LIGHTLY, CARESSINGLY, Marie Antoinette picked up the crown as a gift. She was still too young to know that life never gives anything for nothing, and that a price is always exacted for what Fate bestows. She did not think she would have to pay a price. She simply accepted the rights of her royal position and performed no duties in exchange. She wanted to combine two things which are, in actual human experience, incompatible; she wanted to reign and at the same time to enjoy. Her desire was that all should fulfil her wishes as Queen while she gave free rein to every caprice; she wanted the power of the ruler and the freedom of the woman, wanted, in fact, to have it both ways, wanted her new position to redouble without drawback the intensity of her young and passionate life.
But no freedom was possible at Versailles. In the brightly lit galleries, every step one took was open to the public gaze. Every movement was controlled, every word was bruited abroad by a treacherous wind. Here she could neither be alone nor enjoy ‘solitude à deux’—the solitude of two. At Versailles she could find neither repose nor yet relief from tension. The King was, so to say, the mainspring of a huge striking clock, which inexorably recorded the hours. Every action from birth to death, from getting up in the morning to going to bed at night, the very moments of amatory dalliance, became actions of state. The ruler, to whom everything belonged, was here a part of the show, and did not belong to himself. But Marie Antoinette detested control of any kind, and for this reason, almost immediately after she became queen, she asked her obliging husband to provide her with some corner of retirement where she need not be queen. Thereupon Louis XVI, half through weakness and half in a lover’s mood, bestowed on her the summer palace of the Little Trianon, a tiny realm, but her very own, superadded to the vast realm of France.
In itself this was no splendid gift which Marie Antoinette received from her husband; nothing more than a toy which was to amuse and engross her idleness for more than ten years to come. Its builder had not designed the palace as permanent residence for a royal family, but only as a ‘maison de plaisir’—house of pleasure—as a ‘buen retiro’—good retreat—as a house of accommodation—and Louis XV had made a plentiful use of it as an unwatched love-nest for his amusements with the Dubarry and other light-of-loves. (I speak of the Little Trianon, and not of the Great Trianon, which was built by Louis XIV for Madame de Maintenon.) King Louis’s suppers with the ladies upon whom he bestowed his affections were served upon a cleverly constructed table made after the manner of a modern lift, so that the spread board could rise discreetly into the banqueting room from the basement, and the lord of the earth and his lady could remain unobserved by any menial. For this intensification of erotic comfort, the worthy Leporello was granted a bonus of twelve thousand livres, over and above the seven hundred and thirty-six thousand livres of which the whole pleasure house had drained the state treasury.
Marie Antoinette took over this retired nook in Versailles park when it was still warm after the late King’s sudden death and Madame Dubarry’s eviction. The Little Trianon was one of the most graceful creations of French taste, delicate in design, perfect in execution, a dainty casket for the elegant maiden Queen. A villa in the neo-classical style, its windows giving upon beautiful lawns and gardens, well out of sight of Versailles and yet conveniently near, this palace was no greater and scarcely more luxuriously furnished than a private country mansion of today. There were seven or eight rooms in all; an entrance hall, a dining room, a boudoir, a large drawing room, a bedroom, a bathroom, a miniature library (lucus a non lucendo, for, according to universal witness, Marie Antoinette never opened a book until the last weeks of her imprisonment, except for a few light novels whose pages she fluttered).
