Marie Antoinette: The Journey

by Antonia Fraser

  After that, things got worse. It turned out that the Duc de Chartres was not exactly the hero of the occasion that he purported to be. There were accusations of cowardice, alternatively incompetence. His culpability is open to question. Was he in fact a coward? Over-promoted, thanks to his royal rank, did he mistake the naval signals during the battle through ignorance? Philippe’s frivolous insistence on leaving the scene of the battle for the rapturous Parisian welcome of his dreams was less easy to defend. The satirists went quickly to work:

  What! You have seen the smoke!

  What a prodigious achievement . . .

  It is absolutely right

  That you should be an august sight

  At the opera.23

  A few months later the Duc de Chartres was ogling various beauties at a ball, when he designated the looks of one particular noble lady as “faded.” The lady in question overheard him. “Like your reputation, Monseigneur,” was her curt retort. As if this was not enough, the heir to the Orléans dukedom allowed himself with characteristic lack of judgement to be involved in a squalid intrigue to do with ministers and corruption. Humiliated, the old Duc d’Orléans pleaded for his son. But Louis XVI, who—unlike his wife—had never enjoyed the company of this light-hearted, dashing cousin, banished Philippe from court for a month. The Queen, feeling that her personal position was too vulnerable in view of the Austrian démarche, detached herself from his cause.24 The estrangement of the main Bourbon line and that of Orléans began to take root.

  The Queen’s douleurs, the expressive French phrase for labour pains, began very early in the morning of 19 December 1778. Marie Antoinette had gone to bed at eleven o’clock without any sign that the baby was starting. Shortly after midnight she felt the first pains and rang her bell at 1:30 a.m. As Superintendent of the Household, the Princesse de Lamballe had the right to be told immediately, as did those who enjoyed the “honours,” in other words the privilege of being present. At three o’clock the Prince de Chimay came to fetch the King.

  Never was the etiquette of Versailles held to be so vital. It was the duty of the Princesse de Lamballe personally to tell members of the royal family and the Princes and Princesses of the Blood who were at Versailles. She then sent pages to inform the Duc d’Orléans who was at his nearby palace of Saint Cloud with the Duchesse de Bourbon and the Princesse de Conti. The Duc de Chartres (still sulking), the Duc de Bourbon and the Prince de Conti were all in Paris.

  At the same time as these measured steps were being taken, there was another totally disorganized rush in the direction of the Queen’s apartments from the moment the cry of the royal accoucheur was heard: “The Queen has gone into labour.” These avid sightseers—for that is what they were—were mainly confined to outer rooms such as the gallery, but in the general pandemonium, several got through to the inner rooms, including a couple of Savoyards, who were discovered perched aloft in order to get a really good view.25

  The Queen was still able to walk about until about eight o’clock in the morning when she finally took to the small white delivery bed in her room. Around her, besides the King, were the royal family, the Princes and Princesses of the Blood, and those with the “honours” including Yolande de Polignac. In the Grand Cabinet were members of her household, the King’s household and those who had the Rights of Entry. Throughout the labour, Louis XVI remained helpfully practical. It was he, for example, who insisted on the immense tapestry screens that surrounded the bed being fastened with ropes; otherwise they might well have fallen down on the hapless Queen.

  The baby was born just before 11:30 a.m. It was a tiny Maria Teresa, in other words a daughter.

  The position of the Comte d’Artois, proud father of two sons, the Ducs d’Angoulême and de Berry, was still unchallenged in a country where females could not succeed. From the point of view of the Comte de Provence, still the heir presumptive to his brother’s throne, things had also turned out well. His continuing status was acknowledged by the fact that the grand title of “Madame,” borne by his wife, was not removed from her in favour of the newborn princess, even though the latter was the daughter of the reigning monarch.26 The baby, given the names Marie Thérèse Charlotte (for both her godparents), was to be Madame Fille du Roi, or by the time she was five years old, Madame Royale.

