WHAT FIRST HAPPENED in the great four-poster was—nothing! It was with a disastrous double meaning that the young husband wrote next morning in his diary: “Rien.” Neither the court ceremony nor yet the archiepiscopal consecration of the nuptial couch had sufficed to overcome the Dauphin’s constitutional infirmity. Matrimonium non consummatum est; as far as its essential physical purpose was concerned, the marriage remained unfulfilled, today, tomorrow, for several years. Marie Antoinette had been coupled with a “nonchalant mari”, with a negligent husband, and at first the general belief was that nothing but timidity, inexperience or a “nature tardive” (today we should speak of ‘infantilism’) had made the youth of sixteen impotent when put to bed with so fascinating a maiden.
“Toinette must not be in too great a hurry, for that, by increasing her husband’s uneasiness, will only make matters worse,” thought the mother, who was a woman of experience. Writing to her daughter in May 1771, she said that the latter must not take the disappointment too hardly, must not be peevish, “point d’humeur là-dessus”; recommended tenderness and caresses, “caresses, cajoleries”; yet even in this respect there must be moderation. “If you show yourself impatient, you may spoil the whole thing.”
But when this distressing state of affairs had lasted a year, two years, the Empress began to grow anxious about the “conduite si ètrange” of the young man. There could be no question as to his goodwill, for from month to month the Dauphin showed himself more and more affectionate towards his charming wife. His nocturnal visits were incessantly repeated, but always in vain, for some “maudit charme”, some disastrous spell, always prevented a decisive finale to his embraces. Little Marie Antoinette, being ill informed about such matters, fancied that the only trouble was “maladresse et jeunesse”, clumsiness and youth. Trying to make the best of a bad job, during the last days of 1771 she actually wrote to her mother denying “the false reports which are current here as to his impotence”.
Maria Theresa, however, refused to be hoodwinked, and was determined to seek better information. Sending for van Swieten, her physician-in-ordinary, she begged his advice concerning the “froideur extraordinaire du Dauphin”—extraordinary coldness of the Dauphin—and asked him whether anything could be done about it. The doctor shrugged his shoulders. If a girl with so many attractions could not liven up the Dauphin, he did not think that drugs would be of any avail!
Maria Theresa wrote letter after letter to Paris. Finally King Louis XV, whose experience in this domain had been multifarious to excess, took his grandson to task. Lassone, physician to the French court, was summoned; young Louis was subjected to physical examination; and at length it became plain that the Dauphin’s sexual impotence was not what we should now term ‘psychogenic’, but was due to a trifling organic defect—to phimosis. Details are given in a secret report sent from Paris to Madrid by the Spanish ambassador. It runs as follows: “Quién dice que el frenillo sujeta tanto el prepucio que no cede a la introducción y causa un dolor vivo en él, por el qual se retrahe S.M. del impulso que convinierá. Quién supone que el dicho prepucio está tan cerrado que no puede explayarse para la dilatación de la punta o cabeza de la parte, en virtud de lo que no llega la erección al punto de elasticidad necessaria.”
Consultation followed upon consultation, as to whether the surgeons should intervene with the bistoury, “pour lui rendre la voix”—to give him his voice back—as the cynical whisper ran in the anterooms. Marie Antoinette, who had meanwhile been fully informed about these things by experienced lady friends, did her utmost to persuade her husband to submit to surgical intervention. (“Je travaille à le déterminer à la petite opération, dont on a déjà parlé et que je crois nécessaire”—I’m working on getting him round to the small operation, of which we’ve already spoken, and which I believe is necessary—she wrote to her mother in 1775.) But though five years had elapsed since his marriage, Louis XVI—as he had now become—was not yet an effective husband, and, being a young man of vacillating character, he found it impossible to make up his mind to so energetic a course. He hesitated, procrastinated, tried one futile measure after another, until the situation of the married pair, at once ludicrous and horrible, grew shameful to the Queen, was the scorn of the whole court, enraged Maria Theresa and hopelessly humiliated the new King. Thus matters dragged on for another two years, making in all seven years of frustration. Then Emperor Joseph undertook the journey to Paris that he might inspire his rather pusillanimous brother-in-law with sufficient courage for the operation. The needful was done, and our pitiful Cásar was enabled to cross his Rubicon. But as far as his wife’s mental realm was concerned, that of which he now achieved the conquest had been hopelessly laid waste by these seven years of a preposterous struggle, by the two thousand nights during which Marie Antoinette, as woman and as wife, had suffered the most disastrous mortification that can befall one of her sex.
