Marie Antoinette: The Journey

by Antonia Fraser

  There was something gallant about the Queen’s attempts to make good this situation. Her health continued to give trouble, not only in breathlessness but in headaches, which may have been at least partly psychological. Unfortunately her new seriousness did not transform her at a glance into a successful politician. Her lack of concentration, which can be traced back to an inadequate education, continued to undermine her own efforts. She loved to tell the story of one of her Lorrainer ancestors who, when he wanted to levy a tax, went to church and stood up after the sermon. He waved his hat and mentioned the sum he needed. If she yearned for this kind of feudal paradise, she was not alone in eighteenth-century France. It was nevertheless an illusion of paradise rather than a policy. As the Prussian envoy, Baron Goltz, reported in November 1787, the Queen has “quitted her frivolous [Private] Society and occupies herself with affairs, but as she doesn’t have a systematic brain, she goes from caprice to caprice . . .”13 However, the Queen, unlike the King, was also decisive and she had great courage. There were circumstances in which these qualities might be more important than the more sustained deviousness necessary in a natural politician.

  The fall of Calonne, applauded by the Queen but also desired by the King, represented melancholy news for the Polignac set on whom he had deliberately lavished ingratiatory benefits. Ministers were never allowed much grace in the manner of their departure in eighteenth-century France, but Calonne was particularly bitter at the manner in which he was stripped not only of office but also of his Order of the Saint Esprit. Subsequently he went to Holland and then to England.

  In the meantime the increasing coldness of Marie Antoinette towards the Duchesse de Polignac was the subject of general comment. It also produced a desire in Yolande to absent herself from court. Following his fifth birthday, the Dauphin had been handed over by the Governess to a Governor, the ageing Duc d’Harcourt, a decent if slightly dull man. Despite the continuing presence of the two smallest children in the royal nursery, the Duchesse de Polignac now set off for England in early May. There she was welcomed by her smart friends, to whom she was known as “Little Po,” and where she expected to form “a female treaty of opposition” with Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire.14

  It is possible to see this declining favour of Yolande de Polignac as part of the same alteration in the nature of the Queen’s priorities. For all Yolande’s charms and the hold that her delightful personality had had over the Queen for so long, she had never shown any real allegiance to the Queen’s interests. Marie Antoinette took to sending a page to find out who was at the Polignac salon—for which she was, after all, paying. When she made some critical comment about the company, the Duchesse replied, with that exquisite effrontery so characteristic of her time and type, that just as she would not dream of commenting on the Queen’s company, she could not tailor her own to the Queen’s desires. The implication was quite clear. Yolande de Polignac was willing to provide entertainment and, above all, intimacy for a Queen who had been searching for all these things, but at a price. She needed to receive in return not only tremendous material and social advancement for herself and her family but also recognition of her power. The affection that Louis XVI felt for the Duchesse was a bonus. In spite of all his financial difficulties in July he would pay the debts of her unmarried sister-in-law, Comtesse Diane de Polignac, to the tune of 400,000 francs, on the grounds that this spirited and diverting woman had incurred them entertaining the Queen.15

  On 1 May 1787, the man who was to be the Queen’s political partner for the following vital months was put in control of finance, following the dismissal of Calonne. This was Étienne de Loménie de Brienne, who was sixty years old and had been Archbishop of Toulouse for the last thirty-four years. His appointment was proof enough of the King’s depression since Louis XVI disliked Brienne personally for his unorthodox religious views. Clashing with the Queen, who had wanted to promote Brienne in 1783, the King was said to have exclaimed angrily: “An Archbishop of Paris must at least believe in God!”16

  The Queen’s preference for Brienne was well established and she was said by Castries, the Navy Minister, to be “madly happy” on the night of his appointment. Like so many of her likes and dislikes, this preference was rooted in the past, for her confidential advisor, the Abbé de Vermond, had been in Brienne’s service before he joined her own twenty years earlier. Although Germaine de Staël would dismiss Brienne as “neither enlightened enough to be a philosophe nor firm enough to be a despot,” that was by virtue of hindsight and besides, hers was the point of view of Necker’s daughter. Brienne’s health was not generally good: among other things, he suffered from a disfiguring eczema, which repelled the King. He was seen by some as arrogant and taciturn, by others as “a sly, artful fellow.”17 But then reflection and cunning might be necessary to achieve results.

