Marie Antoinette: The Journey

by Antonia Fraser

  Finally the Archduke and Archduchess left, their last days clouded by the verdict; a great fête on 7 June had to be cancelled as inappropriate. Count Fersen left too for England, where he was goggled at by the smart English, who were friends of Marie Antoinette, and nicknamed “the Picture” for his handsome looks. Even the King left the Queen’s side. He went to Cherbourg and other seaports on an eight-day visit. His Journal recorded inspection of harbours and coastal works, and dinners aboard ships such as the Patriote. He arrived back at Versailles on 29 June 1786.25

  As the father of the family returned, the Queen greeted him on the balcony of the palace with her three children, Madame Royale aged six and a half, the Dauphin approaching five, and the Duc de Normandie at fifteen months. Touching cries of “Papa! Papa!” were heard from the balcony. The King flung himself hastily out of his carriage to embrace them all. He was flushed with the success of his journey, during which he had demonstrated real technical and naval knowledge with his questions; in consequence he had conducted himself with an ease and bonhomie unknown at Versailles. After his departure from Harcourt, the people, much impressed by his goodness, were said to have kissed the sheets left behind on the royal bed. The day after his return, Louis XVI returned to his normal routine of hunting, which he had briefly interrupted for the coastal tour.26

  Ten days later the Queen began to feel unwell. At first she denied that these could be labour pains. She continued with her own routine, which included Mass in the Royal Chapel. It was not until four-thirty in the afternoon that the ministers whose presence was obligatory, including Breteuil, were summoned. Three hours later, at seven-thirty in the evening on 9 July, the baby was born. It was a girl, instantly named Sophie Hélène Béatrice, and to be known as Sophie for the late Madame Sophie, the King’s aunt, who had died of dropsy four years earlier. Mesdames Tantes were consulted about the choice of name; would it revive painful memories of their beloved sister? The royal aunts replied that they had absolutely no objection; on the contrary they would love their new (great-) niece more than ever.27

  The Emperor Joseph was his usual frank self when he observed that it was a pity the baby was not a third son. The King on the other hand was extremely cheerful when he told the Spanish ambassador: “It’s a girl.” The ambassador was equally so when he replied with a gallant reference to the marriage prospects of the new Princesse: “As Your Majesty keeps his Princes at his side, he now has a means [his daughters] of bestowing presents on the rest of Europe.”28 From the first, however, such an august destiny for the new Madame Sophie seemed unlikely. There must be a strong presumption that she was premature, not only taking into account Mercy’s original prediction of the end of July, and the Queen’s unwillingness to believe she was in labour, but also the fact that the King had gone on his coastal tour so close to the baby’s birth.

  The baby did not flourish. The Dauphin’s fevers continued to torment him, and to agonise his parents. As for Marie Antoinette’s mood, it was one of rising “outrage” over the treatment of her “honour.” As Count Mercy told the Austrian Foreign Minister, Prince Kaunitz, she felt she had not been in any way avenged for all the disgust and pain she had felt.29

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  MADAME DEFICIT

  “Behold the Deficit!”

  NOTE PINNED TO AN EMPTY FRAME, INTENDED FOR THE QUEEN’S PORTRAIT, AT THE ROYAL ACADEMY, 1787

  As Marie Antoinette continued to feel anguish at the acquittal of the Cardinal, and Louis XVI grappled with financial problems so acute that they threatened national bankruptcy, there was a second Habsburg family visit. On 26 July 1786, the Archduchess Marie Christine and the Archduke Albert arrived from the Netherlands where they had been made joint Governors in succession to Prince Charles of Lorraine. They stayed for a month, incognito, as “the Comte and Comtesse de Belz.”

