Marie Antoinette: The Journey

by Antonia Fraser

  For the time being, however, it did not happen. Marie Antoinette began to alleviate the desperate homesickness of her early years in France, and the continued frustration of her marriage, with a lifestyle that was to say the least of it agreeable. She had been accustomed to dream of Vienna and her friends there in her first year abroad, reading about Vienna in the newspapers to catch up on their news. Her beloved former governess Countess Brandeis also kept her in touch with chatty weekly letters on the doings of her mother, brothers and sisters. When Marie Antoinette wanted to send presents home to her old friends, she was reproved for the unnecessary gesture. Nevertheless she insisted for once on having her own way; these gifts were acts of charity. It is obvious from later references in her letters to two women in her Austrian household and to their personal troubles, in which she advocated resignation as being the greatest grace God could grant, that she had kept in touch with them.10

  Thoughts of Schönbrunn or Laxenburg permeated Marie Antoinette’s letters to Maria Teresa. How fine the waterfall at Schönbrunn must be! “If only I could transport myself there . . .” She particularly liked her mother telling her details of summer fêtes at Laxenburg so that she could imagine herself being present. The arrival of two miniatures of her “little” brothers, Ferdinand and Max, set in a ring, aroused sentimental recollections; the Dauphine would be able to keep them with her “always.” In a similar vein, Marie Antoinette showed the great Austrian general, Count Lacy, who was visiting France for his health, porcelain vases decorated with views of the Austrian palaces. And when Countess Brandeis’ stream of letters unaccountably dried up in April 1773, Marie Antoinette was distraught. She burst into tears on learning from Mercy that the Countess had been stopped by order of the Empress and pleaded with the ambassador to get the edict reversed, on the grounds that she depended on Brandeis more than anyone else to give her news of her mother. Mercy agreed to assist, on condition that Brandeis wrote less often and more circumspectly. Helping Brandeis and her relations—such as a young cousin destined for the Church—was something that Marie Antoinette continued to do, whatever the imperial disapproval.11

  Nevertheless the pleasures of France—above all, the pleasures of Paris where she seemed to receive the love of a whole people—began to weigh in the balance against memories of her home. As the Abbé de Vermond pointed out contentedly, the Dauphine’s spoken French, once bedevilled by German phrases and constructions, had improved immeasurably with her actual sojourn in the country. She now used the language “with ease and vivacity.” In June 1770 Marie Antoinette had greeted the sight of her mother’s letter with the involuntary exclamation of a polyglot childhood: “Thank God!” (Gott sei dank). A few years later, Maria Teresa found it necessary to throw into her letters “a little German so you do not forget it.” Despite this motherly precaution, less than five years after her arrival in France, Marie Antoinette had achieved that ambition to which she had referred at Strasbourg on her wedding journey. Even Mercy had to admit to the Empress that “the Archduchess,” although she had not forgotten the German language, was unable to speak it properly, still less read it or write it.12 In short, outwardly, in her speech at least, Marie Antoinette was well on her way to becoming an ideal and idealized French princess.

  The opera and the theatre began to necessitate frequent visits. After all, at the age of eighteen, she was young and she was pretty. She had endured three and a half years of an unsatisfactory marriage, one that she could fairly claim she had tried hard to implement—for even her mother now blamed the Dauphin as not being a man like others. But she could no longer make the mourning of her condition her main preoccupation. Those “moments of sadness” mentioned by the Comtesse de Noailles in the summer of 1772 had unfortunately not been banished by the renewed marital offensive—as one might term it—of 1773, despite the high hopes of all concerned, including, perhaps, those of the Dauphin. In between these sad moments, however, there were a great many distractions to be enjoyed.

  It was not yet a question of gallantry or even courtly flirtation. With the awkward business of the marriage bed still unresolved, Marie Antoinette had every incentive to dislike the morals of Versailles, as incarnated by the ever-triumphant Du Barry. The combination of these two factors made her, as her brother the Emperor Joseph would point out a few years later, rather “prudish” in sexual matters than otherwise.13 Admiration, the love of a people, rather than that of a particular man, given that the man was not her husband, was the intoxicant at this point.