  The worst thing that could be said about him, given the extreme unpopularity of the Queen a year after Rohan’s acquittal, was that he was clearly her man. Marie Antoinette was now being hissed at the Opéra by the people of Paris. Once Gluck’s line, “Let us sing, let us celebrate our Queen” had been interrupted by popular enthusiasm; it was now the terrible invocation in Racine’s Athalie—“Confound this cruel Queen . . .”—that received the wild applause. Nevertheless it was still possible that Brienne, as a former member of the opposition party in the Assembly, could deliver where Calonne had failed.

  That was not the case. Cutbacks at court had already been instituted under Calonne. When the Assembly proved no more malleable than before under Brienne’s management, the latter fell back on this policy of retrenchment. The Assembly of Notables was sent away on 25 May 1787 and 173 posts were eliminated in the Queen’s household alone. In terms of public opinion, this curtailment of court extravagance was a useful exercise, although it is noticeable that much of the heavy private royal expenditure on furniture and so forth continued as before. In these years, the King (who greeted reduction in the numbers of horses sulkily) bought the château of Rambouillet to improve his hunting prospects still further, and there were redecorations both at Rambouillet and at Fontainebleau.

  The blame was generally attached to a single individual, the Queen, who in the summer of 1787 was derisively called Madame Deficit. But it was in fact the sheer number of French royals with the current or future right to their own households that was the real problem: the King’s two brothers and their wives, who did not share households; the King’s two nephews; the King’s sister; the King’s surviving aunts; and, of course, his own growing family.

  The trouble was that this retrenchment was fiercely resented by the nobles who had come to see such positions as their inalienable right. Even Louis XVI’s apathy was shaken when the Duc de Coigny seemed to be about to strike his sovereign at the news of his disbandment. The Duc de Polignac was generally admired for having taken the abolition of his charge as Postmaster General so “tamely” yet he could surely expect to make some sacrifice for the monarch who had so singularly advanced him. Besenval for his part thought it quite disgusting how someone could lose one of their “possessions” from one day to the next: “That sort of thing,” he wrote, “used only to happen in Turkey.” At the same time these economies did nothing to tackle the real problem at the heart of it all. By 1788, court expenditure accounted for between 6 and 7 per cent of the total national spend, while over 41 per cent went on servicing the national debt.18 With the disappearance of La Fayette’s “Not Ables,” the need for proper taxation, falling on the aristocracy (hitherto exempt), and a proper administrative system to carry it out, was as acute as ever.

  The Queen, with Brienne at the helm, was beginning to attend ordinary committees of the King and his ministers, not just those that concerned her directly. She was also mounting her own propaganda exercise in a wider sphere, promoting her image as the fecund Mother of the Children of France. Not only was this an historic role but it also went happily with the Zeitgeist influenced by Rousseau who praised women in proportion to their
enthusiastic adoption of family values. It was no coincidence that allegations of bastardy were made against Marie Antoinette’s children from Marie Thérèse onwards; these were pre-emptive strikes against the Queen’s area of greatest strength, her royal motherhood.

  The group portrait commissioned from Madame Vigée Le Brun, to replace that of the Swedish Wertmüller with a proper French work, was intended to disseminate just this image. Gone were the white muslins, the sashes, the roses and the straw hats. Dressed probably by Rose Bertin, the Queen looked conspicuously and consummately regal in red velvet edged in black fur, with white plumes in her matching red velvet pouf, red, white and black being the ancient royal colours. Enormous care was taken to get the details right; accessories were borrowed from the Queen’s Wardrobe in July 1786 and returned a year later. The Queen wore earrings—but significantly no necklace. A large jewel box was intended as a reference to that Roman paragon of virtue Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi, who had famously designated her own children when asked to display her greatest treasures.19 The arrangement of the Queen’s “jewels” was carefully orchestrated. Madame Royale leant tenderly towards her mother—unfortunately not a flattering angle; the Dauphin pointed to Madame Sophie’s cradle, while the plump little Duc de Normandie, in a white baby dress displaying the Order of the Saint Esprit, which was granted to the King’s sons at birth, perched on his mother’s lap.