  The timing was not good. The baby Sophie was only three weeks old. The Queen was slow to recover her health; she suffered throughout the autumn—and beyond—from problems that were probably gynaecological in origin: that “terrible accident” in her first accouchement, which Maria Teresa had thought might be malicious. She was also frequently breathless and began to have problems with her leg. Joseph II thought it quite extraordinary that the two sisters had not met, given their proximity, but the omission had a perfectly good explanation. In the past Marie Antoinette had disliked Marie Christine for trouble-making with their mother. In the Empress’s lifetime, the Queen had combated her plan to arrange such a visit with convenient invocations of the problems of etiquette, given Albert’s comparatively minor status as a mere Prince of Saxony; it was the same point made by the French ambassador at the time of her wedding. With sisterly sweetness, Marie Antoinette had protested that she would not wish “la Marie” to experience any difficulties at the French court.1 Currently, the Queen resented the fact that Marie Christine sent scurrilous publications about her to Joseph.

  Now “the old ideas of the Queen,” according to Mercy, made her fearful that Marie Christine would seek to dominate her once more as she had done in their childhood. All the same, Mercy trusted that the visit would result in warmth between them. Afterwards he had to admit that this was not the case. Put diplomatically, “The renewal of acquaintance between the two august sisters had not been without its clouds.” Marie Christine wished to spend a great deal of time at Versailles, while Marie Antoinette was determined to curtail their meetings. Nor was the Archduchess invited to the Trianon. Consequently she did not receive the special souvenir album of this private retreat, which Marie Antoinette usually had made for bestowal upon her favourites, including Joseph II, the Comtesse du Nord, King Gustav of Sweden and the Archduke Ferdinand.2 Perhaps the sisters might have been more genuinely sympathetic to each other, had they had some prevision of the storms that lay ahead not only for Marie Antoinette but also for the superior and critical Marie Christine.

  A week before the Governors returned to the Netherlands, on 20 August, the Controller General of Finance, Calonne, presented an important memorandum to the King. It was entitled Précis d’un plan pour l’amélioration des finances and he had been working on it throughout the summer with a young assistant named Talleyrand. Calonne’s bold attempt to combat the rising chaos in France, which was not only financial but administrative, suggested ways in which taxation would be far more uniformly and fairly spread. For example, a land tax was to be payable by all landowners without exception—even the Church—only the poor being protected against yet further burdens. Calonne also believed in the use of provincial assemblies in order to remedy a country-wide administration that was becoming unmanageable.3

  Obviously the legal enactment of these reforms—quite apart from their implementation—was something that needed careful handling. Trouble could be expected from the Parlement de Paris, which was already in an obstreperous mood as the acquittal of Rohan had shown, as well as from the various provincial Parlements. The expedient chosen, an Assembly of Notables, was one that had not been used for 160 years, when Cardinal Richelieu employed it in an effort to outwit the Parlements in the reign of Louis XIII. This Assembly was now supposed to express its formal approval for the reforms, which would only then be passed on to the Parlements for their endorsement. They would then be officially registered by edicts of the King in that special process, the lit de justice (which could also be used to enforce edicts that the Parlement resisted). The point about the Assembly was that its members were nominated by the King from various categories; in this it was in sharp contrast to another body, the Estates General, which had been in abeyance for even longer—since 1614. In that body, the Three Estates of nobility, clergy and commons chose their own representatives.

  The opening of the Assembly of Notables was on 22 February 1787; there were 144 members, few of them commoners. The Queen did not attend the opening, at which the King appeared with as much majesty as it was possible for him to muster, in purple velvet, flanked by his two brothers. According to Besenval, Marie Antoinet
te’s absence was a deliberate indication of her disapproval for Calonne and his policies; she sided with those Notables—and there were many of them—who constituted an informed opposition and who would not be managed by Calonne. Afterwards Marie Antoinette herself denied this angrily: “Me!” she cried. “Not at all. I was absolutely neutral.” Besenval, a member of the Polignac set and a supporter of Calonne, replied smoothly: “Madame, that was already too much.” He told her that it was a great mistake to be neutral in such circumstances, since it gave exactly the opposite impression of partiality; thus she was open to the charge of overriding the will of the King.4