  On New Year’s Day 1774 a young Swedish nobleman, Count Axel Fersen, made his first appearance at Versailles. Born on 4 September 1755, he was two months older than Marie Antoinette; he had been making the Grand Tour of Europe for several years, in the course of which he had met her brother, the Archduke Leopold, in Florence. Fersen spoke fluent French, in which language he wrote, as well as Italian, German and English. He was the son of an aristocratic mother and the Marshal of the Armies, “the richest man in Sweden,” supposedly with £5000 a year, to the £3000 of the next-richest man. Apart from this material advantage, Fersen was dazzlingly good-looking. He was tall and slim, with a narrow face, intense dark eyes beneath strongly marked eyebrows and a slightly melancholy air. These were romantic looks, which caused the Duc de Lévis to write that he looked like the hero of a novel—but not a French novel since Fersen was too serious. Another part of his attraction was what Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire called “the most gentleman-like air”; the Count was always extremely concerned to present an elegant appearance.14

  This particular New Year’s Day was extremely cold and snowy; the Dauphine was looking forward to going sledging the next day. In such weather, according to his Journal intime, Fersen was preoccupied with the delivery of a new fur cloak ordered for the occasion from his tailor. When it failed to arrive, Fersen had to delay his planned early departure for Versailles until nearly nine o’clock in the morning. After that his diary recorded the delights of being a young and personable man abroad. A few days later he was received by the Comtesse de Brionne who was at her toilette being coiffed. Fersen watched with amusement as she scraped off spare powder with a special little silver knife, and then selected various types of rouge, so dark it looked almost black, from six separate pots. As for her daughter, he found Mademoiselle de Lorraine, she of the minuet, not as pretty as had been claimed, but vivacious and good company.15

  On 30 January, Fersen went to the opera ball in Paris, arriving at one o’clock in the morning. There was a huge crowd, and those present included the Dauphin and the Comte de Provence as well as the Dauphine. According to custom, the royal party and others were masked in order to preserve their incognito. It was in this way that the eighteen-year-old Fersen fell into conversation with a young and unknown masked woman. As he recorded in his Journal intime: “The Dauphine talked to me for a long time without me knowing who she was; at last when she was recognized, everybody pressed round her and she retired into a box at three o’clock: I left the ball.”16 Thus the myth of the instant love affair, a coup de foudre (perhaps literally so) in the opera box, so beloved of novelists and film-makers, remains just that. What did happen was the conventional establishment of Fersen’s social credentials. He was subsequently asked to a few bals à la Dauphine before departing for England.

  It is significant that Fersen’s Journal intime, which frequently passes comment on the attractiveness or otherwise of the various women he met, does not at this date mention the charms of the Dauphine. Fersen’s real agenda in 1774 was marriage to the English heiress Catherine Lyell, hence his departure from France. Leaving aside her “moments of sadness,” Marie Antoinette herself was more interested in her patronage of her former teacher Gluck who had recently arrived from Vienna.

  “The Chevalier Gluck,” in his seventieth year, had chosen to make this second journey—he had already been to Paris in 1762—at a moment when his Austrian career, successful for so long, was beginning to decline. The presence of his imperial pupil near
to the throne of France, and in a position to help him, was a strong element in his decision. Nor was he disappointed. Soon after Gluck arrived, he was admitted to Marie Antoinette’s formal toilette. The Dauphine’s excitement was so great that she never stopped talking to the composer so long as he remained; in every way, including musically, the Chevalier was a link with home. Marie Antoinette was soon receiving Gluck “at all times” and he could certainly be confident of her attendance if and when he presented his new opera Iphigénie en Aulide in Paris.17

