The Queen's Necklace

by Antal Szerb

  But all this applies only to her early years. After the birth of her children the urge to pursue pleasure left her, and she took little interest in fashion. However, her hatred of protocol did not disappear. In fact, it came to a head. At which point she withdrew to Le Petit Trianon.

  Le Petit Trianon had been built by Louis XV. This little mansion in the park of Versailles, with its nobly simple outline, had from the very first asserted the spirit of the coming age against its neighbour, the grandiose, marble-clad, pink-coloured Grand Trianon erected by Louis XIV, which stirs up so many painful and humiliating memories for Hungarians. At one time Mme du Barry lived in the newer building, when it was known chiefly for the way the dining table was piled progressively higher from the bottom end so that no one would be embarrassed by the billings and cooings of the King and his mistress. After that, it stood unused for some years. Then in 1774 Marie-Antoinette exerted all her influence to have the banished Duc de Choiseul—whom she had to thank for her becoming Queen of France—recalled to ministerial office, but Louis XVI held out against her, and to make amends he gave her Le Petit Trianon.

  “Do you like flowers?” he asked her. “If you do, I have a very pretty bunch waiting for you—Le Petit Trianon.”

  The Queen set about redesigning both the house and the garden with a passion. It occupied her, and gave her enormous pleasure, for several years. The garden was a particular labour of love. Gardening was a specialist art in the Ancien Régime, reaching its heyday in the eighteenth century, and the park at Le Petit Trianon is a graphic memorial to the major shift in taste that occurred in this period.

  Her immediate inspiration was the Anglo-Chinese garden of the Comte de Caraman, though by this time there were already a number of different ‘English’, that is to say, typically pre-romantic, gardens in the country. People had become bored with mathematically correct creations laid out, in the style of Le Nôtre, like a star—mighty avenues of stiffly erect trees lined with frigid statues of classical gods, with their fixed smiles and disdainful expressions of divine serenity. People were bored with formal fountains and baroque arrogance, bored with the topiarised trees, the geometric figures, the general triumph of art and reason over nature. And the royal family was especially bored with Marly, where, in the vivid phrase of the Goncourts, “The pavilions and gardens were filled with the shades of Louis XIV, his greatness and his tediousness.” They were bored, too, with Versailles, where in winter the cold in the predominantly marble and glass rooms was simply intolerable, along with the appalling draught and the hellish smoke from the old-fashioned, poorly-ventilated fireplaces.

  The new fashion, like the whole pre-romantic movement, originated in England. When building, the English nobility began with their gardens. These were to be “like nature itself”. Narrow, winding paths led between fresh, grassy meadows, wild groves and woodland traversed by babbling streams, with flowers growing everywhere, just as one imagined them to do, and with birds singing in the trees the way real birds sing—and heard as if for the very first time. And at night the moon shone just like a real moon, and you were once again transfixed by its long-forgotten, silver-blue enchantment.

  That was the sort of park that Marie-Antoinette wanted. Her excellent taste protected her from the wilder excesses of the fashion, and her garden in Le Petit Trianon had no professionally constructed ruins or professionally designed grottoes, no Chinese bridges or Swiss log cabins, and only one broken column and one miniature pyramid to evoke the required sentimental melancholy. Along with these pre-romantic accessories we find a single little Belvedere, or lookout tower, where the Queen would take breakfast on summer mornings and from where she could survey the whole of her empire. There was also a temple d’amour, a little circular shrine with antique columns: it can be seen in the background of Wertmüller’s celebrated painting of the Queen and her children.

  It is here that the memory of Marie-Antoinette lives most strongly. As you stroll in the park something catches your throat, some remnant of that pre-romantic melancholy hovers in the air around you. Tongues fall silent, and you stand there secretly hoping for the royal ghost to appear, leading her children by the hand, before vanishing at a bend in the path.