  The royal mother at the centre of it all was by now a substantial figure. Her comportment had not altered, that “way of walking all her own” so that you could not see her steps as she glided with “incomparable grace.” This was attested to by three Lorrainers, who spied on her unobserved in the grounds of the Trianon, noting that she carried her head even more proudly when she believed herself to be alone. Her hair had once again been cut short before the birth of Sophie. As the Queen ran her fingers through it in a nervous gesture that became characteristic, Count Esterhazy, Marie Antoinette’s devoted admirer, even detected the first grey hairs . . .20 None of this mattered when a queenly coiffeur could be constructed with the aid of powder and false hair.

  The weight increase, begun the previous year, was now so considerable as to inspire rumours of further pregnancies on a regular basis; the Queen told the Emperor crossly, reacting to one of these stories, that if she had been pregnant as often as people pronounced, she would have sixteen children like her sister-in-law, Archduke Leopold’s wife. Although her waist was still neat, the ample proportions of her bosom, well over forty inches when she herself was only of medium height, are confirmed by the records of the couturiers. Then there are the measurements of surviving corsages, supple structures made of taffeta embroidered with the royal arms (not stiff, like the modern corset), on which her bodices were built, and the records of couturiers. Even the superbly flattering brush of Louise Vigée Le Brun did not seek to conceal altogether a fullness below the chin, which would be further visible in the “blue velvet” portrait of 1788. With a lack of gallantry, King Gustav of Sweden said in public that the Queen of France had grown too fat to be any longer counted as a beauty, while Joseph II took patriotism to its limits when he told Marie Christine that their sister had “the fine face of a good fat German.”21

  Comparisons to fresh young nymphs were no longer likely to arise, but the Mother of France was not supposed to be a nymph. She was supposed to inspire reverence. It is clear from Louise Vigée Le Brun that much care was taken in order to project an image not far from that of a Holy Family. Louise herself was frequently inspired by Raphael. Her fellow painter David suggested that Louise should look at the Holy Families of the High Renaissance in the Louvre, especially that by Guilio Romano. When Louise—who was being paid the high price of 18,000 francs—asked David whether she would be accused of plagiarism, David replied robustly: “Do as Molière does. Take what you want, where you want.” He believed that the use of modern clothes, fashions and furniture would protect the artist from criticism.22

  For all the care taken, and for all the faithfulness of the resemblance, which the Comte d’Hezecques praised as he looked from Queen to portrait when it hung at Versailles, it was not a lucky picture. The youngest member of the group, the baby Sophie, died on 19 June 1787, a few weeks short of her first birthday. Her figure had to be painted out; the Dauphin’s finger pointing in the direction of the empty cradle was a sad memorial to his sister’s short life. The Queen—“greatly afflicted”—told Princesse Louise that the baby had never really grown or developed. This was confirmed by the autopsy, which was signed by the deputy Governess Madame de Mackau in the absence of the Duchesse de Polignac in England. It made pathetic reading, down to the details of three little teeth that the baby had been about to cut and which had been responsible for the five or six days of convulsions that ended her life.23

  When Madame Elisabeth was invited by the Queen to view the corpse of “my little angel,” she was struck by the pink and white appearance of the baby. Elisabeth added in her pious way that baby Sophie was quite happy now, having escaped all life’s perils, while her elder sister Marie Thérèse was left desolate “with an extraordinary sensibility for her age.” Now the tiny form lay in a salon at the Grand Trianon, under a gilded coronet and a velvet pall. The Queen’s foster-brother Joseph Weber tried to cheer her by saying that the baby had not even been weaned when she died, implying that the grief for one so young could not be very great. But he struck the wrong note. “Don’t forget that she would have been my friend,” replied the Queen, a reference to her daughters, who were “mine,” unlike their brothers who belonged to France, that sentiment first expressed at the birth of Marie Thérèse.24 Her tears continued to fall.