I doubt not that many of the more sensitive among my readers will be outraged at my having touched upon this thorny and most sacred mystery of the alcove. “Surely the matter could have been avoided!” they will exclaim. “Would it not have sufficed to refer to the monarch’s ineffectiveness in the marriage bed in such veiled terms as to be practically incomprehensible, to evade discussion of the tragedy by leaving it wrapped in mystery, or at least to rest content with speaking in flowery and unintelligible metaphors of the ‘lack of maternal joys’? Is it really essential to the study of a character that the author should emphasize such exceedingly private details?”—Certainly it is indispensable, for the multitudinous tensions, clashes and interlockings, subserviences and hostilities, which gradually developed between the King and the Queen, Louis’s two brothers and the court generally, with repercussions extending far and wide into the field of history, would remain incomprehensible if no frank explanation were given as to their true causes. More numerous and more momentous historical consequences than people are in general willing to admit have taken their rise in alcoves and behind the curtains of royal beds, but scarcely in any other instance is the logical sequence between an extremely private cause and a worldwide politico-historical effect so plain as in this tragicomedy which concerned the conjugal relationships of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Utterly insincere would be any description which should leave hidden away in the shadows what Marie Antoinette herself spoke of as the “article essentiel”—essential article—the focus of her sorrows and expectations.
Besides, is it really a secret that I am disclosing when I speak frankly and straightforwardly about Louis XVI’s impotence during the first seven years of his married life? By no means! Only the nineteenth century, with its morbid prudery, has made a noli-me-tangere of the unrestrained exposition of physiological facts. Throughout the eighteenth century, as in all previous ages, a king’s competence or impotence, and a queen’s fertility or barrenness, were regarded as public and not as private affairs, were looked upon as matters of state, because upon them depended the ‘succession’, and therewith the fate of the whole country. The marriage bed was as obviously a part of human life as the font or the coffin. In the correspondence between Maria Theresa and Marie Antoinette, though all the letters passed through the hands of the official keeper of the archives and of the copyists, the Empress of Austria and the Queen of France wrote in the plainest terms about the details and the misadventures of this affair. Maria Theresa dwelt upon the advantages of husband and wife sleeping together as a rule, and gave her daughter plain hints as to the best way of turning to account any chance of intimate relations. The daughter, in her turn, never failed to report the arrival or non-arrival of the monthly periods, to describe her husband’s repeated failures with a special mention any time when things went “un petit mieux”—a little better—and finally—triumphantly—to announce a pregnancy. On one occasion the famous Gluck, the composer of Iphigénie, was entrusted with the carrying of such private news because he was leaving a day or two ahead of the courier. In the eighteenth century natural things were still regarded with naturalness.
Nor was it Toinette’s mother alone who was well informed about the husband’s impotence. All the ladies of the bedchamber, the other court ladies no less, knights and military officers, were continually talking about it. The body servants were no less well informed, ‘in the know’, and so were the washerwomen at the court of Versailles. Even at his own table the King had to put up with many a rough witticism on the subject. Furthermore, since the impotence of a Bourbon monarch was a matter of such outstanding political importance, at foreign courts a keen interest was taken in the problem that pressed so urgently at the court of France. The reports of the Prussian, the Saxon, the Sardinian envoys are full of accounts of this ticklish problem. The most zealous among these diplomatists, Count Aranda, the Spanish ambassador, actually bribed some of the palace servants to bring him news as to the condition of the linen in the royal bed, wishing to perfect his physiological knowledge as to the actual state of affairs. All over Europe princes and kings, by letters and by word of mouth, were making fun of their maladroit colleague. Not only in Versailles, but in the streets of Paris and the whole land of France, the King’s conjugal inefficiency was an open secret. People talked of it at the street corners. It found its way into print, lampoons on the topic being passed furtively from hand to hand. When Maurepas was made first minister, the general hilarity was stimulated by the circulation of the following cheerful versicles:
Maurepas était impuissant,
Le Roi l’a rendu plus puissant.
Le Ministre reconnaissant
Dit: Pour vous, Sire,
Ce que je désire,
D’en faire autant.
(Maurepas was powerless, and the King made him more powerful. The grateful minister said: for you, sir, what I desire is to do the same for you.) But what may sound amusing to us of a later generation had a momentous, nay perilous significance. During these seven years of impotence, the characters of the King and the Queen were warped, each in its own fashion—with political results which would be unintelligible had we no knowledge of the prime cause. The fate of this one marriage was intertwined with the fate of the world.
