The Queen's Necklace

by Antal Szerb

  So it is not surprising then, that Marie-Antoinette also played and lost. On one occasion the King paid out 100,000 livres she had forfeited in a single sitting. He was not happy doing it, because he was himself very economical by nature: in fact he was the only Bourbon to be that way. It did him little good. In 1777 Marie’s Antoinette’s gambling debts amounted to 487,272 livres.

  Naturally she also spent unbelievable sums on clothes; probably more than any other queen in history. Her ambition was to be respected and admired not as the Queen but as the prettiest and most elegant woman in France. The pleasure of being a pretty and elegant woman in France has never come cheap—and we can imagine what it meant then, when all her dresses were made from expensive fabrics. According to the eternally well-disposed Mme Campan, the word was that the Queen had bankrupted every woman in the land by the fashions, and the constant changes in fashion, that she dictated.

  She was also fond of building—that greatest of royal passions. The King bought St Cloud for her and then made her a gift of Le Petit Trianon, both of which she remodelled to her own taste. Her taste was of course of the very finest, avoiding anything that might be deemed extravagant. The people naturally were convinced that her financial extravagance was unbounded, and when representatives of the Estates General (regional lawyers and state officials) visited Le Petit Trianon in 1789, they came expecting to find the rooms piled high with diamonds, and the twisting columns of sapphires and rubies with which ‘everyone knew’ the ‘Austrian woman’ had adorned the grottoes in which she conducted her debaucheries.

  But in her own way Marie-Antoinette was thrifty. It was her desire to save money that precipitated the whole necklace affair. We have seen that the King was perfectly happy to buy the fatal jewels for her, but she refused. Had she accepted, she would have been spared the whole painful story of the rest of her life. But her economising zeal was always somehow inappropriate and misplaced. One New Year’s Eve, the day on which French children are given presents, she had the latest fashionable toys brought from Paris, and showed them to her children.

  “You see,” she said, “these are the toys you didn’t get, because we prefer to give money to the poor, who are freezing and have no winter coats.”

  Opinions differ as to whether Marie-Antoinette’s extravagance did put as significant a strain on the state coffers as was believed at the time, and whether she really did deserve the name of Mme Deficit. Probably she did not. The sum total of her various extravagances is dwarfed by the running expenditure of the state, especially in relation to the American war. In 1781 the costs incurred by the King, Queen and Royal Princess, together with the King’s sister, his aunts and their ‘household’, amounted to 27,317,000 livres, and they also paid out pensions to the value of twenty-eight million; while treasury expenditure amounted to 283,162,000 livres. So the outgoings of the royal household amounted to just one tenth of the whole. The war alone, including naval and other outgoings, absorbed around a hundred and thirteen million livres.

  Then there is the separate issue of whether Marie-Antoinette was especially prodigal. She lived, as the Queen of France, at the very apex of the glitter and pomp so typical of the age. The French people had put up with the free spending of her predecessors without a murmur; she was made to atone for the sins of the centuries. Or perhaps not for their sins, but simply because the times had changed, and the hour had come for the great reckoning.

  But for present purposes appearance is much more important than the reality. The common belief was that Marie-Antoinette squandered gold without a moment’s thought, and was in permanently dire financial straits. Rohan ‘knew’ that too, and he believed it—all the more so, because it applied equally to him.

  The second great question concerns etiquette. Rohan ‘knew’ that Marie-Antoinette spurned the ancient protocol of the French court, and lived according to the dictates of her inclinations and caprice. What was the truth in all this?

  The life of a court anywhere and in any period is governed by strict conventions. The function of etiquette is to externalise and indirectly express the ‘charismatic’, specially chosen and divinely ordained nature of royalty, and to instil a sense of religious awe in its subjects. It creates a sense of distance between the ruler and his people, making the king and his entourage seem to them as sacred and unshakeable as the eternal stars that pursue their courses with unvarying regularity. The greater the sense of distance desired by the monarchy, the stricter the protocol. The greatest of all was to be found among the ancient god-kings of the East and the rigid formality associated with them, that lived on in Byzantium. In the West, the most unbending protocol of all was that of the Habsburg court of Spain, reflecting the enormous scale of the empire in its heyday and the eternal preoccupation with heaven and hell that characterised the Catholic world view. It enabled the Spanish to channel their immense personal self-respect into the veneration of the persons of the King and Queen as sacred objects. On one occasion the Queen fell from her horse, her foot caught in the stirrup, and the steed dragged her along with him. A nobleman rushed to her aid, freed her, then leapt onto the horse and galloped away out of the country, knowing that the death penalty awaited him for having dared touch her foot.