Within this Lilliputian palace, during the years of her tenancy, the Queen made few changes. Having excellent taste in such matters, she was careful to introduce nothing that should be ostentatious, pompous or too obviously expensive into rooms that were deliberately intended to produce an impression of privacy and comfort. On the contrary, all was done with a light, delicate and reserved touch, in that new style which is as wrongfully termed ‘Louis Seize’ as America has been christened after Amerigo Vespucci. We ought, rather, to speak of the ‘Marie Antoinette style’, for it is she whom these subtle and charming characteristics recall. They have nothing in common with the stout and massive Louis XVI or with his crudities of person and character. Everything at the Little Trianon reminds us of the frivolous and bewitching feminine figure whose portrait still hangs on the walls. From the bed to the snuff-box, from the clavecin to the ivory fan, from the sofa to the miniature, all is of a uniform type, the choicest materials embodied in the most inconspicuous forms, seemingly fragile and yet durable, a combination of classical lines and French grace. The style is one still congenial to us, reminding us, as does no earlier style, of the dominion of a cultivated and tasteful lady, contrasting by its intimacy and its harmony with the dramatic pomposity of Louis Quinze and Louis Quatorze.
The boudoir, for light conversation and equally light amusements, was, therefore, the centre of the house, rather than the great, echoing reception rooms. Here, a carven and gilt wooden panelling replaced the stiff marble of the more formal apartments; there were soft silken hangings instead of stiff satin and heavy brocades. As to colour, a mat cream, a delicate cherry, a pale blue prevailed. The whole interior was designed to form an appropriate setting for women in the springtime of life, for pleasant and intimate gatherings, for cheerful unconcern. Thus the costly and coquettish furnishing of the Little Trianon gave appropriate harbourage to the statuettes of Clodion, to the paintings of Watteau and Pater, to the silver-toned chamber music of Boccherini, and to the other most select products of eighteenth-century art. Nowhere else did the playfulness of spirit which prevailed among the French high nobility just before the troublous days of the Revolution find so unalloyed an expression. For all time the Little Trianon will remain the most refined, the most fragile and yet the most indestructible shrine of this essentially artificial blossoming. Here ultra-sophisticated enjoyment secured perfect expression in a domicile and in the figure of its owner. The zenith and the nadir of the Rococo, maturing to a climax in the last hour before its death, is, even in our own day, best symbolized by the little clock placed in the centre of the chimney piece in Marie Antoinette’s boudoir.
It was a doll’s house, this Little Trianon, and, characteristically enough, its windows commanded no glimpse of the world of living men—of Paris, of the town of Versailles, of the farms in the working countryside. Ten minutes suffice for a survey of the whole place, and yet, small though it was, as far as Marie Antoinette was concerned it was more important than the whole of France where dwelt her twenty million subjects. Here she felt emancipated from obligations, whether to ceremonial, to etiquette or even to morality. In order to make plain that in this petty realm she and no one else was supreme, she issued her decrees in her own name instead of that of her husband, subscribing them “de par la reine”—on behalf of the Queen—much to the annoyance of sticklers for tradition at court, who continued to lay great stress upon the Salic Law. The servants did not wear the royal livery of red, white and blue, but her own red and silver. Even her husband, the Most Christian King of France, appeared at the Little Trianon as a guest. Tactful and complaisant as ever, he was careful not to turn up uninvited or at inconvenient times, strictly respecting the domestic privacies of his wife. All the same, the good fellow was glad enough to come when asked, finding life in this quiet ‘country house’ far more agreeable than in the great palace, for, ‘par ordre de la reine’—by order of the Queen—strict ceremonial was discarded at the Little Trianon. Here the Queen, and the King when present, did not ‘hold court’. They could loll on the grass in an easy undress. There was no need to worry about precedence, for all were good companions. Stiffness, and sometimes even the most elementary dignity, were laid aside.