Incomprehensible, above all, would be Louis XVI’s mentality if we knew nothing about this private trouble, for his character displays the typical clinical traits of an inferiority complex determined by a sense of defective virility. Because he had been impotent in the privacy of the conjugal bed, he became affected with inhibitions which robbed him in public life of the energy needed for creative activity. He was unable ‘to take the floor’, incapable of exercising his own will and even more incapable of getting his own way on the rare occasions when his will stirred. Suffering from a sense of secret shame, awkward and shy, he did his utmost to avoid social functions, and was especially loath to associate with women. Though a good enough fellow, fundamentally eager to do the right thing, he was aware that everyone at court knew about his misadventures, so that he shrank into himself, wincing at the ironical smiles of the initiated. Occasionally, he tried to assume airs of authority, and to put on a semblance of manliness. Invariably, on these occasions, he overacted his part, becoming rough and brutal in his demeanour—such assumed roughness being unconvincing, a typical manifestation of the flight from reality. Never did he succeed in showing a natural self-confidence, least of all in his hereditary role of king. Because he had been unable to play the man in his sleeping apartment, he could not play the monarch in public.
Many of his personal tastes were ultra-virile; he was fond of outdoor sports and of hard physical toil; he learnt the locksmith’s craft, and the lathe he used in his workshop is still on show. But these circumstances, far from conflicting with the clinical picture just given, serve only to confirm it. He who is not really in all respects a man has an unconscious longing to fulfil a ‘heman’s’ part, seeking compensation for his hidden weakness in an exaggerated display of strength. By keeping the saddle for hours, hunting the boar and wearying one horse after another, by tiring out his muscles when wielding the hammer in his smithy, he found compensation in these proofs of his bodily strength, and could for a moment forget the fatal defect. It was agreeable to him to toil like Hephaestus, who, a titan at the forge, was a laggard in the service of Aphrodite. No sooner, however, did Louis throw aside his hunting costume or his workshop overall in order to put on full dress and strut among his courtiers, than he felt that something more than mere muscular strength was requisite to virility, and his embarrassment returned in full tide. Rarely was he seen to laugh, seldom did he look happy.
From the characterological outlook, the most disastrous consequences of this sense of weakness became apparent in his mental attitude towards his wife. There was a good deal in her behaviour which was repugnant to his taste. He disliked her unceasing round of social amusements, her perpetual noisy pleasure-seeking, her extravagance in money matters, her levity. A man able to play a man’s part would speedily have asserted himself, and would have made his young wife conduct herself in accordance with his wishes. But how could he, who, night after night, was shamed and made ridiculous by his inefficiency as a spouse, assert himself as master in the daytime? Because of his sexual impotence, Louis XVI could make no headway against his wife. The longer this unhappy state of affairs lasted, the more did he fall into dependence, nay servitude. He gave her whatever she wanted, without demur, thus again and again by his complaisance ransoming himself from his sense of culpability. In the last analysis, will-power is but the mental expression of physical potency, and, lacking both, Louis had no aptitude for imposing the necessary restraint upon his wife’s follies. It was the despair of the ministers of state, of Maria Theresa, of the whole court, to watch how the royal power was passing into the hands of a young and giddy-pated woman, and to note the inconsiderate way in which she was squandering her opportunities. Why, it may be asked, did not things improve after a trifling operation had made Louis a competent husband? The answer is simple. Too late! How familiar is the experience that the parallelogram of forces which becomes established during the early years of married life continues to function indefinitely, thanks to the mental relationships thus brought into being. Even when Louis XVI had been for some time seated on his throne, when he had become a husband in the full sense of the word and had procreated several children, he, who should have been the ruler of France, remained the thrall of Marie Antoinette, simply because to begin with he had been an ineffective husband.
The sexual impotence of Louis XVI had results that were no less sinister as regards the mental development of Marie Antoinette. Owing to the contrast between the sexes, one and the same disturbance has opposite results upon the masculine and the feminine nature. When a man is affected with sexual incapacity, he suffers from inhibitions and from irresolution. But when, in the female partner, her readiness to surrender herself to the male does not find its due fulfilment, the inevitable upshot will be irritability and lack of restraint with outbursts of excessive liveliness. By nature, Marie Antoinette was normal enough—a tender, womanly woman, foreordained to motherhood on the old, liberal scale, and only waiting, one may suppose, to submit herself to a real man. Temperamentally ‘foreordained’, I mean. Her ill-starred destiny decreed that this creature of typically feminine sensibilities should enter into an abnormal union, and should be coupled with a man who was not fully a man.
