Marie Antoinette: The Journey

by Antonia Fraser

  The physical fullness of her childbearing years was rapidly disappearing; Léonard had mentioned her thin arms and sunken bust as early as 1789. In 1791 the Comte d’Hezecques called her outrightly thin, and a pastel portrait by Aleksander Kucharski that was begun this year for the Marquise de Tourzel shows a haggard middle-aged woman—one might almost say an old woman, although Marie Antoinette was not yet thirty-six.*87 Certainly the pastoral prettiness of Madame Vigée Le Brun’s images has quite vanished; there is no rose here, no straw hat, no ribbons, only a Queen with a strong nose and chin, her single remaining good feature being her large, sad, wide-apart eyes.

  When Marie Antoinette greeted Madame Campan on her return to the Tuileries for the first time after Varennes, she took off her cap to reveal hair that had gone quite white through her sufferings. The Queen had another ring sent to the Princesse de Lamballe containing a lock of the altered hair with an inscription making the point that the change was due to unhappiness: “Blanchis par malheur.” The Princesse had fled in July, first to Brussels, then to Aix, finally to Spa where she resided as the Comtesse d’Amboisse. In fact Marie Antoinette’s hair had probably been turning white or at least grey for some time, with traces noted by Count Esterhazy as early as 1786.*88 Later the Queen would ascribe white hairs at her temples to “the trouble of 6 October,” although her foster-brother Joseph Weber thought that the death of the first Dauphin had whitened it.8 The colour, of course, was not visible when her hair was being dressed or when she wore a simple cap; pomade, powder and no doubt dye covered up a great deal.

  Nevertheless Marie Antoinette had not lost her ability to please, even to fascinate, when it was urgent for her to do so. At the end of the year Quentin Craufurd, the protector of Fersen’s mistress and her supporter, paid the Queen a number of visits. He was impressed as so many others had been by her demeanour. “All her movements were graceful,” he wrote. As for her appearance, “The expression, so often used, ’full of charms,’ is that which suited her in all its exactitude, and best described her whole person.”9 It was a chivalrous reaction of the sort that Marie Antoinette was always able to evoke among those who had actually been in her presence. Among these was the Feuillant leader Antoine Barnave.

  To reach Barnave, the Queen used an intermediary, the Chevalier François Régnier de Jarjayes, with whom she worked out a code of a fairly rudimentary nature. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s great romantic novel Paul et Virginie was to be used as a code with Fersen,*89 with both parties careful to use the same edition; with Jarjayes, however, it was a question of the alphabet and numbers, Barnave being 2:1 for the first two letters of his name, and Jarjayes 10 for J. Jarjayes, a man in his mid-forties, had like Barnave been born in Grenoble. His wife was one of the Queen’s waiting-women, an intimate who often slept in her room, and was—at least according to the Marquise de Tourzel who may have been jealous—preferred over Madame Campan. Jarjayes himself was a devoted servant of the royal cause and had already been employed on commissions to try to curb the ambitions of Artois when he was still in Turin.10

  There had evidently been private conversations between the Queen and the handsome Barnave at the various stopping-places on the journey back from Varennes, in which Barnave, unlike Pétion, had shown “respectful delicacy.” Barnave had expressed his growing conviction that the Revolution as such must be brought to an end in favour of liberal reforms and conciliation. In short, constitutionalists were not at all the same animals as the republicans. In a letter of early July, the Queen expressed herself as having been “struck by his [Barnave’s] personality” during the two days they spent together and later she also referred to his “most animated and captivating eloquence” in a letter to her brother.11

  Throughout the summer and autumn, the Queen was in constant communication with Barnave, although they did not in fact have any further private interviews until early October and then Alexandre de Lameth was present.*90 Naturally their association, once known, was given the usual lubricious spin. Le Bordel Patriotique, a pornographic play of 1791, had the Queen, Barnave, Bailly, La Fayette and the revolutionary known as la belle Liégoise, Théroigne de Mericourt, all involved in a chain of sexual acts. Count Fersen, more calmly, reported in his Journal intime: “They say the Queen is sleeping with Barnave.”13 The fact that these explicit charges were ludicrous did not mean that Barnave was not in some subtler way mesmerized by the Queen. And he saw himself as playing a crucial role, with her help, in persuading the King to accept the Constitution.