At the Little Trianon Marie Antoinette felt really at home, and soon she had become so much fascinated by the ease of an informal life that she found it hard when she had to go back to Versailles in the evening. Having once tasted the freedom of her ‘country house’, her court duties became more and more irksome to her, so that she was increasingly prone to shake off the responsibilities of her representative position (and, perhaps, to evade her conjugal obligations) by withdrawing ever more frequently, day after day, to her beloved dovecote. Could she have followed her preferences unhesitatingly, she would never have left Trianon. In general, as was her wont, she did follow her preferences, and, for practical purposes, the summer palace became her residence. Her bedchamber had only a single bed in which there would hardly have been room for her bulky husband. The last intimacies of married life took place only when Marie Antoinette desired. As Balkis Queen of Sheba visited Solomon, so did Marie Antoinette visit King Louis, at her own sweet will—or when her mother wrote too acrimoniously about the “lit à part”—separate bed. Not once, so far as we know, was the worthy Louis her guest in the single bed at the Little Trianon, for this summer palace was Marie Antoinette’s inviolable kingdom, her island of Cythera, wholly consecrated to her own pleasures—among which her connubial duties were certainly never reckoned. Here she wanted to live her own life without hindrance; to be nothing but the spoilt, honoured and uncontrolled young woman who, busied among a thousand trifles, forgot everything else; forgot her realm, her spouse, the court, time and the world—and often (perhaps these were her happiest hours) forgot even herself.
At Trianon her idle spirit had at length found occupation, upon a toy which was continually being refurbished. Just as her dressmaker had to design an unending succession of new dresses, and just as her jeweller had to be perpetually finding her new trinkets, so was Marie Antoinette unceasingly engaged upon the readornment and the renovation of her tiny realm set apart among the great pleasure grounds of Versailles. Superadded to dressmaker, jeweller, dancing master and music teacher, were now the architect, the landscape gardener, the painter, the decorator; new ministers of her petty kingdom, helping her to while away the weary hours and to empty even faster than before the treasury of the state. The garden, above all, interested Marie Antoinette, for it seemed to her essential that it should differ in every respect from the old-fashioned precincts of the great palace of Versailles. It must be the most up-to-date, the most stylish, the most peculiar, the most coquettish of the day; a genuine Rococo apanage to her Rococo country mansion. In this matter once again, consciously or unconsciously, Marie Antoinette was following the taste of the new times. Cultivated persons had grown weary of Le Nôtre’s ideas of horticulture; of his lawns shaped with a ruler, of his hedges shaved with a razor; of the formalities designed at the draughtsman’s table, the ornamentations which were to show in boastful spirit that Louis the Roi Soleil had impressed the forms he desiderated, not only upon the kingdom, the nobility, the estates and the nation, but also on God’s own countryside. People were sick unto death of this green geometry, of this “massacre of nature”. As in many other respects, so likewise in respect of the futility of much that was styled landscape gardening, Jean Jacques Rousseau found the apt phrase for his generation when, in La nouvelle Héloïse, he demanded a “natural park”.
Beyond question Marie Antoinette had never read La nouvelle Héloïse. If she had heard of Jean Jacques Rousseau, it could only have been as librettist and composer of the charming pastoral Le devin du village. Nevertheless, Rousseau’s views were part of the contemporary atmosphere. Dukes and marquises were profoundly moved, and their eyes were even bedimmed with tears, when the conversation turned upon this distinguished advocate of primitive innocence (in private life, homo perversissimus!). They were profoundly grateful to him because, after the customary stimuli had lost effect, he had found a last spur for their jaded senses—sporting with naivety, playing of innocence, the masquerade of naturalness. It need hardly be said, therefore, that at this juncture Marie Antoinette, likewise, wanted a ‘natural’ garden, a blamelessly innocent landscape, which must be the most natural of new-fangled natural gardens. With this end in view, she summoned to her aid the most noted, the most highly refined horticultural artists of the day, that, in the most artificial way possible, they might design and create for her an ultra-natural garden.
As fashion decreed, this ‘Anglo-Chinese garden’ was to represent, not merely nature, but the whole of nature. In the microcosm of a few square kilometres, there was to be a quasi-microscopic reproduction of the entire cosmos. However circumscribed the area, it was to contain French and Indian and African trees, Dutch tulips, magnolias from southern climes, a lake and a river, a mountain and a grotto, a romantic ruin, rural dwellings, Greek temples and oriental glimpses, Dutch windmills, North and South, East and West, all that was most natural and all that was most eccentric, all that was most artificial and all that had the stamp of the utmost genuineness. At the outset the architect had planned to introduce into his garden plot a volcano spouting fire and also a Chinese pagoda, but, fortunately, these proposals were, for once in a way, found too costly.
