ALWAYS AND EVERYWHERE during the first weeks of a new reign, engravers, painters, sculptors and medal-makers have their hands full of work. In France, likewise, on this occasion, people hastened to put away pictures and busts of Louis XV—no longer ‘Louis le Bien-Aimé’—Louis the well-loved—and to replace them by garlanded images of the new pair of rulers. ‘Le Roi est mort, vive le Roi’—The King is dead, long live the King!
The medallion designers did not need much flattery in order to produce a somewhat Caesarean impression by their reproductions of the worthy countenance of Louis XVI. Although his neck was rather short and thick, the new King’s face was not devoid of a certain nobility. He had a smooth and somewhat receding forehead; a vigorous-looking nose; full and rather sensual lips; a fleshy but well-modelled chin of a rounded shape; in fine, unquestionably a congenial profile. Where touching-up was most needed was in respect of his eyes and the way he used them, for he was so short-sighted that without a lorgnette the man failed to recognise even his closest acquaintance three paces away. It was not easy, without departing from the original, for the engraver to give his heavy-lidded, pallid and watery eyes some semblance of authority. Being of cumbrous build, he held himself badly, and it was therefore difficult for the court painters to make him look imposing in full royal rig. Grown prematurely obese, awkward in his movements, with an awkwardness that was intensified to the pitch of ludicrousness by his bad sight, Louis XVI, though he was nearly six feet tall and had no stoop, made a poor showing on official occasions (la plus mauvaise tournure qu’on pût voir—the worst outfit that could be seen). He tramped across the shining parquet floors of Versailles heavily and with swinging shoulders “like a peasant at the plough-tail”; he could neither dance nor play tennis; if he tried to walk fast he was apt to stumble over his sword. Well aware of his bodily maladroitness, the poor fellow was embarrassed by the knowledge, and his embarrassment served only to make matters worse; with the result that the first impression produced upon anyone who set eyes on the King of France was that he was looking at a country bumpkin.
Yet Louis XVI was neither stupid nor narrow-minded. The trouble was that, just as his short sight made him gawky in his movements, so did his timidity or shyness (in the last analysis probably due to his lack of sexual virility during the early years of his marriage) gravely hinder him in the manifestation of his intelligence. It was a serious effort for him to carry on a conversation, knowing as he did that his thought-processes were slow and lumbering. The King, therefore, was consumed with anxiety when faced by shrewd, witty and clever persons, whose thoughts were lively and whose words flowed from their lips quickly and easily. In such circumstances, his doltishness made him ashamed. Grant him time to arrange his ideas, however, avoid hurrying him to a decision or an answer, and he could do well enough—could surprise even such a sceptic as Joseph II or Pétion by his excellent common sense. Though never brilliant, he had a sound intelligence which worked satisfactorily as soon as he could overcome his shyness. In general, however, he preferred writing down his thoughts instead of uttering them with his mouth, and he was fond of reading, for books are quiet and unobtrusive, and do not try to hustle the reader. Having read widely, he was well informed upon historical and biographical matters, and he was continually working to improve his English and his Latin, being helped in this endeavour by a remarkably good memory. His documents and his housekeeping books were in perfect order. Evening after evening, in a clear round hand which was almost copperplate in its perfection, he recorded the trifling incidents of his life (“Stag-hunting … got one … Have had a fit of indigestion”) in a diary which fills us with amazement because it utterly ignores matters of historical importance. This journal presents us with the image of a man of mediocre intelligence, with no power of independent thought, designed by nature to become a trustworthy collector of taxes or other civil servant of lower grade, fitted for any sort of mechanical and subaltern activity carried on out of the limelight—anything, anything in the world, except the position of a monarch.