  Was the King disappointed? Much later the girl-child born that day happened to ask her father the age of the new King of Sweden. Louis XVI replied that he knew exactly the date of his birth because it was when they had all been awaiting her mother’s accouchement. Louis XVI had proceeded to warn Marie Antoinette to prepare herself for a girl, “because two Kings would not have two sons in the same month.” Marie Thérèse could not resist asking with great respect whether her father regretted her birth. Naturally the King assured her he did not, and embraced her while the watching courtiers wept with emotion and Marie Thérèse herself also burst into tears. Thirteen years later, this was surely true, the trauma having long faded as with most parents whose first child is not the desired sex. At the time his Journal recorded no disappointment—only his attendance at the ceremony of the swaddling up of his infant daughter in the Grand Cabinet next door—but then his personal feelings were almost entirely absent from his diary.27 After that Madame Fille du Roi was handed to the Princesse de Guéméné, who had the right to the post of Governess to the Children of France.

  As for the Queen, she had had a convulsive fit and fainted. The press of people, the heat and the lack of fresh air in the rooms, whose windows had been sealed up for months against the winter cold, was too much for her after her twelve-hour labour. She may also have been physically damaged by the birth and have haemorrhaged as a result, her accoucheur having been chosen more for his connections than his skill. The Marquis de Bombelles, via his courtier mother-in-law and wife, heard that the Queen had been “wounded” in the course of her labour, and Maria Teresa, learning of some “terrible accident,” even believed in her paranoid way that it had been done on purpose to stop her daughter having more children.28

  For a while nobody seems to have noticed her swoon, in a scene so crowded and noisy that in the words of Madame Campan, “anyone might have fancied himself in a place of public entertainment.” When the Queen’s inanimate condition was eventually registered, some strong men tore down the nailed-up shutters and winter air streamed into the room, saving her.*46

  Thanks to this mishap, the Queen was not informed of the sex of her child for at least an hour and a quarter after Marie Thérèse’s birth. When she heard, she wept—or so the relatives of the Duc de Croÿ told him. These tears were, however, likely to have been a reaction to her labour and the general intensity of emotion at having produced a living child, especially when silence had originally caused her to think the baby was born dead. Her first reported words on the subject were touching in their unconscious reflection on the fate of a princess in a patriarchal society: “Poor little girl, you are not what was desired, but you are no less dear to me on that account. A son would have been the property of the state. You shall be mine; you shall have my undivided care; you will share all my happinesses and you will alleviate my sufferings . . .”30

  As to the real implications of the child’s gender—the need to try again as soon as possible—they were summed up for the Queen and many others in a popular little rhyme:

  A Dauphin we asked of our Queen,

  A Princess announces him near;

  Since one of the Graces is seen

  Young Cupid will quickly appear.

  Certainly for Marie Antoinette, with her lifelong passion for children in practice as well as in theory, the birth of a daughter who was exceptionally robust and healthy was not the straightforward “domestic misfortune” it was rated in Vienna. It was the Prince de Lambesc, son of the Comtesse de Brionne, who was despatched to Austria to make the official announcement on behalf of the King of France. By etiquette, Count Mercy’s own messenger was supposed to follow forty-eight hours later (although Mercy managed
to cut that delay in half). Marie Antoinette had wanted to scribble a few lines in pencil to her mother but was stopped on the grounds that the Empress would be worried by the thought of her daughter’s unnecessary effort at such a critical moment.31

  The Queen was not present at her child’s instant baptism. Thus Marie Antoinette was spared the incident when the malicious Comte de Provence protested to the officiating Archbishop that “the name and quality” of the parents had not been formally given, according to the usual rite of a christening. Under the mask of concern about correct procedure, the Comte was making an impertinent allusion to the allegations about the baby’s paternity made in the libelles. The allusion was certainly not lost on the courtiers present. In Paris, the Duc de Chartres mounted a different sort of protest by decorating the Palais-Royal with an extremely modest set of illuminations; this meanness was attributed by the crowds to his continued state of dudgeon with the King and Queen. Marie Antoinette, more easily able to overlook such insults because she did not hear or see them herself, concentrated on celebrating her daughter’s birth with donations to appropriate charities. She asked the King for 5000 livres to be used as dowries for one hundred “poor and virtuous” girls who were marrying “honest” workmen.32

