, it wasn’t Rohan himself that she loathed so much as the people behind him, the vast entourage from whom she wished to protect her people.
She did all she could to have him recalled. She saw him as the ambassador to her Court not only of France but of the Powers of Darkness. She mobilised her envoy to Versailles, Mercy-Argenteau, and she mobilised her daughter, the Dauphine.
This constant call to action from her mother was one of the causes of Marie-Antoinette’s tragedy. The Empress regarded her daughter as a diplomatic instrument comparable to d’Argenteau, an attitude inherited by her son, Joseph II. But as far as Marie-Antoinette was concerned, her mother was the closest to her of all living creatures, and she sought to obey her in every way possible. For all her sagacity, the Empress did not know, or did not want to see, that despite the present alliance between her country and France the ancient enmity between the French and Germans was a far more deeply rooted affair; nor could she imagine that the same person could be at the same time a good Frenchwoman and a good German. As she wrote to her daughter: “Be a good German—it’s the best way of being a good Frenchwoman.” In short, she sacrificed her daughter to her political ambitions.
Not every child smothered with love by a mother who makes herself indispensable continues to feel strongly bound by that love. But we do sometimes see examples of the reverse—children who remain permanently tied to mothers who want to dominate them for ever. Maria Theresa did not exactly swamp her children with maternal affection—she would not have known how to. Like all Habsburg rulers, she sacrificed every moment to her implacable sense of duty. The Habsburgs ruled the way a born writer writes, and a born painter paints—in the middle of the night, waking between two dreams. For centuries they had had little time for tenderness. Their style was the direct opposite of the idle and voluptuous Bourbons’, with whom Marie-Antoinette, the most delicate flower of the Habsburg forest, was now entangled.
Of course we might think otherwise when we gaze on Maria Theresa’s imposing baroque tomb in the Capuchin cemetery in Vienna. The Empress sits enthroned amidst her offspring, the multitudinous little princes, like some ancient fertility goddess, a Magna Mater, the very symbol of motherhood. But her actual practice is revealed in the words of Marie-Antoinette, as recorded by that gifted writer, her Première Femme de Chambre (not, we repeat, ‘chambermaid’!), Mme Campan: “Whenever she heard that some foreigner of note (un étranger de marque) had arrived, the Empress would surround herself with her family, sit the little ones at table and create a tableau to suggest that she was bringing them up herself.” It was certainly not the case.
So it might well have been from a sense of duty that Marie-Antoinette adopted her mother’s stance of intense hostility towards Rohan. She had met him only once, in Strasbourg. It is possible she took a dislike to the rising young churchman even then. Carlyle may well be right: “Perhaps even then, her fair young soul read, all unconsciously, an incoherent Roué-ism, bottomless mud-volcano-ism, from which she by instinct rather recoiled.”
Carlyle was the second person, after Goethe, to give literary expression to the necklace trial, in his famous essay The Age of Romance, written from the necessary historical distance at the beginning of the last century. In what follows we shall be frequently quoting his highly compressed, savagely ironic and eloquent phrases. In the lines transcribed above he employs the term ‘roué’. The word is still in use today, but it first became current in Rohan’s time. Originally it signified the sort of man who ended up being broken on the wheel; then, once it became fashionable, someone who simply deserved such a fate. But it was not just the word that came into vogue: so did the behaviour. A great many people aspired to the name. Mercier has some important remarks on the subject, if our reader would care to hear them:
“‘What is an ‘aimable roué?’ a foreigner who thinks he understands French might ask. He is the sort of man of the world who has neither virtues nor principles, but gives his vices a veneer of charm and dignifies them by means of his agreeable wit … If the foreigner is then surprised that such an expression should take root in our language, he will find that gallows humour has a long history in our common parlance. Thirty years ago an abbé was hanged for a banking fraud. The miserable fellow hesitated at the foot of the ladder leading up to the scaffold. ‘Come, come, M Abbé,’ said the hangman, ‘don’t be such a bébé.’ Another time, a drunk came out of a pub in the Place de la Grêve, just as they began an execution. The man on the wheel started bellowing, cursing and swearing in his agony. The drunk raised his head towards the scaffold, took offence at what was being said, and called out: ‘There’s no need for rudeness, even if they are breaking you on a wheel.’ This quip was much admired in aristocratic circles.”
So far as the two Queens were concerned, Rohan’s chances were ruined for ever by the indiscretion of Mme du Barry. At the time Prussia and Russia had just carved Poland up between them. Maria Theresa, while strongly condemning their actions, could do nothing about them and demanded a share for Austria. Rohan, who had a justified reputation among his contemporaries as a wit, took the occasion to write to the Duc d’Aiguillon: “Maria Theresa holds a handkerchief in one hand to wipe away her tears, and a sword in the other, hoping to becoming the third partner in the spoils.” D’Aiguillon sent the letter to Du Barry, who took great delight in reading it aloud to her guests over dinner, and they were quick to repeat the contents to Marie-Antoinette the following day.
But while the blundering ambassador slandered Vienna in Versailles, he took every opportunity to slander Versailles in Vienna. Stories that he was spreading about Marie-Antoinette reached Maria Theresa’s ear. Her maternal heart was so aggrieved that she sent Baron Neni to find out what truth there was in them, and the Baron established that Rohan’s source was baseless chatter emanating from the Du Barry-Marsan-Guéménée clique, who so despised the young Queen.
So it was perfectly understandable that Marie-Antoinette too should do everything in her power to have the doubly indiscreet ambassador brought home. But Rohan was protected by his powerful aunts, and while Louis XV was alive, and Mme du Barry remained who she was, it was impossible to remove him.
In April 1774 Louis XV contracted smallpox. Du Barry took herself off to Rueil, and only his daughters remained at his bedside. The Court continued at Versailles, waiting impatiently for the candle burning in his window to signal that his appalling death struggles were over, so they could then leave the infected Palace and withdraw to Choisy. Finally, on 10th May 1774, the flame was extinguished.
The King’s corpse lay there, slowly breaking open. It was already half-decayed, and a hideous stench was pouring from it. The Duc de Villequier, Premier Gentilhomme de la Chambre, called on the surgeon, Andouillé, to carry out his traditional office and apply balsam to the body. Andouillé knew that it would inevitably mean catching the infection himself, and replied: “Very good; but it is your duty, Your Excellency, to hold the head while I do it.” Villequier dispensed with the embalming.
“The Dauphin was with the Dauphine,” records Mme Campan. “They were awaiting news of Louis’s death together. A dreadful noise, absolument like thunder, was heard in the outer apartment above them. It was the crowd of courtiers who were deserting the dead sovereign’s antechamber, to come and do homage to the new power of Louis XVI. This extraordinary tumult informed Marie-Antoinette and her husband that they were called to the throne; and, by a spontaneous movement, which deeply affected those around them, they threw themselves on their knees; both, pouring forth a flood of tears, exclaimed: “O God, guide us and protect us. We are too young to reign.”