  Barnave’s most significant letter was written on 25 July. In this he outlined a new and happier future for Marie Antoinette, still Queen of France but a far more beloved Queen than in the past. He told her that she had misunderstood the nature of the Revolution so far, not realizing that it could actually be helpful to her position. It was true that the Queen had been the object of widespread resentment, but with her courage and character she could overcome this. The candour with which the Queen had always expressed her convictions—convictions hostile to recent political developments—would now work to her advantage. If she openly supported the Constitution, she would be believed to be equally sincere.14

  As August passed, Barnave, convinced that “the monarchical principle is profoundly and solidly rooted,” envisaged a new kind of constitutional court at the Tuileries. All evils would be at an end if the King and Queen managed to make themselves solidly loved—by implication leaving that tiresome incident of Varennes to be forgotten.

  The King accepted the Constitution on 14 September. Publicly, he did so “according to the wish of the great majority of the nation.” Privately, like the Queen, he thought that it would prove unworkable and that he would benefit from the subsequent upheaval. As “King of the French”—with the Dauphin as the “Prince Royal”—he allowed himself to be turned into a constitutional monarch of limited powers, but not actually bereft of them. The King could choose ministers and although he could not declare war, the new Legislative Assembly, which replaced the previous Constituent Assembly on 1 October, could only go to war if the King asked them to do so. The King was also considered to have immunity for actions he might take as monarch—something that incidentally did not apply to other members of his family. An English visitor in the Tuileries gardens would witness two soldiers keeping their hats on in the presence of the Queen while singing disgusting songs, on the grounds that there was no mention of her in the Constitution: “She was owed no respect as the King’s wife.”15

  At the ceremony there was no throne and a simple chair painted with fleur-de-lys was provided for the King; the deputies also kept their hats on as he spoke. It was witnessed by Marie Antoinette from a private box. Afterwards the King flung himself down in an armchair and wept at the humiliation to which he had been subjected—and to which he had subjected his wife: “Ah, Madame, why were you there? You have come into France to see—.” His words were interrupted by his sobs. The Queen put her arms round her husband as Madame Campan stood rooted to the spot. Finally the Queen ordered her: “Oh, go, go.” The fact was that it was the uncomfortable power that he did retain—that of veto over new laws—that was likely to cause real trouble in the future. The veto was voted in by a majority of 300 out of 1000 deputies. In the new Assembly, any measure personally odious to the King had either to be accepted or vetoed. So the King would face a choice of being unhappy or unpopular.

  The celebrations for the new Constitution included a ballet, Psyche, in which the Furies’ torches lit up the theatre. Seeing the faces of the King and Queen in this glow of the underworld, Germaine de Staël, like the Duc de Choiseul at Varennes, was overwhelmed by presentiments of disaster. Yet the King and Queen graciously attended the fireworks in the Place Louis XV after the Constitution had been proclaimed at the Hôtel de Ville.*91 Virieu was much impressed by the “fairyland” created by the lights and there were even a few cries of “Long live the Queen.” The public reaction, however, was summed up by a slogan on a cobbler’s wall which made support f
or the monarch conditional: “Long live the King! If he is being honest.”17

  In November, Barnave would praise the Queen for the “courage and constancy” she had shown in helping the constitutional process. He was unaware that privately his heroine regarded the new Constitution as “monstrous” and “a tissue of absurdities,” even if the King had no choice but to accept it. Since they had “no force or means of their own,” they could only temporize.18 Like the King, the Queen believed that the Constitution had only to be put in place for it to be proved unworkable. Marie Antoinette’s real desires for the future were focused in a very different direction.