Of course she was but fifteen at the time that the marriage should have been consummated, and it may reasonably be surmised that failure of consummation need not, at such a tender age, have seriously scarred her mind. According to our present lights and in view of our present social habits, we cannot regard it as physiologically unnatural for a girl to remain a virgin until she is two-and-twenty. But the case was peculiar in this way—in a way that makes uncanny nervous reactions easily explicable. The husband to whose embraces she had, for reasons of state, been assigned, did not, during these seven years of pseudomarriage, leave her in a condition of untouched and untroubled chastity; again and again, for the space of two thousand nights, awkwardly and fruitlessly he endeavoured to take possession of her youthful body. Year after year her sexual passions were fruitlessly stimulated in this unsatisfying, shameful and degrading way, without a single act of complete intercourse. One need hardly be a neurologist or a sexologist to recognise that her superlative liveliness, her persistent and unavailing search for new satisfactions, her fickle pursuit of one pleasure after another, were typical outcomes of unceasing sexual stimulation by a husband who was unable to provide her with adequate gratification. Because she had never been stirred to the depths and then profoundly satisfied, this wife who was not really a wife after seven years of married existence craved for an atmosphere of perpetual movement and unrest.
By slow degrees, what to begin with had been no more than the high spirits of a spoilt child degenerated into a mania for pleasure, convulsive, morbid, regarded by the whole as scandalous—a vehement desire for pleasure against which Maria Theresa and all Marie Antoinette’s friends fought in vain. Just as in the King unfulfilled virility gave rise to a passion for hard work in the smithy and for the excitement and fatigue of the chase, so in the Queen did these misdirected and unsatisfied feelings find vent in passionate friendship for women, in flirting with handsome young men, in a fondness for make-up, and in similar inadequate emotional satisfactions. Night after night she would keep away from the marriage bed, the place of humiliation, and (while her husband who was no husband slept heavily after the hunt) would stay up till four or five in the morning at masked balls, at the gaming table, at supper parties, often amid dubious company, warming herself at strange fires, an unworthy queen because wedded to an incompetent husband.
Many a moment of frantic melancholy showed, however, that this frivolity was unpalatable, and was the result of a futile search for amusement to escape from a gnawing sense of disappointment. Especially characteristic was her outburst when her relative, the Duchess of Chartres, gave birth to a stillborn child. Thereupon she wrote to her mother: “However distressing, I only wish the same thing could happen to me!” Better a dead child than no child at all! Anything to escape from this degrading condition, anything that would enable her to feel that she was a normal wife, and not still a virgin after seven years of marriage. Only a sympathetic comprehension of the despair that underlay her craze for pleasure can explain to us the extraordinary change which took place when, finally, Marie Antoinette became wife and mother. Her nerves were tranquillized. Another, a second, Marie Antoinette appeared upon the scene, the self-controlled, strong-willed, intrepid woman she showed herself to be during the latter half of her life. But this transformation came too late. As in childhood, so in every marriage, the initial experiences are decisive. Decades cannot rid us of the troubles that have arisen from a primary though ostensibly trifling disturbance in the delicate and sensitive substance of the mind. There can be no perfect healing for these deep-seated and invisible wounds of the affective self.
In general, such a tragedy would be no more than a private affair; misadventures of the kind occur day after day behind closed doors. But in the case we are considering, the disastrous consequences of a conjugal failure extended far beyond the realm of private existence. Here husband and wife were king and queen, pitilessly exposed to the caricaturing concave mirror of public attention. What for others remained confidential, was, as far as they were concerned, a perpetual topic for gossip and criticism. The French attitude towards sexual matters has become proverbial. The wits of the French court naturally did not content themselves with compassionately noting what had gone wrong. It was inevitable that they should continually be asking themselves and one another how Marie Antoinette had sought relief, or would seek relief, for her husband’s failure to perform his marital duties. They had before their eyes a handsome young woman, self-confident and coquettish, full of animal spirits, and in the heyday of her youth. They knew that she, who seemed made for love, was yoked to a man incapable of practising that sublime art. What, in these circumstances, could their idle brains busy themselves with but the problem: Who is cuckolding Louis?