What was really amiss in Louis XVI’s make-up was that he had lead in his veins. Nothing came easily to him. Well intentioned though he was, he had continually to overcome a constitutional inertia, a sort of perpetual sleepiness, before he could do anything, before he could think or even feel. His nerves were like rubber bands that have lost their elasticity. He lacked tension. This inborn obtuseness of sensibility rendered him inapt for notable achievement in the effective realm. Love (whether in the mental or in the physiological sense), pleasure, desire, anxiety, pain, fear—none of these passions could pierce his tough hide, and even immediate peril to his life could not stir him out of his lethargy. When the revolutionists were storming the Tuileries, his pulse was not quickened by a single beat per minute, and during the night before he was guillotined the two pillars of his well-being, sleep and appetite, remained unperturbed. He never grew pale, though a pistol were held to his breast; anger never flashed from his myopic eyes; nothing could alarm him—and nothing could arouse his enthusiasm. He did not care to use his body except in hard physical exercise, such as his locksmith’s work or the chase. What required delicate movements for its attainment (in himself or others)—art, music, the dance—made not the slightest appeal to his emotions. No muse and no god could make his torpid senses vibrate; not even Eros. Never during the twenty years and more of his married life did Louis XVI covet any other woman than the one his grandfather had chosen for him as wife. He was content with her, happy after his fashion, just as he was always well content because he made so few demands. It was a sorry trick that Fate played on him to demand from one of so inert and slothfully animal a nature the most important decisions known to the history of the eighteenth century; it was unfair to expect a man who was only interested in the surface of things to play a leading part in the face of a political catastrophe of worldwide importance. He was a man of contemplation, not a man of action. Physically robust though he was, at the point where action begins, where the muscles should tense themselves voluntarily for attack or for defence, he became pitifully weak. Every demand for prompt and effective resolution threw Louis XVI into the most terrible perplexity. He could only give way, could only do what others wanted, for all he himself wanted was repose, repose, repose. To anyone who was urgent, to anyone who took him by surprise, he would promise whatever was asked, and with the same slack readiness would promise the opposite to the next comer. Merely to approach him, merely to address him, was to take him by storm. Owing to this incredible weakness, Louis XVI was again and again guiltlessly guilty, dishonourable while his intentions were honourable, the tool of his wife and of his ministers of state, a king’s figure in a puppet show, happy enough when people left him to his own devices, but despairing and a man to drive others to despair when called upon to rule. If the revolutionists, when they wanted to rid themselves of this simple fellow, had, instead of slicing through his thick neck with the ‘national razor’, found for him some hut in the countryside with an acre of garden attached and a post where he had some insignificant duties to perform, they would have made him far happier than did the Archbishop of Rheims with the crown of France, which for twenty years he wore without pride, without pleasure and without dignity.
Not even the most courtly of court bards ever ventured to extol this good-natured but ungainly man as a great imperator. On the other hand, the leading artists of France vied with one another to glorify the Queen in every possible way and in all types of phraseology; in marble, terracotta, unglazed porcelain, pastel, ivory miniatures and eloquent verses—for her countenance, her whole demeanour, were in perfect conformity with the late-eighteenth-century ideal. Delicately built, slender, elegant, graceful, playful and coquettish, from the first hour when, at the age of nineteen, she ascended the throne, she became the goddess of the Rococo, the type of fashion and a model for all persons of taste. If a woman wished to be regarded as beautiful and attractive, she tried to resemble the Queen.
Yet Marie Antoinette cannot be said to have had either a remarkable or a peculiarly impressive face. Of a sharply cut oval form, with small and piquant irregularities such as the thick lip characteristic of the Habsburgs and a forehead that was rather too flat, it did not charm either by the promise of much intelligence or by any physiognomical trait. Something chilly and vacant seemed to emanate from this immature face, which not until the later years of her womanhood was to lose its inexpressiveness as of polished enamel and to acquire a certain measure of majestic force and resoluteness. The only features that seemed to indicate a liveliness of feeling were the soft and extremely beautiful eyes, which at one moment would be brimming with tears and the next sparkling with amusement. They were of a half-tone blue, and short-sighted like her husband’s, though in her case short sight seemed to give them a touching expression. But there was nothing to indicate firmness of will or strength of character in this pale oval. All that the acute observer could trace was evidence of a soft and yielding disposition, that of a woman who would be guided by her moods, and, feminine through and through, would swim always with the stream of sensibility. It was this delicate charm which everyone admired in Marie Antoinette. The only real beauties she possessed were her luxuriant hair, shading from pale blond into pale red; the purity of her complexion, which was as delicate as alabaster; her full-bosomed figure; the perfect line of her ivory-smooth and delightfully rounded arms; the carefully manicured hands—all the bloom and the aroma of developing maidenhood—but too fleeting and too sublimated a charm to be conveyed by any of her portraits.