  The Queen stayed in bed for eighteen days, her ladies watching over her night and day in large armchairs with backs that let down as beds. Léonard visited her to cut her hair short and give it a chance to repair the ravages of the past few months. During this period, Marie Antoinette bravely attempted to breastfeed her baby, in accordance with the theories of Rousseau about natural healthy motherhood. This was the advantage of having produced a daughter—“you are mine”—since a Dauphin would have been borne away immediately to the best wet-nurse in the land. But the belief that maternal nursing acted as a contraceptive meant that Maria Teresa greeted the news with open disapproval. It was up to the King of France and the doctor to decide, wrote the Empress, although she would not have permitted it herself; the idea that the Queen of France, still in the happy dream of having given birth, might have some kind of will of her own on the subject was ruled out. Although a wet-nurse for the baby Princess was obviously employed as well, Marie Antoinette seems to have managed to nurse her daughter for a certain period; four months later she told her mother she still had traces of milk.33

  In April 1779, as the Empress called forcefully for “a companion” for Marie Thérèse, she received the unwelcome news that Marie Antoinette had been struck down with an “exceptionally severe” case of measles. Since the King had never had the illness, the Queen decided to keep her three-week quarantine at the Petit Trianon. This was the first occasion on which she actually spent the night in her beloved little paradise, instead of returning to Versailles to sleep. The size of the Petit Trianon meant that the Queen’s household had to be lodged at the nearby Grand Trianon. The days were spent in such therapeutic activities as drinking asses’ milk and boating on the Grand Canal. Certain aristocratic ladies came down from Paris to provide company. So far, so good; there was nothing here that Count Mercy could not explain away to the Empress.34

  More difficult to gloss over was the ostentatiously chivalrous behaviour of four male members of the Queen’s circle who went to watch over their liege lady like so many mediaeval squires. In other words, the Duc de Coigny, the Duc de Guines, Count Esterhazy and the Baron de Besenval (rated as too entertaining to be omitted) were there to amuse the Queen during her convalescence. With the Princesse de Lamballe and the Comtesse de Provence as fellow members of the merry crew, the whole escapade was an innocent frolic rather than anything more sinister. There had been a similar incident in March when the Queen and her ladies were stranded in a broken-down coach on their way to Paris for late-night revelry and had to hire a hackney carriage. “The very next day” this innocent adventure was “blared all over the town.” Such episodes were open to misinterpretation.35

  A question went the rounds: if the King got measles, would he be tended by four ladies? In fact the King did not get the measles and he did miss the Queen; their relationship became noticeably deeper following the birth of their child. Finding three weeks too long to be apart, Louis XVI made his own romantic gesture. He stood for a quarter of an hour in a private courtyard of the Petit Trianon while the Queen leant out of a window. No one else was allowed to be present at this touching encounter but it was learnt afterwards that tender words had been exchanged on both sides.

  In a further step forward, that bone of contention between the King and Queen, the matter of the Bavarian succession, was removed when the military action came to an end. The Peace of Teschen, of 13 May 1779, gave none of the warring powers exactly what they wanted, although everyone received something. Charles Theodore, the Elector Palatine, was acknowledged as the legitimate heir to certain lands, while Austria’s Joseph II got a small piece of Bavarian territory—he called it “a morsel”—known as the Innviertel.36 Frederick II of Prussia had, however, blocked the Emperor’s major plan of aggrandizement. The “co-guarantors” of the Peace were to be the Russia of Catherine II—who had brilliantly succeeded in imposing herself on European councils as a result of the war—and, of course, France.