  It is clear from the Queen’s correspondence with Mercy that following Varennes, she pinned her hopes on her brother, the Emperor Leopold. Although reproaches have been flung at Marie Antoinette for deceiving Barnave, this is to see politics from the point of view of the politician, not the Queen. The constitutionalist Barnave was using the Queen to manoeuvre his own enemies. A captive, brought back to France like a trophy, Marie Antoinette was entitled to use any means at her disposal—and more than one—to try to secure her family’s safety. The Queen did not as yet want an armed rescue. She agreed with Louis, as she told Fersen, that “open force would bring incalculable danger for everybody, not only the King and his family but also all the French.”19 Still less did she want, with her husband, to be “in the tutelage of the King’s brothers.”

  Provence’s successful escape introduced a fresh and extremely unwelcome complication into the situation since he was the next adult male in the line of succession. According to Mercy, Provence was already angling for the Regency when he passed through Brussels following his flight from Paris. There was a rumour that he had actually had himself declared Regent in August, on the grounds that the King was held under duress. This caused a frisson of horror at the Tuileries; even though the rumour was not actually true, it was a threat that would not go away. Marie Antoinette wrote explicitly of the harm it would cause. The Princes in the name of the Regent would give one set of orders and the Assembly another, so that the Princes would be seen to be in open opposition to the orders given in the name of the King. The Queen told the Russian Minister, Simolin, that the Princes would turn out to be far more demanding, far more counter-revolutionary than the King. In short, if the Princes were to be their liberators, “they would soon act as masters.”20

  Coblenz in the Electorate of Trier, south of Cologne, was where the belligerent royal Princes came finally to rest, joining the Princes of the Blood. Its ruler the Elector-Archbishop Clement, being a brother of the late Dauphine Maria Josepha, was thus uncle to Provence and Artois (and Louis XVI). Coblenz became a hotbed of royalist claims, some of them wild, all of them embarrassing to the real King of France who was languishing in the Tuileries. When Marie Antoinette’s enemy Calonne arrived in Coblenz from his English exile, he too wanted the Regency claimed for Provence. In the meantime a mini-Versailles was created, with ostentatious deference to the Princes and even the royal bodyguards reinstated—this last to the intense anger of the King and Queen to whom these bodyguards, if they existed, rightfully belonged. The pleasure-loving aspect of the former court was resurrected too; there were gambling parties and dances until dawn, mainly centred around the Comte d’Artois, whom Fersen described as “always talking, never listening, sure of everything, speaking only of force, not of negotiations.”21

  Of course, if Provence succeeded in his self-promotion as Regent, there was still the question of whom he was to be Regent for—Louis XVI or his son. The idea of a Regency centring on the Dauphin was also floated in France by those who felt that Louis XVI was too inadequate or too compromised to perform the task, yet who did not wish to throw away the monarchical principle altogether. Cries of “Long live our little King!” sometimes greeted Louis Charles as he took his exercise in the Tuileries gardens, an appealing figure, untainted by politics. What then of another possible candidate, the Duc d’Orléans, in the role of Regent? The flight of the Comte de Provence meant that Orléans was next in line of the adult males still inside France. But according to his son, Orléans had irrevocably decided to refuse the Regency; in any case his popularity had been much diminished by his lack of any positive action following the events of July 1789, and by 1791 it had waned still further.22

  What Marie Antoinette had wanted in July was armed demonstrations of imperial power in their favour, which would, in effect, threaten the French and cause them to treat their monarch better, without incurring the hostility inevitably consequent upon an invasion. “The foreign powers,” she wrote privately in mid-August, “are the only ones that can save us.”23 What she got at the end of the month was a declaration made at Pillnitz in Saxony.

  The Emperor joined with the King of Prussia to declare the fate of the French monarchy as being “of common interest” to the great powers, if their warnings about its ill treatment recently were not heeded. But for any concerted action to be taken, all the powers had to be in agreement. Although Artois, the Marquis de Bouillé and Calonne were present at Pillnitz, the declaration was in fact an extremely cautious document, intended to placate the Princes rather than spur them on further.

