THE BIRTH OF THE DAUPHIN marked the zenith of Marie Antoinette’s power. By producing an heir to the throne she had become, as it were, queen for a second time. Once again the acclamations of the crowd had shown that the French people, many disappointments notwithstanding, still had inexhaustible love for, inexhaustible trust in, the ruling house, had made it plain with how little trouble the sovereigns of this nation could have continued to hold its affection. What was now needed was that Marie Antoinette should take a decisive step—from Trianon back to Versailles, to Paris, out of the Rococo world into the real one, out of her giddy entourage back to the old nobility and to the people. Then all would be well. But when she had recovered from giving birth to the Dauphin, she heedlessly returned to her life of pleasure, resuming, as soon as the popular festivals were over, the costly and disastrous amusements at the Little Trianon. Now Destiny lost patience with her, and she crossed the water-parting of good fortune. Thenceforwards her course led downwards towards the abyss.
Not that, to begin with, there were any striking developments. All that could be noticed was that court life at Versailles grew increasingly dull. Fewer and ever fewer gentlemen and ladies appeared at the receptions, and those who did come were cool and aloof in their attitude. They maintained the proprieties, but only for form’s sake and not for that of the Queen. They bowed, they curtsied, they kissed the royal hand, but they did not woo the favour of a private conversation, and their countenances were gloomy and uncongenial. It was the same with the middle and lower classes. When Marie Antoinette visited the theatre, she was no longer received with jubilation by the auditorium, and in the streets the familiar cries of “Vive la Reine!”—Long live the Queen!—were stilled. There was not as yet any manifest hostility, but there was no further sign of that cordiality which had given an agreeable warmth to respect. The sovereign lady was still revered, but there was no affection for the woman. The King’s wife was served with due attention, but not with affectionate interest. People did not openly disregard her wishes, but they preserved a chilly silence—the harsh, malicious, repressive and ominous silence of a conspiracy.
The headquarters of this conspiracy was at the four or five royal palaces; the Luxembourg, the Palais Royal, the Château of Bellevue and Versailles itself. They were in league against Trianon, the Queen’s residence.
The ill-natured chorus was led by the three maiden aunts. They had never forgotten how, as dauphiness, the young woman had given them the go-by, and how as queen she had thrust them into the background. In an evil temper because they no longer played an influential part at court, they had retired to Bellevue. There, neglected and bored, they spent the first triumphal years of Marie Antoinette’s reign, not a soul paying heed to them, now that devotion centred round the young and bewitching Queen, whose little white hands held the reins of power. But at length, when Marie Antoinette was becoming unpopular, the gates of the Château of Bellevue were frequently opened. The numerous ladies who were not invited to Trianon, the disregarded ‘Madame Etiquette’, the dismissed ministers of state, various ill-favoured women whose morals were irreproachable because no one cared to make love to them, gentlemen who had been snubbed, unsuccessful place-hunters, all who detested the ‘new trend’ and sighed for the ‘good old days’ of piety and decency (which were of course in great measure illusory) gathered together in this cave of Adullam.
The aunts’ rooms at Bellevue were transformed into a poison distillery, where the evil-tongued gossip of the court was bottled for public consumption, accounts of the ‘Austrian woman’s’ latest follies, the ‘on dits’—rumours—about her supposed love-affairs. Here was the arsenal of scandal, the notorious ‘atelier des calomnies’. Here were composed spiteful couplets, winged words which flew from Bellevue to Versailles, and thence further afield. Bellevue became the forcing house for scandal, or a vat for the preservation of all that time would fain have left behind, of the living corpse of the disillusioned, the discrowned, that which was over and done with, the mummies of a dead world, the vestiges of a history whose tale was told, but which lingered on to take vengeance for being regarded as out of date. The envenomed shafts, however, were not aimed at ‘the good King’, for whom a sanctimonious commiseration was always expressed, but at Marie Antoinette, the young, the radiant, the fortunate Queen.