Spurred on by the Queen’s impatience, hundreds of workmen, guided by the plans of architects and painters, began to conjure up a designedly purposeless and artificially natural landscape. First of all, as an indispensable requisite of a pastoral scene, there must be a brook that murmured gently on its course through the meadows. Since there was no local spring to tap, the water had to be brought in pipes all the way from Marly, and much gold as well as water ran through the conduit! Still, the essential aim was achieved, for at Trianon the streamlet meandered just as if it had cut its own way. Flowing gently down into an artificial pond adorned with an artificial island, the waters burbled on agreeably beneath graceful bridges, and were deep enough to become the haunt of dignified swans. A rock which might have formed the theme of Anacreontic verses reared its noble head, surmounted by a romantic belvedere, followed by an artificial cave and its flanks coated with artificially implanted moss. There was nothing to show that this touchingly simple scene had been designed upon countless watercolour drawings, or that the whole layout had been foreshadowed by twenty plaster models, wherein the pond and the streamlet were represented by fragments of looking glass, the fields and the trees as in a jigsaw puzzle by painted and adhesive imagery.
But this first installation was by no means the last. Every year the Queen had some new fancy for beautifying her miniature kingdom with more highly artificial and more ‘natural’ additions and alterations. She would not wait until the old bills had been paid before incurring fresh obligations; she had found a congenial amusement and wished to make the most of it. Ostensibly casual in their appearance, but in truth carefully designed by her artificers, further expensive trifles were continually being added to the garden, in order to enhance its charm. A tiny temple, consecrated to the god of those days, a temple of love, crowned a hillock; in its open classical rotunda was one of Bouchardon’s finest sculptures, a Cupid carving his deadly bow out of the club of Hercules. The aforesaid love-grotto in the rock was skilfully provided with loopholes, so that a pair that had sought this retirement for amorous dalliance could glimpse any approaching intruders and escape being taken by surprise. Winding paths led through the little wood; the lawns were planted with rare exotic flowers; and ere long one could notice amid the greenery a small music pavilion, a beautiful octagon of white marble. These various enchantments were so gracefully, so tastefully intertwined into a whole, that, in very truth, their extreme artificiality became inconspicuous. But the fashion demanded yet more genuineness than this. In order to make nature more natural than ever, in order to provide the most refined side-shows which should have the absolute veracity of life, various supers were engaged to intensify the genuineness of this expensive pastoral comedy—real peasants of both sexes; real milkmaids with real cows, real calves and pigs and rabbits and sheep, real scythemen and reapers and shepherds and hunters and launderers and cheese-makers—to mow lawns and wash clothes and manure the soil and milk the cows, so that the puppet show should proceed in lively fashion.
Dipping deeper than before into the public purse, Marie Antoinette had a life-size stage built hard by Trianon for these spoilt children out of a bandbox—the famous ‘Hameau’, fully provided with byres and hayricks and barns, with dovecotes and fowl houses. Mique, the distinguished architect, and Hubert Robert, the famous painter, designed, and superintended the building of, eight little peasant farms, true to type, with thatched roofs, farmyards and dung heaps, all complete. Lest these fire-new make-believes should appear spurious amid the costly pretence of their ‘natural’ surroundings, it was thought advisable to imitate (as far as externals were concerned) the poverty and decay of the actual dwellings of the countryfolk. Rifts were made in the walls; the plaster was romantically chipped away in patches; shingles were ripped off here and there. Hubert Robert painted cracks in the woodwork, so that it might seem touched by the hand of time, and the chimneys were carefully smoked. So much for externals. Within, however, these apparently ruinous cottages were equipped with every possible convenience—with mirrors and stoves, with billiard tables and comfortable couches. All must be clean and in perfect order.