  Gluck certainly had need of the Dauphine’s support since the new, simple, emotionally restrained yet fervent style of the opera that Gluck hoped to introduce met with little favour in advance from the French artistic world. He had anticipated this. “There will be considerable opposition,” Gluck wrote on the eve of his departure for Paris, “because it will run counter to national prejudices against which reason is no defence.” The composer’s methods of rehearsal did not help to smooth things over. “Blunt and quick-tempered,” he did not care for the star-system. He told Sophie Arnould, who wanted great arias instead of perpetual recitative in her role of Iphigénie: “To sing great arias, you have to know how to sing.” For where national prejudices were concerned, Gluck himself was no mean exponent; he was once overheard saying at a banquet that the French could not sing, and that the only point of being in France was to make money. He quarrelled with the dancer Gaëtan Vestris who wanted to end the opera with a ballet, as was customary. “A Chaconne! A Chaconne!” cried Gluck. “We must recreate the Greeks; and had the Greeks Chaconnes?” Vestris, learning to his surprise that they did not, retorted with some spirit: “So much the worse for them.”18

  As predicted by Gluck, patriotism was partly responsible for this hostile reaction. “Their French vanity was sorely wounded to be taught all these things by a Teutonic master,” wrote Mannlich, who as court painter to the German Duke of Zweibrücken had his own axe to grind. The French had a natural partiality for their own earlier composers such as Lully, opera director to Louis XIV, and Rameau, ennobled by Louis XV; they also had a liking for the contemporary Italian composer Niccolò Piccinni since it was easier to bend to “the yoke of an Italian.” The matter was also mixed up with court faction.19

  Relations between the Du Barry and Marie Antoinette existed at this point in a state of barbed neutrality. From the Dauphine’s point of view she had to put up with the situation, since “the lady” could not be dislodged. This did not mean, for example, that she had to accept the Du Barry’s gracious offer of some diamonds. The Dauphine replied that she had diamonds enough. Now the Du Barry was persuaded that espousing the cause of Piccinni would enable her to inflict a further defeat on the Dauphine and so she duly took it up. It was said that she carried her investigations in pursuit of the vendetta to the degree of attending a rehearsal of Iphigénie concealed behind a grille.

  For a while, it appeared as if musical matters were going the way of the Du Barry. There were philistines who continued to detest the alien sounds of Gluck, although not everyone went as far as the English Lord Herbert, visiting Paris, who would describe his music as “worse than ten thousand Cats and Dogs howling.” But as it happened, the conversion of Rousseau, who also attended a rehearsal a week after the Du Barry’s secret visit, was a more significant portent. He congratulated the composer for achieving what he had hitherto thought impossible. In the words of Baron Grimm, Rousseau became convinced that the French language could be as apt as any other for ’strong, passionate and expressive music;20 later he would leave Orphée with tears running down his face, quoting the celebrated lament of its hero: “J’ai perdu mon Eurydice.” Yet at the opening night, on 19 April 1774, victory was still in doubt.

  The Dauphine attended, together with her husband, the Comte and Comtesse de Provence and various Princesses of the Blood including the Duchesse de Chartres, the Duchesse de Bourbon and the Princesse de Lamballe. The performance took place, as was customary, at 5:30 p.m. and lasted for five and a half hours. It did not take that long to establish the success of the piece. Spontaneous applause—or was it to please the Dauphine?—broke out after the overture. Agamemnon makes an opening plea to the implacable moon goddess Diana, who is demanding the propitiatory death of his daughter:

  Shining author of light

  Could you witness without turning pale

  The most dreadful of all sacrifices?

  That was when Marie Antoinette led the applause herself. The clapping lasted for several minutes.21 Hereafter, although the row between Gluckistes and Piccinnistes rumbled on, Gluck’s own position as Marie Antoinette’s protégé was assured.*30

  A real-life drama was about to unfold, which would have the consequence—minor except to Gluck—of putting to an end the run of Iphigénie en Aulide in a Paris where, as a result of its success, “they are thinking and dreaming of nothing but music.”22 Its major consequence was a change in Marie Antoinette’s life for ever and, no less radically, in the life of the Comtesse Du Barry too. Iphigénie was the story of a girl who was to be sacrificed by her father in the flower of her youth, whereas this real-life drama concerned an older man, with a younger mistress who was desperate to avoid being sacrificed.