More dangerous than this toothless yesterday, which could no longer bite but could only vent its spleen, was the new generation of those who had never tasted the sweets of power and had become weary of being kept in the background. In its exclusiveness and indifference, Versailles had cut itself off so completely from the real France that it was wholly unaware of the new currents of thought which were agitating the land. An intelligent, a cultured middle class had come into being. The new bourgeois had been taught by Jean Jacques Rousseau that they possessed rights, and, looking across the Channel, they saw in England a government which was democratic at any rate in form. Those of their order who returned to France after taking part in the American War of Independence brought tidings of a remarkable country where differences of caste had been abolished by the notions of equality and liberty. In France, however, they found nothing but rigidity and decay, for which the incapacity of the court was largely responsible. When Louis XV died, there had been a universal hope that an end had at length come to the dominion of the King’s mistresses, to the regime of a tainted patronage, but instead of a change for the better, the rule of the Pompadours and the Dubarrys had been replaced by that of other women who still had no thought for France, by that of Marie Antoinette swayed by Madame de Polignac from behind the scenes. With growing bitterness, the enlightened bourgeoisie saw how France’s position of power in the world was being forfeited, how the state debts were increasing, how the army and the navy were in evil case, how the colonies were being lost at the very time when neighbouring lands were in process of energetic development. More and more vigorously and more and more widely, therefore, stirred the will to make an end of misgovernment and neglect.
There were good reasons why the concentrated discontent, which was inspired by genuinely patriotic and national feelings, should make Marie Antoinette its chief target. The whole country knew that the King was incapable of effective decision, that he did not count as a ruler, and that therefore the Queen’s influence was all-powerful. Two possibilities were open to Marie Antoinette. She might, following her mother’s example, have seriously, actively, energetically undertaken the work of government, or she might have left politics severely alone. The Austrian group was continually though vainly endeavouring to guide her into the courses of statecraft. One who aspires to rule, or to play even a modest part in the work of government, must spend a few hours every day in the perusal of relevant documents, but the Queen had no taste for reading. One who would make sovereignty effective must listen to ministerial reports and must think them over carefully, but Marie Antoinette found it tiresome to think. For one with her levity of temperament, merely to give careful hearing was a great exertion.
“She scarcely listens to what I say,” wrote Mercy to Vienna, “and it is almost impossible to discuss serious matters with her or to rivet her attention upon an important affair. The pursuit of pleasure holds her in thrall.” The best that could be hoped for was that she would sometimes consent to answer him when, commissioned by her mother or her brother, he became pressing. “Tell me what I ought to do, and I will do it,” she would say, and thereupon she would actually go from Mercy to the King. By the next day, however, she had forgotten the whole thing. Her intervention in matters of state never got beyond the stage of ‘a few impatient impulses’. At length, at the court of Vienna, Kaunitz had to resign himself to circumstances. “It is absolutely useless to count upon her. We must content ourselves, as in the case of a defaulting debtor, to get what little we can out of her.” Writing to Mercy, he said that, after all, it must be remembered that at other courts, likewise, women played no part in politics.
If she would only have refrained altogether from interfering with matters of state! Then, at least, she would have had no responsibility, and no one could have blamed her when things went awry. But, prompted by the Polignac clique, she was continually interfering when there was question of changing a minister of state, or of the occupancy of some other post of importance. She did what is the most dangerous thing anyone can do in politics; she talked at large without having the remotest acquaintance with the subject; she amateurishly thrust her fingers into every pie, interfering in matters of the utmost moment; she used her overwhelming influence with the King exclusively on behalf of her favourites.
“When anything serious is at stake,” complained Mercy, “she is timid and undependable, but when she is egged on by the perfidious intriguers who surround her, she does everything she can to fulfil their behests, even though she recognises that their demands are inexpedient.” The Comte de Saint-Priest, one of the ministers of state, declared that nothing had done more to bring the Queen into odium than her impulsive meddling, her unwarranted nominations to posts. Since, in the view of the bourgeoisie, she was really responsible for the guidance of state affairs, and since the various generals and ambassadors and ministers she had appointed were for the most part incompetent, since France was drifting ever more swiftly towards bankruptcy, the blame for these disasters was placed upon the Queen’s shoulders, although, from her own outlook, she had done nothing more than provide a few delightful persons with good positions. Whoever in France was a devotee of progress, the restoration of public order, justice, creative activity, was up in arms against the spendthrift, heedless, but perpetually cheerful mistress of the Little Trianon, who was sacrificing the love and the welfare of twenty million persons to the twenty ladies and gentlemen who formed the arrogant clique of her favourites.