  The Vigée Le Brun portrait was intended to be shown at the Salon of the Royal Academy at the end of August. In fact it needed to be withdrawn, as the Queen’s unpopularity was so great that demonstrations were feared; Lenoir, the Chief of Police, had to tell her not to appear in Paris. The empty frame was left. Some wag, alluding to the scornful new nickname for the Queen, pinned a note to it: “Behold the Deficit!”

  It was yet another affliction for the Queen in this troubled time that Jeanne de Lamotte had managed to escape from the Salpêtrière prison a few days before the death of Sophie, probably with connivance. She reached England where she proceeded to pour forth ghosted publications which, however, she autographed personally in true celebrity-bestseller fashion.25 The worst of these concerned her “Sapphic” relationship with the Queen—“Ye Gods, what delights I experienced in that charming night!”—because the allegations chimed so happily with the popular notion of the Queen as viciously perverted, not simply immoral. The “affair” with Artois was one thing, but the sexual bouts with the Lamballe and the Polignac, all gleefully narrated with much circumstantial detail, were unnatural. Another aspect of these denigrations was the comparison of the Queen—“the monster escaped from Germany”—to the other notoriously evil or lascivious women in history. She was worse than Cleopatra, prouder than Agrippina, more lubricious than Messalina, more cruel than Catherine de’ Medici . . . This was the vicious misogynistical chant that would continue to Marie Antoinette’s death and beyond it.

  In the meantime the “monster” struggled to support Brienne, to cope with the depression of the King and to come to terms with the death of one child, while the health of her elder son was ever present in her mind. Since the endorsement of Parlement could not be secured for the reforms, these were forcibly registered at the King’s lit de justice on 6 August, at which point Parlement itself was ordered by Brienne to go into exile at Troyes. At the end of August, Brienne was made Chief of the Council. When Castries and Ségur resigned over the decision not to intervene in the Dutch Republic, the Archbishop’s brother replaced Ségur as War Minister. Still the angry disputes continued. Parlement, discontented with its situation, did eventually vote a twentieth part of the money wanted. On 19 November another edict was issued by the King at a meeting termed a séance (session) royale in order to receive loans.
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  This led to further trouble. As Marie Antoinette confided to Joseph II, the King pronounced the simple words: “I ordain registration,” which had always sufficed to give the force of law to an edict at a lit de justice, when his cousin Philippe, now Duc d’Orléans, dared to issue a strong protest. The registration, he said, was illegal, since the votes had not been counted during the session; if, on the other hand, it was not a proper session but a lit de justice, they should all remain silent. The King was furious at this challenge and departed with his brothers, leaving the Duc d’Orléans to read out a protest that he had evidently written in advance.26

  The result was that the Duc was exiled to his château at Villars Cotterets, and two other colleagues, who had spoken “insultingly” in front of the King, were sent to prison. Marie Antoinette’s reporting of the whole matter to her brother was resigned: “I am upset that these repressive measures have had to be taken; but unhappily they have become necessary here.” She added perhaps the most significant phrase in her letter: that the King had also indicated that he would call a meeting of the Estates General in five years’ time, as a way of calming the whole situation down.

  The turbulence in France was by no means ended by the King’s emollient words. During the next months, the battles over the registration of the edicts continued to rage, with provincial disturbances adding to the furore. A few months earlier, Arthur Young, the English agriculturalist who had returned for another tour of France in May 1788, got the impression from dinner parties in Paris that France was on the verge of “some great revolution.” But it was not at all clear what meaning was to be attached to that dangerous term. After all, it was easy—and rather enjoyable—for foreign nationals to predict insurrection in countries that they did not precisely understand. Marie Antoinette had told her English friend Lady Clermont in January 1784 that England was surely on the verge of a revolution and that “[Charles James] Fox will be King”; she had been inveigled into this belief by the nature of the English parliamentary system, with its vociferous opposition.27 In France at this time, such a theoretical revolution would envisage no more than a limitation on the King’s powers, especially his unpopular use of the lit de justice to register edicts. Along with the cries for an Estates General, demands for reform at this point were essentially coming from the nobility rather than the people.