IT IS USUAL at the end of a historical work to append a bibliography of the sources utilized, but in the case of Marie Antoinette it seems to me that it would be more appropriate to mention which sources have not been utilized and why. Even those documents which are as a rule most trustworthy, namely autograph letters, are here unreliable. As has been more than once pointed out in the foregoing pages, Marie Antoinette, being of an impatient disposition, was a careless letter-writer. Rarely did she on her own initiative and uncompelled sit down at that fine writing table which can still be seen in the Trianon. It is not surprising, therefore, that ten, and even twenty years after her death, hardly any letters in her handwriting were known to be extant, or anything in her handwriting at all beyond the countless bills at the foot of which she had scrawled the inevitable “Payez, Marie Antoinette”. At that time the two chief series of letters, those written to her mother and the court of Vienna, and those more intimate missives, sent to the Comte de Fersen, were still hidden away in the archives, where they remained until the nineteenth century was halfway through its course, and the originals of the few published letters to the Countess Polignac were likewise inaccessible. Great, therefore, was the surprise when, in the Forties, the Fifties, and the Sixties of the nineteenth century there appeared for sale, at almost every Parisian auction of autograph documents, letters ostensibly in the Queen’s handwriting, and, more remarkably still, all bearing her signature—whereas she seldom signed her name to a letter! Then, in rapid succession, came three extensive collections of letters, issued from the press: one by Count Hunolstein; a second (still the most abundant) edited by Baron Feuillet de Conches; and, for the third, that of Klinkowström, who published a bowdlerized version of the Queen’s letters to Fersen. The delight of historians in this wealth of material was considerably chastened by the fact that, a few months after the publication of Hunolstein’s and Feuillet de Conches’s collections, doubts were cast upon the authenticity of much of the material. A tedious polemic followed, and before long it became plain to every unprejudiced person that a forger who must be styled a genius at this particular sort of work had been boldly mixing false with true and reaping a rich harvest of ill-gotten gains.
Animated by an almost inexplicable delicacy, accomplished students of these matters have hitherto refrained from mentioning the name of this brilliant falsifier, one of the ablest that ever plied his trade. No doubt Flammermont and Rocheterie, the leading experts in the matter, made it obvious to those who read between the lines whither their suspicions were directed. Today there is no longer any reason for keeping silence, and thus depriving the history of forgery of the story of a case which presents unusual psychological interest. The overzealous multiplier of the letters of Marie Antoinette was none other than the aforesaid editor, Baron Feuillet de Conches, a diplomat of high standing, exceptionally cultured, a remarkably amusing author and extremely well informed upon all details of the history of French civilisation. For ten or twenty years he had been hunting Marie Antoinette’s letters in official archives and private collections, and had displayed remarkable skill in their discovery—an achievement which still commands our respect.
But this estimable and diligent student had one strong passion, and strong passions are always dangerous. He was an ardent collector of autographs, ranked as the scientific pope in this field, and penned an admirable essay on autograph collecting which will be found in his Causeries d’un curieux. His collection, or, as he proudly called it, his “cabinet”, was the largest in France—but the born collector is insatiable. Probably because he was not sufficiently well off to fill his portfolios as tightly as he wanted, he forged a number of autograph letters by La Fontaine, Boileau and Racine, many of which still come into the market from time to time, and which, as opportunity arose, he disposed of through Parisian and British dealers. Incontestably, however, his masterpieces were the forged letters of Marie Antoinette. He had an unrivalled knowledge of her story, her handwriting and all the surrounding circumstances of her life. It was therefore easy enough for him, after discovering seven genuine letters from the Queen to the Duchesse de Polignac, to produce an equal number of excellent forgeries, and, growing bolder, to write a number of letters ostensibly penned by the Queen to those of her relatives with whom he knew her to have been in close touch. His exceptionally intimate knowledge both of the Queen’s handwriting and of her literary style enabled him, unfortunately, to produce forgeries which (being free from historical blunders) almost defied detection. It must be frankly admitted that, with the best will in the world, in the case of many of these letters no expert can make up his mind whether they are genuine or false, whether they were thought and penned by Queen Marie Antoinette or invented and forged by Baron Feuillet de Conches. To give an example, I find it impossible to decide as to the genuineness of the letter to Baron Flachslanden, which is preserved in the Prussian State Library. The contents seem genuine enough, but suspicions of forgery are aroused by the fact that the handwriting is somewhat too composed and well rounded—and, above all, that the previous owner acquired it from Feuillet de Conches! Influenced by these considerations, my desire for historical accuracy has led me, in the present volume, inexorably to disregard documents whose only certificate is the extremely suspicious one of having been derived from the ‘cabinet’ of the late Baron. Better less and genuine than more and of dubious authenticity, has been the fundamental psychological rule in the compilation of the present work.