  In fact the Assembly of Notables was destined to fail for a more fundamental reason than the “neutrality” of the Queen: it simply did not provide the obedient endorsement that was its raison d’être. What it did provide was a plethora of debates, arguments and discussions, with demands that fiscal and administrative reforms should receive proper acceptance from the Parlements—or even for the summoning of that dread spectre, an Estates General. La Fayette asked his friend Thomas Jefferson whether the Notables should really be called the “Not Ables.” At all events Calonne could not secure any form of closure. By Easter Week, the King was refusing to receive Calonne, and on Easter Sunday, 8 April, it was indicated that he was dismissed. At the same time Miromesnil lost his position as Keeper of the Seals, for exactly the opposite crime of having connections to the Notables who were in opposition.5

  In other ways this period marked a time of change. Vergennes’ health had begun to give way; he died on 13 February 1787, having served the King since his accession thirteen years earlier. On the one hand Vergennes’ management had created an enormous dependency in Louis XVI, who was an irresolute character as even his admirers agreed; on the other hand Vergennes had held out successfully against the influence of the Queen in foreign affairs. It remained to be seen what his main legacy would be: an emotional void that needed to be filled, or an ineradicable distrust of Marie Antoinette on the part of her husband.

  Naturally Count Mercy did not allow the death of Vergennes to pass without badgering the Queen over the appointment of a new Foreign Minister. Bracingly he told her that she must perform “a service to the two courts” of Austria and France. The preferred Austrian candidate was the Comte de Saint-Priest who had had a varied diplomatic career over twenty-five years. An enemy of Vergennes, he was known to have favoured Austrian interests; he was also incidentally a close friend of Count Fersen, despite the fact that his wife was one of the Swedish Count’s numerous mistresses. Privately, however, Mercy confided to the Austrian Foreign Minister Prince Kaunitz that although the Queen continued to have a leaning towards her homeland, an attachment to her own blood and feelings of friendship for her brother, she was “incapable of acting positively in any of these interests.”6 Marie Antoinette passively accepted that it was the Comte de Montmorin, a boyhood friend of the King, a former ambassador to Spain and a man personally unfavourable to Austria, who would actually replace Vergennes as Foreign Minister. Insofar as she promoted Saint-Priest, she did so with a conspicuous lack of energy.

  There was, however, one small but significant alteration in the sentiments of the Queen. She now had a “scruple.” Mercy himself seems not to have realized the importance of this change, dismissing it as part of Marie Antoinette’s lack of interest in “serious things.” Her scruple—her principles as she termed them to Mercy—struck him as merely annoying. Yet what the Queen was saying was in fact nothing if not serious. She felt that it was not right “that the Court of Vienna should nominate the ministers of the Court of France.”7 For the first time, over matters of Austrian interest, here was a Queen of France speaking.

  Whatever Marie Antoinette’s tentative new direction, Prince Kaunitz’s attitude to her, expressed to Mercy on 18 March 1787, was shockingly cynical, given the years the Queen had spent struggling to represent the Austrian alliance, however unsuccessfully. “If she were Queen anywhere but in France,” wrote the Austrian Foreign Minister, “in another place with another government, frankly she would not be allowed any meddling in affairs neither interior nor exterior, and she would be a nonentity as a result in every sense of the term. Let us suppose for a moment that it is the same in France, and in that case, let us count on her for nothing, and let us just be content, as with a bad payer [of debts] with anything we can get out of her.” Even Mercy demurred at this crudeness, arguing that he preferred to continue to nurse the Queen along towards “doing great things” as he had done for so long.8

  The fact was that Mercy’s own influence was beginning imperceptibly to decline. It was noticeable that the Queen evaded Joseph’s invitation to visit him in Brussels where he projected a visit, on the grounds of her own health, her children’s health (meaning that of the Dauphin) and then finally because such an expedition would be extremely expensive, and the Queen must set an example of economy. All of these excuses were undoubtedly true. But the impression is left nevertheless that the Queen was at last feeling her political way; there was plenty to occupy her in France, without visiting Belgium for an admonitory lecture on their shared interests from her eldest brother.