  Louis XIV seems to have had the Spanish example partly in mind when he created the much gentler, more aesthetic, but no less unbending protocol of his own court. But, besides creating a sense of distance, he had other, more practical ends in view. He wanted the aristocrats whom he invited or summoned to Court to have something to do, and something to think about. Everything he personally did was to be made a precedent. In all comparable situations, exactly the same procedures had to be gone through. The majority of his courtiers, it seems, approached the resulting elaborate ceremonial with deadly seriousness. An example is that marvellously talented and inexpressibly dull writer the Duc de Saint-Simon, who meticulously recorded every one of those customs in his monumental tomes, so that posterity would know precisely how to behave.

  And Louis XIV had another reason, possibly unconscious. We have mentioned that the unspoken aim of Western culture was to reduce the whole of life to a closed system, like a work of art. The punctilious, undeviating repetition of words and actions imposed by court customs can be seen as analogous to the nightly repetition of dialogue in a play, or movements in a ballet. Etiquette served much the same purpose.

  This closed world-system, the triumph of art over the raw material of life, proved no less successful in creating that sense of traditional distance than the Spanish model had done, with its rigid formal attire for men and the great hooped skirts of the ladies (and how uncomfortable their wearers must have been!). But in her early years Marie-Antoinette felt no need for such ‘historic’ distance. For her these things weren’t historic, they were everyday—boring, outdated rubbish.

  The capacity of Versailles protocol to produce some strange situations is shown by the famous story of the Queen’s shift, as recorded by Mme Campan.

  As Prémière Femme de Chambre it was her task to hand the Queen her slip. However, if a lady of higher rank happened to be in the room, the honour passed to her. Once, in winter—and the Palace could never have been properly heated—Mme Campan was about to pass the garment to the Queen when in stepped the Dame d’Honneur, the person next in rank above her. Seeing the situation, the lady quickly asked Mme de Campan to take off her gloves and lend them to her, as she could not give the Queen her shift without them. But while the gloves were being removed there was a knock at the door, and in stepped the Duchesse d’Orléans. To preserve protocol, the Dame d’Honneur followed the rules and returned the gloves to Mme Campan, who curtsied and offered the shift to the Duchesse, whereupon there was yet another knock on the door and in walked the King’s sister-in-law, the Comtesse de Provence. The Duchesse returned the dress to Mme Campan, who made a fresh curtsey and offered it to the Comtesse, who apologised and quickly handed it to the Queen, who was by now shivering with cold.

  What can als
o be seen in this story is the way members of the royal family were never left to themselves. They were surrounded by attendants at all times, like the gods and goddesses in baroque paintings. This was true even in the most intimate moments of their lives. We know that the lever—when the King got out of bed—was a formal and very public occasion, as was the moment when he put his boots on; and that the members of the royal family gave audience while seated on that discreetly named item of furniture known as the chaise percée. The Queen even took her bath in public—in her shift, naturally.

  Whenever she passed from one part of the building to the next, four ladies of the court in full formal dress, together with various other flunkeys, had to follow her around in procession. These ‘processions’ were almost always undertaken in full formal costume.

  On certain days, royal mealtimes were a public spectacle. Anyone who turned up could watch. “Once the honest folk,” says Mme Campan, “had had a good look at the way the Dauphine drank her soup, they moved on to see how the Princes ate their bouilli, and then ran themselves out of breath to behold Mesdames polishing off their dessert.”

  The rule was that only women could wait at the royal table, the Dame d’Honneur, kneeling on a little stool, and four ladies en grand habit. All these tedious customs were abolished by Marie-Antoinette.