Even the most skilful of these portraits withholds from us the essential elements of her nature, the explanation of the personal influence she wielded. What can a portrait do but fix for later generations some rigid posture of the original, and (as all agree) the real witchery of Marie Antoinette was to be found in the inimitable grace of her movements. Not until she became vivacious did she disclose the native harmony of her body. When she was walking through the lines of courtiers in the Gallery of Mirrors at Versailles; when, with coquettish relaxation, she leant back on a sofa to converse; when she impetuously ran as if on wings up the stairs; when, with a natural grace, she stretched forwards her dazzlingly white hand to be kissed, or affectionately threw her arms around the waist of one of her friends—every movement seemed the spontaneous result of feminine bodily intuition. Horace Walpole, a man who was not easily carried off his feet by admiration, said that when she was standing still she was the statue of beauty, and when she was in motion she was grace personified. In very truth she rode like an Amazon. Whenever her lithe and shapely body came into play, she excelled the loveliest women of her court, not only in adroitness, but also in physical attractiveness. Walpole, who was so delighted with her, strenuously denied the contention that she sometimes danced out of time, saying, in courtly fashion, that if there were any disharmony, then the music must have been wrong. Her own instinct, her own conscious or half-conscious knowledge of how she looked best, made Marie Antoinette love to display herself in movement. That was her true element. Sitting still, on the other hand, listening, reading, reposeful thinking and even (in some measure) sleep, were an intolerable tax upon her patience. She liked to buzz hither and thither, to be always beginning some new task which she would never finish, to be continually occupied without any serious exertion; she loved to feel that time was not standing still with her, or that she was outrunning time. To be quick at her meals, content perhaps with eating a sweetmeat or two; to sleep only for a short time, never to think long, to be perpetually on the go, frittering away her days—such were her desires. The twenty years, or rather less, during which Marie Antoinette was queen were characterised by an unceasing movement in an orbit around her own ego. Since, outside this orbit, she had no goal, nor any inward conviction of an aim, from the human and political standpoint she was circling in the void.
It was her instability, her lack of firm anchorage, her squandering of energies that were great but incessantly misapplied, which her mother took so much amiss in Marie Antoinette. Maria Theresa, equipped with a profound knowledge of human nature, knew that the gifted and inspired girl might have made a hundredfold better use of her powers than she did. Marie Antoinette merely needed to exert her will in order to be what she was fundamentally, and she had royal powers, but it was her doom that an irresistible desire to have an easy and comfortable time led her perpetually to live below her proper spiritual level. Typically an Austrian woman in this respect that, though unquestionably talented even to excess, she was utterly lacking in such resolution as might have made her turn her gifts to good account—she heedlessly scattered her talents while gadding in search of amusements. “Her first movement,” wrote her brother Joseph II, “is invariably a right one, and if she would only persist in it, if she would only reflect a little more, would only disregard cross-currents, she would get on splendidly.” But this “little more reflection” was irksome to her impetuous temperament. Any other thought than was extemporized was a labour, and intellectual labour was repugnant to her capricious and nonchalant disposition. She wanted always and everywhere to be at play, to keep on the surface of things. Above all no toil, no genuine work. When Marie Antoinette talked, it was only with her mouth, and never with her head. If anyone spoke to her, she listened in a scatter-brained way. As a conversationalist, although she was alluring by her amiability and her glittering levity, she let every thought drop as soon as it had come into her mind. She could never talk nor think nor speak to an end; she could never get her hackles into anything in order to suck meaning and facts out of genuine experience. That was why she did not want any books, any state documents, anything of serious moment that would require patient attention to understand, and it was unwillingly that she impatiently scribbled the most necessary of letters. Even in her epistles to her mother the careful reader can often note a desire to get an irksome duty over and done with. “Above all let me avoid anything that will make life a burden, let me avoid anything which will foster gloom or dullness or melancholy!” Such was her attitude, and a man who played up to her slothfulness seemed to her a man of supreme intelligence; whereas he who demanded that she should exert her brains was a tedious pedant, and with a flirt and a flutter she would escape from reasonable counsellors to the light atmosphere with which the courtiers and court ladies of her own kidney provided her. “Let me enjoy myself! Why should I bother to think things over, to calculate and to economise?” Such were her dominant feelings, and such were the dominant feelings of her circle. Live the life of the senses and not the life of reflection! It was the motto of a whole generation, the motto of persons of station in the latter part of the eighteenth century—of the generation to which, symbolically, Marie Antoinette had been assigned as queen, that, in full sight of all men, she should live and should die with it.