The widespread dissatisfaction of those who wanted a new system, a better ordering of public affairs, a more sensible distribution of responsibility, had long been in need of a rallying point. At length it was discovered in a single house, in one man. This embittered adversary likewise had royal blood in his veins; as at the Château of Bellevue, the palace of the King’s aunts, the reaction foregathered, so did the Revolution become centred round the Duke of Orléans in the Palais Royal. Thus from two fronts, mutually opposed, a campaign against Marie Antoinette was simultaneously opened. Louis Philippe Joseph was temperamentally inclined towards enjoyment rather than towards ambition; he was a rake, a spendthrift, a gambler and a dandy, distinguished neither by ability nor by malice. An aristocrat and a mediocrity, he had the weakness characteristic of uncreative natures, a vanity directed only towards externals. Marie Antoinette had mortified this vanity, for, with a quip about her cousin’s achievements as a warrior, she had prevented the bestowal on him of the office of lord high admiral of France. The Duke of Orléans had not been slow to take up the gauntlet. Sprung from a branch of the royal house as old as that to which Louis belonged, wealthy and independent, he did not hesitate to run counter to the King’s will in the Parliament of Paris and to treat the Queen as a declared enemy. It was natural, therefore, that he should become the leader of the malcontents. Anyone who wished to make head against the Habsburgs and against the ruling line of the Bourbons, anyone who regarded an unlimited monarchy as antiquated and oppressive, anyone who favoured the establishment of a rational and up-to-date democratic system in France, now sought the protection of the Duke of Orléans. At the Palais Royal (the first of the revolutionary clubs, conducted in this case under the aegis of one in whose veins monarchical blood ran), there assembled innovators, liberals, constitutionalists, Voltairians, philanthropists and freemasons. Mingled with these were various other discontented elements—those who were heavily in debt, disgruntled aristocrats, cultured bourgeois to whom no positions in the public service were open, unemployed lawyers, demagogues, journalists—fermenting energies which, a few years later, were to animate the shock troops of the Revolution. The mighty spiritual army with which France was to fight its way to liberty was assembled here under the leadership of the weak and self-satisfied Duke. The war cry had not yet been uttered, but everyone knew what it would be, everyone knew the trend of the movement: “Against the King, and above all against the Queen!”
Between these two groups of adversaries, the revolutionists and the reactionaries, there stood in solitary grandeur the man who was perhaps the most dangerous of all the Queen’s enemies, her brother-in-law, ‘Monsieur’ Stanislas Xavier, Count of Provence, in later days to mount the throne as King Louis XVIII. A cautious intriguer, treading delicately, moving like a shadow, he had no intention of compromising himself by premature adhesion to either of the rival groups, but swung like a pendulum to right and to left, waiting till destiny should reveal the moment for taking a definitive inclination. While he was by no means sorry to note the increasing difficulties in which his brother’s government was becoming involved, he carefully refrained from public criticism. Dark and silent as a mole, he burrowed and mined while biding his time. When Louis XVI and Louis XVII had run their course, and when the Napoleonic interlude was over, the Count of Provence at length became Louis XVIII, fulfilling what had since early childhood been his supreme ambition by mounting the steps of the throne. For a while his expectations had risen high. The seven tragical years during which Louis XVI’s marriage remained unfruitful had been for him the seven plentiful years of the Bible. Then his hopes of the succession were dashed because at length his sister-in-law was with child. When Marie Antoinette was delivered of a daughter, he wrote the following avowal to King Gustavus of Sweden: “I do not hide from myself that this matter has been a home thrust … As far as outward appearances are concerned, I was soon able to master myself, and I have behaved with the same decorum as before, though without any demonstration of joy, which would have been regarded as (and would really have been) mendacious … It has not been easy for me to master the inner man, who still rises in revolt from time to time, but I can keep him in good order even if I cannot entirely subdue him.”
The birth of the Dauphin was, to all seeming, a final blow to his hopes. The way was absolutely blocked, and he was forced into those devious and hypocritical paths which were ultimately, though not for another thirty years, to lead him to the long-desired goal. The enmity of the Count of Provence was not like that of the Duke of Orléans an open flame of hatred, but a fire of envy that smouldered beneath the ashes of misrepresentation. As long as the power of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI was unchallenged, this secret pretender to the crown kept his own counsel, giving no sign of his schemes. It was not until the Revolution opened that he began his suspicious machinations, the holding of strange conferences in the Luxembourg. Subsequently, when he had fled to England, he issued challenging proclamations wherein he valiantly dug into the graves of his brother, his sister-in-law and his nephew, in the hope (ultimately fulfilled) that in their coffins he would find the crown he hoped to wear.