  The physical collapse of Louis XV at the end of April 1774 took the court by surprise and for a while frantic efforts were made to pretend that he was capable of recovery. The Baron de Besenval analysed the phenomenon: “When illness comes to princes, flattery follows them to the grave and no one dares admit to them being ill.” Yet at sixty-four the French King had long outlived his father and grandfather. He had also outlived the extraordinary popularity that he enjoyed as a young man. As the Comte de Ségur wrote in his memoirs, he was “in his youth, the object of an enthusiasm which was too little deserved; and in his old age, of severe reproaches which were equally exaggerated.” When a large statue of Louis XV was erected in the square to the west of the Tuileries gardens bearing his name, it showed the King magnificently aloft on his steed with the various Virtues grouped below. The subject was too good for the satirists to ignore:

  Grotesque monument! Infamous pedestal!

  Virtues on foot, vice on horseback.23

  On 27 April 1774, the King, who was staying at the Grand Trianon, went out hunting, but felt sufficiently weak to stay in his carriage. Fever and nausea the next day caused his doctor La Martinière to recommend a return to Versailles. It was at this point that the drama began. When kings were dying—or conceivably dying—a delicate balance had to be maintained by those around them between their physical needs in this world and their spiritual needs in the next. That is to say, even a king could not expect absolution for his sins unless he sent away his current mistress and made a full act of repentance. If the fateful act of exclusion was not performed in time, he risked dying in a state of mortal sin, with the prospect of eternal damnation. Unfortunately from the King’s point of view the decision could not be reversed; to repent totally of a particular relationship and then cheerfully renew it with the return of health was against the rules of spiritual etiquette, which, however lax and casuistical, still existed.

  No one was more aware of this dilemma than Louis XV himself as his health deteriorated, since he had already experienced it once. Thirty years earlier the King had fallen seriously ill, and after a period of agitated conjecture, his then mistress the Duchesse de Châteauroux was sent away. The King duly received absolution. But he did not die. Regrettably, this meant that the Duchesse could not return; her reign was over, if that of the King was not. Other mistresses followed, principal among them the Pompadour, last among them the Du Barry.

  It was not until 3 May that the King, looking at the pustules on his body, said aloud the dreaded words that no one else had dared to pronounce to him: “It is smallpox.” Hitherto he had been buoyed up by believing that he had already suffered smallpox as a young man and was therefore immune. The diagnosis meant that his confession became a matter of urgency. It also meant that his spiritual advisors, in
cluding the Cardinal de la Roche-Aymon and the Archbishop of Paris, had a duty to see that it was made; otherwise criticism within the Church of their pusillanimous conduct would have been severe. As for his devout daughters, they were understandably determined that his spiritual welfare should now take precedence and that the favourite should be banished. The Duc d’Aiguillon, on the other hand, as the favourite’s protégé, had a more complicated hand to play. In all of this, the one person nobody thought of consulting was the Dauphin. It seemed to occur to nobody that in a few days’ time “he might be master.”24

  On the evening of 4 May the King finally ordered the Du Barry to leave for Ruel (Aiguillon’s own château, not far away from Versailles). His words were dignified: “Madame, I am sick, and I know what I have to do . . . Rest assured that I shall always have the most tender feelings of friendship for you.” But perhaps he did not even then give up all hope because a few hours later he sent for his mistress again, only to be told that she had already departed. Two large tears rolled down the King’s cheeks. It was then that he finally confronted the truth of his own mortality. Yet in spite of increasing sickness, which gradually swelled up his whole face and turned it dark “like a Moor’s head,” the King did not die.

  Was the drama of thirty years ago to be re-enacted? Fifteen carriages containing various courtiers were noted by Mesdames Tantes as going to call at Ruel just in case . . . This insurance policy would be held against the courtiers concerned for many years to come. Meanwhile the King’s daughters, defying the possibilities of infection, nursed him devotedly.

  It was not until three o’clock on the afternoon of 10 May 1774 that the candle that stood in the window of Louis XV during his ordeal was extinguished. Suddenly the young couple, Louis Auguste and Marie Antoinette, waiting anxiously together in the Dauphine’s apartments and still ignorant of what happened, heard “a terrible noise, exactly like thunder.”25 It was the sound of rushing feet. The crowd of courtiers hanging around the antechambers of the royal deathbed had instantly deserted them when the news of the King’s decease was broken. All ran towards the rising sun, every man and woman intent on being the first to pay compliments to the new monarch and his wife.