No novelist could have invented a more glaring characterological contrast than that which existed between this pair. Down to the finest nerve-fibrils in their bodies, the rhythm of their circulation, the subtlest manifestations of their respective temperaments, Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI showed an extraordinarily instructive antithesis in their qualities and peculiarities. He was heavy, she was light; he was inert, she was mobile; he was dull, she was sparkling; his nerves were obtuse, hers were sensitive. The difference spread far into their mental life. He was irresolute, she was quick to make up her mind; he pondered long before answering, she was always ready with her yes or her no; he was strictly religious, she was in love with the things of this world; he was modest and unassuming, she was coquettishly self-assertive; he was pedantic, she was frivolous; he was thrifty, she was extravagant; he was over-serious, she was immoderately light-hearted. He felt most at his ease when alone, whereas she delighted in the noise and the bustle of social life. He ate slowly and abundantly like an animal, and had a taste for the heavier wines; she never touched wine, ate little, and that speedily. His element was sleep, hers the dance; his world was the day, hers the night; so that the clocks that ticked off their hours of activity might have been respectively regulated in accordance with the movements of the sun and of the full moon. Towards eleven at night, when Louis XVI went to bed, Marie Antoinette began to wake up thoroughly; one day at the card table or in the gaming house, another day at a ball. She did not turn over in her bed until he had already been away for many hours at the chase. Their habits, their tastes, their daily and nightly rounds, were utterly disharmonious. For most of their married life, Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI could not be said to live together, any more than for the most part (to the great distress of Maria Theresa) they occupied the same bed.
Am I describing a marriage troubled by quarrels, one in which the partners were perpetually at odds, one in which separation seemed almost imminent? By no means! The marriage was one with which both husband and wife were well content, and, had it not been for Louis’s initial impotence, with all the distressing consequences described in a previous chapter, it could have been accounted an extremely happy union. After all, if there is to be friction in wedded life, both partners must be endowed with a fair amount of energy; will must clash with will; there must be a collision between rival hardnesses. Both Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI did their utmost to avoid friction and tension; he from bodily and she from mental indolence. “My tastes do not accord with the King’s,” writes Marie Antoinette lightly in a letter to a friend. “He is only interested in hunting and in mechanical work … I know you will agree that I should not look particularly well standing beside a forge, that the part of Vulcan would not suit me, and I fancy the role of Venus would be mere uncongenial to him than my tastes—of which, indeed, he does not disapprove.”
The fact was that Louis XVI regarded her noisy, bustling life of pleasure-seeking with considerable disfavour, but, being an idler, he never tried to put a stop to it. He smiled good-humouredly at her unrestraint, and, at bottom, was proud to have a wife so charming and so much admired. Insofar as he was capable of taking a clear line, this worthy fellow, in his loutish but honest way, had completely surrendered his will to the woman who so greatly excelled him in good looks and intelligence. Aware of his inferiority, he sedulously drew aside lest he should stand in her light. She, in turn, though she smiled at him a little for being so complaisant a husband, had no malice in her smile; for, in a careless way she was rather fond of him, looking upon him much as if he had been a huge, rough-coated St Bernard, whom it was amusing to pat from time to time, because he never gave her any trouble, and was obedient to her slightest nod. In the long run, were it only from gratitude, she would never be unkind to this pachydermatous spouse. He always let her follow her own whims, withdrew unobtrusively when he felt he was not wanted, never entered her room unannounced, proved an ideal husband in that (thrifty though he was) he paid her debts again and again without complaint, according her every freedom, and remaining devoted to her, in his frigid way, to the end of the chapter. The longer Marie Antoinette lived with Louis XVI, the more did she come to esteem the character of one who deserved respect notwithstanding his weaknesses. Although they had been coupled for diplomatic purposes, by degrees they became good comrades, so that in this respect the marriage compared very favourably with most royal marriages of the time.