Did the Count of Provence do anything yet more sinister? Is it true that, as many authorities have declared, he played a still more Mephistophelean part? Did his ambitions as pretender go so far as to lead him to print and circulate pamphlets throwing discredit on Marie Antoinette’s honour? Can it be possible that he arranged for the theft of certain documents so that the unhappy little boy, Louis XVII, who had secretly been rescued from the Temple, was dragged to a fate whose details remain obscure even to this day? There was a good deal in the behaviour of Stanislas Xavier to give rise to such suspicions. This much is certain, that immediately after mounting the throne King Louis XVIII, partly by money and partly by force, got hold of and destroyed various letters which he had written long before as Count of Provence. Again, does not the fact that he did not venture to have the body of the poor boy who died in the Temple interred as Louis XVII seem to imply that Louis XVIII did not really believe in the death of Louis XVII, but supposed that a changeling had died in prison in the young King’s stead? However these things may be, Stanislas Xavier was well able to keep his own counsel and to cover up his trail, and today the underground galleries he drove in the attempt to mine his brother’s throne have long since fallen in. This much alone is certain, that, among her bitterest adversaries, Marie Antoinette had no more dangerous foe than this ambushed and inscrutable man.
After ten wasted years on the throne, Marie Antoinette was already encompassed on all sides, so that by 1785 the animosities directed against her had become virulent. The groups hostile to the Queen—comprising most of the nobility and half of the bourgeoisie—had consolidated their position, and were awaiting a sign for the attack. But the authority of the hereditary monarchy was still firmly established, and no resolute plan of campaign had hitherto been formed. There was nothing more than chatterings and whisperings, the whizz of feathered shafts traversing Versailles. Every one of these arrows was tipped with poison, and they were aimed, not at Louis, but at the Queen. Printed or written leaflets were passed from hand to hand beneath the table and were quickly hidden in the clothing when a stranger drew near. Distinguished noblemen wearing famous orders would visit the bookshops of the Palais Royal and, having been led by the bookseller into a back room, would, when the door had been carefully shut, purchase the latest lampoon directed against the Queen. Ostensibly printed in London or Amsterdam, it would really be damp from the press, probably machined in the Duke of Orléans’s own palace or in the Luxembourg. Unhesitatingly these blue-blooded purchasers would pay more gold pieces than such pamphlets had pages. They seldom ran to over ten or twenty of these, but were richly illustrated with lascivious copperplate engravings, and peppered with malicious jokes. Such a spicy pasguinade was one of the most acceptable presents a man could give to his beloved—if the lady had not been honoured by an invitation to the Trianon. The gift would bring more pleasure than a costly ring or fan. Penned by unknown authors, printed by hidden hands, secretly distributed, these derogatory writings fluttered like bats through the park gates of Versailles into the boudoirs of the court ladies, and they also made their way into the châteaux of the provinces, but when the lieutenant of police tried to run the offenders to earth, he found himself checked by invisible powers. They insinuated themselves everywhere. The Queen would find one at table when she unfolded her napkin; the King would come across one on his writing desk among his official documents. When Marie Antoinette went to the theatre, one of them would be pinned to the balustrade in front of her seat, a malicious versicle, and when at night she leant out of window for a breath of air she would hear the strains of the street ditty which everyone was singing, and which opened with the enquiry:
Chacun se demande tout bas:
Le Roi peut-il? Ne peut-il pas?
La triste Reine en désespère …
(Everyone secretly asks themselves: is the King capable? Or not? This leads the sad Queen to despair) and which, after giving various erotic details, ended with the threat:
Petite Reine de vingt ans
Qui traitez aussi mal les gens,
Vous repasserez en Bavière.
(Small twenty-year-old Queen who treats people so badly, you will go back to Bavaria.) These pamphlets and ‘polissonneries’ of the early days were much milder than those which were circulated a few years later—ill-natured, certainly, but not positively outrageous. They were intended to annoy rather than to inflict a deadly wound. It was not until the Queen was with child, and this unexpected event had disappointed the hopes of various aspirants to the throne, that the tone became venomous. Now, when the statements were manifestly false, the lampooners began deliberately to speak of the King as impotent and of the Queen as an adulteress, with the obvious design (of course in Stanislas Xavier’s interest) of stigmatizing any issue Marie Antoinette might have as bastards. It was especially after the birth of the Dauphin, incontestably the rightful heir to the throne, that this polemic tended to assume its worst form. The Queen’s intimate friends, Madame de Lamballe and Madame de Polignac, were pilloried as mistresses of the arts of lesbian love; Marie Antoinette was described as a nymphomaniac with perverse inclinations; Louis was a poor weakling on whom his wife had put the horns; the Dauphin was a bastard. Let me give another example of a spicy epigram then current:
Louis, si tu veux voir
Bâtard, cocu, putain,
Regarde ton miroir,
La Reine et le Dauphin.