  The Queen had a more positive scheme in mind. It was now, in her opinion, “up to the emperor to put an end to the troubles of the French Revolution,” since a French monarchy that was not under duress was needed in order to preserve the equilibrium in Europe. In order to achieve this, in an extremely long memorandum to Leopold, on 8 September, Marie Antoinette first mentioned the idea of an armed congress.24 This was essentially seen by her as a means of threatening the French into better behaviour towards their King rather than using outright force. The powers, who would gather at Aix or Cologne as part of this armed congress, would thus declare France to be a monarchy, hereditary in the male line of the reigning branch, with no regency envisaged unless declared by the King himself. The latter would have free powers of communication and among other details the tricolour, that “sign of troubles and seditions,” would be abandoned as the flag of France.

  Marie Antoinette devoted her energies to the subject of the armed congress in her private correspondence in the ensuing months. She wrote prodigious quantities of letters, often in code, sometimes using lemon juice as invisible ink and sometimes other means, which went wrong when water would not resurrect the letters. She despatched these missives by any safe courier she could find. Marie Antoinette lobbied the Bourbon King of Spain and the King of Sweden; later she also tackled Queen Maria Louisa of Spain, referring hopefully to “the nobility of your character” as well as “the double link of blood” that joined them.*92 With these and many other efforts, “I hardly recognize myself,” she exclaimed at one point; was it really her speaking? To Fersen, Marie Antoinette confessed that she was “exhausted by her writings.” She also touchingly admitted how afraid she was of forgetting something or “saying something stupid.”25

  The light-hearted, unintellectual, pleasure-loving young woman of yesteryear at Versailles had developed into a formidably hard worker. Maybe it is true that as the Queen wrote at one point: “It is in misfortune that you realize your true nature.” Or maybe it was “the blood that runs in my veins”—the blood of Maria Teresa, to which she made increasing reference—that was responding to pressure. A year earlier she had wept with her ladies: “How amazed my mother would be” if she could see her daughter in her present condition. Now she found inspiration in her memory. A third explanation is the most likely one: the Queen’s growing determination, alluded to earlier, to preserve the heritage of her son, in whose veins Maria Teresa’s blood also flowed: “I hope that one day he will show himself a worthy grandson.”26 Maternal ambition—or anguish—supplied the motive for the grinding work, to say nothing of the tricky diplomacy. “The only hope that remains to me is that my son can at least be happy,” said Marie Antoinette; it was her reiterated theme.

  The trouble with the idea of the armed congress was that it was a fantasy; furthermore,
it was a fantasy of the Queen in which no one else shared. Where the Emperor Leopold was concerned, Marie Antoinette might perhaps have recalled her own wry words to Barnave in July. “My influence over him is non-existent,” she wrote. “He has regard for the family name and that is all.” Although the Queen was commenting at the time on her inability to secure Austrian acknowledgement of the Constitution, she was in fact all too prescient. It was realpolitik that would sway the Emperor Leopold. The Queen might see the French Revolution as “an insurrection against all established governments,” but the Emperor was far more likely to take up arms in the cause of a predatory Austria against a weakened France than in an ideological cause in favour of monarchy. The Emperor did indeed raise serious objections to the idea of the congress in November, questioning which authority in France he would deal with, while Prince Kaunitz thought the whole notion was a waste of time, not so much a fantasy as “a chimera.” The Princes naturally detested a scheme that would have held them back. Even Louis XVI showed no enthusiasm for the armed congress. Marie Antoinette alone continued to term it “the only useful and advantageous course.”27

  Throughout the autumn, as Marie Antoinette pleaded secretly for an armed congress, Barnave took immense trouble over the details of her new role as Queen. He predicted the return of “happy and serene” days for her if she took his advice. There was still to be panoply as befitted her royal position; for example, the Queen spent 1400 livres on a new court dress for the Feast of All Saints on the eve of her birthday, as she had always done. Louis XVI, said Barnave, was to wear the Cordon Rouge—the order of Saint-Louis—at the Assembly since it was a military order and soldiers would be pleased. One of Barnave’s preoccupations was the precise nature of the theatrical and operatic spectacles that the Queen attended. These were, after all, the traditional opportunities for public acclaim—and Barnave was enthusiastic for the Queen’s attendance, so long as no unfortunate choices were made.28