  How she loved this place! For a while she was content simply to escape there from Versailles during the day, with only the royal family and her closest confidantes accompanying her. Le Petit Trianon was her happy isle, where protocol was set aside and you did not have to go about in formal dress, and where the prying multitude and the ever-demanding, perpetually scheming nobility could never set foot. Here the family could live out the great dream of the age—“to be human, and to live as ordinary citizens”.

  Then she began to spend nights there too, with growing frequency. The first occasion was in 1779, on the pretext that she had the measles and needed to isolate herself to avoid passing the disease on to her husband. She arranged for four knights to watch over her in turns: the Duc de Coigny, the Duc de Guines, Count Esterházy and the Baron de Besenval.

  “And if the King were ill?” malicious tongues asked. “Which four ladies would watch night and day over him?”

  At Le Petit Trianon the Queen did sometimes arrange more formal events. She was much happier bestowing recognition on genuinely talented writers and theatre directors here rather than at Versailles. Here, the guests were genuinely her guests. The grandest occasion of all was the summer evening party, with the invitees strolling among Chinese lanterns, given in honour of the Russian Grand Duke and his wife, with twelve hundred people dining. That was the evening when Rohan spied on her in disguise.

  But as time went by the place ceased to fulfil her yearning for the simple life. So inside the park she built the famous Hameau Rustique, the model country village and farmstead. It too was the height of fashion. The Duc de Condé also had one, in the park at Chantilly. Marie-Antoinette’s consisted of several buildings, the largest of them her own house, where the entire royal family could withdraw from the Court in the afternoon. The King had a billiard room at his disposal, to fend off boredom, and there was a dairy farm, with cows grazing on the turf of the park—from time to time the Queen would milk her two favourite animals herself. There was also a mill, a granary, a poultry yard and a cottage for the gardener. It was a real working farmstead, not just a toy, as the Goncourts assumed.

  On the basis of research done by Pierre de Nolhac, the leading authority on the subject, we must set aside the rather charming story that the Queen settled twelve poor families in the village, together with a saintly hermit to tend to their spiritual needs. Similarly discredited is the legend that the royals would occasionally play at village life there, with the King as miller, Marie-Antoinette as the farmer’s wife, the Comte d’Artois as gamekeeper, the Duc de Provence as schoolmaster, the Duc de Polignac as magistrate and Cardinal Rohan as curate. It cannot be true, if only for the fact that by the time the village was completed Rohan was already a prisoner in the Bastille.

  What is beyond doubt is that in building it Marie-Antoinette was paying homage to the current fashion for folksiness. When, as the new Dauphine, she first arrived in France, at Châlons, actors came from Paris to play Charles Collé’s Une partie de chasse de Henri IV in her honour. The play is about Henri IV, the French equivalent of our own great King Matthias, who loses his way in the woods during a hunt, comes upon some country folk, does not reveal who he is, and tucks into the village hospitality with hearty appetite. However, when the peasants want to drink to his health he refuses to give his name, whereupon they read him a thorough lecture, just as the grey-haired Peterdi does to Matthias in Vörösmarty’s Szép Ilonka (The Beautiful Ilonka). At this point his courtiers arrive, reveal who he is, and he marries every girl off to whoever it seems appropriate. Collé’s piece is not an isolated instance. Leafing through the volumes of Grimm’s Literary Correspondence dealing with events in literature and the theatre in the 1780s, we find that a great many plays given in the period had a similar folk theme, celebrating t
he uncorrupted morals of village people as opposed to the thoroughly corrupt ones of the Court and the city. The convention originated in England, and the French naturally added the sentimental ‘back to nature’ touch, as in Rousseau’s slogan.

  That this was how Marie-Antoinette really imagined the virtues of the people is made clear in the letter we quoted earlier, à propos the philanthropic activities of the Freemasons. Amongst other things, she writes: “… there are hidden virtues among these social classes, wise souls who embody Christian virtues to the highest degree, and we should do all we can to reward them.” She would have loved to have been the sort of popular, simple, patriarchal ruler in the folk tradition that her ancestors, the princes of Lotharingia, supposedly were. Mme Campan says of them that, if they were short of money they went to church, and when the sermon was over, waved their hats in the air to signify they wanted a word, explained how much they needed, and those of their subjects who were present would immediately club together to donate the required sum. What a fine, pre-romantic dream of the relationship between ruler and people!