As for love, which is a great word and a sacred one, the less said about love in this connection the better. Louis was not virile enough to love; his heart was too cold. On the other hand, Marie Antoinette’s liking for her husband was tinged too much with compassion, kindly consideration and at times even condescension, was too lukewarm a mixture of these multifarious ingredients, to be worthy of the name of love. As far as the crudities of bodily intercourse were concerned, from a sense of duty and for reasons of state this highly strung and sensitive woman had to give herself to her husband, but it would be absurd to suppose that so easygoing and sluggish a fellow could have aroused and then gratified erotic tension in a woman of brisk and lively disposition. Joseph II, returning to Vienna after his visit to Paris, said bluntly: “She has absolutely no love for him.” Marie Antoinette herself, writing to her mother, says that, of the three brothers, Louis, “whom God has bestowed on me as husband”, is “still” the one she is fondest of. The “still” which thus slipped itself into the lines betrays more than the writer knows of. The implication is: “Since I could not get a better husband, this good fellow is ‘still’ an acceptable substitute.” The word suffices to disclose how tepid, so far as love was concerned, were the relationships between husband and wife.
Maria Theresa, who had much worse things to put up with as regards news concerning her daughter in Parma, might have been satisfied with this elastic conception of marriage if only Marie Antoinette had shown a little more power of dissimulation, a little more tact in her behaviour; if she had understood better how to conceal from others that she regarded her royal spouse qua man, as null, as “une quantité négligeable”—a negligable quantity! But what her mother found it hard to forgive in Marie Antoinette was that the latter forgot to maintain the formalities, and thus forgot to maintain her husband’s honour. As luck would have it, one of the Queen’s careless words came to Maria Theresa’s ears. Count Rosenberg, a gallant old gentleman who had been one of the Empress’s political associates, went on a visit to Versailles. Marie Antoinette took a fancy to him, and had so much confidence in him that after his return to Vienna she wrote a rambling letter in which she described how she had fooled her husband when the Duc de Choiseul had requested an audience of her. “As you may imagine, I did not see him without speaking about the matter to the King, but you will never guess how cleverly I arranged things so as not to seem to be asking permission. I told him that I had a fancy to see Monsieur de Choiseul, and that my only difficulty was to settle upon a day. Everything went off so well that the poor man (‘le pauvre homme’) himself arranged the most convenient hour when I could see the Duke. It seems to me that I made a pretty extensive use of a woman’s rights on this occasion.”
Carelessly Marie Antoinette penned the phrase “le pauvre homme” just as it came into her head, sealing and dispatching her letter without anxiety, thinking only that she was telling Rosenberg an amusing anecdote, since for her it was merely an expression of kindliness when she referred to her husband in this way. In Vienna, however, a different interpretation was put upon words which implied that sympathy or tender feeling had been diluted with contempt. Maria Theresa was quick to recognise that it was a dangerous breach of tact for the Queen of France, in a private letter, to speak of the Most Christian King as a “pauvre homme”. It implied that in her husband the Queen did not even honour the monarch. If she could actually write such a phrase, in what sort of words was the scatter-brained young woman likely to make mock of the ruler of France at garden parties and routs when lightly conversing with the Lamballes and the Polignacs, and with the young men who danced attendance on her? The feeling at Vienna was that order must promptly be taken about the matter, and so strongly worded a letter was written to Marie Antoinette that many decades elapsed before the Imperial Archives would allow its publication. The Empress, in fact, gave her daughter the Queen a good dressing-down!