As regards oral testimony concerning Marie Antoinette, we are little better off than in respect of the trustworthiness of letters. If as regards other epochs in history we have often to complain of an insufficiency of memoirs and the testimonies of eyewitnesses, as regards the French Revolution we have rather to complain of superabundance. In cyclonic decades, when without pause for reflection a whole generation is hurled from one political wave into the next, there is seldom time for thoughtful survey. Within five-and-twenty years the people of one brood experienced the most unexpected changes, passing with hurried strides through the last blossoming of the monarchy and then its death-agony, the first happy days of the Revolution, the ghastly period of the Terror, the Directorate, the rise of Napoleon, his Consulate, his dictatorship, the establishment of the empire, his aim at world dominion, numberless victories followed by his decisive defeat, the re-establishment of the monarchy, the Hundred Days when Napoleon was again in power. At length, after Waterloo, came the great pause, the tranquil pause of the Restoration when, after a quarter of a century, a world-wide storm of unparalleled violence had blown itself out. Men and women recovered from their alarm and rubbed their eyes. They were astonished, to begin with, to find themselves still alive, and then were amazed at what a wealth of happenings they had lived through in so short a space. (We ourselves shall feel just the same when the inundation which has been sweeping us onwards since 1914 has finished its torrential flow.) Having got safe to shore, they wanted to form quiet and consistent views of the confused happenings they had witnessed and in which they had played their various parts. Everyone, in those days, wanted to read history in the form of memoirs of eyewitnesses, that they might be helped thereby to reconstruct an orderly picture of events—with the result that after 1815 there was a luxuriant output of memoirs, just as, a century later, there was a fungoid growth of war books after the World War. Professional writers and publishers were quick to seize their chance. Before the public interest ebbed (this also we have ourselves seen), they wanted to gratify the universal curiosity for memorials, memorials, memorials of the great days. Everyone who had rubbed shoulders with some individual of historic note was asked to recount his experiences. Since, however, the small fry, who for the most part had been swept helplessly along by the current of events, could remember very few details, and did not know how to relate them interestingly, expert journalists, writing in their names, stuffed a fine thick piece of dough with these few raisins, added a liberal allowance of sugar and flavoured the whole with sentimentalist inventions in order to make a book. Everyone who in those days had been inside the Tuileries, or, for an hour or two, had been a grain of dust carried by one of the cyclones of history through the prisons or the Revolutionary Tribunal, posed as an author. The tailoress, the chambermaid, the first, second and third under-maids, the hairdresser, the prison warder in charge of Marie Antoinette, the first and the second governesses of her children, every one of her friends, found it necessary to write a book. Last not least, even the executioner, Monsieur Samson, thought fit to write memoirs, or at least to make money by putting his name to a book which others, more skilled than he with the pen, had hastily compiled.