  Every book dealing with the Court includes a description of how Marie-Antoinette gave birth to her first child. So many people were milling about the room that she could not breathe, and the King had to haul the windows open with his own hands.

  When Marie-Antoinette first arrived at the Court, it was controlled by the most rigidly protocol-minded of the older generation. To counterbalance the situation she found herself obliged to join forces with Louis XV’s ‘girls’—who had inherited none of the Bourbon magnificence beyond an awareness of protocol and a respect for it, but were otherwise just little old ladies. The Dame d’Honneur, the Comtesse de Noailles, she christened ‘Mme Etiquette’.

  But her greatest horror was Mme de Marsan, who was connected through her husband to the House of Lotharingia (Lorraine) and thus a relation, but who was also one of the Rohan tribe, and the Cardinal’s most important patroness.

  According to the Goncourts she was like the Bad Fairy in the stories. “She more or less personified the narrow and oppressive morality of the age of Henry IV, and retained something of the character of that infamous Marsan who distinguished himself at the time of the dragonnades by the zeal with which he persecuted Huguenots. The Dauphine’s easy, rocking walk was in her eyes the saunter of a courtesan; the airy linen dresses she wore were a theatrical costume calculated to seduce. If the Dauphine raised her eyes, Mme de Marsan saw it as the practised glance of a flirt. If her hair was in the slightest bit awry, it was dishevelled (‘the hair of a goatherd!’ she would complain). If, as was her custom, she spoke in a lively manner, she was talking for the sake of talking when she had nothing to say. If her face lit up during conversation and showed sympathy, Mme de Marsan found it insupportable that she should behave as if she knew everything. If she broke out into happy, childlike laughter, it was simply forced or affected. The old lady was suspicious of everything, and placed an unpleasant construction on all she did. In time Marie-Antoinette took revenge on her, as she did on the Comtesse de Noailles, quite disregarding the fact that Mme de Marsan was the Gouvernante to and friend of the King’s sisters, which ensured that the least of her actions would be criticised and she would be enmeshed in slander.” This was a pattern that would be repeated many times over.

  Marie-Antoinette waged war on Mme de Noailles, Mme de Marsan, and even Mesdames the royal aunts. Primarily it was a battle of the generations, the most instinctive conflict in any society. Perhaps she carried her disdain for formality a little too far the greater to annoy them—an all-too-human trait. But then the two generations grew apart in really significant ways. Those with Mme de Marsan represented the old-style grandeur, the baroque pomp and formality of Louis XIV, which had already been undermined in Louis XV’s day by the spirit of rococo. Marie-Antoinette and her entourage were children of that new age, whose sense of beauty depended not on pomp and grandeur but on delicacy, grace, wit, the joli—charm and prettiness, as critics like Kármány and Kazinczy would say of our own belated Hungarian rococo. The formal severity of the baroque had lost its inner meaning: the age of great passions was over and there was nothing left that needed to be restrained through the imposition of formality. The half-savage courtiers of Louis XIV had had to learn calmness and dignity; the cooler spirits of Louis XVI’s needed to display a little vivacity. In her war on protocol, Marie-Antoinette was very much of her time.

  This liberation from formality was also, without question, a kind of sexual emancipation—which certainly led Rohan, for one, astray. Wherever she could, the Queen spurned the official court costume and appeared dressed down, in light and comfortable clothing. The ladies were deeply shocked—and frantically imitated her. They queued up for Mlle Bertinel, her official dressmaker. Everyone wanted to be as déshabillée as Marie-Antoinette. But the style was not simply more comfortable, it also revealed rather more of the female form.

  The Queen organised donkey rides, during which women sometimes fell off, producing a pretty déshabillée.

  “Send for Mme Etiquette,” she cried, “so she can tell us what a queen of France should do when she falls off a donkey.” But what people claimed she said was:

  “Anyone who wants to take part should come dressed to fall off.”