  From all this it appears that Marie-Antoinette was in her own way just as much a pre-romantic as her admirer Rohan. What the belief in miracles and mysticism were to him, nature, the simple life and a return to the common people were to her. The Queen was bored with her elevated, inhuman role, and yearned for some real connection with a more normal way of life.

  In the course of this work we have said many times that the Ancien Régime was brought down not so much by its vices as by its virtues. The crimes, the ‘abuses’ of Louis XVI’s period, were no greater than those of any previous century, and were moreover, steadily diminishing. The difference was in the prevailing morality—in the new philanthropy and cult of all things popular.

  When a ruling class starts to show understanding and pity for the lower orders, idealising them in verse, arguing over plans for reform and how to better their lot, it is a fine thing, history tells us, and a sign of genuine nobility. But on the one hand it does very little for those same lower orders, and on the other, it augurs very badly for the ruling class. It is a sign that it has lost its self-belief, lost faith in its own divinely ordained superiority: in short, it has lost its raison d’être.

  The medieval nobility understood the people far better than their eighteenth-century counterparts, because they lived among them on their estates, and did much more for them in a practical way. But they never talked or spent time thinking about them. They knew that God had ordained that there should be the rulers and the poor, and that when they helped the peasantry they were carrying out God’s commandment. It was a debt due to God and to their own souls, but not to the people. And it never occurred to them to s’encanailler¸ to mingle with the multitude; they would not have understood the eighteenth century’s strange nostalgia for what lay below them, for roots and origins, simplicity and the Rousseauistic sense of life, which was in fact itself arbitrary and ‘cultured’—a form of class suicide. So long as a racial group continues to believe in itself it will keep aloof from every sort of physical intermingling.

  The same applies to Marie-Antoinette. It was all very fine, thoroughly human and extremely worthy of her that she should love nature, the people, and the whole romantic ideal that would bring the Revolution to a triumphant head. That she hated stiff Spanish formality and wanted to be just one person among others, was deeply sympathetic in her. But it is not the business of a Queen to be human.

  Rather, her duty was to glide through the dazzling, inhumanly magnificent halls of Versailles in blaser, erdenferner Festlichkheit—‘in pale splendour far removed from earth’—unapproachably aloof from her subjects, her every movement like a formally perfect work of art, and to do, as a beautiful queen, what the King, the man, never could in the same measure, simply by being what she was, to make her millions of subjects feel the superhuman magnificence of royalty: to let them know that in the infinite heights above their heads dwelt powers as fixed as the stars, beings that watched over them by night. That would have been a far greater service to the people. Would it also have been death to her sensitive soul? Every vocation has its martyrs.

  Marie-Antoinette did not do that, and the reason was that, like the glittering Court folk around her, she too had lost faith in her calling, in the institution of the monarchy, and with it her own raison d’être. The queen who no longer understands what it is to be a queen, who pays homage to the purely personal rather than the radiance of the crown, becomes superfluous. Marie-Antoinette did not fulfil the highest duty of her calling. When viewed sub specie aeternitatis, her downfall was not, in the end, undeserved.

  The pre-romantic period was the great age of friendship. While the knights of the middle ages enjoyed the kind of brotherhood in arms that expressed itself through sword and deed, and faithfulness in life and death, it was never a matter of ‘kindred spirits’. And while intellectual friendships also developed, following examples from the age of classical humanism and involving companionship of the highest order, with long philosophical discussions at dawn, great banquets and fine wine, and the exchange of beautifully phrased letters, it was only in the eighteenth century that the friendship of shared sensibility was born.