  In early 1787 the Emperor’s restless energies were darting in new directions. A radical reform programme drove the Habsburg-dominated Netherlands into revolt. When the Governors—Marie Christine and Albert—were obliged to negotiate certain concessions, Joseph was furiously angry. In the meantime his alliance with Russia meant that Austria was almost certainly on the verge of a new Turkish war, which the Tsarina was eagerly contemplating. As in 1783, there was a conflict of interests here between Austria’s treaty with France and her understanding with the predatory Russia, which was made still more acute when the latter seized the Crimea.9 Although Marie Antoinette continued to pay lip-service to the needs of the Austro-French alliance, it is clear that events in France were driving home—at last—the message that she might have to decide which came first, the needs of the Habsburgs or the Bourbons.

  What caused this shift, in a woman uninterested at heart in politics, as many close to her attested, to someone with a very different agenda? Seventeen years is a long time at a court with such a powerful atmosphere as that of Versailles; in this case, it represented over half the lifetime of Marie Antoinette. It would be surprising if the character of the thirty-year-old Queen had not altered in some way from that of the childish if charming Dauphine who arrived in 1770. But Marie Antoinette’s shift was comparatively recent. It is therefore plausible to argue that it had causes other than this natural development, which culminated in the famously “serious” thirtieth birthday of 2 November 1785.

  One obvious cause was the enlargement and growing-up of her family—not her Habsburg family but the Children of France, that little clutch of Bourbon Princes and Princesses to whom she had given birth, one of whom would inherit the throne. A deeper reason lay in the frightful adversity that Marie Antoinette had endured over the Diamond Necklace Affair, and the vicious, unfair libels surrounding it. This evidently brought new steel to a fundamentally pliant character. Increasingly, Marie Antoinette would find herself rising to challenges and, in doing so, transcending any previous expectations of a gentle, rather lightweight nature.

  Of course she was hardly unique in being strengthened by adversity; but this neither is, nor was, the case with everyone. Louis XVI, for example, was by no means transformed by the purgations he was currently enduring. His apathy, his indecision, his tendency, surely psychological, to fall asleep in Council meetings—he even snored on occasion—all those characteristics so long bewailed by the courtiers, were only intensifying. There was a direct connection between the positive approach of the Queen—for better or worse—and the negative state of the King. Since she had been trained since youth to respect the male figure of her husband and her sovereign, it was as though she could only spring properly into political life when the natural order was reversed; then residual memories of the true power wielded by the dominant female in
her life, the Empress Maria Teresa, might come into play. Nevertheless, this womanly sense of reverence for the King’s immutably superior position was deeply ingrained and would linger to compete with her new activism. The following year Marie Antoinette would write: “I am never more than the second person” in the state “and despite the confidence that the first person [Louis XVI] has in me, he often makes me feel it.”10

  In May 1787, however, the King was coming to the Queen’s apartments daily and weeping. By August, Louis XVI was exhibiting all the signs of a major depression, in his own terms, brought on by the failure of his recent policies. Count Mercy described only too vividly the low state of the King’s morale, which had led to actual physical degeneration. He hunted “to excess”—as though to escape, where previously he had hunted to enjoy—and then indulged in “immoderate meals.” Worst of all there were “occasional lapses of reason and a kind of brusque thoughtlessness which is very painful to those who have to endure it.”11

  The outside world interpreted this behaviour as ordinary drunkenness; Jefferson heard that the King hunted half the day and was drunk the other half. It is difficult to disentangle the question of the King’s drinking from that of his physical awkwardness (including his short sight) since both could lead to stumbling. His enormous corpulence did not help either. The King’s defenders promoted the idea that he was often taken to be collapsing with drink when it was actually with sheer physical exhaustion after the hunt.12 It is only fair to point out that the Queen—who drank no alcohol out of choice, only mineral water from Ville d’Avray—was also accused of drunkenness and drunken orgies. Nevertheless there seems to have been a connection between the King’s depression and his desperate seeking of escape in alcohol.