  We know from Fragonard’s famous painting Les hazards heureux de l’escarpolette—The Happy Accidents of the Swing—how much the rococo age valued those gratuitous moments which unexpectedly exposed the normally-concealed charms of women. Mercier tells us that ladies would often receive their guests in the morning while still at their toilette, because at those times there would be frequent opportunities for them innocently to reveal parts of the body which the clothes of the time enviously concealed. (But do not think the worst—he means, for example, the arms.)

  One by one the ladies of the Court began to follow the Queen’s example. They gave up their embroidered costumes, their talons rouges (their red boots, which at one time became so typical that the word was used as a general term for the aristocracy). They began to dress like normal people. One problem was that Parisians could no longer identify them by rank and unpleasant scenes occurred. And here lay a hidden danger. Once a courtier dispensed with protocol, how was he or she different from anyone else?

  Even more dangerously, the Queen indulged in that suicidal passion common to every late and over-refined aristocracy: she loved s’encanailler, to mix with the common people, though the translated phrase lacks the suggestion of coarseness and vulgarity in the original. She was thrilled when her carriage broke down and she turned up somewhere in a hired carriage, like a common mortal. Her passion for the theatre in particular presented her with a wealth of opportunities to make contact with the populace, in this case people associated with the stage. She was herself an accomplished actress, brought up as such in Schönbrunn, and as Dauphine she would rehearse and present plays with her brothers and sisters-in-law, with her husband as the only member of the audience (he often fell asleep during performances). When she became Queen she had even more such opportunities, and amateur theatricals became the chief diversion at Versailles, this form of amusement incidentally costing 250,000 livres per annum. (“Do I sing well?” the Comte de Provence once asked Mme Vigée-Lebrun, the painter. “Like a prince!” came the reply.) The Queen took an intense interest in everything going on in the theatre and often visited Paris to keep in touch. She befriended the players, supported an actress with the unfortunate name, given her profession, of Mlle Raucourt, and got herself involved in a diplomatic incident with the Venetian Republic over a tightrope walker called Picq. She knew all the gossip, and had she been alive today she would have been the most ardent reader of the theatrical weekly journals.

  In 1773 she took
part for the first time in an opera ball, and from then on attended them with great enthusiasm. They presented the best opportunities for mingling incognito among her people, the people of Paris, and having direct contact with them, not as subjects but as one human being with another, or rather, as a woman among men. She enjoyed the amusing situations that occurred, the jeux de l’amour et du hasard—The Games of Love and Chance—as Marivaux, one of the most outstanding writers of the rococo period, expresses it in the title of one of his plays: that subtly erotic ambience elicited by simple feminine charm. This naturally gave rise to a great deal of gossip, and to one or two impudent comments from those who recognised her as the Queen and took unpleasant advantage of the situation. Joseph II rebuked his sister severely for these little outings. He worried that they might prove fatal to the French monarchy. His anxiety was not unfounded.

  The rebellion against protocol also involved the Queen’s dressmaker and hairdresser. Mme Campan tells us that Marie-Antoinette would be ceremonially robed in her chamber, in full view of the ladies and other visitors, before briefly thanking them and disappearing into her cabinet, where the really important person, her couturier Mlle Bertin, who according to the rules should not have been there, was waiting. But Mlle Bertin did not work for the Queen alone, nor did her hairdresser Léonard, whose job it was to pile up the mighty tower of her coiffure with emblems, portraits and favourite animals—a whole little market town: he attended to every fashionable female head in Paris. Women readers will find this perfectly natural: if the Queen’s dressmaker worked only for her, and her hairdresser did only her hair, as protocol required, neither of them would have had sufficient practice or been able to keep up with the fashions.

  And—perhaps to overcompensate for feelings of inferiority, as an Austrian vis-à-vis the women of Paris—Marie-Antoinette wanted to be absolutely the most fashionable lady in France. But this concern with the mode was itself a form of s’encanailler. Elizabeth of England and Mary Stuart were also beautiful queens, but were regal enough to ignore the fashions of the town and be guided instead by those of the Court. This deferential attitude to the ‘town’ was a sign of the times, the first step towards the downgrading of the monarchy. In this respect Marie-Antoinette was ahead of her own circle—and closer to the Revolution.