  In response to the prevailing intellectual aridity of the time, when love had become a sophisticated and devious social game that failed to meet their needs, the women of the late rococo period took refuge in friendship. Female friends were always in each other’s company, supporting and comforting one another, and whispering secrets in each other’s ears. They would accept an invitation only if their friend was included. The two would walk about the salon arm-in-arm, or sit on the sofa with their arms around each other. They persuaded poets to compose hymns to Friendship, and temples were erected in parks to the same deity. Like everything else in this period, it became a dizzy, theatrical fashion. Women wore each other’s hair on their heads, sometimes from a stock taken from a whole collection of friends, or they would have portraits of their favourites worked into their towering coiffures. Hair rings, hair watchstraps, hair chains, hair necklaces, hair bracelets and hair boxes came into fashion, and pictures of girlfriends as angels dangled from bracelets. “J’ai un sentiment pour elle, elle a un attrait pour moi”—I have a feeling for her, she has an attraction for me—they would proclaim. (L Goncourt La femme au dix-huitième siècle.)

  As a young girl Marie-Antoinette paid full homage to this fashionable mania. The longing for friendship was no doubt intensified by the long years when she had no real relationship with her husband and, finding herself truly alone, really needed someone who could understand her. Her most passionate friendships have been much discussed by historians. The first was with the Princesse de Lamballe, who met such an appalling end in the Revolution. This lady was descended from the houses of Savoy (the old ruling family of France) and Carignan, and was loosely related through her Savoy connections to the wives of the Duc de Provence and the Comte d’Artois, as well as the Queen’s sister-in-law. Her husband, the Duc de Penthièvre, the grandson of Louis XIV and Mme de Montespan, had died young. But this lofty status did not shield her from the common disease of courtiers: they all wanted something from the King and Queen, and when they got it, they wanted more. The Princesse, to the great annoyance of her opponents, was made Surintendante de la Maison de la Reine, shortly after which their friendship suddenly cooled. She was replaced in the Queen’s heart by the young wife of Comte Jules de Polignac—an even more passionate relationship. The Comtesse Jules, as she was known, was relatively poor, but she sincerely loved the Queen, and in the sincerity of her loyal nature allowed herself to be loved in return. But she was a blind instrument in the hands of her relations. Her husband soon became the Duc de Polignac, and within a few years the family had an annual income of 500,000 livres.

  The Goncourts tell us that the Queen had a burning need for the Polignacs and the group that formed around them as a party in opposition to the royal aunts and other members of the Court aristo
cracy, to protect her from being completely isolated and reduced to subservience. But the reverse is also true: by confining her favours to her tiny clique to the exclusion of everyone else, and perhaps too for absenting herself so much from Versailles so that those others would not be able even to speak to her, she drew even more resentment upon herself. By around 1777 the Versailles balls were almost completely depopulated, leaving scarcely eight to ten people to circulate in the vast rooms, to the Queen’s great annoyance. She was being boycotted by the offended nobles and left to the company of her friends. That clique of friends was undoubtedly one of the reasons for her unpopularity. Increasingly, the money she set aside for her friends became a source of reproach, and slanderers put an obscene construction on her intense feelings for her lady friend.

  The persecution originated in the Court itself. The cause was jealousy. Here, however, we might be permitted to venture a theory of our own, not endorsed by other historians: that it was not the only reason but was exacerbated by feelings aimed at her circle of an even baser kind.

  This is of course difficult to prove. Most writers show the Queen’s companions as superficial beings, creatures of fashion who lived only for the sterile round of pleasure. The Queen’s brother, Joseph II, took precisely that view of them, as is evident from the didactic and reproving tone of his letters to her. But it is possible that he was wrong, and that historians have simply taken over the common prejudice of his contemporaries. The Duc de Polignac, M de Châlons, the Duc de Guines, the Duc and the Comte de Coigny and the rest, were all sensible, intelligent men, and their circle included people of unquestionable intellectuality.