When Marie Antoinette, bored beyond measure or suffering from a fit of the blues, felt impelled to play Jean Jacques Rousseau, and, with some of her court ladies, to undertake the ‘work’ of butter-making, there must be nothing that could soil her fingers. If she visited Brunette and Blanchette in the cow house, it need hardly be said that before her coming the floor had been sedulously cleaned by an unseen hand, that the beasts’ hides had been curried and combed with the utmost care so that one looked like alabaster and the other like mahogany, and that the foaming milk was received, not in the wooden buckets used by ordinary peasants, but in porcelain vases made at Sèvres and adorned with the Queen’s monogram.
This Hameau, today a lovely ruin, was for Marie Antoinette an out-of-doors theatre, the site of a stimulating comédie champêtre—pastoral comedy. At a time when, throughout France, the unhappy peasants were beginning to grow riotous, when the real countryfolk, crushed by the burden of taxation, were uproariously demanding relief from their intolerable miseries—in this Potemkin side-show there prevailed a preposterous and mendacious comfort. Sheep were led to pasture by ribbons of blue silk tied round their necks. The Queen, with a parasol held over her head by one of her ladies, came to look on sometimes while the washerwomen did their work in the rippling brook. This simplicity was so splendid, so moral, so agreeable; everything was so clean and charming in this little paradise; life here was as bright and resplendent as the milk which spurted from the cows’ udders. Marie Antoinette wore dresses of thin muslin, rural in their simplicity, and had herself painted in them for a few thousand livres a picture. She enjoyed the most innocent pleasures, cultivating the ‘goût de la nature’—taste for nature—with all the frivolousness of satiety. She fished; she culled flowers; she went walking (rarely alone) along the winding paths; she ran across the lawns; she watched her ‘good peasants’ at their work; she played catch-ball. She and her intimates danced minuets and gavottes upon the flower-bespangled turf instead of upon parquet flooring; they hung swings between the trees; they played hide-and-seek among the cottages and in the shady paths; they rode, amused themselves in countless ways, and had little dramas staged in this natural theatre, being audience and actors by turns.
The passion for private theatricals was the most recent of Queen Marie Antoinette’s discoveries. She had begun by the building of a tiny private theatre (which still stands, and is beautiful in its lovely surroundings) for performances by Italian and French companies. This caprice cost her 141,000 livres. Then she was suddenly bitten by the idea of appearing herself on the boards. Her light-hearted companions were ready enough to share her enthusiasm for the new venture. Her brother-in-law the Count of Artois, Madame de Polignac, and other members of the court circle were delighted to join in the frolic. The King put in an appearance several times in order to admire his wife’s performances as leading lady. After this innovation, it was carnival-time at Trianon all through the year. Festivals were held in honour of her royal spouse, of his brothers, and then in honour of foreign guests of royal rank to whom Marie Antoinette wished to show off her magic realm. On these occasions coloured glass lanterns—amethyst, ruby and topaz—twinkled out of the darkness among the trees; there were splendid firework displays; and the strains of sweet music sounded from the middle distance. Banquets were served to hundreds of guests; booths were built in which could be enjoyed ‘all the fun of the fair’; the guileless landscape served as a refined background to riotous luxury. There was no need for a ‘natural life’ to be tedious. Marie Antoinette had not come to the Trianon in order to go into retreat or in order to live a life of reflection, but simply that she might amuse herself better and with more freedom from restraint.
The final account for the Trianon was not cast up until 31st August 1791. The total was 1,649,529 livres—but in reality, if various ignored items are added in, the total amount was more than two million. This no doubt was merely a drop in the Danaid sieve of the royal unthrift and general mismanagement of expenditure; still, it was a preposterous sum in view of the disorder of French finances and of the poverty that prevailed throughout the land. When on trial before the Revolutionary Tribunal, the ‘Widow Capet’ had to admit: “It is likely enough that the Little Trianon cost huge sums of money, and perhaps more than I intended, for I gradually became involved in unexpected disbursements.”