Just because there were no solid grounds for suspicion, suspicion ran riot. If the Queen merely went out riding with some good-looking cavalier, with Lauzun or Coigny, for instance, the scandalmongers were sure that he must be her lover; if she took a morning stroll in the park with the ladies and gentlemen of the court, there was talk forthwith of the most incredible orgies. Wags were perpetually thinking and chattering about the love-life of the disappointed Queen, concerning which songs, lampoons, pamphlets and pornographic poems were rife. At first the ladies-in-waiting kept such naughty verses in manuscript, hidden away in secret drawers, reciting them to one another furtively in the privacy of their boudoirs—but it was not long before the strains, growing louder, made themselves heard beyond the palace walls and outside the mansions of the nobility. They were printed, and were read by the common people. When revolutionary propaganda began, the Jacobin journalists had not far to look in order to discover arguments enabling them to represent Marie Antoinette as a prodigy of dissipation, as a brazen-faced adultress—and, in due course, the public prosecutor needed merely to extract an unsavoury item or two from this Pandora’s box filled with gallant calumnies in order to bring the Queen’s slender neck under the guillotine.
We see, then, how in this case the consequences of a disorder in married life extended over the confines of personal fortunes and misfortunes deep into the realm of universal history. The destruction of the royal authority did not begin with the storming of the Bastille, but in Versailles. It was no chance matter that the news of the King’s impotence and the malicious falsehoods about the Queen’s nymphomania spread so rapidly from the halls of the palace to become the property of the whole nation. There were secret family and political reasons for this leakage. The fact was that in this palace there lived four or five persons, Louis’s closest blood relations, who had a strong personal interest in the frustration of Marie Antoinette’s hopes. First and foremost there were the King’s two brothers, to whom the failure to consummate the royal marriage was most welcome, seeing that his anatomical defect and his dread of the surgeon’s knife interfered, not only with the normal course of his marriage, but also with the normal course of the succession—giving these younger brothers unexpectedly good chances of mounting the throne. The elder of the two, Count of Provence and subsequently Louis XVIII (for he reached his goal at last, God alone knows by what crooked ways), had always found it hard to put up with the prospect of playing second fiddle throughout life, instead of wielding the sceptre himself. But Stanislas Xavier, as he then was, was likewise an inefficient husband and was childless; so the third of the brothers Charles Philip, Count of Artois, and in due time Charles X, had most to gain by Louis XVI’s impotence, for he had sons who might succeed to the throne.
To the Count of Provence and the Count of Artois, therefore, Marie Antoinette’s plight was a matter for rejoicing, and the longer the deplorable state of affairs lasted, the more confirmed were they in their happy expectations. Their fury, then, can well be imagined when, in the seventh year of the marriage, the King’s virility was at length fully established, and the sexual relations between himself and his wife became normal. Stanislas Xavier never forgave his sister-in-law for this downfall of his hopes, and he tried to secure by intrigue what had become impossible of attainment along the straight path. From the day when Louis XVI became a father, his brother the Count of Provence and several other relatives were among the most dangerous of his adversaries. The Revolution found zealous assistants at court; princely hands helped to open the doors to it and supplied it with some of its best weapons. The secret of the alcove did more than anything else to undermine monarchical authority.
Almost always, indeed, there are hidden influences at work in the shaping of destiny, and the great majority of events of worldwide importance are but the expression of some inward personal conflict. One of the most cunning wiles of history is the way in which consequences of incalculable moment are developed out of seemingly trifling occasions; this was not the first, and certainly it was not the last time when a sexual disturbance transiently affecting one man threw the whole world into disorder. The impotence of Alexander of Serbia, his erotic enslavement to Draga Mashin (the woman who freed him from this trouble), the assassination of the pair, the summoning of Peter Karageorgevitch to the throne, the increasing enmity between Austria and Serbia and, finally, the Great War developed with the relentlessness of an avalanche. History, casting her mystic shuttle to and fro, weaves the rune of fate out of the frailest gossamer threads. In the life story of Marie Antoinette, the grotesque and, except for herself, seemingly unimportant experiences of the first nights and years of her marriage were decisive, not only in shaping her character, but also in moulding the destinies of the world.
For the time being, however, the storm was still invisible. How distant were all these consequences and complications from the merry child of fifteen, who joked with her awkward bedfellow, and who, with cheerfully beating heart and brightly smiling eyes, looked forward to ascending the steps of a throne—from which she would be torn, and forced to mount the scaffold. The gods give no sign to one for whom they have predestined the drawing of the black marble from the bag. They allow their intended victim to pursue an untroubled course while the fountains of destiny are being unsealed from within.