(Louis, if you want to see bastard, cuckold, whore, look at your mirror, the Queen and the Dauphin.) By 1785 the concert of calumny was in full swing. No more was needed than that the Revolution should shout in the streets what for years had been whispered and rhymed in the drawing rooms, and Marie Antoinette was prejudged before ever she was indicted at the Revolutionary Tribunal. It was the court which really drafted the indictment. The axe of hatred which severed the Queen’s neck had been put into the executioner’s hands by the delicate and bejewelled fingers of members of the aristocracy.
Who composed these lampoons? That is really a minor question, since the poetasters were for the most part writing to order, for pay, and not to fulfil any purposes of their own. When, in the days of the Renaissance, distinguished noblemen wanted to sweep some adversary out of their path, they hired a bravo or bought a dose of deadly poison. The eighteenth century, having grown philanthropic, used more refined methods. People stabbed a political opponent, not with a dagger now, but with a pen, using moral and not physical weapons to overthrow an adversary—slaying by ridicule. As luck would have it, towards 1780 some extremely able pens became available at a price—Beaumarchais, the author of immortal comedies; Brissot, who was to be one of the tribunes of the Revolution; Mirabeau, the genius of liberty; Choderlos de Laclos, a novelist as well as a distinguished general. These, though men of exceptional talent, were, being in low water, purchasable on easy terms. Behind such gifted lampoonists stood hundreds of others, courtiers, commoners, men with dirty fingernails and empty stomachs, ready to write anything they were asked; honey or poison, epithalamia or invectives, hymns or pamphlets, long or short, acerb or tender, political or unpolitical, to suit the employer’s taste.
Besides, a writer of this sort equipped with both boldness and skill could earn his fee twice or thrice over. First he was paid the stipulated sum (through an intermediary, of course, while the prince or nobleman who gave the commission remained discreetly in the background) for a lampoon of the Pompadour, the Dubarry or, at this juncture, Marie Antoinette. Then, turning informer for the nonce, he could privately acquaint the court with the fact that such and such a libel was being printed in Amsterdam or London, and could thus earn a round sum from the treasury or the police, who would be able to take steps for the suppression of the noxious pamphlet. Thirdly, one who, like Beaumarchais, was cunning and bold enough to keep in safe hiding one or two copies of the defamatory print to whose utter destruction he had pledged himself, could threaten to have a new edition printed, altered or unaltered. This last was a merry jest indeed, which in Vienna, under Maria Theresa, brought for its able discoverer the punishment of fourteen days’ imprisonment, and then, as compensation in timid Versailles, a sum of a thousand gold gulden and a further indemnity of seventy thousand livres.
Speedily it became known to the hawkers of this kind of wares that pamphlets directed against Marie Antoinette were, at the moment, the best-paying proposition, and even that there was no serious risk attached to their sale—so naturally the trade was brisk. Thus did hatred and avarice join forces in the composition and diffusion of these scurrilous documents. Nor was it long before their purpose was achieved. From end to end of France, Marie Antoinette became an object of popular detestation both as woman and as queen.
‘The Austrian woman’ was not ignorant of these machinations; she knew all about the lampoons, and guessed in what quarter they originated. She disdained, however, to pay serious heed to them. With inborn and unteachable Habsburg pride, she thought it better to despise dangers than to go out to meet them with prudence and caution. Contemptuously she wiped off the mud with which her dress had been splashed. In the course of a letter to her mother she casually remarked: “We are suffering from an epidemic of satirical verses, directed against the notables of the court, both men and women, and French wit has not refrained from aiming its shafts even against the King. Nor, indeed, have I been spared.”
That was all she had to say about the lampoons. She did not even trouble to be angry. What could it matter to her if a few blowflies settled upon her gown? Thrice armoured by her royal dignity, she regarded herself as invulnerable to these paper darts. She forgot, or she did not understand, that a single drop of this poison of calumny which has entered the circulation of public opinion can multiply like the virus of a contagious fever with which not even the ablest of physicians can cope. Smilingly she made light of the danger. To her way of thinking, words were but chaff in the breeze. A violent storm was needed to awaken her to a sense of danger.