In the political field, as well, the Queen had to pay dearly for her caprices. By leaving the camarilla to its own devices at Versailles, she robbed court life of vital significance. The lady whose function it was to hand her her gloves, and the one who reverently placed the night stool for the Queen’s use; the maids of honour and the knights of honour; the thousand guardsmen, servants and other underlings—what was left for them to do when the Queen spent all her time at Trianon? Day after day they sat unoccupied in the Oeil de Boeuf, the guard room and the servants’ hall, and, just as a machine unused is eaten up by rust, so did this neglected court become ever more dangerously envenomed with gall. Ere long matters had reached such a pass that, by a tacit understanding, good society began to keep away from court festivals. The arrogant “Austrian woman” might amuse herself as best she pleased in her “little Schönbrunn”, in her “little Vienna”, but she must do it alone. The French nobility, as ancient as the Habsburgs, had too good an opinion of itself to be satisfied with occasional bowing and scraping at a formal reception. More and more conspicuous, more and more plain-spoken, became the new Fronde—Revolt—the “cave” that was formed by the blue-bloods of France against the Queen after she had forsaken Versailles. The Duc de Lévis has given us a lively account of the position.
“In an age of pleasure and frivolity, intoxicated by supreme power, the Queen had no fancy for submitting herself to constraint, and she found court ceremony tedious. It seemed clear to her that in so enlightened a century, when prejudices had been whistled down the wind, the occupants of a throne could free themselves from the shackles which custom had imposed upon them. She thought it absurd to suppose that the loyalty of the common people could depend upon the number of hours which the royal family spent in a circle of bored and boring courtiers … Except for a few favourites, chosen for some whim or because of a successful intrigue, everyone was excluded from the royal presence. Rank, service, repute, birth, were no longer warrants for admission into the intimacies of the reigning family. Only on Sundays could persons furnished with proper introductions see Their Majesties for a few minutes. But most of those to whom this privilege was granted soon found it nothing better than a corvée—chore—since they were given no thanks for putting themselves about to attend at court. Coming to realise that it was foolish to make a long journey merely in order to secure an ungracious reception, they preferred to stay at home … Versailles, a scene of such magnificence in the days of Louis XIV, when all Europe was eager to come thither for lessons in good taste and good manners, now became nothing more than a minor provincial town, which one visited with reluctance and whence one departed as speedily as possible.”
From afar, Maria Theresa had been quick to recognise the danger: “I know well enough how tedious and futile is a representative position, but, believe me, you will have to put up with both tediousness and futility, for otherwise you will suffer from much more serious inconveniences than these petty burdens—you more than most rulers, since you have to queen it over so techy a nation.”
But when Marie Antoinette did not want to understand, those who tried to reason with her were wasting breath. What a fuss her mother and the rest of them were making because she preferred to live a mile away from Versailles! Yet the truth of it was that this mile severed her for life from her court and from her people. Had Marie Antoinette continued to hold her court at Versailles, surrounded by the French nobility and amid the customary pomps and ceremonies, in the hour of peril she would have had the support of her royal relatives and of all the distinguished and powerful persons in France. If, on the other hand, she had followed the example of her brother Joseph, and had democratically endeavoured to get into touch with the common people, she would have been idolized by hundreds of thousands of Parisians and by the millions of the inhabitants of France. But Marie Antoinette, individualist to the core, cared nothing about making herself agreeable either to the aristocracy or to the plebs; she thought only of herself, and, thanks to this caprice which made her withdraw to the Trianon, she became unpopular with all ranks. Because she was too eager to be alone in her happiness, she was alone in her unhappiness, and she had to pay with her crown and her head for her devotion to a childish toy.