I cannot hide from you that a letter you have written to Rosenberg has caused me the most profound consternation. What a style! What levity! What has happened to the good, the generous heart of her who was Archduchess Antoinette? I can see in your letter nothing but intrigue, base hatred, a spirit of persecution, banter—intrigue worthy of a Pompadour, or of a Barry, but utterly unworthy of a queen, a great princess and a princess of the House of Lorraine and Austria, who should be full of kindness and decency. Your too speedy success and the danger that you will have your head turned by flattery have made me tremble for you throughout the winter, during which you have hurled yourself into a life of pleasure and preposterous display. This frantic pursuit of pleasure without the King as your companion, or when you know that if he does accompany you it is by complaisance merely and that he will not enjoy himself, and that it is by complaisance likewise that he lets you have your own way—upon all these matters I have touched with disquietude in my previous letters. But my uneasiness has been only too fully confirmed by this last letter. What language to use! “Le pauvre homme”! What sign is there of the respect and gratitude you owe him for his kindness? I leave you to think the matter over, and will say nothing more on that topic, although I might say a great deal … But, foreseeing the difficulties in which you may become involved, I cannot hold my peace, loving you as I do, and I foresee the difficulties more clearly than ever, since you are so light-minded, so impulsive, so heedless. Your good luck will not last for ever, and by your own fault you will be plunged into the depths of misfortune. The trouble arises because you lead so terribly dissipated a life and never apply your mind to anything. What books do you read? Yet you venture to thrust your finger into every pie, to meddle with affairs of state, with the choice of ministers! What is the Abbé doing? What is Mercy doing? I suppose they are in your bad graces, since they do not flatter you grossly, but show their love for you in a way which they hope will make you happy and not so as to amuse you or so as to profit by your weaknesses. You will recognise the truth some day, but then it will be too late. I hope I shall not live until misfortune overtakes you, and I pray God to cut short my days before this happens, since I can no longer be of any use to you, and I could not bear to lose my child or to see her unhappy—you whom I shall love tenderly until the last moment of my life.
Is she not exaggerating when she writes this long tirade and forebodes disaster, merely because her high-spirited daughter, writing in jest, had spoken of the King as “the poor man”? Hardly so; for in this instance Maria Theresa was not so much concerned about the phrase that had slipped from her daughter’s pen as about the things of which that phrase was symptomatic. The words concerning which the Empress seemed to be making such a pother had thrown a flood of light on the scant respect shown for Louis XVI, not only by the wife of his bosom, but by the court circle in general. It was natural that she should become uneasy. Her thoughts may well have run as follows. “If, in any realm, contempt for the monarch has already undermined the essential props of monarchy within his own family, how can it be expected that the other pillars and buttresses shall stand firm in times of trouble?” How could a threatened monarchy persist without a monarch? How could a throne be supported by mere supers, for whom the monarchical idea was no longer any part of their essential being? An irresolute King and a worldly-minded Queen, the former thinking too slowly and the latter never stopping to think at all—how could such a pair maintain the dynasty when storms gathered to assail it? The Empress, though not really in a rage with her daughter, felt alarmed about her prospects.
Contemplating the pair from our modern angle, what grounds can we find for righteous wrath against this King and this Queen of France? What reasons have we for condemning them? Even the Convention found it extremely hard to produce evidence in favour of the charge that this “poor man” had been a tyrant and a malefactor. At bottom there was not a grain of malice either in him or in his wife. Like most mediocrities, they were neither harsh nor cruel—not even ambitious or grossly vain. The pity of it was that even in their merits they could not transcend the qualities of average middle-class specimens of our race—a reasonable measure of good nature, a fair amount of considerateness, temperate benevolence. Had they been born into a time as commonplace as themselves, they would have been esteemed, and would have made a tolerably good showing. But neither Marie Antoinette nor Louis was competent to undergo the internal transformation that would have enabled them to manifest a sublimity of spirit fit to cope with an epoch that became dramatically intense, and they were much better able to die with distinction than to live strongly and heroically.