  Subsequently Vergennes was exultant on the subject in a memorandum to his sovereign: “Your Majesty has prevented the house of Austria getting dominions, and has established the influence of France in Germany; also harmony between herself and Prussia.” Marie Antoinette’s attitude was somewhat different. For her it was naturally a “much desired peace” and her happiness was overflowing at its arrival, as she told her mother. Nevertheless, she ascribed the pacification largely to Maria Teresa’s efforts, praising the Empress’s goodness, sweetness, and, if she dared say so, her patience towards “this country” (France).37

  The American war with England, on which Vergennes was concentrating France’s efforts, was certainly a more remote prospect for her personally. When the Comte d’Estaing returned from capturing Grenada in July, he was crowned with flowers by Marie Antoinette and her ladies who wore white satin “Grenada” hats. Léonard created a special coiffure aux insurgents in honour of the rebels. A new ballet, devised by Gardel and performed in the autumn of 1779, had an American island as a setting and the American hero [John] Paul Jones as a leading character. There were dances by “American officers and their ladies,” and a display of military drill in the third act, which in the early stages of the ballet was prudently performed by professional infantrymen.38 So far, the distant military struggle had no more substance than the passing fashion; no more reality than the ballet.

  Naval warfare was different. The autumn visit to Fontainebleau had to be cancelled because of its expense. An outbreak of dysentery among the fleets in Brittany and Normandy was inconvenient, particularly as it had spread to the Spanish fleet. The Spaniards, who had finally allied themselves with France the previous April, remained reluctant partners, given that their colonies made them more vulnerable in the New World than France. They demanded that there should be a joint operation against England in Europe—possibly using Ireland as a back door—in exchange for supporting France in America. Marie Antoinette hoped that this unfortunate outbreak of disease in the fleet would not encourage the English to be obdurate in refusing to make peace.39

  Yet as the year drew to a close with the first birthday of Marie Thérèse, Madame Fille du Roi, the main preoccupations of Marie Antoinette were not political. Her chief joy was in the precocious development of her daughter. Marie Thérèse had the big blue eyes and healthy complexion that in babies make for admiration. She was also tall and strong, walking in her basketwork stroller by the time she was eight months old and shouting out, “Papa, Papa.” These preferential cries did not offend her mother; on the contrary she was delighted that father and daughter were in this way linked more strongly. As for Marie Antoinette, she could hardly love her more than she did—the child who was “mine.” Marie Thérèse had four teeth by the time she was eleven months old, and at fiftee
n months, by which time she was walking easily, could have been taken for a child of two. In her letters to her mother, Marie Antoinette apologized disingenuously for babbling on about her daughter . . .40

  Her chief worry was her own health, if a “young Cupid” (that is, a Dauphin) was to follow quickly. Marie Antoinette believed herself to have had a miscarriage in the summer of 1779, as a result of reaching up to close a carriage window.*47 The relentless questioning of the Empress on this intimate subject continued. A typical comment was evoked by the death of the Austrian court lady, Générale Krottendorf, who had—for some obscure reason—been the origin of the nickname given by the Empress and her family to their periods. In her New Year letter of 1780, Maria Teresa hoped that her death was an omen that meant the annoying monthly Générale would not visit her daughter again.42

  This was a period when marital relations with Louis XVI had fallen into an amicable pattern. They did not share beds—that was not the French way, as Marie Antoinette tried in vain to persuade her mother—but they did live together as man and wife, and the “two thirds husband” was a thing of the past. However, Marie Antoinette endured persistent gastric troubles. This was an icy winter, which laid low everyone except Louis XVI and the Comte de Provence, so that the Queen’s illnesses may have been due to the general epidemic. On the other hand, they may have been a portent of something more serious as a result of that badly handled labour.

  At least the Queen was able to send a novel New Year present to her mother: a souvenir containing a lock of the King’s hair, her own hair—and that of “my daughter.” Now the seemingly interminable letters of official congratulation that the Queen of France had to write to the King of England on the frequent deliveries of his wife could at last strike a genuine note. The birth of Princess Sophia in December 1777 was greeted with “sincere interest” but that of Prince Octavius, shortly after that of Marie Thérèse, met with “real satisfaction.”43 Where royalties were concerned, Marie Antoinette was no longer the odd—infertile—one out.