It need hardly be said that these spurious reports contradict one another in almost every respect. As regards the decisive occurrences of 5th and 6th October 1789, as regards the behaviour of the Queen during the storming of the Tuileries, and during her last hours, we have at our disposal seven, eight, ten, fifteen, twenty widely divergent accounts by persons who claim to have been eyewitnesses. Only in one respect are the writers unanimous, and that is as regards their political sentiments, for they are all unconditionally, touchingly, inviolably loyal—and this can readily be understood when we remember that their works were printed in the days of the Bourbon Restoration. A serving man or a prison warder who during the Revolution had proclaimed himself the reddest of the Reds could not, under Louis XVIII, be profuse enough in his assurances that in secret he had always had the utmost veneration for the good, the noble, the pure, the virtuous Queen, could not exaggerate the extent of his devotion to this unfortunate lady. Had but a small fraction of those who in 1820 declared their inviolable loyalty really been, in 1792, as loyal as they maintained, Marie Antoinette would never have been sent to the Conciergerie and would never have mounted the steps of the scaffold.
Nine tenths of the memoirs published during that period are, therefore, either crude sensationalism, or else lickspittle productions of the most offensive kind, and he who is in search of historical truth will do well (deviating from the practice of previous writers) to brush aside as hopelessly untrustworthy the evidence of the vast majority of these chambermaids, hairdressers, gendarmes and pages, on the ground that they have found it much too easy to ‘remember’ whatever they wished to be believed.
That explains why, in the present biography of Marie Antoinette, I have thought it desirable to pay no heed to a large number of documents, letters and reported conversations which my predecessors in this field have hesitatingly used. The reader will miss a good many anecdotes which may have charmed or amused him in the aforesaid biographies—beginning with that in which young Mozart is reported to have made a proposal of marriage to Marie Antoinette at Schönbrunn, and ending with that in which, on the scaffold, the Queen, accidentally treading on the executioner’s foot, is said to have politely excused herself with a “Pardon, Monsieur” (an anecdote too good to be true!). The reader will also find no mention of numerous well-known letters, above all the touching one to the “cher coeur” (the Princesse de Lamballe)—for the very simple reason that they are certainly some of Baron Feuillet de Conches’s forgeries, and were never written by Marie Antoinette; I have also omitted a number of witty or affecting remarks which belong to the ‘Marie Antoinette tradition’—have omitted them because they seem to be too witty or too affecting to be appropriate to the Queen’s character, which was that of an average woman.
Though this may seem a loss to the sentimentalists, it will not be regarded as a loss in respect of historical genuineness, and the reader will find that there has been a gain of new and important material. Above all, a careful examination of the state archives in Vienna has shown that in the published correspondence between Maria Theresa and Marie Antoinette, though the letters as here reproduced purport to be complete, there has been a suppression of very important, and often the most important, passages, which were omitted because they were regarded as unduly intimate. Here I have used these repressed passages without reserve, for the reason that the conjugal relations between Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette are psychologically incomprehensible unless the reader has full knowledge of certain physiological matters which have long been veiled in mystery. Especially important, moreover, was the light thrown upon Fersen’s literary remains by the researches of that distinguished investigator Alma Söderhjelm, who was able to discover numerous ‘retouchings’ and excisions that had been effected on ‘moral’ grounds. Thanks to her work, the pious fraud, the chaste legend, concerning Fersen’s troubadour passion for the unapproachable Marie Antoinette—a legend based upon mutilations which, once discovered, make the documents all the more convincing—can no longer be sustained. Thus I have been able to show that the two were lovers in every sense of the word, and, further, to clear up a number of obscure or obscured details. Now that we hold freer views concerning the human and moral rights of a woman, even though she happens to be a queen, we can talk frankly, and are no longer afraid of facing spiritual truths; for we do not believe, as those of an earlier generation believed, that if we are to win admiration for a historical figure we must at any cost idealize a character, bedaub it with sentimentalism or make it appear heroic, while leaving essential traits discreetly veiled and exaggerating others with the skill of the earlier writers of tragedy and romance. Not to idolize, not to deify, but to humanise, is the supreme task of creative psychological study; not to excuse with a wealth of far-fetched arguments, but to explain, is its true mission. That is what I have here attempted in the case of a woman of average character, who owes her long-lasting influence to an incomparable fate, and whose inward greatness was but the outcome of unprecedented misfortunes. My hope is that, in default of all exaggeration, this character will arouse the sympathy and enjoy the understanding of the present, precisely because she was of one flesh with ourselves.